The critical consciousness inherited from the Greeks has been the key to the remarkable ascendancy of the West. Science, technology, individualism, liberal democracy, natural rights … all are ultimately the precious cargo of the Greek way of looking at the World.
—Historian Bruce Thornton1
The original thing in Greek science at its beginnings is that it offers us, for the first time in history, an attempt to supply a purely naturalist interpretation of the universe as a whole. Cosmology takes the place of myth. The ancient empires of the Near East … brought to a certain level of systematization and theoretical development a few officially approved sciences, such as astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. But there is no evidence of an attempt to give a naturalistic explanation of the universe as a whole. There is an official mythology, transmitted in priestly corporations and enshrined in elaborate ceremonial. There are no individual thinkers offering a rational substitute for this doctrine.
—Professor Benjamin Farrington2
Christ is the omnipotence of subjectivity, the heart released from all the bonds and laws of Nature, the soul excluding the world, and concentrated only on itself, the reality of all the heart’s wishes, the Easter festival of the heart, the ascent to heaven of the imagination: – Christ therefore is the distinction of Christianity from heathenism.
—Ludwig Feuerbach3
Then Jesus said to the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep—the people of Israel.”
—Matthew 15:24
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
—Socrates4
As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.
—John Adams5
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
—James Madison6
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
—Tertullian (c 160 – 225 AD)
Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.
—Sir Henry Maine7
It has become fashionable over the last few decades to describe the core of Western society and its values as “Judeo-Christian.” But if one simply walks around the great buildings and monuments of Washington, D.C. it will be clear that a major influence is completely overlooked by the phrase Judeo-Christian. From the towering marble columns and the frieze-covered triangular pediment of the Supreme Court to the temple-like grandeur of the Capitol Building, Washington’s architecture is an elaborate tribute to the classical world of Greece and Rome.8 Nor is that influence limited to architecture. From politics to literature to law, the concepts, ideas, and models that form the foundation of American life are Greco-Roman in their origins.
The Christian basis of American and Western societies is considerable, but it should not be forgotten that classical culture is also essential when it comes to understanding the particular character and genius of the European mind. Nor should we forget the contributions of the Teutonic peoples, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Celts in addition to those of the Romans and Greeks when it comes to the formation of Western man. It is inaccurate and improper to describe Western Civilization as simply Judeo-Christian. Indeed, it is in Christianity’s ability to adapt to and find synthesis with this classical inheritance that we find the secret of its success. Neither Islam nor Judaism (for the majority of its existence) was able to accomplish such a synthesis with the world of observation and reason. It is Islam’s particular inability to adapt to that world which both marks the borders of European civilization and ensures that Islamic imperialism will remain the principal existential enemy of the West.
For centuries, scholars in the West have puzzled over the different ways in which our civilization has synthesized its religious roots with its rationalist heritage. It would take an encyclopedia to fully explore their findings. Historian Bruce Thornton, however, provides a useful starting-point for understanding this synthesis:
One unique characteristic of the Greeks that more than anything else explains their innovative brilliance: the “critical spirit,” the way they made everything they encountered an object of thought to be discussed and analyzed free from the constraints of religion and government … Their curiosity, their relentless questioning, their drive to explain human existence rationally and coherently and to find meaning in experience, are the starting point for all the other intellectual achievements we attribute to them … all are Greek words, all are formalized expressions of this fundamental quality we can call “critical self-consciousness.”9
All the critical studies of modern life—physics, chemistry, all the “–ologies”—are named by Greek words, as Thornton points out. In each one it could be shown how ancient Greek and Roman philosophers first engaged in those critical empirical observations which are the basis of science. In the following pages we will focus generally on five areas of culture which illustrate the essential debt the West owes to ancient Greece and Rome. Those areas are government and politics, law, literature, education, and science.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Most of the words we use to describe political things and phenomenon were borrowed from the Greeks and Romans. The words ‘politics’, ‘policy’, and ‘police’ all come from the Greek word polis (city). The words ‘citizen’, ‘civic’, and ‘civil’ all come from the Latin word for city, civitas. For many concepts in common use today like ‘republic’ (from Latin res publica, meaning public affairs) or ‘democracy’ (from Greek demokratia, rule of the people) we not only borrowed the words we also studied the analysis of these concepts. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics remain useful today for their observations about human political behavior.
