One and The Many: Studies in The Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy

Th e Tw e n t y - Fi r s t C e n t u ry E di t ion
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
Chalcedon / Ross House Books

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To
H. W. Luhnow
whose thoughtful role in the furtherance of

research, science, and scholarship is of major and
central importance to this age.
Other books by
Rousas John Rushdoony
The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. I

The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. II, Law & Society
The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. III, The Intent of the Law
Systematic Theology (2 volumes)
Chariots of Prophetic Fire
To Be As God
Noble Savages
The Death of Meaning
Intellectual Schizophrenia
Hebrews, James & Jude
The Gospel of John
Larceny in the Heart
The Biblical Philosophy of History
The Mythology of Science
Thy Kingdom Come
Foundations of Social Order
This Independent Republic
The Nature of the American System
The “Atheism” of the Early Church
The Messianic Character of American Education
The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum
Christianity and the State
Salvation and Godly Rule
Romans & Galatians
God’s Plan for Victory
Politics of Guilt and Pity
Roots of Reconstruction
The One and the Many
Revolt Against Maturity
By What Standard?
Law & Liberty
For a complete listing of available books by

Rousas John Rushdoony and other Christian
reconstructionists, contact:
ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

PO Box 158
Vallecito, CA 95251
www.ChalcedonStore.com
Table of Contents
I — The One and the Many
1. The Nature of the Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Attempts at a Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. The Trinitarian Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. The Unitarian Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Faith and Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6. Political Perspectives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7. Implications for Education and Freedom . . . . . . . . . . 19
8. The Question of Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
II — The Ground of Liberty

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2. Liberty and Dialectics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3. The Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4. The Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5. The Libertarian Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
6. The Christian Answer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
7. Law and Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
III — The Continuity of Being

1. Egypt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2. Mesopotamia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3. Persia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4. The Chain of Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5. The Bible and the Concept of Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
6. Being and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
IV — The Unity of the Polis

1. Greece: The Humanist’s Homeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2. Greek Science and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3. The Chaos-Order Dialectic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4. The Esoteric State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5. The Polis as Cosmos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
6. The One and the Many. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
7. Socrates and Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
8. Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
V — Rome: The City of Man
1. The Priority of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2. Cicero and the Rule of Reason. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3. Julius Caesar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4. Chaos Cults . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5. Cicero and Revolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6. Cicero and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
7. Caesar and the New State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
8. The New Perversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
9. Marcus Aurelius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
10. Commodus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
11. Last Hopes in Chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
VI — Christ: The World De-divinized

1. War Against the Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
2. Mysticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3. Gnosticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
4. Christianity and the Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5. Abortion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6. Emperor Worship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
7. Creation and History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
8. History and God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
9. Constantine the Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
10. Arianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
11. Nicaea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
12. Constantinople I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
13. The Orthodox Faith vs. Heresies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
14. Ephesus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
15. Chalcedon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
16. Pelagianism and Asceticism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
17. Deprecation of Matter and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
18. Augustine on the Pelagians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
19. The Church as New Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
20. Later Councils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
21. The One and the Many . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
VII — The Return of Dialectic Thought

1. Boethius. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
2. Scholasticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
3. Aquinas’ Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
4. Thomistic Dialecticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
5. Noetics and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
6. Common Ground in Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
7. The One and the Many in Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
8. The State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
VIII — Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized

1. Medieval Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
2. Frederick II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
3. Dante. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
4. Dante’s View of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
5. The Witness of The Divine Comedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
6. Pope John XXIII . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
7. Pope Paul VI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
IX — The Immanent One as the Power State

1. Castiglione. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
2. Machiavelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
X — The Reformation: The Problem Redefined

1. Luther . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
2. Against Erasmus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
3. Luther and the One and Many . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
4. Calvin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
5. Calvin on Law and Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
6. Richard Hooker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
XI — Utopia: The New City of Man

1. Humanism and Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
2. Thomas More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
3. Francis Bacon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
4. Campanella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
5. Hobbes, Locke, Harrington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
XII — Autonomous Man and the New Order

1. Descartes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
2. John Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
3. Berkeley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
4. Alexander Pope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
5. La Mettrie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
6. Hume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
7. Rousseau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
8. Immanuel Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
XIII — War Against the Beyond

1. Hegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
2. Feuerbach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
3. Max Stirner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
4. Karl Marx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
5. Nietzsche. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
6. Sartre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
7. Wittgenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
8. Marcuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
9. Hammarskjold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
XIV — The Christian Perspective

1. Modernism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
2. Van Til . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
3. At the End of an Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382
APPENDIX — Observations on the End of an Age

1. The End of an Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
2. The Religious Foundations of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
Scripture Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .397
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .399
Chapter I
The One and the Many
1. The Nature of the Problem

One of the most basic and continuing problems of man’s his-
tory is the question of the one and the many and their relation-
ship. The fact that in recent years men have avoided discussion
of this matter has not ceased to make their unstated presuppo-
sitions with respect to it determinative of their thinking.
Much of the present concern about the trends of these times
is literally wasted on useless effort because those who guide the
activities cannot resolve, with the philosophical tools at hand
to them, the problem of authority. This is at the heart of the
problem of the proper function of government, the power to
tax, to conscript, to execute for crimes, and to wage warfare.
The question of authority is again basic to education, to
religion, and to the family. Where does authority rest, in
democracy or in an elite, in the church or in some secular
institution, in God or in reason? The implications of the
problem are religious, as will be shown, but the fact that it is
not discussed permits an ignorant equalization of various
religions and diverse theologies. The differences between
Christianity and atheism are basic, as are the differences
1
2 The One and the Many
between Buddhism and Christianity. Russian Orthodoxy,

Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and
Calvinism each has its characteristic culture or consequence in
the social and political action of its own presupposition.
Failure to recognize the fact that all routes to God are not
equally valid or relevant to the maintenance of historic
Western culture, especially in the United States, has
extensively clouded the possibility of an intelligible answer.
The plea that this is a pluralistic culture is merely recognition
of the problem—not an answer. The problem of authority is
not answerable by reason alone, and basic to reason itself are
pre-theoretical suppositions or axioms1 which represent
essentially religious commitments. And one such basic
commitment is with respect to the question of the one and the
many.2 The fact that students can graduate from our
universities as philosophy majors without any awareness of
the importance or centrality of this question does not make
the one and many any less basic to our thinking. The
difference between East and West, and between various aspects
of Western history and culture, rests on answers to this
problem which, whether consciously or unconsciously, have
been made. Whether recognized or not, every argument and
every theological, philosophical, political, or any other
exposition is based on a presupposition about man, God, and
society—about reality. This presupposition rules and
determines the conclusion; the effect is the result of a cause.
1. Pre-theoretical suppositions or axioms are religiously held and unproved prop-

ositions which are assumed to be so true in a culture that it is ridiculous to question
them or to attempt their proof. They exist as the very ground and premise of
thought. They are religiously held but are prior to any formal religious thinking as
well as philosophical speculation.
2. The one and many is perhaps the basic question of philosophy. Is unity or plu-
rality, the one or the many, the basic fact of life, the ultimate truth about being? If
unity is the reality, and the basic nature of reality, then oneness and unity must gain
priority over individualism, particulars, or the many. If the many, or plurality, best
describes ultimate reality, then the unit cannot gain priority over the many; then
state, church, and society are subordinate to the will of the citizen, the believer, and
of man in particular. If the one is ultimate, then individuals are sacrificed to the
group. If the many be ultimate, then unity is sacrificed to the will of many, and an-
archy prevails.
The One and the Many 3
And one such basic presupposition is with reference to the one

and the many.
This avoidance of the problem makes necessary a few
elementary definitions as a prelude to a discussion. The one
refers not to a number but to unity and oneness; in
metaphysics, it has usually meant the absolute, the supreme
Idea for Plato, the universe for Parmenides, Being as Such for
Plotinus, and so on. The one can be a separate whole, or it can
be the sum of things in their analytic or synthetic wholeness;
that is, it can be a transcendent one, which is the ground of all
being, or it can be an immanent one. The many refers to the
particularity or individuality of things; the universe is full of a
multitude of beings; is the truth concerning them inherent in
their individuality, or is it in their basic oneness? If it is their
individuality, then the many are ultimate and the proper
source of authority, and we have philosophical Nominalism. If
it is their oneness, then the one is ultimate, and we have
Realism. According to Realism, universals, which are terms
applicable to all the universe and can be called real “second
substances,” are aspects of the one Idea and exist within it.
Egyptian, much Greek, and medieval scholastic thought has
been “Realistic.” For “Nominalism,” abstract or general terms
have no real existence and are mere names applied to aspects of
reality; reality belongs to particulars, actual physical
particulars, so that the truth of being is simply that individual
things exist. Truth is not some abstraction concerning
particular things but is simply the fact of particularity.
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
individuals. God, law, government, church, and morality are

abstracts which represent a tyranny to man; liberty means an
unshackling of these chains and the affirmation of
individuality as the essential aspect of reality. A logical
champion of such Nominalism, as witness Thoreau and
Robert LeFevre, is hostile to all religion and government and
favors only a purely individual religion, if any, a
self-government as the only true or possible government.3 The
Realist affirms instead the reality of the one rather than the
many; for Plato’s followers, the Idea, and the State, had a
reality which particulars did not possess. For the Scholastics,
as Aquinas, the Church, as the representative of the absolute
reality and a continuation of the incarnation, had a reality
above and beyond its every member. After Christianity lost its
primary power in U.S. history, Nominalism took over and
found expression in the thinking of the so-called “robber
barons.” Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) reintroduced Realism in
its pragmatic and non-religious form into American thought,
and Dewey developed it extensively. In England, G. E. Moore
(b. 1873) molded Fabian thought and thereby influenced
America. The priority of the state to the individual, and the
reality of the state as against the unreality of the individual,
marked such thinking. For Dewey, the Great Community was
the basic fact of history. Towards its actualization in history,
all effort must be bent. But, for Dewey, the individual and the
soul were invalid concepts; man was truly man, not as an
individual, but, after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the
state. True education thus for Dewey meant, not the
development of the individual in terms of learning, but his
socialization. Progressive education is “Realistic,” as is
parochial education to a great extent. Most basic educators,
however, are “Nominalists”: educate the individual in terms of
the particular facts of the universe without reference to God,
truth, or morality. Further instances of the implications of the
3. See Must We Depend Upon Political Protection? Yes, Edmund A. Opitz; No,
Robert LeFevre (Colorado Springs, CO: The Freedom School, 1962). Modern lib-
ertarian movements are extensively influenced by Nominalistic, anarchistic philos-
ophies.
one and many problem can be seen in art. In the seventeenth

to nineteenth centuries, art was Nominalistic and generally
aimed at a photographic reproduction of subjects, so that in
some instances the very warts on a man’s nose were religiously
depicted. Reality belonged to a particularity, to individuals,
and ideas were less important progressively than material facts.
Medieval art had been dedicated to philosophical Realism, i.e.,
more interested in portraying universal ideas (faith, love, etc.)
than persons, who were particulars and less real. Modern art is
non-Thomistic Realism; it despises things, particulars,
individuals, and is given to portraying the experience of unity.
It is thus a pagan mysticism and not infrequently seeks the
mystical experience in drugs because of its hunger for the
absorptive one. In Science, a clear instance of Nominalism is
Kinsey, who, in his studies of sex, denied the validity of
universals and affirmed the sole reality of particulars; sexual
acts of any character are thus real, but moral laws are not.
They are merely nominal, conventional, and alien to the
nature of things.
In much Far Eastern thought, as in Hinduism and Bud-
dhism, the problem of the one and the many no longer exists
in many circles, since centuries ago resolution was made in fa-
vor of the one. The goal of being is thus absorption into the
one, and, since particularity is unreal or even an illusion, it fol-
lows that history is unimportant. Thus, the Buddhist Milarepa
could declare:
Because I see the self-face of the View,
The thought of contrast by itself dissolves;
How then can I have the Idea-of-Two —
the self and others?
The View is void of limit and discrimination.
When in the Practice I become absorbed,
Good and evil are reduced to self-liberation;
How then can I have the Idea-of-Two —
happiness and suffering?
The Practice is devoid of limitary feelings and experience.
When I adhere to the self-continuance of Action,
Dislike is reduced to self-liberation;
How then can I have the Impulse-of-Two —

craving and aversion?
The Action is free from limitary attachment.
Since self-liberation is the Fruit,
Both Nirvana and Samsara are reduced to it.
How then can I have the Idea-of-Two—
getting and Abandoning?
Absence of fear and hope is
The Fruit of this great Practice.4
Meaning disappears from such a system, since meaning imposes
limits and requires discrimination, all of which are alien to the
unity of the one. Since history is struggle and discrimination,
history means a revolt against the undifferentiated unity of be-
ing. As a result, Far Eastern cultures in a sense abdicated from
history when their philosophies so resolved the problem of the
one and the many. Only as Western thought has infiltrated
Asia has history again gained relevancy. By virtue of its predis-
position to absorption into the great one, Eastern thought has
been ready to accept such various forms of the one as the Com-
munist International, the ecumenical church, and the United
Nations. If meaning is accepted, it is the meaning of unity.
In the West, philosophy has usually been dialectical, i.e.,
holding two antithetical principles in tension, such as form and
matter in Greek philosophy, nature and grace in Scholasti-
cism, and nature and freedom in modern thought, as
Dooyeweerd has shown.5 Because of this dialectical tension, it
has been unable to rest content with a final solution as has the
East. In the West, therefore, both “Realism” and “Nominal-
ism,” the one and the many, have had their uneasy sway.
The Enlightenment, Deism, and illuminist thought exalted
the principle of the one at the sacrifice of the many. Alexander
Pope, in his Essay on Man, stated this Enlightenment faith
clearly:
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.
All are parts of one stupendous whole

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
This whole was for Pope present in every part, and the parts
found their true being in the whole. As a result, the Enlighten-
ment hope was in a social order, introduced by the scientific
State, which would liberate man and unite him in that true
world brotherhood which represented his only hope.6 This
faith received a major setback in the American rebellion, a
Christian counter-revolution, but it is again prevalent and has
its great institutional formulation in the United Nations. The
religious reduction of all reality to one is pantheism, or, in
more sophisticated forms, existentialism and neo-orthodoxy.
The political reduction of all humanity to one, with the oblit-
eration of all differences, is the United Nations’ hope. It is a
faith present in many forms. Thus, a state law barring a conser-
vative Bible club from state colleges as divisive (because limited
to fundamentalistic Protestants and excluding Jews, Roman
Catholics, atheists, and others) presupposes unity as the one
virtue. Divisiveness is by definition evil. It is thus apparent that
both “Realism” and “Nominalism” are ultimately destructive
of the idea of truth. “Nominalism” admits no reality in univer-
sals other than particularity, and “Realism” ultimately reduces
all universals to one, unity, and, especially in nonreligious
forms, is quickly hostile to any notion that truth and unity can
be in conflict.
The Protestant Reformation asserted the priority of truth to
unity; Modernist Protestantism increasingly denies the possi-
bility of their conflict—implicitly accepting authoritarian uni-
ty: truth is unity, and unity is truth. Ecumenicity (all churches
in one) is of itself therefore deemed both good and necessary.
Politically, the United Nations is also seen as both good and
necessary. The possibility of improvement is admitted, but not
the possibility of elimination, for both hope and progress rest
in the development of the principle of unity. With respect to
6. For an account of the implications of the Enlightenment, see Louis I. Bred-

vold, The Brave New World of the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1961).
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?
7. Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The

Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1959), 72.
8. See Elgin Groseclose, “Diplomacy of Altruism?,” in James W. Wiggins and
Helmut Schoeck, eds., Foreign Aid Reexamined, A Critical Appraisal (Washington,
DC: Public Affairs Press, 1958), 25-42.
Raising these questions immediately makes apparent the fact

that our society does have opinions on the one and the many,
and that both Nominalist and Realist have in the last century
extensively influenced our education, religion, and legislation.
3. The Trinitarian Answer

Orthodox Christianity has asserted another answer to the
problem, and, to make clear that answer, certain elementary
distinctions are necessary. Theology and philosophy distin-
guish between the ontological trinity and the economical trin-
ity in speaking of God. The Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost are each a personality, and together they constitute the
triune and exhaustively personal, totally self-conscious God.
God is totally self-conscious, meaning that He has no hidden,
unknown aspects of His being, no unexploited potentiality.
He is actuality, self-conscious and personal. Each person of the
trinity is equally God. As Van Til has stated it,
Each is as much God as are the other two. The Son and the
Spirit do not derive their being from the Father. The diversity
and the unity in the Godhead are therefore equally ultimate;
they are exhaustively correlative to one another and not cor-
relative to anything else.9
The trinity so described is called the ontological trinity, that is,
the trinity in its relationship to itself, in terms of its own being.
When the relationship of the triune God to His creation is dis-
cussed, the economical trinity is referred to, i.e., the trinity in
its relationship to its activity with respect to the universe, cre-
ating, sustaining, or redeeming it. Our concern now is with the
ontological trinity, God in His being. The being of God is in-
finite, eternal, unchangeable, and holy. Biblical thought differ-
entiates between created being and uncreated being, whereas
all non-Christian systems speak of being in general, one undif-
ferentiated being shared, in various degrees, by God and man
alike. In these non-Christian metaphysics, the idea of the great
chain of being—of the ultimate oneness of God and man—is
9. Cornelius Van Til, Apologetics (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed

Publishing Co., 1953), 8.
implicit or explicit. Evil is non-being, and man either moves

downward into non-being or upward on the ladder or chain
into absorption by, or full participation in, being. Salvation is
thus metaphysical, a development of being, whereas for bibli-
cal faith it is ethical, involving a new life and a new relationship
to God, a change from status as a covenant-breaker to status as
a covenant-keeper. Because man is a created being, he is totally
under the government of God, and his thinking is true only as
subject to God, whom he meets in every aspect of the universe
because it is totally the creation of God.
The main point is that if man could look anywhere and not be
confronted with the revelation of God then he could not sin
in the Biblical sense of the term. Sin is the breaking of the law
of God. God confronts man everywhere. He cannot in the na-
ture of the case confront man anywhere if he does not con-
front him everywhere. God is one; the law is one. If man
could press one button on the radio of his experience and not
hear the voice of God then he would always press that button
and not the others. But man cannot even press the button of
his own self-consciousness without hearing the requirement
of God.10
Thus, all factuality in the universe is created and understand-
able only in terms of the ontological trinity. Because He creat-
ed it, its meaning is also created meaning, derived from Him
who made it. This points us to the ontological trinity as the an-
swer to the problem of the one and the many. Immediately we
have a distinction which does not exist in non-Christian
thought: we have a temporal one and many in the created uni-
verse, and we have an eternal One-and-Many in the ontological
trinity, an absolute and self-complete unity. In Van Til we
have a definitive formulation of the implications:
Using the language of the One-and-Many question we
contend that in God the one and many are equally ultimate.
Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, and
diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The
persons of the Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another.
The Son and the Spirit are ontologically on a par with the
10. Cornelius Van Til, A Letter on Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian

and Reformed Publishing Co., 1955), 40-41.
Father. It is a well-known fact that all heresies in the history

of the church have in some form or other taught
subordinationism. Similarly, we believe, all “heresies” in
apologetic methodology spring from some form of
subordinationism.11
Since both the one and the many are equally ultimate in God,
it immediately becomes apparent that these two seemingly
contradictory aspects of being do not cancel one another but
are equally basic to the ontological trinity: one God, three per-
sons. Again, since temporal unity and plurality are the prod-
ucts and creation of this triune God, neither the unity nor the
plurality can demand the sacrifice of the other to itself. Thus,
man and government are equally aspects of created reality. The
locus of Christianity is both the believer and the church; they
are not independent of or prior to one another. The wishes of
husband and wife do not take priority over marriage, nor does
the institution of marriage have primacy over the partners to
it; marriage indeed is a type of an eternal reality (Eph. 5:22-25),
but man is himself created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27).
Education must be geared both to the individual and to soci-
ety, but, above all, to God.
4. The Unitarian Failure

It becomes apparent at once why Unitarianism has floun-
dered between the one and the many, between anarchism and
statism.
Lacking as it does any doctrine of the equal ultimacy of the
one and the many in the ontological trinity, it has accepted,
since its orientation is the temporal, either the ultimacy of man
or of the state. Mohammedanism, because of its “unitar-
ianism,” has been primarily a monolithic statist order, Islam.
Its denial of free-will and espousal of rigid determinism is
related to this theological premise. Since plurality has no
ultimate reality in Mohammedanism, the freedom of the many
is an academic question; the one will of Allah governs all
11. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1955), 42; published also, rev. and abr., in paperback,
1963, see page 25.
reality. The tendency of Mohammedan thought, when not

arrested by statist action, to run into mysticism is an obvious
and natural one. Since the one alone has ultimate reality, the
proper goal of the many is absorption into that one. Since the
one alone has ultimacy, the one alone has freedom. There is no
Reformed or Augustinian distinction between proximate and
ultimate causes. Indeed, if two ingredients are lacking in a
system of thought, i.e., the ontological trinity and a distinction
between created and uncreated being, this distinction is
bluffed, in that both proximate and ultimate causes, if the
difference is made, are alike derived from a common well of
being and are basically one. For Calvin, responsible proximate
causes rested precisely on the total, all-comprehensive ultimate
cause; that is, the Christian doctrine of free will rests on the
eternal counsel of God, on predestination. As the Westminster
Confession stated it,
Although, in relation to the foreknowledge, and decree of
God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and in-
fallibly, Yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall
out according to the nature of second causes, either necessari-
ly, freely, or contingently.12
God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel
of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever
comes to pass: yet so as thereby neither is God the author of
sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is
the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but
rather established.13
In this perspective, liberty and law are not hostile factors but
necessary aspects of one another, so that the one cannot exist
without the other. The eternal One-and-Many is both unity
and plurality, both totally free, being self-determined, and, be-
ing fully self-conscious, having also a total counsel, predestinat-
ing all things by His eternal decree. Law and liberty coincide
in the ontological trinity; in the temporal one and many, the
fulfilment of creation is in terms of the glorious liberty of the
12. Chap. 5, sec. 2.

13. Chap. 3, sec. 1. For Calvin’s statement, see Henry Cole, ed., Calvin’s
Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950).
sons of God, their growth within the structure of God’s law

(Rom. 8).
By and large, the Unitarian influence in U. S. history has
been statist. Very early, Unitarian thinkers led the country
into a messianic view of the state as man’s source of salvation
and of true order, and also into statist education. Even in so
cautious a man as Emerson, some of these facets appear. In
1844, in Essays, Second Series, Emerson, in “Nominalist and Re-
alist,” affirmed his support of Realism and saw Nature and nat-
ural process as the “incarnation and distribution of the
godhead.” This meant that no part or particular in Nature
could permanently express or incarnate the truth, which rested
in process.
Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would im-
pose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defense.
Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest
blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of
power.14
In “The American Scholar,” an address of 1837, Emerson as-
serted an ostensibly extreme individualism which was actually
a dissolution of the individual to give ground for the totalitar-
ian conception of society. The common will he saw embodied
in “representative men.” In 1838, in “An Address (Delivered in
Divinity College, Cambridge),” Emerson declared, “The soul
knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full
circle of the Universe.” In “Literary Ethics,” he declared:
The man of genius should occupy the whole space between
God or pure mind and the multitude of uneducated men. He
must draw from the infinite Reason, on one side; and he must
penetrate into the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other.
From one, he must draw his strength; to the other, he must
owe his aim. The one yokes him to the real; the other, to the
apparent.15
The man of genius is thus for his age the incarnation of Reality,
but the people whom he serves are merely appearances, “the
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.
apparent.” This is a parallel development to the Hegelian and

Marxist doctrine of the elite and the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat. In writing on “History” in Essays, First Series (1841), Em-
erson stated that “There is one mind in common to all
individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of
the same.”16 But since most men have only a meager participa-
tion in this great one, the common being, the great representa-
tive men become their voice and representative in that era.
These men are the true state.
To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appear-
ance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of char-
acter makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State.17
While Emerson was ready to affirm with Jefferson that the
least government was the best government, he laid the founda-
tion for statism. The utilitarian belief in nature as the perfect
mechanism working to effect the greatest good of the greatest
number he transferred to the state:
As we say in our modern politics, catching at last the language
of morals, that the object of the State is the greatest good of
the greatest number,—so, the reason we must give for the ex-
istence of the world is, that it is for the benefit of all being.18
It is no surprise then to learn that Emerson was in the second
echelon of the Secret Six, a group dedicated to forcing statist
and military action with respect to slavery and supporting
John Brown.19 Emerson, in public addresses, seemed to regard
Brown as the needed representative man of the hour.20 Just as
in Nominalism universals become abstract universals, mere
verbal generalizations without any meaning in themselves, so
in Realism individuals tend to become mere abstract particu-
lars, thin in being and meaningless apart from the great one. In
Emerson, representative men (and the state) were the incarna-
tion of that oneness for their particular era, occupying “the
whole space” as true mediators of reality. This is the essential
16. Ibid., 125.
17. “Politics,” Essays, Second Series (1844), in ibid., 302.
18. “Character,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches, in ibid., 974.
19. J. C. Furnas, The Road to Harpers Ferry (New York: Sloane, 1959), 7.
20. Emerson, Boston and Salem Speeches, in Complete Writings, 1202-1206.
doctrine of ancient Babylonian statism and a continuing foun-

dation of new Towers of Babel.
5. Faith and Science

In the ontological trinity, we have a concrete universal and
concrete particulars. Moreover, “In God’s being there are no
particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing uni-
versal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.”21 This
means that the trinity is totally self-contained and totally expli-
cable in terms of itself. In turn, this means that the temporal
one and many, having been created by God, is entirely and
only explicable in terms of the ontological trinity, and that the
non-believer’s knowledge of the universe is in terms of bor-
rowed premises, for the logic of any other premise is, as Van
Til has repeatedly shown, the denial of our experience and of
reality. Nominalism ends by dissolving the world into an end-
less sea of unrelated and meaningless facts or particulars,
whereas Realism progressively denies the validity of particu-
lars, of the many, and absorbs them into an undifferentiated
and shoreless ocean of being. At either end, definition, mean-
ing, and truth disappear; at one end total relativism and anar-
chy, and, at the other, total authoritarianism.
It is thus understandable why Van Til states that “the Chris-
tian should frankly begin his scientific work on the presuppo-
sition of the cotermineity of the universal and the particular in
the Godhead.”22 This is the concealed premise whereby the un-
believing scientist operates; he assumes the validity of both
particulars and universals, of both the one and the many, and
their relationship, for otherwise he could formulate nothing.
To assume the ultimacy of chance is to deny the possibility of
science and of meaning. As Pei has observed, “Unless we
choose to accept the doctrine of predestination, it is chance
21. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 43; 26 in 1963 ed.

22. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co, 1947), 40.
that makes history.”23 Van Til has summarized the matter

clearly:
Sinners use the principle of Chance back of all things and the
idea of exhaustive rationalization as the legitimate aim of sci-
ence. If the universe were actually what these men assume it
to be according to their principle, there would be no science.
Science is possible and actual only because the non-believer’s
principle is not true and the believer’s principle is true. Only
because God has created the universe and does control it by
His providence, is there such a thing as science at all.24
6. Political Perspectives
If God has truly and causally created all things and is himself
sovereign, self-contained, and triune, then no fact is a fact apart
from Him, nor can any fact have a valid interpretation in and
of itself. God-created factuality means God-interpreted factual-
ity.25 Apart from God, there is only the concept of brute factu-
ality, facts in and of themselves and without any relationship
or meaning in terms of one another, a sea of meaningless and
unrelated particulars, or else the absorption of all facts into the
ocean of being and their loss of both identity and particular
meaning. The first means a world of anarchistic atoms or par-
ticulars, and the second means a totalitarian and obliterating
unity. Much if not most anarchism escapes from its total isola-
tionism and meaninglessness by discovering the whole as
present in every part. In Simone Weil, anarchism thus ended
in the tyranny of the one. A friendly scholar thus describes her
Utopia:
Simone Weil’s utopia is essentially a system of production in
which every worker would determine his own behavior by
reason alone, without reference to any rules, with respect
both to his own role in the productive process and the coordi-
nation of his role with the roles of all the other members of
the community.
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.
In such a society, everyone would be in a position to control

the entire life of the community, so community life would al-
ways be in conformity with the general will. Would this not
put the whole society at the mercy of a single arbitrary act?
The situation is excluded conceptually, because “there is only
one single, identical reason for all men; they become foreign
and impenetrable to one another only when they depart from
it; thus a society in which the necessary and sufficient condi-
tion of all material life is that everyone exercises his reason
would be completely transparent to every mind.”26
The similarity to Marxism is readily apparent, as is the reason
why anarchism historically has worked so closely with social-
ism and communism.
In orthodox trinitarian Christianity, the problem of the one
and the many is resolved. Unity and plurality are equally ulti-
mate in the Godhead, and temporal unity and plurality are on
a basis of equal validity. There is thus no basic conflict between
individual and community. The individual lives in communi-
ty, and the community flourishes as the individual finds him-
self and grows in terms of consistently Christian faith. Instead
of a basic philosophical hostility between individual and gov-
ernment, believer and church, person and family, there is a
necessary co-existence. Neither the one nor the many is reduc-
ible to the other. They cannot seek the obliteration of the oth-
er, for that involves self-obliteration. The Augustinian and
Calvinistic faith, by its hostility to subordinationism, holds, if
developed, the possibilities for true social order, and, to the ex-
tent that Augustinianism and Calvinism have been followed,
Western culture has developed both freedom and order. When
christological subordinationism has set in, that is, the subordi-
nate status of the second person of the trinity affirmed, statism
has arisen, as in Byzantium Russia (with its docetic Christolo-
gy), Anglicanism, and modernism, to cite but a few instances.
The equal ultimacy of the one and the many is disturbed, and
the order of revelation demoted. The Roman emperors were
intensely aware of this fact, and, to promote statism, supported
26. Roy Pierce, “Sociology and Utopia: The Early Writings of Simone Weil,”
Political Science Quarterly 77, no. 4 (December 1962): 519. The quotation from Weil
is from her Oppression et Liberte, 131-132.
Arianism and other subordinationist views as essential to the

maintenance of the state as the one true order in which man’s
life was totally comprehended. The hostility to Athanasius
rested on this premise. The Council of Chalcedon in 451, by
affirming the full trinitarian faith, was thus the significant vic-
tory that led to what is called Western civilization. Reduction-
ism is the outcome of a faulty Christology. Once the eternal
One and Many is negated in its equal ultimacy, it ceases to be
the framework of reference, and an immanent one absorbs the
many. This immanent one the Roman, Byzantine, and Holy
Roman Empires sought to be, as does the modern state, and
now the United Nations. Instead of the focal point being a
transcendental one and many, which no human order, as cre-
ated being, could embody, the temporal order became the
frame of reference. The eternal order was denied so that a hu-
man one could replace it. The divine emperors, and the divine
right of kings, rested on this philosophical premise, and the
Byzantine court developed a theology of the emperor and
court. Modern statism is a descendant of this faith. Whether
democracy, communism, or the United Nations, it sees the ful-
filment of man in terms of the state, the true One and Reality
of being. Man, after Aristotle, is seen as a social animal who ex-
ists truly only in the state. There is no law beyond the state, so
that, whether in Russia or the United States, Christianity must
be denied its role as the basis of law and be given at best toler-
ation as a peripheral or non-essential factor in man’s history.
Man is now defined as humanity rather than the individual,
and this great one, humanity, to be truly a unity, must exist as
one state. In this picture, any assertion of individuality, local
or national independence, or the reality of races, is viewed
with hostility and as a sign of mental sickness; it is an assertion
of plurality which challenges the reality and unity of the uni-
versal. It is a “sick” shattering of the great oneness of being.
But, since differences and distinctions are basic to all descrip-
tion and definition, meaning disappears as this universal tri-
umphs. We have noted the bold derogation of all plurality and
meaning in Milarepa. There are signs of a similar boldness in
modern champions of this exclusive universal, humanity as a

world state. Thus, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and oth-
ers negate all other meanings in terms of the one reality, hu-
manity, but humanity seen as totally divorced from Christian-
ity, law, morality, and civilization. The tension between the
one and the many, in non-Christian systems, means the exclu-
siveness of one or the other, with the end result being the total
meaninglessness of categories, whether in Milarepa or Miller.
7. Implications for Education and Freedom

Basic then to all cultures and civilizations is an answer to the
problem of the one and the many. The fact that this century
witnesses an organized philosophical, educational, religious,
and practical evasion of the problem makes it only more ur-
gent and our plight more serious. Formal education today is a
tool for the systematic destruction of knowledge because it by-
passes the basic questions. It is Alexandrian, learned but igno-
rant, and given to masses of detail without a focus. As at the
end of the Middle Ages, the academic world again is plagued by
a reign of dunces. A curious footnote to history is the fact that
John Duns Scotus (1266 or 1274-1308), the father of the dunc-
es, was followed in his Realism by the American Charles
Peirce (1839-1914), who influenced James, Dewey, and Royce.
But, irrespective of these men, the fact remains that their eras
saw a rise of statism because the prevailing thought of the day
moved towards an exclusive principle of unity. Duns Scotus
indeed tried to give the individual place within the one, but the
era as a whole tended either to a mystical absorption of the plu-
rality by the one, or a shattering of all unity by the assertion
of the autonomy of the many.
In our day, when philosophy, economic theory, psychiatry,
and politics question the idea of the soul, and at times even of
the mind of man, concepts such as liberty are basically irrele-
vant. Where is man’s freedom in Freud, Marx, Keynes, or
Dewey?
The upsurge of mass-conditioning in this century has spelled
the demise of the autonomous man who has been so
enthusiastically proclaimed by liberal theorists. Autonomy

may still be a reality for the small minority who operate the
conditioning process — or who manage to escape it. But
because the vast bulk of the community passively receives the
attitudes which are implanted in them, it is necessary for us to
recast our thinking about the “individual” in politics. If his
mind is not “his own,” the notions which we have inherited
from liberal theory must be overhauled, or even discarded.
Conceptions such as “consent,” “obedience,” “obligation,”
“leadership,” “public opinion,” “representative government,”
“majority rule,” and even “freedom” must take on new
meanings. The traditional definitions which spring from
liberal theory may perhaps still hold true for those who plan
the conditioning of others. But they are gross malaprops for
those whose minds are on the receiving end. And this latter
group contains the vast majority of us.27
Such a perspective rests on a doctrine of man which is
non-Christian and without any awareness of the trinitarian
answer to the problem of the one and the many. Our
anthropology, or doctrine of man, is a product of our
theology, our doctrine of God. When the temporal one and
many problem is viewed in non-trinitarian terms, either the
anarchistic autonomy of man, the many, is asserted, or the
totalitarian reign of the one, the State or some other total
order. The problem cannot be evaded, and, to be met, the right
questions must first be raised.
8. The Question of Authority

