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of a Philosophical Classic
The One
And The Many
St u di e s i n t h e Ph i l o s op h y
of Or de r a n d Ult i m ac y
Rousas John
Rushdoony
Va l l e c i t o, C a l i f o r n i a
copyright 1971, 2007
Mark R. Rushdoony
H. W. Luhnow
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .399
Chapter I
The One and the Many
1
2 The One and the Many
2. Attempts at a Solution
The importance of these two philosophies becomes readily
apparent if we analyze the presuppositions of dominant
modern politico-economic theories. Nominalism has, since
Occam, held extensive sway in modern history. Materialism
and Empiricism have been essentially Nominalistic.
Anarchism is the logical conclusion of such a philosophy. No
truth or reality or law exists apart from particulars and
4 The One and the Many
4. Garma C. C. Chang, trans. and annotator, The Hundred Thousand Songs of Mi-
larepa, vol. 1 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962), 212.
5. See Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols.,
1953-1958; and In the Twilight of Western Thought, 1960, both Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia.
The One and the Many 7
the United States, Van Zandt deplores the fact that the decisive
liberal thinker, Jefferson, was a Nominalist, and hence given to
an anarchistic individualism as expressed in his agrarianism. As
a result, “America’s French Revolution has awaited the twen-
tieth century,”7 but now the Realism of Peirce and modern
thinkers is restoring the primacy of the one. From such a per-
spective, a one-world order is a necessity.
Ideas thus do have consequences. More than that, the
presuppositions behind ideas have consequences. The differ-
ence between presuppositions and intentions is an important
one. With respect to foreign aid, the U. S. program has had a
liberating and ostensibly Christian intention while actually
resting on a thorough-going Marxian dialectical materialism, as
Groseclose has ably pointed out.8 This presupposition, rather
than its announced intention, has governed the outcome of
foreign aid. A religious and philosophical consistency is thus
important. Eclectic systems, which lack systematic
consistency and organization, are doomed. In facing the
menaces of Marxism and anti-Christianity, we cannot succeed
if our own premises or presuppositions carry concealed
Marxist and anti-Christian axioms.
The problem of the one and the many may be avoided in the
classroom, pulpit, and press, but it cannot be avoided in life.
The question remains: which has primacy and priority? Is the
state more important than the individual, or does the individ-
ual have a reality which the state does not possess? What is the
locus of Christianity, the believer or the church? Does mar-
riage have a reality which makes its condition mandatory irre-
spective of the conditions of the husband and wife, or do the
persons in the marriage take priority, in their wishes, over the
idea of marriage? Is education to be geared to the development
of the individual or to the welfare of society?
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New
York: Wise, 1929), 309-310.
15. Nature Addresses and Lectures, in ibid., 57.
14 The One and the Many
23. Mario Pei, The Story of English (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1952), 11.
24. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Presbyte-
rian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1953), 193.
25. See R. J. Rushdoony, By What Standard? (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
formed Publishing Co., 1959), 23ff.
The One and the Many 17
1. Introduction
Liberty has been a recurring factor in history, and has repeat-
edly been a commanding aspect of the human scene, only then
to disappear into an order in essence and action radically hos-
tile to it. It is important, therefore, to consider the root and
ground of true liberty. Liberty has obviously been repeatedly
accidental, as in medieval Moslem culture; it has disappeared
with none to regret its passing as the inner logic of a culture has
progressively manifested itself and dropped the procedural ten-
sions which for a season gave rise to liberty. Liberty is thus
comparable to happiness in that it is a result, not to be sought
for as a primary end, but rather as the product of true order.
And, even as a basically unhappy man can have happy mo-
ments, so basically anti-libertarian cultures can have periods of
liberty without any deviation from their fundamental nature.
This point is especially relevant, in that current libertarian
movements are radically premised on the same grounds as mes-
sianic statism, on the Enlightenment and its faith.
The history of the West has seen, as Herman Dooyeweerd
has analyzed it, four cultural motives, all based on radically
23
24 The One and the Many
3. Lin Yutang, Between Tears and Laughter (Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon
Books, 1943), 179.
26 The One and the Many
4. The implicit statism of all Greek thought is rarely noted. For an important
study, see Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1956). For a study of Plato in this respect, see Warner Fite, The
Platonic Legend (New York: Scribners, 1934).
The Ground of Liberty 27
3. The Enlightenment
The next great cultural motive, having roots in the two
previous dialectics and in the humanism of the Renaissance,
came to a sharp statement in the Enlightenment. The
dialectical tension was now between nature and freedom. Man
was the ostensible resolution of this dialectic. In Descartes,
man became the focal point of these two worlds. Various
devices were used to attempt to overcome the handicap of
man’s previous dialectics. To avoid atomism in the natural
order, the state was posited as a body created by social contract
between autonomous and atomistic men. To avoid the
collapse of the spiritual realm, the realm of freedom or value,
the mind was credited with creative power in the religious
sense. As Dooyeweerd has pointed out, Hobbes, in the
foreword to his De Corpore, declared that the mind should first
destroy the given world, and then, god-like, re-create it by
theoretical thought, for, according to Hobbes, “logical
thought should create, like God or like the artist.”5 Because the
state was the creation of man, it was believed that, in a special
sense, whereas by contrast the family was given and the church
somewhat external to the natural realm, the state became all
6. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Brave New World of the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1961), 111 ff.
The Ground of Liberty 31
4. The Crisis
The dilemma is a very real one, and, in terms of the cultural
motive, insuperable. Detach law, because it is an expression of
value, from reality, and law as unreal and subjective disappears,
as law in the integral sense has disappeared under pragmatic,
relativistic, and historistic thinking. Attach law to reality as an
aspect of matter or energy, it ceases to be a value and becomes
a blind, deterministic force hostile to man’s liberty. Thus lib-
erty is dissolved either into myth or into license, and if license,
becomes anti-law in nature. In terms of the blind force of na-
ture, liberty is no more than determinism and a myth. In terms
of the world of value, liberty is again a myth: it has no reality
or meaning because it is a part of that unreal world. In terms
of atomistic particularity, liberty is anti-law. In terms of the
oneness of reality, it is a divisive separation from the wholeness
of the unity of being. With the collapse of the dialectic comes
mysticism or cynicism. Occultist and mystical books are the
unacknowledged (because undignified) best sellers of our day.
Modern art and literature are extensively mystical, although
not in the medieval sense; they are an openly pagan mysticism.
They are dedicated to private and subjective worlds of mean-
ing, and are built on the hatred of and flight from the material
world and realism, into the vast ocean of unconsciousness con-
sidered as true value. The extent of open cynicism in our cul-
ture is apparent in such works as Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy
Barbarians (1959). Ginsberg’s Howl was at its trial defended as
religious and moral by university professors precisely because
it denied all law and morality in favor of a new creed: the equal
value or non-value and acceptability of all things. To this new
32 The One and the Many
10. Cornelius Van Til in Westminster Theological Journal 17, no. 2 (May, 1955):
182.
11. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order (Nutley, NJ:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1968), 63-82.
The Ground of Liberty 35
15. For a popular presentation of this, written by a former student of both Van
Til and Dooyeweerd, see H. Evan Runner, “The Relation of the Bible to Learning,”
Christian Perspectives (Pella, IA: Pella Publishing Co., 1960), 83-158.
The Ground of Liberty 37
king, priest, and prophet in, to, and over all creation, subduing
it, i.e., bringing it under his dominion in knowledge,
righteousness, and holiness. The fall, redeemed man’s return to
God and the development of his status under God, and fallen
man’s developing apostasy, all these things and more are
circumscribed by the eternal decree of God. They are a part of
the permission and plan of God in order to further what Van
Til calls epistemological self-consciousness, man’s self-
awareness of the ground of his knowledge and being and the
full development of the implications of his regeneration or of
his apostasy. History, then, is the process whereby
epistemological self-consciousness is brought to maturity. It
has, therefore, a double maturation, as the parable of the tares
and wheat makes clear (Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43), the maturation
of both good and evil. Apostate man will become progressively
more dialectical in his thinking and more and more given to
the absolutizing of the relative, and the deification of his
autonomy and his theoretical thought. Redeemed man, as
God’s vicegerent living in terms of “the glorious liberty of the
children of God” (Rom. 8:21), will progressively develop the
implications of his image in terms of his mandate to know and
use creation in terms of the word of God. To subdue it as king
under God, as Van Til has pointed out, man must interpret the
creation as prophet under God, and represent God as priest
and dedicate the world to Him. Man is “like God... but always
on a creaturely scale.” He “was organically related to the
universe about him. That is, man was to be prophet, priest and
king under God in this created world. The vicissitudes of the
world would depend upon the deeds of man.”16 Christ, as very
God and very man, was the true prophet, priest, and king and
man’s federal head and representative, reinstating him into
communion with God and into standing with God by His
representative and vicarious atonement for man’s violating of
that law. Since, as Chalcedon saw clearly, the two natures were
in Him without commingling or confusion, the confusion of
17. H. Van Riessen, The Society of the Future (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1957), 225.
Chapter Three
The Continuity of Being
1. Egypt
Apart from biblically governed thought, the prevailing con-
cept of being has been that being is one and continuous. God,
or the gods, man, and the universe are all aspects of one con-
tinuous being; degrees of being may exist, so that a hierarchy
of gods as well as a hierarchy of men can be described, but all
consist of one, undivided and continuous being. The creation
of any new aspect of being is thus not a creation out of noth-
ing, but a creation out of being, in short, a process of being. This
conception of being in process, when seen in its cosmic aspect,
can be either static or dynamic, the framework of reference be-
ing history. The process is static if it flows upward out of his-
tory, as in ancient Egypt; being in this perspective has achieved
a desired earthly order and now exists to serve, magnify, and
then move into the eternal order. The process is dynamic if it
flows forward through history towards a final historical order,
or if it merely flows forward as endless process, as in Mesopot-
amian thought. In both forms, a cyclic view is possible, and
“eternal cyclic renovation” was an aspect of Egyptian Hermet-
ic thought as well as of other philosophies.1
1. W. M. Flinders Petrie, Personal Religion in Egypt Before Christianity (New
York: Harper, 1909), 166.
39
40 The One and the Many
The Osiris, the Scribe Ani, whose word is truth, saith: I flew
up out of primeval matter. I came into being like the god
Khepera. I germinated (or, grew up) like the plants. I am con-
cealed (or, hidden) like the tortoise (or, turtle) (in his shell). I
am the seed (?) of every god. I am Yesterday of the Four (Quar-
ters of the Earth, and) the Seven Uraei, who came into being
in the Eastern land. (I am) the Great One (i.e., Horus) who il-
lumineth the Hememet spirits with the light of his body. (I
am) that god in respect of Set. (I am) Thoth who (stood) be-
tween them (i.e., Horus and Set) as the judge on behalf of the
Governor of Sekhem (Letopolis) and the Souls of Anu (He-
liopolis). (He was like) a stream between them. I have come. I
rise up on my throne. I am endowed with a Khu (i.e., Spir-
it-soul). I am mighty. I am endowed with godhood among the
gods. I am Khensu, (the lord) of every kind of strength.10
This pride of achievement manifested by the god Osiris can
be shared by men. Man is able, by works of righteousness, to
become one with the gods. To become one with the heavenly
beings, he must be able to affirm a confession, which, among
other things, declared:
... I have not committed sin. I have not stolen.
... I have not slain men and women.
... I have not stolen the property of God.
... I have not committed adultery,
... I have not lain with men. I have made none to weep.
... I have not been an eavesdropper.
... I have not shut my ears to the word of truth.
... I have wronged none, I have done no evil.11
Having been judged innocent, the deceased becomes divine, de-
claring, “There is no member of my body which is not a mem-
ber of a god. Thoth protecteth my body altogether, and I am
Ra day by day.”12 Salvation is deification. Moreover, “It is not
spiritual but physical salvation that is sought.”13 In the biblical
10. E. A. Wallis Budge, trans. and intro., The Book of the Dead (New Hyde Park,
NY: University Books, 1960), 552-553. On Osiris, see Sir James George Fraser,
Adonis, Attis, Osiris (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961). On the
centrality of Osiris, see Sir Wallis Budge, Egyptian Religion (New Hyde Park, NY:
University Books, 1959).
11. Budge, Book of the Dead, 576-580.
12. Ibid., 608.
13. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris: The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, vol. 1 (New
Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961), 276.
The Continuity of Being 43
The gods arose out of chaos, and the primeval earth hill or
pyramid is their fitting symbol. In relationship to eternity, the
gods stand thus: . In relationship to man, the pyramid is in-
verted: . Man’s relationship to the gods and heaven is also
symbolized by the pyramid, pointing upward. In later mystery
religions, and in Kabbalism especially, the two pyramids, the
inverted pyramid of the gods and the sky-reaching pyramid of
man, were brought together to form a “star,” $, the double
pyramid, the union of the human and the divine, their coales-
cence in the war against chaos. Its first known Jewish use is in
the third century A.D. In Egyptian thought, there is a continu-
ity rather than a coalescence of human and divine, so that the
relationship of the two pyramids can be perhaps described
symbolically thus: . The meeting point of the two pyramids
is the pharaoh. Ritually, “one of the highest sacraments con-
sists in setting up a mound, or altar, which represents the
world. The sacrificer by the ritual recreates the earth; but he
recreates it by the same methods as were used by the original
creator.”17 The ruler is thus also a priest as well as king, since
he, as the apex of the pyramid, is the person who has contact
with the gods. Indeed, he may be himself divine either in his
person or office.
The Egyptian pharaoh was both man and god, priest and
king, the umbilical cord uniting society with the gods:
Worship King Ni-maat-Re, living forever, within your bodies
And associate with his majesty in your hearts.
He is Perception which is in (men’s) hearts,
And his eyes search out every body.
He is Re, by whose beams one sees,
He is one who illumines the Two lands more than the sun
disc.
He is one who makes the land greener than (does) a high Nile,
For he has filled the Two Lands with strength and life....
The king is a ka, (vital force... the other self which supported
a man)
And his mouth is increase.
He who is to be is his creation,
(For) he is the Khnum of all bodies, (Khnum... a god who fash-
ioned mortals...)
The begetter who creates the people.18
As the umbilical cord, the pharaoh was of necessity central to
both political order and religious order. As Mercer noted,
“The most fundamental idea of worship in ancient Egypt con-
nected itself with the person of the god-manifesting pha-
raoh.”19 Similar concepts, traced together with the ancient
Egyptian beliefs to “old and widespread Hamitic belief,”20 are
present in Africa in the twentieth century, holding that “all the
people are the slaves of the king,” who is “absolute lord and
master of the land, and of the bodies and lives and possessions
of all his people.”21 Common to these African cultures, as to
those of the ancient Near and Middle East, is “the idea of a lad-
der, reaching from earth to heaven,”22 a form of the belief in
the pyramid or tower.
Atum, the first god, was bisexual, “that great He-She,” ac-
cording to a coffin text, and “He was not only God but all
things to come.” “Osiris is past and future — cause and poten-
tiality.”23 These two aspects were opened to man by the pha-
raoh. “The king was the mediator between the community and
the sources of divine power, obtaining it through the ritual and
regularizing it through his government.”24 The king was neces-
sary to social order, and he was essential to social salvation.
“The king was recognized as the successor of the Creator, and
this view was so prevalent that comparisons between the sun
The king warred against and controlled chaos, and the duty
of the people, as well as their privilege, was to be in subjection
to the king in order to participate in the community of heaven,
earth, and hell in the person of pharaoh. “One might say —
though only metaphorically — that the community had sacri-
ficed all freedom in order to acquire this certainty of harmony
with the gods.” Harmony was central to Egyptian religion.31
Because of the centrality of the king to all things, the “great
oath” in Egyptian courts of law was by the life of Pharaoh.32
For the Egyptians, “right conduct was ‘doing what the king,
the beloved of Ptah, desired.’”33 Magic, man’s attempt to ma-
nipulate and control the powers of nature, was central to
Egyptian society and life; the gods had used magic against cha-
os, and man must utilize the magical powers made available by
the gods.34
The king was one of the gods and “the one official interme-
diary between the people and the gods, the one recognized
priest of all the gods.”35 He was the Shepherd, a divine title, of
the people, over “men, the flock of the gods.”36
The dialectical tension of Egyptian thought was between
chaos and life, but chaos itself could appear in life, when social
order collapsed or weakened.37 Chaos therefore could itself be
in life, whereas order meant the unity and harmony of heaven,
earth, and hell under the divine monarch. The one and the
many were brought together in the person of the king. The
Egyptian language had no word for “state.”38 For them, the
31. Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (New York: Harper Torch-
books, 1961), 58.
32. Margaret A. Murray, The Splendour That Was Egypt (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1961), 78. See Genesis 42:16, Joseph’s oath, “By the life of
Pharaoh surely ye are spies.” For Murray on the pharaoh as a god, see 174ff.
33. E. O. James, The Ancient Gods (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1960), 261.
34. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Amulets and Talismans (New Hyde Park, NY:
University Books, 1961), xv-xvi. See also Budge, Egyptian Magic (New Hyde Park,
NY: University Books, n.d.).
35. Wilson, “Egypt,” 73.
36. Nora E. Scott and Charles Sheeler, “Instructions for King Mery-ka-Re,”
Egyptian Statues (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1945).
37. See “A Dispute Over Suicide,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts,
405-407.
38. Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, 30.
48 The One and the Many
state was not one institution among many, but rather the es-
sence of the divine order for life and the means of communica-
tion between heaven, earth, and hell. Life, therefore, was
totally and inescapably statist. In this perspective, anything re-
sembling liberty and individuality in the contemporary sense
was alien and impossible. Moreover, the cyclic view of nature
and history which is basic to the Osiris faith and Egyptian re-
ligion made for a pessimistic worldview. The Isis temple in-
scription, reported by Plutarch, cited two aspects of this faith:
“I am the female nature, or mother nature, which contained in
herself the generation of all things.” “I am all that has been, and
is, and shall be, and my peplum no mortal has uncovered.”39
First, a total immanence is asserted: deity does not transcend
the being of humanity, it is a common being, generated first
out of chaos and then out of the gods. Second, it has an un-
known potentiality: its future is unknown, covered, and
veiled. There is no eternal decree of law and order, based on an
absolute and totally self-conscious potentiality. Instead, there
is only a tenuous community against a background of chaos
and an unknown potentiality which may include chaos. The
only slim wall against this was the king, the divine monarch
and the human apex of the risen mountain of order out of cha-
os. In his person, pharaoh was the identity of all being and the
identity of unity and particularity. All men had to be under
him to be in being. The official voices from Egypt affirmed the
stability and permanence of this order; history has entered its
emphatic dissent.
According to Anthes, for the ancient Egyptians, “Eternity is
oneness,” and the “human goal after death is deification.”40 De-
ification was entry into the oneness of the divine order, and
membership in the state in this life was similarly participation
in the divine oneness manifested in the pharaoh and protection
against the horror of chaos and meaningless particularity.
39. James Bonwick, Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought (Indian Hills, CO:
Falcon’s Wing Press, 1956), 145, 149.
40. Rudolph Anthes, “Mythology in Ancient Egypt,” in Samuel Noah Kramer,
ed., Mythologies of the Ancient World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1961), 41, 51.
The Continuity of Being 49
2. Mesopotamia
In the Mesopotamian worldview, the tension between cre-
ation and chaos was also basic, but it was not viewed with the
same confidence as in Egyptian thought. For the Egyptians,
the order had arrived and had to be maintained. The Mesopot-
amian feared the nearness of anarchy.
To the Mesopotamian, accordingly, cosmic order did not ap-
pear as something given; rather it became something achieved
through a continual integration of the many individual cosmic
wills, each so powerful, so frightening. His understanding of
the cosmos tended therefore to express itself in terms of inte-
gration of wills, that is, in terms of social orders such as the
family, the community, and, most particularly, the state. To
put it succinctly, he saw the cosmic order as an order of wills
— as a state.41
For the Mesopotamians, kingship had descended from heaven;
the king was mortal, but his responsibilities were a part of the
divine calling.42 The gods were “part of society,”43 and the
struggle between cosmic order and chaos was a concern of gods
and men alike. Man’s prospects in this struggle were bleak, in
that chaos triumphed over him in the form of death. The Gil-
gamesh Epic portrays Gilgamesh as “man seeking immortali-
ty” and failing through no fault of his own. The epic lacked
any sense of original sin; man is not a sinner but an innocent
victim.44
Man’s life was comprehended and made comprehensible not
through religion but through the state, for religion was in es-
sence political theory. The state rather than God is thus the ba-
sic environment of man, and the ruler is beyond appeal in his
authority, for there is no order which transcends the state. The
gods of the state cannot be appealed to against the state.
Oh! that I only knew that these things are well pleasing to a
god!
What is good in one’s sight is evil for a god.
What is bad in one’s own mind is good for his god.
Who can understand the counsel of the gods in the midst of
heaven?
The plan of a god is deep waters, who can comprehend it?
Where has befuddled mankind ever learned what a god’s con-
duct is?49
Akkadian man could only approach the gods in slim and dubi-
ous confidence of his own righteousness: “My clean hands
have made a sacrifice before you.”50 For the Sumerians, “The
primeval sea engendered the cosmic mountain consisting of
heaven and earth united.”51 The primeval sea, or chaos, was
thus the source and ground of heaven and earth, and, despite
all tensions, their ultimate governor. Sumerian religion, in par-
ticular Inanna or Ishtar worship, utilized “large numbers of eu-
nuchs and perverts, hierodules, and other types of sacred
prostitutes.”52 These represented religiously controlled chaos,
but ultimately chaos overtook man and the state. Meanwhile,
the mountain or primeval hillock or pyramid represented or-
der as against chaos. The ziggurat, or temple-tower or stepped
pyramid, was the religious expression of this faith from at least
the days of Sumer. The ziggurat was a “link” or “bond” be-
tween heaven and earth in their common ascent in being and
their war against chaos. Parrot has stated, “Thus, the ziggurat
appears to me to be a bond of union, whose purpose was to as-
sure communication between earth and heaven...for what is
the ‘mountain’ but a giant stepladder by means of which a man
may ascend as near as possible to the sky?”53 The mountain,
then, was the bond between heaven and earth against chaos.
