Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 104 - Let's Talk Turkey - the Cappadocians.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Let's Talk Turkey, the Cappadocians. Some things run in families, musical talent for example. Consider the Bach family of Thuringia. They produced not only the renowned Johann Sebastian Bach, but also his children, a good number of whom became significant musicians in their own right. Or more recently, think of the Jackson family of Gary, Indiana. So deep was their talent pool that they were able to form the Jackson Five without even calling on the services of Sister Janet. Of course, musical stardom has many things in common with philosophy—the fast cars, the groupies, the constant press attention. But this phenomenon of famous families doesn't seem to be one of them. I recently appealed to listeners on the podcast's Facebook group—you might want to join in if you haven't yet—for examples of philosophical siblings. Helpful responses pointed me towards the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August, who were major thinkers of German Romanticism. I was also reminded of Plato's brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, who feature in The Republic. Okay, Glaucon and Adeimantus weren't necessarily great philosophers, but like the Jacksons, that family did have one heck of a frontman. As far as I can tell, though, the greatest philosophical siblings of all time were Christians who hailed from Cappadocia, a region of central Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. Their names were Macrina, Basil, Gregory, and Tito. Oh, no, sorry, Tito was one of the Jacksons. I always get that confused. Actually, there were five brothers and five sisters in this Cappadocian family. A decisive influence came from the oldest sibling, Macrina. She helped raise the younger kids and was partly responsible for bringing her brothers Gregory and Basil to a religious life. When Gregory wrote A Dialogue on the Soul, in imitation of Plato's Phaedo, he presented Macrina as a kind of Christian Socrates. She is shown on her deathbed using arguments to convince Gregory not to grieve at her imminent death. If Gregory gives us anything close to an accurate portrayal of Macrina, she was opinionated and knowledgeable about Hellenic philosophy, able to discourse on fine points of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and medical theory. As usual, though, this female philosopher is known to us only indirectly through the writings of men, in this case her two brothers. Of this fraternal pair, Gregory seems to have been more inclined towards philosophy than Basil. Though he had studied in Athens, at Macrina's prompting Basil became a monk living in ascetic retreat from the world. He was called away from this vocation to the highly politicized world that was the 4th century church. In the 360s, Basil took up a post in the Cappadocian city of Caesarea and eventually became bishop there. Much of his life would be devoted to doctrinal battles over Christian theology, as we'll see in a moment. For support in this struggle, he called on the services of his brother Gregory, who became bishop of a small town called Nissa. Hence, these two Cappadocian thinkers are usually called Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nissa. A third significant Cappadocian philosopher, or rather fourth, counting Macrina, is another Gregory called Gregory of Nazianzus, because he likewise took up a post as bishop in the small settlement of Nazianzus at Basil's urging. This Gregory was a dear friend of the family, and often wrote of his longing for the peace offered by a life of retreat with Basil and Macrina. But he was also a well-trained rhetorician who was steeped in previous Christian philosophy. All three Cappadocian fathers were especially influenced by origin, albeit that they did not follow him indiscriminately, rejecting for instance his view that the soul exists before it comes to be in a body. Origins influence in Cappadocia can perhaps be traced back to yet another Gregory, this name being to Cappadocian thought what the name Ammonius is for Neoplatonism. The earlier Gregory Thamaturgos, meaning Gregory the Wonder Worker, had brought originist teachings to the region in the 250s. Drawing on this originist tradition and their training in rhetoric and philosophy, the Cappadocians engaged in extensive debate with theological rivals, in addition to carrying out their daily pastoral duties. Neither of the Gregories took to this life with unmixed enthusiasm. Gregory of Nazianzus in particular had mixed feelings. His resentment at being assigned to such a backwater town by Basil and his preference for a life of withdrawal led him to complain bitterly about his calling and to abandon his duties more than once. Yet he did not shy from political controversy. His writings in defense of what he took to be orthodoxy became classics, to the point that in the later Byzantine period he was simply called Gregory the Theologian. He bravely faced the more dangerous side of the controversy as well. During time spent in Constantinople, he was showered with stones by rival monks and then nearly assassinated. The would-be killer had a last-moment change of heart, and Gregory forgave him on the spot. Whatever his misgivings about the