The Cave and the Light Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Arthur Herman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company, New York.

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  Image credits:

  © iStockphoto.com/Vgm6 (this page)

  © iStockphoto.com/zakkum5 (this page)

  © iStockphoto.com/mmac72 (this page)

  Wellcome Library, London (this page)

  © iStockphoto.com/HultonArchive (this page)

  akg-images/Fritz Eschen (this page)

  akg-images/Anna Weise (this page)

  From K. Clinton, Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian

  Mysteries: The Martin P. Nilsson Lectures on Greek Religion,

  Delivered 19–21 November 1990 at the Swedish Institute at Athens

  (ActaAth-8°, 11), Stockholm, 1992, p. 88. (this page, this page, this page)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Herman, Arthur

  The cave and the light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the struggle for the soul of Western civilization / Arthur Herman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-553-80730-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-90783-4

  1. Civilization, Western—Greek influences. 2. Plato—Influence. 3. Aristotle—Influence. 4. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Title.

  CB245.H4286 2010 909’.09821—dc22 2010008230

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design by Susan Zucker

  Jacket painting: Raphael, The School of Athens, c. 1510 (detail) (Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City)

  v3.1

  PREFACE

  An editorial in The New York Review of Books recently asked: “Do the Classics Have a Future?” The real question is: Will the classics ever leave us alone? This books tells the story of how everything we say, do, and see has been shaped in one way or another by two classical Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle.

  Far from being “dead white males,” they’ve been powering the living heart of Western culture from ancient Greece to today. Their influence extends from science and philosophy and literature, to our social life and most cherished political institutions—and not just in the West but increasingly in the rest of the world, too, including the Muslim world. And at the center of their influence has been a two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion.

  It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own. The clash of ideas that then sprang up between Plato and Aristotle is summed up in this book’s title.

  The Myth of the Cave appears in Book VII of Plato’s most famous work, the Republic. Plato used it to represent his most fundamental idea: that man is destined by his creator to find a path from the dark cave of material existence to the light of a higher, purer, and more spiritual truth. It’s when we rise above the merely human, Plato insisted, and enter the realm of “the everlasting and immortal and changeless” that we achieve wisdom.

  As readers will learn, Aristotle disagreed, and his dissent from his famous teacher would have enormous consequences.

  “All things have a specific nature,” he would argue in his Physics, based on a union of form and matter. Instead of trying to rise above mundane reality, Aristotle believed the philosopher’s job was to explain how the world works, and how as human beings we can find our proper place in it. There is no cave; only a world made of things and facts. “The fact is our starting point,” he once said, and that insight permeated his thinking on everything, from science to politics and drama.

  For the next two thousand years Aristotle would become the father of modern science, logic, and technology. Plato, by contrast, is the spokesman for the theologian, the mystic, the poet, and the artist.

  One gave us a view of reality as multiform and constantly evolving; the other, as eternal and One.

  One told us we have to learn to deal with things as they are, including each other. The other said we need to think about how things ought to be, including ourselves and our society.

  One shaped the contours of Christianity; the other, the ideas of the Enlightenment.

  One gave us modern economics; the other, the Reformation.

  One inspired Europe to lift itself out of the Dark Ages; the other inspired the greatest artistic works of the Renaissance, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

  One gave us the U.S. Constitution, the Manhattan Project, and shopping malls. The other gave us Chartres Cathedral, but also the gulag and the Holocaust.

  Aristotle asks, “How do you fit into the world that already exists?”

  Plato asks, “Why does that world exist at all?”

  How this split happened, and how Western culture came to develop this strange dual face, forms the narrative of this book. So do the events and thinkers and personalities who perpetuated that struggle between the two ancient rivals, as well as the strange twists and ironies that arose along the way. This is neither a history of philosophy nor a history of Western civilization. It is an account of the interaction of both, and of how the legacies of Plato and Aristotle live on around us and continue to shape our world.

  May 7, 2013

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Prologue: The School of Athens

  One: The First Philosopher

  Two: The Soul of Reason

  Three: The Mind of God

  Four: The Doctor’s Son

  Five: Good Citizen or Philosopher Ruler?

  Six: The Inheritors: Philosophy in the Hellenistic Age

  Seven: Knowledge Is Power

  Eight: Hole in the Soul: Plato and Aristotle in Rome

  Nine: Dancing in the Light: The Birth of Neoplatonism

  Ten: Christ Is Come: Plato and Christianity

  Eleven: Toward the Heavenly City

  Twelve: Inquiring Minds: Aristotle Strikes Back

  Thirteen: Celestial Harmonies: Plato in the Middle Ages

  Fourteen: At the Summit: Arabs, Aristotle, and Saint Thomas Aquinas

  Fifteen: The Razor’s Edge

  Sixteen: Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the Paradoxes of Liberty