One of the chief influences Greek and Roman political thought had on the later West can be found in the development of notions of public affairs. In the empires of ancient Egypt or Persia, there was, strictly speaking, no such thing as politics because there was no such thing as public affairs. Government was no more than the private affairs of the ruler and his ruling class.
The great advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and secondly for their study.10
In other words, the Greeks paved the way for the scientific study of politics and government by recognizing that there was a dimension to public affairs beyond the private interests of a king or pharaoh.
The basic political unit of the Greek and Roman world was the city, understood as a built-up urban core surrounded by the farmland, pastures, wood and stone which provided the necessary food and raw materials for ordinary human life. Today, we commonly refer to these cities of the classical world as “city-states.” They were in many ways both the laboratories and the classrooms of the West. The model of the Greek city-states from the seventh through the fourth centuries BC “provided Europe with its first concept of a reasonable society.”11 In the words of historian Carl Richard, the Greeks of this period “formulated the theories of popular sovereignty, natural law, and mixed government that undergird modern democratic government.”12 The Greeks also experienced the difficulties attending democratic rule—most notably in the relative lack of unity among the different cities which left them vulnerable to powerful empires with a stronger central government. It was the Romans under the Republic who would later combine the city-state model of the Greeks with powerful administrative and bureaucratic authority into a working and durable system of government. Through the Romans, the example of the Greeks was transmitted forward to what would become Western Europe.
The model of Athens in particular would serve as both a warning and an inspiration to later political thinkers. Classical Athens was ruled by a direct democracy, with all adult male citizens coming together to make political decisions in an assembly. This form of representation proved unwieldy and chaotic once Athens became a major seafaring power, and eventually led to crippling internal struggles between the wealthier citizens and those of humble means. Nevertheless, during the European Enlightenment the American Founding Fathers and their European counterparts revived the old Athenian values of free speech and open political deliberation, making them sacrosanct in the new model of liberal democracy they were creating. The great Athenian statesman Pericles had once declared, “instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”13 The commitment Pericles showed to free inquiry and unfettered public expression still lies at the heart of America’s First Amendment today.14
The American concept of a divided government with a balance of powers among its different branches is a direct descendant of classical political philosophy. Plato was the first to identify the three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—or rule by one man, by a few, or by the many) and observe that all three tended to descend over time into misrule. He proposed the solution of a mixed government in which the different classes of society would be represented and balanced against one another. Aristotle made this idea of mixed government the centerpiece of his Politics, discussing it as a mixture not just of classes but of different functions—legislative, executive, and judicial. By the second century BC, the Roman political historian Polybius produced a definitive version of the theory, arguing that such a government was necessary to avoid the cycle of discord and misrule that inevitably came with the other forms. Polybius regarded the Roman republic as a real-world model of mixed government.15
The Founding Fathers looked to Polybius and the example of Rome when framing a new model for what became the United States.16 Polybius described the three powers of government as represented by the Roman Senate, the magistrates, and the Assembly of the people. Later researchers such as German legal scholar Hans Julius Wolff have mostly agreed with Polybius’ assessment, with Wolff in particular calling it “an ingenious system of checks and balances.”17 The Founders used this model in the hope that a mixed government would be a bulwark against government oppression of the individual or of one group of society against another. The Constitution directly reflects the Founders’ reading of classical political theory and their understanding of the ideals and issues found there.18
In political affairs, the influence of classical Greece is so strong it extends even to non- Western cultures. Bruce Thornton describes how Chinese dissidents in 1989 made use of the Goddess of Democracy at their gathering in Tiananmen Square:
These Chinese freedom-fighters understood something too many Western intellectuals have forgotten: that political freedom is dependent on consensual government, a link forged in ancient Greece. There the concept of political freedom itself was first created and recognized as a value worth dying for.19
Above all, the Founding Fathers looked to Greece and Rome as crucial examples of liberty and political behavior. The Federalist Papers hearken back to examples of Rome in order to defend the advantages of the proposed Constitution. In describing the state of England in his time, John Adams quoted the Roman historian Sallust in describing as a venal place, “ripe for destruction.” Drawing from examples he learned from Greek and Roman writers, James Madison observed that history’s greatest tyrants have often hidden themselves in the cloak of democracy, only later to reveal themselves as power-hungry demagogues. This observation may well have come right from Thucydides, who describes the Athenian statesman Cleon in this same fashion. Most importantly, the Founders did not simply revere the classics in religious fashion, but read them with a critical eye— picking and choosing what they wished to preserve from what they found. When it came to the example of ancient Sparta, for instance, both Adams and Alexander Hamilton recoiled from the Spartans’ communal ownership of goods and excessive focus on military training (Hamilton called it “stark mad”). Instead, they preferred to preserve the Spartan dedication to the development of virtue but with a less brutal and collectivist model of education.20