The implications for the practical question of authority are
now apparent. In Nominalism, sovereignty and authority rest
with the many, with individuals, who are a law unto them-
selves. No law beyond themselves can have any binding power
over them. The logic of Nominalism leads it into anarchy. Re-
alism, however, renders sovereignty and authority into the
hands of the one, whether bishop or caesar. There is no appeal
beyond this powerful unity, and no right which can be logical-
ly asserted against it.
27. Andrew Hacker, “Dostoievsky’s Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political

Theory,” The Journal of Politics 17, no. 4 (November 1955): 613.
As against this impasse, orthodox Chalcedonian trin-

itarianism asserts the transcendence of sovereignty, which rests
in the triune God. Temporal authority is ministerial or
delegated power, subject to God and His law. Authority rests
both in the temporal unity and in the plurality, and its true
exercise requires this diffusion. Since there is an equal ultimacy
of unity and plurality in the eternal One-and-Many, there is an
equal delegation of authority in the temporal one and many.
In civil government, to cite one instance of a temporal one and
many, this means that there is a division of powers, a general
diffusion of authority, and a balance of controls and powers
throughout the entire structure of civil government, from
citizenry on through all the diversified structure of their
government. Both liberties and powers are alike limited, under
God, and hence under law. Liberty is limited and power is
limited because the temporal order is under God. The effect
historically of this concept on Reformed church structures, on
institutional life, and on civil government and constitutional
theory is of major importance. Whatever other influences may
have been at work, it is apparent that, in the shaping of the
United States, a truly Christian concept of the one and the
many was a decisive, if often unrecognized, presupposition.
Restoration of this presupposition, and further development
of its implications, is basic to man’s future in its every facet.
We are still living on the unearned increment of past ages,
reaping from fields we did not sow, and harvesting from
ancient trees we never planted. This as of old is the road to
Babylon and to captivity. Faced with such a threat, an ancient
precedent should give us warning. Zedekiah tried every
practical answer but avoided the essential one. His premise was
basically Babylonian, and, as a result, his small Babylon in
Judea fell before Nebuchadnezzar’s greater one. Then as now,
we are no stronger than our foundations.
Chapter II
The Ground of Liberty
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
religious premises.1 These premises are not always recognized;

they often function as the unrecognized axioms of thought and
are all the more powerful by virtue of the basically religious
commitment to them. Moreover, these cultural premises have
as their basis a philosophical tension. With the exception of the
Christian motive, they are all dialectical in nature, which
means that they are basically and intrinsically divided by an
irrevocable religious and philosophical antithesis, “two central
motive powers” in tension and conflict. In such a situation,
liberty often arises as a by-product of dialectical imbalance, as
was the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only
to disappear subsequently. As the recognition of the
irrevocability of the tension becomes more and more clear, the
culture collapses.
This philosophical tension is, as Cornelius Van Til has
shown, between the one and the many, between unity and
diversity, universality and particularity.2 The question which
haunts the dialectical culture is this: how to have unity
without totally undifferentiated and meaningless oneness? If
all things are basically one, then differences are meaningless,
divisions false, and definitions are sophistications, in that the
tyranny, or destiny, of oneness is the truth of all being. But, if
all things are basically many, and if plurality is ultimate, then
the world dissolves into unrelated particulars and becomes, as
some thinkers insist, not a universe but a multiverse, and every
atom is in a sense its own law and being. The first leads to the
breakdown of differences and the liberty of atomistic
individualism and particularity; the second is the breakdown
of fundamental law into nihilism and the retreat of men and
their arts into isolated and private universes. Our naïve
experience testifies to the reality of both the one and the many.
1. See Dooyeweerd, Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought (Grand

Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948); 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.
2. See Van Til, The Metaphysics of Apologetics, 1931; A Christian Theory of
Knowledge, 1954; The Defense of the Faith, 1955; Some Issues in Contemporary
Thought, 1962, all Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia.
The Ground of Liberty 25
The history of thought and culture testifies to the continual

shattering of cultures on the impossibility of their theoretical,
religious, cultural, and political reconciliation apart from the
premise of consistently biblical thought and faith. Operative in
all these other philosophies, all apostate from the Christian
perspective, is the presupposed autonomy of theoretical
thought, i.e., reason playing the role of god and ultimate judge
rather than reason as reason.
2. Liberty and Dialectics

All this means that, at the very least, two questions are in-
volved in any discussion of liberty. First, what is true liberty,
liberty not as the accident of a culture but as an aspect and
product of its essence?
Second, is liberty worthwhile? The second question is an ob-
vious one, but it needs to be recognized. Liberty is worthwhile
only when it has an essential relation to the faith of a culture.
A few years ago, Lin Yutang called attention to the change in
Western culture since Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or
give me death!” Those words once electrified men. “The only
whisper we can hear now is, ‘Give me security or give me
death! Put me in a collectivistic jail if you want, but give me a
meal ticket and an old-age coupon!’ What a comedown for a
revolutionist! What an amazing contrast to the hope of man in
the eighteenth century!”3 The question of liberty is thus in a
very real measure a question of faith. Man’s current problem
in the economic realm is not that capitalism has failed but that
man has failed. As a result, capitalism, liberty, and individual-
ism all have an unpleasant and distasteful ring to man; their
very success adds to their offense when man himself is a failure.
What is it in Western culture that has produced this recur-
ring revulsion for liberty? Why has it been so widely prevalent
again in our day? We have cited its repeated abandonment in
3. Lin Yutang, Between Tears and Laughter (Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon
Books, 1943), 179.
dialectical cultures; let us now examine the cultural motives of

Western civilization in terms of this concern.
The antithesis or dialectic of Greek culture came to be, as a
result of a long development, the form-matter motive. The dif-
ferences between Greek philosophers were differences of em-
phasis; the common presupposition of all was the form-matter
motive.4 Two worlds were thus seen in mixture, but as basical-
ly alien to one another, one, the world of nature, or matter, of
“hard reality” and atoms, and the other, the world of form,
ideas, universals; the first is given to change and flux, the other
is timeless, unchanging, and eternal. Reality, the real world,
was thus made up in some fashion of two antithetical and irrec-
oncilable elements. Naïve experience might see this all as one
world, but theoretical thought understood it as an irrevocably
dialectical existence. Accordingly, as theoretical thought dealt
progressively with this problem, it became progressively
aware that its dialectics was destroying rather than undergird-
ing human faith and culture; it tended steadily to denegate or
suppress one or another aspect of this dualistic interpretation
of reality. If matter were stressed, then all things were reduced
to atoms, all else in reality being dismissed as subjective and il-
lusionary, with consequent cynicism and cultural collapse. If
form or ideas were stressed, then mysticism became man’s es-
cape from the false world of appearance or matter. Mysticism
is always incapable of dealing with the problems of culture be-
cause it is a denial of their validity. The great one must absorb
all reality, and individuation is an unhealthy separation. Neo-
platonic mysticism permeated the Greco-Roman world, and it
quickly infiltrated the church thinly disguised as Christianity.
Thus Simon Stylites was under constant disapproval as far as
the church was concerned, and his roots were in Neoplatonism
and the Atargatis cult. The mystical contempt of the world,
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).
however, always has as its counterpart the materialistic con-

tempt of law and meaning as subjective, relative, or irrelevant.
Thus the Cynics, who came into prominence in Greece in the
fourth century B.C. and continued to be prominent to the
sixth century A.D., held that hedonism or happiness was the
only true goal for life, and that the wise man, furthermore,
sought to decrease his desires as the wiser means of attaining
happiness. Cynicism thus fathered Stoicism. (The Cyrenaic
school differed in that it sought to increase the satisfactions.)
The name of both schools was derived from Kyon, dog, and the
name is revelatory. Since law and with it ethics had been ex-
cluded from the hard world of reality as subjective nonsense,
the philosophers of this school often deliberately aped dogs (in
shamelessness, begging, barking, and biting) and even copulat-
ed in public to express their contempt of any philosophy
which would exalt man above his “animal reality.” Man being
an atom in an atomic world, self-sufficiency became his goal,
to be independent of any law outside of his own desires, and to
be wholly dependent on his own inner resources for happi-
ness. Thus Diogenes of Sinope (died shortly after 325 B.C.),
who is well known for his pseudo-search for an honest man,
demonstrated these doctrines very vividly. He was indepen-
dent of housing. He held that the sexual urge was totally natu-
ral, and that to seek privacy in its satisfaction, or to be
governed by prohibitions such as that against incest, was un-
natural. (In our day, Kinsey has classified homosexuality and
“animal contacts” with marital sex as alike normal, because
natural, outlets.) Diogenes saw no reason to prefer one woman
to another, or, if a woman were lacking, he prescribed open
and public masturbation as a natural and prophylactic mea-
sure, stating that he wished all hungers were equally easy to sat-
isfy. Likewise Diogenes saw no valid objection to cannibalism.
Thus, Diogenes was ready to grant extreme license, and yet, by
his contempt of anything destructive of atomism, he was at
one and the same time given to fantastic ascetic practices to
avoid dependence on others. The difference is not great; both
mysticism and asceticism on the one hand, and materialistic at-

omism on the other, involve a denial of an aspect of reality and
run into both a wild emotionalism and a ready castration of
the whole man and his life. Thus, on the one hand, wealth and
success were religiously reprehensible and dirty, whereas, on
the other, as much later in the French and Russian Revolu-
tions, and in Nazi thought, culture was a divisive and ugly
thing, a pretension as against the hard world of material, polit-
ical, and economic reality. The reported Nazi statement,
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver,” epit-
omizes the recurring temper of diseased societies. Modern mu-
sic, art, and literature are at war against culture.
The medieval Roman Catholic nature-grace motive retained
the dialectical character of Greek thought. The natural world
was a realm in itself, knowable by means of autonomous rea-
son, which, while unable to penetrate the mysteries of the su-
pernatural, was still self-sufficient in terms of the natural.
Grace thus neither canceled nature nor superseded it, but rath-
er perfected it, in terms of Scholastic thought. In the natural
realm, no authority but reason needed to be acknowledged, al-
though it was assumed that nature would not contradict grace.
Indeed, it could not, since two separate worlds were involved.
Man dwelt in one world as a perishable and material body, and
in the other as an ostensibly rational and immortal soul. Here
the Greek form-matter motive is seen in thinly Christianized
terminology and form. Again, the same nemesis plagued it.
The Nominalists simply denied the reality of the universals of
the world of grace; the world again relapsed into atomism. If
reason were sovereign in its realm, and reason knew nothing
of this realm of grace with its law, then reason must conclude
that this world of grace and law was not real. And, assuming
the reality of the two worlds, what held them together? The re-
sult was cynicism and mysticism. Extravagant mystical and as-
cetic practices flourished. Various cults gave license to nudism
and sexual promiscuity in the name of the new “Christianity.”
Physical degeneration characterized the man of the late Middle
Ages, and medieval historians have estimated that, at Luther’s

coming, one third to one half of Europe was infected by vene-
real diseases, then far more virulent than now. Churchmen
themselves, often led by popes, gave expression to both radical
cynicism and a frenetic immorality. As in the case of Gre-
co-Roman culture, the decline was not without its sky-rocket-
ing by-products, startling but eventually earth-bound
manifestations of one facet or another. Thus, the Renaissance
was dedicated to a materialistic atomism on the one hand, and
a revival of Neoplatonism on the other. Both were equally
sterile in the long run, and the atomism paved the way for the
Renaissance tyrant by its destruction of the concept of funda-
mental law. Restraint was thus removed.
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
5. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, 67.

the more powerful, real, and “natural” precisely because it was

man’s creation in the world of nature. Likewise, in the realm
of value, man was creating his own contracts, laws, and
standards and thereby asserting his autonomy. Rootlessness
was conceived of as an intellectual virtue, in that the denial of
the past, of history and of God, was essential to the true
sovereignty and creativity of man.6 In Immanuel Kant, the
sovereignty of this autonomous man and his reason came to
full focus, and hence to rapid dissolution as the dialectical
tension became paramount. For him, the true self of man is
identical with the law which man himself creates. Thus, man
became truly sovereign, and, in Kant’s theoretical and practical
reason, became the creator of his world and of his values. Kant
sought also, as against Hume, to establish the validity of
science. In the process of doing so, he also heightened the
dialectical tension between nature and freedom. Indeed, a new
set of expressions articulated this cultural motive. On the one
hand, science and faith were seen as the two irreconcilable
worlds of nature (science) and freedom (faith), and, on the
other, the revealing terminology that came into usage at the
same time saw it as a dualism of reality and value. As science
came into increasing prominence, prestige, and power with the
twentieth century, this dualism worked more sharply to drive
a wedge between nature, science, and reality on the one hand,
and freedom, faith, and value on the other. Kinsey has not
been the only scientist to turn on freedom, faith, and value
with all the dogged and determined scientism of the ancient
Cynics. This dialectic is basic to modern thought, as almost
any textbook gives witness. Thus, so influential a text writer as
Edwin Arthur Burtt, in his Principles and Problems of Right
Thinking, A Textbook for Logic, Reflective Thinking and
Orientation Courses (1928), devoted a central chapter
introductory to his concluding section to “Fact Versus Value.”
But this very statement of the dialectic is its breakdown.
Religion, freedom, value, morality, and law are seen as
6. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Brave New World of the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1961), 111 ff.
non-factual, implicitly subjective and as merely pragmatic or

relativistic. As a result of this breakdown, crisis again grips the
West, already twice rescued by the entrance and revival of
biblical faith. The reality which remains is either an atomistic
and lawless particularity, or the undifferentiated and
meaningless oneness of matter or energy in motion, in either
instance hostile to value and to liberty.
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
gospel of cynicism Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and other

works are dedicated. Today also, as in the days of the Roman
circus, marked interest is shown in another “natural” levelling
phenomenon, bestiality, and pornographic films showing
trained dogs copulating with women are beginning to appear
at “smokers” and “special showings.” When meaning is gone,
and the exploration of reality in terms of fundamental mean-
ing collapses, then the exploration of sensation takes its place.
The process, in the Greek text of Romans 1:27, is described by
Paul as the “burning out” of man.
5. The Libertarian Failure

In the face of this, some libertarians have sought to revivify
culture and reestablish liberty by returning to the eighteenth
century formulation of the dialectic. Apart from the difficulty
of giving life to a faulty and dying faith, this attempt is doomed
to failure in that it fails to see the source of the cultural
problem. By its limited although important concern, liberty, it
overlooks the basic matter of faith and fails to recognize that
the liberty it looks back to was a youthful accident of the
humanistic dialectic, of which statism is the essence. However,
more perceptive libertarians have attempted to keep up with
the times by recognizing the death of values as such and
seeking somehow to draw out a new kind of value from the
world of science out of brute factuality. These libertarians
attempt to extract, from the great god nature, by means of
science in the form of tests, measurements, or natural laws,
some results to prove that nature does permit liberty. Thus
much has been made of the physicists’ discovery of the
principle of indeterminacy, to cite one example, i.e., the one
most prominently used in this century. But scientific
indeterminacy is not much more than chance variation. It is
blind, impersonal, and purposeless. Statistical probability is
not liberty. Moreover, this procedure merely underscores the
subservience of man and of man’s illusory liberty to nature, a
blind force or energy in motion. Furthermore, the essential
point is missed, namely, that modern man is not primarily
interested in liberty, and often is not interested in it at all.

Above all else, as Dooyeweerd has stated it, “modern man has
lost himself,”7 and he cannot grieve greatly over other things
when faced with this primary loss, and with the sense of the
total collapse of all meaning. When man finds himself, to use a
characteristic expression of Van Til, on the frightening and
vast shore of undifferentiated being, he has no standard by
which to value himself or anything else in all creation. Liberty
is thus inevitably irrelevant. The average libertarian fails to see
this problem because he is often unaware of his own position
of relative wealth. Having usually been reared in a Christian
home, he lives on unearned increment and steadily lays waste
his inherited capital, which he treats as a fact of nature rather
than a past Christian victory. He assumes civilization, as Jose
Ortega y Gasset said the typical “scientist” does, whom he
described in “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation’” as believing
“that civilisation is there in just the same way as the earth’s
crust and the forest primeval.”8 This fearful error is reinforced
by the myth of evolution, which treats civilization and culture
as natural products of man’s evolutionary development in the
same basic sense as nest building is a part of the life of birds.
Man’s blindness is thus doubly ensured.
The libertarian contribution has been a splendid one in the
narrow provinces of literary criticism and political and
economic thought, but it has been oblivious to the larger issue.
By avoiding the larger issue, it has been at times both marginal
and parasitic; this is apparent in the hope of some libertarians
for “another Burke,” i.e., for a man reflecting Christian
tradition without being fully a part of it. Its hunger has too
often been for God without God. This hope was well
expressed in the title of one book, John Crowe Ransom’s God
without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930).9
7. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, 175.

8. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932),
126.
9. See William Raymond Smith, “Presume the Rest: The Conservative
Argument?,” Modern Age 6, no. 1 (Winter 1961-62): 67-80.
This purely sociological orthodoxy has its nemesis: since it is

without true commitment, it is equally usable to justify
statism, as notably in Machiavelli and Reinhold Niebuhr, and
it still fails to answer the dialectical tension.
6. The Christian Answer

As Van Til points out, in Christology and Barthianism, “all
non-biblical thought is dialectical,” and all of it “expresses itself
in the form of a religious dualism.” Moreover, as Van Til has
pointed out in another context, all such thought is immanen-
tistic and is dedicated to the principle of continuity. By its im-
manence philosophy, it insists that all power, purpose, and
meaning must be inherent in the world of nature, so that it
seeks “to envelop God in his cosmos.” By means of the princi-
ple of continuity, all things are reduced to a common being.10
Modern thought, whether Marxist or libertarian, is alike estab-
lished on the Enlightenment’s dialectic. This does not obscure
the internal differences. But, even as the Nominalists and Real-
ists of Scholasticism shared a common world and a common
fate, so contemporary facets of the humanistic dialectic, how-
ever hostile, share a common destiny as the dialectical tension
tears their world apart. No late medieval Index or Inquisition
could stem the decay; neither can Soviet tyranny and suppres-
sion, which only testify to the abiding and growing collapse of
the dialectic; the Soviet intellectual does not believe in the cul-
tural motives he is expected to champion.
The Christian cultural motive has been, although mainly pe-
ripheral, nonetheless the vitality of Western culture since the
fifth century, when the Council of Chalcedon, facing a world
in disintegration, boldly asserted the Christology which is ba-
sic to true liberty.11 This motive has been described by
Dooyeweerd as “the biblical theme of creation, fall into sin and
redemption by Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, in
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 communion of the Holy Spirit.”12 According to Calvin,

the ground and presupposition of self-knowledge is the knowl-
edge of God. Accordingly, self-knowledge “transcends the the-
oretical attitude of thought.”13 This means that, because man is
not self-created and because the universe is not man’s creation,
man’s knowledge of himself and his world must be governed
by the prior interpretation of the Creator. Man’s knowledge is
thus not creative but, in the Christian sense, analogical. To fol-
low Van Til, whose formulation here is the decisive one, the
Christian motive is basically that of the ontological trinity as
revealed in Scripture. God is eternal and uncreated being, and
the universe is His creation and thus created being; it has mean-
ing only in terms of Him since He is its creator and sustainer.
This triune God is the eternal One-and-Many as distinct from
the temporal one and many. “In God the one and the many are
equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than
diversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than
unity. The persons of the Trinity are mutually exhaustive of
one another. The Son and the Spirit are ontologically on a par
with the Father.” Moreover, “It is only in the Christian doc-
trine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, that we re-
ally have a concrete universal. In God’s being there are no
particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing
universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars. It goes
without saying that if we hold to the eternal one and many in
the manner explained above we must hold the temporal one
and many to be created by God.” “If the creation doctrine is
thus taken seriously, it follows that the various aspects of cre-
ated reality must sustain such relations to one another as have
been ordained between them by the Creator, as superiors, in-
feriors or equals. All aspects being equally created, no one as-
pect of reality may be regarded as more ultimate than
another.”14 The whole body of Van Til’s writings is given to
the development of this concept of the ontological trinity and
its philosophical implications.
12. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, 42; Transcendental Problems,
67ff.; A New Critique, vol. 1, 61ff.
13. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique, vol. 1, 57.
14. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 42-44.
For our purposes, briefly stated, very important implica-

tions are clearly apparent. There is in this position no dialecti-
cal tension. Because of the Trinity, the equal ultimacy of the
one and the many, we are not faced with the insoluble Scylla
and Charybdis of all theoretical thought. We are not faced
with a vast, undifferentiated and meaningless ocean of being
which swallows up all things. Neither are we faced with an in-
finite and atomistic particularity, in which the many are with-
out contact with one another. There is no need for the cultural
yawing between a destructive collectivism and an atomistic
particularity. Both the one and the many are equally created
and hence equally concrete—and equally under the absolute
law of the eternal One-and-Many. Instead of a cultural tension,
for example, between state and man, there is a cultural unity as
both are undergirded and have meaning in terms of the funda-
mental law of God, which governs and delimits all things.
7. Law and Liberty

A basic aspect of this meaning is law. Man’s liberty is rooted
and grounded in this law, as Sir Walter Scott, in terms of his
Calvinistic heritage, saw when he opposed to the French Rev-
olution’s “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” his own battle
cry, written for the Scottish Dragoons, “Liberty and Laws.”
Because the fulness of man’s meaning is discernible only in
terms of his Creator and the creative purpose, it is impossible,
if man is in harmony with God, for liberty and law to be in
conflict. Even as a fish needs water to live in, because it is his
environment or law-sphere, and “liberation” into air would
kill him, so man finds his true liberty in God’s law, his envi-
ronment. The law becomes a curse to apostate man, since it
makes it clear that his course apart from God’s law sphere is
death, but to the redeemed man, it is the environment of life.15
Man, created in the image of God, has a cultural mandate,
i.e., to exercise the implications of that image, to be God’s
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.
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

the divine and the human which characterizes non-Christian

thought was forestalled.
This is the framework of liberty. Its biblical character has
been the decisive factor in Western history, even though its na-
ture has been only spasmodically apprehended. The Reforma-
tion set forth this motive, although Melanchthon quickly
absorbed Lutheranism, and Beza, Calvinism, into the older
and newer dialectics without clear recognition of the full na-
ture of the Christian motive. The churches of today are radi-
cally infected either by the dialectics of Scholasticism or of pre-
and post-Kantian humanism, by the presuppositions of the En-
lightenment. At their very best, their witness is limited to so-
teriology in a fragmentary sense, and the broad cultural calling
is bypassed by conservatism or associated with humanism and
statism by religious liberalism. As a result of this failure and
also of the general cultural failure, van Riessen’s comment is an
apt description of our time: “The disintegration of existence,
i.e., the dissolution of coherence in the elements of existence,
has reached an advanced stage for a great many people.”17
Men who find life itself meaningless or worthless usually
find little value in attempts to recall past liberties. Liberty be-
longs for them to a dead world of meaning. That true world of
meaning must first be restored if liberty is to be given its right-
ful place and respect.
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
For Egyptian thought, god and man were of a common na-

ture and alike products of a common being. As Wilson has ob-
served, “Between god and man there was no point at which
one could erect a boundary line and state that here substance
changed from divine, superhuman, immortal, to mundane, hu-
man, mortal.” The Egyptian religious faith was not monothe-
istic but monophysite, not one god but one nature in common
to gods and men. “It is not a matter of single god but of single
nature of observed phenomena in the universe, with the clear
possibility of exchange, and substitution. With relation to gods
and men the Egyptians were monophysites: many men and
many gods, but all ultimately of one nature.”2 This common
nature was shared by the entire universe in varying degrees and
set forth in various aspects of worship. Juvenal, in Satire 15,
commented on the “garden gods” of Egypt: “It is an impious
outrage to crunch leeks and onions with the teeth. What a holy
race to have such divinities springing up in their gardens!”3
Both gods and men developed or evolved, and in a very real
sense, battled their way out of the original chaos of being. Ac-
cording to Fontenrose, “The peoples of the Near and Middle
East looked upon creation as a process of bringing order out of
chaos.” This is both process and combat. “For the cosmos has
been won from the chaos that still surrounds it, as a cultivated
plot from the encompassing wilderness.”4 Chaos or darkness
generates life; it is both the source of life and the enemy of life.
“Life requires order, which means putting a limit upon action
in certain directions. But an order that resists all change and
further creative activity denies life and turns into its opposite:
it becomes a state of inactivity and death.” Chaos and life are
thus in a necessary tension: life without chaos becomes death,
but life which surrenders to chaos and abandons order is also
death. Life requires order, and order means death, the triumph
of chaos. As Fontenrose notes, “This is only to say that both
2. John A. Wilson, “Egypt,” in Henri Frankfort, etc., Before Philosophy: The In-
tellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (n.p.:Penguin Books, 1951), 74-75.
3. G. G. Ramsay, trans., Satire XV, Juvenal and Persius, Satire XV, 11. 9-11 (Lon-
don: William Heinemann, 1930), 289.
4. Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1959), 218-219.
The Continuity of Being 41
life forces and death forces are necessary in a properly balanced

individual and world.”5 Here we have the dialectic of man in
the ancient world: chaos and life, a dialectic which undergirds
much of subsequent thought. Expressed in worldwide myths
of antiquity, it reappears as modern medical science in the psy-
choanalysis of Freud and his theory of Eros and Thanatos, life
instincts and death instincts.6
Chaos and cosmos must thus coexist in balance in the ideal
state. Cosmos means the world of the gods and the world of
men, heaven and earth, and chaos is the underworld. The ideal
state, the high point of being and “the center of the world,” is
that society where the three levels of being—heaven, earth, and
the underworld — are in communication, and “this communi-
cation is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal
pillar, axis mundi,” which brings all three together.7 A state or
empire which dominated the world scene of its day was espe-
cially sure that its society represented the center of the earth,
the high point in the process of being to date, that order in
which chaos, men, and the gods were in communication.
Thus, in Assyria, the king officiated before a garlanded pole or
tree which has been explained as “the ritual centre of the
earth.”8 This communication was the basis of political and re-
ligious life: “reality is conferred through participation in the
‘symbolism of the Center’: cities, temples, houses become real
by the fact of being assimilated to the ‘center of the world.’”9
This communication rested in a community of being,
through participation in one common being, out of which the
gods had germinated and developed, and from whom men
were germinated. According to the Papyrus of Ani,
5. Ibid., 473.
6. Ibid., 474. See R. J. Rushdoony, Freud (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1964).
7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane., trans. Willard R. Trask (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 37.
8. Eric Burrows, “Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian Religion,” in S. H.
Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual
in the Ancient World (London: SPCK, 1935), 63n.
9. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans.
Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 5.
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.
faith, resurrection is an act of discontinuity and a miracle. In

the Egyptian perspective, man, after death, manifested a conti-
nuity either towards chaos and destruction or towards deity
and resurrection. The doctrine of the resurrection in Egypt
was set in the context of a naturalistic, fertility cult perspec-
tive. The gods themselves “are not immortal but perennial.”14
The first creation arose out of the primeval waters of chaos,
the gods and the primeval hillock or mountain arising and then
becoming the source of subsequent being. Chaos is the ground
of being, and the source of being, and an Egyptian papyrus de-
clared:
The All-Lord said, after he had come into being:
I am he who came into being as Khepri. When I had come into
being, being (itself) came into being, and all beings came into
being after I came into being.15
The place of creation is the primeval hillock, mountain, or
pyramid, arising out of the waters of chaos to establish order.
This sacred mountain or tower is the meeting-place of heaven
and earth, where communication is established between heav-
en, earth, and hell. It “is situated at the center of the world. Ev-
ery temple, or palace—and, by extension, every sacred city or
royal residence—is a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Cen-
ter.”16 True social order requires peace and communication
with both chaos and deity, and society either moves down-
ward into chaos or forward into deification. The significance
of the Tower of Babel is thus apparent: it denied the disconti-
nuity of God’s being and asserted man’s claim to a continuity
of being with God and heaven. The Tower was the gate to God
and the gate of God, signifying that man’s social order made
possible an ascent of being into the divine order. The Egyptian
pyramid set forth the same faith.
14. Jane E. Harrison, “Introduction” to Budge, Osiris, v.

15. James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament, second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 6; in
reference to the primeval hillock, see, 3.
16. Eliade, Cosmos and History, 12. See also Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the
Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 151ff.
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....
17. A. M. Hocart, “The Life-Giving Myth,” in Hooke, The Labyrinth, 266.

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
18. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 431.

19. Samuel Alfred Browne Mercer, “The Religion of Ancient Egypt,” in
Vergilius Ferm, ed., Ancient Religions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 37.
20. C. G. Seligman, Egypt and Negro Africa: A Study in Divine Kingship (London:
George Routledge, 1934), 60.
21. Budge, Osiris, vol. 2, 162.
22. Ibid., 168.
23. R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (New York: Grove
Press, 1959), 41, 157.
24. Ibid., 121. See also Wilson, “Egypt,” 73.
and Pharaoh unavoidably possessed theological overtones.”25

Kingship in this sense was basic to civilization, and the corona-
tion of the pharaoh was “an epiphany.” The pharaoh repre-
sented order against chaos. His death was a temporary victory
for chaos. Nature required kingship, for nature represented or-
der as against chaos, so that nature was not conceivable apart
from the pharaoh, who was not only the mediator between the
gods and man, and between society and nature, but also the
source of order as against chaos.26 Incest was an important as-
pect of Egyptian mythology,27 and, between brother and sister,
common to the royal line.28 Although economic motives were
present, such incest also had a deep-seated religious motive. It
was a controlled act of chaos, an act in which order deliberate-
ly entered into chaos to make it fruitful for order. Plutarch’s
Lives, in describing Julius Caesar at the Rubicon, reported
“that the night before he passed the river he had an impious
dream, that he was unnaturally familiar with his mother.” Sue-
tonius reported the same dream, or a similar one, for an earlier
date in Caesar’s life:
The following night he was much disquieted by a dream in
which he imagined he had carnal company with his own
mother. But hopes of most glorious achievement were kindled
in him by the soothsayers, who interpreted the dream to mean
that he was destined to have sovereignty over all the world, his
mother whom he saw under him signifying none other than
the earth, which is counted the mother of all things.29
This concept, somewhat dimmed in Caesar, prevails full force
in some contemporary cultures, where incestuous unions, nor-
mally a horror and a terror, become obligatory in the invoked
chaos of the festival.30
25. Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 148.

26. Ibid., 3ff., 33, 101, 212.
27. Ibid., 168-169, 177-180.
28. Immanuel Velikovsky, Oedipus and Athnalon: Myth and History (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 96-102.
29. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (New York: Book League, 1937), 6.
30. Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Glenco, IL: The Free
Press, 1959), 117.
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.
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.
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.
41. Thorkild Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” in Frankfort: Before Philosophy, 139-140.

42. Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 237.
43. Thorkild Jacobsen, “Formative Tendencies in Sumerian Religion,” in G.
Ernest Wright, ed., The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in honor of William
Foxwell Albright (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 274.
44. Sebatino Moscati, Ancient Semitic Civilizations (New York: Putman’s
Capricorn Books, 1960), 71-74. See Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 72ff.
A crowd with no leader to organize and direct it is lost and be-

wildered, like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. It is also
dangerous, however; it can be destructive, like waters which
break the dams that hold them and submerge fields and gar-
dens if the canal inspector is not there to keep the dams in re-
pair.... Finally, a leaderless, unorganized crowd is useless and
unproductive, like a field which brings forth nothing if it is
not ploughed.
Hence an orderly world is unthinkable without a superior au-
thority to impose his will. The Mesopotamian feels convinced
that authorities are always right: “The command of the palace,
like the command of Anu, cannot be altered. The king’s word
is right: his utterance, like that of a god, cannot be changed.”45
For destruction and chaos to overwhelm a state meant a like
fate for its gods. Thus, the goddess Ningal is seen, in a “Lamen-
tation over the Destruction of Ur” by Elamites and Subarians,
as herself defeated and homeless.46 For the Sumerians, “a king
was the vicegerent of god upon earth — ‘tenant-farmer’, they
called him — and the god was the real ruler of the land.”47 The
king was thus in a very real sense the god of this world in terms
of his vicegerency. In the Akkadian Amarna letters, the mon-
arch is addressed as, “the king, my lord, my pantheon, my
Sun-god.”48
In biblical literature, God, by virtue of His transcendence
and deity, is beyond exhaustive knowledge, but, by virtue of
His total self-consciousness, is the source of certain knowledge;
His word for men is clear-cut and knowable. The Mesopotami-
an gods, being involved in a being common to men and chaos,
and involved in a cosmic struggle of questionable outcome, are
neither totally sovereign nor fully self-conscious. They can be
defeated, and they can be self-defeating. The result for the wor-
shiper is clearly moral confusion: how can he truly know gods
who do not know themselves?
45. Jacobsen, in “Mesopotamia,” 218.

46. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 455-463.
47. Sir Leonard Wooley, Ur of the Chaldees (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1938), 102. On
the “Mythology of Sumer and Akkad,” see Kramer, Mythologies of the Ancient
World, 93-137; Kramer, “Sumerian Literature, A General Survey,” 249-266, and
Jacobsen, “Formative Tendencies in Sumerian Religion,” 267-278.
48. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 484; cf. 483-490.
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.
king is the great mountain, the father Enlil.”54 Man’s hope

therefore is comprehended in the form of the state and the per-
son of the king. There is here no concept of an area of freedom
from statist control, because man has no area of transcendence
to the state. His life and hope is the state. In this perspective,
the alternative to total statism is not liberty under God but
chaos, and the unhesitating choice for the state. Indeed, an al-
ternative to the state does not exist to any real degree, if at all.
“Your king is the great mountain, the father Enlil.” But the
source and wellspring of that order is chaos, and hence the Me-
sopotamian pessimism.
The pre-Hittite Anatolian religion was naturalistic and
shared in Ishtar worship.55 Hittite religion, with variations,
clearly showed the same war against chaos.56 The title of the
Hittite king was “the Sun.” When he died, he became a god.57
“The god was to his worshippers exactly what a master was to
his slaves.” His representative was the king, who was “chief
priest.”58 The access to the gods was thus mediated by the king.
The state was thus again the order of existence and man’s en-
tire world; man was a creature of the state, and theology was a
branch or aspect of political science.
The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi saw the authority of
law in “an enduring kingship” which, like “the sun,” rose “to
light up the land.” Nippur-Duranki, the cult-center of Enlil,
set forth the bond of heaven and earth.59 Hammurabi saw him-
self as “the shepherd of the people, whose deeds are pleasing to
Ishtar,” and as
the ancient seed of royalty, the powerful king, the sun of
Babylon, who causes light to go forth over the lands of Sumer
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.
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:
60. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 167.