Sumerian mythology identifies the mountain for us: “Your
49. Ibid., 435, “Akkadian Observations on Life and the World Order.”
50. Ibid., 337.
51. S. N. Kramer, History Began at Sumer (n.p.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959),
84. First published as From the Tablets of Sumer (Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing
Press, 1956); 78 in this edition.
52. S. N. Kramer, “Sumerian Religion,” in Ferm, Ancient Religions, 52-53.
53. Andre Parrot, The Tower of Babel, trans. Edwin Hudson (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1955), 64.
52 The One and the Many
54. Kramer, History Began at Sumer, 96; in Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer, 89.
55. Seton Lloyd, Early Anatolia (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1956), 124.
56. See Hans Gustav Guterbock, “Hittite Mythology,” in Kramer, Mythologies of
the Ancient World, 139-179; H. G. Guterbock, “Hittite Religion,” in Ferm, Ancient
Religions, 81-109, 139ff; O. R. Gurney, The Hittites (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1954).
57. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 203; the king, “the Sun Mursilis,”
spoke of his father’s death as the time “when my father became god.”
58. Gurney, The Hittites, 65, 157.
59. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 164. On “Mosaic Laws and the Code
of Hammurabi,” see Merrill F. Unger, Archaeology and the Old Testament (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1954), 154-157.
The Continuity of Being 53
and Akkad; the king who has made the four quarters of the
world subservient; the favorite of Inanna am I.60
As Unger has pointed out, whereas Moses proclaimed law as
the law of Jehovah (“Thus saith the LORD”), in the immanent
religion and political theory of Babylon, Hammurabi pro-
claimed the law: “I establish law and justice.”61
In Hammurabi’s law, “the entire population is theoretically
in slavery to the king.”62 “Kingship was lowered from heaven”
and the Assyrian monarchs proclaimed themselves “king of
the world” because their order represented the true cosmic or-
der, which the gods established, and made the king’s “shep-
herding... as agreeable to the people as (is the smell of) the
Plant of Life.”63 The Assyrian monarch was not only the great
shepherd and source of order, but he was also the source of
chaos; he was usum-gal, the “Giant Snake” or “Great Dragon”
and the source of terror:
(I am) Shalmaneser, the legitimate king, the king of the world,
the king without rival, the “Great Dragon,” the (only) power
within the (four rims) (of the earth), overlord of all the princ-
es, who has smashed all his enemies as if (they be) earthen-
ware, the strong man, unsparing, who shows no mercy in
battle.64
The Assyrian monarch therefore represented both chaos and
order, and he was the incarnation of both. The fearful power
of Assyria rested not only in its military might but also in its
summation of the dialectic of chaos and creation in the terrify-
ing person and activity of the Assyrian king. For the Assyrian,
there was no escape from chaos into order, nor any escape
from the total order of the state into chaos, since both chaos
and order were summed up in the monarch and the state. We
can agree with Oppenheim’s comment concerning the religion
of the common man in Assyrian and neo-Babylonian cultures:
3. Persia
In ancient Persian thought, the chaos-creation dialectic is
also present, as it is in ancient India,75 but stated as a tension be-
tween darkness and light. The gods war against chaos or dark-
ness in and from the heavenly realm, and the king wars on
earth against darkness.
Ahura Mazda is the great god...as the king of Eran is the great
king...; Ahura Mazda has created heaven, earth, and mankind;
these, therefore, are his property, but he only reserved for
73. Robert Francis Harper, ed., Assyrian and Babylonian Literature (New York:
Appleton, 1904), 150.
74. Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 148, 286.
75. For the concept of kingship in India, see Charles Drekmeier, Kingship and
Community in Early India (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). See
also A. M. Hocart, Kingship (London: Humphrey Milford, 1927), 106.
The Continuity of Being 57
himself the domination over heaven, for earth he has made the
king of Eran his substitute and his ONLY SUBSTITUTE; he,
the king, holds for mankind Ahura Mazda’s place.76
Plutarch gives confirmation of this position of the Persian
monarch in a statement of Artabanus to Themistocles, a
Greek, giving the condition of audience with the Persian mon-
arch. In Plutarch’s, “Life of Themistocles,” we read:
Among our many excellent laws, we account this the most ex-
cellent, to honour the king, and to worship him, as the image
of the great preserver of the universe; if then, you shall con-
sent to our laws, and fall down before the king and worship
him, you may both see him and speak to him; but if your
mind be otherwise, you must make use of others to intercede
for you, for it is not the national custom here for the king to
give audience to any one that doth not fall down before him.
In Plutarch’s “Life of Artaxerxes,” we are told that this mon-
arch regarded “himself as divinely appointed for a law to the
Persians, and the supreme arbiter of good and evil.” Unlike
Babylon, where the law was subject to the king, in Medo-Per-
sia, the king was subject to the law. The king could not alter or
change his decree; his law bound not only his subjects but also
himself. Esther 1:19 and 8:8 record this power of the law, and
Diodorus Siculus reported that Darius III found himself bound
by the law, for, having sentenced Charidemos to death, he re-
pented of it and felt that he had erred, “but it was not possible
to undo what was done by royal authority.” This same invio-
lability of law is cited with respect to Darius the Mede in
Daniel 6:8-9, 12, 14, 16-17.
76. Eugen Wilhelm, Kingship and Priesthood in Ancient Eran (Bombay, India: Ed-
ucation Society’s Steam Press, 1892), 10. On the religion of ancient Persia, see M. J.
Dresden, “Mythology of Ancient Iran,” in Kramer, Mythologies of the Ancient
World, 330-364. See also Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia (Cleveland, OH:
World Publishing Co., 1963). The anti-Persian hostility of many of the ancient
Greeks is shared by many modern scholars, who regard Persia as the Oriental East,
decadent and luxurious, as against the virile, spartan and youthful West; see Herbert
J. Muller, The Loom of History (New York: Mentor Books, 1961). The Aryans of
Persia and India were a part of the ancient West, which may have extended into Chi-
na. The Sumerians, a non-Semitic and non-Indo-European people, had linguistic af-
finities with Chinese. See Gordon, Hammurabi's Code, 1, and C. H. Gordon, Before
the Bible: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962), 47.
58 The One and the Many
77. David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the
Abdication of James the Second, 1688, vol. 4, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1852), 336-
337.
78. Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England's Eliza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi-
ty Press, 1939), 4-6, 201-207. Wilson herein discusses contemporary comparisons to
the Virgin Mary.
79. Ibid., 406.
The Continuity of Being 59
80. Cornelius Van Til, Paul at Athens (Phillipsburg, NJ: Grotenhuis, n.d.), 4.
81. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 2, The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 1-24, etc. In vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle
(1957), the same concept prevails, and there is also the characteristic terminology of
“the anxiety of the fall from being,” 62. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the
bankruptcy of much ostensible conservatism than its approval of Voegelin.
The Continuity of Being 61
home, church, and state. Man cannot take judgment into his
own hands; he can exercise it only under God in a God-given
office, as father, presbyter, and state officer, and in that office
only within the bounds of the word of God. The use of the
term “gods” in Psalm 82 and elsewhere has reference not to the
person but to the function of the office, to fulfil God’s law. In
Psalm 82, such officers are warned that their wickedness is
known to God, who denounces them, concluding, “I have said,
Ye are gods,” but, because of their treasonable iniquity, “Ye
shall die like men.” Jesus cited the psalm to issue the same
warning to the leaders of His day, with this difference: the test
of their divine authority was not merely their conduct towards
those suing for justice, but also supremely their relationship to-
ward Himself. Because their office partook of the function
(but not the person) of God in the exercise of justice, now that
He, the true Son of God (in person, nature, and function), had
come, He was the first and foremost test of their office. They
had tried to use Scripture against Jesus, claiming, “thou, being
a man, makest thyself God.” Jesus answered by declaring him-
self to be, not a man making himself God, but He whom the
Father had sent into the world, His Son, God made incarnate.
Again, John 3:6 is cited, “That which is born of flesh is flesh;
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Is a man born of
the Spirit made divine? Is he not rather made into a new man
ethically and accordingly brought into communion with God?
The clear-cut meaning is a contrast of the two humanities.
Those who are members of the fallen humanity of Adam are
by nature sinners and humanists. Those who are born of the
Spirit are born into the new humanity of the last Adam, Jesus
Christ; they are now members of the kingdom of God and are
sons of God by grace, not by nature. All paganism asserts, im-
plicitly or explicitly, the natural divinity and sonship of man.
This is emphatically rejected in the Bible. Man cannot become
divine; he always remains man, saved man or lost man. Jesus
Christ is the “only begotten” Son of God, and members of
Christ’s new humanity share in His sonship by grace. Man’s
communion with God in Christ is not one of substance but of
life, not of nature but of grace. He is the recipient and partaker
64 The One and the Many
90. Gerardus Van Der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in
Phenomenology, trans. J. E. Turner (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 118-122.
91. Ibid., 271.
Chapter IV
The Unity of the Polis
67
68 The One and the Many
2. Ibid., 17. Dodds cites the emphasis on face and public honor: “Homeric man’s
highest good is not the enjoyment of a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of time,
public esteem.”
3. Kathleen Freeman, God, Man and State: Greek Concepts (Boston: Beacon Press,
1952), 11.
4. Rex Warner, The Greek Philosophers (New York: New American Library,
1958), 9.
The Unity of the Polis 69
15. Plutarch, “Lycurgus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (New
York: Modern Library, n.d.), 61.
16. Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis:
A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (New Hyde Park, N. Y.: University
Books, 1961), 36.
17. Irwan Edman, ed., The Works of Plato (New York: Modern Library, 1930),
345.
18. H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New
York: New American Library, 1964), 54-55.
74 The One and the Many
19. Ibid., 55-62. Dodds cites, as two telling examples of Greek “wish-fulfillment,”
the desire to “thrash your father,” and “mother-incest,” “the Oedipus dream,” citing
Aristophanes and Plato respectively; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 47.
These motives are not without a link to homosexuality.
20. A statement by the Byzantine scholar Tzetzes, Epilegomena.
21. Marie Delcourt, Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in
Classical Antiquity (London: Studio Books, 1961), xi, 42.
22. Ibid., plate 7, facing 37.
23. Ibid., 69, 101.
24. Ibid., 72. Joan of Arc wore masculine dress but did not give a utilitarian
reason for it, but rather a religious justification, 94.
25. Ibid., 4.
The Unity of the Polis 75
36. Edman, Works of Plato, 63, 76-77 (Apology), 92, 105-106 (Crito), 113 (Phaedo).
37. Francis Macdonald Cornford, trans. and ed., The Republic of Plato (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 180, 184ff.
38. Kitto, The Greeks, 161.
39. Richard Kroner, Speculation in Pre-Christian Philosophy (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1956), 53-54. For the Heraclitus statement in full, see Freeman,
Ancilla, 26, Fragment 30.
40. Freeman, God, Man and State, 57.
41. George Emmanuel Mylonas, “Mystery Religions of Greece,” in Ferm,
Ancient Religions, 178-179.
78 The One and the Many
52. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 43.
53. For a discussion of some aspects of the case, see M. I. Finley, “Was Socrates
Guilty as Charged?,” Horizon 2, no. 6 (July 1960): 100ff.
54. See Warner Fite, The Platonic Legend (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1934), 97-112, 162.
84 The One and the Many
55. John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan, The Republic of Plato (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1935), 332. Cornford translates the last clause, “for we allow them
to go free only when we have established in each one of them as it were a constitu-
tional ruler, whom we have trained to take over the guardianship from the same
principle in ourselves,” Republic, 318; in other words, the citizens are free only
when completely brainwashed.
56. Republic, 443-444, Cornford trans., 143.
57. Republic, 389; Davies and Vaughan trans., 79-80.
The Unity of the Polis 85
this means that the rulers are the embodiment of that law, or,
at the least, its source of expression.
Seen thus in the perspective of Plato, which is the perspec-
tive of the city-state, the basic ideas are philosopher-kings,
guardians, or dictators “in whom the divine element is su-
preme,” as Socrates believed concerning himself, men in
whom, to use Cornford’s translation, “a power of godlike wis-
dom” resides. Anaxagoras held that Mind was the physical ele-
ment in the universe and the principle of order. The young
Socrates read Anaxagoras with enthusiasm and then disap-
pointment, for his Nous or Mind promised much but stopped
short of fulfilment. The Platonic idea, derived in part from So-
crates, was more than matter; it was a kind of structure, it was
order, soul, and universal; it was the one against or over the
many, but it was clearly, above all else, the elite and ruling
body of The Republic. The ideas of Plotinus cannot be read
back into Plato. For Plato, the ideas are supremely manifested
in the guardians, in them the order of being is manifested. To
the extent that their ideas are bypassed, the state is threatened
with chaos, for they are the order of the state. Plato’s Republic,
in attaining its main purpose and function, justice, does not
abolish war, nor is the abolition of war even hinted at. Eco-
nomic self-sufficiency is required, but the abolition of poverty
is not promised, and luxury is definitely condemned. In terms
of modern Utopias, The Republic indeed promises very little,
because its concept of “Utopia” is not the material fulfilment
of the people but total government by the elite. Dictatorship
by the intellectuals is, in fact, both the goal and the product of
The Republic and its greatest appeal to the modern academician.
The realization of the idea of justice, then, and the realization
of every idea, means the triumph of the central idea, guardian-
ship as the principle of order and oneness.
Socrates, according to Plato, had declared, “And if I find any
man who is able to see ‘a One and Many’ in nature, him I fol-
low and ‘walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.’”58 Socrates
and Plato thus summoned men to follow them, because The
Republic was their “vision” of the answer. More specifically, as
Voegelin points out, the true Philosophers see the “one” in the
“many.”59 And this one, clearly, is the philosopher-ruler. The
Republic needs no laws, no legal code of justice, because the
guardians are the walking law, the idea incarnate. As Willough-
by observed, “Plato’s republic is, therefore, to be a state with-
out laws; one governed entirely by special ordinances issued by
its rulers as occasion for them arises.”60 In every age, whenever
and wherever these esoteric guardians arise, they are hostile to
law because they themselves are the truest idea of law. Plato
only wrote his Laws in his old age, as a suggestion for the sec-
ond-best state, and it is a society designed to be a palatable step-
ping-stone to the best. For Plato, ethics and politics were
essentially the same,61 and if virtue is political, how else can it
best manifest itself than in rulers who have knowledge and can
best institute order? “We say that the one and many are identi-
fied by the reasoning power,” and “all things which are sup-
posed to exist draw their existence from the one and many, and
have the finite and infinite in them as a part of their nature.”62
The goal of education is to understand the harmonious order
or cosmos of the whole world, and the goal of justice and the
state is to attain to that order, and The Republic is the model of
that order.
The guardians indeed shall strive to set their country free,
but this is freedom from foreign powers, not the freedom of
the people; it is to be a free state, not a free people. Because ed-
ucation was seen as conditioning, the environment had to be
totally controlled, and art was part of that environment.63
Death was the lot of the physically unfit, and children born
without license should be disposed of.64 The guardians had to
live under a material and sexual communism, and this was, in
The Laws, recommended for all men as the ideal state.65 For
Plato, consent of the governed meant that their best interests
Families, children, people, all are the property of the state, and
the citizen should be “moulded to suit the form of government
under which he lives.” Lest any misunderstand him, Aristotle
stated plainly, “Neither must we suppose that any one of the
citizens belongs to himself, and the care of each part is insepa-
rable from the care of the whole.” Like the whole of man’s life,
“That education should be regulated by law and should be an
affair of state is not to be denied.”79 The state is the “highest
community” and “embraces all the rest, aims at good in a great-
er degree than any other, and at the highest good.” The state is
thus man’s true church and his basic religious institution for
Aristotle; it is man’s savior and his order of salvation. Al-
though the family has a biological priority, philosophically,
“the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the in-
dividual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” And
“justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of
justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the prin-
ciple of order in political society.”80 “The end of the state is the
good life,”81 but we can as easily say that the good life for Ar-
istotle is life within the state, for his state is man’s only true
god and church.
Aristotle, perhaps partly for political as well as for personal
reasons, is fearful of the radical, communistic order of Plato’s
Republic, which creates in the state, “such a degree of unity as
to be no longer a state,” for “the nature of the state is to be a
plurality” in unity. His purpose in calling for some plurality is
to further the desired self-sufficiency. Aristotle is for a totali-
tarian but non-communist state, and his arguments against
communism in property and women are based on practical
rather than moral and religious considerations. The state
“should be united and made into a community by education.”
The socialism of Aristotle is thus neither material nor marital,
but rather educational: man himself is to be socialized, “for it
is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require
87. Ibid., 9.
88. Cornelius Van Til, Metaphysics of Apologetics (Philadelphia: Westminster
Theological Seminary, 1931), 18.
89. Ibid.
90. Gilbert T. Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 202.
The Unity of the Polis 93
95
96 The One and the Many
The family indeed was powerful in Rome, but it was the crea-
ture of the City; the City was not an outgrowth of the family.
Priority did not belong to the family or to race, although the
later aristocracy tried to maintain such a thesis, but to the City,
for Rome began as a city and then created the Roman people
and the Roman family. Only the rigidity of evolutionary pre-
suppositions has obscured this obvious fact from scholars. The
family was the creature of the City, as was marriage, for the
only legally recognized marriages in Rome were the marriages
of citizens. The right to contract a legal union was — like the
right to vote, eligibility for magistracy, and the right to serve
in a legion — a right of citizens only. The same was true of the
right to possess, acquire, and bequeath property, and originally
most land was periodically re-allotted by the City. “The peo-
ple” were of the City, and “the plebs” of the country.3 The
function of Roman religion was pragmatic, to serve as social
cement and to buttress the state.
3. Pierce Grimal, The Civilization of Rome (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1963), 221, 227, 438.
4. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (London:
Heinemann, 1959), 389.
5. Grimal, Civilization of Rome, 100.
98 The One and the Many
ple and their city as a divine personality.” This idea was not
foreign to Rome, in its developed concept of the god-king, “as
may be seen in the old legend of the apotheosis of Romulus
into the divine figure of Quirinius.”10 The discrediting of king-
ship in early Rome led to a dislike of the idea of a god-king but
not to a rejection of its religious foundations. Power, wherever
and however manifested, whether for good or for evil, was an
indication of the presence of immanent divinity. Hence, diseas-
es were raised, in times of plague, to the ranks of deity, temples
built to them and sacrifices made, as Febris (fever), Mefitis,
Cloacina, and Verminus (wormy, during a plague among cat-
tle).11 The growth of the cult of Rome, and the rise of a cult of
the god-king whenever a strong ruler appeared, were thus in-
evitable and logical outgrowths of the Roman faith.
The conflict of Christianity with Rome was thus political
from the Roman perspective, although religious from the
Christian perspective. The Christians were never asked to
worship Rome’s pagan gods; they were merely asked to recog-
nize the religious primacy of the state. As Francis Legge ob-
served, “The officials of the Roman Empire in time of
persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to
any heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the
Fortune of the City of Rome; and at all times the Christians’
refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political of-
fense.... Whatever rivalry the Christian Church had to face in
its infancy, it had none to fear from the deities of Olympus.”12
The issue, then, was this: should the emperor’s law, state law,
govern both the state and the church, or were both state and
church, emperor and bishop alike, under God’s law? Who rep-
resented true and ultimate order, God or Rome, eternity or
time? The Roman answer was Rome and time, and hence
Christianity constituted a treasonable faith and a menace to
political order. The Roman answer to the problem of man was
political, not religious. This meant, first, that man’s basic prob-
lem was not sin but lack of political order. This Rome sought to
supply, religiously and earnestly. Second, Rome answered the
problem of the one and the many in favor of oneness, the unity
of all things in terms of the state, Rome. Hence, over-organiza-
tion, undue simplification, and centralization increasingly
characterized Rome. Although he sees it as a yearning for their
simple past, William Carroll Bark cites as one of the causes of
Rome’s failure the fact that “they confused simplicity with
strength, as if one could not exist without the other.”13
However real the differences of Rome from other ancient
cultures, it still subscribed to the basic myth and dialectic of
chaos and order, and the republic was firmly committed to the
primacy of order. The necessity of and the revitalizing powers
inherent in chaos were recognized, and hence the festival, the
Saturnalia, with its controlled, limited, and ostensibly revivify-
ing chaos. When order was in crisis, and endangered, the
amount of chaos permitted was increased. Thus, cults such as
the Bacchanalia were permitted in Rome as a consequence of
the devastating challenge to the Roman order by Hannibal. In
the court case brought about by Aebutius, it was held that al-
most half the population was involved in the Bacchanalia,
which required total defilement as a condition of entrance, the
systematic violation of all moral laws as their law. “The holiest
article of their faith was to think nothing a crime.” The cult
was not only involved in sexual perversions, but also, like all
such cults then and now, aimed at political power and control
and was involved in murder, falsifying evidence, and forging
signatures and wills. The senatorial decree of 186 B.C. abol-
ished the Bacchanalia from Italy except for minor local cults.
Julius Caesar may have reintroduced it; it reappeared certainly
in connection with other foreign cults of chaos in the days of
the emperors.14 Although the Roman festivals were often ex-
13. W. C. Bark, Origins of the Medieval World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday An-
chor Books, 1960), 144.
14. Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, trans. Gilbert and Helen Highet
(New York: Dutton, 1935), 118-123.
Rome: The City of Man 101
15. See Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (New York: Do-
ver, 1956).
16. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (New York: Modern Li-
brary, n.d.), 424.
17. John C. Rolfe, trans., The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, vol. 2 (London: Hei-
nemann, 1927), 279.
18. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: Heinemann, 1927),
419, 423, 441-447.