On the matter of slavery and freedom, the Greeks were even in some cases well advanced. In the historian Herodotus, it is taken for granted that the Greeks who fought for their liberty against the Persian invasion at Marathon and Salamis were also slave owners. Slavery was simply accepted as normal in the ancient world:
From time immemorial that was the attitude in all the world. There was never anywhere a dreamer so rash or so romantic as to imagine a life without slaves. The loftiest thinkers, idealists, and moralists never had an idea that slavery was evil. In the Old Testament it is accepted without comment exactly as in the records of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even the prophets of Israel did not utter a word against it, nor, for that matter, did St. Paul. What is strange is not that the Greeks took slavery for granted through hundreds of years, but that finally they began to think about it and question it.21
The Bible contains no criticism of slavery. The book of Leviticus lays down rules concerning the ownership of slaves and how they may be passed down as permanent property.22 In the New Testament, slaves are taught to “obey your human masters with fear and trembling and with sincere devotion to Christ.”23 The book of Timothy even presents guidance in proper conduct for Christians who are enslaved, telling them to “serve more faithfully” in order that “God’s name and our teaching won’t get a bad reputation.”24
Compare this approach with the rational critiques that began to arise in the Greek world. With the Athenian playwright Euripides in the fifth century BC we find the sentiment that slavery is “that thing of evil, by its nature evil, forcing submission from a man to what no man should yield to.”25 A generation later, the philosopher Plato would call a slave “an embarrassing possession” and Aristotle would describe in detail the arguments that had arisen describing slavery as an institution that violated nature. In the years after Aristotle, the Stoic school of philosophy denounced slavery as an intolerable wrong committed by man against man.26 More than 2,200 years later America would fight a bloody Civil War to finally put an end to the institution of slavery within its borders.
LAW AND JUSTICE
If the ancients provided conceptual foundations for government and politics, when it comes to the law they provided even more. In law, the achievement of the Romans has been, as Wolff summarizes, “one of the foundations of Civil law … We are therefore entitled to call Roman Law one of the strongest formative forces in the development of Western civilization.”27 What made Roman law so robust was that it was able to assimilate so many new concepts over a period of many centuries of activity. It was remarkably able to adapt to new developments while retaining its core identity of clear, rational thought and empirical evidence above all. Even when Roman power and sovereignty crumbled, its legal system lived on for centuries more, informing the legal codes of all Western Europe.28
Unlike some of the other classical contributions to the West, Roman law never entirely disappeared from the scene. The so-called barbarians who gradually put an end to Roman sovereignty in Europe were in many cases quite noble and organized people with long histories of adaptation to Roman ways. Even as they claimed territory from a dying empire that was unable to administer or maintain it, they found the old Roman law supremely useful. The seminal act which ensured that Roman law would be passed down to future generations came in the sixth century AD in the surviving Eastern half of the Empire (the Byzantines). The great Byzantine Emperor Justinian assembled and codified the vast, dispersed tenets of Roman law into a central text, the Corpus Iuris Civilis (Body of Civil Law, c 529 – 533 AD). While Justinian’s motives were domestic and practical, the result of this great work was that a millennium of Roman legal wisdom was preserved and disseminated.29
In the 11th century, Western Europe was reintroduced to a crucial portion of Justinian’s Corpus which contained the basic laws of the Romans along with commentary on the laws by Roman legal scholars.30 Following this rediscovery, thanks to the emergence of medieval universities across Western Europe, “Roman law became the basis of a common western European legal culture.”31 Thanks to Justinian, as legal scholar Peter Stein puts it, “the idea of a common European culture” could be created.32 Today, legal codes across Europe and in Latin America are based on Roman law. While the law in Anglo-Saxon countries is founded on English Common Law, this too was influenced by Roman law (via Canon Law, the legal system employed by the Catholic Church). The crucial concept of natural law found in the Common law is also derived from Roman law. Therefore, it is not far- fetched to say Roman law has had a critical formative influence upon the legal systems of all of Europe.33
Like all long-lasting cultural forces, Roman law has endured because diverse societies across time have found it adaptable and applicable to their own circumstances. The texts of Roman law have, in Stein’s words, “constituted a kind of legal supermarket, in which lawyers of different periods have found what they needed at the time. It has indelibly impressed its character on European legal and political thought.”34 Perhaps nothing signifies the debt the West owes to the classical world so clearly as this.