61. Ibid.; Unger, Archaeology, 155-156.
62. Cyrus H. Gordon, Hammurabi's Code: Quaint or Forward Looking? (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957), 11.
63. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 265, 274-275, 281; from an inscription
of Adad-nirari III, 810-783 B.C.
64. Ibid., 276; Shalmaneser III, 858-824, B.C.
“At bottom... his outlook was that of fatalistic resignation.

There was no salvation.”65 A prayer found in Assurbanipal’s li-
brary expresses this unhappy mood:
... O Lord, my transgressions are many; great are my sins.
... O god whom I know or do not know, (my) transgressions
are many; great are (my) sins.
... The god whom I know or do not know has oppressed me;
The goddess whom I know or do not know has placed suffer-
ing upon me;
Although I am constantly looking for help, no one takes me
by the hand;
When I weep they do not come to my side.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Man is dumb; he knows nothing;
Mankind, everyone that exists, — what does he know?
Whether he is committing sin or doing good, he does not
know.
The monarch himself, who embodied both chaos and order,
echoed this pessimism. A letter of Assurbanipal quotes two
proverbs expressive of cynicism: “When the potter’s dog went
into the oven, he even growled at the potter.” “A sinful woman
at the gate of a judge’s house — her words prevail over that of
her husband.”66
The “Cosmic Mountain” was basic to Babylonian thought as
to all thought in the ancient world, “with various modifica-
tions, from Egypt to China.”67 The king, in the context of a rit-
ual, was god. At times, he was “the link between the gods and
the people whom they had created to do them service. He rep-
resented the people before the gods, and in turn was the pipe-
line through which the gods regulated the affairs of the state
for the people.” Mankind was made from the blood of a slain
god, and, in another myth, the gods declared to the goddess
Mami, “You are the primeval womb, creatress of mankind.”68
65. A. Leo Oppenheim, “Assyro-Babylonian Religion,” in Ferm, Ancient Reli-

gions, 78.
66. Albert Champdor, Babylon, trans. Elsa Coult (London: Elek Books, 1958),
88.
67. H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Hawthorn
Books, 1962), 33; cf. 354-358.
68. Ibid., 361, 416-417.
There was thus a continuity of being between gods and men.

This continuity of being was an important aspect of astrology
then and now, since astrology was “based on the theory of cor-
respondence between the earth and the sky.”69 This correspon-
dence rested in a common being which, in its varying aspects,
manifested a like power in the stars and in men. Babylonian
omens saw chaos as the source of fertility and power. Thus, “If
a man (in his dream) goes in (sexually) to a wild beast, his
household will become prosperous.”70 Temple prostitution
was present in Babylon,71 as it almost invariably is where chaos
is an aspect of the religious dialectic.
Jacobsen, in his discussion of “The Cosmos as a State” and
“The Function of the State,” has called attention to an impor-
tant aspect of Mesopotamian thought:
The fact that the Mesopotamian universe was conceived of as
a state — that the gods who owned and ruled the various city-
states were bound together in a higher unity, the assembly of
the gods, which possessed executive organs for exerting out-
ward pressure as well as for enforcing law and order internally
— has far-reaching consequences for Mesopotamian history
and for the ways in which historical events were viewed and
interpreted. It vastly strengthened tendencies toward political
unification of the country by sanctioning even the most vio-
lent means used toward that end. For any conqueror, if he was
successful, was recognized as the agent of Enlil. It also provid-
ed — even at times when national unity was at a low ebb and
the many city-states were, for all practical purposes, indepen-
dent units — a background on which international law could
work.72
Two implications are clearly apparent here. First, the universe
was a state, and earth should be a state. Both Assyria and Baby-
lon, under Nebuchadnezzar, sought to unify the world of their
day, forcibly moving and dispersing recalcitrant peoples in or-
der to break down old loyalties and to create a unified empire.
Second, it was the successful conqueror, not the legitimate rul-
er, who was the agent of Enlil, the instrument of the gods. This
69. Ibid., 454.

70. Ibid., 192.
71. Ibid., 348-351.
72. Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” 210.
placed a premium on force and violence, but, even more, it de-

clared that the divine law and order was manifested in the most
powerful force of the day, beyond which there could be no ap-
peal, because the powers of heaven were manifested in it. An-
other and widely different power could manifest the divine
agency tomorrow, but it always rested at the moment with the
greatest existing power. Nebuchadnezzar, born into this faith,
could ask incredulously of the three Hebrews, “and who is that
God that shall deliver you out of my hands?” (Dan. 3:15). For
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego to appeal to a god beyond
Nebuchadnezzar for vindication was to him an incredible
thing. Whatever the gods were and sought to be for that day
was manifested in history in the person of Nebuchadnezzar.
Tomorrow was an unknown factor, and Nebuchadnezzar
could plead in prayer that his “descendants rule...forever over
the black-headed,” with a strong sense of the instability of his-
tory,73 knowing that the king who was representing the gods
today could tomorrow be their victim. Thus, whereas in the
Egyptian view “the king was recognized as the successor of the
Creator,” the Mesopotamian king was sometimes identified
more clearly with the suffering god.74 Pessimism was close at
hand in Mesopotamian thought.
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.
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.
Some of the most important insights into the Persian con-

cept of kingship are to be found in F. W. Buckler, although he
tends to identify this concept as “Oriental” and “Eastern.” Its
presence in European thought certainly is no less clear, al-
though Christianity and Hellenic-Renaissance- Enlightenment
strands have introduced other concepts as well. Thus, an act of
Parliament under Queen Elizabeth of England spoke of royal
absolutism in language that was not limited to the English
scene but was common to the doctrines of state elsewhere:
It was asserted that the queen inherited both an enlarging and
a restraining power; by her prerogative she might set at liberty
what was restrained by statute or otherwise, and by her pre-
rogative she might restrain what was otherwise at liberty; that
the royal prerogative was not to be canvassed, nor disputed,
nor examined; and did not even admit of any limitation: that
absolute princes, such as the sovereigns of England, were a spe-
cies of divinity: that it was in vain to attempt tying the queen’s
hands by laws or statutes; since, by means of her dispensing
power, she could loosen herself at pleasure: and that even if a
clause should be annexed to a statute, excluding her dispensing
power, she could first dispense with that clause and then with
the statute.77
This was more power than the “Oriental” Persian monarch
could claim. John Dowland in 1600 wrote of Elizabeth:
When others sing Venite exultemus!
Stand by, and turn to Noli emulari!
For Quare fremuerunt, use Oremus!
Vivat Eliza for an Ave Mari!78
Lord North wrote of Elizabeth to the Bishop of Ely, saying,
“She is oure God in earth; if ther be perfection in flesh and
blood, undoubtedlye it is in her Majestye.”79 In different termi-
nology, an even greater absolutism is now in process of being
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.
granted to the United Nations. “Oriental” monarchy is not

alone in seeing the monarch or the state as “God on earth.” If
the transcendental and discontinuous nature of the being of
God be denied, then the god, gods, or powers of the cosmos are
continuous with man and identifiable with him. To the extent
that they are directly identified with man, to that extent the so-
cial order is absolute and a total power. In full-blown panthe-
ism, the one and the many, and every aspect of being, are
completely unified and totally identifiable one with another.
The most minute particle, then, as fully incorporates being in
itself as the greatest man or force, for being is one being and is
totally and exhaustively present in all things. No social order
is possible in terms of such a concept, although anarchism is an
aspect of this faith.
4. The Chain of Being

The great chain of being concept moves towards this identi-
ty but definitely does not possess it. There is a hierarchy of be-
ing, with a thinness of being in most places and a concentration
of being at other points. This greater immanence of being can
be manifested in a monarch, in reason, or in a class or a people,
or it can be manifested in the collective whole of humanity.
But, wherever manifested, this being is law beyond appeal. It
is possible for the future to see a further development of being,
but for the present there is no appeal beyond the law of mani-
fest power and being. The powers that be are a supreme court
against which there is no appeal. Queen Elizabeth was declared
to be beyond all law; the Persian monarch was bound by law,
but it was his law, issuing only from him, so that he was bound
to himself, to self-consistency. The concept of the continuity
of being, therefore, is incapable of producing other than a to-
talitarian order, whether it be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a
democracy. The high point of being is manifested in the social
order and is total law: apart from it men have no true being.
They are outlaws, mentally sick, or socially maladjusted; they
are seen as incomplete or deformed human beings whose only
hope is conformity to the continuity of being in its present

manifestation.
The only hope such an outcast can have is that, however
deformed he may be in terms of the present, the next
development of being might be his vindication. Although the
freak of today, he may be the standard form of being
tomorrow. Thus, Aristotle was interested in freakish births for
this reason, and, as Cornelius Van Til has pointed out, the
Greeks were interested in Paul’s teachings on the resurrection
for the same reason.
They believed in “the mysterious universe”; they were per-
fectly willing therefore to leave open a place for “the un-
known.” But this “unknown” must be thought of as the
utterly unknowable and indeterminate.80
This same Greek concept, in a gnostic version, is the founda-
tion of the thinking of Eric Voegelin, who reads history in
terms of the concept of the continuity of being and sees
progress in terms of “the leap in being.”81 This is, of course, a
totally relativistic concept. Truth is what the incarnate or man-
ifest being of the day determines it to be: it then changes with
the next leap in being. Stalin was the incarnate truth for his
day, and Khrushchev, with his variations, is the truth of being
for his era. When Khrushchev criticized Stalin on February 25,
1956, a question quickly arose as to the infallibility of the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat, the incarnation of manifest being,
in view of these criticisms of Stalin. Was not the infallibility
and authority of the Party endangered by this speech? This im-
pression was subsequently corrected by Khrushchev: aspects
of Stalin’s leadership which were incorrect for the present had
their place in terms of Stalin’s day and must be seen in histori-
cal perspective. Accordingly, Khrushchev concluded,
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.
Stalin will take a due place as a dedicated Marxist-Leninist and

stalwart revolutionary. Our party and the Soviet people will
remember Stalin and pay tribute to him.82
This same concept of history was read into American history
by the U.S. Supreme Court under Oliver Wendell Holmes,
whose concept of the law saw law as the dominant mores of
the people; truth, therefore, was pragmatic, democratic, and
relative. Basic to this position was an acceptance of
evolutionary thought, and evolution is simply a modern
application of the concept of the continuity of being to the
problem of origins.
In the ancient Persian version, the kingdom of God is
present on earth in the state, and the glory of God is possessed
by the monarch, “The Great King personally represents God
on earth.” He is both man and god, continuous with both dei-
ty and humanity, and it is important for men to be incorporat-
ed into his being by rites of unity, in particular the royal feast
and the robe of honor.83 This concept of divine kingship has
been a continuing aspect of Iranian history.84 It is an important
aspect of Akbar’s Decree of 1579, making him the Khalifah of
the Faithful, one directly inspired of God, the rightful heir of
the Kingdom of God, and the Khalifah of the Age.85
This ancient concept of the kingdom as one body of contin-
uous being between God, the king and the state, and his peo-
ple, is important, for in its modern form it is the doctrine of
the corporateness and completeness of humanity. The high
point of being in its development is man, and all law is of man
and for man, according to this faith. Humanity, therefore,
must be one and undivided, and no law can be imposed upon
it save its own will, as manifested in an elite or in a consensus.86
82. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, Sino-Soviet Ideological Relations: 1956-1957 (Unpub-
lished Study, 1959), 52.
83. F. W. Buckler, The Epiphany of the Cross; or, The Kingdom of God on Earth and
the Faith of the Church (Cambridge, England: W. Heffer and Sons, 1938), 4-6.
84. F. W. Buckler, “Firdausi’s Shahnamah and the Genealogia Regni Dei,” Jour-
nal of the American Oriental Society, Supplement no. 1 (September 1935): 1-21.
85. F. W. Buckler, “A New Interpretation of Akbar’s ‘Infallibility’ Decree of
1579,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (October 1924): 606.
86. For the educational philosophies of this faith, see R. J. Rushdoony, The
Messianic Character of American Education (Nutley, N J: The Craig Press, 1963).
Thus, the ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, and other realms

have their more modern and more thorough counterpart in
the dreams of a one-world order.
5. The Bible and the Concept of Being
Proponents of the social gospel and of social action by the
churches are insistent in reading the Bible in terms of this
continuity concept. The whole of the Bible, however, sharply
militates against it. First, a sharp discontinuity between the
sovereign, absolute, and omnipotent God and man, his
creature, is declared. There can exist between man and God
only an ethical, not a metaphysical, community, whereas the
community of being prevails in the pagan concept of the
kingdom. Second, because man is a sinner, the ethical
community of life in the kingdom of God is limited to those
who are regenerate in Jesus Christ. In both Old and New
Testaments, the community is ethical, rests on a vicarious
sacrifice (typical in the Old, Jesus in the New Testament), and
is sharply divisive with respect to humanity, discriminating
between the saved and the lost.
In John 6, the multitude, on perceiving the divine powers of
the Messiah, sought forcibly to make Him king on their terms,
to control God thereby in terms of their own kingdom. Jesus,
first, refused to accept their kingdom and crown, and, second,
offered them participation and membership only in His perfect
humanity. They could eat His flesh (partake of His perfect hu-
manity, be one body with it) and drink His blood (accept His
atoning and vicarious sacrifice as the ground of their salvation
and new life). Thus, He denied any metaphysical continuity
and made the ethical communion with Himself conditional
upon their acceptance of Him as man’s redeemer.
Two texts are sometimes cited as contrary evidence, al-
though wrongly so. The first is Christ’s use of Psalm 82 in
John 10:34, “Ye are gods.” Psalm 82 is addressed to judges, or
civil magistrates. According to Scripture, judgment and ven-
geance belong to God alone, to be exercised, if not directly,
then through His duly constituted law and authority, in the
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
of God’s nature ethically, not metaphysically. The goal of

man, therefore, is not metaphysical but ethical, not in terms of
a unified order but in terms of a transcendental law.
6. Being and Society
Wherever a society has a naturalistic religion, grounded on
the concept of continuity, man faces the total power of the
state. This is clearly true today, as it was in antiquity. The
Scythians “worshipped the elements” and practiced veneration
of ancestors, and the royal Scyths “ruled as despots.”87 The
Parthians practiced a religion affirming continuity, and their
monarchs had “nearly despotic” power and claimed the title of
“Kings of Kings.”88 The list can be extended at length. Where
there is no transcendental law and power in a separate and om-
nipotent being, then power has a wholly immanent and imme-
diate source in a state, group, or person, and it is beyond
appeal. The state becomes the saving power and the source of
law; it becomes the priestly agency of its own total power and
the manifest power of its divinity.89 Such a state becomes god
walking on the earth, and its every tyranny is identified as lib-
erty, because being and meaning are both identifiable in terms
of the state. Since it is held that there is no law beyond the
state, meaning is what the state defines, and liberty is what the
state provides. In this faith, for man to be free means to be in
the state. More than that, for man to be, he must be a member
of the state, for being is one and continuous, and salvation is a
metaphysical unification of all being.
In its older forms, this doctrine held that the power and will
of being were manifested or incarnated in the king, who was
the bearer of power and will in relationship to men and the re-
cipient of it from the gods. “The idea of the good king who en-
sures the well-being of the world is practically universal.” The
potency of being is manifested through him. “The king’s pow-
er, then, is no human might, but the power, the potency of the
87. Tamara Talbot Rice, The Scythians (New York: Praeger, 1957), 52-55, 84-90.
88. George Rawlinson, The Sixth Great Oriental Monarchy...Parthia (New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1872), 86-88, 398-401.
89. See R. J. Rushdoony, “The Modern State: The Sociology of Justification by
Law,” Westminster Theological Journal 24, no. 1 (November 1961): 29-37.
world; his imperialism is not covetousness, but an assertion of

his world status, and his garb ‘the living garment of God.’”
From the ancient kings to present empires and the United Na-
tions, this motive is paramount: their imperialism is seen by
themselves, in all sincerity, not as covetousness, but as an asser-
tion of that order which they incarnate. “The king, then, is a
god: indeed he is one of the first and oldest gods: Power has
been embodied in a living person.... In a still more literal sense
than he is a god, the king is the son of god; and in this also he
is a saviour form.” The relativism we have previously noted is
apparent in this godhood. Each king and state represent a di-
vine order for their day; they pass away, and another truth and
power succeed them. “Royal power, then, is world-power, but
like that of the sun it is valid only for its own period.”90
The king has given way to a new focus for the potency of be-
ing, humanity, the new object of “adoration” since the Enlight-
enment, with the intellectual and “the philosopher its high
priest.” Goethe declared, of the magical powers of humanity,
that, “For all human failings, Pure humanity atones.” The cult
has its Unknown Soldier, lighted at his grave by “the eternal
flame,” and Mother’s Day, to celebrate pure humanity, and hu-
manity is for many “the sole entity worthy of worship.”91
Unfortunately for this faith, humanity, instead of manifest-
ing power, is revealing a radical impotence.
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
1. Greece: The Humanist’s Homeland

The importance of Greek thought in Western history can-
not be understood by a reading of the works of specialists in
the field, because the prevailing approach is neither philosoph-
ical nor historical but religious. A conspicuous example of this
is the more learned than wise study of Werner Jaeger, Paideia:
The Ideals of Greek Culture. The majority of scholars turn to
Greek culture, not for its own sake, but to find a heritage and
a homeland to buttress their anti-Christianity. Thus, Greek
scholarship is more often autobiography than history. Hence
the inappropriate emphasis of many, and here we can exempt
Jaeger, on Greek rationality, happiness, individualism, secular-
ism, and democracy. In attempting to read their modern un-
derstanding of these terms into classical Greece, or to derive
them from that culture, they are clearly guilty of wishful
thinking. Greek culture was clearly and emphatically reli-
gious; its center of orientation was not the individual and his
fulfillment but rather the city-state and its destiny; and, in its
emphasis on face, and its long history as a shame culture,1 clas-
1. See Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957). Note Dodds’ chapter on “The Fear of Freedom,” 236-269. Note also
the comment, 31, “Men knew that it was dangerous to be happy.”
67
sical Greece was closer to the Japan of the samurais than to

modern Western civilization.2 The concept of the continuity of
being was basic to Greek thought, and the line of demarcation
between the gods and men was not a difference of being but a
difference of power and station. The gods and men avenged
themselves on any who trespassed on their honor and position.
Hubris, pride, was a sin in that it was a contempt of station and
a contempt of a higher dignitary’s power and honor.
To the Greeks, also, great honors are ascribed in the history
of human thought. “The earliest school of rational thought, it
is agreed by all authorities, arose at Miletus in the sixth century
B.C.,” we are told.3 Another scholar assures us that
The Greeks invented, among other things, science and philos-
ophy. The first scientists and philosophers lived during the
sixth century B.C. on the Greek coast of Asia Minor and in
the Greek cities of southern Italy. Later, during the fifth and
fourth centuries, the important center of thought was Athens.
It would be an exaggeration to say that before the time of Tha-
les of Miletus men were incapable of rational thought, but
there would be some truth in the statement, since before his
time it does not appear that anyone asked those precise ques-
tions out of which science and philosophy were to develop.
The questions were “What is everything made of?... How do
things come into being, change and pass away?,” “What per-
manent substance or substances exist behind appearances?”4
This is an amazing statement in view, for example, of Egyptian
and Babylonian architecture, mathematics, and astronomy,
and of the civilization of Mohenjo-daro. The Minoan culture
which preceded Greek civilization gives extensive evidence of
having reached stages of technological development never ap-
proached by the Greeks. Greek science, moreover, involved
heavy borrowings from other cultures. Why, then, in view of
these well-known facts, are the Greeks given priority in the
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
history of human thought? They were obviously not the

equals of their Minoan predecessors. They had a long, ugly his-
tory of incessant warfare and persistent tyranny. Whereas the
Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, to cite but three peo-
ples, made excellent use of their natural resources and gave
abundant evidences of scientific management of soil and water,
the Greeks rapidly destroyed their future by gutting their
country. The forests very early were ruthlessly stripped, and
the marshes drained, and Greece was reduced to the barren and
impoverished land which it has remained to this day.5 The in-
ability of the Greeks to make intelligent use of their natural re-
sources contributed heavily to their decline, and yet they did
not lack examples of scientific conservation and the develop-
ment of natural resources. Why, then, the curious exaltation of
Greek science and rationality? Why the ascription of most de-
sirable qualities in modern culture to a “Greek heritage”?6
2. Greek Science and Philosophy

The answer appears in Benjamin Farrington, for whom
“Greek science constitutes a veritable miracle.”7 Greek science
did not, in any practical, working sense, surpass the science of
some other ancient cultures, but what Farrington is looking
for is theoretical, “evidence of an attempt to give a naturalistic
explanation of the universe as a whole,” and this the other
Near Eastern cultures lacked. The originality and scientific as-
pect of “the Ionian way of thought was that it sought to ex-
plain the mysteries of the universe in terms of familiar
5. See C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing

Company, 1957), 4; and H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Chicago: Aldine Publishing
Company, 1964), 34, 37. Plato, in the Critias, called attention to the fact that once
forested mountains “now only afford sustenance to bees,” and, “in comparison of
what then was, there are remaining in small islets only the bones of the wasted
body, as they may be called; all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen
away, and the mere skeleton of the country being left”; B. Jowett, trans. and ed., The
Works of Plato, vol. 4 (New York: Tudor, n.d.), 384.
6. A curious and strained effort to link even Hebrew civilization to the Greeks
is Cyrus H. Gordon’s Before the Bible: The Common Background of Greek and
Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), a work which strains
credulity in its attempt to find common factors.
7. Benjamin Farrington, Greek Science: Its Meaning for Us, vol. 1, Thales to
Aristotle (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1949), 13.
things.”8 For Farrington, science is thus more accurately to be

defined as materialism, naturalism, and humanism, as anthro-
pomorphic thinking.
They might be said to have given an operational rather than a
rational account of the nature of things. Their criterion of
truth was successful practice. The exaltation by them of the
practical knowledge contained in the techniques into a meth-
od of analysis of natural phenomena was the truly revolution-
ary step.... With the Milesians technology drove mythology
off the field. The central illumination of the Milesians was the
notion that the whole universe works in the same way as the
little bits of it that are under man’s control.... The processes
men controlled on earth become the key to the whole activity
of the universe.9
It appears now what constituted Greek “philosophy” and “sci-
ence.” Earlier cultures, in their legal codes, mathematics, and
often remarkable calculations, indicated their high order of in-
telligence and rationality, but they were not “scientific” be-
cause they were not naturalistic. Thus, when Kitto, another
worshiper of the Greeks, tells us that they “showed for the first
time what the human mind was for,”10 he contributes nothing
to our knowledge of the Greeks but much to our knowledge
of his anti-supernatural, anti-Christian bias; he thus contrib-
utes nothing to our knowledge of the Greek mind but much
to our knowledge of his mind.
While there is an important element of truth in Farrington’s
thesis, the fact remains that Greek thought was religious, and
it was esoteric. However, the public philosophy was an
exoteric presentation, whereas the “hidden” truth belonged to
the members of the school only. The Greek philosophers were
apparently the first to teach an exoteric philosophy as a means
of enlisting followers into the expert, professional, and esoteric
school. A man was initiated into a school of thought and its
concepts were property, jealously hoarded. This secrecy was
both a principle and an early form of copyright and
8. Ibid., 29, 77.

9. Benjamin Farrington, Head and Hand in Ancient Greece (London: Watts,
1947), 3.
10. Kitto, The Greeks, 7.
professional unionism. Today, professional, legal, scientific,

and medical associations form often a closed corporation to
protect the initiates of the profession; the protection has passed
from the ideas to the profession of the practitioner, and there is
often a legally enforced barrier to protect the initiates. Plato’s
writings give evidence of hidden doctrines, and Farrington
himself cites evidence of the same in Aristotle:
When Alexander the Great, whose tutor Aristotle had been,
heard a report that the subject matter of the morning lectures
had been published he wrote to his teacher to protest. “If you
have made public what we have learned from you, how shall
we be any better than the rest? Yet I had rather excel in learn-
ing than in power and wealth.” Aristotle told him not to wor-
ry. “The private lessons,” he wrote, “are both published and
not published. Nobody will be able to understand them ex-
cept those who have had the oral instruction.”11
The religious and the esoteric aspects are pervasive in Greek
thought.
However, there is some validity to the ascription of natural-
ism to the Greeks. According to Mylonas, “the religion of the
Prehistoric Greeks was a nature creed.”12 For Greek mytholo-
gy, “In the beginning was Chaos, ‘yawning void.’ Out of Cha-
os came the broad, flat Earth, the true mother of all things,
gods as well as men.”13 The foundations of Greek thought were
thus the same as the Egyptian and Babylonian, to name but
two: the dialectic of chaos and order, and the concept of conti-
nuity. There was a oneness of being in the cosmos, but a differ-
ence of power. Pindar stated it clearly in “Nemea 6”:
There is one
race of men, one race of gods; both have breath
of life from a single mother. But sundered power
holds us divided, so that the one is nothing, while for the other
the brazen sky is established
their sure citadel forever.
11. Farrington, Greek Science, 2, 15-16.

12. George Emmanuel Mylonas, “Religion in Prehistoric Greece,” in Vergilius
Ferm, ed., Ancient Religions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 164. See also
Axel W. Perkson, The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1942).
The cornerstone of all naturalism is this concept of the conti-

nuity of being, and every culture or religion based on that con-
cept is either implicitly or explicitly naturalistic.
3. The Chaos-Order Dialectic

The chaos-order dialectic stands against the background of
continuity, so that ultimately the vision is one of unity. Chaos
and order represent, not an ultimate dualism, but aspects of be-
ing and stages of growth. In a sense, chaos, as the womb of be-
ing, is the female principle, and order is the male principle.
These concepts seem to have governed the Greek sexual out-
look. Woman was the ground and the nurse, but not the par-
ent of the seed. Apollo, in the Eumenides of Aeschylus,
declared:
I will tell you, and I will answer correctly. Watch. The mother
is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of
the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who
mounts. A stranger she preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god
interfere. I will show you proof of what I have explained.
There can be a father without any mother. There she stands,
the living witness, daughter of Olympian Zeus, she who was
never fostered in the dark of the womb yet such a child as no
goddess could bring to birth.14
For a similar concept of woman, see the laws of Lycurgus:
Lycurgus allowed a man who was advanced in years and had a
young wife to recommend some virtuous and approved young
man, that she might have a child by him, who might inherit
the good qualities of the father, and be a son to himself. On
the other side, an honest man who had love for a married
woman upon account of her modesty and the well-favoured-
ness of her children, might, without formality, beg her com-
pany of her husband, that he might raise, as it were, from this
plot of good ground, worthy and well-allied children for him-
self. And indeed, Lycurgus was of a persuasion that children
were not so much the property of their parents as of the whole
commonwealth, and, therefore, would not have his citizens
begot by firstcomers, but by the best men that could be found;
the laws of other nations seemed to him very absurd and in-
consistent, where people would be so solicitous for their dogs
14. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies,
vol. 1, Aeschylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 158.
and horses as to exert interest and to pay money to procure

fine breeding, and yet kept their wives shut up, to be made
mothers only by themselves, who might be foolish, infirm, or
diseased; as if it were not apparent that children of a bad breed
would prove their bad qualities first upon those who kept and
were rearing them, and well-born children, in like manner,
their good qualities. These regulations, founded on natural
and social grounds, were certainly far from that scandalous
liberty which was afterwards charged upon their women, that
they knew not what adultery meant.15
Original creation was from chaos, even as man’s first birth is
from woman, an inescapable fact. On coming to manhood,
however, the male child must purge himself, through rites of
initiation and purgation, from femaleness and chaos. Atten-
tion was called to this by Jane Harrison:
In the case of the Kouros the child is taken from its mother, in
the case of the Dithyramb it is actually re-born from the thigh
of its father. In both cases the intent is the same, but in the case
of the Dithyramb it is far more emphatically expressed. The
birth from the male womb is to rid the child from the infec-
tion of his mother—to turn him from a woman-thing into a
man-thing.16
Homosexuality had an important part in this “re-birth,” and in
the education of the “reborn.” Xenophon declared, “I must
now speak of pederasty, for it affects education,” and Plato, in
the Symposium, set this perversion in a pedagogical and
mystical context; he saw homosexuality, philosophy, and
gymnastics as “inimical to tyranny.”17 According to Marrou,
“‘Greek love’ was to provide classical education with its
material conditions and its method. For the men of ancient
times this type of love was essentially educative.... ‘Its aim is to
educate’ as Plato says.”18 It was “an anti-feminine ideal of
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.
complete manliness.” It established a closer relationship,

according to Plato, than between parents and children (an
indication perhaps of initiation into a cult). Women were
similarly educated into perversions by women, with Sappho
an instance of the teaching woman.19
The triumph of order was the goal, and order could beget or-
der, but in the fullest society, chaos was a necessary part of all
things and continuous with order. Hence, the truest symbol of
perfection was not Zeus as a male god, nor kings (“Zeuses the
ancients used to call their kings”),20 but rather the hermaphro-
dite. Indeed, hermaphroditism was attributed “to a number of
divine beings, as one of their several perfections.” It was
“bound up with human aspirations to perpetual life.”21 As a re-
sult, Zeus himself was portrayed as a hermaphrodite.22 Chaos,
according to Rufinus, “caused to emanate from himself a dou-
ble form androgynous, made by the conjunction of opposites.”
To simulate the perfection of androgynous being, women in
ancient mysteries assumed male dress or wore a beard, and
men castrated themselves in terms of this same perfection.
“The bisexuality of the philosophers amounts to asexuality:
spiritual man is completely freed from the bonds of the
flesh.”23 The hermaphrodite ideal of perfection entered deeply
into gnostic thought, and into the Talmud, which “drew the
doctrine of primitive humanity as bisexual, which passed into
Jewish mysticism, as well as into Arab esoterism, in which the
unity Adam-Eve represents universal man.”24 There are con-
nections between the concept of androgyny as perfection and
the religious myth or performance of incest.25
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.
4. The Esoteric State

Out of Chaos comes the androgyn; and, according to Plato
in the Symposium, out of the splitting of the androgyn come
the sexes, and whether a man is a lover of men or of women
depends on what part of “that double nature which was once
called Androgynous” they are derived from.26 “Human nature
was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and
pursuit of the whole is called love.”27 The polis, or Greek
city-state, has often been called a men’s club, and with reason,
because in its gymnastics, games, music, and political order, it
was a brotherhood of initiates into a divine wholeness. The
city was a holy sanctuary, a sacred enclosure around an altar,
“the religious abode of gods and citizens.”28 “The real religion
of the fifth century was... a devotion to the City itself,”29 to the
wholeness and unity it represented. Divinity could reside in
men, an opinion held by Aristotle and Plato and claimed for
himself by Empedocles.30 Scholars have attempted to give no-
ble reasons for the durability of the ancient city state.31 The
Greeks themselves saw the homosexual aspect as a binding
quality, as Marrou has pointed out. The city-state was an eso-
teric, mystical, and divine body with a kind of androgynous
wholeness, and the religion of the city-state was basically a fer-
tility cult. Justice was defined as the law of the city. According
to Antiphon the Sophist, probably of Athens in the latter half
of the fifth century B.C., “Justice, then, is not to transgress that
which is the law of the city in which one is a citizen.”32 There
was thus no element of transcendence: no justice existed be-
yond the city-state because it was an entity with wholeness.
26. Edman, Works of Plato, 355-356.
27. Ibid., 357.
28. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1956), 141.
29. Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1955), 72.
30. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 238, 242, 259. Empedocles declared to
the citizens of Akragas, “I go about among you, an immortal god, no longer a mor-
tal”; Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 2, The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 223.
31. See John W. Snyder, “The Ancient City State: Some Reasons for Its
Durability,” The Classical Journal 54, no. 8 (May 1959): 363-371.
32. Kathleen Freeman, trans., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 147.
According to Diogenes of Appollonia, from the same period as

Antiphon the Sophist, “to sum up the whole matter.... all ex-
isting things are created by the alteration of the same thing,
and are the same thing.”33 As a result, each city-state was in a
sense a cosmos unto itself, with the full spectrum of being from
gods to man and to the very earth, so that it was a unity against
an outer and an inner chaos and an order for the continuing
mastery and use of chaos. Because it was a mystical wholeness,
its religion, law, and philosophy were naturally esoteric, in
their essence meant for the inner circle. As a result, because the
modern, Enlightenment mind is insistent upon a neutral ratio-
nality, it quietly bypasses such earnest aspects of Pythagoras’
teaching as the injunction, “Do not eat beans,” and the decla-
ration of Empedocles, “Wretches, utter wretches, keep your
hands from beans!”34
5. The Polis as Cosmos
Cosmos means order, and the city-state represented order in
a wholeness due to its status as the mystical bond of heaven and
earth. The polis or city-state wholly comprehended man’s life
until mystical thought made for ascetic withdrawal. According
to Jaeger, “The centre of gravity of Greek life lies in the polis....
Thus, to describe the Greek polis is to describe the whole of
Greek life.” It means, therefore, to describe its theology and
ethics as well. “Whatever helps the community is good, what-
ever injures it is bad.”35 The city-state was thus itself the cos-
mos, the order of being.
Earlier, as Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City, has
pointed out, Greek culture was oriented to the family, and the
basic religion was the family as the mystical bond of heaven
and earth, as the cosmos. The family gave way to the polis, the
city-state, as the true cosmos, and law was an expression of the
nature of that cosmos. The city-state was an organic and reli-
gious entity. What fascism tried very faintly to do, to create a
sense of the unity of the people of the state, Greece had in full
33. Ibid., 87.

