The General Shape of Western History

Let’s build up a general picture of the course of European history and put our philosophers into it.

First there’s the most general view. The history of the West is typically divided into three parts:

1.                    Ancient                  ends between 4-500 AD

2.                    Mediaeval             (aka the Middle Ages) ends between 1400-1500 AD

3.                    Modern                  continues

The dates can only be given roughly because history doesn’t really divide itself up into nice neat periods (much less into centuries!). We divide history up this way because we think that it helps us explain and describe historical events, but people who are interested in different aspects of a culture will notice significant changes at different times. Someone who is interested in political developments will say, for example, that the Middle Ages ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or the battle of Bosworth in 1485, or some other point, while an artist might say that the paintings of Giotto mark the beginning of a modern sensibility. It just so happens that we note significant changes in very many aspects of Western culture on either side of those transitional bands, hence the standard division seems useful.

The general form of European civilization is imagined as a gradual rise to an advanced civilization in the ancient world, followed by the collapse of that world into barbarism with the Fall of Rome and the Barbarian Invasions, followed by the slow recovery into an advanced pre-modern civilization, and at last the emergence into the light of Modernity. Like this:

(Please don’t take this too seriously!)

Now let’s look at the different periods in a little more detail

The Ancient World

In fact Ancient European history[1] is itself divisible into three parts.

                1.             Minoan/Mycenaean            ~2500 BC – ~1200BC

                2.             Greek Dark Ages                  ~1200BC – ~800BC

                3.             Classical Age                        ~800BC – ~400AD

For which we could draw very much the same sort of diagram

But we’re only interested in the last of these.

The Classical World

The Classical World is the world centred on the Mediterranean and is basically the story of two great peoples, the Greeks and the Romans. The Greeks were the greater of these, more inventive, more civilised, better in almost every respect except one. All the significant ethical philosophies of the Classical World originated with the Greeks. The Romans were, however, more efficient and brutal; and so the Romans conquered the Greeks and united the entire Classical world in their Empire. They recognised the general superiority of the Greeks, however, and adapted whatever Greek culture they could to their own uses.

Greece

The heyday of Greece was the period 500-300 BC. During most of this period the Greeks lived in city-states in a state of pretty constant conflict with each other. The greatest of the cities was Athens . It was during this period that Athenian democracy was formed; that Athens led the successful effort to defend Greece from the Persian Empire; that the plays of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus were performed; that the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides were written; that the Parthenon was built; and that SOCRATES, PLATO, and ARISTOTLE worked out the problems that would occupy Western philosophers for the next 2500 years. In this course we’ll see what those thinkers had to say about ethical matters, but here we’re just going to briefly describe the ethical background in which they operated.

The Greeks were pagans – we’re all familiar with their gods and myths – and the Greek religion didn’t really have a sacred scripture such as the Bible, but enormous respect was shown to Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. Every educated person could recognise or produce a huge store of quotes from those poems. I mention this because those poems to some extent express the ancient cultural norms and ethical standards. (The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan war, which took place just before the end of the Mycenaean civilization.) The poems were formed in the barbaric period of the Greek Dark Ages that preceded the Classical period, and so the culture in which it is set is a barbaric, warrior culture, much concerned with honour, fame, revenge, fate, courage, and pride. These were values that were still held to some degree in the later periods, and they were taken as ideals even more than they were actually acted upon. But intelligent Greeks were well aware of the fact that such norms, which may well have suited their primitive, Heroic ancestors, were problematic for civilized men. In the period that we’ll be interested in there was an effort, more or less conscious, to develop and justify a new understanding of how Men should act together. We can see this, for example in the ‘Oresteian Trilogy’ of plays of Aeschylus. Of course, it’s even clearer in the work of the philosophers that we’re going to look at, but even the philosophers had respect for those old norms. We will see that Plato, for example, thought that a fundamental part of the human soul was dedicated to seeking after honour, and no truly happy human life was possible without taking that part of our humanity into account.[2]

In the age of the city-states, however, men were more likely to agree that the cardinal virtues were the quartet of courage , temperance, justice, and wisdom.