LITERATURE AND THE IMAGINATION
While the legal texts of Rome shaped the codes of European law, the literatures of Greece and Rome were just as crucial in shaping the European imagination. The Roman Empire was a highly literate society, unmatched until the mass literacy programs of the modern post-industrial era.35 In the words of legendary classicist Gilbert Highet:
The revelation of the Greco-Roman forms of literature, coming together with the introduction of so many stylistic devices, the expression in language, and the wealth of material provided by classical history and legend, stimulated the greatest production of masterpieces the modern world has ever seen: tragedy in England, France, and Spain; comedy in Italy, England, and France; epic in Italy, England, and Portugal; lyric and pastoral in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany; satire in Italy, France, and England; essays and philosophical treatises throughout western Europe; oratory throughout western Europe.36
The literary heritage of Greece and Rome begins with the blind bard, Homer, who is believed to have lived and worked in or before the 8th century BC. His epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey became the standard and model of greatness for Greek literature. Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, tried to emulate and surpass Homer with his own epic, Aeneid, which concerns the legendary foundations and essential moral values of Rome. In the 17th century another blind genius, the poet John Milton, walked consciously in the footsteps of Homer and Virgil when he created his own English epic, Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson regarded Homer as the greatest of poets, and Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed in the 19th century that “every novel is a debtor to Homer.”37
While Homer is the jewel in the crown of classical literature, he is also only one among many. R. R. Bolgar emphasizes the importance of the Greeks in recording compositions written with the sole end of providing aesthetic pleasure to the reader. And just as Virgil followed Homer in composing a great epic, the Roman city fathers also embraced the literary example of Greece.38 Today, in order to be fully conversant in the literature of Western civilization one must be familiar with the stories not only of epic poets such as Homer and Virgil, but dramatic poets like Euripides and Sophocles, and lyric poets like Juvenal and Horace. The myths retold by Ovid make their way down through the ages to modern literature and movies.
EDUCATION AND LEARNING
There may be no better way to summarize the impact of classical politics, law, and literature on the development of the West than to consider the general impact of Greco-Roman antiquity on Western education. Many of the norms, the topics, the methodologies, and even the purposes of Western education were inherited from the classical world. As in the other areas, this inheritance came through a process of influence and rediscovery. More than a millennium’s worth of educational advances from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was shaped, informed, and catalyzed by Greek and Roman sources. “Much of the progress of the Middle Ages,” Highet explains, “was educational progress; and one of its chief marks was that the knowledge of classical thought, language, and literature expanded and deepened.”39
The connection between classical learning and Western education was circular and reinforcing. The more connected to its classical inheritance the West became, the more its culture matured, and the more sophistication it attained, the more it sought out classical learning. This should not be surprising, given that educational advances in the classical era were likewise tied to social progress. Bolgar recounts:
Before the fifth century B.C. the Greeks had given their children a type of training which is common to all semi-primitive societies, and whose aim is to produce good fighting men versed in the usual religious practices and traditions.40
The demands of Athenian democracy, however, necessitated a more involved training. Citizens had to be able to read, to investigate, to listen carefully, and to speak convincingly and coherently. As democracy emerged in the Greek cities, a premium was placed on the skills of communication and persuasion.41 Finding people who not only knew those skills but could pass them on to others became a critical issue.