34. Warner, The Greek Philosophers, 21, 33.
35. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1, trans. Gilbert
Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 78, 92.
measure. Because the city-state embraced the full spectrum of

being in continuity, it included not only men and gods, but
also athletes, leaders, and heroes who could become in some
sense divine.
Since being was seen as continuous, an elite could embody
divinity or wisdom. Socrates clearly believed in his divine in-
spiration,36 and Plato, in The Republic, not only saw his philos-
opher-kings and elite as wise, but also held that knowledge is
infallible.37 The wholeness of the city-state made it the locale
of the eliteness of being, and, when the city-state became an
empire, it was the elite community governing the world, true
order bringing chaos into fructifying submission. The United
Nations today is the heir of this ancient city-state elitist con-
cept.
Both Plato and Aristotle held “that the polis should be
economically self-sufficient. To them, Autarkeia,
self-sufficiency, is almost the first law of its existence; they
would practically abolish commerce.”38 Being a cosmos, this
was a philosophical necessity. Anaximander held the cosmos
to be “a vast community to which the gods as well as man
belonged,” and Heraclitus stated that “the cosmos is the same
for all and that neither one of the gods nor of men has made it,
but that it was always.”39 Chaos, seen by Aristotle as “the
unrealised possibilities of matter,”40 required the action of
order to realize itself. According to one cult, the evil Titanic
element in every man’s soul, and by analogy in the body
politic must be subjected to the divine, Dionysian urge for
order, deliverance, and salvation.41
Aeschylus, in the Oresteia, depicted justice as the move from
chaos to order. The Furies still moved in terms of ancient
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.
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.
family law as the principle of order and demanded vengeance,

but, in the Eumenides, the Furies transfer the framework of
order from the family to the polis, and to the “gods of the
younger generation.” They become “Eumenides,” “Kindly
Ones,” and the polis emerged “as the pattern of Justice, of
Order, of what the Greeks called Cosmos; the polis, they saw,
was—or could be—the very crown and summit of things.”42
The Furies demanded “definite powers” before making the
transfer, and Athene declared, “No household shall be
prosperous without your will.” When the question was raised,
“You guarantee such honor for the rest of time?,” Athene
answered, “I have no need to promise what I cannot do,” a hint
of the basic Greek pessimism, with its cyclic view of history.43
Until that turn of history, however, it was believed that the
prosperity and life of the people depended upon the total order
of the state. Against this state or cosmos there was no appeal,
no higher law. Man’s only recourse was either to be an outlaw
or to join another cosmos, another city-state, and hence the
readiness of many political losers in Athens, for example, to
join with honor an enemy state; their lives required a religion
and a cosmos, and if Athens cut them off, it was necessary to
become a member of another body.
6. The One and the Many
The Greek approach to the problem of the one and the
many rested on this background of a chaos-order dialectic set
in the context of the continuity concept. Both the early
monists and the pluralists accepted this framework; they did
not essentially alter the ideas of the original form of things, but
they raised the question of centrality. What was wanted was an
intellectual Archimedean lever for the universe. The Monists
first addressed themselves to this question: Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes of the Milesian school;
Xenophanes of Colophon; Elea, Parmenides, and Zeno of the
Eleatic school; and Heraclitus at Ephesus. The Milesians
assumed, first, one unchanging cosmic substance at the basis of
42. Kitto, The Greeks, 77

43. Grene and Lattimore, Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, 166-167.
the changes of nature, and, second, that moving matter is living

matter. Xenophanes dealt with the first premise, as did the
Eleatics, while Heraclitus accepted only the second. For
Heraclitus (530-470 B.C.), change is the key and the reality. All
things are in process of becoming and are continually in
motion, passing away. “It is not possible to step twice into the
same river.” Rest is in change, for all things flow, and “all
things are one.” Reality is thus a perpetual becoming, energy
in motion. Thus, the sun, in size “the breadth of a man’s
hand,” is “new each day.” Fire “steers the universe.” Change is
the harmonious interaction of opposites as a closed circle, a
continuing and continuous dialectic: “God is day-night,
winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-famine.” This dialectical
tension is the true god: “War is both king of all and father of
all,” and “The Hidden harmony is stronger (or, better) than
the visible.... That which is in opposition is in concert, and
from things that differ comes the most beautiful harmony.”
Thus, a dialectical tension and a kind of relativity are basic to
Heraclitus.44 Chaos and order are necessary, one to another,
and male to female: this is the tension and motion which
constitutes reality.
For Parmenides of Elea (515-440 B.C.), identification of the
cosmic substance was the key. This cosmic substance is Being,
which is the same as thought. “For it is the same thing to think
and to be.” Moreover, “One should both say and think that Be-
ing Is; for To Be is possible, and Nothingness is not possible....
Being has no coming-into-being and no destruction.... How
could Being perish? How could it come into Being?” Further-
more, Being “is motionless” and it is spatial, so that Being is
not only thought, but it is also at the same time matter.45
Heraclitus eliminated permanence, and Parmenides elimi-
nated change. For Heraclitus, there was only process, but the
process had a unity, a rhythmical law. To know justice, we
must have injustice; all things are relative, and hence dialecti-
cal. For Parmenides, Being is an eternal, finite, motionless, and
spherical solid body. The famous illustrations of Zeno, such as
44. Freeman, Ancilla, 24-34.

45. Ibid., 41-46.
the flying arrow that remained at rest, were designed to dem-

onstrate the truth of Parmenides’ system. However naturalis-
tic their presuppositions were, these men were not scientific in
their concern; rather, it was the theology of politics which con-
cerned them. They were interested in the nature of the cosmos
and the key or lever to its government. For Heraclitus, “the
world is governed by a Logos, a Reason, a Law, and this is the
fire itself.”46 According to Plato, Parmenides and Zeno sought
“to disprove the existence of the many.”47 For him, Being had
to be one and homogeneous. Because of this pantheistic one-
ness of all Being, one can perhaps assume that Parmenides may
have been favorable to an equalitarian and democratic order.
There is perhaps a curious hint of this in Fragment 18:
When a woman and a man mix the seeds of Love together, the
power (of the seeds) which shapes (the embryo) in the veins out
of different blood can mould well-constituted bodies only if it
preserves proportion. For if the powers war (with each other)
when the seed is mixed, and do not make a unity in the body
formed by the mixture, they will terribly harass the growing
(embryo) through the twofold seed of the (two) sexes.48
The Being of Parmenides was equal throughout, without ori-
gin and without a future.
Such a Being had no future, nor did such a philosophy. The
pluralists offered another answer: Empedocles at Agrigentum,
(or Acragus), Anaxagoras at Clazomenae, the later Pythagore-
ans at Thebes mainly, and Leucippus at Abdera. The pluralists
assumed a permanence which became transposed rather than
transformed. For Empedocles (495-435 B.C.), there were four
elements, fire, air, water, and earth; and Strife and Love, repul-
sion and attraction, were responsible for change and motion.
History is therefore cyclical, as Strife and Love create, first, an
era in which Love reigns and all elements are totally mixed and
indistinguishable; second, the era in which Strife enters in and
the elements are separated, although with freakish combina-
tions at times; third, Strife triumphs, and the four elements are
46. Gordon H. Clark, “The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy,” in Vergilius

Ferm, ed., A History of Philosophical Systems (New York: Philosophical Library,
1950), 73.
47. Jowett, “Parmenides,” Works of Plato, vol. 4, 315.
48. Freeman, Ancilla, 46.
totally separate, and life, as in the first era, is impossible;

fourth, Love invades the separated, elemental world, and the
resultant mingling again produces life. According to Empe-
docles, in Fragment 8, there is no birth nor death of substances
but only “mixing and exchange,” and substance is the name ap-
plied to the combination. The elements are “uncreated.” Em-
pedocles thus has a pluralism of elements and a unity of process
because of the eternal and continuous tension of Love and
Strife, attraction and repulsion. Love produces a chaos of un-
differentiated mixture; Strife produces an order of sterile dif-
ferentiation, and life is an impossibility under either total
chaos or total order. The dialectical tension of the two is a ne-
cessity for life.
Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) insisted on pluralism but with a
required unity. He refused to limit the number of elements to
four, but he also insisted that “in everything there must be ev-
erything. It is not possible (for them) to exist apart, but all
things contain a portion of everything.” According to Warner,
“He held the view that matter is a continuum, infinitely divis-
ible and that, however much it may be divided, each part will
contain elements of everything else.”49 How could this chaos
of matter, infinitely divisible yet continuous, produce any-
thing? To introduce motion, growth, and change, Anaxagoras
posited a Nous or Mind, as a physical element, which is “infi-
nite and self-ruling, and is mixed with no Thing, but is alone
by itself.”50 Order is thus joined to chaos to make life possible.
This dialectical tension of chaos and order (or matter and
mind, form, or idea) continued to assert itself. The later
Pythagoreans tended to fix this tension into a dualism. Pluralism
in the form of atomism ostensibly came into its own with
Democritus of Abderk (460-370 B.C.), who, we are told,
interpreted reality mechanically rather than teleologically, in
terms of atoms and the void, with worlds forming as atoms
collide. The result, however, is the same, relativism, and a
cyclical teleology is ultimately as relativistic as a mechanical
atomism. For Democritus, “We know nothing in reality; for
truth lies in an abyss” (Frag. 117). The facts and truths of men are
conventions: “Colour exists by convention (usage), sweet by
49. Warner, The Greek Philosophers, 38.
50. Freeman, Ancilla, 84.
convention, bitter by convention” (Frag. 125). This same

statement, found also in Fragment 9, continues, “atoms and Void
(alone) exist in reality.... We know nothing accurately in reality,
but (only) as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the
constitution of those things that flow upon (the body) and
impinge upon it.” Knowledge is thus in the main a knowledge
of phenomena. However, according to Fragment 34, “Man is a
universe in little (Microcosm).” Reality then appears to be not
only atoms and the void, but also man, the little cosmos, a
walking order. Democritus therefore favored democracy
(Frag. 251), and his democracy was by implication not only
political but also moral, with every man a walking law unto
himself. Apparently, for Democritus, women were not a
microcosm but, perhaps, a void! “A woman must not practise
argument: this is dreadful” (Frag. 110). “To be ruled by a woman
is the ultimate outrage for a man” (Frag. 111). The basic reason
is that “Rule belongs by nature to the stronger” (Frag. 267).
Slaves were to be used “as parts of the great body” (Frag. 270),
functionally, and women were also functional in their nature.
Man was the social atom, and his desires the social law.
7. Socrates and Plato
The political focus of philosophy appeared more clearly in
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, where we have more documen-
tation of their position. Socrates, a statist and a homosexual, is
the object of the most appalling idolatry. Kroner, in reading
Plato’s dialogues, is reminded “of the gospel stories.” He agrees
with Justin Martyr in comparing “Christ with Socrates.” In-
deed, “Socrates was a Greek anticipation and counterpart of
Jesus Christ. But one has to remember that such a Greek
Christ was no Christ at all. Nevertheless, the human features
of the two personalities can be compared without blasphe-
my.”51 For Voegelin, “The life and death of Socrates were the
51. Kroner, Speculation in Pre-Christian Philosophy, 134. Kroner taught at Union

Theological Seminary from 1948 to 1952. See also 147, where, on some counts, Kro-
ner finds “Socrates... in complete agreement with the spirit of Jesus.” Kroner states
further that “Socrates was an inspired thinker... perfectly and exclusively human,
and yet a man of God. Unless we assume that God inspired and commanded So-
crates to prepare for the coming of his Son, on the level and in the language of Greek
philosophy, Socrates demonstrated, by his personality and conduct, that the human
mind has resources enabling it to approach by its own effort, the truth revealed in
the Bible,” 151.
decisive events in the discovery and liberation of the soul.”52

Some scholars have been ready to point out, however, that So-
crates was guilty as charged and merited the sentence of
death.53 Socrates was a champion, not of “the rights of man but
the rights of superman,” and his circle of friends and disciples
were close to or involved in the imposition of a reign of terror
in Athens four years prior to Socrates’ condemnation. Basic to
his trial, although Plato did not mention it, was the political is-
sue. Socrates expressed his contempt for the Athenian jury,
comparing them to children trying a doctor on a cook’s charg-
es. The esoteric background is close to the surface in Socrates,
who in the Symposium, according to Fite, finds “the key to the
universe... in the fact of boy-love, or pederasty.”54 Plato shared
the same opinion most of his life, only dropping it to a mea-
sure in his old age, in The Laws.
Discussions of Plato usually concentrate on the Platonic doc-
trine of ideas or forms, and the result is a serious distortion, be-
cause, central to Plato, is not the doctrine of ideas but his
concept of the city-state, of which the ideas are simply a central
aspect. In Plato’s Gorgias, “some wise men tell us that friend-
ship and community and orderliness (Kosmioles) and modera-
tion bind together heaven and earth, gods and men, and that
this whole is therefore called order (Kosmos), not disorder (ako-
smia).” The cosmos is a community of gods and men, and the
city-state is such a cosmos. It embraces both the human and the
divine, both matter and form, and controlled both chaos and
order. Form (idea), order, mind, and the divine are related if
not basically one. Justice is the subjection of all things to this
divine-human order, and liberty is therefore the negation of
justice. The Guardians or elite of the state represent “god-like
wisdom,” and they must be obeyed. The citizens must be edu-
cated into accepting this wisdom of the elite as their own mind
in order to obey voluntarily, but, if not, it must be imposed
from without.
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.
Then, in order that such a person may be governed by an au-

thority similar to that by which the best man is governed, do
we not maintain that he ought to be made the servant of that
best man, in whom the divine element is supreme? We do not
indeed imagine that the servant ought to be governed to his
own detriment, which Thrasymachus held to be the lot of the
subject: on the contrary, we believe it to be better for every
one to be governed by a wise and divine power, which ought,
if possible, to be seated in a man’s own heart, the only alterna-
tive being to impose it from without; in order that we may be
all alike, so far as nature permits, and mutual friends, from the
fact of being steered by the same pilot.55
Justice, for Plato, means that, in the individual, reason rules
over the will and the appetites, and in the body politic, it is the
rule by the philosopher-king over all other men. “Justice is
produced in the soul, like health in the body, by establishing
the elements concerned in their natural relations of control
and subordination, whereas injustice is like disease and means
that this natural order is inverted.”56 There is thus no
transcendental justice, no appeal beyond the guardian
dictatorship which, in its person, incarnates the divine wisdom
and the idea of justice.
This is clearly demonstrated in the concept of truth. Since
the state is the ultimate order, it stands above law. Men are re-
sponsible to the state, not the state to its citizens. Truth and
falsehood are held to be only instrumental, comparable to
“medicine,” and hence “must be kept in the hands of physi-
cians, and... unprofessional men must not meddle with it.”
These physicians who use truth and falsehood as social medi-
cines are the rulers of the state. “To the rulers of the state, then,
if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either
enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state.”57 The
“good of the state” as seen by its rulers is the highest law, and
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.
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
58. Edman, “Phaedrus,” Works of Plato, 312.

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
59. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 66.

60. Westal Woodbury Willoughby, The Political Theories of the Ancient World
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1903), 103.
61. Jowett, The Laws, in Works of Plato, vol. 4, 419.
62. “Philebus,” in ibid., 360, 362.
63. Republic, 395, 401; Cornford, trans., 83, 90, etc.
64. Ibid., 410, 461; Cornford trans., 100, 161.
65. Jowett, Works of Plato, vol. 4, 434.
were served by the guardians: they became masters of them-

selves only when the guardians governed them totally and pre-
vented the base nature of the people from prevailing. “Do you
see that this state of things will exist in your commonwealth,
where the desires of the inferior multitude will be controlled
by the desires and wisdom of the superior few? Hence, if any
society can be called master of itself and in control of pleasures
and desires, it will be ours.”66
Much has been said about the failure of the Greek city-states
to unify, and yet the central point has been missed, despite the
historical evidence. The Greek city-states, except briefly and to
meet a military crisis, could not unify: their idea of unity came
too close to obliteration, and, when applied at home, consis-
tently meant social unrest; when applied to another state, it
meant virtual death for that state. As a result, they fought until
they all fell.
8. Aristotle
We have noted, in Aristotle’s reply to Alexander the Great,
his own esoteric orientation, and his works are often difficult
because of their deliberate vagueness and circumlocution. This
is usually dismissed by scholars as a problem of style, but Ar-
istotle had no difficulty in writing plainly and directly when he
so chose. Aristotle began as a disciple of Plato, but he later
withdrew from some of the implications of that position.
His orientation, however, is no less statist: the state is his cos-
mos. As Kitto notes, when Aristotle speaks of man as “a polit-
ical animal,” “What Aristotle really said is, ‘Man is a creature
who lives in a polis’; and what he goes on to demonstrate, in
his Politics, is that the polis is the only framework within
which man can fully realize his spiritual, moral and intellectual
capacities.”67
Basic to Aristotle is the oneness of Being and Unity: “Unity
is nothing distinct from Being.” Moreover, “no universal exists
in separation apart from its particulars.”68 There is a continuity
66. Republic, 431; Cornford trans., 125.
68. Hugh Tredennick, trans., Aristotle: The Metaphysics, Books I-IX (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 151, 393.
of being, and “the Divine pervades the whole of nature.” There

is a great chain of being, and “the matter of every thing, and
therefore of substance, must be that which is potentially of
that nature.” It follows then, “if, as we said, the matter of each
thing is that which it is potentially—e.g., the matter of actual
fire is that which is potentially fire—then the Bad will simply
be the potentially Good.” It follows, therefore, that man is to-
tally comprehended in terms of an immanent structure of con-
tinuous being, and that, whatever he is potentially, that he can
become actually only within the framework of that structure,
the state. Thus, “Ethics or Morality” is a branch of “Political
or Social science, and no other.” Anaxagoras had posited a
Nous or Mind as a physical entity and a mechanical device to
make possible motion, growth, and change. Aristotle’s “god”
or First Cause or Prime Mover is a similar mechanical device.
If causes were infinite in number, then knowledge of causes
and knowledge itself would be impossible.69 But the function
of this First Cause is to guarantee knowledge, not to provide
it. Things are still to be understood in terms of the continuum,
not by reference to a First Cause. Thus, we are told in both
Ethics and Politics, “man is a social (or political) animal.”70 For
Aristotle, as with Plato, justice has an exclusively socio-politi-
cal meaning. “For to do justice is to have more than one ought,
and to suffer it is to have less than one ought.” Justice is “a
mean,” not in relationship to extremes, but as “a permanent at-
titude of the soul toward the means.” The apportionment of
property is the illustration used to define justice: “What he (the
just man) will do is to give each his proportionately equal
share, whether he is himself one of the parties or not.”71 There
is no transcendence here: justice is within the framework of na-
ture (which the Christian, unlike Aristotle, holds to be fallen),
and the high point of order and justice within nature is the
state.
69. Hugh Tredennick and J. Cyril Armstrong, trans., Aristotle's Metaphysics,

Books X-XIV, Oeconomica, and Magna Moralia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi-
ty Press, 1962), 163, 265, 289, 447; Tredennick, The Metaphysics, Books I-IX, 93.
70. J. A. K. Thomson, trans., The Ethics of Aristotle (n.p.: Penguin Books, 1958),
37. Benjamin Jowett, trans., and Max Lerner, intro., Aristotle’s Politics (New York:
Modern Library, 1943), 54.
71. Thomson, Ethics, 154-155.
Men, of course, can “become gods by sheer nobility of char-

acter,”72 and there is an element of divinity in all men.
If the intellect is divine compared with man, the life of the in-
tellect must be divine compared with the life of a human crea-
ture. And we ought not to listen to those who counsel us, O
man, think as man should, and O mortal, remember your mor-
tality. Rather ought we, so far as in us lies, to put on immor-
tality and to leave nothing unattempted in the effort to live in
conformity with the highest thing within us.... 73
“Intellectual activity... forms perfect happiness for a man,” be-
cause it lives in terms of “something divine within us,” a “di-
vine particle.”74 Aristotle, however, did not directly identify
this life of intellect, this realized life, with politics. And he did
recognize that, in a natural sense, “Nature has made man even
more of a pairing than a political animal in so far as the family
is an older and more fundamental thing than the state.” The
purpose of marriage is not only procreation, but also “to pro-
vide whatever is necessary to a fully lived life” by a division of
labors by man and wife.75 The priority of the family is a natu-
ral and historical rather than an ethical one, and the true realm
of intellect is the state. Hence it is the state which best educates
for goodness,76 and “the legislator must mould to his will the
frames of newly-born children.”77 The right to live, as well as
the right to educate, belongs to the state, which should limit its
population.
As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law
that no deformed child shall live, but that on the ground of an
excess in the number of children, if the established customs of
the state forbid this (for in our state population has a limit), no
child is to be exposed, but when couples have children in ex-
cess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun;
what may or may not lawfully be done in these cases depends
on the question of life and sensation.78
72. Ibid., 193.

73. Ibid., 305.
74. Ibid., X, vii, 304-305.
75. Ibid., 251-252.
76. Ibid., 311-312.
77. Jowett and Lerner, 314.
78. Ibid., 316.
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
79. Ibid., 27ff; 320-21.

80. Ibid., 51, 55.
81. Ibid., 144.
to be equalized, and this is impossible, unless a sufficient edu-

cation is provided by the laws.”82
To understand what a state is, we must know what the citi-
zen is, and the citizen is one who “shares in the administration
of justice and in offices.” But “we cannot consider all those to
be citizens who are necessary to the existence of the state.”83
We maintain that the true forms of government are three, and
that the best must be that which is administered by the best,
and in which there is one man, or a whole family, or many
persons, excelling all the others together in virtue, and both
rulers and subjects are fitted, the one to rule, the others to be
ruled, in such a manner as to attain the most eligible life. We
showed at the commencement of our inquiry that the virtue
of the good man is necessarily the same as the virtue of the cit-
izen of the perfect state. Clearly then in the same manner, and
by the same means through which a man becomes truly good,
he will frame a state that is to be ruled by an aristocracy or by
a king, and the same education and the same habits will be
found to make a good man and a man fit to be a statesman or
king.84
This is Aristotle’s good state, but, since the state is the highest
order of being, the good state is really what its philosophers
declare it to be. There is no true transcendence. Aristotle’s
definitions of things are pragmatic. “Virtue is a mean,” and
therefore “the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable
by every one, must be best.”85 It is this pragmatism which
requires a balance and a pluralism in Aristotle’s state, not a
matter of ultimate principle. And because Aristotle lacked a
doctrine of man in the biblical sense, man as covenant-breaker,
he hoped that self-interest would lead man to the rational
choice of a pragmatically sound social order. Aristotle was
philosophically committed to the ultimacy of the one; he
hoped pragmatically to provide a place for the many.86 It was
the power of the one which men best learned from Aristotle.
De Gaulle has stated, and Max Lerner has assented, that, “At
82. Ibid., 80-92, 99.

83. Ibid., 126, 134-135.
84. Ibid., 167.
85. Ibid., 190.
86. Ibid., 139ff., 179, etc.
the root of Alexander’s victories one will always find

Aristotle.”87
In Aristotle’s world, there was no appeal to a transcendental
justice or law. His universe was not the creation of God, nor
was his God man’s maker; rather, man posited a Prime Mover
simply to guarantee the validity of his own, independent
knowledge. Man was thus God’s maker, and God was a logical
concept, not a reality. As Cornelius Van Til has noted,
...it remains to be proved that anyone of the Greeks ever
thought of the universe as God’s creation. The term creation
is used to be sure, but the connotation of the term creation in
Greek philosophy is always determined by the fact that the
universe is thought of as having an eternal or semi-eternal
existence alongside of the existence of God. And if such is the
creation concept of Greek thought, it is impossible that the
immanence of God in the universe could mean anything else
than a sort of identity with the universe. The God of Greek
philosophy is either exclusively deistic or exclusively
pantheistic.88
As Van Til notes further, “God would not be truly indepen-
dent of the world unless the world were dependent upon God.
No one is absolutely independent unless he alone is indepen-
dent. There cannot be two absolutely independent beings.”89
For the Greeks, the state was the highest order of being and
man’s truest life. The state was a human-divine order in which
the truth and oneness of being was most fully incarnated. Sal-
lustius, who is cited together with Julian the Apostate by Gil-
bert Murray as the last protesting voice of the Greek tradition,
declared that, “The rulers are analogous to Reason.”90 This was
to a very extensive measure the first and last voice of Greek
philosophy.
Bowra, while seeing it in part as “a denial of the whole Greek
conception of man,” cites another symbolic act in the decline
of the Greek tradition. The ambitious Greek monarch of
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.
Egypt, Cleopatra, in her last hours, “clothed herself in her roy-

al robes and put to her breast the asp, minister of the Sun-god
Re, that she might be joined with him, her father, in death.”91
But, in spite of Bowra’s qualification, the Greek state had no
other destiny, unless it denied itself. Cleopatra, on giving birth
to Ptolemy Caesar by Julius Caesar, was in 46 B.C. hailed as
the “Mother of Ra.” When her three-year-old son was raised to
share her throne, he was called “Ptolemy Caesar, God, and Be-
loved Son of his Father and Mother.”92 The rulers were analo-
gous to Reason and were the only effective gods Greek faith
afforded. For the state and the rulers to act in terms of their in-
herent divinity was, in terms of Greek philosophical premises,
an intellectual and political necessity. The only alternative to
this divine unity under the ruler was the anarchy of Diogenes
and the mystics, every man his own god and his own cosmos.
Their only unity could be under a divine-human monarch’s or-
der, and their only particularity could be in the chaos of anar-
chy. The two roads of Greek philosophy led equally to ruin.
91. Bowra, The Greek Experience, 190.

92. Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, trans. K. and R. Gregor Smith
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 61, 63.
Chapter V
Rome: The City of Man
1. The Priority of the State

The exaltation of Greece often goes hand in hand with a dep-
recation of Rome. Rex Warner, in The Greek Philosophers, for
example, regards Roman thought as merely imitative of Greek
philosophy and as a branch of it. Marrou has rightly observed
that, “Modern historians have not always done justice to the
greatness of the Roman achievement,”1 and C. N. Cochrane, in
Christianity and Classical Culture, has done much to reestablish
the importance of Roman thought as well as to indicate its fail-
ure. Certainly, humanists will find a better homeland in Rome
than in Greece.
Virgil clearly stated the Roman ideal:
But thou, O Roman, learn with sovereign sway
To rule the nations. Thy great art shall be
To keep the world in lasting peace, to spare
The humbled foe, and crush to earth the proud.2

York: New American Library, 1964), 391.
2. Theodore C. Williams, trans., The Aeneid of Virgil (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1908), 218. C. Day Lewis translates it, “Remember, Roman, To rule the people
under law, to establish The way of peace to battle down the haughty, To spare the
meek. Our fine arts, these, forever.” Cited in Michael Grant, The World of Rome
(Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1960), 50-51.
95
Virgil’s words were written centuries after Rome was estab-

lished, and before Rome fully became an empire, and yet they
express clearly what was implicit in Rome from its origin.
Greece began its history as families and clans which became
city-states; its religion moved from the religious centrality of
the family to the centrality of the city-state. Fustel de Coulang-
es, in The Ancient City, saw the same pattern in Roman origins,
and certainly there is much to suggest it. There is, however, a
strong body of evidence to affirm the contrary, the priority of
the City of Rome to the Roman family and the creation of a
strong family as an act of state. It is today a mark of intellectual
respectability to treat ancient records as non-historical, but
even an elementary respect for the Roman records points to
rather startling conclusions. Two boys, abandoned twins, set
out to found a city. Romulus ploughed a furrow as the first
wall around the planned city, with the trench or furrow as the
moat, and the overturned earth as the wall. By this act, he cre-
ated his sacred city. His brother, Remus, expressed his con-
tempt for the wall and moat by leaping across them into the
City, whereupon Romulus killed him at once, declaring, “So
perish all who ever cross my walls!” Rome thus began, first,
with two boys abandoned by their family, and, second, with
the murder of a brother as its first sacrifice. The priority of the
City to the family is emphatically set forth. But this is not all.
Third, the first citizens were not members of a common family
or clan but neighboring shepherds, outlaws, and stateless peo-
ple. The City made them Romans, not ties of family or of
blood. Fourth, Roman family life and Rome’s first alliance be-
gan by an assault on the family, when the womenless men
joined in the rape of the Sabine women, with an ensuing war
against their fathers ending in peace and a very close alliance,
when the Sabine women, who had been carried off by the Ro-
mans, interceded with their fathers to restore peace. A Sabine
king, Titus Tatius, then shared the throne with Romulus.
These stories, very much at odds with the origins of other peo-
ples, embarrassing to many later Romans, and clearly hostile
to the idea of the priority of the family, have the ring of truth.
Rome: The City of Man 97
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.
2. Cicero and the Rule of Reason

At a later date, Cicero expressed this quite frankly:
So in the very beginning we must persuade our citizens that
the gods are the lords and rulers of all things, and that what is
done, is done by their will and authority; that they are like-
wise great benefactors of man, observing the character of ev-
ery individual, what he does, of what wrong he is guilty, and
with what intentions and with what piety he fulfils his reli-
gious duties; and that they take note of the pious and the im-
pious. For surely minds which are imbued with such ideas will
not fail to form true and useful opinions.4
This, of course, represented a self-conscious use of religion
which, while in the Roman tradition, lacked the integrity of
the earlier position. Grimal is correct, in speaking of Roman
morality of the early period, that its “distinct aim” was “the
subordination of the individual to the City.”5 This was true
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.
also of Roman religion. The meaning of the word “pietas,” de-

scriptive of the religious man, is revealing. A man was “pious”
if he recognized, admitted, and moved in terms of his subordi-
nation and obligation to god, man, family, and the state; he dis-
charged his duty where duty was due because of sacred
relationships.6 The framework for the religious and familial
acts of piety was Rome itself, the central and most sacred com-
munity. Rome strictly controlled all rights of corporation, as-
sembly, religious meetings, clubs, and street gatherings, and it
brooked no possible rival to its centrality. One of the reasons
for the later supremacy of the military bodies over Rome was
the lack of any organized bodies within the state to provide a
counter-balance to the two swollen bodies which became the
rulers of the Empire: the army, and the abiding and growing
civil service. The state alone could organize; short of conspira-
cy, the citizens could not. On this ground alone, the highly or-
ganized Christian Church was an offense and an affront to the
state, and an illegal organization readily suspected of conspira-
cy. Pietas meant the observance of ritual and relationship “be-
tween beings anywhere in the universe; pietas is first and
foremost a kind of justice on the immaterial plane, maintain-
ing spiritual things in their due place.” A related verb is piare,
which refers to “the act of wiping out a stain, an evil omen, a
crime.” A man who violates the order of things, like a son
striking his father, “is a monstrum, a prodigy contrary to the
order of nature.”7
Closely related to this concept of piety was the idea of genius,
“a divinity symbolizing the ‘spirit,’ the religious principle in-
herent in a being or a place, even in a ‘college.’”8 Basic to this
belief was the concept of continuity, and the immanent divin-
ity in all being. “The worship of the Emperor’s Genius was
one of the many elements which led up to Caesar-worship.”9
From 195 B.C. on, the Dea Roma cult, begun in Smyrna, grew
into “a new and potent abstraction, the idea of the Roman peo-
6. R. H. Barrow, The Romans (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1964 [1949]), 22.
7. Grimal, Civilization of Rome, 103.
8. Ibid., 457. Barrow, The Romans, 19-21.
9. Cyrus Bailey, Phases in the Religion of Ancient Rome (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1932), 52.
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
10. Ibid., 137-138.

11. Walter Addison Jayne, M.D., The Healing Gods of Ancient Civilization (New
Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962), 399-400.
12. Francis Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, From 330 B.C. to 330
A.D., vol. 1 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964), xxiv-xxv.
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.
pressions of the chaos faith, they were so thoroughly con-

trolled by order, the Roman state, that chaos had to use foreign
forms, rather than the historic Roman myths, when it gained
its ascendancy. Hence the extensive presence of “oriental” cults
in the empire.15 The Romans tended to identify chaos with the
body and its appetites, and reason with order. The roots of
Western asceticism are extensively bound up in this dialectic
rather than biblical Christianity, which is hostile to asceticism.
To submit to the pleasures of the flesh, however enticing, was
to submit to chaos and to dethrone order. The older Romans
were thus distrustful of sex. Of Marcus Cato, Plutarch wrote,
Manilius, also, who, according to the public expectation,
would have been next consul, he threw out of the senate, be-
cause, in the presence of his daughter, and in open day, he had
kissed his wife. He said that, as for himself, his wife never
came into his arms except when there was great thunder; so
that it was for jest with him, that it was a pleasure for him,
when Jupiter thundered.16
When Cato and other Romans like him kissed their wives
without thunder, it was “for the purpose of detection, so that,
if they had been drinking, the odour might betray them.” The
women fought back at this by drinking “spiced wine” in which
the smell of spices would be stronger than the smell of alco-
hol.17 While Cato may have been more rigorous than most, he
was definitely in the Roman tradition, regarded as old-fash-
ioned in his day but truly Roman.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was in the same tradi-
tion, a Roman conservative, that is, a champion of Reason
against chaos. For him, the equation was a simple one: knowl-
edge meant order, and error meant disorder.18 For Cicero, or-
der meant law, and law meant reason. “True law is right reason
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.
in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, un-

changing and everlasting; it summons to duty by its com-
mands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”
“Law is the highest reason, implanted in Nature.... This rea-
son, when firmly fixed and fully developed in the human
mind, is Law.... Law is intelligence.... the origin of Justice is to
be found in Law, for Law is a natural force.” For Cicero, na-
ture was not fallen but normative and hence the source of jus-
tice. The world of nature, the cosmos or order of being,
includes both God or gods and men, and they share in a com-
mon reason. “Therefore, since there is nothing better than rea-
son, and since it exists both in man and God, the first common
possession of man and God is reason. But those who have rea-
son in common must also have right reason in common. And
since right reason is Law, we must believe that men have Law
also in common with the gods.” This order, which is basic to
both divine society and human society, makes them one
world. “Hence we must now conceive of this whole universe
as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are mem-
bers.”19 This law or order is given and ultimate. “Law is not a
product of human thought, nor is it any enactment of peoples,
but something eternal which rules the whole universe by its
wisdom in command and prohibition. Thus they have been ac-
customed to say that Law is the primal and ultimate mind of
God.”20 Although men had been “accustomed to say” God, Ci-
cero was basically committed to saying Law or Reason. In
“Scipio’s Dream,” Cicero wrote, “Know, then, that you are a
god, if a god is that which lives, feels, remembers, and foresees,
and which rules, governs the body over which it is set.... an im-
mortal spirit moves the frail body.”21
If Cicero was a god, then why not Caesar? In the spring of
54 B.C., Cicero indeed wrote to Julius Caesar in Gaul, “You
will see from this letter how convinced I am that you are a sec-
19. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, 211, 317, 319, 321, 323.