102 The One and the Many
ond self to me.”22 The gods gave an especially high place to the
“saviours of state”:
All men who have saved or benefited their native land, or have
enhanced its power, are assigned an especial place in heaven
where they may enjoy a life of eternal bliss. For the supreme
god who rules the entire universe finds nothing, at least
among earthly objects more pleasing than the societies and
groups of men, united by law and right, which are called
states. The rulers and saviors of states set forth from that place
and to that place return.23
The true order, pleasing to whatever gods may be, is thus the
state. This means that time, history, is the central and determi-
native arena of being, and the state is the locale of its meaning
as it becomes incarnate. There is no eternal decree emanating
from God to make eternity determinative of time. The gods
and men are both subject to chance, and “it is not in the power
even of God himself to know what event is going to happen
accidentally and by chance.”24 Cicero was ready to accept div-
ination as a religious exercise of state, as a necessity in keeping
the populace religiously respectful of authority, but in practice
he disbelieved it utterly.25 When he wrote the Republic, Cicero
favored maintaining the rites of augury and of auspices because
of their historical part in Rome, “because of his belief in obe-
dience to law and because, as a member of the aristocratic par-
ty, he thought augury and auspices the best means of
controlling the excesses of democracy.”26 The area of determi-
nation and destiny was time and history, and, more specifical-
ly, the state. And, in answer to the question, “What is a state?,”
Cicero made it clear that a true state is reason, and the law and
order which flow from reason. Accordingly, he could say of
his exile, in 58 B.C., during the Clodian upheaval, “I was not
exiled from the state, which did not exist,” because it had for-
22. L. P. Wilkinson, Letters of Cicero: A New Selection in Translation (London:
Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 60.
23. Cicero, On the Commonwealth, trans. and ed. George Holland Sabine and
Stanley Smith (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1929), 258-259. In the Keyes
edition, 265, 267.
24. Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead
Falconer (London: Heinemann, 1922), 389.
25. Ibid., 511-539.
26. Falconer, in ibid., 216.
104 The One and the Many
37. F. R. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1956),
263.
38. Wilkinson, Letters, 191.
39. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Hohn Selby Watson (London:
George Bell, 1884), 184.
40. Ibid., 186.
Rome: The City of Man 107
3. Julius Caesar
Cicero avoided sensuality; Julius Caesar courted it religious-
ly. He was, according to Suetonius, “extravagant” in his sexual
intrigues with women, and his soldiers, in his Gallic triumph,
duced all races of creatures, and gave forth, at birth, vast forms
of wild animals, now being exhausted, scarcely rears a small
and degenerate offspring.”50 Lucretius also gave a vivid picture
of the “crudity” of Roman religion in his day, of the rash of all
kinds of superstitious cults. There is no reason to doubt his tes-
timony. Romans were agreed that it was the end of an era, and
new vitality was needed. Caesar met this religious hunger with
his own participation in the faith in chaos, in revolution as the
means to social regeneration.
There is extensive evidence of this. Because modern histori-
ans are secular in their approach, they strip history of its reli-
gious framework. But Julius Caesar moved always in a
religious context and appeared as its fulfilment. As Grimal has
pointed out, “The Roman games were essentially religious
functions. They represented a ritual that was necessary for
maintenance of the necessary good relations between the City
and its gods.” In origin, they were in part Etruscan. The chaos
faith was apparent in the games.
At the Games of Flora, it was the custom for the courtesans of
the City to display themselves naked in lascivious dances. The
meaning of this rite is clear; its purpose was to restore full vi-
gour to the forces of fertility in the springtime, and no one
would have dared to suppress this indecent spectacle, for fear
of making the year barren.51
This was in the days of the republic, when the games were a
part of the social order and represented controlled chaos, chaos
under the jurisdiction of reason. With Caesar, chaos became
the primary source of social energy, and hence the games
gained a new prominence and a religious and social centrality.
Mannix states, “Julius Caesar might be called the father of the
games because under him they ceased to be an occasional exhi-
bition of fairly modest proportions and became a national in-
stitution.”52
4. Chaos Cults
The mythology of chaos cults involved extensive bestiality,
and it became an important aspect now of the revived cult.
Women, representing the human world of reason and order,
were, in exhibitions under the stands or in the arena, subjected
to rape by animals representing chaos and its fertility — by li-
ons, leopards, wild boars, zebras, cheetahs, chimpanzees, bulls,
and giraffes. Sometimes small boys were assaulted by men
dressed as satyrs.53 It is customary for scholars to seek a non-re-
ligious reason for all this in sadism, and sadism it certainly was,
but it was not the cause but rather a result of a religious faith.
The older Romans had been more inclined to humane actions
than many another nation of antiquity. Now they had swung
from asceticism to sadism for religious reasons. Their asceti-
cism represented a religious dislike for the disturbing, chaotic
effect of sex and a reverence for reason as the principle of or-
der. Their sadism represented a religious asceticism against rea-
son and order, an assault against all that stood for it, in the
name of social regeneration, the renewing power of chaos. In
Apullius’ Golden Ass we have, according to Grant, “a story of
sin and redemption, symbolizing the greater redemption of the
world to come.”54 But the redemption is in terms of the chaos
cult. Apullius described the passion of a rich noblewoman for
an ass, and he also reported a similar public sexual act in the
amphitheatre, preceded by the Greek Pyrrhic dance and an al-
legorical religious performance concerning the gods. Bestiality
as a religious act has a long religious history and a ritual role,
as in ancient Egypt, where men mated with the sacred croco-
dile. C. S. Sonnini and Burton reported the continuing exist-
ence of such acts in nineteenth century Egypt, where, as “the
sovereignest charm for rising to rank and riches,” men drove
off the male, leaving the female crocodile turned on her back
and helpless, “to supplant him in this frightful intercourse.”55
“To block all the approaches of revolution,” this was his hope.
This he attempted to do with reason and integrity, as an honest
soldier and consul, as a dedicated proconsul of Cilicia, where
he placed the welfare of Rome and the province above enrich-
ing himself, and as a defender of the republic unto death. There
were not many like him. Marcus Junius Brutus, another repub-
lican leader, respected in his day for integrity, still saw nothing
unusual in lending the city of Salamis a large sum of money at
forty-eight percent a year interest and then pressuring the pro-
vincial governor to use troops to collect the debt.58 Most “re-
publicans” were now of this kind of “integrity.”
Cicero’s education was directed to the solution of this na-
tional crisis. He despised ivory-tower scholarship and held
“that our countrymen have shown more wisdom everywhere
than the Greeks, either in making discoveries for themselves,
or else in improving upon what they have received from
Greece,” because the Roman criterion was practical and prag-
matic, not theoretical.59 He recognized the reality of Rome’s
decay: “Men reckon that our courts of law have no strictness
left, no conscience — nay, by now, no existence worth the
name. The result is that we are contemned and despised by the
people of Rome. We have been groaning, and that for many
years, under a heavy load of infamy.”60 More than mere orato-
ry was involved in his intense concern over bringing Verres to
justice, in convicting crime “engendered by greed, nourished
by lust, and finally completed by cruelty.”61 The republic was
at stake. And Cicero was always concerned with present reali-
ty: his republic was not, like Plato’s, an ideal concept, but a
present political battle. And the reality was not good. On Jan-
uary 20, 60 B.C., he wrote to Atticus from Rome, “There is
not a ghost of a statesman in sight. The man who could be one,
my friend Pompey..., sits silently contemplating the triumphal
cloak awarded him. Crassus never utters a word that could
58. H. J. Haskell, The New Deal in Old Rome (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1939), 120.
59. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3-4
60. Cicero, The Verrine Orations, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1959), 109-110.
61. Ibid., 383, cf. vol. 2, 283.
Rome: The City of Man 113
as conditional upon rational law, but the state, being the one
and all powerful, could function without Cicero’s kind of law
to exile and execute Cicero. All Cicero could say about this
was that death was freedom for the mind.67
Man was outwardly at the mercy of the state, and, according
to De Fato, of chance. Thus, as against necessity or fate, Cicero
chose a world of chance as his way of asserting man’s free will.
He sacrificed the idea of the gods, moreover, to make man free.
But Cicero’s “free” man was now the slave of the state, of cir-
cumstance, heredity, and all things else. Man, therefore, had
been surrendered, as well as the gods, because Cicero’s one ba-
sic reality was the state. Cochrane was right in commenting
that, “for Cicero no less than for Virgil, salvation is not indi-
vidual, but marks the achievement of purposes which are to be
realized only in the corporate life.”68
This corporate life, the Roman state, was everything for Ci-
cero. However much he talked about reason in nature, for him
the reality could truly exist only in the state. In classical
thought, Greek and Roman, an abstract, non-temporal univer-
sal, the idea, logos, or reason of being, inevitably became tem-
poral and concrete in a dictator or ruler because time was
central and determinative, not eternity. Men posited the ideal
in eternity to give themselves room for growth, to make room
for process and for the reality of history and development, but,
because time was central and not eternity, the idea inevitably
gravitated to the center of the stage and became historical in a
ruler. Everything in Cicero’s thought called for an incarnate
reason to save the Roman state. He sought, by advocating the
composite state in his Republic, to save Rome, but Rome had
been a composite state and was now collapsing. As Cicero ad-
mitted to his son, “our republic we have lost forever.”69 He
himself, together with the aristocracy before him, had reduced
their Roman order to their fiat will by denying the validity of
plied, but it was in the main his policy and became the pro-
gram of the People’s Party.75
Caesar thus was fulfilling a religious and a divine function.
And the way had been prepared for a divine ruler. Philoso-
phers of note had already received their apotheosis, Plato from
Cicero, and Epicurus from Lucretius, and Cicero in two
speeches referred to P. Lentulus Spinther, the consul responsi-
ble for Cicero’s return from exile in 57 B.C., as the “god of his
fortunes.” “The way was thus prepared and Julius Caesar was
ready to take advantage of it.” Statues declared him to be a
“demi-god,” and “god invincible,” and he was given his own
flamen or priest for his worship.76 Caesar was thus a deified
man, to whom divine honors were paid. His face appeared on
coins where previously the effigies of gods had been figured.77
Caesar avowed himself to be “the unconquered god,” and coins
proclaimed him the “Pater Patriae,” whose divine Clementia
was itself the object of worship.78 The claim of divinity was not
the problem or stumbling block for Rome; it was a new step,
but it had ancient Roman roots. The problem was the move to-
wards kingship, which, because of the deep-rooted antipathy
towards kings, excited opposition which divine honors did
not.79
But Roman clementia was mercy and forgiveness without
grace; it altered nothing and, for all Caesar’s hopes, regenerat-
ed neither man nor empire. It was a forgiveness and mercy
which in effect tolerated and subsidized sin.80 And Caesar be-
gan to take his divine role very seriously. Warned of conspira-
cies, and against being too “open-hearted,” he responded by
dismissing his whole bodyguard. Ferrero has described this pe-
riod vividly:
85. Horace Gregory, trans. and ed., The Poems of Catullus (New York: Grove
Press, 1956), no. 85, 151.
86. Ibid., no. 58, 74.
87. Ibid., no. 56, 72, etc.
88. Ibid., nos. 88-90, 152-156.
89. Ibid., no. 91, 157.
90. G. G. Ramsay, trans., Juvenal and Persius (London: Heinemann, 1930).
91. H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex, The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1964), 99.
120 The One and the Many
der to preserve the empire. The empire did have its problems,
and its long economic crisis was its central problem; its even-
tual collapse was a combination of economic decline and a
breakdown of meaning. But, in the process, the instability of
the emperial office was not the distressing fact to the peoples
that it is to the modern mind. Their faith, after all, was in the
regenerating power of chaos, in revolution. To see ordinary
soldiers and foreigners rise up through the ranks to command
the empire, preside at the games, possess women at will, show-
er gold on favorites, and ride in triumph, was exciting and
heartening to many. It was the world they demanded, where,
although men could fall suddenly, they could also rise sudden-
ly. The Romans had become gamblers, and the empire was it-
self a gamble. They were not Ciceronian moralists. The
Atargatis cult from Syria had brought with it an ancient part-
ner of fertility cults, the usurers, who had been in disrepute in
republican Rome but were used in the empire of the republic
to subjugate peoples.97 The Syrian money-lenders now spread
throughout the empire.98 The chaos of debt was added to the
moral chaos.
Only one element of order of major significance remained in
the empire, the Christians. But their adherence was not to Ro-
man order or peace but to God’s order and peace. The Pauline
epistles warned against revolutionary activity and hopes: the
Christian confidence was neither in chaos nor in Roman order
but in God’s regenerating power in and through Jesus Christ.
9. Marcus Aurelius
There were attempts, of course, to restore ascendancy to rea-
son in the reason-chaos dialectic. Most notable of these efforts
was the reign of the philosopher-king, Marcus Aurelius An-
toninus (originally Marcus Annius Verus), A.D. 121-180. The
97. Cato, when “asked what was the most profitable feature of an estate,...
replied: ‘Raising cattle successfully.’ What next to that? ‘Raising cattle with fair
success.’ And next? ‘Raising cattle with but slight success.’ And fourth? ‘Raising
crops.’ And when his questioner said, ‘How about money-lending?’ Cato replied:
‘How about murder?’” Cicero, De Officiis, 267.
98. Cumont, Oriental Religions, 107-109.
122 The One and the Many
republic was dead and gone; the empire could be ruled by the
reason of Stoicism. The messianic hope of the Caesars could be
realized by reason. To his wife, Faustina, he wrote in 175: “For
there is nothing that can commend an emperor to the world
more than clemency. It was clemency that made Caesar into a
God, that deified Augustus, that honoured your father with
the distinctive title of Pius.”99
Marcus Aurelius held to the old asceticism of reason, and, in
his Meditations, was grateful “that I kept unstained the flower
of my youth; and that I did not make trial of my manhood be-
fore the due time, but even postponed it.”100 He had an ascetic
dislike of the body and its care. “As your bath appears to your
senses — soap, sweat, dirt, greasy water, all disgusting — so is
every piece of life and every object.”101
“The key-note of Stoicism was Life according to Nature, and
Marcus was converted to the pursuit of this possibility by Sex-
tus the Boeotian. By ‘Nature’ was meant the controlling Rea-
son of the Universe.”102 For the emperor, God and man were
aspects of one universe, “For there is both one Universe, made
up of all things, and one God immanent in all things, and one
Substance, and one Law, one Reason common to all intelligent
creatures, and one Truth, if indeed there is also one perfecting
of living creatures that have the same origin and share the same
reason.” The “gods” and men are “fellow-citizens” of the uni-
verse.103 Deity is thus immanent in all men, and all men partic-
ipate in divine reason.104 Men’s minds come from the one mind
124. Pre-Nicene Fathers, The Writings of Justin Martyr and Athenagoras (Edin-
burgh: T. & T. Clark, 1874), 375.
125. Grant, World of Rome, 146-147, 169, 177, 180, 243-244.
126. Legge, Forerunners and Rivals, vol. 1, 54.
127. Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, 222-223.
128. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I (New
York: Modern Library, n.d.), 86.
Rome: The City of Man 127
2. Mysticism
But mysticism also sought to give an answer in terms of the
one. Mysticism and asceticism, which appeared in Jewish, Syr-
ian, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman cultures before invading
Christianity (Julian the Apostate was a pagan ascetic and mys-
tic), made history and man’s soul both determinative. The om-
nipotent One had two all-absorbing faces, nature and history,
before which man was helpless, and the great Soul, into which
man must be absorbed. Then, finally, both arms of the dialec-
tic would be absorbed, as the cycle ended and history began an-
other round in its endless cycle, with man helpless in the face
of this grim reality.
4. Ibid., 25.
134 The One and the Many
3. Gnosticism
This ancient, cynical, nihilistic atomism found several forms
of expression, one of them being an early form of existential-
ism known as Gnosticism.8 Gnosticism has been viewed in
terms of its two types of dualism, first, the Syrian, in which the
dualism is derived “from the one and undivided source of be-
ing,” and, second, the Iranian type, “a dualism of two opposed
principles,” with man’s destiny seen in terms of “mixing and
unmixing, captivity and liberation.”9 Also important is the
analysis of Gnosticism in terms of the concept of time. Helle-
nism saw time as cyclical and circular, perpetually repeating it-
self. In biblical thought, “Time is rectilinear, it is a scroll
unrolling itself irreversibly from the creation straight on to the
end of the universe.” For the Gnostic, time is a defilement to
be escaped; the gnosis is a progressive restoration which leads
to an escape from time.10
19. Peter Holmes, trans., The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. unknown, The
Five Books of Quintus Sept. Flor. Tertullianus against Marcion (Edinburgh: T. & T
Clark, 1868), 53.
138 The One and the Many
written: “If you should take your wife in adultery, you may
with impunity put her to death without a trial; but if you
should commit adultery or indecency, she must not presume
to lay a finger on you, nor does the law allow it.”23
Gellius is genuinely fond of the old Romans and proud of
them. Nevertheless, his interest is antiquarian and at points hu-
morous. The picture of the wives of old Romans drinking
heavily spiced wine to cover the smell of alcohol is clearly
amusing. Human foibles rather than moral questions appeal to
Gellius. His report “About the strange suicides of the maids of
Miletus” is again indicative of this.
Plutarch in the first book of his work On the Soul, discussing
disorders which affect the human mind, has told us that al-
most all the maidens of the Milesian nation suddenly without
any apparent cause conceived a desire to die, and thereupon
many of them hanged themselves. When this happened more
frequently every day, and no remedy had any effect on their
resolve to die, the Milesians passed a decree that all those maid-
ens who committed suicide by hanging should be carried to
the grave naked, along with the same rope by which they had
destroyed themselves. After that decree the maidens ceased to
seek a voluntary death, deterred by the mere shame of so dis-
graceful a burial.24
This is Gellius, a kindly, curious observer who views virtue
with friendly eyes and a ready humor, and vice with a kindly
awareness that it is a condition of life. Because good and evil
are metaphysically ultimate for him, a crusade against evil is an
exercise in futility. In this perspective, it is inevitable that so-
cial ethics becomes a matter of poise and manners rather than
good and evil.
Second, when religion wanes, words lose their basic context
of meaning, which is theological, and semantics takes over in a
futile attempt to provide meaning. It is not surprising that Gel-
lius is more interested in the meaning of words than in moral-
ity.25 The basis of community and communication is a
common world of faith and meaning. When that religious
26. For the five main steps, see Carle C. Zimmerman, in Carle C. Zimmerman
and Lucius F. Cervantes, S.J., Marriage and the Family (Chicago: Regnery, 1956), 59.
Christ: The World De-divinized 143
40. Stewart Perowne, Caesars and Saints: The Evolution of the Christian State, 180-
313 A.D. (New York: Norton, 1963), 139.
41. Ibid., 85.
148 The One and the Many
43. Robert South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, vol. 1 (Philadelphia:
Sorin and Ball, 1845), 25.
Christ: The World De-divinized 151
against Rome and the idea of Rome. The church and the indi-
vidual Christian, as independent realms alike under God to-
gether with Rome, and the Christian under God only, in
obedience to God, represented an empire within an empire.
Rome very quickly recognized this challenge to its existence.
7. Creation and History
The sharp difference between the Christian and the
non-Christian perspectives rested extensively and basically on
the doctrine of creation. All non-biblical cosmogonies, accord-
ing to Keil and Delitzsch, “are either hylozoistical, deducing
the origin of life and living beings from some primeval matter;
or pantheistical, regarding the whole world as emanating from
a common divine substance; or mythological, tracing both
gods and men to a chaos or world-egg. They do not even rise
to the notion of a creation, much less to the knowledge of an
Almighty God, as the Creator of all things.”44 The consequenc-
es of this non-biblical perspective are far-reaching. In this con-
cept, being is evolving and is in process. Because being is in
process, and being is seen as one and undivided, truth itself is
tentative, evolving, and without finality. Since being has not
yet assumed a final form, since the universe is in process and
not yet a finished product, truth itself is in process and is con-
tinually changing. A new movement or “leap in being” can
give man a new truth and render yesterday’s truth a lie. But, in
an order created by a perfect, omnipotent, and totally self-con-
scious Being, God, truth is both final, specific, and authorita-
tive. God’s word can then be, and is inevitably, infallible,
because there is nothing tentative about God himself. More-
over, truth is ultimately personal, because the source, God, is
personal, and truth becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus
Christ and is communicated to those who believe in Him.
Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as the way, the truth, and the
life, is also the Christian principle of continuity. The Christian
doctrine, therefore, involved a radical break with the pagan
44. C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: The
Pentateuch, vol. I (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1949), 39.
152 The One and the Many
47. Marcus Dods, trans., The City of God, by Saint Augustine (New York: Modern
Library, 1950), 393-397.
154 The One and the Many
ity, through which the vast oncoming future flows into the
endless receding past....
The Future is logically first, but not chronologically....
The Past issues, it proceeds, from the Future, through the
Present.... 48
The direction of this chronological movement and its pur-
pose is made known to us by God, who decreed it, in His
Word, in which, Salvian declared, “God testifies that He Him-
self performs and ordains all things.” This fact is for Salvian the
“full explanation” of reality, for “Just as God is greater than all
human reason, in like manner it should mean more to me than
reason that I recognize that all things are done by God. There
is no need to listen to anything new on this point. Let God
alone, the Creator, be sufficient over the reasoning of all men.”
God’s Word is sufficient for Salvian as he seeks to understand
history. “When we read that He rules all things He has created,
we prove thereby that He rules, since He testifies that He
rules.” Scripture speaks with clarity; and “the very words of
Holy Scripture are the mind of God.”49
8. History and God
Thus, the genius of history, i.e., its tutelar deity in the Ro-
man sense, was not Caesar but Jesus Christ, whose Word de-
clared the purpose of history. When the Roman officials
demanded, as they did of Polycarp and other Christian mar-
tyrs, an offering of incense to the emperor, declaring, “Swear
by the genius of Caesar; repeat and say, Away with the Athe-
ists,” they were declaring that the god and in a sense almost the
fortune of Rome was the emperor. To deny him worship was
to deny Rome and the meaning of its history and existence. An
atheist was one who disbelieved or denied Caesar as this ge-
nius. Polycarp’s answer was to say, “raising his eyes toward
heaven,... ‘Away with the Atheists.’”50 For Polycarp, the real
48. Nathan R. Wood “God, Man and Matter,” The Secret of the Universe (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955), 43-45.
49. Salvian, “The Governance of God,” in Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, trans., The
Writings of Salvian, the Presbyter (New York: Cima Publishing Co., 1947), 68-69.
50. Eusebius, “Church History,” in A. C. McGiffert, trans., Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952), 190.
Christ: The World De-divinized 155
51. Irving Woodworth Raymond, trans. and ed., Seven Books of History Against
the Pagans: The Apology of Orosius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936),
397; see also 31, Dedication.
52. Ibid., 72.
53. Ibid., 120.
54. Ibid., 51.
55. Ibid., 152.
156 The One and the Many
creeds.60 The first great creed came from the Council of Nicaea
in 325, called by Constantine the Great.