The English words do not quite represent their Greek originals, and we must not read too many associations or subtleties into them. … [I]t endured from the sixth to the fourth century and even later; it was known to Aeschylus, approved by Pindar, explained by Socrates, subjected to a far reaching analysis by Plato and Aristotle, and strong enough to survive the disintegration of Hellenism and to play a basic part in the new ethical doctrine of the Stoics. It embodied what the Greeks admired in theory and sought in practice, and most of them would have thought that, if a man exercises these virtues and applies them to each situation as it arises, he does as much as can be expected of him.[3]

Note that from what has been said, it is clear that these virtues coexisted with the more primitive ones mentioned above. I think this is typical of how civilisations develop. The consequences of old preoccupations need not disappear without trace when new preoccupations arise. In the case of cultural and ethical norms, these are embodied in the culture and continue to be transmitted for as long as there is a chain of transmission linking the old culture to the new, and for as long as the old preoccupations are seen as relevant to people’s lives. People are shaped by their culture which continues to include traces of the old. One way that I like to think of this sort of thing is as if a culture was written on sheets of OHP slides. Each renovation of the culture is written on a new sheet and layed over the old one. We can still see the previous writing, but the further down it goes the fainter it gets, but perhaps it never disappears. At the moment we’ve identified just two layers.

We’ve seen that the philosophers of the classical age endorsed the traditional norm to some extent. But they also wanted to justify and to rationalise it. We will see that it is characteristic of their attempts that they begin by asking what it is that leads to a good life, and what they mean by that is almost always: how may a man achieve happiness in this life? It was taken for granted that happiness was the appropriate goal of life, and that the likelihood of achieving happiness for a man was the appropriate criterion to judge that man’s actions.

For SOCRATES, PLATO, and ARISTOTLE, this view of the pursuit of happiness was, in general, a positive one: a man could act so as to achieve positive benefits for himself, and this would be a good thing. For the STOICS, however, things were not so sunny. And the reason lies in the change in the Classical world that came about after the Classical Age.

Empires and Rome

About 300 BC the Greek world was unified by Alexander the Great. The little city states where a man could make a difference, where a citizen could believe that he directed the state policy, and where he could feel himself to be the master of his fate, disappeared under Alexander’s empire and its successors. Things became even more hopeless when Greece was absorbed into the Roman Empire between about 200 and 100BC. After this happened the idea that positive happiness could be achieved became less attractive, and various philosophies arose that proposed that one should act so as to minimise the bad effects of the inevitable misfortunes of life. For example, one would be advised not to aspire to luxurious food because you’ll only be disappointed and unhappy if you don’t get it. Aspire only to the bare minimum and you’ll never be disappointed. The STOICS were one such group. Stoicism became, to a significant degree, the official creed of the elite of Rome . One of the major Stoic texts, for example, is a journal written by the emperor Marcus Aurelius recording his meditations.

This sort of philosophy may well have suited the intellectual classes who could take a sanguine view of their hardships, and who, increasingly, had nothing but contempt for the old religion, but it could hardly be very attractive to the common people of the Empire. They, indeed, soon began to look for stronger stuff.

About the 1^st centuries BC and AD there was a growing popularity of religions that promised happiness for their believers. Sometimes this happiness was promised in this very life and sometimes it was promised in the afterlife, and sometime it promised both at different times. Amongst the Roman soldiers, for example, it became common to worship the Aryan god Mithras, or Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun,) while other Romans adopted the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. And then, of course, there was the religion of the Syrian god of the Christians. All of these involved gods dying and being reborn, and all of them promised salvation. Eventually, of course, Christianity triumphed over its rivals and the ancient paganism. The Emperor Constantine treated Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire from about 300AD.