perilous, distracting, and contentious life he led as a bishop, we should be grateful that he was forced into a life of active engagement with his Christian community. Many of his surviving writings are orations that were delivered to that community. In one of the most moving, he implores his listeners to care for the poor, and in particular for victims of leprosy. Here Gregory's rhetorical training is on full display as he tries to bring his audience to feel pity and mercy for the disadvantaged. At one point, he speaks of how lepers become so disfigured that they must cry out their own names so that their former friends will be able to recognize them. But Gregory does not only appeal to our emotions, he also calls on the assistance of philosophy. The condition of the lepers, he says, teaches us that things of the body are subject to destruction and suffering, and that only the goods of the soul are invulnerable—a point Stoics and Platonists had been making for a fair few centuries by this stage. When Gregory denounces his fellow citizens for their attachment to luxury—floors strewn with flower petals, slaveboys with modish haircuts, serving fine food—he sounds like Epictetus, or any number of authors from the rhetorical movement called the Second Sophistic. But Epictetus never told us that we need to devote our lives to the care of the poor, that the health of our souls could be secured through tending to those who are diseased in body. As soon as Gregory begins his oration by referring to St. Paul's triad of virtues—faith, hope and love—we realize that we are in a new ethical territory. Gregory extols love even above faith and hope, and identifies love of the poor as the purest expression of this virtue. We have here a stark contrast with pagan thinkers, and particularly the pagan Platonists of Gregory's time, like the somewhat earlier Iamblichus or the emperor Julian. In fact, like Basil, Gregory made the pilgrimage to the philosophical Mecca of Athens, around the same time Julian was there. Yet the fourth century offers few pairs of thinkers more opposed than Julian, the anti-Christian emperor, and Gregory the theologian. Not only did Gregory attack Julian directly in impassioned pro-Christian orations, but he had a completely different understanding of the place of philosophy in the good life. It isn't just that he emphasizes practical action more than Julian and other pagan Platonists do. It is also the nature of the action he recommends. Iamblichus and Julian think the practical side of philosophy means using theurgic ritual to come into contact with the gods. For Gregory, God has already come into contact with us, by sending us his son. We should humble ourselves just as he did, by going amongst the least fortunate and sharing whatever we have with them. Gregory repeatedly invokes an ethical precept from Plato, imitate God insofar as is possible. But his god is a very different one from Plato's, a god who is best imitated by loving one's fellow man without concern for oneself, and gladly choosing the very poverty one tries to alleviate in others. Greek ethics had long revolved around the apparently selfish goal of perfecting oneself. Now Gregory gives us the Christian version of that goal. We help ourselves only by helping others. And by the way, he adds, don't worry about those scaremongers who claim that leprosy might be contagious, those are just silly rumors. Leprosy was not the only potentially lethal malady found in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. Gregory's nearly averted assassination was the symptom of a chronic social and political disease, a severe case of theological dissent. The careers of both Gregory's and also Basil revolved around one of the most bitter and protracted intellectual disputes of the ancient world, a controversy over the Holy Trinity. This dispute threatened the unity of ancient Christianity and vexed political leaders in the highest seats of power. Various emperors tried imposing a solution, negotiating between disputing bishops, and occasionally playing them off one against the other, almost always to little avail. The fundamental question was this. Apparently the earliest church fathers, like Origen and the apologists, had recognized that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like Jews before them and Muslims after them, the Christians were emphatic that they believed in just one God, yet their God was somehow three. This problem turned out to need a lot of solving. Although one could wonder about the relation between all members of the Trinity, most attention was directed to the relation of begetting between the Father and the Son. If we could understand how this begetting works, we might understand better how exactly the Trinity forms a divine unity. In the normal course of events, fathers are distinct from their sons, and there's a good reason for that. The relation that a father bears to a son is an asymmetrical one. That is, fathers beget their sons, whereas sons are begotten by their fathers. This is not a two-way street. For instance, it would be impossible for Joe Keaton to be Buster Keaton's father while also being Buster's son. Yet in the case of God, this is precisely what happens. He is both father and son. It seems the begetting relation, which we hoped would solve our problem of how God can be