There is no question that Constantine has been savagely
treated by historians, who find it hard to forgive him for end-
ing the persecution of Christians. It is becoming common to
omit the historic designation, “the Great,” from his name, al-
though historians indulge in no such post mortems with re-
spect to Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Peter the Great,
or Frederick the Great. He is regularly set down as a murderer
because of the executions of several members of his family,
with no consideration given to the fact that evidence for judg-
ment is lacking. It may have been murder, and it may have
been morally as well as legally valid in terms of the various
conspiracies so common to the day. Certainly, Percival was
right in calling attention to the fact that Constantine’s charac-
ter was outstanding in comparison to the character of his pre-
decessors, and, in itself, was not without clearly commendable
aspects and strength.61 A good case can be made for the moral
stature of Constantine the Great, as well as for his greatness as
a ruler. Religiously, the sincerity of his faith need not be
doubted; delayed baptism was not uncommon in his day. It is
in the realm of theology that Constantine must be found want-
ing. He respected Christianity deeply, and, at the Council of
Nicaea, was deeply moved at the sight of the maimed, blinded,
and crippled veterans of the persecutions. Christianity repre-
sented strength, and Constantine believed in strength; it repre-
sented the power of God, and Constantine believed in the
power of God as a Roman. As Constantine saw it, the function
and calling of the church was to revivify the Roman Empire
and to establish on a sound basis the genius of the emperor.
Constantine was respectful, kindly, and patient with the
60. On the creeds, see Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 2 vols. (New
York: Harper, 1919); Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils; John H. Leith, ed.,
Creeds of the Churches (Chicago: Aldine, 1963); F. J. Badcock, The History of the
Creeds, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 1938); J. Armitage Robinson, ed., Texts and Studies,
vol. 7, no. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909); J. F. Bethune-Baker,
The Meaning of Homoousios in the ‘Constantinopolitan’ Creed (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1901); etc.
61. Percival, Seven Ecumenical Councils, 423-435.
158 The One and the Many
church, but in all this he still saw the church as an aspect of the
empire, however central a bulwark. The evidence indicates
that he saw himself somewhat as Eusebius of Caesarea saw
him. Even as God was sovereign and monarch over all in heav-
en, so Constantine was sovereign and monarch on earth. Euse-
bius wrote, “Thus, as he was the first to proclaim to all the sole
sovereignty of God, so he himself, as sole sovereign of the Ro-
man world, extended his authority over the whole human
race.”62 Constantine stated, in a letter to Alexander the Bishop
and Arius the Presbyter, that his purpose was twofold with re-
spect to the empire, the second a military goal, the first, intel-
lectual: “My design then was, first, to bring the diverse
judgments formed by all nations respecting the Deity to a con-
dition, as it were, of settled uniformity; and, secondly, to re-
store to health the system of the world.” However patient he
was with the theological struggle, it seemed to him “trivial” as
compared to the virtue of unity, and he was dismayed because
the churchmen “wrangle together on points so trivial and alto-
gether unessential.”63 For Constantine, the fine points of the
doctrine of Christ were “unessential” because it was the wel-
fare and the unity of the empire which were essential to him.
The Form of Prayer given by Constantine to his soldiers is in-
dicative of this: it was a prayer which pagans could use as readi-
ly as adherents of other religions: its central faith and hope is
in the imperial victory:
We acknowledge thee the only God: we own thee as our King,
and implore thy succor. By thy favor have we gotten the vic-
tory: through thee are we mightier than our enemies. We ren-
der thanks for thy past benefits, and trust thee for future
blessings. Together we pray to thee, and beseech thee long to
preserve to us, safe and triumphant, our emperor Constantine
and his pious sons.64
On one occasion, Constantine, in Eusebius’ hearing, said to a
company of bishops, “You are bishops whose jurisdiction is
62. Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1,
505.
63. Ibid., 516-517.
64. Ibid., 545.
Christ: The World De-divinized 159
70. Athanasius, “De Synodis, Councils of Arminum and Selencia,” pt. 2, in ibid.,
458.
71. Alexander’s “Deposition of Arius,” in ibid., 70.
72. Athanasius, “Four Discourses Against the Arians,” in ibid., 429.
73. Archibald Robinson, “Prolegomena,” in ibid, xxv; H. M. Gwatkin, The Arian
Controversy (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 1-15.
162 The One and the Many
74. Athanasius, “Four Discourses Against the Arians,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, vol. 4, 402.
75. Athanasius “Four Discourses,” in ibid, 371.
Christ: The World De-divinized 163
12. Constantinople I
At the First Council of Constantinople, in 381, the Nicene
Creed was affirmed and sharpened, so that the authentic deity
of the Holy Spirit as well as of the Father and the Son was af-
firmed. In the Council’s “Synodical Letter” of 382, “the true
faith....the ancient faith....the faith of our baptism,” is defined:
According to this faith there is one Godhead, Power and Sub-
stance of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; the
dignity being equal, and the majesty being equal in three per-
fect hypostases, i.e., three perfect persons. Thus there is no
room for the heresy of Sabellius by the confusion of the hy-
postases, i.e., the destruction of the personalities; thus the blas-
phemy of the Eunomians, of the Arians, and of the
Pneumatomachi is nullified, which divides the substance, the
78. Athanasius, “De lncarnatione Verbi Dei,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
vol. 4, 65.
79. Athanasius, “Four Discourses Against the Arians,” in ibid., 403.
166 The One and the Many
82. Athanasius, “Four Discourses,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 434.
168 The One and the Many
Man and God are thus together struggling against the universe
and time, warring against chaos.
A version of this early doctrine appeared after Nicaea in
Marcellus of Ancyra, who held that the eternal and impersonal
Logos, immanent in God and itself the divine energy, became
personal at the incarnation, and, after the incarnation, was re-
absorbed into the Godhead. Athanasius pertinently comment-
ed of Marcellus, “This perhaps he borrowed from the Stoics,
who maintain that their God contracts and again expands with
the creation, and then rests without end.”83 The pagan concept
of being was clearly in evidence: an aspect of God’s energy be-
comes personal in time, where it becomes powerful and com-
mands history, and then, passing from history, returns to a
contracted and lower state. History is again the central arena,
and God comes to a fuller self-consciousness in history.
Thus, every departure from the orthodox trinitarian faith,
however seemingly an exaltation of God and His
transcendence, was a destruction of theism. The perfection and
omnipotence of God were in effect denied, and eternity ceased
to be determinative of time. History became the focal point of
the universe, not the throne of God, and, to be effectual or
even fully self-conscious, God had to enter history and link
himself with determinative man. God had to find himself in
man and in history! This was not theism but humanism. It was
bluntly called atheism by the orthodox fathers. As they
recognized, the only possible theism was orthodox trinitarian
theism, three persons, equal and without subordination, one
God, omnipotent, unchangeable, and wholly self-conscious
and determinative.
14. Ephesus
This same question, in another form, was dealt with by the
Council of Ephesus in 431. Was Christ born a common man
of the Virgin Mary, and did God then unite himself to this per-
fect man in moral fellowship and communion? Was it a case of
15. Chalcedon
Nestorianism having been dealt with at Ephesus, the Mono-
physite danger had yet to be faced, and, at the Council of Chal-
cedon, in 451, the problem was dealt with. More than that, a
theological wall was erected against divinization. An impor-
tant part of the Council’s history is the Tome of Leo. St. Leo
the Great, Bishop of Rome, in a statement sent to the Council,
asserted the reality of the two natures in Christ: “For each of
the natures retains its proper character without defect; and as
the form of God does not take away the form of a servant, so
the form of a servant does not impair the form of God.” God
the son did not unite himself with a man already in existence
but in fact put on humanity:
What was assumed from the Lord’s mother was nature, not
fault, nor does the wondrousness of the nativity of our Lord
Jesus Christ, as born of a Virgin’s womb, imply that his nature
is unlike ours. For the selfsame who is very God is also very
man; and there is no illusion in this union, while the lowliness
of man and the loftiness of Godhead meet together. For as
“God” is not changed by the compassion (exhibited), so
“Man” is not consumed by the dignity (bestowed).
Christ: The World De-divinized 171
the Armenians, while losing his life and the battle in a bloody
stand, still halted the Persian march.
16. Pelagianism and Asceticism
Since Chalcedon had blocked one avenue of incursion by pa-
ganism into Christianity, other avenues had to be used. The
doctrine of God and of Christ had been defined: the new ap-
proach was made through the doctrine of man. Already, be-
fore Ephesus, Pelagianism had allied itself with Nestorius in
429, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 linked in condemna-
tion “the opinions of Nestorius and Celestius,” Celestius (or
Coelestius) being a Pelagian leader. Pelagianism was pagan
moralism and philosophy, comparable to eighteenth century
Deism in many respects. Warfield has correctly stated, “The
real question at issue was whether there was any need for
Christianity at all; whether by his own power man might not
attain eternal felicity,” the only function of Christianity being
to help man in this self-salvation. The origins of Pelagianism
were monastic and ascetic, and they were philosophical.97
It is important to note the equation of asceticism with phi-
losophy. As Richardson noted, philosophy meant virginity,
and, in its earlier usages, did “not refer to Christian virginity,
but primarily to philosophical celibacy.... The Neo-Platonic
philosophy of the times, through its doctrine of the purifica-
tion of the soul by its liberation from the body or sensuous
things, taught celibacy and ascetic practices generally. So Ploti-
nus (d. A.D. 270) practiced and taught to a degree, and Porphy-
ry (d. 301+) more explicitly.”98 As Prestige noted, pagan
mystics “prayed to be delivered from the flesh rather than
sin.”99 Hellenized Jewish hermits appeared well before Chris-
tian hermits in the Egyptian desert, and there was a Hellenized
97. Percival, Seven Ecumenical Councils, 225ff., 229, 230; B. B. Warfield, “Intro-
ductory Essay on Augustin and the Pelagian Controversy,” in Saint Augustin, An-
ti-Pelagian Writings, vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1956), xiv, xxi.
98. Ernest Cushing Richardson in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952), 546n.
99. G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics (London: SPCK, 1940), 76.
Christ: The World De-divinized 175
100. Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 100, 139, 318.
101. See R. J. Rushdoony, “Asceticism,” in Encyclopedia of Christianity, 432-436.
176 The One and the Many
nature’s nude powers,” but the deification still stands, and the
human powers are extensive.105
In Lactantius, the basic premise of asceticism appeared
clearly:
... those things which belong to God occupy the higher part,
namely the soul, which has dominion over the body; but
those which belong to the devil occupy the lower part,
manifestly the body: for this, being earthly, ought to be
subject to the soul, as the earth is to heaven. For it is, as it were
a vessel which this heavenly spirit may employ as a temporary
dwelling.106
The soul thus belongs to the enduring One, and the body to
the transient Many. Salvation is thus not so much in Jesus
Christ as in man’s soul. According to Lactantius,
Knowledge in us is from the soul, which has its origin from
heaven; ignorance from the body, which is from the earth:
whence we have something in common with God and with
animal creation. Thus, since we are composed of these two el-
ements, the one of which is endowed with light, the other
with darkness, a part of knowledge is given to us, and a part of
ignorance. Over this bridge, so to speak, we may pass without
any danger of falling; for all those who have inclined to either
side, either towards the left hand or the right, have fallen.107
The balance Lactantius had in mind is between divine philoso-
phy and natural philosophy: it means keeping informed on
both sides. But the gap between the soul, from God, and the
body, from the earth, cannot be balanced: the soul is far greater
and more important than the body, for it is that which we have
“in common with God.”
When Leo the Great opposed Manichaean asceticism and
dualism, he did it at times with almost monistic rather than
Christian weapons. In denying the Manichaean view of evil, he
answered that “evil has no positive existence,” i.e., it is not a
metaphysical substance but rather “a penalty inflicted on
105. Polycarp Sherwood, trans. and ed., St. Maximus the Confessor: The Ascetic
Life; The Four Centuries on Charity (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1955),
71.
106. William Fletcher, trans., “The Divine Institutes,” The Works of Lactantius,
vol. 1, in Ante-Nicene Christianity Library, vol. 21 (Edinburgh: Clark, 1871), 122.
107. Ibid., “Institutes,” in ibid., 147.
178 The One and the Many
115. Marcus Dods, trans., The City of God, by Saint Augustine (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 1950), 328.
116. Ibid., 446.
117. Ibid., 361, 382.
118. Ibid., 461.
180 The One and the Many
119. Dom R. H. Connolly, trans., Homily XVII (A) in Texts and Studies, vol.8,
no. 1, The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1909), 16.
120. Ibid., 20-21.
Christ: The World De-divinized 181
Power thus has flowed, and centrality also, from the historical
event to the memorial symbol and to the church which guards
and celebrates that symbol. Forgiveness of sins and salvation
are now attributes of the symbol rather than the act of atone-
ment, and the worshiper “receives in his hands the adorable
Body of the Lord of all; and he embraces it and kisses it with
love and affection.” The church’s proclamation during distri-
bution is plain spoken:
Lo, the Medicine of life! Lo, it is distributed in Holy Church.
Come, ye mortals, receive and be pardoned your debts. This
is the Body and Blood of our Lord in truth, which the peoples
have received, and by which they have been pardoned without
doubt. This is the Medicine that heals diseases and festering
sores. Receive, ye mortals, and be purified by it from your
debts.
Come, receive for naught forgiveness of debts and offences
through the Body and Blood which takes away the sin of the
whole world.121
Not only does the symbol take over the function of the act,
but the representative, the priest, “bears in himself the image
of our Lord in that hour.”122 So great is the power of the priest
that people need to be reminded, that when “the priest receives
the Sacrament,” he takes it “that he may teach the people that
even the priest himself stands in need of mercy.”123 The priest
“is a mediator between God and men.”124 He thus has assumed
the role of Christ. In Baptism, “He calls and entreats the
hidden Power to come down unto him and bestow visible
power to give life. The waters become fruitful, as a womb; and
the power of grace is like the seed that begets life.”125 Indeed, it
can be said that “A mortal holds the keys of the height, as one
in authority; and he binds and looses by the word of his
mouth, like the Creator.”126 The priest has taken the place of
the emperor as the great mediator and the source of continuity
between the divine and the human. Even Gabriel and Michael
“bow beneath the Will that is concealed” in the priest’s
administration of the Mysteries:
And if spiritual impassible beings honour thine office, who
will not weave a garland of praises for the greatness of thine
order? Let us marvel every moment at the exceeding greatness
of thine order, which has bowed down the height and the
depth under its authority. The priests of the Church have
grasped authority in the height and the depth; and they give
commands to heavenly and earthly beings. They stand as me-
diators between God and man, and with their words they
drive iniquity from mankind. The key to the divine mercies is
placed in their hands, and according to their pleasure they dis-
tribute life to men.... The debt of mankind the priest pays by
means of his ministry; and the written bond of his race he
washes out with the water and renews it (sc. his race).127
This saving role — this authority over “heavenly and earthly
beings,” and this mediatorial status and power over evil — rep-
resents the continuation in the priesthood of the emperor’s re-
demptive office.
These concepts, which steadily crept into the church, be-
came the cornerstones of sacerdotalism and of papalism. The
church, the body of Christ, i.e., of His perfected humanity,
came to regard itself as a continuation of the incarnation, so
that the confusion prohibited by Chalcedon with respect to
the person of Christ was accomplished in the church, the re-
deemed humanity becoming now the continuing incarnation.
18. Augustine on the Pelagians
It is not surprising, then, that Pelagianism spread so readily.
Although clearly a novelty in the church, it had the advantage
of conformity to the pagan presuppositions of men. According
to Warfield, “the central and formative principle of Pelagian-
ism” was “the assumption of the plenary ability of man.”128
The Pelagian accusation against orthodoxy seemed a persua-
sive one: first, predestination, or sovereign grace, was a denial
129. Augustine, “A Treatise on the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the
Baptism of Infants,” in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, 68.
130. Ibid., 26.
131. Augustine, “On the Predestination of the Saints,” in ibid., 507.
132. Augustine, “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in ibid., 106.
184 The One and the Many
133. Augustine, “On the Good of Widowhood,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fa-
thers, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 449-450.
134. See Leith, Creeds of the Church, 37-45.
Christ: The World De-divinized 185
God was restricted to the realm of grace and revelation, and na-
ture became the universal government rather than God. This
appeared clearly in a statement of Orosius: “Among Romans,
as I have said, I am a Roman; among Christians, a Christian;
among men, a man. The state comes to my aid through its
laws, religion, through its appeal to the conscience, and nature
through its claim of universality.”139
Augustine had declared that unity is transcendental because
God is transcendental; the unity and center of the City of God
is in eternity, and hence it cannot surrender to a this-worldly
authority and purpose.140 This emphasis was formally main-
tained but increasingly compromised. Nature was steadily to
be given authority and universality over creation and over rea-
son, and Christ was to be steadily restricted to eternity and
faith.
20. Later Councils
To return to the Councils and their development, the Sec-
ond Council of Constantinople (553) reaffirmed the position
of Chalcedon and, in The Capitula, sharpened the definition in
detail.141 The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) dealt
with the Monothelites. Since the two-nature doctrine was en-
trenched now as the hallmark of orthodoxy, the argument
shifted from nature to will. The Monothelites held to one will
only in Christ, charging the orthodox party with a destruction
of the unity of Christ’s person. The term “will” was used not
only in the sense of the ability of choice, self-determination,
and volition, but also to apply to appetites, desires, and affec-
tions. Was Christ capable of fear, suffering, and shrinking
from death? The Duothelites, the orthodox party, charged that
the one-will doctrine destroyed the incarnation and gave only
a docetic character to Christ. The Letter of Pope Agatho to the
emperor clearly affirmed the orthodox position: “And we rec-
ognize that each one (of the two natures) of the one and the
same incarnated, that is, humanated (humanati) Word of God
is in him unconfusedly, inseparably, and unchangeably, intel-
ligence alone discerning a unity, to avoid the error of confu-
sion. For we equally detest the blasphemy of division and of
commixture.”142 The pagan principle of continuity had to be
denied; there could be no confusion of natures or of wills. The
discontinuity, metaphysically, of God and man must be main-
tained. But the Christian principle of continuity is God’s sov-
ereign and total government of all His creation and His
redeeming power as manifested in the incarnation and atone-
ment. This, clearly, is not a metaphysical continuity. This
Christian principle of continuity closes the door to the pagan
principle, and, at the same time, it bars a pagan deism which
would isolate God from the world by its limitations on God
while permitting the upward and divinizing ascent of man.
The Letter of Agatho and the Roman Synod of 125 Bishops,
a letter of instruction to their legates, stressed the perfect union
without confusion of the two natures and two wills “in one
Person and one Subsistence, not scattered or divided into two
Persons, nor confused into one composite nature.... Where-
fore, as we confess that he truly has two natures or substances,
viz.: the Godhead and the manhood, inconfusedly, indivisibly
and unchangeably (united), so also the rule of piety instructs us
that he has two natural wills and two natural operations, as
perfect God and perfect man, one and the same our Lord Jesus
Christ.”143
The Council’s Definition of Faith, in the course of its state-
ment, affirmed both the discontinuity and the unity, as well as
the purpose of the Christian principle of continuity, the salva-
tion of the race:
Preserving therefore the inconfusedness and indivisibility, we
make briefly this whole confession, believing our Lord Jesus
Christ to be one of the Trinity and after the incarnation our
true God, we say that his two natures shone forth in his one
148. Augustine, “On the Morals of the Catholic Church,” in Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 62.
149. Percival, Seven Ecumenical Councils, 315.
150. Augustus Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church,
vol. 3 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1855), 214-221.
Christ: The World De-divinized 191
without confusion. The two wills were also affirmed, and the
Third Council of Constantinople, but again without citing
that crucial phrase: without confusion. Since this question of
confusion had been extensively cited by the Council of 754,
the Second Nicaean Council in 787 left itself especially vulner-
able in failing to answer the charges made, and, in its reaffirma-
tion of the six ecumenical councils, in avoiding so critical an
aspect of their faith. It recalled minor aspects of past councils,
such as the condemnation of “the fables of Origen, Evagrius,
and Didymus” in the Fifth Council, but, while coming close to
the Chalcedonian statement, side-stepped the crucial question.
Confusion was now the catholic faith. And, although in the
West, the Council of Frankfort (794) and the Convention of
Paris (825) were hostile to icons, the veneration of images be-
came identified with the faith in the West as well as the East.
The battle in Christendom was to be the warfare of church and
state in their claims to best represent the divine continuity on
earth. The re-divinization of earthly orders was in process.
157. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
formed Publishing Co., 1947), 64.
Chapter VII
The Return
of Dialectic Thought
1. Boethius
In the philosopher Boethius (d. 525), an early example of the
scholastic method and framework can be seen. In his Theologi-
cal Tractates we have a spirited defense of the orthodox Chris-
tian faith; in The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison
awaiting death, we have an expression of a faith in the face of
death which never refers to Jesus Christ or to Christianity.
The gap between the two sets of documents is not as great as it
would appear.
Boethius defended the doctrines of the Trinity and the two
natures of Christ; he was theologically committed to the
orthodox faith, but he was philosophically committed to the
old form-matter dialectic, and this latter commitment was
decisive in his thinking. When faced with death, he turned to
that philosophy.
For Boethius, God is Form. “But the Divine Substance is
Form without matter, and is therefore One, and is its own
essence.”1
195
196 The One and the Many
VII. Every simple thing possesses as a unity its absolute and its
particular Being.
VIII. In every composite thing absolute and individual Being
are not one and the same.
IX. Diversity repels; likeness attracts. That which seeks some-
thing outside itself is demonstrably of the same nature as that
which it seeks.6
In this thoroughly Hellenic perspective, the distinction be-
tween the divine being of God and the created being of the uni-
verse and of man is lost; there is instead one common Being in
which all things participate. Their particularity is their individ-
ual being; their absolute Being is God. This is the Hellenic ra-
tionalism which characterized scholasticism. The theology of
Boethius, moreover, is not biblical theology; it is at all times
rational theology, and the defense of orthodoxy is to be under-
taken on rational grounds.