20. Ibid., 381.
21. Ibid., 279, 281.
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.
saken reason.27 Cicero’s answer to the question, “What is free-

dom?,” was this, “The power to live as you will,” but the only
man who truly “lives as he wills” is the “one who follows the
things that are right.”28 Thus, if the state be ruled by reason, or
by philosopher-rulers, then, however totalitarian its law, its
citizens are for Cicero free men. The issue between the aristo-
crats and the People’s Party (led also by aristocrats like Caesar)
was not liberty but power. For the aristocrats, at their best, as
in Cicero, freedom was the rule of reason as represented in the
old order. For the democrats, freedom was the triumph of
force, power, of planned overturning or chaos. Cicero had
been ready to grant extraordinary powers to Pompey, involv-
ing possible innovations, to preserve order.29 His readiness
briefly to see some good in Julius Caesar was grounded in the
hope that Caesar would champion rational order. Dickinson
maintained that Caesar represented instrumentalism, and Ci-
cero constitutionalism.30 The distinction is a thoughtful and a
valid one if we avoid reading the modern connotations into in-
strumentalism and especially constitutionalism. Constitution-
alism for Cicero meant reason, and instrumentalism for Caesar
meant the creative force of sheer power. Power could crush,
forgive, and regenerate. Power, not reason, was the life-blood
of the state for Caesar, who saw the conservative senators as
unrealistic fools.
Both parties were moving towards a showdown, and to-
wards an incarnation of their faith. Cicero earnestly saw his
standard of reason as the hope, and himself as representative of
reason, and looked back fondly to the time when he had been
hailed “Saviour of the country.”31 Later, he was able to hail Oc-
tavian hopefully as “this Heaven-sent young man.”32 Cicero
spoke of knowledge as more exalted than God, and hence he
27. Cicero, De Oratore II, III, De Facto; Paradora Stoicarum; De Partitione Orato-
ria, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1948), 279.
28. Ibid., 285-293.
29. Cicero, The Speeches: Pro Lege Manilla, Pro Caecina, Pro Cluentio, Pro Fabiro,
Perduellionis, trans. H. Grose Hodge (London: Heinemann, 1927), 60, 71.
30. John Dickinson, Death of a Republic: Politics and Political Thought at Rome,
59-44 B.C., ed. and intro. George Lee Haskins (New York: Macmillan, 1963).
31. Wilkinson, Letters of Cicero, 31.
32. Cicero, Philippics, trans. Walter C. A. Ker (London: Heinemann, 1926), 299.
could call the learned “Plato, the god of philosophers.”33 Ev-

erything in his thinking called for an incarnation of reason as
head of state, but the times created instead an incarnation of
power as head of state. And in this Cicero had a hand, as did
others before him, as they stripped religion from reason and
left no moral obstacle to the democratic demand for chaos.
The controlled use of chaos in festivals Cicero recognized as
a valid part of Roman life. Interestingly, he defended Gnaeus
Plancius before a jury in 54 B.C., declaring,
You say that he raped a ballet-girl; we hear that this crime was
once committed at Atina by a band of youths who took ad-
vantage of an old privilege allowed at the scenic games, espe-
cially in country towns. What a tribute to the propriety of my
client’s youthful days. He is reproached with an act which he
was permitted by privilege to commit, and yet even that re-
proach is found to be baseless.34
But now the rape of the Roman Republic was in process, “vio-
lence becoming a means to omnipotence.”35 Cicero, as we have
seen, held that reason, law, “is a natural force,” a very real pow-
er, and the true means to omnipotence and true order should
be reason. But, even as the body could be ruled by sensuality
and its chaos rather than by reason, so could the body politic.
The wise man, and Cicero believed himself to be wise, con-
trolled his sensuality by reason, governing the power of chaos
by the power of divine intellect. He regarded sensual indul-
gences not as sins but as surrenders to chaos, as abandonments
of the true order of reason. Sex was thus to be distrusted and
used with care, under the control of reason. Chaos, vice, when
set in motion, could not be stopped. “He therefore who looks
for a ‘limit’ to vice is doing much the same as if he were to
think that a man who has flung himself headlong from Leucas
can stop his fall when he will.”36 And thus, in spite of all his
33. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, trans. Francis Brooks (London: Methuen, 1896),
91, 150.
34. Cicero, The Speeches: Pro Archia Poeta, Post Reditum in Senatu, Post Reditum
ad Quirites, De Domo Sua, De Haruspicum, Responsis, Pro Plancio (London: Heine-
mann, 1923), 445, 447.
35. Ibid., 75. Cicero’s speech, on his return from exile, was probably delivered on
September 5, 57 B.C.
36. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 371.
persistence in hoping and in trying to reestablish the republic,

he feared Rome was done. After the murder of Caesar in 44
B.C., when a friend, more respectful of Caesar than Cicero,
said “there is no way out of the mess,” Cicero was inclined to
agree. Six or seven weeks later, he observed, “I was a fool, I
now see, to be consoled by the Ides of March. The fact is we
showed the courage of men, the prudence of children.”37 He
persisted in trying and was in the end beheaded, one of his ex-
ecutioners being a man whom Cicero had defended in court
against the charge of murdering his own father.38
Cicero, as a champion of the order of reason, feared sex
religiously, not as a sin but as a revolt against reason whose
overindulgence meant overturning order. The atheistic
philosopher-poet, Lucretius, shared the same horror of sex.
Sexual passion was a chaotic and destroying power, from his
perspective:
Yet fly such phantoms, from the food of love
Abstain, libidinous; to worthier themes
Turn, turn thy spirit; let the race at large
Thy liberal heart divide, nor lavish, gross,
Over one fond object thy exhausted strength,
Gend’ring long cares, and certain grief at last.
For love’s deep ulcer fed, grows deeper still,
Rank, and more pois’nous; and each coming day
Augments the madness.39
The fearful and chaotic power of sex spelled for Lucretius both
devastation and slavery.
Then, too, his form consumes, the toils of love
Waste all his vigour, and his days roll on
In vilest bondage.40
He counselled, as one means of escape, the studied contempla-
tion of all the woman’s physical defects, and the frailties of
flesh lest her “humid kisses” mislead him. Every hour, man
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.
should remember the defects of the woman, lest he be “in the

silly net led captive” and become as shameless as the dogs
which copulate in the streets.41 Cicero, too, feared sensuality
and counselled his son against it, advising training in toil and
endurance “of both mind and body, so as to be strong for ac-
tive duty in military and civil service.”42 The service of the state
was thus paramount for Cicero. Sensuality destroyed reason
and hence virtue. “For sensual pleasure, a most seductive mis-
tress, turns the hearts of the greater part of humanity away
from virtue; and when the fiery trial of affliction draws near,
most people are terrified beyond measure.”43 Not even in re-
tirement, said Cicero, “did I surrender myself to a life of sensu-
al pleasure unbecoming to a philosopher.”44 Like Sophocles, he
felt that a great advantage of old age was deliverance from sex.
“We come now to the third ground for abusing old age, and
that is, that it is devoid of sensual pleasures. O glorious boon
of age, if it does indeed free us from youth’s most vicious
fault!”45
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,
41. Ibid., 187-189.

42. Cicero, De Officiis, 125.
43. Ibid., 205.
44. Ibid., 171. Cicero spoke of the body’s “natural functions” with distaste, and
said of sex, “To beget children in wedlock is indeed morally right; to speak of it is
indecent...let us follow Nature and shun everything that is offensive to our eyes or
our ears,” 129, 131.
45. Cicero, De Senectute, etc., 49. A parallel to the Salome-John the Baptist inci-
dent, which New Testament scholars would do well to note, is cited by Cicero: “It
was a disagreeable duty that I performed in expelling (in 184 B.C.) Lucius Flamini-
nus from the senate, for he was a brother of that most valiant man, Titus Flamini-
nus, and had been consul seven years before; but I thought that lust merited the
brand of infamy. For when in Gaul during his consulship, at the solicitation of a
courtesan at a banquet, he beheaded a prisoner then under condemnation for some
capital offense”; cf. Livy XXXIX 42.7, 43.2. The reference to Sophocles is in Plato’s
Republic: “I remember someone asking Sophocles, the poet, whether he was still ca-
pable of enjoying a woman. ‘Don’t talk in that way,’ he answered; ‘I am only too
glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman’”;
Francis Macdonald Cornford, trans. and ed., The Republic of Plato (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1945), 329.
sang of his homosexual exploits with King Nicomedes. Brutus

may have been Caesar’s son, for his mother, Servilia, and pos-
sibly his sister, Tertia, had been Caesar’s mistresses. His sexual
interest was in men and women of power, including queens.
Curio the elder called him, in a speech, “every woman’s man,
and every man’s woman.”46 Cicero’s conceptions of power
were oriented to the rule of reason, a thorough dictatorship
but a coldly rational one. Caesar’s idea of power was bluntly
sexual. Suetonious reported: “Transported with joy at this suc-
cess, he could not keep from boasting a few days later before a
crowded house, that having gained his heart’s desire to the
grief and lamentation of his opponents, he would therefore
from that time mount on their heads,” a term used in a double
sense, one being fellatio.47 Cicero’s dreams were the dreams of
reason and of order. Caesar’s dreams, seen as good omens,
were the dreams of chaos, and his religious associations were in
terms of this. Early in his career, in Spain, he dreamed of incest
with his mother, and the soothsayers “interpreted the dream to
mean that he was destined to have sovereignty over all the
world, his mother whom he saw under him signifying none
other than the earth, which is counted the mother of all
things.”48 Before crossing the Rubicon some years later, we are
told that he had a similar dream of incest with his mother.49
And, as has been noted, Caesar may have restored the Baccha-
nalia to Rome. Certainly his triumph marked a newly religious
era in Rome, a hope in the revitalization of chaos, the very
“over-indulgence” feared by Lucretius and Cicero now seen as
the new source of social vitality and power. Lucretius and Ci-
cero represented the decline of the religion of order and of rea-
son; Julius Caesar represented to the people of Rome political
renewal and religious revival. Lucretius, who died a suicide,
saw the world as declining and dying: “And thus, even now,
the age of the world is debilitated, and the earth, which pro-
46. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (New York: Book League of Amer-
ica, 1937), 31.
47. Ibid., 14.
48. Ibid., 6.
49. Plutarch, Lives, 874.
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
50. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 96.

51. Grimal, Civilization of Rome, 318-319; cf. 330ff, 456.
52. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About to Die (New York: Ballantine, 1958), 35.
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
53. Ibid., 53ff., 117-118.

54. Grant, World of Rome, 174.
55. Sir Richard Burton, Love, War and Fancy: The Customs and Manners of the East
(New York: Ballantine, 1964), 227.
The prohibitions of the Mosaic law against sexual relations

with animals were religious prohibitions, directed in terms of
an environment in which these things, both in Egypt and espe-
cially in Canaan, were religious acts. And, significantly, Cice-
ro, in his laws on religion, which are exclusively concerned
with ritual and the protection of the sanctuaries from profana-
tion and theft, includes this law: “The pontiffs shall inflict cap-
ital punishment on those guilty of incest.” As for the religious
law concerning games, Cicero called for “moderation.”56
Chaos as revitalization has a long and continuing history in
Western civilization, and, with the French Revolution, it
gained a new vitality as revolution and sexual chaos became the
means to social regeneration. In the world of art, the creative
artist came to be identified as of necessity with a social and sex-
ual anarchist, and in popular thinking, order and morality
came to mean monotony and devitalizing, enervating palls,
whereas lawlessness meant liberty and power. The middle-aged
“fling” and sexual license came into being as a grasping after re-
newal, and Negress prostitutes came to be used as “a change of
luck” device, an especial sin against order as a means of a re-
charging of luck and power. Basic to all these manifestations,
from ancient Egypt through Caesar to modern man, is one
common hope: destroy order to create order afresh, or, even
more bluntly, destroy order to create order.
5. Cicero and Revolution
Cicero saw what was coming:
Wherefore if it is the duty of a good consul, when he sees ev-
erything on which the state depends being shaken and uproot-
ed, to come to the public, to plead for the loyal support of the
citizens, and to set the public welfare before his own; it is also
the duty of good and courageous citizens, such as you have
shown yourselves to be at every crisis in our history, to block
all the approaches of revolution....57
56. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, 397.

57. Cicero, Speeches, 455.
“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.
make him unpopular.” In June of the same year, he referred to

Rome as “Romulus’ dunghill.”62 But none of this compared to
the flagrant overturning of morality which was to come with
the revolutionists. His Philippics, especially the second, cite
the debauched nature of Mark Antony.
His answer, as De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum made clear,
was morality, the morality of reason. Moral goodness, as he
told his son, in De Officiis, “depends wholly upon the thought
and attention given to it by the mind.” Moreover, “neither
ought we to do anything for which we cannot assign a reason-
able motive; for in these words we have practically a definition
of duty.”63 How many even of the aristocracy could follow so
refined a conception of morality? Of course, for the common
people, as Grant has pointed out, Cicero devised in his Laws a
legal structure “for the employment of religion to control the
people.”64 And what social vitality was there in a system which
commended itself only to a few philosophers? “All the appe-
tites must be controlled,” said Cicero, but what agency of con-
trol was there, when reason carried little authority with
most?65
6. Cicero and the State

Cicero’s state was as all-absorbing and total as Caesar’s; the
difference rested in the source of power. For Cicero, it was rea-
son, and for Caesar, the army and raw power. Cicero declared,
“This, then, ought to be the chief end of all men, to make the
interest of each individual and of the whole body politic iden-
tical.”66 What freedom then remained to man? Cicero’s ratio-
nal state was a total and all-absorbing One, and the “free” man,
a Stoic of sorts, is the Many, whose freedom is entirely an in-
ner thing, restricted to rational acceptance of the Ciceronian
state as the true order of being. Cicero saw the state’s existence
62. Wilkinson, Letters of Cicero, 33-35.

63. Cicero, De Officiis, 81, 103.
64. Grant, World of Rome, 156.
66. Ibid., 293.
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
67. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, 519, Fragment 1 of The Laws.

68. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of
Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London: Oxford, 1944), 48.
religion except as a social instrument to keep the people in sub-

jection.70 Cicero saw the revolutionists as barbarians, but in
truth his party was the truer barbarian element. “A society
that gives everything for material wealth, that shrinks from
nothing in the pursuit of power, is barbarous, however great
its mastery of nature.”71 Aristocratic, republican Rome had be-
come barbarian in this sense, despite Cicero, and moved only
in terms of power. It was inevitable that the army should be
used as the surest road to power, and Caesar used it. And Cice-
ro himself was not untainted and was charged by Brutus with
opportunism,72 a charge some historians also make. He has also
been accused of simply having tried to make the world safe for
property. At any rate, Caesar’s coming to power had all the
manifestations of a religious revival.
7. Caesar and the New State

The religious excitement was marked. Cicero, in all his writ-
ings, made no mention of what Dickinson called “this orgy of
hysteria,” which “reached its pitch when two men were of-
fered up for human sacrifice on the Campus Martius under the
presidency of the pontiffs and the High Priest of Mars.”73 Cae-
sar’s professed policy of clementia was a religious one. Clemen-
cy, mercy, forgiveness, and judgment are with modern man
purely personal attitudes, but in origin and truest meaning
they are religious concepts and juridical in framework. The
profession of clementia was by Caesar a religious and regal pro-
fession, an expression of royal status. According to Stauffer,
“He wanted power in order to practice goodness, in order to
heal the world by clementia. Julius Caesar believed in a policy
of clemency.”74 His clemency was not always consistently ap-
70. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, 398.

71. Harold Mattingly, Roman Imperial Civilisation (Garden City, NY: Double-
day Anchor, 1959), 132-133.
72. Wilkinson, Letters, 185.
73. Dickinson, Death of a Republic, 236.
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 44.
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:
75. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic, 248-249, 256-296.

76. Bailey, Phases, 139-140.
77. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic, 256ff.
78. Dickinson, Death of a Republic, 225-226; Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, 50-
51.
79. Dickinson, Death of a Republic, 364-365.
80. For an example of this, see Frank O. Copley, trans., Plautus: The Haunted
House (Mostellaria) (Indianapolis, IN: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 62-63.
Meanwhile, he made promises of all sorts, possible and impos-

sible, to every one who came near him, and no longer even at-
tempted to stop the wholesale pillage of public money which
his friends were conducting under his very eyes. The Dictator-
ship was degenerating into a senile and purposeless opportun-
ism that recalled the feeblest expedients of the old republican
government.81
The expectations and emotions of the people were messianic
and revolutionary. The age of gold was to return, and all things
were to be made new.
All this while Italy was as distracted as ever with the problem
of debt, and the middle class was still feeling the pinch of the
prevailing crisis, while among the poor population of Italy
and Rome there was a strange recrudescence of vague revolu-
tionary propaganda which was becoming daily more alarming
to the property-owning classes. The wildest dreams were ban-
died about in the streets of Rome and over the Italian country
side. Caesar, with his colonies and his Parthian War, would
bring back the age of gold; the tyranny of the rich and power-
ful was drawing to its close, and a newer and better govern-
ment was at hand. The memories of the great popular
revolution became so lively in men’s minds that a certain Ero-
philos, a native of Magna Greecia, a veterinary surgeon by
profession and no doubt more or less weak in the head, passed
himself off as the grandson of Marius and immediately became
the hero of the hour. Associations of workmen, colonies of
veterans and even municipalities chose him as their patron,
and he actually formed a sort of court around him and dared
to treat Caesar and the aristocracy on terms of equality. Afraid
to embroil himself with the people, Caesar did not dare to re-
move him; and the utmost he would do was to turn him out
of the metropolis.82
In popular fancy, in the fantastic new games and ritual battles,
in the new scope given to sexuality, in economic and political
expectations, the religion of chaos and of revolution was run-
ning with free course. The assassination of Julius Caesar did
not stem the fervor of this religious movement but rather dem-
onstrated how unrealistic the conspirators were. As Stauffer
has observed,
81. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, vol. 2, Julius Caesar,
trans. Alfred E. Zimmern (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 335.
82. Ibid., 339.
The Roman people glorified the dead Caesar in a unique pas-

sion liturgy, which echoes the ancient eastern lament for the
death of the great gods of blessing, and many of whose motifs
show an astonishing connexion with the Good Friday liturgy
of the Roman mass. “Those whom I save have slain me,” they
sang in the name of the murdered man. And Antony declared
before the temple of Venus, where the son of the goddess lay
in state: “Truly the man cannot be of this world whose only
work was to save where anyone needed to be saved.”83
The now divinized Caesar had given a new direction to Roman
history. Augustus Caesar was to be more discreet in his ways,
more bent on maintaining the forms of the republic to placate
the aristocrats, and more business-like in government, but his
reign was heralded as a messianic one on his coins.
The symbolic meaning is clear: a new day is dawning for the
world. The divine saviour-king, born in the historical hour or-
dained by the stars, has come to power on land and sea, and
inaugurates the cosmic era of salvation. Salvation is to be
found in none other save Augustus, and there is no other
name given to men in which they can be saved. This is the cli-
max of the Advent proclamation of the Roman empire.84
8. The New Perversity
The religion of chaos had, as we have noted, a new morality.
Augustus was, although himself flagrantly adulterous, anxious
to revive, by law and punishment, traditional Roman moral
standards. The rising immorality was notoriously present in
his own family. All his efforts were futile. The old Roman mo-
rality had been based on the asceticism of reason, and this
foundation was now gone. The sensuality of chaos was the
new rationale, and essential to chaos is perversity. Roman sex-
uality thus went from asceticism to passionate perversity. Ca-
tullus (84?-54 B.C.) had already charted the essential nature of
this new temper in the previous generation. Catullus had to
love what he despised, and to despise whatever he loved. Per-
versity and degeneracy drew him like honey.
83. Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, 52.

84. Ibid., 88.
I hate and love.

And if you ask me why,
I have no answer, but I discern,
can feel, my senses rooted in eternal torture.85
This temper was now basic to love. He was wildly in love with
a woman, probably a Lesbian, a murderess of her husband, and
faithless even to her lovers. Yet he loved her “more than him-
self and all things he ever owned or treasured,” and he grieved
that Lesbia’s “body’s given up in alley-ways, on highroads.”86
A homosexual,87 he wrote with savage hate of Gellius, to
whom he was drawn, accusing him of incest with his mother,
sister, and aunt, and “gymnastic fornication” with himself.88 It
was with full knowledge of these things that Catullus became
involved with Gellius in “this evil, disastrous love that con-
quered me.” Catullus deluded himself that Gellius would, be-
cause of their “love,” “check your crimes,” only to find himself
linked to further sins. Catullus’ accusation against Gellius is
equally valid of Catullus: “you enjoy, better than all things on
earth, love that is stripped of love and is merely, crime.”89 This
was the essence of chaos, and the essence of Catullus’ poetic in-
spiration.
In the second century A.D., Juvenal reported bitterly, “If
you want to be anybody nowadays, you must dare some crime
that merits narrow Gyara (a prison island) or a gaol; honesty is
praised and starved. It is to their crimes that men owe their
pleasure grounds and high commands, their fine tables and old
silver goblets with goats standing out in relief.”90 Men actually
went through wedding ceremonies with men.91 The old moral-
ity of Cicero was echoed by Seneca, who wrote of honesty and
courage, and became Nero’s servile and immoral attendant, de-
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.
claring of Nero, “He restores to the world the Golden Age.”92

For Seneca, man, divine in that he is in part mind and thus
shares in divine mind,93 was apparently under no obligation to
be a man in simple matters of moral integrity. The chaos cult
was exemplified in Nero’s life, and although the legions finally
revolted, the mob in the main remained faithful to Nero and
believed in fact that he was not dead, or, if dead, would return
to lead them and to destroy his enemies, according to Sueto-
nius. There was a systematic manner to Nero’s debauchery:
rape, incest, perversion, the desire to overturn every moral law
characterized his activity. Significantly, Nero, according to
Suetonius, “utterly despised all cults, with the sole exception of
that of the Syrian goddess,” the Atargatis cult, a fertility cult of
chaos, only to surrender it for another like faith.94 The Liber
Pater effigy (identified with Bacchus and Dionysus, chaos
cults),95 appeared most frequently on his coins, and his associ-
ates were apparently close to various chaos cults, Otho follow-
ing Isis. When Nero died, those who continued in the tradition
of Cicero and Brutus hoped to revive the Roman republic. Sig-
nificantly, they attempted this, not in the name of reason, but
in the name of the chaos cult. The Phrygian liberty cap of
Liber Pater was adopted as the emblem of their hopes, revolu-
tionary cries raised in the streets, and the senate was persuaded
briefly to proclaim the return of the republic.96 Their only ra-
tionale for power was anti-republican. Nero’s faith was closer
to the hearts of the people. Arthur Weigall’s Nero (1930) was
right in one respect: Nero was popular with the mobs of
Rome.
As the parade of emperors began, with their frequent and
usual debaucheries, and at times madness, the army raised up
new emperors on their shields and then also destroyed them.
It is easy to see all this simply as a long nightmare which only
the consistent work of the Roman civil service overcame in or-

93. Sir Roger L’Estrange, ed., Seneca’s Morals (New York: Burt, n.d.), 384.
94. Suetonius, Lives, 279.
95. Grimal, Civilization of Rome, 427, 447.
96. Alexander De Mar, Roman and Moslem Moneys (Washington, DC: Square
Dollar Series, n.d.), 28.
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.
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
99. C. R. Haines, trans., The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, vol. 2

(London: Heinemann, 1920), 319. Fronto was Marcus Aurelius’ tutor, to whom
Marcus Aurelius wrote, in A.D. 162, that he loved him “passionately” (33), and to
whom Fronto had written, A.D. 145-147, when Marcus was Caesar, “What is sweet-
er to me than your kiss? That sweet fragrance, that delight dwells for me in your
neck, on your lips” (vol. 1, 221).
100. C. R. Haines, trans. and ed., The Communings of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
Emperor of Rome, Together with his Speeches and Sayings (London: Heinemann,
1916), 21.
101. A. S. L. Farquharson, trans. and ed., The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus
Antoninus, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), 155. For Farquharson’s com-
ments, see 283, 370.
102. Haines, in intro. to Communings, xxii, 153.
103. Ibid., 169, 261.
104. See Farquharson’s comments, Meditations, vol. 1, 281, 291ff., 419.
of the universe, their bodies from the earth. Hence, as Farqu-

harson noted, “Mind transcends particularity, bridging the
gulf which in appearance divides men (with their individual
persons, wills, ends, senses) from one another by means of the
reason which they have in common.”105 Mind is thus the One,
and divine, and bodies and things material are the many, and
earthy. The preeminence of the One is thus very apparent. It
represents the true commonwealth of man. The philoso-
pher-king was for Marcus Aurelius the binding quality where-
by the oneness of being was brought together in terms of
reason. “The sentence of Plato was ever on his lips: Well was it
for states, if either philosophers were rulers or rulers philoso-
phers.”106 The world of the senses had a monotonous similarity;
particularity had little meaning for him. His view of the games
was not one of moral horror but of ascetic boredom and dis-
dain:
As the shows in the amphitheatre and such places grate upon
thee as being an everlasting repetition of the same sight, and
the similarity makes the spectacle pall, such must be the effect
of the whole of life. For everything above and below is ever
the same and the result of the same things. How long then?107
He was not the cold rationalist Cicero had been. Both Marcus
Aurelius and Fronto believed in dream-cures.108 But he prized
“the ruling Reason”; all else in him was “mere flesh and a little
breath.”109 The asceticism of reason was more developed than
in Cicero. Reason, neither in man nor in the universal mind of
nature, is omnipotent, and it is wholly good and free of evil:
The Universal Substance is docile and ductile; and the Reason
that controls it has no motive in itself to do wrong. For it hath
no wrongness and doeth no wrong, nor is anything harmed by
it. But all things come into being and fulfil their purpose as it
directs. 110
105. Ibid., 321.

106. Haines, Communings, 361.
107. Ibid., 157.
108. Ibid., 25; Haines, Correspondence, vol. 1, 253.
110. Ibid., 131.
It is curious that scholars have seen, as did some churchmen, a

semi-Christian in Marcus Aurelius, when Christianity holds to
the fallen, covenant-breaking nature of the total man. Man,
said Marcus Aurelius, is body and soul: “To the body indeed
all things are indifferent, for it cannot concern itself with
them. But to the mind only those things are indifferent which
are not its own activities; and all those things that are its own
activities are in its own power.”111
What, then, is the power of this good, free, and sovereign
mind? It faces an alien world, and, to all events, it must say,
“This has come from God, and this is due to the conjunction of fate
and the contexture of the world’s web and some such coincidence
and chance.”112 History, moreover, is cyclical; “change is the
universal experience,” “a perpetual transformation, and in
some sort, decay,” personal and universal.113 The physical
world must decay and change,114 but all “The parts of the
Whole — all that Nature has comprised in the Universe —
must inevitably perish, taking ‘perish’ to mean ‘be
changed.’”115 If the gods are not concerned about the universe,
“an impious belief,” still, “if it be so, I say, ... it is still in my
power to take counsel about myself, and it is for me to consid-
er my own interest.”116 Marcus Aurelius knew his function:
“Revere the Gods, save mankind. Life is short. This only is the
harvest of earthly existence, a righteous disposition and social
acts.” The social goal, the One, Rome, was as paramount for
Marcus Aurelius as for his early Roman forebears. The alterna-
tive as he saw it was either oneness or anarchy: “But art thou
discontented with thy share in the whole? Recall the alterna-
tive: Either Providence or Atoms! and the abundant proofs there
are that the Universe is as it were a state.”117 The alternative
was either a universal state, a whole which absorbed all and
111. Ibid., 129.

112. Ibid., 61.
113. Ibid., 243, cf. 93.
114. Ibid., 253; clearer in Farquharson, Meditations, vol. 1, 185, 187.
116. Ibid., 145-146.
117. Ibid., 69.
moved through a repetitious cycle of growth and decay, or uni-

versal anarchy and particularity. It was for him a choice be-
tween law and no law. In this picture, the individual was
nothing in the whole. “Thou has subsisted as part of the
Whole. Thou vanish into that which begat thee, or rather thou
shalt be taken again into its Seminal Reason by a process of
change.” Therefore, “Cease not to think of the Universe as one
living Being, possessed of a single Substance and a single Soul;
and Now all things trace back to its single sentience; and how
it does all things by a single impulse.”118 There is “scarcely any-
thing stable” in being, “for all substance is as a river in ceaseless
flow.” This is small comfort, but the choice is either anarchy
or this, “a unity and a plan and a Providence.”119 There was a
universe, and a void or chaos surrounding this area of order,
and the power of mind or reason is in its ability to “trace” the
plan of all this and comprehend “the cyclical Regeneration of
all things.”120 Mind or reason therefore understood the dialec-
tic of chaos and order and had the power of preferring order.
Marcus Aurelius has been described as “a good but very wor-
ried man.”121 The brutally empty nature of his Stoic faith has
been tellingly summarized by Cochrane in his comparison of
the Meditations with Augustine’s Confessions: “the work of Au-
gustine was addressed to God, that of Aurelius was addressed
to himself.”122 In his dying words to his family, his son Com-
modus, and his friends, he urged that his son be given good ad-
vice in terms of the philosophy he had laid down, for “it is
difficult to check and put a limit on our desires when Power is
their minister.”123
10. Commodus
Commodus (161-192) had already been regarded as a philos-
opher, together with his father, and Athenagorus the Athe-
118. Ibid., 75-81.
119. Ibid., 133.
120. Ibid., 293.
121. Mattingly, Roman Imperial Civilization, 341.
122. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 386.
nian, a Christian philosopher, had addressed A Plea for the

Christians, “To the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and
Lucius Aurelius Commodus, conquerors of Armenia and Sar-
matia, and more than all, philosophers.”124 Commodus, who
came to power in 180, was philosopher enough to see no hope
in his father’s philosophy. His gilt-bronze bust in the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London shows him wearing the Phry-
gian liberty cap of chaos, “the cosmic cap with the seven stars.”
This star-spangled cap designated the Shepherd of the Stars; it
was common also to Mithras-worship, which Commodus also
favored. On Commodus it meant clearly world domination.125
Commodus appeared in a procession of the Isis cult as an image
bearer.126 Commodus exemplified the regenerating power of
chaos in his life; he maintained a double harem of three hun-
dred boys and three hundred women and took a commanding
part in the games. He assumed the name of the “blessed Com-
modus,” and Eastern cities, probably taking their cue from
Rome, expressed their delight with a coin carrying the inscrip-
tion, “Under the reign of Commodus the world experiences an
age of blessing.” Later, he portrayed himself as “Hercules redi-
vivus, the strong man sent from heaven and armed with super-
human powers to set the poor world free from the powers of
destruction.”127 Finally, his apparently Christian favorite wife,
Marcia, arranged for his assassination. The horror for Commo-
dus felt by Gibbon and other historians cannot altogether con-
ceal the fact of his popularity. It was necessary, in order to
prevent disorders, to state that Commodus had died of an apo-
plexy and that the senator, Pertinax, “had already succeeded to
the throne.”128 The senate reviled the dead Commodus, and
Pertinax sought to institute ancient ideas of reform. The son of
a freed slave who had become wealthy, Pertinax had bought
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.
his way to the throne, and now he sought to reform it and to

avoid a continuous bribery. He issued coins, declaring himself
to be emperor “Through the Providence of the gods.” The
army assassinated him in the same year and sold the throne to
General Didius Julianus, whose coins realistically proclaimed
the source of chaos and revolution: “Through unanimous res-
olution of the army (chosen emperor).”129 Commodus had
been assassinated on the first day of 193; by June 1, 193, Perti-
nax and his successor Didius Julianus had both been killed by
the army. When Septimius Severus, of Punic ancestry and
speaking Greek and Latin with a Punic accent, became emper-
or later in the same year, he declared himself an Antonine by
adoption and claimed Commodus as his brother.130 Whatever
the senate felt and modern historians believe concerning Com-
modus, he was clearly a popular figure. Septimius Severus had
power, which was sufficient for legitimacy, and senate approv-
al as well. His “relationship” to the popular Commodus was
needed to establish him with the people.
The triumph of the religion of chaos in Rome under Julius
Caesar had served to unite Rome more firmly with the empire
and to pave the way for the empire to triumph over Rome it-
self. Septimius Severus had represented such a triumph over
the feeble tradition of the senate, and many an emperor rose to
power because of his relationship to the cult of chaos. It is not
enough to say that the army began to name the emperors, be-
cause the army did not always or by any means limit itself to
naming military men. Religious enthusiasm was a major as-
pect, as in the fervor generated in the army when it saw the
fourteen-year-old Elagabalus, “looking like Bacchus,” preside
as pontiff of Ela-Gabal at Emesa, and was then easily won over
to proclaiming him emperor against Macrinus.131 The quick
disillusionment with Elagabalus does not alter the original re-
ligious (and then monetary) loyalty to him.

130. Stewart Perowne, Caesars and Saints: The Evolution of the Christian State,
180-313 A.D. (New York: Norton, 1963), 52, 75.
131. Ibid., 114-155.
11. Last Hopes in Chaos

The messianic attempts to save Rome continued. Gallienus
(253-268, sole emperor after the capture of his father Valerian,
260-268), issued a coin of most ambitious design, which includ-
ed a portrayal of himself with the wreath of Ceres, yet wearing
a beard:
This can only mean that he looked upon himself as the univer-
sal god in human form. Even the conflict between the male
and the female principle, which separated the gods of Olym-
pus, has been vanquished. All that god and the worship of god
meant in heaven and on earth was concentrated in him.
The reverse (side).... The ancient conflict between West and
East has been overcome, and all strife on earth is over. That is
the meaning of the high-flown inscription, UBIQUE PAX,
“Peace on Earth.”
This coin, then, proclaims a twofold gospel to the nations,
blessing of the earth and world peace. It is the culmination of
the imperial philosophy which lies behind this gospel. In the
emperor the conflict between heaven and earth, between West
and East, between male and female, between power and bless-
ing, has been overcome. In the emperor the fulness of the god-
head dwells bodily, and gives life and peace to the universe in
the year of salvation.132
The import is very plain. Not only is time and history the de-
terminative force in the universe, but all meaning can be and is
decisively incarnate in the Roman state and its emperor. There
is no other way of salvation and no other area of determina-
tion. Here the true One is fully present, and this is the true area
of its manifestation. Meaning and incarnation are truly and
even exhaustively temporal.
It was the theoretical triumph of the idea of Rome, but it was
also its defeat. The sick and decaying empire mocked the
claims of its philosopher-rulers. In republic and empire, chaos
and reason had both become “incarnate” over and over again,
and they had failed wretchedly. Men were looking to another
incarnation and, in spite of savage persecutions, turning to
Him. For some generations now, the real enemy of Rome had
132. Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, 239-240.

been neither the advocates of republic nor of empire, of reason

nor of chaos, but very clearly Jesus Christ. It was Christ or
Rome, and the emperors knew it. Not even the later compro-
mise with Christianity could obscure that fact. And, in the
fifth century, when the barbarian invasions began, Treves pe-
titioned “its Emperor for restoration, not of its walls, but of its
arena” and games.133 According to Salvian, the people had been
shouting themselves hoarse at the games while that city was be-
ing taken in 406. He described the nude and torn bodies of
both sexes in the streets, “torn to pieces by birds and dogs,”
and “the deadly stench of the dead brought death to the living.”
Yet “a few nobles who survived destruction demanded circuses
from the emperors as the greatest relief for the destroyed
City.”134 Those who point to the early death of the Roman
gods forget that the intensely religious exercises of the games
survived to the end and were, with the cult of the emperor, the
essential religious manifestation of Roman life.
133. Mattingly, Roman Imperial Civilisation, 196.