  Seventeen: The Creative Ascent: Plato and the High Renaissance

  Eighteen: Twilight of the Scholastics: The Reformation and the Doom of Aristotle

  Nineteen: Secrets of the Heavens: Plato, Galileo, and the New Science

  Twenty: God, Kings, and Philosophers in the Age of Genius

  Twenty-one: Aristotle in a Periwig: The Culture of the Enlightenment

  Twenty-two: Starting Over: Plato, Rousseau, and Revolution

  Twenty-three: “Feeling Is All”: The Triumph of the Romantics

  Twenty-four: Victorian Crossroads: Hegel, Marx, and Mill

  Twenty-five: The Scale of Nature: Darwin, Evolution, and Aristotle’s God

  Twenty-six: Unseen Worlds: Physics, Relativity, and the New World Picture

  Twenty-seven: Triumph of the Will: Nietzsche and the Death of Reason

  Twenty-eight: Common Sense Nation: Plato, Aristotle, and American Exceptionalism

  Twenty-nine: Worlds at War: Plato and Aristotle in the Violent Century

  Conclusion: From the Cave to the Light

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

&
nbsp; Select Bibliography

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Raphael, The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura, The Vatican

  Prologue

  THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS

  There are Plato and Aristotle, and around them is a great school of philosophers.

  —Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Raphael of Urbino”

  He was a provincial boy, a painter like his father. Everyone recognized that Raphael Sanzio had extraordinary artistic talent: talent, as his fellow painter Vasari later said, more like a god than a man.1 At sixteen and with his father’s encouragement, he moved from his sophisticated but small hometown of Urbino to work with the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino, and then to Florence, the city of the Medici.

  What he found there was a visual and artistic feast. Raphael spent days and nights examining the works of his two great elders, Michelangelo and Leonardo, which, according to Vasari, “inspired him to study even more intensely” so he could raise his skills closer to their exalted level. However, Raphael’s big break came in 1508, when a letter arrived from another Urbino native, the architect Bramante, inviting him to work for the pope in Rome.

  In 1508, Rome was western Europe’s most revered city. It was the former capital of an ancient empire and the center of the contemporary art scene. Pope Julius II had come to the throne of St. Peter five years earlier determined to remake the city in his own grandiose image and to use the revived classical style of the ancient Greeks and Romans to do it. He had commissioned Bramante to create a design for the new St. Peter’s Basilica, which was to be larger and more ornate than any church in Christendom.

  Bramante also supervised a host of other artistic projects at the behest of Pope Julius. In 1508, money and an appetite for grand artistic visions were plentiful in Rome. That meant big opportunities for a talent like Raphael.

  Bramante and the pope had already engaged the best artists in Italy. When Raphael arrived in the Eternal City, Michelangelo Buonarroti was just starting to set up the scaffolding for painting a series of frescoes for the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. The bearded, brooding Florentine was thirty-four, in the prime of life and at the height of his creative powers. He was still furious that Pope Julius had pulled him off the project on which Michelangelo’s heart was set, the pope’s tomb and its almost forty life-size marble statues, and instead put him to work in the chapel. Michelangelo had no inkling he was about to start work on his greatest masterpiece. Nor did he realize that the slim youth from Urbino to whom Bramante introduced him was about to create something that would be as much a landmark of Western civilization as his own Sistine Chapel ceiling.

  In addition to the morose Florentine, Julius’s stable of artists included Luca Signorelli and Raphael’s old master Perugino; the enigmatic Venetian Lorenzo Lotto; and an eccentric character whose scandalous sexual habits earned him the nickname “the Sodomist” (Il Sodoma).* However, unlike these temperamental and even tempestuous artists, Raphael was easygoing and easy to work with. Life at the court of Urbino had taught him what today we call the power to make friends and influence people. After the stormy negotiations with Michelangelo over painting the Sistine ceiling, the pope was delighted to deal with someone with charming manners and a winning personality.

  But where to put the young man to work? Julius’s mind drifted to his papal apartments in the Vatican Palace. He hated them.2 Their splashy gilt decorations and dated lifeless frescoes served only to remind him of his predecessor the infamous Pope Alexander Borgia and Alexander’s poisonous children Cesare and Lucrezia. Julius already had Il Sodoma, Lotto, and the rest hard at work redecorating key rooms on the first and second floors. He had something else in mind for Raphael.

  The room he was thinking about was on the third floor and offered more than five hundred square feet of wall space. It had high, arched ceilings and a mosaic pavement set with geometric designs. The rest stood bare except for some ceiling frescoes Julius intended to replace. So at some point in the winter of 1508, he and Raphael and Bramante would have wandered inside, passing teams of artists and assistants laboring in the halls with paintbrushes and trowels. They would have seen their breath as they stood in the frigid air. Their words would have echoed in that soaring empty space.

  “This shall be our personal library,” Julius probably said, gesturing toward the empty walls. “Give us a design suited to that purpose.”