2. Scholasticism
It is this characteristic that has led scholars to describe Boet-
hius as the first scholastic.7
The scholastics, moreover, had an academic orientation,
which brings them closer to the twentieth century era than to
any other age. Intellectual inquiry was directed primarily to
the analysis and critique of what other scholars had to say
about any question rather than to satisfying either the ques-
tions of the naïve mind or of practical living. The inquiry
could be rationalistic, empirical, and theoretical or practical,
but it was always academically oriented.8 Moreover, the scho-
lastic, as well as much of the medieval world, were marked by
the eminence of youthfulness. Pieper has well described this as-
pect of medieval thought:
We happen on another surprising element in the history of
medieval philosophy when we consider Abelard and Bernard:
namely, how young these writers and magistri were when they
began their public activity. Nothing is wider of the mark than
the image of white-bearded monks sitting in cells remote from
the bustle of the world and penning on parchment their trac-
tates. Boethius was all of twenty years old when he wrote the
first of his books which were to influence so many centuries
to come. He began the commentaries on Aristotle at twen-
ty-five. At thirty Anselm of Canterbury was prior in Le Bec.
Bonaventura, already a university teacher at twenty-seven,
was called at the age of thirty-six to be General of a Franciscan
order that had already spread through the entire West. Duns
Scotus wrote his principal work, the enormous Opus Oxo-
niense, at the age of thirty-five. And William of Ockham was
only twenty-five when he turned his back for good upon his
distinguished career in science and letters.9
Youthfulness flourishes in a deeply rooted culture which has vi-
tality and communicates it readily and early to its sons. A dy-
ing culture, or a new one, is often dominated by age, by older
men, in that it takes men longer, amid the shaking foundations
and rubble, to develop roots and to establish their thinking in
terms of them. Despite their asceticism at times, and their cel-
ibacy, medieval students and masters were far more at home in
the world than are twentieth century humanists. Some, in-
deed, feared that they were too much at home in the world.
With many, however, there was instead a progressive exten-
sion of the claims of Christian man in the world and over the
world. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224 or 1225 - 1274) clearly repre-
sented this approach. In 1263, Pope Urban IV, a champion of
this concept, reminded scholars that the decree of 1231 of Pope
Gregory IX, while it forbade the teaching of Aristotle as medi-
ated by the Arabs, called for scholars to examine and interpret
Aristotle for the faith. William of Moerbeke and Thomas
Aquinas were summoned to the papal court to assume the task
of assimilating Aristotle into the Christian world of thought.
Aquinas’ purpose reflected a supreme confidence, a confidence
shared by many, that an establishment of Christian truth upon
the foundation of the reason of autonomous man was possible.
The reason of autonomous man could, it was held, establish
9. Ibid., 78-79.
The Return of Dialectic Thought 199
3. Aquinas’ Task
It should be noted that it was the truths of revelation which
Aquinas sought to establish. Far more than the Arminian Prot-
estant thinkers who are his philosophical heirs, Thomas was
dedicated to maintaining the truths of Scripture and affirming
biblical theology. He held to the orthodox theology, to the
eternal decree of predestination, to the centrality and authori-
ty of revelation for faith, and to the doctrine of creation, but
he also believed that these doctrines could to a large degree be
confirmed by the reason of autonomous man. He could de-
clare, as he often did, that “The authority of Scripture suffic-
es,”10 but it was not his concern to begin on the foundation of
Scripture but to move upward to God from sense experiences
and deductions made from them by an independent, autono-
mous reason. From this foundation of autonomous man,
Aquinas hoped to demonstrate Romans 1:20, “for the invisible
things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made.” Let us examine
the implications and consequences of this Thomistic approach
in its most conservative phase, its application to theology, its
defense of the faith.
4. Thomistic Dialecticism
The basic approach of Aquinas is dialectical, and the two as-
pects he is intent on reconciling are nature and grace. Nature
and grace are, for Aquinas, not two hostile worlds, but rather
in close and integral relationship. It is on this foundation that
he is confident that autonomous natural reason will lead di-
rectly to the truths of revelation, which is its perfection. Right-
ly used, reason leads to revelation. “Since therefore grace does
not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason should min-
ister to faith as the natural inclination of the will ministers to
the other, his own rationality. For biblical faith, man’s basic
problem is not metaphysical but ethical, his apostasy from
God, and man’s epistemological problem is also basically ethi-
cal. Man suppresses or holds down the truth in unrighteous-
ness (Rom. 1:18). Apostate man suppresses the truth about
reality because it witnesses to God and seeks to reduce factual-
ity from a God-created, God-testifying reality to a position of
neutrality, of brute factuality. A neutral reality, a world of
brute factuality, is then a world in which sovereign man can
exercise his ultimate control, his predestinating power and de-
cree. For the biblical perspective, as summarized by August-
ine, men are divided into two camps, the City of God and the
city of man, and the differences are religious, moral, noetic,
and epistemological. Between these two camps, warfare exists.
The opposition, the city of man, must be either converted or
fought. The premises of the unregenerate man must be chal-
lenged, and the autonomy of his reason exposed as a lie. Man
is not neutral, nor is his mind a blank tablet or clean paper, for
man is a sinner against God and is bent on twisting all reality
to conform to his rebellion.
But Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that man’s intellect
“is like a tablet on which nothing is written.”36 This means that
the mind, as it confronts nature, is passive to nature
epistemologically and morally, as well as psychologically. It is,
to use a modern term, a question of stimulus and response. In
consistency with this position, evil is a privation, a lack, not an
active and aggressive power. Man’s sin is thus a privation, a
lack of love, or of certain advantages, and to supply these lacks
is to overcome this “evil.” In any perspective of evil as passive,
moral responsibility is implicitly weakened or destroyed, in
that the necessary ingredient to goodness is the supply of a
lack, whether of being or of material advantages. A passive
man is more sinned against than sinning. Man is passive also in
his knowledge; he receives sense impressions and reacts to
them, so that his epistemology has problems of privation of
37. Ibid., Q 2, A 3.
38. E. Crewdson Thomas, History of the Schoolmen (London: Williams and
Northgate, 1941), 276-277.
39. Armand Maurer, “Revived Aristotelianism and Thomistic Philosophy,” in
Vergilius Ferm, ed., A History of Philosophical Systems (New York: Philosophical Li-
brary, 1950), 207-209.
The Return of Dialectic Thought 207
42. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, pt. 2, vol. 2 (London: SPCK, Macmillan,
1939), 432.
43. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q 1, A 8.
44. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, 157.
45. Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, vol. 1, The Nec-
essary Presuppositions of Philosophy, trans., David H. Freeman and William S. Young
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1953), 179.
The Return of Dialectic Thought 209
8. The State
In accepting Aristotle, Aquinas “was prepared to accept the
doctrine that man was a political being whose potentialities
could only be fulfilled in political society.”52 The “Christian
Revolution” of the early centuries had been a great one “where
the matter of sovereignty is concerned. In the days before
Christianity the world knew of one sovereignty only, that of
the State, which exercised its sway alike on religious and civil
life, on the spiritual and on the temporal. With the advent of
Christianity this unity was destroyed.”53 Augustinianism
placed church and state alike under the sovereignty of God.
Aquinas, by holding to the perfection of nature by grace, made
the church the perfection of the state and the superior author-
ity. The state had an autonomy in the natural sphere, but at ev-
ery point, this natural sphere pointed to and was perfected in
50. Ibid., Q 44, A 1.
51. See Sister Mary Fredericus Niemeyer, The One and the Many in the Social Or-
der According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press, 1951), 26-27, 73ff.
52. Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization
(New York: Macmillan, 1963), 514.
53. Joseph Lecler, S.J., The Two Sovereignties: A Study of the Relationship Between
Church and State (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1952), 9.
The Return of Dialectic Thought 211
the sphere of grace. Hence, at every point the state, while inde-
pendent of, was subordinate to the church. What Lecler called
the “Christian Revolution” was, according to Dooyeweerd,
the death blow to the Aristotelian view of a perfect communi-
ty. The latter implied a transformation of the divine world or-
der into a metaphysical order of reason and, in its theory of
the substantial form of human nature, it arrested the transcen-
dental societal Idea of mankind in the Idea of a rational and
moral perfection, attainable in the State alone.
The Christian view did not place a new community (the
Church in its transcendent religious sense) on a parallel with,
or if need be, above all temporal relationships, as a merely
higher level in the development of human perfection. Nor did
it project a cosmopolitical temporal community of mankind
beyond all boundaries of families, races and States, in the Stoic
fashion.
Instead, it laid bare the religious meaning-totality of all social
relationships, each of which ought to express this meaning-to-
tality according to its own inner structure. Without this in-
sight into the radical spiritual foundation of human societal
life, the differentiation of structural principles of temporal so-
ciety cannot be understood in its true meaning.54
By reviving this Aristotelian concept, Aquinas did two things.
First, he made the Church the true state of man in the ultimate
sense, as the perfection of nature. Second, he gave to the state a
freedom from the Christian doctrine of the state and a ratio-
nale for its revived assertion that man’s true life and communi-
ty are attainable in the state alone. His Aristotelianism
destroyed medieval Augustinianism and furthered two
counter-claims to total power, the state and the church each
claiming to be the order of true reason and of man’s perfection.
A further danger was created by Thomism. The dialectical ten-
sion between nature and grace led to a desire by some to shave
off the ostensibly superfluous world of grace and leave to na-
ture a world of anarchic plurality, whereas others so infused
the world of nature with the divine being that a virtual panthe-
ism was created. The result was a cultural collapse.
1. Medieval Civilization
Humanists, Roman Catholics, and Protestants commonly
err in their accounts of “medieval” civilization in that they as-
cribe to it a modern perspective with regard to the papacy and
then either condemn or approve the “Middle Ages” in terms of
their attitudes towards the claims of the papacy. Their histori-
cal perspective is thus conditioned by their reactions to an ec-
clesiastical dogma rather than by an examination of a culture.
Because it was a Christian era, the humanists wrongly ascribe
to it a lack of scientific and intellectual vigor. Because it was
Catholic, Protestants ascribe to it a lack of biblical zeal and in-
terest. But Thomas Aquinas was more conscientious and faith-
ful in his adherence to Scripture than are most Protestant
Arminians and modernists, whose faith is simply a degraded
Thomism, lacking in Aquinas’ faith and intelligence. The fail-
ure of Aquinas was not in ignorance of the Bible but in the im-
portation of Aristotelian thought into his apologetics.
In twelfth century England, in the diocese of Worcester, a
preacher had quoted poetry rather than the Bible in his ser-
mon, and the congregation held an indignation meeting after
213
214 The One and the Many
1. Roger Lloyd, The Golden Middle Ages (London: Longmans, Green, 1939), 237.
2. E. Thomson, ed., Select Monuments of the Doctrine and Worship of the Catholic
Church in England before the Norman Conquest (London: John Russell Smith, 1875),
95-96. It is interesting to note that the old English version of the creed, in affirming
belief in the Catholic Church and the communion of saints, literally declared, “And
I beleue on the Holy Ghost. And the holy Congregation. And of the saintes the so-
cietie,” 86.
Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized 215
3. Joseph Clayton, Pope Innocent III and His Times (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1941),
43.
216 The One and the Many
made them rex et sacerdos, whereby the ruler not only became
“the chosen mediator between clergy and people, but also im-
posed on him the duty of ‘ruling’ his church.... The king did
not need to ally with a church which was tied to him by pro-
prietary and sacerdotal bonds: it was his church and he was its
divinely appointed ruler.”4 One clergyman ascribed primacy
to the king. The Anonymous of York held the bishops of the
realm to be subordinate to the king, as it was held that the Son
is to the Father, a definitely subordinationist Christology. Ac-
cording to Tellenbach’s summary of this position,
For him the king embodies the divine, the priests the human
nature of Christ. Christ was both king and priest, but the king
in him was the higher; the Church is the Bride not of Christ
as priest, but of Christ as king; and he even dares to point out
that the Church is called Queen not Priestess.5
According to Williams, “The prevailing imagery is royal rather
than sacerdotal. Christ as rex et sacerdos is divinely King and
only humanly a Priest.”6
In earlier thinking, the concept of sovereignty was reserved
to God alone. It was this absence of sovereignty that was re-
vived in colonial America and in the constitutional settlement
to make of the United States a Protestant feudal restoration.7
Christian Europe, after the fall of Rome, developed a social or-
der which reserved sovereignty to God. According to Kern,
Certainly, the monarchical principle even in this form pre-
cluded any idea of popular sovereignty; the people in the Mid-
dle Ages were no more regarded as “sovereign” than was the
monarch. If we wish to use this inappropriate expression at all
for the Middle Ages, we may only say: God is sovereign, and
the Law, which binds both the monarch and the community,
is equally sovereign, so long as it does not run counter to God.
The monarch on the one hand, and the community on the
8. Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1939), 10.
9. Ibid., 194.
10. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe, 1100-1350, trans. Janet Sondhe-
imer (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1962), 284.
218 The One and the Many
Henry II (who threw himself to the ground and bit the carpet
in his rages) said on more than one occasion: “The displeasure
and wrath of Almighty God are also my displeasure and
wrath.” “By nature I am a son of wrath: why should I not
rage? God Himself rages when He is wrathful.”11
2. Frederick II
In Frederick II (1194-1250), Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman
Emperor, King of Sicily and Jerusalem, we see the statist
expression of the dream of unity as it manifested itself in the
empire. Frederick, who, among other things, denied the virgin
birth and life after death, is held to be a “freethinker” by many,
but he clearly believed in his own divinity. Church order was
a necessity to him in order to maintain imperial order, and
Frederick took from Innocent III the idea of the Inquisition
and put it to his own use to protect the ecclesiastical arm of the
empire. In every area, his insistence on imperial control was
relentless.
The dictum Frederick II placed over his symbolic statue on
the Capuan Gateway characterizes his mental temper at the
time, Quam miseros facio quos variare scio. “I shall make miser-
able those who are variable in spirit.”12
Frederick could speak so openly because he was confident of
his divine ordination to enforce unity in terms of imperial jus-
tice. A man of great intelligence and practical abilities, he was
known as “the wonder of the world,” thus combining his sense
of divine calling with the power to further it.13
Frederick, whose name meant “rule of peace” (Germanic,
fride, “peace” and rik, “rule”), saw himself as the one called to
institute a new world order of peace. At his birth, Frederick
was hailed as the fulfilment of prophecy, as savior and
world-ruler, king of all the world.
14. Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194-1250 (New York: Unger,
1957), 5.
15. Ibid., 425; see also 395ff.
220 The One and the Many
The papacy dreamed of the unity of the world under its do-
minion. St. Francis preached what closely resembled the gos-
pel of the third age in that it reduced the church to a spiritual
role and to a poverty that almost implied a surrender of the
world to the state, a position some heretical Franciscans later
took. Frederick saw the world renewed under the unity of the
empire. He saw himself in continuity with the Christian era
but as the creator of the new post-Christian world of peace and
unity. His coins, the golden Augustales, had not the slightest
Christian sign or symbol: “independent of the Christian God
there reigns here a Divus who summons men to faith in him,
like a new Caesar Augustus.”16 Frederick saw himself as the im-
age of God and mediator of Justice between God and man and
as the Logos of Justice: “The Emperor must therefore be at
once FATHER AND SON, LORD AND SERVANT of
Justitia,” infallible in law as the pope was infallible in matters
of faith.17 Phrases that Frederick applied to God were applied
to Frederick by his courtiers, as though he were incarnate god,
“Who bindeth the corners of the earth and ruleth the ele-
ments.” “Thy power, O Caesar, hath no bounds; it excelleth
the power of man, like unto a God.” “Wear the crown that be-
seems thy supernatural position.” An imperial governor
wrote, “Our forefathers looked no more eagerly for the com-
ing of Christ than we do for thine.... Come to free and to re-
joice us.... Show thy countenance and we shall find salvation!
This it is for which we groan, this for which we sigh: to rest
under the shadow of thy wings.” He was hailed as “a harbour
of salvation to them that believe.”18 He was “Law incarnate
upon earth,” and his law code rested on this premise.19
The Emperor taught that the State herself daily begets afresh
the only true and valid Law of God; that the living law of the
temporal world is the Living God himself. That the Eternal
and the Absolute must themselves adapt and change with time
if they are to remain living. This was a decisive break with the
past.20
This meant that God’s primary area was again the immanent
world and that the world of time was the great arena of being,
the area of determination. “The Eternal and the Absolute must
themselves adapt and change with time if they are to remain
living” because the truest and fullest presence of God is in time,
in the state and in the person of the emperor. God is in time,
and in time God is best expressed in the emperor. The Third
Age was the age of this incarnation, and hence the era of peace,
because eternity was reconciled with time and the world unit-
ed under the great messiah-king, the emperor. To deny the em-
pire was to deny world peace and order, it was to deny justice,
because the eternal order was contingent upon the temporal
order, and eternity was determined by time.
This Joachimite concept was widely held. “The thirteenth
century awaited daily, as no other had ever done, the end of the
world, and the prophecies foretold: the end of the world
should be middle and beginning, should be alike redemption
and creation.”21 A part of this hope was the idea that the renew-
al of Rome was necessary for the end of the middle age and the
renewal of time and beginning of the third age. The emperors
were the first to seek the renewal of Rome, but they soon had
two rivals, the papacy and then the Romans. “The Cae-
sar-Popes of the Middle Ages felt themselves to be the succes-
sors of the Roman Divi, just as much as did the Emperors,”
basing their claim on the forged Donation of Constantine.22
Frederick’s state ended in total tyranny, and he became less
and less the new Christ and more and more the anti-Christ.
The papacy won, only to fall victim to its own departure from
its mission and the attendant destruction of Christian Europe.
20. Ibid., 244.
21. Ibid., 225.
22. Ibid., 441.
222 The One and the Many
3. Dante
The demand that the church be purely “spiritual” was not
only a demand that the church abdicate its responsibilities but
also that the church retreat to what the critics held to be the
determined rather than determining realm. If “the Eternal and
the Absolute” are determined by time and the “living law of
the temporal world,” then to relegate the church to that spiri-
tual realm is to relegate it to the subordinate and determined
world. However, the attempt of the church to dominate the
world in the same manner attempted by the empire meant that
the church had accepted the same non-Christian premises con-
cerning the priority of time and the temporal world. Such a po-
sition was more readily criticized in the church than in the
state, and men could weep crocodile tears over the apostasy of
the church simply because they found it a hindrance to the
apostasies of state. One such weeper and rager was the poet
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who succeeded where Frederick
failed and made statist heresy an adornment of Western culture
and literature.
According to scholar Giuseppe de Sanctis, “Dante is a
modern man.” Bishop Giovanni Fallini, also speaking at the
700-year anniversary of Dante’s birth in Florence, Italy, April,
1965, at the Palazzo Vecchio, said, “He worked for a united
world foreshadowing the United Nations by over 600 years.”23
The framework of Dante’s Divine Comedy was rich in
in its totality bear Adam and his perfection, his status subtilis
(if we may say so), in its limbs.32
This thesis is basic also to the Divine Comedy. Christ is made
irrelevant to this world: He is good medicine for dying but not
for living. The political order is the true path to the one-world
paradise under one monarch.
Hence, as a consequence of his setting apart of humanitas from
Christianitas, of virtutes intellectuales from virtutes infusae, ter-
restrial paradise from celestial paradise, Dante had to set apart
also Adam from Christ and make the return to man’s original
image on earth independent of man’s transcendental perfec-
tion in Christ by grace. In other words, Dante had to cleanse
man from the peccatum originale in non-sacramental fashion.33
In the realization of this earthly paradise with its total unity
under a ruler, the one is greater than the many, and the part ex-
ists for the sake of the whole, for “the part is related to the
whole as to its end and supreme good.”34 The world must be
under one monarch even as the universe is one under God as
its monarch, and it is God’s purpose that this universal order
be approximated in the human order by being unified. It is
man’s created function to be in God’s image, “But the human
race is most likened to God where it is most one; for it is in
him alone that the absolute principle of the one exists.”35 Al-
though Dante affirmed the doctrine of the trinity, his assent
was defective, in that he exalted unity over multiplicity instead
of affirming equal ultimacy. Man’s true freedom is in unity, ac-
cording to Dante, since, “the more universal a cause is the
more fully has it the nature of a cause.... And the more a cause
is a cause the more does it love its effect.” As a consequence,
“since the monarch is the most universal of mortal causes of
the well-being of men (since the other princes... are so through
him), it follows that the good of men is more loved by him
than by any other.”36 In other words, the more total the power
32. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology, 474; cf. 458-473. The De Monarchia reference to the two paradises is canto
3, st. 16.
33. Ibid., 485.
34. Howell and Wicksteed, 142.
35. Ibid., 146.
36. Ibid., 154.
226 The One and the Many
of the world ruler, the more impartial and loving his power,
and the greater man’s freedom is as a result! In The Banquet,
Dante affirmed the imperial office to be the promotion of “the
perfection of human life,” adding, “it is the director and ruler
of all our operations, and justly so, for however far our opera-
tions extend themselves, so far the Imperial Majesty has juris-
diction, and beyond those limits it does not reach.”37 Beyond
that, how could it reach? Its goal and province is “the perfec-
tion of the Universal Union of the Human Race.”38
This total unity must be of a radical sort. For Dante, “It is
clear, then, that everything which is good, is good in virtue of
consisting in unity. And since concord, as such, is good, it is
manifest that it consists in some unity, as in its proper root.”
This concord or unity requires the unity of human wills under
one ruler. This is thorough totalitarianism, the unmitigated
tyranny of the one. Wicksteed commented, “it is only in their
unity that things really exist” for Dante’s philosophy.39
The world order Dante defended was a continuation of the
Roman Empire. For him, ancient pagan Romans were “a most
Holy Race” and a chosen people, and its many heroes had, he
maintained, “Divine inspiration.” “And certainly I am of the
firm opinion that the stones which remain in her walls are
worthy of reverence; and it is asserted and proved that the
ground whereupon she stands is worthy beyond all other that
is occupied by man.” Rome for Dante was “that holy City.”40
His philosopher was Aristotle, who “is most worthy of faith
and obedience,” and whose “words are a supreme and chief Au-
thority.” “Aristotle is the master and leader of Human Reason
in so far as it aims at its final operation.”41
History was the proof of Roman eminence, and this meant
Nature. “And what Nature has ordained, it is right to main-
tain.”42 Rome was invested with a messianic role by Dante; he
37. Elizabeth Price Sayes, trans., The Banquet of Dante Alighieri (London: Rout-
ledge, 1887), 195.