both three and one, is just giving rise to further puzzles. An important early attempt to resolve these puzzles was put forward at the Council of Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in the year 325. Clips from across the empire assembled and produced a statement of belief, a creed, which would later be seen as a definitive statement of Christian doctrine. But to the extent that consensus was reached, it would not last. Nicaea would be followed by many more councils which likewise failed to put the dispute to rest. The Nicaean position on the relation of father to son was that they are the same in substance. The broader theological point of this formula was, of course, to ensure that the divine persons do constitute a unity. The more immediate political point was to put a stop to the malign influence of a theologian named Arius, who leaned towards affirming a significant difference between father and son. Nonetheless, the council wanted to stop short of the heresy known as Sibelionism, named after the third-century theologian Sibelius. This was the view that God is in reality a unity and not a trinity, for the persons are in themselves identical and distinguished from one another only as modes by which the divine unity expresses itself. Theologians of the fourth century thus presented themselves as steering a course between the two extreme views of Arianism and Sibelionism. Some tried to diffuse the controversy by arguing against applying the term uzia, the Greek word for substance or essence, to God in the first place. But compromise middle positions were waiting to be occupied, and if ever there was a debate where every possible position was eventually occupied by someone or other, it was the debate over the trinity. Some theologians proposed modifying the Nicaean formula to say that the father and the son are different in substance. After the Greek for this expression, modern scholars call this group the heteroceanes. The idea was to concede a real difference in the persons, albeit that they remain unified by a single divine will. Naturally enough, those who took up this view were accused by opponents of falling into the error of Arius by effectively affirming three gods where there should be only one. Some of these opponents realized they could stake out a ground between this supposedly neo-Arian heterocean position and the total identity view of the Sibelians by saying that the persons are similar in substance. It was this solution that was taken up by the heroes of today's episode, the Cappadocians. Of course, they presented their solution not as a correction of the Nicaean formula that the persons are the same in substance, but rather as an explanation of the sense in which that is true. Thus Gregory of Nyssa gave the analogy of three humans who share the same nature of humanity. As Aristotle himself said in his categories, the universal humanity is itself a sort of substance, which makes it parallel to the single substance of the godhead. Meanwhile, the three individual humans are distinct from one another, yet similar in virtue of their same nature, just as the three divine persons are similar, yet not fully identical. Appropriately enough, the debate over these ideas was itself pretty personal. The leading heterocean intellectual and the chief target of the Cappadocians' refutations was a man named Eunomius. In thinking through the implications of his heteroceanism, where father and son are said to be the same god and yet different, Eunomius gave a fairly sophisticated account of how words relate to things. Of course, he was particularly interested in words like father, son, and begotten, but his view can be generalized to all names. Eunomius proposed that a name will reveal the essence or nature of the thing that is named. Names cannot acquire this power by mere convention, but must have some kind of innate correctness. We would not know the begottenness of the divine son with merely human resources, but now that God has revealed this begottenness, we can say that in the sentence, the son is begotten by the father, the word begotten gives us a direct insight into the son's substance. This is a perfect fit with heterocean theology, since different words, begetting and begotten, will apply to the father and to the son, yielding a difference in substance. Along the way, Eunomius has taken sides in a dispute that goes back at least as far as Plato's Cratylus. As we saw a mere 75 episodes ago, in that dialogue Plato considers two theories of names, one of which makes names naturally relate to their bearers, as would happen in a case of onomatopoeia. It's not mere chance or custom that makes us use the word bang for a loud noise. Loud noises just sound like the word bang. On the naturalist theory, though, all genuine names relate intimately to what they name. Names can even be analyzed, perhaps by means of etymology, to arrive at an understanding of what is named. The Stoics too liked this theory of names, but by late antiquity the dominant position was that of Aristotle, who had said clearly in his work On Interpretation that names are conventional. We arbitrarily assign sounds to things, and thereby produce new names that work just fine. So, when Basil of Caesarea comes to refute Eunomius, he needs to reject the naturalist theory of names, and it is only