THREE:  RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, THE ARTS

We’ve been discussing the Greeks and  Romans in general. I am going to continue to do that, and to bring us up to around the fourth or fifth century of our own era. Next, we'll do an overview of the developments in Europe between around 300 and 800 C.E. There will be some overlapping. Keep in mind that dates in history tend to be rough approximations, superimposed by those of us who like the organization of chronology There is no exact time, for example, at which the Roman world suddenly came to an end and the Medieval world began. Rather, there was a gradual shifting from one and blending into the other so that individuals who lived let's say in the year 460 C.E. in Paris or Verona probably considered themselves to be still very much citizens of the Roman Empire. Yet, when we look at that particular time period with the wisdom of hindsight, we can also see the beginnings of what is going to be the political and socioeconomic system of the period to come.

The shift from a theocentric or God-oriented world view, which had been characteristic of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Hebrews (who eventually became part of the Roman world) toward a humanistic worldview, that is a worldview in which human thinking and human, depending on where they made their homes of course, activities were taken very seriously, started out with the Greeks, and their cultural ancestors, the Minoans. The Minoan civilization came to an end around 1500 years before the birth of Christ. The Greeks themselves tended to look back at the Minoan period as some kind of fabulous age which to them had existed and ceased to exist before the dawning of their own memory. The Minoans apparently were a fairly worldly bunch. They didn't even have a hereditary priesthood. There is no evidence there of any kind of temples. There is evidence of worship of a Mother Goddess and a variety of deities, but that was apparently centered in the home. The Minoans cherished their palaces and their rulers and their good life. They manifested some of the attitudes which would later on distinguish the Romans, at a relative early point in time. But the civilizations which were the overpowering civilizations of that era in the ancient world, particularly the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, did indeed consider their lives inextricably intertwined with some kinds of transcendent realities.

The Greeks gave credit to the Minoans for some of their works of art. The Greeks discovered the glory of being human. Most of you have probably seen pictures of Greek sculptures of the human body. They are at once realistic and not realistic because the people, particularly the males, they portrayed were too handsome, too perfect to be true. At this point, I'd like to make a distinction between Greek sculpture and Roman sculpture. The differences tell you some things about the ways the Greeks thought and the ways the Romans thought. Imagine the sculpture known as the Discus Thrower. Well, for those of you who don't remember it, this work is the image of a perfectly muscled male, the ancient Greek version of Mr. Universe, in the process of throwing the discus. It is also a very well balanced work of art. Still, as you look at that statue you can't imagine that there would be a wart on his nose or bald spot on top of his head or anything whatsoever which would not be reflective of a  male body at the summit of health. Devoid of any kind of blemish. No zits. No moles. Definitely no potbelly!  Perfection.  Youthful perfection. Not over-stated. Occasionally one sees body builder types on television flexing their muscles, and it seems as though those muscles are overdeveloped. The Greeks with their sense of balance didn't go in for that kind of "bigger equals better" obsession. Rather they sought strength, but strength contained to give a sense of balance. But, there is more. Ultimately, the Discus Thrower is less a man whom you could imagine alive and eating and breathing than a god in human form.

What the Greeks sought to capture in art was literally the ideal of humanity. In many ways there is a connection between a sculpture such as this from the classical period and Plato's view that after all the material world somehow obscures and confuses and messes up the ideal. Now, having imagined the Discus Thrower, I want you now to imagine a Roman portrait sculpture. If you can, imagine Cato or Cicero. It is very possible that most of you have never seen a picture of a Roman portrait sculpture. But, I can describe a Roman portrait sculpture to you quite easily, because it could be a life mask of anyone in this class. Preferably of those of you who are middle aged and overweight and have their share of warts, wrinkles, and other blemishes.

Roman portrait sculptures were extraordinarily realistic in what we would now call in a photographic sense. I am using the term photography as an imperfect analogy because photography is two dimensional and doesn't provide a three dimensional representation. Roman portrait sculpture was a naturalistic imitation of the way people really are. On the other hand, real people generally do not even come close to the perfection which the Greeks tended to portray.

Still, both the Greeks and the Romans were concerned with the human form, and not as some kind of abstract vision. You may recall the human form portrayed in earlier times, in the cave paintings, for example. You will find quite realistic portraits of animals. But the human form tends to be very abstract. Some of you have probably seen images of early Christian art. There is great deal of abstraction--line drawings and symbolism with practically no depth of field. No naturalistic perspective. If persons are portrayed, they are represented according to status. God or Jesus are large, and humans are small. A king is portrayed large, his servants are tiny. If you look at the faces, those are not faces you would be able to recognize. They are not even caricatures. They are abstractions similar to what a three or four year old might draw. There are certain standard shapes of nose and mouth and eyes. The lack of realism is overpowering and deliberate.

I believe that I can use these kinds of images to try to demonstrate that a real shift took place from the Greco-Roman way of looking at things to the Christian way. That shift was in turn connected with the prevalent classical emphasis on life on earth versus the Christian emphasis on life afterdeath.