Faced with these demands, two new types of teacher emerged: the grammarian and the rhetorician. The grammarians provided a general education covering all topics that the citizen would need to manage and master. Their approach is still alive today in the concept of a liberal arts education, with its design of producing “well-rounded” citizens. The rhetoricians focused on the specific art of making a case effectively to the political and legal assemblies.42 A speaker at the assembly was called a rhetor and was responsible for making his case with truthful vigor.43 The political realities of direct democracy and free speech at Athens produced a new and sophisticated culture of education centered on the virtues of language acquisition.44
A similar situation existed in Rome, where the leading men of the republican era were disciplined by a need to persuade both the Senate and the law courts. Before the imperial era, Rome’s greatest men were necessarily masters of rhetoric. The greatest of these was Cicero (109 – 43 BC) who, Richard insists, “was the acknowledged master of each of the three types of rhetoric: deliberative, epideictic, and forensic—speeches for the Senate building, the funeral hall, and the courtroom.”45 It says a lot about the later importance of Cicero’s political knowledge and rhetorical skill that his words would become a staple of the Western educational diet. “For nearly two millennia,” Richard says, “every educated European and American read Cicero.”46
During the Middle Ages, much of the sophistication of the old Roman educational system was lost. But as the culture revived, it began to look again for models and found them in its Greco-Roman forbears. It was part of Charlemagne’s great accomplishment to bring a new thirst for the Roman past to his people. By 900 AD it was again considered essential in Western Europe for an educated man to know how to read and write in Latin. Over the next two centuries, a new classically-grounded scholarship was established.
The re-establishment of classical scholarship in the late Middle Ages provided the necessary grounding for the birth of the medieval university. Starting in Italy and eventually encompassing all of Europe, the university model proved invaluable for the production and dissemination of knowledge and learning. The sad fate of Constantinople in the 15th century had the effect of infusing the West with the full glory of the classical heritage of Greek and Latin texts. The rallying cry of the era became ad fontes—“to the sources.” Neither the 18th century Enlightenment nor 19th century Romanticism would forsake the reverence for the classics which was by then so firmly established. Above all, the values placed by the classical world on being able to read, write, and speak reasonably, precisely, and eloquently remained well in place. At their best, Western educators still strive to reach these goals. As Jefferson remarked, “in a republic, whose citizens are led by reason and persuasion, and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of the first importance.”47
SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE
Just as important in the Greco-Roman heritage of the West was its irreplaceable contribution to scientific theory and inquiry. The Greeks did not just make seminal advances in what was known and understood about the world, they also taught us how to learn more. Their starting point was rigorous commitment to free and rational inquiry and to empirical observation of the world as it is. Unlike the more dogmatically limited and cloistered investigators of other ancient cultures, as Richard points out, “Greek scientists were laymen, to whom science was an avocation—men who could think and act independently, and who considered all questions open to debate.”48
Science itself could be said to begin with Thales of Miletus in the sixth century BC, who was committed to finding the natural causes of phenomenon and insisted that the universe was governed by physical laws. Science as we now know it rests on precisely this intellectual breakthrough. Similarly crucial is the modern scientific revolution which began in earnest in the 17th century, following the theories of men such Francis Bacon and the observations of Galileo and Descartes. Bacon insisted on the importance of rigorous empirical observation proceeding according to a fixed method of induction that started from the facts of experience before deducing laws of nature. The discovery of these laws was aided by the foundations laid by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus, who lived in the fifth century BC.49
What Thales did for scientific inquiry, Hippocrates did for medicine. Hippocrates’ primary contribution was the principle that illness proceeded from natural causes. This principle required that symptoms of illness be observed and compared and that theories ought to be tested. His followers held to a high professional and ethical standard exemplified by the Hippocratic Oath (originally much more extensive than the confidentiality clause everyone is familiar with today). We can also thank Herophilus (335 – 280 BC) for seminal advances in human anatomy, and Erasistratus (304 – 250 BC) for developments in physiology.50
The number of Greek and Roman contributors to scientific learning could be expanded almost indefinitely. Astronomers such as Aristarchus provided us with early theories concerning the movements and structure of the heavens. Archimedes and Pythagoras are just two of the most well-known among a whole group of mathematicians whose theories and insights are still with us. Even where theories are incorrect, such as Aristotle’s analysis of physics, they still retain value through their basis in observable reality. In all of these areas and more the Greeks brought an analytical mind, an observant eye, and a logical rigor to observation of the natural world which remains the model of the scientific inquirer.