134. Salvian, “The Governance of God,” in Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, trans., The
Writings of Salvian, the Presbyter (New York: Cima Publishing Co., 1947), 178; cf.
12.
Chapter VI
Christ:
The World De-divinized
1. War Against the Gods

The essence of the ancient city-state, polis, and empire was
that it constituted the continuous unity of the gods and men,
of the divine and the human, and the unity of all being. There
was thus no possible independence in society for any
constituent aspect. Every element of society was a part of the
all-absorbing one. Against this, Christianity asserted the abso-
lute division of the human and the divine. Even in the
incarnation of Jesus Christ, the human and the divine were in
union without confusion, as Chalcedon so powerfully defined
it. Thus, divinity was withdrawn from human society and
returned to the heavens and to God. No human order or
institution could claim divinity and thereby claim to represent
total and final order. By de-divinizing the world, Christianity
placed all created orders, including church and state, alike
under God. By denying divinity to all, and by reserving
divinity to the triune God, all created orders were freed from
one another and made independent of each other and together
interdependent in their dependence on God. Church and state
were alike required to be Christian, but neither was able to be
total Christian order.
131
The hostility to Christianity sprang from this obvious as-

sault on the divinity of this world waged in the name of the tri-
une God. As even Voegelin has noted, “What made
Christianity so dangerous was its uncompromising, radical
de-divinization of the world,” and Celsus saw this as the “lan-
guage of sedition.”1 Greek and Roman culture rested on the
foundation of this continuity of being, whereby divinity was
an especial aspect of the created and human order. It is custom-
ary to trace ideas of divine kingship to “Oriental” influences (a
vague and meaningless term), but it is not explained why the
divine claims were perhaps even stronger in Greek and Roman
cultures than elsewhere. Certainly, the concept of continuity
was prevalent everywhere, and there was an interaction of in-
fluences in terms of this common faith. The Near Eastern and
North African cultures which ostensibly influenced Rome,
and the influence did exist, were, however, themselves heavily
Hellenized and Romanized. Even Judea was, by the time of
Christ, an outpost of Greek culture. The Hellenization of Pal-
estine had been briefly arrested by Antiochus Epiphanes, who
refused to accept the steady growth of syncretism and demand-
ed total Hellenization and thereby precipitated the Maccabean
struggle. Josephus noted that Greek-influenced education was
strong in Jerusalem. Alexandria shared honors with Jerusalem
as a Jewish center of thought, and Alexandrian Jewish thinking
was heavily Hellenized. There is a tradition that, at the time of
Christ and previously, the ability to speak Greek was required
as a qualification for a seat in the Sanhedrin.2 The quarrel with
Rome was primarily nationalistic, not religious. Jewish messi-
anic dreams of Israel as the divine and imperial race were at war
with the Roman messianic order.
Not only of the Greeks, but also of the Romans and all other
peoples, it could be said, as Van Til has noted, “In their gods
the Greeks indirectly worshipped themselves.”3 But with equal
1. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: Universi-

ty of Chicago Press: 1952), 100-101.
2. J. Westbury-Jones, Roman and Christian Imperialism (London: Macmillan,
1939), 50.
3. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity in Conflict: A Syllabus, vol. 1 (Philadelphia:
1962), 83.
Christ: The World De-divinized 133
justice it can be noted that, in their gods, they enslaved them-

selves. By divinizing themselves, their rulers, state, or human
order, they created an immediate and total power, a god on
earth, whose slaves they inevitably were. One can live among
men as a free man, but one cannot live in a god’s domain except
as a slave, and the divine states assured their freedom by enslav-
ing their subjects. The state is either the servant of the tran-
scendental God or the master of man.
The only solution and conclusion of Greek philosophy was
the total state. Greek philosophy “had been unable to solve the
basic problems of being and of knowledge.”4 As a result, Ro-
man philosophy, based on the failure of Greek philosophy,
was pragmatic and political, in the main. This relativism end-
ed, as in Greece, in failure. The collapse of the dialectic in
Greece and Rome led, first, to atomistic individualism, in
which the individual, as a law unto himself, became ultimate
and beyond good and evil. Second, it led to intensified claims
for the divine manifestation of the one. Men were promised
more and more by the state and emperor in attempts to reviv-
ify the dying power of the one. The ruler increasingly claimed
to be a god in history, ending history.
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.
Such mysticism ran helplessly between the Scylla and

Charybdis of monism and dualism, between the shattering
rock of a divided universe and the deadly whirlpool of the
sucking maws of the all-absorbing one. Such a philosopher was
Plotinus, who sometimes made Matter “The Other-than-Be-
ing.”5 The dialectical warfare was basic to reality for Plotinus:
But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessar-
ily comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because
the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for
necessarily this All is made up of contraries: it could not exist
if Matter did not. The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a
blend; it is blended from the Intellectual-Principle and Neces-
sity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the An-
cient King which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet
brought to order by the Ideal-Form.6
This would appear to leave man in a hopeless situation. How
is unity possible when Plotinus’ god cannot achieve it? The
Absolute One is known and attained in the inward experience
of the individual. Matter, which is evil and yet permeated by
the divine, is united to intelligence by the human soul. Thus,
man, even as he enters the all-absorbing one, suddenly reap-
pears as himself that one! Van Til has observed:
When we have found this unity it is not we who have found it;
it is that Unity that has found itself through us. And yet this
Unity has not even thus found itself for it is no self. If it were
a self it would not have found itself, and if it has found itself it
is no longer itself. Thus the Absolute as well as we must run
off in opposite directions simultaneously. It must be pure act
and to be pure act it must act in still greater heights of separa-
tion from all contact with temporal plurality. On the other
hand it cannot thus be active in the direction of pure negation
if it is not, at the same time, active in the direction of pure af-
firmation. But this affirmation is affirmation of pure temporal
individuation and as such is at the same time negation of pure
unification by negation and separation.7
5. Stephen Mackenna, trans., Plotinus: The Ethical Treatises, vol. 1 (London:
Warner, The Medici Society, 1917), 94, 97, 148.
6. Eighth Tractate, “On the Nature and Source of Evil,” in ibid., 100.
7. Van Til, Christianity in Conflict., vol. 2, 33; cf. Richard Kroner, Speculation
and Revelation in the Age of Christian Philosophy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1956), 100. In Plotinus, “Man, by the sheer effort of his thinking mind, redirects the
downward movement of the One and leads the cosmos back to its divine origin....
The human soul can thus redeem itself.”
In these philosophies, the fate of this all-absorbing one is to

destroy itself. Meaning is derived from the creative act and
thought of man. By absorbing all, the one destroys all mean-
ing, in that it nullifies every distinction and order before its im-
perial philosophical and political sway. All things are equalized
before and into the one, so that no meaning exists except one-
ness, unity. When truth is reduced to unity, nothing can then
exist or be true except unity, when the logic of this position
presses relentlessly forward in its total claims. All law, order,
and meaning are thus eroded, and there remains only the om-
nipresent unity and a now anarchistic and lawless individual
who shatters that unity in the name of his own ultimacy. Ato-
mistic individualism is the handmaid and consequence of total-
itarian unity.
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
8. Hans Jonas, “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” The Gnos-

tic Religion, 2nd ed., rev. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 320-340.
9. Ibid., 236-237.
10. Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to the
Gnostic Coptic Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion (New York: Viking Press,
1960), 110-115.
But Gnosticism can also be seen as a philosophy of

self-deification, whereby man ascends, out of his fall into
matter, beyond time, matter, good, and evil into his divinity.11
According to the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistrus, “This is
the good end of those who have attained gnosis: to become
God.”12 Even as for the modern existentialist theologian the
starting point of thinking is “the death of God,”13 so for
Gnosticism, this was, either explicitly or implicitly, the
starting point. In language resembling that of Paul Tillich
today, some spoke of the God beyond Being.14 Hippolytus
cited Basilides’ use of the doctrine of the non-existent or
non-being God.15 In this scheme of things, the Sonship of
Christ is the pattern of the sonship or deification of all men. A
Gnostic hymn portrayed Jesus, representing Mind, as the one
who led man away from Chaos, enabling the Soul to escape
from Chaos by Gnosis.16
Gnosticism survives today in theosophy, Jewish Kabbal-
ism,17 occultism, existentialism, masonry, and like faiths. Be-
cause Gnosticism made the individual, rather than a dualism of
mind and matter, ultimate, it was essentially hostile to morali-
ty and law, often requiring that believers live beyond good and
evil by denying the validity of all moral law.18 Gnostic groups
which did not openly avow such doctrines affirmed an ethic of
11. See G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnostics: A Contribu-

tion to the Study of the Origins of Christianity (New Hyde Park, NY: University
Books, n.d.), 223, 303, 329, 381, 487-488; cf. 470; originally published 1906.
12. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 153.
13. See Thomas J. J. Altizer, Miraca Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Phila-
delphia: Westminster Press, 1963); Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture
of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: George Braziller, 1961); “Christianity,” Time,
25 December 1964, 45-49.
14. Mead, Fragments, 256ff., 547ff.
15. H. Macmahon, trans., Ante-Nicene Christian Library: The Refutation of All
Heresies by Hippolytus, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1870), 274-275.
16. Mead, Fragments, 205-206.
17. Ibid., xv, 361ff.; Doresse, Secret Books, 285ff.
18. See Wayland Young, Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society (New York: Grove
Press, 1964), 252-279, for a brief survey of such cults in Western history; Mead,
Fragments, 229ff. 235-236,; Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 270ff., 274, for what Jonas called
“sin as the way to salvation,” “the idea that in sinning something like a program has
to be completed, a due rendered as the price of ultimate freedom...a positive
prescription of immoralism”; Doresse, Secret Books, 16.
love as against law, negating law and morality in terms of the

“higher” law and morality of love. Their contempt of law and
of time manifested itself also by a willingness to comply with
the state. Marcion, having for a time been an orthodox Chris-
tian, was an exception here, the Marcionites refusing to wor-
ship the emperor.19 The usual attitude was one of contempt for
the material world, which included the state, and an outward
compliance and indifference. A philosophy calling for an es-
cape from time is not likely to involve itself in the battles of
time.
4. Christianity and the Family

When Christianity entered into this Roman world, its im-
pact was primarily as a people rather than as an institution.
The church, for at least the first century of the Christian era,
was apparently without property, meeting, as the New Testa-
ment states, in homes. It was not an institution but a Christian
people whom Rome encountered in terms of the context of
their daily lives. The church met in homes, and families were
the basic Christian institution.
In early Greek and Roman cultures, paternal power was
religious power, a power continuous with all being and
essentially divine, requiring duties of the father and conferring
him with authority. The father, as Fustel de Coulanges has
shown, in The Ancient City, was under law; but, it must be
added, he was not only under law but also a part of that law
and continuous with it in the chain of being. He was thus to a
degree the law incarnate, in that he possessed a measure of the
ultimate law in his person. This manifestation of law moved
steadily from the father to the state, so that the state, originally
the creature of the family and of the fathers, made itself the
father, and the source of law, with the family turned into its
creature. Progressively, as man became a creature of the state,
the family lost its meaning and its status. Meaning was now
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.
statist, not familistic, and hence the family as an institution

was especially prone to atomistic and eroding influences.
Zimmerman has analyzed Roman life in the second century,
A.D., as reflected in The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (A.D.
117-180). According to Zimmerman, the family conditions
reflected are these:
1. Considering its attendant annoyances, marriage and
rearing a family is exceedingly difficult and only the re-
ligious or strong-minded man has the fortitude neces-
sary to do so (Book I, 6; II, 23).
2. Family virtue among the upper and middle classes is
such that in a book for children he can speak most ca-
sually of Demosthenes and Lais and state that the rea-
son Demosthenes did not have an affair with the
courtesan was either price (10,000 drachmas) or disease
(“regret”) (Book 1, 8; II, 23; V, 11; X, 23).
3. Children are judging the reasonableness of a parental
request or command, in a frame of reference in which
obedience is purely the individual prerogative of non-
age (Book II, 7).
4. The Augustinian laws on having children are “ancient
history” (Book II, 15; XVI, 10).
5. The general use of the plural of child (children) is amus-
ing (Book II, 13; IV, 2; XIII, 23).
6. Trust in friends and relatives is “idle and vain” (Book II,
29).
7. Divorce is laughable and not to be taken seriously
(Book III, 2; IV, 3).
8. Sexual abnormalities are the subject of everyday con-
versation. Hermaphrodites, once “prodigies,” are now
“instruments of pleasure” (Book III, 5; IV, 1; IX, 4;
XVI, 7; see also Juvenal and Martial on perversions).
9. The vestal virgin and the wealthy prostitute are both

successful persons, but in different professions (Book
VII, 7; IX, 5).
10. The sex life and morals of early Roman and Greek pub-
lic characters must be shown at their worst (Book VII,
8, 9; X, 6; XI, 9; XVII, 18; XV, 14; XII, 12). The good
is unusual (Book XV, 12).
11. The practices of abortion, having children nursed and
reared by slaves, and general neglect of children by par-
ents were common. The use of wet nurses from the
ranks of slaves and the servile classes had become a dis-
ease hazard. Popular conception held that “nature gave
women nipples as a kind of beauty spot” (Book II, 1).
12. The avenging of kin-murder, even by relatives of the
first degree (parent-child), was an unusual crime and
could be excused only in severe cases and by fiction.
“Kin” no longer had meaning (Book XII, 7, 8; XIII, 3).
13. The problem of dissipation of the idle upper-class
youth is still prominent (Book XV, 11).20
At first glance, Zimmerman’s analysis seems grossly over-
drawn and unfair to Aulus Gellius; a far stronger case could be
made by the use of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus, and others. Why
this use of the kindly and inoffensive Aulus Gellius? Gellius
was not always in agreement with what he reported; he be-
lieved himself to be a good man and a worthy citizen. But it is
precisely because Gellius reflected Roman dignity and charac-
ter that the world he echoes appears more deadly than the
world of Catullus. There are no real commitments in Gellius,
no basic faith. The basic issues of life are barely touched on by
Gellius, and then only casually. The question of fate versus free
will is reported with the same detached curiosity as are items
of popular gossip.21 Basically, Gellius was in agreement with
20. Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (New York: Harper, 1947),
421-422.
21. John C. Rolfe, trans., The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, 3 vols. (London:
William Heinemann, 1927-1928); see vol. 2., 95-101.
Chrysippus, On Providence, that our perspective must be dia-

lectical: good and evil require one another, for good could not
exist if there were no evil, for, according to Chrysippus, “since
good is the opposite of evil, it necessarily follows that both
must exist in opposition to each other, supported as it were by
mutual adverse forces; since as a matter of fact no opposite is
conceivable without something to oppose it.”22 This means
that good and evil are not ethical facts, moral acts of obedience
or disobedience to God, but, rather, like God, metaphysical
facts, varying aspects of being and necessary phases of life. And
to make evil a metaphysically ultimate fact is in a very real
sense to justify it. It is not surprising that a moral imperative is
lacking in the kindly Gellius. Gellius’ real concern lies in two
other directions. First, there is an antiquarian interest in the
past and a gossipy report of Roman and other customs. Two
examples of this can be cited as indicative both of Gellius’
charm as a writer and his lack of concern in his reporting:
Those who have written about the life and civilization of the
Roman people say that the women of Rome and Latium
“lived an abstemious life”; that is, they abstained altogether
from wine, which in the early language was called tematum;
that it was an established custom for them to kiss their
kinsfolk for the purpose of detection, so that, if they had been
drinking, the odour might betray them. But they say that the
women were accustomed to drink the second brewing, raisin
wine, spiced wine (Flavored with myrrh-ed.) and other
sweet-tasting drinks of that kind. And these things are indeed
made known in those books which I have mentioned, but
Marcus Cato declares that women were not only censured but
also punished by a judge no less severely if they had drunk
wine than if they had disgraced themselves by adultery.
I have copied Marcus Cato’s words from the oration entitled
On the Dowry, in which it is also stated that husbands had the
right to kill wives taken in adultery: “When a husband puts
away his wife,” says he, “he judges the woman as a censor
would, and has full powers if she has been guilty of any wrong
or shameful act; she is severely punished if she has drunk wine;
if she has done wrong with another man, she is condemned to
death.” Further, as to the right to put her to death it was thus
22. Ibid., vol. 2, 91.

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
23. Ibid., 277-279.

24. Ibid., vol. 3, 85-87.
25. See ibid., vol. 1, 151ff., 163, etc.
structure is eroded, language, too, is eroded, and semantics em-

barks on the sterile task of trying to salvage or analyze words
rather than the religious, metaphysical, epistomological, and
ethical task of establishing a new world of meaning. Gellius’
antiquarianism and semanticism were thus different aspects of
a single factor and were equally ineffectual. The Julian family
law was, for similar reasons, mainly impotent with respect to
Rome; it could not replace by law what had been removed by
unbelief, cynicism, and relativism. The Augustan and Julian le-
gal program26 was far more influential in subsequent Christian
states than in Rome.
The Christian family in the Roman Empire was clearly an
alien institution. Living within a totalitarian, unitary state, it
moved in terms of a law which had no standing in Rome,
God’s law as revealed in the Old and New Testaments. Rome
recognized various national traditions and legalized them as
subordinate aspects of imperial law. Christian family life, how-
ever, respectful of Roman law, moved clearly in terms of a law
claiming priority to Rome and, indeed, granting tolerance by
way of commanding obedience to it (Rom. 13). Christians
could defend their position as an obedient, law abiding people,
but their defense was obviously offensive. Rome claimed the
right to establish the gods and religions, but the Christians
obeyed because they declared their God had established Rome
and commanded obedience to civil authorities. A more direct
assault on the fundamental principle of Roman law is hard to
imagine. Whether the God of the Christians commanded obe-
dience or rebellion, the principle of the priority of His law,
and His right to ordain and to recognize, was clearly treason-
able, and many emperors felt that persecution for obliteration
was necessary in order to remove this threat to their power and
position.
It is possible, too, that Lewinson’s comment may have been
true, in its account of the Roman reaction:
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.
The moral teaching of the Christian missionaries sounded like

a criticism of the private life of the Imperial family, an attack
on Roman law and on the morals of Roman society. The up-
per classes did not, indeed, let it worry them, but since this
foreign sect won certain adherents among the proletariat, the
police smelt a rat. Persons propagating and accepting such
doctrines were capable of anything, even of deliberate subver-
sion of the Roman Empire. The inquisition set on foot against
the Christians after the burning of Rome in July A.D. 64
yielded no evidence that they had been responsible for the
fire, but they were, as Tacitus reports, found guilty of “hatred
against human-kind.” This was ground enough for organizing
a massacre of them.27
It should be noted that Tacitus suspected Nero of ordering the
fire. “Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the
guilt on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians
by the populace.” An “immense multitude” of the Christians
“was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as
of hatred of mankind.”28 The hatred of the Christians is appar-
ent in Tacitus’ paragraph, and their separateness is the ground
of their offense as haters of humanity. The Christian concept
of law as revealed in its simple family life made it clear that true
Christians could not be assimilated into the empire.
5. Abortion
This Christian law with respect to the family appeared very
quickly with respect to abortion. Plato had sanctioned
abortion when conception took place past the age-limits of the
state-controlled procreation, because it was “an offense against
religion and justice, inasmuch as he is raising up a child for the
state.”29 As this statement clearly shows, religion and justice
are set in the context of the state and its desires. Aristotle also
required abortion when state-allowed births were exceeded.30
In Rome, Septimius Severus and Antoninus prohibited
27. Richard Lewinson, M.D., A History of Sexual Customs (New York: Harper,
1958), 83.
28. Tacitus, Annals in A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb, trans., Complete Works
of Tacitus (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 380-381.
29. Plato, The Republic, 461-462.
30. Benjamin Jowett, trans., and Max Lerner, intro, Aristotle’s Politics (New
York: Modern Library, 1943), 16.
abortion, not as intrinsically immoral or as murder, but on the

ground that it defrauded the husband. For Plato and Aristotle,
it was a matter of state law entirely. Rome saw abortion in the
context of the father’s right to an heir, so that the validity of
abortion stood or fell in terms of that right.31 The
condemnation of abortion as murder was quickly in evidence
in Christian circles. In a collection of rules and comments, we
read, “Thou shalt not slay thy child by causing abortion, nor
kill that which is begotten; for ‘everything that is shaped, and
has received a soul from God, if it be slain, shall be avenged, as
being unjustly destroyed’ (Ex. 21:23, LXX).”32 Tertullian
declared, “To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing;
nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or
destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is
going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed.”33
The Church Councils repeatedly dealt with abortion. Can-
on XXI of the Council of Ancyra stated:
Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy
that which they have conceived, or who are employed in mak-
ing drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them until
the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Neverthe-
less, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have
ordained that they fulfil ten years (of penance), according to
the prescribed degrees.34
It is not our purpose here to analyze the development of the
penitential system, or the changing ideas of it within the
church, but simply to note that the law of murder with respect
to abortion was applied severely to converts who had been
prostitutes and abortionists and barred them from full com-
31. See R. J. Rushdoony, “Abortion,” in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 1
(Wilmington, DE: National Foundation for Christian Education, 1964), 20-23.
32. James Donaldson, ed., “The Apostolical Constitutions,” in Anti-Nicene
Christian Library, vol. 17, The Clementine Homilies: The Apostolical Constitutions
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1870), 179. On the “Apostolic Constitutions,” see
Edward F. Hills, in Edwin H. Palmer, ed., Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 1, 373-
374.
33. “Apologeticus,” in A. Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene
Christian Library, vol. 11, The Writings of Tertullian (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark,
1872), 71-72.
34. Henry R. Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, vol. 14 of Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 73.
munion for ten years. Basil of Caesaria in Cappadocia, in his

Canons, held to the same requirement. Basil called abortion
murder, and declared also, “That a woman being delivered of a
child in a journey, and taking no care of it, shall be reputed
guilty of murder.”35 In the Quinisext Council of 692, Canon
XCI declared, “Those who give drugs for procuring abortion,
and those who receive poisons to kill the foetus, are subjected
to the penalty of murder.”36 Abortion was murder, suicide was
murder, and self-mutilation was murder. Anyone who mutilat-
ed himself was subjected to excommunication if a layman, and
deposition as well if a clergyman.37 For the Christians, the only
open question here was administrative: God’s law was final
and absolute. A man’s life was not his own, nor his body, nor
the life of his unborn child. To tamper with these things was
to sin against God. It meant attempting to play God with life,
and all life and all creation was subject to man only under
God’s infallible word and law. The Roman conception of the
priority of the state was hence anathema: it was a part of that
sin from which men were to be saved, the attempt to be gods.
The Roman position has since revived among sociologists, pol-
iticians, and modernist clergymen. A sociologist has written:
A demand for abortion is frequently viewed as a type of social
deviance, and indeed most responsible physicians insist it
should be satisfied only as a last resort. Yet social engineers
should realize that at times abortion can be a vital instrument
of social control — preventing serious family disorganization,
economic hardship and diminution of physical health. Recog-
nition of this possibility by legislators may play an important
role in fostering social and economic reform.38
The key clause in this statement is this: “social engineers
should realize that at times abortion can be a vital instrument
of social control.” This precisely pinpoints the difference: so-
cial control by man, playing at god, is the goal on the one
35. Ibid., Canons II, VIII, XXXIII, 604-606.

36. Ibid., 404.
37. Ibid., “Apostolical Canons” XXII-XXIV, 595.
38. Edwin M. Schur, “Abortion and the Social System,” in E. M. Schur, ed., The
Family and the Sexual Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964),
379. Reprinted from Social Problems 3 (1955), 94-99.
hand, and obedience to God’s law is the requirement on the

other. For this reason, the priority of God and His word, the
Christian family, while sharply stronger than the non-Chris-
tian families in its environment, by no means resembled the
conservative family of old Rome, or of any other area. The
loyalty was not to the family, and to the authority of the fa-
ther, but to God. This was clearly apparent in the first eyewit-
ness account of Christian martyrdom, the death in the arena of
a young woman, Perpetua, on March 7, 203, at Carthage. Per-
petua was a young mother of twenty-two, of a noble family,
with an infant son at her breast and her breasts heavy with
milk. We have her own account of the trial:
Then my turn came. And my father appeared on the scene
with my boy, and drew me down from the step, praying to
me, “Pity thy child.” Then Hilarian the procurator, who at
that time was administering the government in the place of
the proconsul Minucius Timinianus, deceased, said, “Spare
thy father’s grey hairs; spare thy infant boy. Sacrifice for the
safety of the Emperor.” And I replied, “I do not sacrifice.”
“Art thou a Christian?” asked Hilarian; and I said, “I am.” And
when my father persisted in endeavouring to make me recant,
he was ordered down by Hilarian and beaten with a rod. And
I felt it as keenly as though I had been struck myself; and I was
sorry for his miserable old age.39
Much as she loved her father, husband, and son, her God rath-
er than her family came first in this situation.
6. Emperor Worship
The question of emperor worship is central here. The state-
ment of Hilarian to Perpetua is an interesting one: “Sacrifice
for the safety of the Emperor.” It would be absurd to maintain
that at any time Rome feared for its safety in the threat of a
Christian uprising. On the contrary, the excellent character of
the Christians was, despite some slanders, well recognized by
the emperors. The danger was religious and philosophical: the
entire theoretical and legal foundation of the emperor and the
empire was threatened by the Christian de-divinization of this
39. R. Wateverille Muncey, trans., with intro. and notes, The Passion of S. Perpet-
ua (London: Dent, 1927), 34-35.
world. The imperial sacrifices represented the recognition,

whatever other gods one held to, of the centrality of the em-
peror and the Roman state in the divinity of being. The central
direction and intelligence of being moved in the development,
power, and authority of the emperor and Rome. As Perowne
has noted, “Refusal to sacrifice amounted to a refusal to obey
an order of the emperor, and as such was accounted as treason,
for which the punishment was death. The object of the state
was not to eradicate the Christians, but to reform them,”40 or,
failing to reform them, then to exterminate them. The excel-
lence of the Christian character marked them all the more as a
dangerous and powerful alien power within the state. The slan-
derous stories invented concerning Christians reflected not
only hatred and malice but also the firm belief that a people
who denied the divinity of emperor and state were probably
such wild anarchists that they also practiced incest and canni-
balism. But the Christians, “while they were ready and anxious
to pray for Caesar, and, as their Master had taught them, to
render unto him the things which were his, they refused to
pray to him.”41
The imperial cult was ready to be syncretistic, ready to
absorb other religions into itself and into the framework of the
empire. Orthodox Christianity was militantly hostile to any
compromise in principle. Divinity in the Roman faith was,
first of all, continuous with all being, and thus it could be
manifested everywhere and in diverse forms. Second, it was
being in process, developing steadily and evolving; receptivity
to new movements was hence a religious necessity, the new
movements being evaluated, digested, and put to use in terms
of their utility to the idea of Rome. The reason for the long
survival of Rome was precisely this readiness to adopt each
new movement or “revolution” as a part of the meaning of
Rome. As a result, Rome underwent a series of revolutions
from monarchy to republic to empire, and, thereafter
40. Stewart Perowne, Caesars and Saints: The Evolution of the Christian State, 180-
313 A.D. (New York: Norton, 1963), 139.
41. Ibid., 85.
especially, was in continual revolution as an empire, all of

which left Rome sometimes in great self-contradiction to its
yesterdays but faithful to eternal, divine, and evolving Rome.
Rome destroyed Carthage as a state in 146 B.C., but in time a
Punic emperor, Septimius Severus, proud of his ancestry and
speaking Greek and Latin with a Punic accent, came to rule
Rome. He disdained to take even a Roman woman to wife,
marrying rather Julia Donna, of his own race and the daughter
of a prince-priest. He was by adoption made an Antonine, and
he was steadily promoted by the Romans, who a few centuries
before had destroyed his country, but he was now a part of the
ever-new and yet eternal Rome. Rome was continually
transforming itself while remaining always divine Rome,
ready also to absorb the Christians and use them, if they would
be absorbed.
But the orthodox Christians rejected all compromise. Their
God, the ontological trinity, being sovereign, omnipotent, and
transcendent, needed nothing to complete himself. As uncreat-
ed Being, all the universe, as created being, was His handiwork;
creation could not exist without God, or apart from Him,
whereas God made it clear that He needed nothing to com-
plete himself. Man could contribute nothing to Him, nor
could man contribute to his own salvation: God created, sus-
tained, and redeemed man. Sovereignty being entirely tran-
scendental, no human order could claim any authority apart
from or beyond God’s sovereign word. And God being per-
fect, complete, and totally self-conscious, His Word was ac-
cordingly final, infallible, and sufficient for man’s salvation.
Man’s reason, therefore, is not creative but analogical, think-
ing God’s thoughts after Him. Man’s works cannot save him
nor can they add anything to God. This is true of the elect:
how much more so the works of an unbelieving empire? Man
must render God obedience and give Him all glory, acknowl-
edging that in Him all power, glory, and dominion reside.
There was no lack of Christian philosophy, but there was a re-
jection of a “mottled” or syncretistic philosophy. When such
“mottled” philosophies appeared, the philosophers were not
always aware of their compromise: they were trying to defend

the faith and assert the antithesis. Their Greek and Roman ed-
ucation often colored their apologetics, but their purpose was
to assert an antithesis, and even Origen was ready to endure
persecution for that antithesis. Tertullian, in a famous passage,
sharply stated this faith in the sufficiency of the Scripture, the
rejection of compromise, and the rejection of “dialectics, the
art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its
propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh in its ar-
guments, so productive of contentions — embarrassing even to
itself, retracting everything, and really treating of (in the sense
of conclusively settling) nothing!” Thus, declared Tertullian, a
line of division must be drawn between this pagan philosophy
and the Christian faith:
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord
is there between the Academy and the Church? what between
heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from “the
porch of Solomon,” who had himself taught that “the Lord
should be sought in simplicity of heart.” Away with all at-
tempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic,
and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation af-
ter possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the
gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is
our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to be-
lieve besides.42
This passage was not without a lengthy history in the church
and an extensive influence on minds of a very different per-
spective than Tertullian. Thus, Robert South (1633-1716), in
his sermon of November 9, 1662, at St. Paul, “Of the Creation
of Man in the Image of God,” declared,
All those arts, rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds
gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are but the relics
of an intellect defaced with sin and time. We admire it now
only as antiquaries do a piece of old coin, for the stamp it once
bore, and not for those vanishing lineaments and disappearing
draughts that remain upon it at present. And certainly that
must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are
42. “On Prescription Against Heretics,” in Peter Holmes, trans., The Ante-Nicene
Christian Library, vol. 15, The Writings of Tertullian, vol. 2, (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1874), 9-10.
so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepid, surely

was very beautiful when he was young. An Aristotle was but
the rubbish of an Adam, when he was young. An Aristotle
was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens, but the rudi-
ments of paradise.43
Tertullian recognized Christian philosophy, because it came
from “the porch of Solomon,” but he rejected all others, spec-
ifying especially the Stoics, Platonists, and Aristotelians, (“dia-
lectic composition”). This uncompromising perspective
required not only a surrender by pagan philosophies but also a
surrender to God by the pagan state. Neither a divine nor an
autonomous existence was permitted to any man or institu-
tion: all must recognize themselves to be a part of the created
order, dependent upon God, and subject to His Word. This
submission was mandatory for all, for church, state, school,
home, and for every person and institution; every knee must
bend to the triune God or be judged by Him. This was a trea-
sonable faith to Rome; Rome claimed to be that canopy under
which all institutions and beings within its jurisdiction found
themselves and from whence they derived their legal existence.
In Rome, “Whoever or whatever was capable, and being sub-
ject to, rights was a persona,” or legal person, whether an indi-
vidual or a group. Thus, Rome decreed who or what was a
person and had rights. But the church claimed to be the body
of Jesus Christ and to have rights derived directly from God
and not subject to the jurisdiction of the state. Every Christian
family insisted on exercising rights with respect to worship
and obedience to God in their everyday lives which were not
subject to state jurisdiction because these rights were derived
from God and His Word. The Christian, as an individual and
in his institutions, claimed to be a person in virtue of God’s
Word. He insisted on obedience to the state within the frame-
work prescribed by Scripture, so that he derived right and per-
son not from Rome but from God, and Rome’s right and person
were themselves derived from God and His Word. Thus, even
in their obedience, the Christians had struck a death-blow
43. Robert South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, vol. 1 (Philadelphia:
Sorin and Ball, 1845), 25.
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.
doctrine of the continuity of being and with the doctrine of

chaos. It also involved a break with the other aspect of the di-
alectic, the pagan, rationalistic concept of order. Order is not
the work of autonomous and developing gods and men but
rather the sovereign decree of the omnipotent God. This faith
freed man from the sterile autonomy which made him the
helpless prisoner of Fate, of the relentless workings of a blind
order. Even so weak a Christian thinker as Tatian the Assyrian
saw this, declaring, “But we are superior to Fate, and instead of
wandering demons, we have learned to know one Lord who
wanders not; and, as we do not follow the guidance of Fate, we
reject its lawgivers.”45 The result was a radically new philoso-
phy of history, one in which all creation, physical and human,
is governed by the personal laws of the personal God. Co-
chrane has described this new concept of history thus:
But if this be history, it is history in a sense wholly without
parallel in secular literature. For it is neither economic nor
cultural nor political, local and particularist or general and
cosmopolitan; it deals neither with problems of war and peace
nor with those of competition and co-operation; and it does
not concern itself in the least with the “search for causes.”
What it offers is an account of human freedom, its original loss
through the first Adam and its ultimate recovery through the
second. This it presents in the form of a cosmic drama: but the
drama is not Promethean, it tells no story of “virtue” in con-
flict with “chance” or “necessity.” For, with the disappearance
from Christian thought of the classical antithesis between
“man” and the “environment,” there disappears also the possi-
bility of such a conflict. The destiny of man is, indeed, deter-
mined, but neither by a soulless mechanism nor by the fiat of
an arbitrary or capricious power external to himself. For the
laws which govern physical, like those which govern human,
nature are equally the laws of God.46
The Greco-Roman view of history was cyclical. The order of
history periodically returned to chaos in order to effect a new
beginning, and the entire order of the universe also made this
45. “Address of Tatian to the Greeks,” in B. P. Protten, Marcus Dods, Thomas
Smith, trans., Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 3, The Writings of Tatian and Theo-
philus; and the Clementine Recognitions (n.p.: Clark, 1875), 14.
46. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Cultures: A Study of
Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London: Oxford, 1944), 368.
periodic return to total chaos in order to begin again its ascent