38. Ibid., 174.
39. Howell and Wicksteed, 168-170.
40. Sayes, The Banquet, 176-180.
41. Ibid., IV, vi., 182-183.
42. Howell and Wicksteed, 198.
Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized 227
much the more of good doth each possess, and the more of
love burneth in that cloister.” This is grounded in the doctrine
of God’s nature, whereby His love continually gives, and those
who receive it, reflect it by their love.49 His Inferno has an un-
favorable reference to Fra Dolcino, who taught the communi-
ty of goods and women.50 The reference to Fra Dolcino does
not condemn his communism but rather includes him in the
category of those creating disorder, sowers of scandal and
schism. Lindsay’s opinion is justified, that “In Book XV of the
Inferno Dante expressed his belief in the Golden Age. And he
states explicitly that the principle of social progress was the ac-
tualisation of communism to the greatest extent possible at
each stage.”51
Until that day, the emperor was Dante’s earthly Christ and
Savior. In “Epistola VII,” written to the emperor, Dante said
he had raised the hopeful messianic question, “Art thou he
who should come or do we look for another?” Dante answered
in faith:
Yet although long thirst, as it is wont, in its frenzy turneth to
doubt (just because they are close at hand) even those things
which are certain, nevertheless, we believe and hope in thee,
averring that thou are the minister of God and the son of the
church and the promoter of Roman glory. And I too, who
write for myself and for others, have seen thee, as beseems im-
perial Majesty, most benignant, and have heard thee most
clement, when that my hands handled thy feet and my lips
paid their debt. Then did my spirit exult in thee, and I spoke
silently with myself, “Behold the Lamb of God! Behold him
who hath taken away the sins of the world.”52
5. The Witness of The Divine Comedy
The universe for Dante is a great cosmic state governed by
justice, and true love is true justice. This cosmic Justice is thus
more closely connected to a world state than to a universal
love. They are more sins against order than against the person
of God, and the framework of reference is Italy and the em-
pire. It is unnecessary to know the Bible to read Dante intelli-
gently; it is necessary to know imperial and Italian history, or
else have a well-documented text of The Divine Comedy as a
guide. At the beginning of the journey, in Canto 2, the issue of
the relationship of Aeneas and Paul, of empire and church, is
raised. Dante does not give us any of the old answers: his is to
be a new one, and he is the new Aeneas, journeying through
the underworld to give a fresh answer. In giving this answer,
Dante, for all his professed humility, claimed the authority of
Virgil, prophet of empire, ostensible foreteller of Christ, and
symbol of the power of natural reason. He also claimed the
power of Beatrice, the power of divine wisdom and illumined
reason, Beatrice, whom he had hailed in one poem of the Vita
Nuova as salvation.58 Beatrice will lead Dante, together with
Virgil, to true order, and to the “‘in Godding of the self,’ the
taking of the self into God.”59 Beatrice is not only sent by
Mary, she is also “a type of Mary,” and, “in her analogical
sense, a type of the Church Triumphant.”60 This by no means
exhausts the meaning of Beatrice. What is clear is that the per-
sons and symbols of the church are stripped from the church
and piled onto the empire. St. Lucy, “this spirit of enlighten-
ment... the medium between grace and revelation,”61 is also on
the side of Dante and the empire. Very early we begin to meet
churchmen in hell, beginning in Canto 3, in the class of the
Trimmers, with one commonly identified as Pope Celestine V.
The goal of being is the realization of potentiality and unity
in the great chain of being. Hell is the perfection of the
disruption of this cosmic unity. “Every Circle is the perfection
of a sinful power.... The perfection of a sinful power is its
58. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (London: Faber and
Faber, 1943), 21-22, 26-27; cf. 218, 184ff.
59. Charles Williams, Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love
(Glasgow: Dacre Press, Westminster, n. d., c. 1940s), 32.
60. John Chydenius, The Typological Problem in Dante: A Study in the History of
Medieval Ideas; Commentationes Humanarum Litterarun, vol. 25, (Helsingfore, Den-
mark: Societus Scientiarum Fennica, 1960), 143. 145.
61. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy, 45.
Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized 231
state, will, by his own will, live the perfect life, the life of hap-
piness, for
The chief good and final end of Man is happiness, which has
been compared to a tower consisting of Moral Virtue as the
base, Intellectual Virtue as the spire, and the Act of Contem-
plation as the crowning point, final end and realisation of the
whole structure. It is possible that such an idea may be repre-
sented in the spheres assigned respectively to Virgil, Matelda
and Beatrice, the trinity of teachers in the Divine Comedy.70
When Dante reached the goal of purgatory, the Garden of
Eden, Virgil, symbol of the empire, declared,
No more expect my word, nor my sign. Free, upright, and
whole, is thy will, and ‘twere a fault not to act according to its
prompting; wherefore I do crown and mitre thee over
thyself.71
The meaning is obvious: the restored man, restored by the em-
pire, by Virgil and Cato, no longer needs either church or
state; he is his own church and state.
Dante’s Paradiso is the paradise of this restored humanity.
All things are reconciled within it, Francis and Dominic,
Aquinas and Siger, Christian and pagan, and many others.
Joachim of Flora is also present. In this third stage of mankind,
all coexist, or almost all, for the Apostle Peter himself is cho-
sen, in Canto 27, to denounce the papacy. They are “in garb of
pastors ravening wolves.” Peter declared that the papacy had
made his burial place a sewer for “the blood and filth by which
the perverse one,” i.e., Satan, finds relief, in that the papacy is
“like a second and worse Fall,” to use Williams’ phrase.72 Very
plainly, the church was doing the devil’s work, in Dante’s
opinion. As Canto 15 made clear, unity is the goal of being,
and absorption into God (Canto 14, 29). The orthodox doc-
trines of heaven are given lip service, but the heathen are given
ground for hope of moral perfection and heaven apart from
... this freedom (or this principle of all our freedom) is the
greatest gift conferred by God on human nature; for through
it we have our felicity here as men, through it we have our fe-
licity elsewhere as deities.75
Dante used the façade of Catholic faith; the church wisely rec-
ognized his hostility to it and quickly placed De Monarchia on
the Index as well as recognizing the heresy in The Divine Com-
edy. Papini was correct in observing of Dante’s Divine Come-
dy, “He proposes, in a way, to write a new gospel intended to
complete the redemption of mankind. And therefore he dares
to make himself the herald of a new manifestation of the Di-
vinity who comes to save,” the Veltro.76
But Dante’s faith came gradually to be equated with true
faith. On April 30, 1921, the 600th anniversary of Dante’s
death, Pope Benedict XV, in his encyclical In Praeclara, “re-
peatedly cited with praise the De Monarchia, that work which
for so many centuries languished on the Index.”77
79. Fr. J. F. Cronin, S.S., “New Encyclical and Marxism,” Monitor (San Fran-
cisco), 26 April 1963, 3.
80. New York Times, ibid.
81. Gerald Miller, in an Associated Press dispatch from Vatican City, “Reds Give
Praise to New Encyclical,” Oakland (CA) Tribune, 12 April 1963, 5.
82. National Observer, 10 June 1963.
Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized 239
7. Pope Paul VI
Pope Paul VI, on August 6, 1964, in his encyclical Ecclesiam
Suam, declared that “the Church must be ever ready to carry
on the dialogue with all men of good will within and without
its own sphere.”83 The pope saw concentric circles around him-
self; the first is humanity at large:
101. Wherever men are trying to understand themselves and
the world, we can communicate with them. Wherever the
councils of nations come together to establish the rights and
duties of man, we are honored when they allow us to take our
seat among them. If there exists “a soul which is naturally
Christian,” we desire to show it our respect and enter into
conversation with it.84
These are words Dante would have rejoiced in. This circle in-
cludes “atheistic communism,” and its denial of God. Pope
Paul declared, “We shall, therefore, resist with all our strength
the assaults of this denial.” The hostility came from commu-
nism, not from the pope:
105. It could be said that it is not so much that we condemn
these systems and regimes as that they express their radical op-
position to us in thought and deed. Our regret is, in reality,
more sorrow for a victim than the sentence of a judge.85
Communism insisted on an antithesis; the pope did not. He re-
affirmed Pope John’s hope:
109. Accordingly, bearing in mind the words of our predeces-
sor of venerable memory, Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical
Pacem in Terris to the effect that the doctrines of such move-
ments, once elaborated and defined, remain always the same,
whereas the movements themselves cannot help but evolve
and undergo changes, even of a profound nature, we do not
despair that they may one day be able to enter into a more pos-
itive dialogue with the Church than the present one which we
now of necessity deplore and lament.86
83. Pope Paul VI, Ecclesiam Suam, with commentary by Gregory Baum, O.S.A.
(Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1964), 57-58.
84. Ibid., 59.
85. Ibid., 60.
86. Ibid., 62-63.
240 The One and the Many
1. Castiglione
Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), courtier, diplomat, sol-
dier, and author, wrote, in The Courtier (written 1508-1516,
first printed in 1528, four years before Machiavelli’s The
Prince), a classic statement of the ideal Renaissance man. The
influence of The Courtier on European standards has been very
great. Very quickly translated into English, “it became famous
as the perfect guide for young members of the English Estab-
lishment practically until Edward VII’s times.” Castiglione
himself represented the standard he taught: he “became a man
of varied accomplishments, in all of which he was good but in
none of which he was uncouth enough to excel.”1
Castiglione’s courtier is a man of the world, urbane,
sensitive, and responsive to every wind of influential opinion
and observation. He is formally for all things — church, state,
family, and society — but substantially he is only for himself,
not in any crude, egoistic sense, but in the sense that the true
universal is not to be found in religion or in the state, but in
the individual man. Similarly, he shall seek in a woman, not a
1. Luigi Barzini, The Italians (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), 86.
243
244 The One and the Many
2. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (II Cortegiano), trans. Thomas Hoby (n.p.:
National Alumni, 1907), 359.
3. Ibid., 320-321.
The Immanent One as the Power State 245
9. Ibid., 92-93.
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Ibid., 97.
12. Ibid., 98.
13. Ibid., 141.
14. Ibid., 348.
248 The One and the Many
2. Machiavelli
Thus, the counterpart to Castiglione was the Italian states-
man, Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469-1527). Machi-
avelli’s The Prince (Il Principe, or De Principatibus) was first
written in 1513 and was printed in 1532. His Discourses on the
First Ten Books of Titus Livius are also, like The Prince, con-
cerned with the theory of civil government. According to
250 The One and the Many
17. Max Lerner, in intro. to Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses
(New York: Modern Library, 1940), xlvi.
18. Machiavelli, ibid., 243.
19. Ibid., 138.
The Immanent One as the Power State 251
20. Valeriu Marcu, Accent on Power: The Life and Times of Machiavelli, trans.
Richard Winston (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), 254.
21. Machiavelli, ibid., 29.
22. Ibid., 60.
252 The One and the Many
Father and son had won new successes for the papacy. In
Rome, the Colonnesi and Orsini had been broken. The baro-
nial houses had been humbled and subordinated. The rulers of
ecclesiastical territories — the lord of Urbino, Faenza, Rimini,
Camerino, Perugia, Imola, Forli, Pesaro and Piombino — had
either been expelled or murdered. And never before had the
College of Cardinals and the Curia been such willing tools in
the hand of the Pope.23
This concept of the use of terror has been extensively con-
demned and as extensively used in subsequent history. Lenin
openly recommended Machiavelli in Left-Wing Communism,
an Infantile Disorder, and the Communist use of terror is well
known.
Machiavelli very early, as a clerk in the Florentine bureau-
cracy, learned the uses of power and loved it. He clearly recog-
nized the power inherent in a bureaucracy, and, instead of
being a lazy clerk, his one fear was that his excessive zeal for
his work might awaken jealousies and malice.
The position of these Florentine clerks, low as it was, gave
them a certain superiority. For they had their own desks, and
they could drive rich men to desperation by repeated exami-
nation of their tax-reports; they could make men of promi-
nence wait for permits and withhold powder and pay from
celebrated generals. These bureaucrats could release a plague
of malice against any individual or against the mass of non-of-
ficeholders. They were the tiny ink-stained Saints guarding
the vestibule of Power — the indispensable muck of sovereign-
ty! The Great Council, the Standard-bearer of Justice, the
Eight of the Guard, the Six of the Board of Trade, the Ten of
Liberty and the numerous commissions and subcommissions
made decisions and changes. But in the end, they were them-
selves dependent upon the indolence, indifference, and malice
of an anonymous office. For already a man had two lives in
Florence, his personal and his documental life. And the life on
paper was capable of destroying the individual behind it.24
Machiavelli saw two ideas in conflict: “the way men live and
the way they ought to live.” But, “A man who always and
everywhere would act according to a perfect standard of
1. Luther
With the Reformation, the problem of the one and the many
was shifted from the arena of philosophy to the arena of theol-
ogy. Moreover, the locale of the determinative power was
shifted from time to eternity. The shift came dramatically, and
the dissatisfaction with the reigning answer came in Luther’s
reaction to Tetzel’s preaching. The Dominican Tetzel was the
vendor of the indulgences proclaimed by the pope. People
were urged to buy indulgences to save their suffering parents
and loved ones from the pains and torment of purgatory. Tet-
zel declared, “Remember that you are able to release them,” for
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.1
There are those who hold to the theory that Luther’s
opposition to the indulgences was not at first a radical
theological break with Rome but that rather, as the debate was
carried on, Luther was led, step by step, to the point of
departure. Such a position is defective, in that it disregards the
1. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abing-
don-Cokesbury Press, 1950), 78.
257
258 The One and the Many
3. Karl Holl, The Cultural Significance of the Reformation (New York: Meridian
Books, 1959), 51.
260 The One and the Many
4. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing
House, 1943), 85.
Reformation: The Problem Redefined 261
was also Pelagian. It was not exegetical: Erasmus was not con-
cerned with accepting what Scripture taught and faithfully in-
terpreting it; his concern was to “save” the freedom of the will.
As against Luther, he declared, “it is not at all true that those
who trust in their own works are driven by the spirit of Satan
and delivered to damnation.”14 Erasmus held that “there are
several places in Scripture which obviously ascribe contingen-
cy to God, yes, even a certain mutability.”15
Moreover, in his “Preface,” Erasmus, the ostensible champi-
on of free will and reason, attacked propositional truth; he
spoke of his great “dislike of assertions,” which he declared to
be so great “that I prefer the views of the sceptics wherever the
inviolable authority of Scripture and the decisions of the
Church permit.” Erasmus felt that “Holy Scripture contains
secrets into which God does not want us to penetrate too deep-
ly, because if we attempt to do so, increasing darkness envelops
us, so that we might come to recognize in this manner both the
unfathomable majesty of divine wisdom and the feebleness of
the human mind.”16 This humble language concealed the reali-
ty: because for him God had both a contingency and mutabil-
ity, there was thus no certain knowledge, because a conditional
and changeable God could not have estab-lished an absolute de-
cree and certain knowledge. Propositional truth, “assertions,”
must give way to hypotheses because the universe is not the to-
tal handiwork of an absolute God. Packer and Johnston stated
it succinctly when they described free-will in Erasmus’ sense as
“an inherent power in man to act apart from God.”17
Luther’s answer to Erasmus, On the Bondage of the Will (De
Servo Arbitrio, 1525), is clearly Luther’s greatest work, and one
of the greatest documents in the history of thought. Luther
met Erasmus’ attack on propositional truth head-on: the asser-
tion in question, he pointed out, is “the assertion of what has
22. Luther’s Works, vol. 24, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, Chapters 14-16 (St.
Louis, MO: Concordia, 1961), 109.
23. Ingve Brilioth, Eucharistic Faith and Practice, Evangelical and Catholic (Lon-
don: SPCK, 1939), 101.
Reformation: The Problem Redefined 267
4. Calvin
The work of reformation begun by Luther was carried for-
ward by John Calvin. The two men were fully agreed on essen-
tials, and both insisted on the sovereignty of God and His
absolute predestination of all things.
Calvin’s work was in Geneva, a city which turned to the re-
formers, not out of any desire for the reformation, but simply
because the old order had collapsed, and architects were need-
ed to restore and rebuild social order. Because social order was
seen as essentially religious, it was religious leadership which
Geneva sought. Geneva, an important trade center, faced mor-
al and social anarchy.
But Geneva, even at Calvin’s death, was not on the whole
converted to the new faith, or to any faith. Cadier was right in
stating that “the masses had not been won over.”24 The doc-
trines of the Libertines were closer to the tastes of Geneva, but
such doctrines the practical people saw also as leading to anar-
chy. The Libertines, who were inclined towards pantheism
and atheism, were also communists. They taught a community
of goods and of women.25 The whole of Europe was honey-
combed with secret and semi-secret fraternities or societies
dedicated to spreading scepticism and “enlightenment,” and
Geneva had a generous share of such causes.26
Central to Calvin’s strength and the vigor of his position was
his doctrine of the Trinity. Warfield listed three theologians as
the great orthodox theologians of this doctrine — Tertullian,
Augustine, and Calvin.27 Calvin came to the subject with a
24. Jean Cadier, The Man God Mastered (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960), 181.
25. William Childs Robinson, “The Tolerance of Our Prophet,” in Jacob T.
Hoogstra, ed., John Calvin: Contemporary Prophet (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1959), 45.
26. Albert-Marie Schmidt, Calvin and the Calvinistic Tradition (New York:
Harper, 1960), 58.
27. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1931), 284.
268 The One and the Many
28. John Murray, Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Book House, 1960).
29. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, trans. John Allen (Phil-
adelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 138.
30. See R. J. Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press,
1968).
31. Calvin, Institutes, vol. 1, 146.
Reformation: The Problem Redefined 269
48. Calvin, “The Secret Providence of God,” in Calvin's Calvinism, trans. Henry
Cole (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 282.
49. Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God,” in ibid., 32-33. Before Calvin’s
work on free will appeared, Pighius died. Calvin expressed his annoyance at being
unable to speak plainly and bluntly about Pighius’ foolishness with one of the deft-
est insults in controversial literature: “Shortly after my book on free-will appeared,
Pighius died. And that I might not insult a dead dog, I turned my attention to other
serious matters” (ibid., 25). But the cream of responses in the controversies came
two centuries later, in Toplady’s controversy with the Arminians with respect to
personal election: “One day an Opponent of the doctrine said to him, ‘Would you,
if you were God, create any being to misery,’ ‘When I am God,’ Toplady said, ‘I
will tell you’”; see Thomas Wright, Augustus Toplady and Contemporary Hymn
Writers (London: Forncombe and Sons, 1911), 21.
50. Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, 787-788.
Reformation: The Problem Redefined 277
6. Richard Hooker
And England had little to counteract this trend, since the
semiofficial position of the Church of England came to be
Erastian, Arminian, and heretical. Richard Hooker
(1553-1600) was clearly subordinationist and Arian in his
Christology. Hooker wrote:
1. Giorgio de Santillana, ed., in into. to The Age of Adventure (New York: Mentor
Books, 1956), 29.
281
282 The One and the Many
2. Ibid., 193-194.
3. Ibid., 249.
4. George Chapman, “Bussy D’Ambois,” act 5, scene 4, in Hazelton Spencer,
Elizabethan Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), 555.
Utopia: The New City of Man 283
5. See Morris Philipson, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Aspects of the Renaissance Genius
(New York: George Braziller, 1966).
6. Santillana, Age of Adventure, 155.
284 The One and the Many
2. Thomas More
The term, utopianism, comes, of course, from Thomas
More’s ideal society. More was made a saint in 1935 by the
Church of Rome, an ironic fact, in that few “saints” have been
more subversive towards the church. Santillana’s comment is
to the point:
Men like Erasmus, Colet and More were first and foremost
apostles of Culture, the reformers of the educational system,
and the founders of the modern English school system, of
which St. Paul’s was the first example. More compared the
school to “the wooden horse in which were concealed armed
Greeks for the destruction of barbarous Troy”; but the Troy
that these new Greek scholars were bent on wrecking was the
stronghold of medieval learning.8
It is not surprising, when More’s works are examined, that Ro-
man Catholic scholars tend to discourage too close an analysis
of More. We are told that, “in a certain sense,” More is “un-
knowable.” Moreover, we are told that “Men like More are a
threat and a scandal to the single-mindedly earnest, to the ‘true
believers,’” and to “the single-minded absolutists.” This should
intimidate weak-minded scholars from calling attention to
More’s inanities! Moreover, to prevent us from taking More at
his word, we are told that his work represents subtle “wit and
irony” as well as satire.9 More to the point is van Riessen’s
comment on Utopia and its intense and absurd earnestness:
“One is amazed that the pen of More, noted for its spirited wit,
did not drop from his hand from sheer tediousness.”10 More’s
Utopia was also dishonest: the book is devoted to a passionate
plea for the abolition of private property and the adoption of
communism; the book, however, concludes with a vague dis-
claimer of this position. In brief, More wanted the liberty to
preach a doctrine without any penalty, in case such should en-
sue. More’s “wit” is not in evidence in his writings; it was often
remarkable in his speech. His death was noble and truly hero-
ic, but, at this point we must agree with Greene: “His death
was a heroic gesture in defense of the autonomy of con-
science.”11 Precisely: More died as the authentic humanist
“saint” rather than as a Christian martyr.
More’s Utopia is clearly anti-Christian as well as hostile to
the church. For More, the normative is derived, not from God,
but from nature. In Utopia, “they define virtue to be a life or-
dered according to nature.” The phrase is derived from Cice-
ro’s De Finibus, Bk. 4.12 But the nature More has in mind is not
13. Frank E. Manuel, ed., Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1966), 75.
14. Greene and Dolan, The Essential Thomas More, 66.
Utopia: The New City of Man 287
3. Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), perhaps more than any other
man, influenced the new view of science. In his Novum Or-
ganum, Aphorism 124, he wrote:
Truth therefore and utility are here the very same things; and
works themselves are greater value as pledges of truth than as
contributing to the comforts of life.16
Bacon denied the primacy of ideas; instead of approaching the
world from the perspective of a philosophy, a worldview, or a
theory, Bacon proposed that the new science let the “facts” de-
termine science, and a pragmatic concept of “truth” then be
forthcoming as the theory.