Historian Will Durant provides one of the best summaries of the Greek impact on Western science and its conception of the life of the mind. Durant sees the impact beginning in the Greeks’ willingness to challenge tradition on the basis of reason:
Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy—of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest … Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of our life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism … all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked philosophy, they lived it; the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life.51
It is no accident that one of the two great heroes of Greek epic poetry, Odysseus, was most renowned not for his military prowess but for his knowledge of men and their world.
TRIBAL EUROPE
Although the focus of this appendix is on Greco-Roman foundations, it would be remiss simple to ignore the contributions of other pre-Christian elements to the character of the West. It was fashionable for centuries to dismiss the contributions of Germanic and Celtic cultures (among others) simply because these were felt to be “barbarian.” This prejudice has since been discarded, and we can now see that the so-called barbarian world was much richer than the old stereotype suggests. In fact, we have the witness of the great Roman historian Tacitus himself to make this case.
The first century AD tribes Tacitus describes in his Germania were a liberty-loving, honest, generous, and moral people. Particularly noteworthy is their practice of decision- making, which may be considered a precursor to the parliamentary system later found in the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic world. Tacitus observes of these tribes:
Affairs of smaller moment the chiefs determine: about matters of higher consequence the whole nation deliberates, yet in such sort, that whatever depends upon the pleasure and decision of the people, is examined and discussed by the chiefs. [At the assembly,] the King or Chief is heard, as are others, each according to his precedence in age, or in nobility, or in warlike renown, or in eloquence; and the influence of every speaker proceeds rather from his ability to persuade than from any authority to command.52
This communal approach to decision-making was matched to a more egalitarian notion of authority in general. Even kings did not possess arbitrary power, Tacitus notes with approval, and generals tended to be obeyed by force of example rather than by any particular authority they held. Although he regards the liberty of the German tribes as tending to excess, Tacitus also approves of their sexual restraint and unmatched hospitality.
From this small example it is clear that Western civilization draws from many elements beyond just the classical world. The love of liberty the Founding Fathers take for granted is as much a feature of their Anglo-Saxon heritage as it is of the Roman world. Even the sophisticated Jefferson praised ancient Anglo-Saxon England as “that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century.”53
CHRISTIANITY AND SYNTHESIS
The rise of Christianity to a position of prominence within cultures shaped by Greco- Roman and tribal values is a story of great adaptability and synthesis. Christianity did not succeed in Europe by replacing Greco-Roman culture but by adapting to it. In adapting to the classical world, Christianity managed to overcome part of the violent exclusivism that it inherited from its Semitic roots. By accepting Greek philosophy, Christianity became more universal.
Christianity’s inheritance from the Semitic theory of revelation has produced countless pointless theological disputes, genocides, mass exterminations, and complete annihilations of perceived theological and racial enemies. As early as the Council of Ephesus in 449 disputes over the meaning of the Incarnation (i.e., was Jesus both God and man at once or was he purely human or purely divine) triggered violence between Christians who believed the “wrong” thing.54 The Roman Emperor Marcian eventually had to impose order by force to prevent bloodshed in Alexandria over arguments with no real answers.55 The Emperor Charlemagne waged war on the tribal Germanic people in the eighth century in an effort to convert them to Christianity. One episode in this effort is known as the Massacre of Verden, where 4,500 Saxons who resisted efforts to be Christianized were massacred even as they were being held captive following their surrender. Between the 15th and 18th centuries as many as 100,000 people in Europe were executed for alleged participation in witchcraft—despite obvious lack of evidence—simply on the basis of the Bible’s command that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”56
The scholar Jason Long has provided a detailed comparison of the traditions inherited from the Hebrews and the Greeks. It was the Greeks who provided political progress (in the form of democracy and aristocracy), followed logical and rational thought, and laid the foundations for the scientific method by their insistence on investigating the natural causes of all phenomena. The Hebrews, meanwhile, were content with a theocratic monarchy, beliefs guided by faith and superstition, and regarded God (or YHWH) as fundamentally in control of all of reality. Where the Hebrews explained their past through myths and legends, Herodotus and Thucydides were establishing the principles of historiography by conducting research, checking sources, and putting tall tales to the test of reason.57
Long uses the example of Hippocrates to illustrate the fundamental difference between the Hebrew approach to learning to the Greek approach. Writing around four centuries before the birth of Jesus, Hippocrates remarked, “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it.” Then 400 years later, we read in the New Testament that Jesus was allegedly curing epilepsy by casting out demons:
This leads us to perhaps the most important question I will pose … How is it that the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe sent a messenger, the savior of all humanity, who knew less than an ordinary man who had been dead for centuries? How could Hippocrates have a better understanding of the world than Jesus? Why should we hold Jesus as a superior teacher?58
But Christianity itself also has roots in Greek thought. It is well known that several of the most influential Fathers of the early Church were well versed in Platonic philosophy. Through these writers, there was a strong tendency early on to go beyond the literal words of a text and find an allegorical meaning in the sayings or teachings of Jesus.59 These Fathers even admitted that philosophers such as Plato had discovered truths about the world through their own reason rather than from God alone—a fact which they reconciled by arguing that “God used philosophy to prepare the Greeks for Christ just like He used the law of Moses to prepare the Hebrew people for Christ.”60 Such an argument is simply unthinkable in Islam, which regards all knowledge outside of itself as heathen ignorance.