With the rise of Christianity a new set of moral beliefs came into prominence. Sin, humility, kindness, love of God and one’s fellow man, forgiveness, and mercy. You’ll note that these were quite different from the previous norms. In fact, it is a common criticism of the pre-Christian Greek morality that there was so little of human sympathy in it. The new norms fill in that gap and did markedly improve the quality of ethical feeling. We also find that the Christian ethical system was in some places directly opposed to the ancient moral system. For example, the seven deadly sins included wrath and pride, which were certainly not considered culpable under the pre-Christian systems. We shall see in our treatment of the teachings of AUGUSTINE how these ethical ideas were justified and how they were related to the other Christian beliefs, and what consequences they had for how men were thought to be commanded to live.

One very important aspect that I’ll mention now is the notion of a Natural Law. This was an adaptation of a Stoic view of law to the new religion. The tendency over time was to say that since God is the ruler of the universe, His commands are binding on us and form a ‘legal’ structure independent of human law. This wasn’t Augustine’s view, but we’ll see what he had to say about natural and divine law at the appropriate time.

Augustine was also concerned to explain how it could be that Rome was great while it was pagan, but now, when Rome was a Christian Empire, it was being torn apart by pagan barbarians. This hardly seemed fair of God. The Roman Empire had been divided in two parts for some time – just for administrative convenience. The West, which spoke Latin, was still ruled from Rome itself but the East, which spoke Greek, was ruled from the new capital that Constantine had built – called Constantinople (today’s Istanbul .) Whereas the East was still strong enough to defend itself, the West was not. Augustine was shocked when the city of Rome itself was sacked by barbarians in 410AD. Further disasters followed and by about 500 most people would say that the Roman Empire had fallen (at least in the West) and the Middle Ages had begun.

The Middle Ages

The period between about 400 to about 700 was a time marked by barbarian invasions. The Huns, Alans, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles, and countless other tribes swarmed one after another over the land, killing, raping, plundering, burning, and destroying. This used to be called the ‘Dark Ages’ because there is so little written record of the events of the time. After all barbarians tend not to record what they’re destroying. Nowadays this terminology is felt to be ‘judgmental’. It’s also frowned upon to talk about ‘barbarians’. But I think that no-one who knows anything about these times can have any doubt that they were a very bad thing. Civilisation was very nearly completely extinguished in Western Europe . And the people responsible were barbarians if anybody was a barbarian. Some of these barbarians were tribes of primitive, brutal, and warlike people who had been pushed out of their lands by even more brutal and warlike people to their East, and they had been pushed in their turn in a series of movements of peoples that extended all the way across Asia to modern Mongolia . Others were spreading out from the so-called ‘womb of peoples’ in Scandinavia (the last invasions from here were the Viking raids.) All of them were attracted by the wealth of the West as well as its vulnerability.

For a long time the Romans had tried to ease the pressure on their borders by allowing tribes to enter and settle and become Roman. And they also tried to use these immigrants to fight against other tribes whom they wanted to keep or force outside the borders. This worked for a while, but eventually the constant immigration and pressure changed the character of the population. By the time that the Roman border finally collapsed in the West and the barbarians began to establish kingdoms in the previous Roman provinces, the demography and the culture of the area was sadly altered.

Eventually, of course, the barbarians began to settle down, and a new civilisation began to form. By about 900AD to 1000AD a respectable civilisation had once again arisen on European soil. This civilisation had a generally feudal form and would last for about 500 years. This is the time of kings and queens, knights on horseback, Crusades, monasteries and cathedrals. This new civilisation, however, had a severe case of schizophrenia: it operated according to norms derived from two quite distinct and – one would have thought – incompatible sources.

Feudalism

In the first place, the system of feudalism was the political expression of a warrior culture that had developed from the warrior culture of the early barbarian hordes and their early kingdoms. The ethical and cultural norms derived from that source were similar to those that had prevailed in the similar circumstances of the Greek Dark Ages of 2000 years earlier: men were again much concerned with honour, fame, revenge, courage, and pride. But this was also slightly improved by some new elements derived from the second source.