Bacon’s position, the priority of factuality, and the
pragmatic standard of truth, represented no less a philosophy
than the Scholasticism he opposed. Plato had held to the
priority of the idea: Aristotle had tried to maintain a dialectical
tension between form and matter, idea and brute fact; Bacon
stood Plato on his head and asserted the priority of the fact,
and derived, ostensibly, his truth from the fact. All three
positions are equally philosophical. The idea that facts are both
prior and self-interpreting is as much a form of faith as Plato’s,
Aristotle’s, and Aquinas’ positions had been. Like them,
Bacon tried to remake the world in terms of his own idea.
In philosophy, Bacon clearly pointed out the direction for
Comte and Dewey. In science, his position led to the Royal So-
ciety.17 No less than Descartes, Bacon’s position was governed
by philosophical presuppositions which he termed “science.”
Thus, in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the world of religion is left
largely undisturbed, as are economic and social questions. Ba-
con was not interested in the communistic extravagances of
other utopians. His hope for man’s future rested in science, or,
more accurately, in a state-controlled science. Bacon, in fact,
was clearly critical of More’s morality, speaking critically of “a
feigned commonwealth, where the married couple are permit-
ted, before they contract, to see one another naked.”18 The
heart of Bacon’s utopia was Solomon’s House, the College of
the state scientists, a state created and state controlled scientific
body. The purpose of this body is stated thus:
The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and se-
cret motion of all things; and the enlarging of the bounds of
human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.19
As Lewis Mumford observed, “Long before all the
components of the Invisible Machine were consciously
assembled, Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis, was quick not
merely to anticipate its benefits, but to outline the conditions
for its achievement: the application of science to all human
affairs, ‘to the effecting of all things possible.’”20 According to
17. See Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1967).
18. Charles M. Andrews, ed., Famous Utopias (New York: Tudor Publishing Co.,
n.d.), 260.
19. Ibid., 263.
20. Lewis Mumford, “Utopia, The City, and The Machine,” in Manuel, Utopias
and Utopian Thought, 21.
Utopia: The New City of Man 289
1. Descartes
The Hellenic form and matter dialectic had a continuing in-
fluence on Western thought as an undercurrent and rival to
Christian thought. In Rene Descartes (1596-1650) there was a
scientific effort to avoid the dialectic by recourse to a dualism
of two substances, mind and body. These two substances were
to be kept in unity by still a third substance, God.
Descartes was a devout Roman Catholic and believed that
his work would undergird the faith. However, he approached
the problems of philosophy, not as a philosopher, but as a sci-
entist. Although he is often classified as a rationalistic philoso-
pher, his intention was scientific. His scientific credentials
were good. In mathematics, he was the discoverer of analytical
geometry and the first to represent powers by exponents. In
physics, he stated in trigonometrical form the principle of the
refraction of light, explained the rainbow, and weighed air.
Truth, for Descartes, meant empirical science.
How then could an empirical scientist be the fountainhead
of modern philosophical rationalism? Cushman’s comment on
Descartes gives us the clue: “The philosophical proclamation
293
294 The One and the Many
are directly linked to the new concern for science: valid knowl-
edge requires dissection, atomization, and an analysis in terms
of dissection and atomization. These four points immediately
limit true knowledge to that which the mind of man can clear-
ly grasp and understand in terms of its own autonomous laws.
Revelation is clearly excluded. God is also clearly excluded by
implication, because who can fully and clearly grasp the idea of
God, or how can God be dissected and atomized into compo-
nent parts for analysis by a scientist? But Descartes, in his sys-
tem, clearly and distinctly needs God to link the two
substances of mind and matter, and to provide a first cause. In
this sense God enters into Descartes’ science; later philoso-
phers, on Descartes’ premises, dropped the idea of God. More-
over, because, as Descartes wrote, “I resolved to commence,
therefore, with the examination of the simplest objects,”5 the
foundational facts for Descartes were the most elementary
facts, not God but the amoeba and the atom. In evolutionary
terms, reality begins with the atom and works upward. The
key to understanding is thus not God but the atom. It is not
surprising that the new philosophy was usually more prone to
favor the individual than society, and then the atom rather
than man. Social atomism was extensively promoted, and
there began the exaltation of the commonest man by aristo-
crats who in daily life despised the peasants they knew. The
search for truth turned downward, and the atom came to out-
rank God.
In the course of his search, Descartes “formed a provisionary
code of morals.” “The first was to obey the laws and customs
of my country, adhering firmly to the faith in which, by the
grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood.” The
ground Descartes gave for adhering to Christian faith was
expediency. Whatever his personal feelings, his expressed
ground was pragmatic: “although there are some perhaps
among the Persians and Chinese as judicious as among
ourselves, expediency seemed to dictate that I should regulate
5. Ibid., 172.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 297
2. John Locke
John Locke (1632-1704), in An Essay Concerning Human Un-
derstanding, laid down the basic principles of the Enlighten-
ment which dominated philosophy through Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason, which in turn has dominated philosophy ever
since. Locke indeed has been called the father of the Enlighten-
ment, and the fact of his personal piety cannot alter the impli-
cations of his philosophical premises. Cushman’s comment is
to the point: “The Essay differs from any previous modern
philosophical writing. Man and not the universe is the subject.
For the first time we find an examination of the laws of mind,
and not of the laws of the universe.”15 Man was now the center
of things, but Locke’s free man emerged as a greatly reduced
man. What appeared at first to men as a new bible and a new
hope for man soon came to be a startling problem, as man and
man’s knowledge began to show signs of following God into
the limbo of oblivion created by the Enlightenment.
To return to Locke, the mind of man rather than the mind
of God was now the key to the universe. A few years earlier in
England, The Westminster Confession had begun with the Scrip-
tures (God’s word) and the eternal decree (God’s plan) as the
key to all things. The Confession had been approved in 1647 by
the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and ratified
by Act of Parliament in 1649. By 1690, a new document,
Locke’s Essay, had come into existence as a kind of new confes-
sion and standard for Enlightenment man.
In Book 1, Chapter 1 of An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, titled “Neither Principles nor Ideas Are
Innate,” Locke denied that either the “first principles” of
knowledge and science are innate or any other “speculative
maxims.” The same is true of religious principles and moral
rules: they are acquired, not innate, ideas. Conscience is no
proof of any innate moral idea or rule. Men come to moral
rules by experience and reason, or by “their education,
company, and customs of their country; which persuasion,
16. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 2, sec.
8.
17. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 3, secs. 8-18.
18. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 1, sec. 2.
19. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 1, secs. 22-23.
304 The One and the Many
3. Berkeley
George Berkeley (1685-1753) built on the foundation of
Locke’s empiricism. Although an empirical idealist rather than
a materialist, he was still an empiricist. For him as for Locke,
all knowledge was derived from sense perception, and he ac-
cepted Locke’s empirical psychology. Berkeley, in “An Essay
Toward a New Theory of Vision” (1709), took Locke’s pre-
mises “far out of the common road,” as he observed, in his ded-
ication to Sir John Percivale. In this amazing document,
written when Berkeley was only twenty-four, Berkeley taught
23. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952); Ruth Ly-
dia Saw, Leibniz (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954).
24. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 11, sec. 17.
306 The One and the Many
that all we see is our sensations: “For all visible things are
equally in the mind, and take up no part of the external
space....”25 From this premise, Berkeley went on in 1710 to
write his “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge Wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty
in the Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and
Irreligion, Are Inquired Into.” The full title is important in
that it reveals Bishop Berkeley’s religious concern; he became
a bishop (of Cloyne in Ireland) in 1734, and he was a
hard-working prelate. His purpose in this latter work is to
teach that all that exists is knowledge. In Locke’s system, God
was the insurance agent who certified and guaranteed knowl-
edge, but the real source of knowledge was the natural world.
Berkeley saw the implications of this: nature was preempting
God’s position, and he eliminated nature to retain God as the
source of knowledge. Moreover, he recognized what Hume
was later to develop, that a radical destruction of the possibili-
ty of knowledge was latent in Locke’s empiricism. He wrote,
It is a hard thing to suppose, that right deductions from true
principles should ever end in consequences which cannot be
maintained or made consistent. We should believe that God
has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men, than to give
them a strong desire for that knowledge which he had placed
quite out of their reach.26
The difficulties, he felt, “are entirely owing to ourselves. That
we have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.”27
The creative mind of Locke, however passive, was ultimately
man’s only world, Berkeley recognized; the natural world was
possibly no more than one of the mind’s ideas or abstractions.
In such a case, all that remains is Lockean man, the mind of
man and his knowledge. It was important, therefore, to Berke-
ley, to retain that knowledge, for his starting point was Lock-
ean man, but to ascribe the source of that knowledge to God.
25. George Berkeley, “An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision,” in The Works
of George Berkeley, vol. 1 (London: Richard Priestly, 1820), 292.
26. George Berkeley, “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowl-
edge,” in ibid., 4.
27. Ibid.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 307
5. La Mettrie
But not everyone could rest in this self-satisfaction. Julien
Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) took the new philosophy and
subjected it to an operation similar to that performed by Ber-
keley, except that La Mettrie dropped spiritual substance. He
held to a great chain of being, entirely material or mechanistic,
evolving upwards.39 Man is a machine, and no other substance
than matter exists. By this means, La Mettrie, far less profound
or able, still did not succeed in avoiding Berkeley’s problem:
the dualism between ideas and the knowing process remained.
La Mettrie chose to ignore God and to drop any spiritual sub-
stance. By this means, he solved his own desire to abolish a seg-
ment of reality, but he offered no solution to the problem of
knowledge.
6. Hume
David Hume (1711-1776) carried the Enlightenment
philosophy towards its logical conclusion in An Inquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (1748), a reworking of his
earlier and fuller Treatise on Human Nature, written between
1734 and 1737 and published in 1739-1740. Hume did not deny
material substance; he simply acted on the basic premise of the
Enlightenment, that the autonomous mind of man deals with
ideas and not reality, and held philosophy strictly to that fact.
As a strict empiricist, Hume wiped out every factor
incompatible with strict empiricism; ideas are copies of
impressions. There are no innate ideas, no direct knowledge of
any material substance, nor of spiritual substance. There are
simply impressions and their fainter copy, the ideas. “All ideas,
especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the
mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be
confounded with other resembling ideas; when we have often
employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we
are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it. On
39. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Man a Machine (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publish-
ing Co., 1943), 103.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 311
40. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 2, para. 17.
41. Ibid., sec. 5, pt. 2, para. 41.
42. Ibid., sec. 6, para. 46.
312 The One and the Many
7. Rousseau
This world was the world of Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778), who essentially denied natural law,50 was dubious
of the social contract idea while using it, and strongly denied
48. David Hume, “Of the Social Contract,” in Sir Ernest Barker, ed., Social Con-
tract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau (London: Oxford, 1 1958), 215-216.
49. Ibid., 235.
50. See ibid., xxxviii, Barker’s intro.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 315
8. Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) not only acknowledged his debt
to Rousseau but also hung Rousseau’s picture on his study wall
and declared that Rousseau was the Newton of the moral
world. This moral primacy belonged to Rousseau because he
had made man the new absolute of the universe; God might ex-
ist, and He might be a beautiful character, but He was no long-
er primary or even relevant in Rousseau’s universe. Kant gave
philosophical props to Rousseau’s position. For Kant, God
and all those unknown things-in-themselves are Noumena,
whose reality need neither be affirmed nor denied and who are
not a part of the realm of knowledge.
Philosophy had worked to this point to eliminate the a prio-
ri; now, with Kant, it was ready to introduce a new a priori;
since both spiritual and material substances had been eliminat-
ed from the realm of valid knowledge, and only the mind of
autonomous man left, the a priori could now be relocated firm-
ly in man’s reasoning without any reference to God. Man
could now have knowledge, but he did not need God for this
new kind of Kantian knowledge. Kant’s concern was “a sys-
tem, based on no data except reason itself, and which therefore
seeks, without resting on any fact, to unfold knowledge from
its original germs.”52 Kant thus sought a new foundation for
knowledge, one neither dependent on spiritual or material sub-
stances, nor dependent either on God or on sense impressions
as representations of things-in-themselves. Kant was working
towards cutting the umbilical cord which bound man to God
and the universe. Kant’s new a priori involved a new concep-
tion of what is universally and necessarily true:
Pure Mathematics, and especially pure geometry, can only
have objective reality on condition that they refer to objects
of sense. But in regard to the latter, the principle holds good,
that our sense representation is not a representation of things
in themselves but of the way in which they appear to us.
Hence it follows, that the propositions of geometry are not
52. Dr. Paul Carus, ed., Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 1955), 24-25.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 317
1. Hegel
After Kant, philosophy began to develop the implications of
his radical humanism. It quickly became evident that a new
reign of dunces had begun, i.e., brilliant minds working a pro-
gressively mined-out vein in search of wealth. Kant had set the
temper of the new philosophy very plainly:
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must
conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge
of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori,
by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in fail-
ure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have
more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that
objects must conform to our knowledge.1
This was, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s
(1770-1831) starting point: the real is the rational.
But Kant had left confusion in his wake. He had established
a new concept of knowledge, but he had left, still dangling in
an intellectual limbo as an affront to man, things in
themselves. Although unknowable, they were there. This was
323
324 The One and the Many
5. Ibid., 37.
6. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Holdane
and Frances H. Simson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 24, 191.
7. Ibid., 545.
326 The One and the Many
8. Ibid., 551-552.
9. J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 131.
10. G.W.F. Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M.
Know and Richard Kroner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 38.
War Against the Beyond 327
The development of Mind lies in the fact that its going forth
and separation constitutes its coming to itself.
This being-at-home-with-self, or coming-to-self of Mind may
be described as its complete and highest end; it is this alone
that it desires and nothing else. Everything that from eternity
has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the
deeds of time simply are the struggles for Mind to know itself,
to make itself objective to itself, to find itself, be for itself, and
finally unite itself to itself; it is alienated and divided, but only
so as to be able thus to find itself and return to itself. Only in
this manner does Mind attain its freedom, for that is free
which is not connected with or dependent on another.14
To express this better, the activity of Mind is to know itself. I
am, immediately, but this I am only as a living organism; as
Mind I am only in so far as I know myself.15
Philosophy is the thought of its time, standing only above it in
its critical analysis. “In as far as Philosophy is in the spirit of its
time, the latter is its determined content in the world, although
as knowledge, Philosophy is above it, since it places it in the
relation of an object. But this is in form alone, for Philosophy
really has no other content.”16 There is a progressive evolution
of truth, but the truth is more than the final result, if the word
final can be allowed: “The truth is the whole.” The “result” is
the “Absolute,” but “the truth is the whole.” Moreover, “it is
the very nature of understanding to be a process; and being a
process it is Rationality.”17 Clearly, Reason is important to He-
gel, since by the exercise of independent reason man knows his
autonomy and knows that Mind is both subject and object.
“Reason is the Sovereign of the World.” Moreover, “man is an
object of existence in himself only in virtue of the Divine that
is in him — that which was designated at the outset as Reason;
which, in view of its activity and power of self-determination,
was called Freedom.”18 Spirit, Mind, Reason, and Freedom are
closely identified:
2. Feuerbach
The radicalism of Hegel was veiled; that of the post-Hege-
lians was open. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872)
brought out into the open the veiled anti-Christianity of his
day in The Essence of Christianity, which was translated into
English by the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans). Feuer-
bach, in writing a preface to the second edition, observed that,
“The basic ideas of my book — though not in the form in
which they are expressed and had to be expressed under
present circumstances — will certainly some day become the
property of all mankind.”32 Feuerbach had rightly understood
the reception of his book among intellectuals: its ideas would
be taught by the schools and universities for some generations
to become “the property of all mankind.”
His thesis was a simple one, namely, the anthropological es-
sence of religion. It was not God who made man, but man who
made God. “The object of a subject is nothing else than this
subject’s own nature objectified. Such as are a man’s thoughts
and moral character, such is his God.”33 It follows, therefore,
that God’s attributes are simply projections and purifications
of man’s attributes:
For the “divine Being” is nothing else than the nature of Man,
i.e., human nature purified, freed from the imperfections of
the human individual, projected into the outside, and there-
fore viewed and revered as a different and distinct being with
a nature of its own. All the attributes of the “divine Being” are
therefore attributes of man.34
40. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York:
Modern Library), 3, 5.
336 The One and the Many
condemn him who acts otherwise than their faith will allow.
The brand of “crime” is stamped upon him, and he may lan-
guish in reformatories, in jails. Moral faith is as fanatical as re-
ligious faith! They call that “liberty of faith” then, when
brother and sister, on account of a relation that they should
have settled with their “conscience,” are thrown into prison.
“But they set a pernicious example.” Yes, indeed others might
have taken the notion that the State had no business to meddle
with their relation, and thereupon “purity of morals” would
go to ruin. So then the religious heroes of faith are zealous for
the “sacred God,” the moral ones for the “sacred good.”41
This passage probably explains why Nietzsche, who cited
many authors, did not cite Stirner: he himself may have been
involved in an incestuous relationship with his sister Elisabeth
and had no desire to make his kinship with Stirner’s philoso-
phy an open acknowledgement.42
To return to Stirner, he concluded logically that, if there is
no God, there can be no moral law. How then dare we use a
moral law to judge a Nero? “After the annihilation of faith
Feuerbach thinks to put in to the supposedly safe harbor of
love.” Feuerbach has only changed gods, exchanging “love to
the superhuman God,” for “love to the human God,” so that
“Feuerbach’s proposition, ‘Theology in anthropology,’ means
only ‘religion must be ethics, ethics alone is religion.’”43 The
result is simply another form of self-renunciation instead of
self-affirmation. Like the Christians, Feuerbach is trying to de-
liver us, to save us, from ourselves. Where is man and man’s
freedom in all this?
To live for an idea is clericalism, even if it appears in non-
Christians like Robespierre and St. Just. As against all these
priests and representatives of ideal interests “stands a world of
innumerable ‘personal’ profane interests. No idea, no system,
no sacred cause is so great as never to be outrivaled and modi-
fied by these personal interests.” The ego will always assert it-
self against the ideal.44 The communist, by saying that “Power
had any meaning! The one and the many had been brought
down to earth, then the one abolished, and the many made
meaningless. Stirner concluded his work with these words,
“All things are nothing to me,” or, literally, “I have set my af-
fair on nothing.”51 All things being nothing to Stirner, then his
ego was logically nothing also.
Perhaps Stirner’s most vitriolic critic was Marx. In a long
section usually omitted now from editions of The German Ide-
ology, Marx unleashed a rambling attack on Stirner’s work.
“Saint Max” had identified Hegel’s “spirit” with the individual
and had disposed of the world. For Marx, this meant a depre-
cation of history which was intolerable. The individual, in-
stead of being the center of the world, is for Marx the product
of history: “the changing of oneself coincides with the chang-
ing of circumstances.”52 This does not mean that Stirner is
right, Marx declared, in charging that communists seek to
abolish the individual in favor of the general, self-sacrificing
man.53 The reason for Marx’s savage attack on Stirner thus is
seen. Both Stirner and Marx were competing Hegelians seek-
ing to identify the true revelation of Hegel’s “spirit.” Both saw
the world basically as a realm of change. Neither had any valid
principle for asserting the ultimacy of anything in the face of
that change and chance. Both consequently asserted a purely
arbitrary and personal priority for their concepts. Marx thus
had to overwhelm Stirner with abuse in order to assert his own
thesis. His critique is accordingly essentially abuse plus a re-
statement of the communist thesis. As against Christianity,
Marx could assert the ultimacy of change and thereby rule
God’s sovereignty an impossible concept. This same principle
left him no ground for countering the rivalry of another phi-
losophy of chance. As against “Sancho’s” ego or individual,
Marx asserted that the communist organization of society
72. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power in Science, Nature, Society & Art (New
York: Frederick Publications), 5.
73. Ibid., 175.
74. Ibid.
346 The One and the Many
6. Sartre
With Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905), a relative of Albert Sch-
weitzer,86 we find ourselves in the world of radical existential-
ism. The extent to which Sartre has sought to be consistent in
his existentialism appears strikingly in the title of his major
work, Being and Nothingness. Why not, one may well wonder,
“Being and Freedom,” since so radical an urge to freedom gov-
erns his philosophy?87 Again, why not title the work “Being
and Essence,” or “Existence and Essence,” since a sharp separa-
tion of the two is so important a starting-point for Sartre? The
reason for Sartre’s title rests with Sartre himself, but perhaps
an aspect of his title choice was a bypassing of the traditional
aspects of philosophy. “Nothingness” for Sartre is given; it is
“at the heart of Being.” Sartre wants no dualism of being and
non-being, or of being and nothingness. “Man presents him-
self... as a being who causes Nothingness to arise in the world,
inasmuch as he himself is affected with non-being to this end.”
In brief, “Non-being exists only on the surface of being.”88
92. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1947), 18.
93. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1957), 13, 15.
War Against the Beyond 353
110. Ibid., 613-614. The reference to the child has to do with thumb-sucking as a
means of filling the hole of the mouth.
111. Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World, 240.
War Against the Beyond 359
7. Wittgenstein
It is difficult to comment on Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951), not only because of the difficulty of understand-
ing his disorganized jottings, but also because his many follow-
ers, a strange swarm of eunuchs, buzz angrily if anyone differs
with what Veatch has called “the precise esoteric interpreta-
tion that a thorough Wittgensteinian would want to place”
upon the text.113
Wittgenstein’s concern was not with existence but with lan-
guage, and his famous slogan was, “The meaning is the use.” As
Barrett has summed it up, Bertrand Russell, in analyzing lan-
guage, felt that, “To exist is to satisfy a propositional func-
tion... i.e., satisfy the equation.” As a purist in logic,
Wittgenstein sought to separate existence and logic, although
with poor success.114
Wittgenstein’s requirements of language were hard and pre-
cise. He would have agreed with Sartre’s rejection of the un-
conscious. For Wittgenstein,
8. Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse deserves attention very briefly for his com-
ments on Hegel. As a radical and leftist, Marcuse is closer to
Hegel than most commentators. In a telling Preface entitled “A
Note on Dialectic,” Marcuse began,
This book was written in the hope that it would make a small
contribution to the revival, not of Hegel, but of a mental fac-
ulty which is in danger of being obliterated: the power of neg-
ative thinking. As Hegel defines it: “Thinking is, indeed,
essentially the negation of that which is immediately before
127. Maslow, Study in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, x.
128. Ibid., 17-18, 38.
129. Anthony Channell Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village, 1915-1930 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 147.