The Greeks, as I have said repeatedly, were extraordinarily proud of the human capacity to reason. This insistence on rationality includes the two major philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato tended literally to identify human nature with the ability to know and to learn. Consequently, Plato distinguished between different classes of people. Plato's state is an ideal state. At the very top there is the philosopher king, in touch with the realm of ideas. Below the philosopher king are the guardians, responsible for keeping the state safe. They are also involved in various governmental activities. Below the guardians are the masses. The vast majority of humanity according to Plato, is incapable of becoming fully human.

Plato distinguished between full humanity and what I would call a sort of partial humanity. The vast majority of the population was engaged in such practical things as commerce or growing food or picking up the garbage or producing garbage like writing fiction or sculpting marble. None of these crafts which we might consider fairly noble, represented for Plato particularly high attainments of humanity. For Plato, full humanity inevitably involved thought. Thinking in such a way that one is almost separated from the physical aspects of life. So, in Plato we have a Greek prototype of the later emphasis on life of the spirit in opposition to life of the flesh.

If you read the letters of Paul, you will see there is an opposition between the flesh and the spirit. Sin is connected with the material world, isn't that so? Even Satan is associated with the material world eventually. The spirit is where perfection and purity and even love reside.

Many scholars agree that this dualism in Christianity is derived partly from Plato and partly from some other movements I am going to discuss soon. It is not originally part of Christianity itself. We will get into the sources of this dualism later. But, the fact that it is not originally part of Christianity itself does not mean that Christianity has not been living according to those principles for almost 2,000 years. You will find it again and again and again. What I am trying to show you is that there is an alternate way of looking at Christianity which worked itself out during the Middle Ages, and that of those two strands, the dualistic strand which insists on a split between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, good and evil, God and Satan, is actually something which we can trace back to the ancient Greeks, and specifically Plato. This is not contradicted by the fact that the ancient Greeks represented humanism in the sense of being very much concerned with the power of human beings over their environment and the ability of human beings to reason.

The second major philosopher of the Greek period was Aristotle. I will discuss Socrates first. Socrates was the teacher of Plato who was the teacher of  Aristotle.  Plato and Socrates both discriminated between a realm of form or ideas and a realm of matter, that is the tangible world of physical realities. To them, if you were to impose ethical or moral qualifiers, then form would be good and matter would be evil. Or form would be true and matter would be a lie. The material world would be a world of appearance, a world of deception, a world of, in the words of Plato who supposedly based his words on Socrates, shadows. Think of what shadow means: a shadow is a reflection of something which the shadow itself is not. But, shadow is also a taking away of light. It is absence rather than presence. It is something which is negative. And form is what Plato would call reality. Matter according to Plato, was not real. The very things which we would consider to be in common sense language usage real, this piece of wood here, for example, would not be real according to Plato. You don't have to believe what I am saying. I am not trying to convert you to Platonism. But, you need to keep this is mind because we will be discussing this later, during the Middle Ages, when we talk about the Scholastics among whom there are those called realists, and the realists are precisely those who don't think that physical objects are real.

Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that reality consisted in a fusion of form and matter. That is, that he linked the two. According to Aristotle, physical reality dose not exist apart from form. There is no such thing as unformed matter, and in the world there is no such thing as "matterless" form. They always go together. So, the Aristotelian view would be one which would tend not to discriminate against material objects. Another way of remembering this is to think of Plato as a mathematician. He thought like a geometer because the ancient Greeks tended to identify mathematics literally with geometry. Mathematicians deal with ideas. They deal with intangibles, with theory alone. This is also what makes mathematics difficult for some people. Because if you want everything to be concrete then you run into problems. Aristotle's preferred science was biology. He collected specimens. He developed a form of classification of the animal kingdom which we can still accept today. He understood enough about zoology (a Greek term!) to classify dolphins as mammals, despite their fishy Appearance and behavior. Aristotle realized that these aquatic Critters were warm blooded and nursed their young. The kind of classification system developed by Aristotle depended on his willingness to observe the world. The messy world. Plato didn't like to deal with the messy world. To expose himself to pollution. So, he thought in rarefied terms of ideas and ideals. Aristotle, on the other hand, didn't mind dealing with concrete objects.

However. lets go a little bit further. As the Greeks city states, the Greek world itself, began to disintegrate, an extreme version of Plato's point of view became more and more appealing to the people, resulting in the philosophical school called neo-Platonism which became quite important during the period of the decline of the Greeks and was picked up by the Romans later. Neo-Platonism was even more dualistic than its progenitor Plato himself. When I use the term dualism, I refer to the tendency to think of everything in terms of either or. Either good or bad. Either black or white. Either spirit or matter. Either heaven or hell. And so on. It is this kid of dualism which became one of the intellectual movements of the waning ancient world.

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Posted 28 August 2000
Last revised: 00-09-08
Text and images copyright © Ingrid Shafer 2000