Later Church Fathers argued that Greek philosophy was worth studying because it agreed with the teachings of Jesus. This was the position of Church historian Eusebius and the great theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine even believed that study of philosophy could be beneficial in religious conversion, writing: “when I read those books of the Platonists I was taught by them to seek incorporeal truth, so I saw your ‘invisible things, understood by the things that are made.’”61 Augustine’s position is particularly worth noting because many of his beliefs became the ordinary views of the Church all the way down to the modern era.62
By accepting Plato and Greek philosophy, the Christian Church became open to admitting the validity of discoveries of human reason. In doing so, Christianity became a truly universal religion. The process by which Christianity became fertilized by classical learning can be seen in a summary view by a look at three main areas: law, logic, and language.
Until the rediscovery of Justinian’s Corpus, the Roman legal tradition was carried forward in the West by the Catholic Church. Far from abandoning Roman law as pagan ignorance, the Church embraced it as wise, useful, and noble. As the Church faced increasingly complex problems over the years, it came to rely increasingly on Roman law to understand and address those problems.63 In the Western Church, Roman law became integrated into Canon law. Thus, as the Church expanded its dominion, through its influence Roman law spread to parts of Europe that had never known Roman rule. Other parts, such as England, experienced greater Roman influence through the Church than they had ever known as part of the Empire.64
As the sophistication and reach of the western Church developed, it found itself increasingly reliant upon the sources and techniques of the ancient world. This pattern emerged from the fact that investigating Christian doctrine, Roman law, and Greek philosophy required a common set of commitments and skills. As historian David Lindberg notes, “the earliest Christian apologists undertook a reasoned defense of the faith; and scholars of the Middle Ages (inspired by the example of Boethius) made a persistent effort to apply Aristotelian logic to knotty theological problems.”65 In other words, the same logical techniques used to interpret the law or philosophy proved invaluable in understanding theology and transmitting doctrine.66
The process by which Christian thinkers came to rely on classical tools of thought only increased after the rediscovery of Justinian’s Corpus. Seizing upon this invaluable source of Roman law, scholars used the logical techniques they learned from the classics to understand and interpret what they were reading in the Corpus. In this way, Roman law and ordinary logic were used to assist the development of theology and doctrine. Thus, Bolgar concludes, “theologians discovered that dialectic was needed to solve their difficulties [and] logic rather than literary taste forged the strongest link that binds us to Greece and Rome.”67
Finally, the synthesis of Christianity with Greco-Roman culture was also assisted and framed by language. Christian scriptures were originally written in Hebrew and Greek, a fact which in itself shows the marriage of Semitic and classical minds. This combination ensured that Christianity itself would rely upon cross-cultural connections. Like the Roman Empire, the Church found from a very early time that it needed to communicate with people in common, non-sectarian, and non-ethnic-specific language. The standard translation of the Bible in the western Church for centuries was called the Vulgate precisely because it was written in the simple and common (the original meaning of “vulgar”) Latin used by ordinary people across the continent.68 It was only when the Romance languages developed and the use of Latin shrunk to the clergy alone that use of the Vulgate became a barrier rather than an open door to the masses.
