POLITICAL EQUALITY

In the fifth century democracy, both as an established political constitution and as an ideal, reached its climax in Athens and some other Greek cities. Against it stood oligarchy, by no means a spent force, and whether in power or in opposition always a foe to be reckoned with. Naturally therefore an ideological conflict developed which led men on beyond constitutional questions to larger problems of human nature and human relations. Democracy was part of a general movement towards equality, and the need to defend democracy was a spurto further arguments in its favour. Thucydides provides some of the best examples of this, for instance in the speech of Athenagoras, democratic leader of Syracuse, who says to the young oligarchs of his city (6.38.5):

Do you dislike being politically on an equality with a large number? But how is it just for members of the same state to be denied the same rights? I shall be told that democracy is neither sensible nor fair [literally ‘equal’], and that the wealthy are also the best fitted to rule; but I reply, first, that demos means the whole state, oligarchy only a part; secondly, that the wealthy may be the best guardians of property, but the best counsellors are the intelligent, and the best at listening to and judging arguments are the many. And in a democracy all these, whether acting separately or together, have an equal share.

Here we have the ideal of a democracy, in which the rich have their place, but it is for the most intelligent to give counsel—possibly conflicting counsel, for there are two sides to every question—and the decision is in the hands of the whole people, when they have listened to the arguments and sized them up. In practice it did not always work out like that, for demos no less than oligoi could be applied to a section only of the population—could mean plebs as well as populus — and as such could be ruthless in its treatment of the rich or intellectual.

Opinions differ as to how far the theory of the social contract, or compact, as understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D., was anticipated in our period of Greek thought, and the differences spring largely from the different meanings which scholars have given to the phrase. We shall look at the evidence first (briefly in some cases where it has already been touched on), and may then, if we wish, see how close the Greek conceptions were to those of later Europe.

One ancient belief about law attributed it ultimately to the gods. The human lawgiver or constitution-maker (whose existence was not denied) was only the channel through which the commands of heaven became known and effective. In Tyrtaeus's poem (seventh century, fr. 3 Diehl) Lycurgus's constitution for Sparta is actually dictated in detail by Apollo at Delphi. Later, men tended to say that Lycurgus drew up the constitution himself but went to Delphi for assurance that it had the god's approval (Xen. Rep. Lac. 8.5). Herodotus (1.65) finds two versions side by side, the traditional one of a religious origin for the laws, and a rationalistic—based on the similarity of Spartan and Cretan laws—that Lycurgus copied the constitution of Crete. The Cretan laws in their turn were said to have been the work of Zeus (Plato, Laws, adinit.). Even Cleisthenes, making his democratic reforms at the end of the sixth century, received the names for his new tribes from the Pythia (Arist. Ath. Pol. 21-6), and probably therefore sought the oracle's ratification of his whole scheme.

By the fifth century an impersonal nature had in some men's minds replaced the gods as the worldwide power that produced the whole order of which men are a part. For others, like Hippias, the two can exist comfortably side by side, and Euripides, when he speaks in ‘Presocratic’ language of the ‘ageless order of immortal nature’, and elsewhere in his poetry, shows a desire to keep them united.

‘Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or is it a matter of practice, or natural aptitude or what?’ The urgency with which this question was debated in the fifth century has been mentioned in an introductory chapter (p. 25), where the meaning of areté was briefly outlined and it was suggested that it had powerful social implications inclining a writer to answer in one sense or another on grounds not purely rational. The debate reflected the clash between older aristocratic ideals and the new classes which were then rising to prominence under the democratic system of government at Athens and seeking to establish what would today be called a meritocracy. The claim of Sophists that areté could be imparted for fees by travelling teachers, instead of being freely transmitted by the precept and example of family and friends, and by association with ‘the right people’, coupled with the qualities of character native to any young man of good birth, was to the conservative-minded profoundly shocking. Philosophically, the question whether it was a matter of natural talent, or could be acquired by either teaching or assiduous practice, is chiefly important because, as a commonplace of the time, it was caught up in the thought of Socrates and Plato, who tried to answer it at a deeper level. Since the present study must be in part preparation for meeting these two great figures we may take a brief look at the kind of answers offered in and before their time. After-wards, of course, the topic became more commonplace still, till we get to Horace's ‘fortes creantur fortibus et bonis … doctrinased vim promovet insitam’.