364 The One and the Many
130. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), vii.
131. Ibid., vii-viii.
War Against the Beyond 365
man, the man who declares his autonomy from God, is in ef-
fect Marcuse’s messiah. Marcuse’s two meaningful proposi-
tions describing our situation are, “the whole truth is the truth,
and the whole is false.” A new whole must be established be-
yond good and evil.132
Man is defined by Marcuse after Hegel in terms of reason;
freedom presupposed autonomous reason, and autonomous
reason presupposes freedom, but freedom, and reason especial-
ly, “exists only through its realization, the process of its being
made real.”133 This means remaking the world; the process is
revolution. Of the social order Marcuse writes,
And, Hegel continues, that which persists in this “merely em-
pirical manner,” without being “adapted to the idea of rea-
son,” cannot be regarded as “real.” The political system has to
be destroyed and transformed into a new rational order. Such
a transformation cannot be made without violence.134
The first sentence is an accurate report of Hegel’s position; the
second is Marcuse’s conclusion. But Marcuse’s conclusion fol-
lows logically from Hegel’s premise and is more faithful to He-
gel than the formally correct statements of timid professors
who cite Hegel’s words but not his meaning.
Because there is no essence to man, and “Being is a continu-
ous becoming,” not a state (“Every state of existence has to be
surpassed”),135 “truth” is a process and cannot be stated as a
proposition. Hence, falsehood, bondage, and irrationality are
themselves “essential parts of the truth.”136 The goal is a world
of truth created by man:
The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man
does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and
his own life “behind” the fixed form of things and laws. When
he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only
to the truth of himself but also of his world. And with the
recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into
action and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the
fulfillment of man’s self-consciousness.137
This means total war against God’s Beyond in the name of
man’s beyond, the revolutionary world order. Man’s instru-
ment is the power of negative thinking and revolutionary de-
struction. Is it any wonder that the world is given over to
destruction?
Marcuse, having denied an essence in order to strike at God’s
order, reveals here a new essence implicit in his negative think-
ing. The world is already “essentially... the fulfillment of man’s
self-consciousness.” The war has been newly declared, and
Marcuse is dividing the spoils before the battle! King Ahab, for
all his evil, had better sense: “Let not him that girdeth on his
harness boast himself as he that putteth it off” (1 Kings 20:11).
A final note: there is no one and many in Marcuse, because
there is no truth, only process. Neither the oneness or unity of
things, nor the particularity or individuality of things, is of any
importance. All alike are committed to a process of destruc-
tion. The one and the many apply to life. Philosophy, from
Hegel to Marcuse, applies to death and invites it.
9. Hammarskjold
Although modestly and philosophically worded, man is the
new god of philosophy. Not surprisingly, politics in the mod-
ern world has increasingly assumed a messianic character. In
Dag Hammarskjold, late Secretary-General of the United Na-
tions, this messianic note came prominently to the fore after
his death and was duly commended. Hammarskjold (d. 1961)
was a homosexual.138 He may have been responsible for his
plane’s crash by his suicidal urge.139 For Hammarskjold, as a
modern man, life was meaningless: “What I ask for is absurd:
1. Modernism
The history of religious thought after Kant is largely an echo
of Kant. The extensive success of men like Barth, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Tillich, and others has been largely due to their man-
ifestation in theology of the principles of modern philosophy.
They give us variations on a common theme; their difference
lies in the concerted attempt to force modern philosophy onto
the biblical message.
The fundamental principle of modernism has been to ex-
press the spirit of the age and to adapt Christianity to it. A
changing theology has been accepted because of a basic belief
in an evolving truth.
Modernist liberalism in the church has presented itself as the
“spirit of open-minded investigation of facts, without any pri-
or assumptions or commitments. The method is defined as the
empirico-inductive method of science, which is sharply con-
trasted with the alleged dogmatic, deductive method of the
conservative theology.” Its basic aspect is “humanism.”1
369
370 The One and the Many
2. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth
and Brunner (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1946), 7.
3. Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed., Toward a New Christianity: Readings in the Death of
God Theology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 1.
The Christian Perspective 371
The doctrine of the trinity thus provides the key to the prob-
lem of the one and the many. In the trinity, both particularity
and unity are equally ultimate and equally concrete. The tem-
poral one and many are created by God out of nothing, or bet-
ter, “God created the universe into nothing.” Non-being is to
be viewed as “the field of God’s possible operation” by man,
whereas “for God non-being is nothing in itself.” The doctrine
of creation means that the temporal one and many are under
the determination of the eternal one and many. “Creation, on
Christian principles, must always mean fiat creation.”17 Thus,
there are no possibilities outside of God, nor any determina-
tion except from Him, who is the creator, determiner, and sus-
tainer of all things.
Seventh, this means that the created one and many as God’s
creation is entirely and absolutely under God and His law. As
Van Til summarizes his philosophy on this point,
If the creation doctrine is thus taken seriously, it follows that
the various aspects of created reality must sustain such
relations to one another as have been ordained between them
by the Creator, as superiors, inferiors or equals. All aspects
being equally created, no one aspect of reality may be regarded
as more ultimate than another. Thus the created one and many
may in this respect be equal to one another; they are equally
derived and equally dependent upon God who sustains them
both. The particulars or facts of the universe do and must act
in accord with universals or laws. Thus there is order in the
created universe. On the other hand, the laws may not and can
never reduce the particulars to abstract particulars or reduce
their individuality in any manner. The laws are but
generalizations of God’s method of working with the
particulars. God may at any time take one fact and set it into
a new relation to created law. That is, there is no inherent
reason in the facts or laws themselves why this should not be
done. It is this sort of conception of the relation of facts and
laws, of the temporal one and many, imbedded as it is in that
idea of God in which we profess to believe, that we need in
order to make room for miracles. And miracles are at the heart
of the Christian position.
Thus there is a basic equality between the created one and the
created many, or between the various aspects of created reali-
ty. On the other hand, there is a relation of subordination be-
tween them as ordained by God. The “mechanical” laws are
lower than the “teleological” laws. Of course, both the “me-
chanical” and the “teleological” laws are teleological in the
sense that both obey God’s will. So also the facts of the phys-
ical aspect of the universe are lower than the facts of the will
and intellect of man. It is this subordination of one fact and
law to other facts and laws that is spoken of in Scripture as
man’s government over nature. According to Scripture man
was set as king over nature. He was to subdue it. Yet he was
to subdue it for God. He was priest under God as well as king
under God. In order to subdue it under God man had to inter-
pret it; he was therefore prophet as well as priest and king un-
der God.18
Eighth, because the world is totally under God and is abso-
lutely determined by Him, it is therefore a world with purpose
and meaning. History is rescued from meaninglessness. It is no
longer brute factuality, meaningless and uninterpreted facts. It
is no longer a matter of abstract particulars and abstract univer-
sals. It has purpose, meaning, and direction because God creat-
ed it in terms of His ultimate decree and purpose. As Van Til
has stated,
The philosophy of history inquires into the meaning of histo-
ry. To use a phrase of Kierkegaard, we ask how the Moment
is to have significance. Our claim as believers is that the Mo-
ment cannot intelligently be shown to have any significance
except upon the presupposition of the Biblical doctrine of the
ontological trinity. In the ontological trinity there is complete
harmony between an equally ultimate one and many. The per-
sons of the trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another and
of God’s nature. It is the absolute equality in point of ultimacy
that requires all the emphasis we can give it. Involved in this
absolute equality is complete inter-dependence; God is our
concrete universal.
We accept this God upon Scriptural authority. In the Bible
alone do we hear of such a God.19
22. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Idealism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1955), 67.
23. Ibid., 72.
24. Cornelius Van Til, The Confession of 1967: Its Theological Background and Ec-
umenical Significance (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.,
1967), 109.
25. Cornelius Van Til, The Theology of James Daane (Philadelphia: Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Co., 1959), 31.
26. Van Til, Is God Dead? (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Co., 1966), 5.
The Christian Perspective 381
383
384 The One and the Many
4. William Carroll Bark, Origins of the Medieval World (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1960), 184-185.
5. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, The Religion of Humanity, 3rd ed. (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875), 7-8.
386 The One and the Many
law for that age. Truth and moral law mean “the spirit of trans-
gression” in faithfulness to “the moment.”
The modern era, which can also be called the age of human-
ism, has been rich in its promises to man: cradle to grave secu-
rity, equality, a rich life for all, the abolition of poverty,
ignorance, war, disease, and even death itself. Year in and year
out, modern man has had the message of nearing Utopia
dinned into his ears. He has believed it. Man has become impa-
tient with respect to all problems, and a revolutionary rage at
delays is increasingly in evidence. This impatience is not
helped by the growing collapse of the humanistic age. Material
progress there has been, but man finds himself increasingly en-
gaged in deadlier wars with the world and himself, facing dead-
ly problems of air, earth, food, and water pollution, and
progressively suicidal in his own impulses.9
The increasing prominence of psychology is an important
sign of the times. When man becomes a problem to himself,
psychology comes into its own. As man’s inner problems
grow, his ability to cope with the outer world and its problems
declines. Thus, a psychology-oriented age is an age in decline,
unsure of itself, and incompetent in the face of its responsibil-
ities. It is significant that modern man talks so much about
“alienation”; his position of modernity isolates him from God
and man and leaves him a prisoner of his isolated ego.
Because of this “alienation” created by modernity, modern
man reacts violently in his effort to reestablish “communica-
tions,” another key word. Much is said about the “communi-
cations gap,” about the failure of old and young to
communicate, and of the inability of any man to find common
ground with other men. Again, this loss of communication is
a sign of the end of an age; the essential faith of an age, which
binds man to man, has then lost its cohesive power, and, as a
result, communication is lost.
9. See Samuel J. Warner, The Urge to Mass Destruction (New York: Grune and
Stratton, 1957).
388 The One and the Many
12. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Myth of Over-Population (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press,
1969), 39-51.
13. Bernard M. Baruch, A Philosophy for Our Time (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1954), 4.
Observations on the End of an Age 391
15. John Vriend, “Christ and Culture,” review of K. Schilder, Christus en Cult-
uur, in Torch and Trumpet 1, no. 1 (April-May 1951): 11.
394 The One and the Many
abetted by the cultural activity of man. And only thus the sab-
bath of God’s eternal rest would be ushered in.16
Until there is Christian reconstruction, there will continue to
be radical decline and decay.
16. Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Philadelphia: Presby-
terian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1959), 138.
Scripture Index
Genesis John
1:26-27 — 11 1:3 — 155
27:22 — 196 3:6 — 63
42:16 — 47 6 — 62
6:51 — 272
1 Kings
10:34 — 62
20:11 — 366
14:6 — 166
Esther 14:9 — 166
1:19 — 57
Acts
8:8 — 57
15:18 — 153
Psalms
Romans
2 — 227
1:18 — 205
82 — 62
1:27 — 32
Isaiah 3:31 — 260
2:4 — 393 8 — 13
58:3 — 277 8:21 — 37
8:24-25 — 390
Daniel
3:15 — 56 1 Corinthians
6:8-9 — 57 15:28 — 275
6:12 — 57
Ephesians
6:14 — 57
5:22-25 — 11
6:16-17 — 57
5:30 — 274
Matthew
Colossians
5:44 — 278
1:20 — 394
13:24-30 — 37
13:36-43 — 37 2 Peter
16:15-19 — 214 1:4 — 275
24:45 — 215
Luke
7:3-4 — 278
397
Index
A Letter Concerning Allen, John, 261, 268
Toleration, 304 Allshorn, Lionel, 218
A priori, 312, 316, 323, 343, Altizer, Thomas J. J., 136,
356 370
Abbasid Caliphs, 185 Alvarez, Leo Paul S. de, 61
Abelard, 197 Amarna letters, 50
Abortion, 89, 139, 143-145 American rebellion, 7
Abraham, 192 “American Scholar, The”, 13
Adam, 63, 150, 152, 175, 179, Amillenialism, 392
225, 227, 271, 394 Amusement, 384
Adler’s complex, 358 An Essay Concerning Human
Adoptionism, 167 Understanding, 291,
Adultery, 73, 140 302
Aebutius, 100 An Inquiry Concerning
Aeneas, 230 Human
Aeschylus, 72, 77 Understanding, 310-
Aesthetic individualism, 248 312
African cultures, 45 Analogia entis, Analogia fidei,
Afro-Asiatic religions, 240 200
Agatho (Pope), 186 Analogical thought, 35, 148
Age of Reason, 305 Anarchism, anarchy, 2-3, 11,
Agrarianism, 8 15-16, 20, 49, 59, 93,
Ahab, 366 124, 229, 249, 267,
Ahura Mazda, 56 321, 331, 335, 340
Akbar, 61 Anarchy, 382
Akkadia, 50-51, 53 Anathemas, 169
Akragas, 75 Anatol, A., 391
Alexander the Bishop, 158, Anatolian religion, 52
161 Anaxagoras, 80-81, 85, 88
Alexander the Great, 71, 87, Anaximander, 77-78
92, 157 Anaximenes, 78
Alexander VI, 251, 254 Ancient City, The, 26
Alienation, 387 Anderson, Sherwood, 363
Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Andrews, Charles M., 288-
Allah, 11 289
399
400 The One and the Many
Erastianism, 278
Erdmann, Johann Eduard, Fabianism, 4, 393
334, 338 Facts, factuality, 5, 10, 15-16,
Erophilos, 117 288, 324, 332, 354, 371
Eros, 41 brute, 16, 32, 205, 370,
Esoteric state, 75-76 380
Essays, First Series, 14 Fairchild, Hoxie Wale, 278
Essays, Second Series, 13-14 Faith, 15-16, 23, 25-26, 30, 32,
Essence of Christianity, The, 99-100, 104, 121, 125,
333 183, 187, 262, 312,
Eternity, 99, 103, 114, 160, 319, 335, 379, 392
164, 167-168, 172, in chaos, 109
179, 186, 193, 249, Falconer, William
257-259, 265, 268, Armistead, 103
271-272 Fall (the), 232-233, 294, 309,
Ethics, 27, 76, 86, 88, 202- 331
207, 312, 314, 331, Fallini, Giovanni, 222
334, 336, 361 Family, 76, 78, 89-91, 96-98,
Etruscan, 109 137-138, 142-143, 145,
Euchites, 170 150, 243, 249, 392
Eumenides, 78 Farquharson, A. S. L., 122
Eunomians, 165 Farrington, Benjamin, 69-71
Eusebius, 154, 158-159 Fascism, 76, 315
Eutyches, 190, 270 Fasting, 178
Evagrius, 193 Fatalism, 183
Evans, Marian, 333 Fate, 135, 139, 152
Evil, 7, 10, 177, 201, 205 Faustina, 122
Evolution, 33, 61, 207, 296, Febris, 99
301, 327, 345, 392 Feltoe, Charles Lett, 171
Existence/Essence, 350, 355- Ferm, Vergilius, 45, 71, 77,
356 80, 206, 262
Existentialism, 7, 135-136, Ferrero, Guglielmo, 116
203, 207, 299, 326, Fertility cult, 43
350-352, 360, 367, 386 Feudalism, 214-215
Exoteric philosophy, 70 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas,
Experience, 303 333-336, 341
Exposure, 89 Fiat will, 114
410 The One and the Many
358-359, 362, 364-366, Matter, 26, 31, 77, 79, 81, 83,
378, 382 85, 88, 175, 179
as a god, 284 Mattingly, Harold, 115, 125,
political animal, 87, 89 129
prophet, priest, king, 37 Maurer, Armand, 206
Manichaeanism, 170, 177- McGiffert, A. C., 154
179, 275-276 McGuinness, B. P., 360
Manilius, 101 McNeill, John T., 277
Mannix, Daniel P., 109 Mead, G. R. S., 136
Marcellus of Ancyra, 168 Meaning, 6, 9-10, 14-16, 18,
Marcia, 126 27, 31, 33-36, 38, 63-
Marcion, 137 64, 121, 128, 135, 137,
Marcu, Valeriu, 251 139, 141, 154, 194,
Marcuse, Herbert, 363-366 222, 255, 339, 341-
Marius, 117 343, 347-348, 351,
Markings, 367 354, 356, 359, 361-
Marriage, 8, 11, 89, 97, 138, 362, 365, 367-368,
170, 175, 178, 290 370, 372, 378, 393
Marrou, H. I., 73, 75, 95, 156 Meaninglessness, 24, 31, 36,
Mars, 115 38, 375
Martial, 138-139 Mediaeval Studies, 189
Martius, Campus, 115 Meditations, 122, 298
Martyr, Justin, 82 Medo-Persia, 57
Martyrdom, 146, 154 Meeter, H. Henry, 277
Marx, Karl, 326, 331, 334, Mefitis, 99
339-343 Melanchthon, 38
Marxism, 8, 14, 17, 19, 61, Mercer, Samuel Alfred
286, 289, 292, 331, Browne, 45
390, 393 Mesopotamia, 39, 49-50, 52,
Mary, 170, 230 55-56
Maslow, Alexander, 361, 363 Messalians, 170
Masonry, 136, 237 Messiah, 62, 227, 233
Masters, Edgar Lee, 363 Metaphysics, 3, 9, 62, 64, 140-
Masturbation, 27 141, 177, 179, 187,
Matelda, 234 208, 311, 314, 318, 381
Materialism, 3 Metaphysics of Apologetics,
Mathematics, 311, 316, 318 The, 371
Index 419
Oresteia, 77
O’Sullivan, Jeremiah F., 129, Origen, 149, 193
154, 178, 384 Original sin, 225
Occam, 3 Orosius, Paulus, 155, 186
Occultism, 31, 136 Orsini, 252
Oceana, 291 Orthodox Faith, 166-168
Octavian, 104 Orthodoxy, 173, 197, 373
Oedipus, 74 Osiris, 42, 45, 48
Olympus, 99, 128 “Other, The”, 356-357
Omnipotence, 105 Otho, 120
On Providence, 140 Ousset, Jean, 342
On the Bondage of the Will, Oxford, 301
263
On the Dowry, 140 Pacem in Terris, 238-239
On the Soul, 141 Packer, J.I., 263
One (the), 255, 305 Paganism, 165, 167, 174
One-and-Many, 35-36, 78, 85- Paine, Thomas, 13
86, 100, 124, 133, 156, Painting, 283
164, 173, 193-194, Palestine, Greek influence,
332, 339, 374, 376 132
defined, 1-21 Palmer, Edwin H., 144
Greek approach to, 78, 82 Palo Alto Times, 241
in Aquinas, 209-210 Pan-Deism, 240
Ontological Trinity, 9-12, 15, Pantheism, 7, 59, 80, 92, 151,
35, 148, 166, 194, 207, 211, 267
300, 374-375, 378 Papacy, 182, 185, 213-215,
Opitz, Edmund A., 4 220-221, 234, 241,
Oppenheim, A. Leo, 53 252, 259
Opus Oxoniense, 198 Papini, Giovanni, 223, 236
Oration, 159 Papyrus of Ani, 41
Order, 39-41, 43, 45-49, 51- Parable of tares and wheat, 37
55, 59, 62, 64-65, 98- Paracelsus, 281
106, 108-111, 113-115, Paradise, 150, 224-225, 231-
121, 125, 131-132, 234, 236, 241, 253,
135, 147, 150, 152, 331, 386
160-162, 164, 173, Parliament, 58
182, 189, 193 Parmenides, 3, 78
422 The One and the Many
363
Women, 74-75, 82, 90, 107, Yang-yin, 246
110, 121, 139-140, Young, Wayland, 136
144, 178, 358 Young, William S., 208
Wood, Nathan R., 154 Youthfulness, 197-198
Wooley, Sir Leonard, 50 Yutang, Lin, 25
World community, 236
World mind, 332 Zarathustra, 343-344, 348
Zedekiah, 21
World-spirit, 325
Zeno, 78-80
Wright, G. Ernest, 49 Zeus, 72, 74
Wright, G. H. von, 361 Zeus-Jupiter, 185
Wright, Thomas, 276 Ziggurat, 51
Zimmerman, Carle C., 138-
Xenophanes, 78 139, 142, 178
Xenophon, 73 Zimmern, Alfred E., 117
The Author
Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) was a well-known
American scholar, writer, and author of over thirty books. He
held B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California
and received his theological training at the Pacific School of
Religion. An ordained minister, he worked as a missionary
among Paiute and Shoshone Indians as well as a pastor to two
California churches. He founded the Chalcedon Foundation,
an educational organization devoted to research, publishing,
and cogent communication of a distinctively Christian
scholarship to the world at large. His writing in the Chalcedon
Report and his numerous books spawned a generation of
believers active in reconstructing the world to the glory of
Jesus Christ. He resided in Vallecito, California until his death,
where he engaged in research, lecturing, and assisting others in
developing programs to put the Christian Faith into action.
The Ministry of Chalcedon
CHALCEDON (kal-see-don) is a Christian educational orga-
nization devoted exclusively to research, publishing, and cogent
communication of a distinctively Christian scholarship to the
world at large. It makes available a variety of services and pro-
grams, all geared to the needs of interested ministers, scholars, and
laymen who understand the propositions that Jesus Christ speaks
to the mind as well as the heart, and that His claims extend beyond
the narrow confines of the various institutional churches. We ex-
ist in order to support the efforts of all orthodox denominations
and churches. Chalcedon derives its name from the great ecclesias-
tical Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), which produced the crucial
Christological definition: “Therefore, following the holy Fathers,
we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the
same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead
and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man....” This for-
mula directly challenges every false claim of divinity by any hu-
man institution: state, church, cult, school, or human assembly.
Christ alone is both God and man, the unique link between heav-
en and earth. All human power is therefore derivative: Christ
alone can announce that, “All power is given unto me in heaven
and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). Historically, the Chalcedonian
creed is therefore the foundation of Western liberty, for it sets lim-
its on all authoritarian human institutions by acknowledging the
validity of the claims of the One who is the source of true human
freedom (Galatians 5:1).
The Chalcedon Foundation publishes books under its own
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