The Church

The second source was the Christian faith. After the fall of Rome the Church with its system of monasteries and continued use of Latin as a universal language was the only link to the older and better world of learning and high culture: and even that was pretty tenuous. Only the clergy were literate. Only the clergy continued to write in defence of their moral system. We’re already familiar, in very general terms, with the ethos of Christianity.

In uneasy combination with the warrior ethos this gave rise to the system of courteous behaviour known as chivalry. It’s unfortunate that chivalry, as the code of a warrior class, never found a real philosophical champion – but then that would hardly be surprising either. The system itself is recognised in the literature of the time, such as the romances of King Arthur, or the Song of Roland or the Romance of the Rose, but philosophical ethics derives almost entirely from the Christian source. Nevertheless, chivalry continues to exert an influence as another layer in our cultural heritage, and one which is surprisingly close to the surface. For example, we say that one doesn’t kick a man when he’s down, that one should stand up for the weak against the strong, and that women and children should be the first on the lifeboats. We think this is normal, but it’s not. It’s not normal in most cultures around the world today, and it certainly wasn’t normal amongst the Greeks and Romans: they would have found the ideas of chivalry quite alien.

We shall be studying the writings of ST THOMAS AQUINAS, who wrote towards the end of this period, and whose works are the culmination of the scholastic Christian philosophy, and link to the beginnings of Modern philosophy. We’ll be particularly interested in some of his ideas on Natural and Divine law too, since it is quite different from Augustine’s view and leads naturally to some of the ethical ideas of the modern age.

The Modern World

Chivalry and scholasticism depended upon the political structure of feudalism, but that type of government was fading from the world by the 15^th C. and those carriers of the Mediaeval norms had to fade with it. There is no generally accepted marker that tells us when the Modern age begins, but it’s generally thought that by about 1500 the world is so different from the world of 800 that we really are talking about two different kinds of thing, Just as 800 is so different from 100 as to be a different thing. I won’t go into all the minor subperiods that have been identified in the Modern Age, but two of them are really of cardinal importance because they indicate the defining intellectual characteristic of the Modern Age.

Renaissance

The very first recognised sub-period is the Renaissance, from about 1300 to about 1600, and in that time Europeans rediscovered their heritage from the Ancient World. There was a rebirth (that’s what ‘renaissance’ means) of the classical leaning and a renewed appreciation of the art and literature and the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. This involved, most significantly, a refocusing of interest in the life on Earth rather than Heaven, and a concern with Man’s interests rather than God’s. The Greeks and Romans you’ll recall – and contrary to the Christians of the Middle Ages – had those interests and concerns. In this respect the Renaissance was actually a rejection of much of the cultural emphasis of the Middle Ages in favour of what they imagined was the cultural emphasis of the Classical World. This all began in the advanced city-states of Italy and spread north.

Enlightenment

The second sub-period of interest is the Enlightenment of the 18^th C. This was a movement that claimed that questions were best addressed in the light of human Reason, and that no aspect of the world would not benefit from being exposed to this light. In particular ethical questions and political questions were treated rationally, without reference to revealed truth – because the various religious conflicts of the preceding centuries had made plain just how dangerous that sort of conflict could be. Argument and compromise are much more difficult if all sides are convinced that they’re doing God’s Will. Again, the continuing reaction against the culture of the Middle Ages is apparent. The Enlightenment’s political activism reached its culmination in the American and French Revolutions and the general acceptance amongst elites in the West that Democracy was the proper form of government.

In the Modern World ethics has been much more concerned with supposed rights, obligations, and duties, largely modelled on ideas that are used in explaining how law works. Sometimes this was justified by claiming that Society itself was a contractual relationship, and sometimes it was said that there was some sort of Natural Law that looked and worked much like man-made law, and sometimes it was said that the very fact of there being the possibility of following a Law indicated that there was a Law – or something like that. We’ll see how these concepts were treated by HOBBES, LOCKE, KANT, and MILL.