to be expected that he would align himself with the Aristotelian position. This is exactly what he does, though there is some debate about how much he takes directly from philosophical sources and how much is filtered through previous Christian theological literature. He stakes out a position not unlike the one we've seen in Platonist commentators on Aristotle, according to which thoughts are an intermediary between language and the world. When you hear the word giraffe, you understand it as referring to a giraffe, but only by way of a thought in your mind, the thought or notion of giraffes. Basil takes this in a skeptical direction by claiming that the names we use can get us only as far as these notions. Never do we find language actually revealing the essence of a thing, it only signifies the way those things are conceptualized in our minds. In the case of the Trinity, this allows him to say that no real difference is being implied when we use one word, like begetting, to refer to the Father, and another word, like begotten, to refer to the Son. The upshot is that Basil has the anti-Eunomian position he wants, but only by casting doubt on the power of language and thought to get at things in the world. We might take this to show that Eunomius has a big advantage over Basil. Surely we want to protest, language does refer to the real things, and not only our mental conceptions of them. Surely too we can know the essences of these things, if indeed they have essences. Basil's stance seems to land us in a radical skepticism, not just about God, but about anything we can name. But Basil's point is somewhat more nuanced than I have made out thus far. Though he does insist that the essences of things remain unknowable to us, he adds that language and our mental conceptions allow us to identify those things and keep track of them. Thus, if I say, the tall strikingly beautiful creature in the enclosure there, I am successfully picking out an object, namely a giraffe. However, the description only leads to identification of the giraffe and the possibility of classing it with other things that share some of its characteristics. Never will I actually achieve a direct grasp of its substance, essence, or being. In Greek, it's ousia. Another objection, and one that the Cappadocians would find at least as troubling, is a religious one. Their anti-Eunomian theory places God irrevocably beyond the reach of our minds. One might suppose that the Cappadocians would simply bite the bullet here. After all, unlike pagan Platonists who honored contemplative perfection, didn't they emphasize good actions in this life rather than theoretical understanding? We saw Gregory of Nazianzus persuading his audience to love the poor, and Gregory of Nyssa wrote on the same theme, all in support of a social campaign launched by Basil. As bishop of Caesarea, he built a hospice which offered food and shelter for the indigent. And yet the Cappadocians were also powerfully attracted to a life of seclusion devoted to the contemplation of God. The tension faced by both Gregory's between pastoral duty and monastic retreat is one we'll be looking at in a few weeks when we discuss the ascetic movement. So, the Cappadocian Fathers insist that we can, rather paradoxically, know this unknowable God. For one thing, as Basil points out, we have a conception of God through his workings without knowing his substance. For instance, we can say that he is good because of the goodness of the world he has made. Philosophically, this is on a par with our ability to identify a giraffe through the impressions it makes on us, even if we cannot know its substance. This may still seem unsatisfying. As wonderful as giraffes are, our ultimate happiness does not require our coming to know their substances. With God, things are different. Gregory of Nyssa puts forth a radical response to this dilemma. He admits that God's essence is unknowable because God is unbounded or infinite. But this means that our desire for him must also be infinite. The reward we receive through contemplation, and even in the afterlife, is ceaseless progress along an infinite but never-ending path of knowledge. Just as in mathematics a curve may approach a straight line and get indefinitely closer without ever touching it, so the blessed soul comes ever closer to understanding God completely without this desire ever being fully satisfied. Some might think this sounds more like the eternal torment of Tantalus than a heavenly reward. But for Gregory, love and desire go hand in hand. Perfect love is love for a beloved object that can never be fully attained, so that the flame of desire is never quenched by the satisfaction of that desire. Thus, Gregory remains true to the characteristically Cappadocian conviction that God exceeds our grasp. The good thing about infinite unknowability, though, is that there is always more to say about it. We'll be saying more about it next week, when we reach the greatest ancient theorist of the ineffable. He will show us the limitations of human knowledge and language while challenging our expectations about the possibility of uniting pagan Platonist ideas to Christianity. Who was this great Christian Neoplatonist and negative theologian? Try as we might, we won't find out next week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.