Ironically, it was the rediscovery of classical learning which provoked a religious revolution in the western Church. As knowledge of Greek was recovered, men such as Martin Luther were able to read the New Testament in its original language. They soon identified distortions and errors which had made it into the Latin Vulgate (and thence into the Church itself). It was through the drive to recover their original meaning of the Bible that a movement arose to purify and purge the medieval Church of a number of abuses. But along with greater knowledge of Greek for religious purposes came a greater knowledge of and appreciation for all of Greek literature. So it was that a middle-class boy from East London named John Milton would learn Greek and base his great religious poem on the work of a two thousand year old Greek poet.
Christianity learned from and adapted to the classical heritage. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this is in Augustine of Hippo. Augustine began his life as a Roman rhetorician, teaching young men the proper and eloquent use of Latin. After his conversion to Christianity, he wrote a great prose tract called City of God synthesizing the political ideas of Plato with Christian conceptions of the moral life and the nature of God. If even one of the most revered figures in Christianity can make use of the classics, anyone can.
THE IMPLACABLE OPPOSITION OF ISLAM
Contrast the approach of Christianity with the reality of the Islamic world. In Islam, the cultures and civilizations which preceded Islam are regarded as jahiliyya (ignorant). The conventional Islamic position is that no wisdom, no logic, and no understanding exist outside of Islam. Therefore, where Christianity came to terms with its pre-Christian roots and nourished itself on pre-Christian sources, Islam has consistently and violently rejected any debts to non-Islamic cultures. It is neither coincidence nor mistake that the spread of Islam has typically been characterized by genocide and refusal to adapt.
This refusal to adapt works the other way as well. Even in countries where Muslims are minority, they still agitate for the right to reject the culture of their hosts. The British Muslim Anjem Choudary is an example of this. In 2011, Choudary launched the Islamic Emirates Project, which aims to turn 12 British cities into Islamic states which implement Sharia law outside the reach of British law.69 While many Muslims do not support such campaigns, the fact remains that it is acceptable and almost expected for Muslims to cling to their own creed in the West while other immigrants seek to integrate and thrive.
Despite 1,400 years in which Islam’s primary attitude to non-Arab civilizations has been war and contempt, some still try to argue that this is not inevitably the case. They typically cite the example of the so-called golden age of Islamic science and learning. While the myths and exaggerations that support this view have been dealt with elsewhere in this book, it would be useful to address a few of them here simply because the fate of Islam’s golden age confirms its inability to synthesize with Western cultures.
The West does not owe medieval Islam a debt of gratitude for preserving classical texts. Some Muslim rulers showed some interest in learning from Greek writers in physics, mathematics, and medicine, all contributions outside those areas were more or less ignored. Furthermore, medieval Muslims were almost completely uninterested in and ignorant of the entire Roman corpus. Many of the classical texts which medieval Muslims read were made available not by Arabs but by Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule.
Also, while classical knowledge became thoroughly integrated into every area of Western culture, Islam’s brief flirtation with Greek learning came to an end. The result was not synthesis or enrichment but an experiment which failed. Classical logic, philosophy, politics, literature, law, and language all helped make Western society astonishingly varied and rich in its cultural output. Today, Islamic societies are still locked into barbaric, restrictive, and repressively ignorant cultural modes.
This sad state of affairs is a result of religious dogma, not ethnicity. This fact is underlined by the accomplishments of Jewish people who have for the most part avoided the same fate. Arabs and Jews are Semitic cousins who share many of the same cultural and linguistic roots. Yet the Jewish people have demonstrated an aptitude for adaptation and a willingness to adopt beneficial practices from cultures they have encountered.
Islam stands almost alone among the world religions in its rigid rejection of all that did not emerge from seventh century Arabia. While some individuals may resist this tendency, as a whole the movement is irresistible. The conclusion we should draw from this, however, is not hopelessness but recognition of opportunity. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, and even skeptical Muslims can and should unite and work together in opposing the existential threat each faces in violent and intolerant Arab Islamic imperialism.
For those of us in the west, recognizing the pre-Christian and Greco-Roman origins of our civilization is an essential step on the way. Once we understand that the classical foundations of our society have been both the key to its success and the common ground on which both religious and secular persons have prospered, we can confront our common enemy rather than each other. The Western civilization we benefit does not belong to any particular one of us, after all. It is fertile ground for all who wish to use their minds and energies to develop and improve.