The old idea is typified by Theognis in the sixth century. To his young friend Cyrnus he writes (vv. 27 ff. Diehl; the rest of the poetry makes it abundantly clear that for him ‘good ’ and ‘noble’ mean ‘of the right class’):

Out of the goodwill I bear you I tell you what I myself learned from good men when I was still a child.

The chapter on the Sophists (p. 49) mentioned Sir Alexander Grant's division of morality into three stages, corresponding in a nation to childhood, adolescence and maturity in the individual. In one respect his division would not pass unchallenged today. He calls the second, sceptical or sophistic era ‘transitional’, and implies that only the third, that is, a return to earlier beliefs more deeply held because attained by independent thought, represents maturity. In Greek thought the transition was to the idealism of Plato, a philosophical reaffirmation and defence of those absolute values which are accepted by the ‘simplicity and trust’ of childhood as they are in the pre-critical stage of society. The second or sceptical stage might equally well be called positivist, and it is by no means generally accepted that belief in absolute values is more mature than positivism. Not every adult recovers the convictions of his childhood. The positivist rejects the view that positive law must set out from the ideal of a natural, i.e. universally valid, standard of right: there is only a relative right or goodness, which is derived from the positive law prevailing at a particular time. The positivist knows that the search for goodness is a chimaera-hunt. Similarly beauty, as it was for Hume, is ‘no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the minds which contemplate them, and each mind perceives a different beauty’. In statements like these the modern positivist would not wish to be told that his standpoint was either pre-Platonic or adolescent, but he is in fact repeating the Sophists' assertions in the controversy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Value for him, as for Archelaus, exists by nomos only, not by physis.

CRITICISMS OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION

The Presocratic philosophers, whether or not they retained a belief in a divine force or forces, all alike promulgated conceptions of religion which were far removed from the anthropomorphism of the popular or state cults based on the Homeric pantheon. Xenophanes openly attacked them, and substituted a non-anthropomorphic monotheism or pantheism, while others tacitly abandoned them in favour, first, of an ever-living world-stuff described vaguely as governing or steering the motions of the cosmos and everything in it, and later, in Anaxagoras, of a single Mind separate from the matter of the universe and the cause of the rational order which it displays. We have seen Heraclitus condemning phallic and other cults for their unseemliness and Democritus (doubtless under the influence of already existing evolutionary theories) claiming that it was only the alarming nature of thunder, lightning and similar phenomena that made men think they were caused by gods. As ‘enlightenment’ grows, it shows itself under two main aspects (whether in ancient Greece or Europe since the Renaissance): first, the determination to believe only what is reasonable and a tendency to identify reason with positivism and the progress of natural science, and secondly a genuine concern with morality. Morality is identified with the amelioration of human life and the elimination of cruelty, injury and all forms of exploitation of human beings by their fellows, and is based on purely humanistic and relative standards, for it is held that absolute standards claiming supernatural authority not only have led in the past, but must inevitably lead, to cruelty, intolerance and other evils. The Greek gods were very vulnerable in both these aspects, and as soon as conventional piety began to yield to a more thoughtful attitude—when nomos in all its aspects was no longer taken for granted but rather contrasted with what was natural and universal—scepticism and disapproval began to make themselves felt in increasing volume.