to order. The energy of being required the regular, cyclical re-
freshing of rest and revitalization in chaos in order to begin
anew its upward strain into order. These cycles, in Augustine’s
words, “will ceaselessly recur” as “a constant renewal and rep-
etition of the order of nature.” The soul of man, with “a cease-
less transmigration,” is also subjected to this cycle. No true
believer can accept this cyclical view of history. History
moves, as The City of God was written to demonstrate, in terms
of God’s predestination, in terms of His plan. Our problem is
not history’s cycles but sin. And, because “Christ died for our
sins,” a once and final act, the dominion of sin and death is bro-
ken. “The wicked walk in a circle,” but it is not a cycle of his-
tory, but rather the circle of “false doctrine.” “What wonder is
it if, entangled in these circles, they find neither entrance nor
egress?” There was a beginning to creation, and a beginning to
time, in terms of the sovereign decree and act of God. More-
over, Augustine held, the movements “which are the basis of
time, do pass from future to past.”47 This is a concept of mo-
mentous importance. The past is chronologically prior to the
future, but it is not logically so. Since God is the totally
self-conscious and omnipotent Creator of all things, He knows
and ordains the end and the beginning. As was declared at the
Council of Jerusalem, “Known unto God are all his works,
from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). The events pro-
ceed from the determined ends and purposes of God, so that
the movement of time is from future to past. This fact has been
well stated by a modern writer:
Never does yesterday turn back in its flight and become
to-day, or to-day become to-morrow. Never does the past pass
into the present, or the present into the future. No. It is the
other way. To-morrow becomes to-day. To-day becomes yes-
terday. The future becomes the present. The present becomes
the past. The future is the source, it is the reservoir of time
which will some day be present, and then past. The present is
the narrow strait, it is the living instant, it is the flashing real-
47. Marcus Dods, trans., The City of God, by Saint Augustine (New York: Modern
Library, 1950), 393-397.
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.
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.
atheists were these persecuting Romans: they denied history in

denying Christ, for “All things were made by him; and with-
out him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3).
History, according to Paulus Orosius, is the record of
progress, despite its occasional declines from the human per-
spective, because it moves in terms of God, who makes all
things work together for good unto His elect, “and all of
Whose acts (even those that they have thought evil) they have
found to be good.”51 For Orosius, creation means providence
and the government of God: “It follows, too, that if we are the
creation of God, we are also properly the object of His con-
cern.”52 The Roman Empire and the Roman peace were creat-
ed by Christ to prepare the world for His coming.53 Christ is
“the Judge of the centuries” and Judge over Sodom and
Rome.54 Man can understand history only through the Word
of God, because man’s own perspective is that of a creature,
and, if he has no criterion outside of himself, his perspective is,
even to his own mind, an obviously limited one, because what
man knows and feels most sharply is the present:
A man who is annoyed by fleas at night and unable to sleep
may happen to recall other wakeful hours that he once en-
dured from burning fevers. Without doubt he will bear far less
patiently the restlessness of these hours than the recollection
of his earlier experience. Everyone on the basis of his own ex-
perience can testify that the time element does introduce a
new consideration here. But will anyone come forth and as-
sert, whatever his pain, that fleas cause greater suffering than
do fevers?55
Man is subject, in his knowing, to the limitations of time, to
the fact of his sin, which places him in rebellion against God
and God’s truth, and to the fact that man’s own being is still
extensively unknown to himself, in that his creaturely
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.
potentiality is not yet fully realized. He is therefore

changeable. But God is, as Tertullian emphasized,
unchangeable and eternal. Moreover, God “neither ceases to be
what He was, nor can He be any other thing than what He
is.”56 As Williams has summarized it, “The concept of
potentiality cannot be applied to God.”57 This God has total
command of Himself and of all His creation, and He therefore
both speaks and acts with perfection. True and consistent
revelation and knowledge are thus possible, whereas, among
the non-Christian philosophers of the New Academy, their
“basic principle was that probability in the realm of knowledge
is all that man can hope to attain.”58
As Marrou has aptly observed, “Christianity is an intellectu-
al religion and cannot exist in a context of barbarism.”59 The
uneducated it must educate, and the learned it must challenge
and overcome by the unrelenting apologetics of biblical faith.
In the conflict with the Roman Empire, the Christian thinkers
carried the day, and Rome found that its only effective argu-
ment, which finally failed, was persecution. And, the more fa-
natically the Roman emperors sought to advance salvation,
economically, politically, and religiously, through their ge-
nius, the more obvious their failure became. Their “salvation,”
for all Romans, more closely resembled oppression. Clearly,
the non-Christian Romans themselves, who were not bound
to pray for those in authority as were Christians, were at times
more in a mood to swear at the genius of the emperor than by
it.
9. Constantine the Great
The issues with respect to the Christian doctrine of the one
and the many came to focus in the struggles leading to the
56. Holmes, “Adversus Praxean,” Writings of Tertullian, 397.
57. Robert R. Williams, A Guide to the Teachings of the Early Church Fathers
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960), 115.
58. Sister Mary Patricia Garvey, trans., in intro. to Saint Augustine: Against the
Academicians (Contra Academicos) (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press,
1957), 1.
York: New American Library, 1964), 421.
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.
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.
within the Church: I also am a bishop, ordained by God to

overlook whatever is external to the Church.”65 How Con-
stantine saw his episcopal office is best revealed in the church
he had built in memory of the apostles at Constantinople. In
anticipation of his own death, “He accordingly caused twelve
coffins to be set up in this church, like sacred pillars in honor
of the apostolic number, in the center of which his own was
placed, having six of theirs on either side.”66 This construction
openly and obviously invited comparison to Christ. Constan-
tine had trouble following the Christological controversy,
which, despite his patience, he found “trivial,” but he did not
find it difficult to define his own christological status as emper-
or, savior, pontifex maximus, and bishop of God.
This is not to deny that Constantine believed in the reality
of the biblical God but rather to affirm it. Moreover, however
Roman his outlook, his God was still the Christian God, and,
as Constantine declared, “it is God’s work to guide everything
to the best fulfilment, and it is for man to be obedient to God.”
The state was not man’s savior, nor was the emperor a deity.
Stauffer’s comment is to the point: “Constantine promised no
golden age, as the emperors and court prophets of the past had
done, but an age of grace, an empire which practised forgive-
ness, because it was founded and depended upon God’s forgiv-
ing act.”67 This is an important fact: an age of grace is markedly
different from an age of messianic emperors. The critical ques-
tion comes with respect to the administration of the age of
grace. Is there one earthly administrator, even as there is one
heavenly Christ, and, if so, who is he? The loyal bishop, Euse-
bius, in his Oration, in speaking of the Christ, answered this
question:
This is he who holds a supreme dominion over this whole
world, who is over and in all things, and pervades all things
visible and invisible; the Word of God. From whom and by
whom our divinely favored emperor, receiving, as it were, a
65. Ibid., 546.

66. Ibid., 555.
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 275.
transcript of the Divine sovereignty, directs, in imitation of

God himself, the administration of this world’s affairs.68
The emperor, then, was the vicegerent of God and of Christ.
It was an age of grace, and Rome was the focal point of that
grace. The Roman Empire, once viewed as the world order
born of chaos, was now viewed as the world order ordained by
God. Old Rome was now linked with the New Jerusalem, and
the pagan polis was baptized into a Christian polis. For many
churchmen, as well as for Constantine, this was the correct or-
der: Rome had strayed because she had lost contact with the di-
vine order. That relationship with the divine order had now
been reestablished, and the fact of central importance was not
the person of Christ and doctrines concerning it, but the per-
son of the empire, its unity and strength. Priority belonged to
the temporal order and to the empire, not to the eternal order
and the divine-human Christ. Hence, the orthodox doctrine of
Christ was a menace, in that this Christ was clearly lord of
time and eternity and denied priority to the temporal order.
The orthodox Christ was a final and only Christ, and this was
a denial of a determinative history and potentiality to the tem-
poral order.
10. Arianism
This heretical doctrine found expression in Arius (c.
260-336) and Arianism. In Thalia, Arius struck out sharply
against the idea of a final and only Christ and mediator be-
tween God and man: “Many words speaketh God; which then
of these are we to call Son and Word, Only-begotten of the Fa-
ther?” Athanasius, in citing this, called it “anything but Chris-
tian!,” and rightfully so.69 The god of Arius was a god with no
certain or final word. He spoke many words, and hence his
truth was at least a changeable word and at best an evolving
truth. The possibility of an absolute truth was destroyed, and
the priority of eternity was destroyed. Arius’ god, like man,
68. “The Oration of Eusebius,” in ibid., 583.

69. Athanasius, “De Decretis, or Defense of the Nicene Definition,” in Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 160.
was seeking expression in history and working towards true

order. Arius professed to have, as do Barth and others today, a
high doctrine of the “otherness” of God, but his god was in-
comprehensible, not because of his transcendence, but because
he was a god who did not comprehend himself. How then
could man know this god of “many words”? The god of Arius
has a real kinship to Chaos. He is “ineffable,” and “the Unbe-
gun,” not only to all men, but also, as Arius wrote, in Thalia,
“To speak in brief, God is ineffable to His Son. For He is to
Himself what He is, that is, unspeakable. So that nothing
which is called comprehensible does the Son know to speak
about; for it is impossible for Him to investigate the Father,
who is by Himself.”70 The resemblance to the god of Kantian
and post-Kantian thought is very real. How can a Son know a
god who “is to Himself... unspeakable,” who cannot know
himself? Of necessity, Arius must say, “Many words speaketh
God,” not one Christ but many christs, because, not knowing
himself, he cannot speak a final word or an authoritative one.
Instead of an eternal Word, Arianism held to a changing word:
“Accordingly, when someone asked them, whether the Word
of God can possibly change as the devil changed, they were not
afraid to say that He can; for being something made and creat-
ed, His nature is subject to change.”71 The issue of this, Atha-
nasius said, is “polytheism.”72 A god with many words and
many potentialities is not one but many, closely resembling
Chaos and the gods arising out of Chaos. The Arian god need-
ed the many words, who were not gods and yet like many
gods, in order to have any relationship to the world. As a re-
sult, the Arian “monotheism” ended up as a vindication of pa-
gan polytheism.73 As Athanasius stated it,
Rather then will the Ario-maniacs with reason incur the
charge of polytheism or else of atheism, because they idly talk
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.
of the Son as external and a creature, and again the Spirit as

from nothing. For either they will say that the Word is not
God; or saying that He is God, because it is so written, but not
proper to the Father’s Essence, they will introduce many
because of their difference of kind (unless forsooth they shall
dare to say that by participation only, He, as all things else, is
called God; though, if this be their sentiment, their irreligion
is the same, since they consider the Word as one among all
things). But let this never even come into our mind. For there
is but one form of Godhead, which is also in the Word; and
one God, the Father, existing by Himself according as He is
above all, and appearing in the Son according as He pervades
all things, and in the Spirit according as in Him He acts in all
things through the Word. For thus we confess God to be one
through the Triad, and we say that it is much more religious
than the godhead of the heretics with its many kinds and
many parts, to entertain a belief of the One Godhead in a
triad.74
The Arians, believing history to be the determinative realm,
were thus partial to any order which offered salvation in and
through the control of history. They were, accordingly, stat-
ists, hostile to the independence of the church, zealous for the
power of the emperor, and deriving their main power from
state support. As Athanasius said, “they prop up the heresy
with human patronage.”75
11. Nicaea
The Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine to unify
the church as a part of the movement to strengthen and unify
the empire. Constantine sought unity, was impatient of doc-
trine, but was also studiously patient with what seemed to him
to be “trivial” points of doctrine. With Nicaea, the civil pun-
ishment of Christian heresy began. Much has been made of
this fact by historians, who have used it to belabor the church.
They have not stated, however, that, first, this was simply a
continuation of Roman imperial policy respecting religion.
The state cult had to be accepted by all, whatever else they also
74. Athanasius, “Four Discourses Against the Arians,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, vol. 4, 402.
75. Athanasius “Four Discourses,” in ibid, 371.
believed. The state cult was now a form of Christianity. Sec-

ond, the state cult then and in the following centuries was usu-
ally a pseudo-Christianity or a defective Christianity, which,
like Arianism, was subservient to the state. The state, con-
cerned with its own power and welfare, usually favored that
church group which best rendered prior allegiance to Caesar
rather than to Christ. The persecution of orthodox Christian-
ity continued: it was often seen as the enemy of the state, a sit-
uation no less true in the twentieth century.
But the Council of Nicaea, called by Constantine with the
religious welfare of the empire in mind, and its civil and reli-
gious unity, was used by the church to unify itself against her-
esy and against doctrines leading to a surrender of the church
to the state. As Leith has noted, against Arius, Nicaea “insisted
that God has fully come into human history in Jesus Christ”
and declared “the finality of Jesus Christ.” Moreover, “The cul-
tural significance of the Nicene theology is revealed in the dis-
position of the political Imperialists to be Arians. Imperialism
as a political strategy was more compatible with the notion
that Jesus Christ is something less than the full and absolute
Word of God.” The Nicene Creed declared:
We believe in one God, the Father All Governing (pantokra-
tora), creator (poieten) of all things visible and invisible; And
in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Fa-
ther as only begotten, that is, from the essence (reality) of the
Father (ek tes ousias tou patros), God from God, Light from
Light, true God from true God, begotten not created (poi-
ethenta), of the same essence (reality) as the Father (homoou-
sion to patri), through whom all things came into being, both
in heaven and in earth; Who for us men and for our salvation
came down and was incarnate, becoming human (enanthrope-
santa). He suffered and the third day rose, and ascended into
the heavens. And he will come to judge both the living and the
dead.
And (we believe) in the Holy Spirit.
But those who say, Once he was not, or he was not before his
generation, or he came to be out of nothing, or who assert that
he, the Son of God, is of a different hypostasis or ousia, or that
he is a creature, or changeable, or mutable, the Catholic and

Apostolic Church anathematizes them.76
In a famous footnote, Gibbon expressed his contempt for
Christian doctrine as defined at Nicaea: “I cannot forbear re-
minding the reader that the difference between the Homoou-
sion and Homoiousion is almost invisible to the nicest
theological eye.”77 The difference which triumphed at Nicaea
was a momentous one: the issue was Christ or Caesar, a final
and authoritative Christ, or a statist order as the expression of
the truth of history. The whole of Gibbon’s work is a longing
for the old Roman totalitarian state. The Nicene Creed assert-
ed that Christianity can only mean an authoritative, final, and
only-begotten Christ, and the priority of eternity to time. The
state was dethroned from its pretension to be the divine order.
By denying that Christ is Lord and Savior, Arianism, first, had
made the state man’s lord and savior, and the Arians were ded-
icated statists. The emperor, not Christ, His Word, and the
church, was central to the Arians. Second, the Arians denied
the Christian answer to the problem of the one and the many.
Arius insisted on the primacy of unity: the one was all-impor-
tant. Arius made history more determinative than eternity.
This unity in the determinative realm is the state, the Roman
Empire. The orthodox Christians, by affirming one God of
three equal persons, affirmed the equal ultimacy of the one and
the many, and, by their doctrine of God, they affirmed His
perfection, power, eternal decree or determinative role, and
they thereby de-divinized both the state and history or time.
The god of Arius was a philosophical abstraction, a chaos with
polytheism added. The only person on man’s horizon was the
emperor, and the emperor’s hearing and power were better
and more immediate than God’s. The issue, contrary to Gib-
bon, was not the letter “i,” but the liberty of man under God.
Because Athanasius (299-373) led the orthodox forces, the
forces of hostility were aimed against him. Twice, intruders,
76. Leith, Creeds of the Churches, 29-31.

77. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (New York:
Modern Library, n.d.), 719.
state appointed and subservient bishops, were forced onto his

see to replace him. Athanasius was exiled five times. His life
was often in danger, and he spent six years in the desert with
hermits. He was falsely accused of a wide variety of offenses,
including murder and sexual immorality. His real offense was
his orthodoxy, his refusal to allow the doctrine of a final and
ultimate Christ to be replaced by beliefs which left the door
wide open for the revival of Roman polytheism and statism.
This is not to say that Athanasius’ position was flawless. The
defect in Athanasius’ thinking is apparent in his statement, of-
ten repeated, “For He (Christ) was made man that we might be
made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we
might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured
the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”78 For
Athanasius, this deification of man was not “by nature” but
“given to man by grace,”79 and he objected to the Arian doc-
trine as conducive to a natural deification. In spite of his qual-
ification, Athanasius’ concept here was a departure from the
faith, and a dangerous one. It was an open door to paganism
which Chalcedon emphatically closed.
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.
nature, and the godhead, and super-induces on the uncreated

consubstantial and coeternal Trinity a nature posterior, creat-
ed and of a different substance. We moreover preserve unper-
verted the doctrine of the incarnation of the Lord, holding the
tradition that the dispensation of the flesh is neither soulless
nor mindless nor imperfect; and knowing full well that God’s
Word was perfect before the ages, and became perfect man in
the last days for our salvation.80
The implications of the orthodox position were steadily be-
coming explicit, and it is not merely rhetoric that led them to
call their opponents atheists and unbelievers. The logic of their
position required them to define theism as trinitarian theism,
with no subordination of persons in the ontological trinity.
Monism is essentially pantheistic; instead of making man a
creature of God, it makes man a participant in the very being
of God, the only differentiation being in the degree of partici-
pation. Dualism simply divides divinity into conflicting and
dialectical spheres: it is equally given to divinizing man. Can a
non-Christian theism exist? The orthodox fathers saw Christ
in New Testament terms, present as God the Son, with the Fa-
ther and the Holy Ghost, in the whole of the Old Testament.
Theism had always been trinitarian; no other kind of theism
was possible. With a supposedly one-person God, no commu-
nication and mediation was possible, nor any salvation feasi-
ble.81 Jesus had denied that any man could come to the Father
but through Him (John 14:6). Moreover, “he that hath seen me
hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). There was no other God
than this triune God, and hence no other theism was possible.
13. The Orthodox Faith vs. Heresies
One God, three persons: this was the orthodox faith. Every
attempt to weaken this faith had been also an attack on theism.
Monarchianism had said that God the Son was indeed equal
with the father, but it had denied that He was a separate or
80. Percival, Seven Ecumenical Councils, 189. For a clarification of erroneous
opinions regarding the Constantinopolitan Creed, see Bethune-Baker, the Meaning
of Homoousios.
81. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and
Councils of the Early Church (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Co., 1968).
distinct person in the Godhead. This was the position of Paul

of Samosata. The Logos existed in God just as human reason
exists in man. The Logos was an impersonal power. This
impersonal power of God was present in all men but most
present in the man Jesus, whom it gradually deified through a
union of will rather than of essence. In the modalistic
Monarchianism of Sabellius, the Son and the Spirit were
simple modes of the Father in His self-expression,
developments, as it were, in His coherence. To avoid this, said
Athanasius, “then is a true Word essential,” and, according to
Scripture, “neither is the Word separated from the Father, nor
was or is the Father ever Wordless.”82 Monarchianism had thus
two alternatives, first, the adoptionist or dynamic view,
whereby Christ was a mere man to whom the single person
God, of single being, attached himself by a union of wills. This
opened the door to other such attachments, so that God could
enter history repeatedly to divinize it by His union with men,
movements, emperors, or states. This was paganism again, and
history was made the arena of God’s activity. The divine will
did not issue an eternal decree and create and govern history
from eternity; instead, the divine will worked in and through
a fluid history by uniting His will with the will of a great man
or movement to effect a desired end. Time and man become
determinative, and the best god is the one who captures the
dynamic union in history. For the second group, the Modalists,
Christ was truly divine and one person with the Father, being
simply a mode or manifestation of the divine being. There was
no real incarnation. But, to preserve any reality to the Christ,
it was necessary to ascribe to the being of the single person,
God the Father, all that befell the Christ in history, including
birth, suffering, and death. Thus, this supposedly transcen-
dental being was made a creature of time and a subject of it, so
that again the temporal arena became decisive over eternity,
or, at the very least, it became an area which eternity and God
must struggle, with frequent or possible setbacks, to conquer.
82. Athanasius, “Four Discourses,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 434.
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
83. Ibid., 437.

a perfect coexistence and coworking of the human and the di-

vine? In this opinion, the two natures continue as two natures,
but in full communion rather than union. This opinion, com-
monly called Nestorian, was opposed by Cyril of Alexandria.
At Ephesus, twelve Anathematisms were issued against the
Nestorian position. The Second Anathema declared, “If any-
one shall not confess that the Word of God the Father is united
hypostatically to flesh, and that with that flesh of his own, he
is one only Christ both God and man at the same time: let him
be anathema.” The Third Anathema continued, “If anyone
shall after the (hypostatic) union divide the hypostases in the
one Christ, joining them by that connexion alone, which hap-
pens according to worthiness, or even authority and power,
and not rather by a coming together, which is made by natural
union: let him be anathema.”84 The Third Anathema made
clear the pagan doctrine which had been opened up by this her-
esy: a worthy man, with power and authority, could effect a
common operation with God and become the manifestation of
God for his age. The uniqueness of Christ would be destroyed,
and the door left wide open to divine rulers and emperors. In
this perspective, Christ was, as the Fifth Anathema pointed
out, only “Theophorus,” that is, Godbearing man, instead of
“very God” as well as very man. Again, the door was open to
other God-bearing men. Jesus becomes, as the Seventh Anath-
ema stated, merely a man “energized by the Word of God.”
Can others then not claim to be also energized? Is not this the
implication of this heresy? Nestorius, in keeping, as he hoped,
God and man separate, had actually opened the door to their
continual non-Christian, pagan union of wills. In his own
words, he wanted to give “to God that which is God’s, and to
man that which is man’s,”85 but by his departure from the or-
thodox doctrine he had given the divine initiative to a man
who had effected a union of power with God.

85. Ibid., 216.
The Council of Ephesus also issued a condemnation of the

Messalians, also known as Euchites, a group of heretics with a
thinly veiled dualism which resembled Manichaeanism. They
believed that two souls existed in man, one good and the other
evil. They despised physical labor, moral law, and marriage,
and asserted that prayer alone would drive out the evil spirit or
soul. They held to a changing divinity who united himself to
man. Christ’s body was held to be infinite but was originally
full of demons. Man could attain perfection to the point of
equalling the deity in virtue and knowledge; perfection meant
impassibility. Their infiltration of monasteries was especially
extensive. The group survived and was on the medieval scene
as the Bogomiles as well as the Messalians. Here, more openly
but with the same tenacity, the issue was orthodox Christian
theism vs. anti-Christianity.
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).
Moreover, there is no confusion of the two natures: “And as

the Word does not withdraw from equality with the Father in
glory, so the flesh does not abandon the nature of our kind.”86
That this statement should have come from St. Leo is of
great importance, because, as a biographer has noted, “Leo was
no heresy hunter.”87 Although “his personal contributions
contained little that was strictly original,” St. Leo’s role is an
unusual one, since “Neither before nor after him was there any
Pope who actually took the initiative motu proprio in a con-
troversy in which a purely doctrinal issue was at stake.”88 St.
Leo was primarily a pastor and an administrator, but he was
able to see that the life of the church was at stake in this con-
troversy. Man’s salvation, as he repeatedly emphasized in let-
ters and sermons, is at stake in the doctrine of the two
natures.89 “For if there is not in Him true and perfect human
nature, there is no taking of us upon Him, and the whole of
our belief and teaching according to this heresy is emptiness
and lying.”90 The two natures are in union without confu-
sion.91 Man had sinned against God, and through man must be
made the perfect obedience and atonement, but man himself
cannot render it. The incarnation changed all the possibilities
of man’s existence. At this point, Leo shared Athanasius’ error:
“the descent of God to man’s estate became the exaltation of
man to God’s.”92 As with Athanasius, this was by grace, and
Leo tended to see it as a communion, a sound view, rather than
a heretical union. He saw that virtually all heresies stemmed
from a failure to believe in the reality of the two natures in the
one person of Christ.93 He insisted on the equality of the three
86. Ibid., 255-256.

87. Trevor Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great (London: SPCK, 1941),
420.
88. Ibid., 423.
89. Charles Lett Feltoe, trans., Leo the Great, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
vol. 12 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 44ff., 69-70, 91ff., 130, 135, 139ff.,
142ff., 165ff., 180ff., 190ff., 201-202.
90. Ibid., Letter LXXXVIII, 69.
91. Ibid., Letter CXXIV, 93.
92. Ibid., Sermon XXVII, 140; cf. Sermon LXXII, 184.
93. Ibid., Sermon XXVIII, 142.
persons of the Trinity, whose “substance admits of no diversi-

ty either in power or glory or eternity.”94 Christ must be
“Himself True GOD, possessing unity and equality with the
Father and with the Holy Ghost” in order to be our Savior,
and He must be very man of very man as well as very God of
very God: “If it is only man’s nature which is to be acknowl-
edged, where is the Godhead which saves? if only God’s,
where is the humanity which is saved?”95
Nestorius could accept Chalcedon in his own sense, but not
Chalcedon and Ephesus as the unity they were. The Mono-
physites could accept Ephesus, but Chalcedon presented prob-
lems. Since Chalcedon stood firmly on the foundation of
Ephesus and in unity with it, no partial interpretation or any
deviation could stand approved.
The Definition of Chalcedon thus preserved the reality of
the eternal and electing God, and the reality of the incarnation.
The Definition declared:
Following, then, the holy fathers, we unite in teaching all men
to confess the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This
selfsame one is perfect (teleion) both in deity (theoteti) and
also in human-ness (anthropoteti); this selfsame one is also ac-
tually (alethos) God and actually man, with a rational soul
(psyches logikes) and a body. He is of the same reality as God
(homoousion to patri) as far as his deity is concerned and of
the same reality as we are ourselves (homoousion hemin) as far
as his human-ness is concerned, thus like us in all respects, sin
only excepted. Before time began (pro aionon) he was begot-
ten of the Father, in respect of his deity, and now in this “last
days,” for us and on behalf of our salvation, that selfsame one
was born of Mary the virgin, who is God-bearer (theotokos)
in respect to his human-ness (anthropoteta).
(We also teach) that we apprehend (gnoridzomenon) this one
and only Christ — Son, Lord, only-begotten — in two natures
(duo physesis); (and we do this) without confusing the two
natures (asunkutos), without transmuting one nature into the
other (atreptos), without dividing them into two separate
categories (adiaretos), without contrasting them according to
area or function (achoristos). The distinctiveness of each
94. Ibid., Sermon LXXV, 190.

95. Ibid., Sermon XCI, 202.
nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the “properties”

(idiotetos) of each nature are conserved and both natures concur
(suntre-chouses) in one “person” (prosopon) and in one
hypostasis. They are not divided or cut into two prosopa, but
are together the one and only and only-begotten Logos of God,
the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus have the prophets of old testified;
thus the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us; thus the Symbol
of the Fathers (N) has handed down (paradedoke) to us.96
The two natures were thus declared to have been united in
Christ unchangeably, inseparably, and unconfusedly. This
Definition became the touchstone of orthodoxy. Its implica-
tions were important. First, it sharply separated the Christian
faith from non-Christian concepts of nature and being. Syncre-
tism was thereby condemned. There could be no legitimate fu-
sion between Christianity and non-Christian religion and
philosophies. Second, by denying the confusion of the human
and the divine even in Christ, it denied its possibility in any
other person or institution. The divinization of the state, the
ruler, or the state office was undercut. The gap between the un-
created being of God and the created being of man could not
be nullified. Even the incarnation, which was final and unique,
was without confusion of the two natures. The persistent pa-
gan attempts to divinize man and his order were denied any
toehold in orthodox Christianity. Third, the doctrine of the
Trinity was underscored: three persons, one God, all three per-
fect and equally ultimate and powerful in all things. Thus the
equal ultimacy of the one and the many was further defended.
The truth about life was neither unity nor particularity, nei-
ther social atomism nor totalitarianism, but rather the equal
importance of both the one and the many. The Trinity, three
persons, one God, made impossible any legitimate Christian
totalitarianism or atomism: the one and the many are equally
ultimate in the triune God. Significantly, in the same year, 451,
the forces of Persian dualism were halted in their westward re-
ligious and military march by the Armenians, who, while out
of touch with Chalcedon, nevertheless fought a similar battle.
At the crucial battle of Avarair, Vartan Mamigonian, hero of
96. Leith, Creeds of the Church, 35-36.

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.
Jewish colony of hermits near Lake Mareotis. From the second

century B.C., the “immured ones” of Serapis lived incarcerated
in cells near their god, receiving food through small windows
and living and dying in their holes.100 This pagan asceticism,
deeply rooted, infiltrated into Christianity.
Asceticism is of two varieties. First, monistic asceticism
holds to the oneness of all being with gradation and variation.
Thus, particularity is an illusion, and unity is the goal and
truth of being. Spirit is high on the scale of being, while matter
is a thinness of being, so that spirit has more substantiality than
matter. The holy man seeks to ascend on this ladder of being
from the nothingness of evil and matter to the substantiality
and holiness of pure spirit. For Dante, the depth of Inferno is
locked in ice and darkness and is motionless, close to non-be-
ing, whereas the ultimate vision of heaven is the fulness of
light, energy, and motion, pure spirit as against pure matter.
Second, dualistic asceticism sees reality divided into two hos-
tile camps, spirit versus matter. These two worlds are in con-
fusion: the way of holiness is to disentangle the two worlds and
affirm the good world, the world of spirit. Man must therefore
surrender, negate, or destroy in himself all that which would
affirm the evil world of matter. This can be done either by as-
cetic practices or by debauchery, by treating the flesh as out-
side the world of law or morality and hence open to any use,
ascetic or sensual, which treats it with contempt.
Biblical revelation is radically hostile to both forms of ascet-
icism. Matter and spirit are both created by God, both fallen in
Adam and under the curse, and both objects of saving grace and
the resurrection.101 The church, following the Scripture, began
by condemning the practice and theory of asceticism:
If any bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, or indeed any one of
the sacerdotal catalogue, abstains from marriage, flesh, and
wine, not for his own exercise, but because he abominates
these things, forgetting that “all things were very good,” and
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.
that “God made man male and female,” and blasphemously

abuses the creation, either let him reform, or let him be de-
prived, and be cast out of the church, and the same for one of
the laity.102
Nonetheless, however, asceticism of both kinds crept into the
church and brought with it a high view of man and his ability
to save himself. As Scott noted, asceticism, already “fully de-
veloped” in the empire among the pagans, crept into the
church with monasticism, and “The monk needs no Saviour;
he is a self-redeemer like the Stoic or any other moralist.”103 As
Pickman noted:
In this faith there was nothing specifically Christian: pagan
priests and philosophers had held their prestige by similar
methods, and even the physicians of that day were expected to
be chaste and abstinent during a stated period before adminis-
tering their cure. A canon of the Council of Tours held much
later, in 461, shows that this conception was never eradicated:
Priests and deacons are urged to be always chaste: for at any
moment they may be called upon to perform some holy of-
fice, as to say mass, baptize, etc. (Canon No. 1).
Evidently asceticism’s popular appeal in those days was less on
account of its psychological effect on the ascetic himself, than
of its physical effect on those to whom he ministered. It was
the chosen weapon of the humanitarian. That is why before
long a physician who did not become a monk lost his
practice.104
More than humanitarianism, it was humanism, a belief in the
ability of man to divinize himself by ascent on the scale of be-
ing. As Polycarp Sherwood has summarized the teaching of St.
Maximus the Confessor, “Deification is the ultimate fulfilling
of human nature’s capacity for God.... In actual historical fact
deification and salvation are the same.” This is qualified by the
statement that it is possible through Christ and by grace, so
that “deification is wholly a gift of God and is not attainable by
102. “The Apostolical Constitutions,” in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 17,

264.
103. Hugh M. Scott, Origin and Development of the Nicene Theology (Chicago:
Chicago Theological Seminary Press, 1896), 250.
104. Edward Motley Pickman, The Mind of Latin Christendom (London: Oxford,
1937), 457.
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.
substance.” Evil thus existed in men not as a substance but as a

penalty thereon.108 But, more than that, evil is not a
metaphysical but rather an ethical condition, not so much a
penalty but rather a moral act and condition which brings on
the penalty of God’s wrath and of death. Fasting in the Bible
appears on a limited scale as a voluntary act and as an
expression of concentrated grief or repentance. It now became
a good work, a self-restraint which led to spiritual pleasures. 109
It was a means of vanquishing the Enemy, an armor in the
warfare against the devil. It was and is required in Lent.110
Lenten fasting is a means of restoring purity.111 St. Leo’s ascetic
tendencies, however, were relatively mild, and his general
stand was resolutely Christian.
In Salvian, regrettably, we find the weakening of the body
required, “for the health of the body is inimical to the soul.”
The soul is “an attribute which is divine,” and the body “an en-
emy which is of the earth.”112
For Gregory the Great, asceticism was a prerequisite to au-
thority.113 Sacerdotal celibacy was of central importance to
him.114
In terms of this ascetic perspective, matter was equated with
a lower and temporal reality, with a negligible particularity,
and the spirit was equated with a good and eternal reality and
unity. This position varied in emphasis from a Neoplatonism
to a neo-Manichaeanism. Its consequence was a tendency to
108. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 12, 22.