  Raphael had little experience painting frescoes and none conceiving an artistic program comprehensive enough to fill such a space. But Julius knew how to handle men, and he knew artists. He sensed that if this young provincial, whose reputation was built on his charming but rather anodyne portraits of the Madonna and Child, was turned loose to decorate the papal library—what would be the center of Julius’s intellectual life—the result would be a masterpiece.

  He was correct. We can see it today, just down the hall from the Sistine Chapel. Like Michelangelo’s ceiling, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura† is a triumph of skill and intellect. In Vasari’s words, “By the genius shown in this work, Raphael clearly demonstrated his determination to be the undisputed master” of Renaissance painting, the equal of both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.3

  We know that the complete artistic program of the Stanza, with its allegorical representations of Philosophy, Theology, Law, and the arts, was drawn up not by Raphael but probably by the pope’s librarian, with the help of the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.4 But Raphael brought his own gift for pictorial drama to the task, and it permeates the Stanza’s centerpiece. The School of Athens is a grand summing-up of Western civilization’s debt to the ancient world at midcareer, and to that world’s two greatest and most influential minds, perhaps the two greatest minds of all time: Plato and Aristotle.

  The painting shows the two philosophers larger than life size in an architectural setting of unparalleled splendor, with other philosophers arrayed on either side until they fill the entire wall.

  Plato stands slightly to the left and points heavenward toward a transcendent reality. Next to him stands his great teacher Socrates, and below him sits the mathematician Pythagoras. Alongside are Plato’s closest disciples, his nephew Speusippus and Xenocrates, but also the ancient thinkers who emphasized the importance of intuition, the emotions, and speculative philosophy. Scholars have identified Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, and Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, as well as an Arab philosopher, Averroës; and a woman, the pagan priestess Hypatia. At their feet sits another philosopher, Heraclitus, which is in fact a portrait of Michelangelo. Over all their heads stands a statue of Apollo, the god of the arts and divine inspiration.

  On the opposite side, on the right side, is the vigorous bearded figure of Aristotle, which we know Raphael drew from ancient busts of Aristotle in order to make it as accurate and lifelike as possible.5 Beside him are the representatives of science and empirical thought. There is Eudemus, the historian of mathematics, and Aristotle’s student Theophrastus, the father of botany. There are the scientists of the ancient Alexandrian school who were heavily influenced by Aristotle, like Ptolemy the astronomer and Euclid the geometer, which is actually a portrait of Raphael’s mentor Bramante (“portrayed so realistically,” Vasari says, “that he almost seems alive”). There is the geographer Strabo6 (which some argue is actually a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, who had arrived in Rome just as Raphael was finishing), Diogenes the Cynic with his famous begging bowl, and others who cannot be identified. Above their heads Raphael has placed a statue of Pallas Athena, the goddess of reason and wisdom.

  Raphael’s painting offers in visual form an idea that Pico and the Renaissance inherited from the Roman statesman and thinker Cicero: that Plato and Aristotle serve as the twin fountainheads of Western reason, intellectual coequals who sum up the entire scope of human knowledge.7 It is a historical view that permeated not only the Renaissance, but Western education for centuries until our own time. It lives on in old-fa
shioned textbooks that talk about the “wisdom of the Greeks” when they really mean Plato and Aristotle, and in sound bites from cultural arbiters who refer to “the classical mind” and “Plato and Aristotle” as if they were virtually interchangeable.

  Now it’s time to look deeper.

  Today we see that as a painting, The School of Athens not only sums up the legacy of Plato and Aristotle as the progenitors of ancient philosophy and Western thought, it also captures the dual character of Western culture almost from its start.

  On one side there is Plato the idealist, who became the guiding spirit of Western idealism and religious thought. In Plato’s arms Raphael has put his famous dialogue the Timaeus, which inspired a thousand years of theologians, mystics, and students of the occult.

  On the other side stands Aristotle, the man of science and common sense, who points earthward in contrast with Plato’s gesture toward the heavens. In Aristotle’s arms Raphael put Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which St. Thomas Aquinas used to rewrite the Catholic Church’s understanding of morality and which Cicero believed was the finest guide on how to live free in a free society. Twenty-five hundred years later, Aristotle’s Ethics may still be the single most decisive influence on our modern understanding of politics, morals, and society just as Aristotle remains the father of modern science.

  Mysticism versus common sense; religion versus science; empiricism versus idealism: The School of Athens is in fact an allegorical painting about two contrasting but highly influential worldviews that have shaped our world, in a perpetual struggle for the soul of Western civilization.

  Seen in this light, the West’s greatest thinkers, theologians, scientists, artists, writers, and even politicians have found themselves arrayed on one side or the other in a twenty-four-centuries-old battle between the ideas of Plato and Aristotle and the two paths to wisdom they represent. At certain critical junctures of history, thinkers have tried to knit the two together into a single system. But each time, the old antagonism reasserts itself and the battle is renewed from generation to generation, century to century.