The Greek words sophos, sophia, usually translated ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, were in common use from the earliest times, and, standing as they do for an intellectual or spiritual quality, naturally acquired some delicate shades of meaning which can only be crudely illustrated here. At first they connoted primarily skill in a particular craft. A shipwright in Homer is ‘skilled in all sophia’, a charioteer, a steersman, an augur, a sculptor are sophoi each in his occupation, Apollo is sophos with the lyre, Thersites a contemptible character but sophos with his tongue; there is a law in Hades (for comic purposes) that whoever excels his fellow-craftsmen in ‘one of the great and clever arts’ shall have special privileges until someone else comes along who is ‘more sophos in his art’. This sense merges easily into that of generally knowing or prudent, by way of a line like that of Theognis (II9ff.) that it is easy for a sophos to detect counterfeit coinage, but much more difficult to unmask a man of spurious character. Here sophos might still mean an expert (there are experts in testing coinage, but alas none in testing humanity), though more probably it is going over to the meaning of knowledgeable in general. In a similar doubtful position is Hesiod's description of Linus, the mythical singer and musician, as ‘versed in all kinds of sophia (fr. 153 Rzach). In this way it was used of the seven Sophoi Wise Men or Sages, whose wisdom consisted chiefly of practical statesmanship and was enshrined in brief gnomic sayings, or of anyone of good sense (Eur. I. A. 749).

Along with generalization, a term of value like this, implying positive approval, inevitably suffers division into a ‘true’ and a ‘false’ meaning according to the user's point of view. The sophia of charioteer, shipwright or musician must have been to a large extent acquired by learning, but Pindar no doubt pleased his royal patron when he wrote that he who knows much by nature is wise (sophos), in contrast to the chattering crows who have gained their knowledge by learning.

In volume II (ch. VI) I briefly sketched the climate of thought in the fifth century, especially at Athens, and the effect in several different fields of the substitution of natural for divine causation. The present chapter will attempt an outline of the main causes and features of this changing outlook, before we go on to consider the meaning of Sophistic and investigate each separate topic in detail.

To determine the causes of an intellectual revolution is always a rash undertaking, and when a great many things are happening together it is not always easy to distinguish cause from effect; but a few things may be mentioned as more likely to belong to the former category. We are bound to dismiss, on chronological grounds, the assumption that the ‘Presocratics’, and in particular the Ionians, could all have been influential in moulding the thought of the Sophists. If there is any causal connexion between the ideas of Democritus and those of Protagoras or Gorgias, it is more likely to have been the other way round. On the other hand the influence of the Eleatics on Protagoras and Gorgias is undeniable, as is that of Heraclitus on Protagoras, and Gorgias is said to have been a pupil and follower of Empedocles. One of the most powerful influences for humanism is to be found in the theories of the natural origins of life and society which were a feature of Ionian thought from Anaximander onwards. Life, including human life, was the product of a kind of fermentation set up by the action of heat on damp or putrefying matter, and social and political groups were formed by agreement as man's only effective form of defence against non-human nature. The cosmogonies themselves assisted in banishing divine agents from the world, not because they were evolutionary rather than creative—the idea of divine creation was never prominent in Greek religion—but because they made more difficult the Greek habit of seeing divine or semi-divine beings every-where in nature.

So much for the problems–what positive points emerge? Each pattern has grown and developed. An image or picture is creative and can open up new possibilities. A code of law is hard and dead, but a pattern or picture is never still. The wide variety of insight expressed by very different people confirms the openness and creativity of the four patterns which have been examined. With prolific development there remains remarkable constancy. Clement, Basil, John and Augustine belonged to different historical settings, and were strong in personal idiosyncrasies. Yet, beginning from the variety of the New Testament background, we may move to Alexandria, Asia Minor, Constantinople and North Africa, passing in our travels through four centuries. In such a movement we find that Christian morality is seen by these four people as well as by the New Testament largely in terms of righteousness, discipleship, faith, freedom and love. Few things are as insular as moral discourse, and few things change more rapidly. Yet here in the moral life of people called Christians there is surprising continuity. This gives new reason for speaking of Christian morality as an identifiable phenomenon.

The value of the notion of ‘pattern’ has been amply proved. Further investigation is needed to clarify the logic of such patterns. The relation between key ideas and related principles is something like that found between principles of natural law and their original axiom; but there is clearly more to be said of the imaginative or aesthetic element.

