IV.
THE SYMBIOSIS OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN CHRISTIAN PLATONISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

The first century of the Christian era witnessed the emergence of a unique constellation in the Mediterranean region, the geographical birthplace of the future West. Here, in the porous ideological milieu of Hellenism, which had been on the advance since Alexander, and within the political framework of the Roman Empire, two doctrines met that formed a tension-laden opposition within the spectrum of the axial age: Christianity and Platonism. In terms of their respective contents, this was an encounter of a theocentric with a cosmocentric worldview. Christianity, which was forthwith organized ecclesiastically in the forms of Roman law, was ritually firmly anchored in the vibrant cult of the rapidly growing and socially mixed religious communities; conversely, the de-ritualized forms of Greek philosophy – in addition to Neoplatonism, the Stoic and Epicurean currents in particular – found a sympathetic audience among the educated elite and assumed the role of an individualized and enlightened learned religion. Among the populace, belief in the world of the Roman gods – a counterpart to the Homeric pantheon – initially continued uninterrupted. As had already occurred in Greece, religious cults from the Near and Far East mixed with this indigenous religion. Gnostic currents and mystery cults, in particular, exerted a certain, though sometimes overestimated, influence on early Christianity.

Of crucial importance for the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking is the constellation of ‘Athens’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rome’, which has shaped Western culture and thought to the present day. The Jewish and Greek intellectual formations of the axial age encountered each other in the milieu of a Roman civilization that was itself shaped by Greek culture; they did not close themselves off from each other – as Hinduism and Islam would later do in India, for example – but learned from each other through polemics and cross-fertilization. The synthesis they achieved under the tutelage of Christian theology, itself influenced by Hellenism, will be of interest to us in its role as a catalyst for the emergence of independent modern intellectual formations. However, Roman Catholic Christianity, as a dogmatically developed and thoroughly rationalized doctrine, made itself vulnerable to attack from the philosophical side not only from within, as it were, through its connection to metaphysics, but as a temporal power, it also became vulnerable to political attack. For it was in the organizational form of the church shaped by Roman law that Christianity acquired political influence; after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it entered into political competition with secular powers. These institutional links between ‘Rome’ and ‘Jerusalem’ contributed to the global spread of Christianity and its impact on world history; at the same time, however, this led to the Roman Church becoming so deeply involved in the development of Western legal culture that, in an ironic twist, Christian natural law paved the way for the secularization of the early modern period under the influence of rational natural law.

The Western theme of ‘faith and knowledge’ can be explained in terms of the division of labour between Christianity and Platonism in late antiquity. In both cases, the cognitive dissonance between the knowledge that had accumulated in profane spheres of life, on the one hand, and the explanatory power of mythologies, on the other, had played a destructive as well as a constructive role. While the violation of moral-practical sensibilities spurred the moralization of the sacred in all axial cultures, there were significant differences in how these cultures responded to the excessive demands placed on mythical and magical thought by advanced technical and natural philosophical knowledge. By opening up epistemic access to the divine, cosmological worldviews apparently stimulated curiosity about what holds the world together. Their comprehensive notion of ‘wisdom’ laid the groundwork for linking mundane knowledge with the religious promise of salvation. The Jewish prophets and scribes, on the other hand, were more concerned with the events of salvation and misfortune unfolding in the dimension of history. For them, communicative access to God was primarily a matter of securing revealed truths of relevance for salvation. Thus, mundane knowledge did not enjoy priority, even though it had to remain compatible on the whole with the character of nature as God’s creation.

Platonism and Buddhism in particular, but also some of the Chinese wisdom teachings, attempt to integrate mundane knowledge into the categorial framework of salvific knowledge. These wisdom teachings are geared to processing mundane knowledge, i.e. to the inclusion of knowledge. Monotheism, on the other hand, can be content with a blanket elimination of cognitive dissonance, leaving a de-demonized nature to be explored by mundane knowledge that has no further theological relevance. This situation changed in the Hellenistic period. Even if Aristotle’s scientized philosophy had not yet received the attention it deserved, the challenge that the encounter with Greek philosophy posed to the Jews and Christians was not only to oppose its highly developed theories. Rather, this encounter made them aware of their deficiency in learned knowledge that necessitated an unbiased appropriation of Greek philosophy. Among Jewish thinkers, it was Philo of Alexandria who undertook this task, while among the Christian thinkers, it was above all the Alexandrian church fathers. But the more carefully we examine the complementary fusion of Christian theology with Greek metaphysics in terms of its freedom from contradiction, the more fragile appears the unity of pistis and sophia claimed by both sides. At the end of a long path, the tension – exacerbated by the reception of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages – between the two opposing conceptual frameworks of the theocentric and the cosmocentric worldviews could only be stabilized in the form of the Thomist synthesis; this was achieved through the differentiation – with the communicative and the epistemic modes of access to the absolute and the two corresponding, but not mutually contradictory, forms of affirmation [Für-wahr-Halten] – of two attitudes and types of cognition, namely, faith and knowledge.

With the accumulation of mundane knowledge the increasing polarization of faith and knowledge shattered the unity of theology and philosophy. In the early modern period, this legacy would give rise to the methodologically independent natural sciences, and, at the same time, to philosophical systems that, as a result of reflection on the separation of faith and knowledge, would establish epistemology and rational natural law as disciplines in their own right, independent of theology. This differentiation already provides the answer to Luther’s prior decoupling of theology from mundane knowledge; theology itself brings about the ‘end of the age of worldviews’ and adapts itself to the secular authority of the sciences and to a secular, rationally legitimized state authority. Philosophy, having renounced metaphysical certainties, now had to compete with religious conceptions of self and the world. Moreover, it had to answer the question of how its own scientific character is to be understood: as an assimilation to the sciences, or as a scientific way of thinking that upholds the perspective of self-understanding and defends it against the exclusive claim to mundane knowledge of the objectifying sciences?

In the controversies between the Christians and the Jewish and the Platonic heritage during the Roman Empire, the creativity of the axial age at first continues and focuses attention on the spiritual form of Christianity. However, the dynamics of Christianity’s development into an ecclesiastically constituted world religion and world power can only be explained by its encounter with its political, societal and cultural environment. For the most part, the Roman state was tolerant of the influx of religious currents and cults from the Orient. In the early imperial period, however, the intellectual and cultural life of the elite in general was shaped by Greek educational traditions. Rome was not one of the original axial cultures. This last, socially and politically highly advanced ancient civilization did not produce a metaphysical or religious worldview of its own. The productivity of Roman culture manifested itself in another area. The Romans achieved a combination, unique in the ancient world, of an increasingly inclusive citizenship with an effective large-scale administration that enabled them to ensure the cohesion of their vast empire, which had grown out of and was modelled on a city-state. They were, above all, the political creators of a world empire centred on and modelled on the city of Rome, and the inventors of the admirable form of organization of a geographically extensive and functionally differentiated social and economic network of communication and trade based on civil law.

The rationalization of legal relations was accompanied by a further differentiation of the legal medium compared to the Greek polis, so that it stood out as a distinct layer of norms from religious and everyday moral precepts. For the first time, legal experts were trained to practise law as a profession and to...