John was born at Antioch towards the middle of the fourth century. His father was a military commander; his mother, left a widow at the age of twenty, was a devout Christian who gave all her attention to her son. John showed exceptional intelligence and studied to be a lawyer under the great teacher Libanius, who when dying named as his successor, ‘John, if the Christians had not stolen him from us’. John's eloquence was extraordinary; but he gradually turned from his first goal towards a life of renunciation. He could not bring himself to take a fee for arguing a false case. He was baptised and then ordained as a reader. His desire to become a monk was resisted by his mother, who pleaded that he should not make her a widow a second time. So he stayed at home; but he lived an ascetic life. He ate little, slept on bare ground, prayed, and lived in almost unbroken silence. Later, he went into the mountains south of Antioch, where he followed the guidance of an old Syrian monk. Finally he lived in isolation in a mountain cave where he slept and ate so little, that at the end of two years his health was broken and he had to return home to Antioch. These years left their mark on his body and mind. Back at Antioch he was ordained as deacon in 381, and as priest five years later.

An examination of early Christian ethics may begin with a brief appreciation of those contemporary factors which make this enterprise appropriate now. The study of ethics has, in the last thirty years, moved towards a wider recognition of the complexity and diversity of ethical problems. If moral philosophy is a practical science concerned with questions of the form ‘What shall I do?’ then, one writer insists, ‘no general answer can be given to this type of question. The most a moral philosopher can do is to paint a picture of various types of life in the manner of Plato and ask which type of life you really want to lead.’ Another sees the function of moral philosophy as ‘that of helping us to think better about moral questions by exposing the logical structure of the language in which this thought is expressed’. For him moral judgements are prescriptive, can be universalised, are descriptive and may be logically interrelated. Reason, good reason for acting in one way rather than in another, provides another way of looking at ethical inquiry or moral judgements. The crucial thing is that we should have moral points of reference which we have deliberately adopted. ‘To become morally adult is… to learn to use “ought” -sentences in the realisation that they can only be verified by reference to a standard or set of principles which we have by our own decision accepted and made our own.’

At the end of ‘Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy’, the editor, I. T. Ramsey, stressed the urgent need for ‘such a thorough biblical and patristic study, including a study of Christian moral theology down the ages, as enables us both to formulate the most reliable Christian principles and the moral obligations they express, relating this understanding to some key-phrase in terms of which the full Christian commitment is given’. This book springs from a sense of the same need. It begins with an account of the function of ethical patterns. After the historical background and New Testament beginnings, the ethics of Clement of Alexandria, Basil, John Chrysostom and Augustine are examined. The four patterns of righteousness, discipleship, faith and love are seen in the distinctive thought of each writer. Exposition is tied to text because ethical terms are either ambiguous or meaningless when lifted out of context. Two necessary features of any Christian ethic emerge–a respect for the contingent and a challenge to perfection.

The obstacles to a work of this scope are considerable; there is too much material. The New Testament possesses an ethical complexity which has been carefully explored. Clement's writings are oriented to ethics and intricate in content. Basil poses questions to which there are no answers. Suidas said that it was for God, not man, to know all that John Chrysostom had written; Isidore of Seville confidently asserted that anyone who claimed to have read all of Augustine was a liar.

There are four questions which may be considered in the light of what has been learned. Each pattern has at least one problem. The account of righteousness raises the question of natural law, discipleship raises the problem of imitation and the Jesus of history, faith raises the question of how much non-Christian ethics can exist in a Christian ethic and love raises the problem of situation ethics. These issues have all been discussed during the last twenty years. Happily the study of patristic ethics illuminates each of these questions.

NATURAL LAW

Natural law, with its ambiguities, dug itself into Christianity during the patristic period. During its long history the term has come to mean three main things–a universal system of laws, a rational foundation of ethics, and a theory of natural rights. The first two themes play some part in early Christian thought but are far removed from their development in later centuries. The Apologists appealed to a law which was sovereign over all men and to right reason as the guide to conduct; but they did not make the wide claims of Justinian or Aquinas under these headings. Nature was subordinate to the central notion of Logos. The key move is made by Justin, whose scheme is dominated by the Christ who is both Nomos and Logos. Standing in continuity with Matthew's gospel, he speaks of the culmination of all divine law in Christ.