109. Ibid., Sermon XIX, 127-128.
110. Ibid., Sermon XXXIX, 152ff.
111. Ibid., Sermon XLII, 156ff.
112. O’Sullivan, Writings of Salvian, Letter VI, 251-252.
113. James Barmby, trans., St. Gregory’s “Pastoral Rule,” in Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 12, 7.
114. Ibid., 56ff., 91, 152, 158-159. It should be noted here that very serious mis-
representations of the patristic views of sex, women, and marriage abound. Cer-
vantes has cited examples of this. Thus, in Stromata, Bk. 2, chap. 2, Clement, in
speaking of drunkenness among men and women, wrote, “For nothing disgraceful
is proper for the logical male; much less is it for the women to whom the very con-
sideration of what she is (i.e., drunken) brings shame.” A prominent writer, widely
quoted, has rendered this sentence: “Every woman ought to be filled with shame at
the thought that she is a woman.” See Zimmerman and Cervantes, Marriage and the
Family, 657-658; cf. 504, 754.
despise things temporal in favor of things eternal. But, for

orthodox Christianity, matter and spirit are alike created by
God, alike fallen, and alike redeemed. The life of holiness is not
living in terms of the spirit and eternity, but obeying the word
of God, living under God both materially and spiritually.
Time and matter are not to be despised; like spirit and eternity,
they are good or evil only in their relationship to God and His
word. Augustine, coming out of Platonism and Manichae-
anism, and at first showing their traces, struck out against this
false view of matter: “it is sin which is evil, and not the
substance or nature of flesh.”115 Moreover,
There is no need, therefore, that in our sins and vices we ac-
cuse the nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in
its own kind and degree the flesh is good; but to desert the
Creator good, and live according to the created good, is not
good, whether a man choose to live according to the flesh, or
according to the soul, or according to the whole human na-
ture, which is composed of flesh and soul, and which is there-
fore spoken of either by the name flesh alone, or by the name
soul alone. For he who extols the nature of the soul as the
chief good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as if it were
evil, assuredly is fleshly both in his love of the soul and hatred
of the flesh; for these his feelings arise from human fancy, not
from divine truth.116
The origin of sin is not in nature but in will, and sin is contrary
to nature, which was created good, “and whose property it was
to abide with God.” Sin is not metaphysical but ethical. “In
Scripture they are called God’s enemies who oppose His rule,
not by nature, but by vice having no power to hurt Him, but
only themselves.”117 Sin is disobedience, rebellion, living for
oneself, as one’s own god. Adam’s sin as act was preceded by
an evil will. “The devil, then, would not have ensnared man in
the open and manifest sin of doing what God had forbidden,
had man not already begun to live for himself.”118
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.
17. Deprecation of Matter and History

This deprecation of matter and time, against which August-
ine spoke, meant also the deprecation of history. In Greek ter-
minology the idea was important, not the matter. In Gnostic
and heretical writings and apocryphal books, history was often
casually treated and rewritten because it was unimportant: it
merely illustrated an eternal verity. As applied to the life of
Christ, within the fold of the church, this deprecation of his-
tory meant that the atoning death of Christ on the cross gave
way to the sacrament, which now was the source of atonement
rather than the historical event it was to commemorate. In the
Nestorian teacher, Narsai, this appeared very clearly. Con-
cerning the elements of the Lord’s Supper, he declared, “And
He commanded them to receive (and) drink of it, all of them,
that it might be making atonement for their debts for ever.”119
Each celebration of the sacrament is comparable to the creative
act of Genesis 1:
He (the priest) summons the Spirit to come down and dwell
in the bread and wine and make them the Body and Blood of
King Messiah.... The Spirit descends upon the oblation with-
out change (of place), and causes the power of His Godhead to
dwell in the bread and wine and completes the mystery of our
Lord’s resurrection from the dead.... Towards the height the
priest gazes boldly; and he calls the Spirit to come and cele-
brate the Mysteries which he has offered. The Spirit he asks to
come and brood over the oblation and bestow upon it power
and divine operation. The Spirit comes down at the request of
the priest, be he never so great a sinner, and celebrates the
Mysteries by the mediation of the priest whom He has conse-
crated (or, who has consecrated). It is not the priest’s virtue
(or, his virtuousness, moral goodness) that celebrates the ador-
able Mysteries; but the Holy Spirit celebrates by His brood-
ing. The Spirit broods, not because of the worthiness of the
priest, but because of the Mysteries which are set upon the al-
tar.... without a priest they (sc. the Mysteries) are not celebrat-
ed for ever and ever.120
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.
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
121. Ibid., 29.

122. Ibid., 4; cf. 21-22.
123. Ibid., 27.
124. Ibid., Homily XXXII (D), 65.
125. Ibid., 66; cf. 32ff.
126. Ibid., 68.
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
127. Ibid., Homily XXI (C), 48.

128. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine (New
York: Oxford, 1930), 291.
of free will. Second, a denial of free will was fatalism, immoral-

ism, and a destruction of history.
Augustine, in meeting this attack, was, first of all, resolved to
be strictly biblical: “For whenever a question arises on an un-
usually obscure subject, on which no assistance can be ren-
dered by clear and certain proofs of the Holy Scriptures, the
presumption of man ought to restrain itself; nor should it at-
tempt anything definite by leaning to either side.”129 Man’s
creaturely reason must submit to God’s infinite wisdom as de-
clared in Scripture: “But we must first bend our necks to the
authority of the Holy Scriptures, in order that we may arrive
at knowledge and understanding through faith.”130 Second, sov-
ereign grace, which is proclaimed through all Scripture, means
predestination: “between grace and predestination there is
only this difference, that predestination is the preparation for
grace, while grace is the donation itself.”131 If there is a sover-
eign God, it is impossible for there to be anything but predes-
tination, which is merely another way of saying that God is
sovereign, that God is the first cause as well as the sustainer of
all creation. The alternative to predestination is not free will
but chance. Therefore, it follows, third, that it is predestina-
tion and grace which establish free will:
Do we then by grace make void free will? God forbid! Nay,
rather we establish free will. For even as the law by faith, so
free will by grace, is not made void, but established. For nei-
ther is the law fulfilled except by free will; but by the law is
the knowledge of sin, by faith the acquisition of grace against
sin, by grace the healing of the soul from the disease of sin, by
free will the love of righteousness, by love of righteousness the
accomplishment of the law. Accordingly, as the law is not
made void, but is established through faith, since faith pro-
cures grace whereby the law is fulfilled; so free will is not
made void through grace, but is established, since grace cures
the will whereby righteousness is freely loved.132
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.
Man is a creature: thus, he is a secondary cause, not the prima-

ry cause. His free will is not the absolute freedom of God but
the freedom of the creature. The freedom for man claimed by
Pelagianism is the freedom of God, a plenary power, and it is
a manifest impossibility. The freedom of the creature is possi-
ble only through grace, which reestablishes the lost liberty of
the creature by its victory over the slavery of sin. Thus, faith
establishes the law, and grace establishes free will.
Wherefore the free choice of the human will we by no means
destroy, when the Grace of God, by which the free choice it-
self is helped, we deny not with ungrateful pride, but rather
set forth with grateful piety. For it is ours to will: but the will
itself is both admonished that it may arise, and healed, that it
may have power; and enlarged, that it may receive; and filled,
that it may have.133
19. The Church as New Rome

The church, however, gradually moved towards semi-
Pelagianism, despite some early stands against it in Africa.
The Council of Orange, in 529, affirmed at best only a
moderate Augustinianism.134 The decline after that was
steady. As a result, both asceticism and sacerdotalism
continued to develop and flourish. The church now became a
rival to the empire as the heir of old Rome.
Political importance was the principle of ecclesiastical
importance, and hence the basis of the Roman see’s claims to
central authority. Peter established many churches: why was
Rome so central, assuming that he established it? The early
councils established the eminence of sees in terms of their
political role, and this was plainly apparent in Canon XXVIII
of Chalcedon, when the bishop of New Rome,
Constantinople, was granted the same honor as the bishop of
Old Rome, on account of the removal of the empire: “For the
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.
Fathers rightly granted privileges to the throne of old Rome,

because it was the royal city.”135
The church increasingly became the new Rome, but there
were tendencies towards a revival of the same concepts in the
empire. The position of Justinian II apparently was that
“Christ as King of Kings is the supreme power,” but “He rules
through the rulers of the earth, rather than directly over each
individual human being.” This was a concept related to the
Greco-Roman idea of Zeus-Jupiter as “pambasilius.” Later,
Christomimesis came to be a part of the Byzantine imperial
ceremonial, so that the emperor represented, in his golden cos-
tume, “insofar as it is possible for a mere human being to do
so, Jesus Christ Himself!”136
The later developments within the papacy have been sharply
summarized by Buckler:
The Pope claimed that he was the source of all authority, spir-
itual and secular, and, forgetting his vicegerency of Christ,
claimed to be the vicar of God on earth, and the vicar of the
Apostle of God on earth. These were the titles claimed by the
Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad. The Pope had, in reality, be-
come the supreme Prince of this World, and his pretensions
resemble the claims set forth to our Lord on the Mount of
Temptation (Luke, iv. 5). In his claim to be the absolute source
of all law and justilia, to hold it in his breast, and to be in him-
self a Theos Epiphanes, he had become the Hellenistic monarch
within the Church, and the son of man was once more his
slave, condemned to a servile righteousness.137
Meanwhile, also, another threat to Christianity was reviving
in the form of natural law. The Institutes of Justinian clearly per-
petuated the Roman doctrine and transmitted it to the centu-
ries to come.138 The universal sovereignty and government of
135. Percival, Seven Ecumenical Councils, 287; see also 14, 178-179, 288ff., 302ff.,
321ff., 326, 382-383, 537-538, 580. See also Jalland, Life and Times of St. Leo the Great,
18, 320, 328, 411, 424. See Henry Edward Symonds, The Church Universal and the
See of Rome (London: SPCK, 1939); B. J. Kidd, The Roman Primacy to A.D. 461
(London: SPCK, 1936), etc., for various accounts of the development of Roman au-
thority.
136. James D. Breckenridge, The Numismatic Iconography of Justinian II (685-695,
705-711 A.D.), Numismatic Notes and Monographs no. 144 (New York: The Amer-
ican Numismatic Society, 1959), 51, 56-57, 92.
137. F. W. Buckler, The Epiphany of the Cross (Cambridge: Heffer, 1938), 53.
138. Thomas Collett Sanders, trans. and ed., The Institutes of Justinian, (London:
Longmans, Green, 1905), 7-8.
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-
139. Raymond, Seven Books, 209.

140. Marcus Dods, trans., The City of God, by Saint Augustine (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 1950), 696.
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
142. Ibid., 330.

143. Ibid., 340-341.
subsistence in which he both performed the miracles and

endured the sufferings through the whole of his economic
conversation, and that not in his appearance only but in very
deed, and this by reason of the difference of nature which
must be recognized in the same Person, for although joined
together yet each nature wills and does the things proper to it
and that indivisibly and inconfusedly. Wherefore we confess
two wills and two operations, concurring most fitly in him for
the salvation of the human race.144
By the time of the seventh ecumenical council in 787, the
Second Council of Nicaea, the earlier theological sharpness
was blurred. The cause of the council was the Byzantine icon-
oclastic controversy. The hostility of the iconoclastic emper-
ors was not against icons as such, but against icons of the
church, because the imperial icons were the true representa-
tions of Christ’s government. As Ladner has pointed out,
The Byzantine emperors certainly did believe in the
Incarnation, but they did not accept the following two
consequences: the absolute supremacy of the Church in
spiritual matters and the terrestrial representation of the
celestial world in Christian imagery. Many historians have
stated that the iconoclastic controversy developed from a
rather ritual question to a fundamental contest between
Church and State, that is to say the emperor. But the truth is
that iconoclasm was from its beginning an attack upon the
visible representation of the civitas Dei on this earth. Not only
because the images had such an important place in the
Byzantine Church, theologically and liturgically, that an
attack against them was ipso facto an attack against the
Church but also and still more because, as we shall see, the
emperors showed unmistakably that even in maintaining the
belief in the supreme, supernatural government of Christ,
they did not wish to permit on this earth any other but their
own image or more exactly the imagery of their own imperial
natural world. They wished even more ardently than their
predecessors and than most of the occidental emperors to be
the Christian, the sacred emperors. “I am King and Priest,”
wrote Leo III to Pope Gregory II, following the old
caesaropapistic theory — but they understood this in such a
way that only their sacred empire was to be the material form
of Christendom in the terrestrial world; the Church would be
144. Ibid., 345-346.

only the liturgical function of the empire. Accordingly the

supernatural should remain abstract, Christ and his heavenly
world should not and could not be expressed visibly in
images.145
Byzantine caesaropapism was long linked to various heresies
which challenged the orthodox doctrine of Christ, monophys-
itism, Arianism, Nestorianism, and monotheletism, as well as
others. These heresies, by “narrowing the extension of Christ’s
government in the human world widened the extension of the
emperor’s rulership.”146 Thus, the question at issue was wheth-
er the state or the church was the highest expression of the di-
vine life on earth. Both church and state were thus claiming to
be the institution whereby Christ re-divinized the world, or,
at the very least, maintained his divine manifestation on earth.
The basic premise of Chalcedon had therefore been set aside:
fusion and confusion had become basic to the faith. The hu-
man order could be transubstantiated by the divine order, and
the argument was over the question of which order received
this position. Was the new polis or divine empire the church,
or was the Christian state?
Earlier, churchmen had not only condemned images but rid-
iculed their use by the Romans. Lactantius dealt with the Ro-
man excuse that they worshiped heavenly beings and merely
venerated their images, precisely the argument later used by
the church:
But, they say, we do not fear the images themselves, but those
beings after whose likeness they were formed, and to whose
names they are dedicated. You fear them doubtless on this ac-
count, because you think that they are in heaven; for if they
are gods, the case cannot be otherwise. Why, then, do you not
raise your eyes to heaven, and, invoking their names, offer sac-
rifices in the open air? Why do you look to walls, and wood,
and stone, rather than to the place where you believe them to
be?147
145. Gerhart B. Ladner, “Origin and Significance of the Byzantine Iconoclastic

Controversy,” in Mediaeval Studies, vol. 2 (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940), 134-
135.
146. Ibid., 135.
147. Fletcher, Works of Lactantius, 74.
Augustine classified the “many worshippers of tombs and pic-

tures” together with those who, in the name of grief and reli-
gion, are gluttonous or drunk at funerals. He saw them alike as
an offense to the faith.148 The Second Council of Constantino-
ple (553) in condemning Nestorianism, declared that the wor-
ship of a Christ who began as a man “and became worthy of
Sonship, and to be worshipped out of a regard to the Person of
God and the Word (just as one worships the image of an em-
peror) is anathema.”149
The Definition of the “Iconoclastic Conciliabulum,” held in
Constantinople in 754, condemned images. This council, at-
tended by 338 bishops, the largest church assembly to that
date, although neither Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, nor Jerus-
alem sent representatives, has been condemned by church his-
torians.150 Let us examine the Definition of this council, as it
defines the faith and images.
After we had carefully examined their decrees under the guid-
ance of the Holy Spirit, we found that the unlawful act of
painting living creatures blasphemed the fundamental doc-
trine of our salvation — namely, the Incarnation of Christ,
and contradicted the six holy synods. These condemned
Nestorius because he divided the one Son and Word of God
into two sons, and on the other side, Arius, Dioscorus, Euty-
ches, and Severus, because they maintained a mingling of the
two natures of the one Christ.
The Councils forbid “that one may imagine any kind of sepa-
ration or mingling in opposition to the unsearchable, unspeak-
able, and incomprehensible union of the two natures in the
one hypostasis or person.” The name Christ represents the
union of God and man. To represent Christ is “a double blas-
phemy — the one in making an image of the Godhead, and the
other by mingling the Godhead and manhood.” When blamed
for depicting the Godhead, many iconophiles took refuge in
the excuse: “We represent only the flesh of Christ which we
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.
have seen and handled.” But this is a Nestorian error, to hold

to the possibility of their separate existence. Any attempt
therefore to make images and claim for them either a part in
the unique incarnation or a representation thereof, or merely
a representation of Christ’s humanity, falls into heresy at every
turn:
Whoever, then, makes an image of Christ, either depicts the
Godhead which cannot be depicted, or mingles it with the
manhood (like the Monophysites), or he represents the body
of Christ as not made divine and separate and as a person
apart, like the Nestorians.
The only admissible figure of the humanity of Christ,
however, is bread and wine at the holy Supper. This and no
other form, this and no other type, has he chosen to represent
his incarnation.
The only permissible representation or sign is that which
Christ himself has appointed. The council went on to define an
early statement of that doctrine which came to be known as
transubstantiation.
All images were decreed barred by the Council: “Christiani-
ty has rejected the whole of heathenism, and so not merely
heathen sacrifices, but also the heathen worship of images.”
Thus, imperial images were implicitly forbidden also. The
council grounded its position in “the Holy Scriptures and the
Fathers.” It barred not only images but also the robbing of
churches by “prince or secular official... under the pretext of
destroying images.” The council believed it had “more firmly
proclaimed the inseparability of the two natures of Christ” and
“banished all idolatry,” and, among its anathemas, it declared:
(10) If anyone ventures to represent the hypostatic union of
the two natures in a picture, and calls it Christ, and thus false-
ly represents a union of the two natures, let him be anathema!
(11) If anyone separates the flesh united with the person of the
Word from it, and endeavors to represent it separately in a pic-
ture, let him be anathema!
(12) If anyone separates the Christ into two persons, and
endeavors to represent Him who was born of the Virgin
separately, and thus accepts only a relative union of the

natures, let him be anathema!
(13) If anyone represents in a picture the flesh deified by its
union with the Word, and thus separates it from the Godhead,
let him be anathema!151
The purpose of the Second Council of Nicaea, in 787, was to
overturn the iconoclastic council and to make icons essential
to the faith. It was ratified by 350 bishops. In Henry R. Per-
cival’s words, “The council decreed that similar veneration and
honour should be paid to the representations of the Lord and
the Saints as was accustomed to be paid to the ‘laurata’ and tab-
lets representing the Christian emperors, to wit, that they
should be bowed to, and saluted with kisses, and attended with
lights and the offering of incense. This was defined as ‘the ven-
eration of honour and affection’ rather than worship.”152 The
council expressed no condemnation for the imperial cult; it
simply rated the ecclesiastical icons as more important and
called iconoclasm “the worst of all heresies, as it subverts the
incarnation of our Saviour.”153 The council held to the conti-
nuity of the incarnation in the church; hence it could not see
iconoclasm in the church as anything but a denial of the incar-
nation. Images could be more influential on the faithful than
the Scripture, for St. Gregory of Nyssa read the story of Abra-
ham’s sacrifice of Isaac many times apparently without weep-
ing, “but when once he saw it painted he wept.”154
Significantly, the council, in defining its position and affirming
its faith in Christ, did not at all refer to Christ’s two natures
without confusion.155 It did affirm its faith in the intercession
of saints, a new form of the pagan continuity concept. It af-
firmed Christ’s “two natures, recognizing him as perfect God
and perfect man, as also the Council of Chalcedon hath pro-
mulgated,”156 but again it did not say that the two natures were

152. Ibid., 526.
153. Ibid., 535.
154. Ibid., 539.
155. Ibid., 540-542.
156. Ibid., 549. For a critique of the Iconoclastic Conciliabulum, see Rushdoony,
Foundations of Social Order, 148-160.
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.
21. The One and the Many

Meanwhile, through asceticism, heavily imbued with Hel-
lenic thought, a non-Christian concept of sin made increasing
headway. Evil came to be seen as the wilful attachment to
things temporal rather than things eternal. The non-Christian
attempt to save history by divinizing it had again become a
flight from history. The Christian doctrine of creation, by de-
nying divinity to man and by making time rather than eternity
his earthly habitat, had made history central to man. The uni-
verse, time, and man had been created by God, and the time of
their end would eventually come, when time should be no
more. But, meanwhile, history is important precisely because
it is determined by the omnipotent and sovereign God and is
an area of valid secondary causes rather than fortuitous events.
Because the universe and history are created by the triune, ab-
solutely self-conscious and self-sufficient God, it is totally pre-
destined and governed by Him, since nothing can be unknown
to Him or exist apart from His decree. Hence, the world of
time and space cannot be an atomistic and meaningless world

of independent particularity. Neither can it be a world with its
own independent universals and plans, because it was created
in total accord with and in terms of the plan or the universal
of God. The one and the many, the universals and the particu-
lars, cannot exist in history in independence of God or in inde-
pendence of one another. They are interdependent upon one
another since they are from a common and equally ultimate
creative act, and hence they are both derivative from His de-
cree. In God, the One and the Many are equally and absolutely
ultimate. History, therefore, is completely meaningful. Not a
sparrow falls, nor even a hair (Matt. 10:29-30), apart from this
total decree. History and man are rescued from the “blind alley
of the absolute particular” (to use Van Til’s phrase), and also
from the meaningless ocean of undifferentiated being, from
the abyss of unity in the chaos of being. According to Van Til,
“The ontological trinity will be our interpretative concept ev-
erywhere. God is our concrete universal; in Him thought and
being are coterminous, in Him the problem of knowledge is
solved.”157
This biblical doctrine has been extensively compromised,
and it was to be subjected to further attempts to fit it into a
Hellenic mold. Its impact was nonetheless great, and its course
of influence and sway only just begun.
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
1. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, trans., “De Trinitate,” Boethius: The Theological

Tractates (London: William Heinemann, 1918), 11.
195
So then if God be predicated thrice of Father, Son, and Holy

Spirit, the threefold predication does not result in plural num-
ber. The risk of that, as has been said, attends only on those
who distinguish Them according to merit. But Catholic
Christians, allowing no difference of merit in God, assuming
Him to be Pure Form and believing Him to be nothing else
than His own essence, rightly regard the statement “the Fa-
ther is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and this
Trinity is one God,” not as an enumeration of different things
but as a reiteration of one and the same thing, like the state-
ment, “blade and brand are one sword” or “sun, sun, and sun,
are one sun.”2
It is not our concern here to analyze Boethius as a theologian,
but to call attention to his basically philosophical orientation
and concern. As Boethius further stated of God, “Again, con-
cerning His Form, we have already shown that He is Form,
and truly One without Plurality.”3 It is already apparent that
“the Faith” Boethius was most zealously defending was Hel-
lenic, and the “Trinity” he championed was outwardly Chris-
tian but inwardly Greek. “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the
hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). There was no lack
of earnestness and sincerity on the part of Boethius; the new
faith seemed an admissible means of expression and a true rep-
resentation of the old philosophy. Accordingly, for Boethius,
God was the great universal, the true One, but God did not
represent plurality or particularity, because God is not Matter,
and plurality and particularity are attributes of matter.4
In De Fide Catholica, Boethius affirmed the doctrine of cre-
ation, because he was recounting the biblical narrative.5 But, in
dealing with the same question philosophically, his answer is
radically different:
VI. Everything that is participates in absolute Being through
the fact that it exists. In order to be something it participates
in something else. Hence that which exists participates in ab-
solute Being through the fact that it exists, but it exists in or-
der to participate in something else.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 19.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid., 53-71.
The Return of Dialectic Thought 197
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:
6. “Quomodo Substantiae,” in ibid., 43.

7. Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 36-38.
8. Ibid., 125.
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 truths of revelation out of sense experience and by the em-

pirical method.
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
10. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q 69, A 1; Q 70, A 1, A 2; Q 71, A 1; etc.

charity.”11 As Anne Freemantle has pointed out, “St. Thomas’

philosophy is based on the premise that knowledge and being
are correlative, ‘In so far as a thing is, it is knowable, and in this
resides its ontological truth.’”12 The method of this premise is
the analogia entis, the analogy of being, which bypasses both
rationalism and irrationalism for analogy. Since knowledge
and being are correlative, God, as true being, is what the anal-
ogous concept, thought, signifies, and much, much more. The
analogy of reason makes known what being signifies, and the
super-analogy of faith makes known the infinite reaches of be-
ing which the analogy of reason cannot extend to. Man’s rea-
son works from below and extends upward. It can extend
upwards with assurance both because of its correlativism with
being and because of its freedom from the taint of the fall, for
“the intellect is always true as regards essence,” according to
Aquinas. This is true for both men and angels, although with
differences.13 As Cornelius Van Til has pointed out,
The analogia entis idea rests finally on the notion that man can
interpret himself in terms of himself. The God of the analogia
entis idea is wholly beyond and therefore wholly meaningless,
or else He is wholly within and therefore wholly useless. In
this respect it is outdone by nothing more thoroughly than by
Barth’s analogia fidei. The historic Protestant idea of God’s
revelation in Christ through Scripture, rather than Barth’s
analogia fidei, is the true answer to the analogia entis idea.14
“The principle of intellectual operation” is “the soul of
man,” and “the intellectual soul itself is an absolute form, and
not something composed of matter and form.” Moreover, “We
must assert that the intellectual principle which we call the hu-
man soul is incorruptible,” for “being belongs to a form, which
is an act, by virtue of itself. And thus, matter acquires actual
being according as it acquires form; while it is corrupted so far
11. Summa Theologica, I, Q 1, A 8.

12. Anne Freemantle, The Age of Belief: The Medieval Philosophers, 149.
13. Summa Theologica, 1, Q 58, A 5.
14. Cornelius Van Til, “Analogia Entis,” in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol.
1 (Wilmington, DE: National Foundation for Christian Education, 1964), 201.
as the form is separated from it. And therefore it is impossible

for a subsistent form to cease to exist.15
Being is good, although “in idea being is prior to goodness.”
“Every being, as being, is good.” Evil is not to be ascribed to
being but is a lack of being: “No being is said to be evil, consid-
ered as being, but only so far as it lacks being. Thus a man is
said to be evil, because he lacks the being of virtue.... As prima-
ry matter has only potential being, so is it only potentially
good.”16 As Hebert has noted, “We can rightly speak of the ‘be-
ing’ of the Devil as Good; for the Devil must ex hypothesi be
sustained in being from moment to moment by God.” More,
“The idea of evil is contrary to that of the First Cause, in that
only that which really is, and therefore is good, can be a cause
at all.” “St. Thomas’ thesis is, Good and Being are really one;
hence, all that has being is good.”17 In Aquinas’ words, “every
being is good.... omne ens est bonum.”18
Evil is therefore a lack of being, a deprivation or a negation.
“The very nature of evil consists in the privation of good;
therefore evil can be neither defined nor known except by
good.”19 “Evil is known by God, not through its own likeness,
but through the likeness of good. Evil, therefore, has no idea
in God, neither in so far as an idea is an exemplar, nor so far as
it is a likeness.”20 “God does not will evils.”21 The opposite to
the notion of being is non-being.22 Evil is simply the absence of
good; it is “neither a being nor a good. For since being, as such,
is good, the absence of being involves the absence of good.”
Evil is privation, and no privation has or is a being, and “nei-
ther therefore is evil a being.”23 How then is evil caused, since
“even matter, as a potentiality to good, has the nature of a
15. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q 75, A 2, A 5, A 6.

16. Ibid., Q 5, A 2, A 3.
17. A. G. Hebert, Studies in St. Thomas (London: SPCK; Macmillan, 1936), 37,
83.
18. Summa Theologica, I, Q 5, A 3.
19. Ibid., Q 14m, A 10.
20. Ibid., Q 15, A 3.
21. Ibid., Q 19, A 15.
22. Ibid., Q 25, A 3.
23. Ibid., Q 48, A 1, A 2.
good.”? It “is caused by reason of the defect of some principle

of action, either of the principal or the instrumental agent.”
Rather than being a deliberate covenant-breaking by man the
sinner, seeking to dethrone God and become as God, evil is ba-
sically accidental and passive, a by-product of good. “Hence it
is true that evil in no way has any but an accidental cause. Thus
good is the cause of evil.”24
Since all being is good, the tendency and the goal of being is
perfection in the good, in God. “God alone is good
essentially.” The goodness of men is not creaturely obedience
by faith to the revealed word of God, but “by way of
participation.” “Everything can be called good and a being
inasmuch as it participates in the first being by way of a certain
assimilation, although distantly and defectively.”25 Instead of
the biblical distinction between the uncreated being of God
and the created being of man, Aquinas held to the Hellenic
concept of a common world of being, although “God is
self-subsisting being itself,” and “all beings other than God are
not their own being, but are beings by participation.”
Although Aquinas emphatically affirmed the doctrine of
creation, his philosophy better described God as the source
rather than the creator of other beings. “A thing is being by
participation,”26 rather than by creation, for all beings other
than God “are beings by participation.”27
5. Noetics and Ethics
It is apparent that, by speaking of intellect in general as both
form and as incorruptible, Aquinas was refusing to “distin-
guish between the intellect of the regenerated and the intellect
of the non-regenerated man.”28 The moral differences between
men have no epistemological significance for Aquinas; his con-
cept of the intellect was one which ascribed neutrality to it. In
24. Ibid., Q 49, A 1.

25. Ibid., Q 6, A 3, A 4.
26. Ibid., Q 44, A 1.
27. Ibid., Q 61, A 2.
28. Cornelius Van Til, Metaphysics of Apologetics (Philadelphia: Westminster
Theological Seminary, 1931), 59.
this respect, he was clearly a partisan of the Arabic and Jewish

Enlightenment of that era. He saw the intellect as a passive
power.29 Aquinas followed Aristotle in holding that the intel-
lect “is like a tablet on which nothing is written.” “The origin
of knowledge is from the senses.”30 There is no knowledge
apart from sense impressions, although the understanding of
material things comes “as they are abstracted from matter and
from material images, namely phantasma.”31 In this process,
“the intellect is always true.” Where one is deceived, there is no
right understanding. “The proper object of the intellect is the
quiddity in a thing,” i.e., the very entity of the thing. “The in-
tellect is not in error concerning this quiddity,” but with re-
spect to composition or division, and in “the process of
reasoning.” Thus, “the intellect cannot err in regard to those
propositions which are understood as soon as their terms are
understood,” as with first principles. “But in the absolute con-
sideration of the quiddity of a thing, and of those things which
are known thereby, the intellect is never deceived.”32
In analyzing this position, it is necessary to note that there
are two basic approaches to the problem of noetics and ethics,
the relationship of knowing to morality. First, it is often held
that man’s autonomous reason is able to discern and to know
reality without reference to his ethical status, i.e., whether or
not he be a sinner. This is a position common to Hellenic
thought, to Thomism, to the Arab and Jewish medieval
Enlightenments, to Kantianism, to neo-orthodoxy, and to
existentialism, as well as to other philosophies. Man’s basic
problem is held to be metaphysical or epistemological. It is
either a question of finitude or of knowledge. Rationality is
assumed to be neutral, and sin is stupidity or uninformed
reasoning. All rational men will, with clear-cut argumentation,
be brought to true knowledge. Hence, debate is basic to social
process in order to bring forth truth, and the ideal of the
29. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q 79, A 2.

30. Ibid., Q 84, A 3, A 6.
31. Ibid., Q 84, A 7, Q 85, A 1.
32. Ibid., Q 85, A 6.
university expresses this faith. The United Nations must

further this necessary dialogue. Summit meetings between the
great powers are necessary, since it is held that ultimately the
Communists will listen to reason. This is, for example, the
premise of Erich Fromm, who stated in 1962 that a dialogue
with Hitler would have been impossible “because he was
lacking in sanity,” but “it seems quite clear that the Russian
leaders of today are sane and rational people”; the leaders of the
Soviet Union “are realistic men of common sense.”33 Fromm
advocated unilateral disarmament by the United States as a
means of establishing a situation of trust and hence of rational
negotiations.34 A premise of the U. S. foreign aid program is
that demonstrated good will can further diplomacy, or sound
reasoning. The Lutheran, Karl Francke, in discussing the
noetic effect of sin, sees man’s renewal, in Van Til’s words, “in
the fact that the ‘natural’ is after all quite powerful for good
because he always remains a rational creature, and no rational
creature is ever quite helpless.”35 Thus, in every realm,
political, theological, or epistemological, it is held that man’s
autonomous reason can have valid and true knowledge
without any determinative noetic effect by sin.
The second basic approach to the relationship of knowledge
and morality is the biblical faith that man’s knowledge rests on
a common religious premise with his ethical concepts. Man is
either a covenant-keeper, or a covenant-breaker, with God. If
man is a covenant-breaker, his whole outlook, noetic and eth-
ical, is colored and shaped by his rebellion against God. He re-
fuses to accept as his basic premise the sovereignty of God and
God’s eternal decree as revealed in Scripture. Instead, he asserts
his own sovereignty and sees a world of brute factuality which
can only be ordered ultimately by his creative interpretation
and progressive control. For the one man, God is ultimate, for
33. Erich Fromm, “Explorations into the Unilateral Disarmament Position,” in

John C. Bennett, ed., Nuclear Weapons and the Conflict of Conscience (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), 135.
34. Ibid., 126.
35. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster Theological Seminary, 1954), 137.
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

data or of faulty process rather than an active reasoning to

establish a lie. In this perspective, man is essentially passive to
nature because, in its every facet, this philosophy sees man as
basically a creature of nature. If man is a product of nature, he
will of necessity be passive towards nature; he is nature’s
product and therefore totally subject to nature. But this same
man will be creative towards God, active towards God, since he
is not essentially God’s creature but nature’s. God is known
only through sense experience and the deductions man makes
from these data.
According to Aquinas, “the existence of God can be proved
in five ways.” The first argument is from motion, which is “the
reduction of something from potentiality to actuality.” The
second is “from the nature of efficient cause.” The third is
“from possibility and necessity.” The fourth “is taken from the
gradation to be found in things,” and the fifth “is taken from
the governance of the world,” which shows design rather than
chance.37 These proofs are another way of stating that knowl-
edge and being are correlative, but it becomes apparent now
that this means that man’s knowledge and being are correla-
tive; this is the premise rather than an assertion that God’s
knowledge and the universe of created being are correlative. In
terms of this equation, “Socrates and Aristotle regarded all
wickedness as due to ignorance.” For Aquinas, “Being is Pure
Act. God alone, Who is Being, is Pure Act.”38 “A creature is
nothing but a limited participation in the Act of Existing of
God, and its essence marks off the measure of that participa-
tion. In all created things, therefore, there is a real distinction
between essence and act of existing.” Man’s intellect cannot
“penetrate the Act of Existing which is God.” As a result, man
can “have no positive knowledge of God as He is in Himself,
but only as He is represented in creatures.” Man’s own unity
rests in “his act of existing,” which has primacy over essence.39
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.
In a sense, Aquinas pointed forward to existentialism. His God

was the necessary postulate to human thought, to the correla-
tion of knowledge and being. In later eras, the God of Aquinas
was increasingly reduced from reality simply to this postulate,
and then not entirely a necessary one. The problem has been
well illustrated by an incident cited by Anne Freemantle:
When the philosophers William James and Henri Bergson
met, on May 28, 1905, there were several instants of silence
and then James asked Bergson straightway how he envisaged
the problem of religion. It is good to believe, but is the expe-
rience of God or of oneself? Is the revelation, James asked, our
own revelation of God to ourselves, or is it the revelation of
God to us? This most central of all questions — did God make
us or we Him — worried St. Thomas not at all.40
The fact that Aquinas, with his very earnest and dedicated
faith, did not worry over this problem does not obliterate the
fact that his philosophy, by transferring the starting-point and
the given from the ontological trinity to the autonomous mind
of man, made the problem unavoidable. Moreover, since it is
man’s thought which is independently correlative to being,
man’s intellect is therefore active as it relates to God. In subse-
quent thinking, it was increasingly to assume the prerogatives
of God while denying the responsibilities of man by its passiv-
ity to the world of nature. In thought, creative, in morality and
psychology, passive, this is the result of St. Thomas’ incorpo-
ration of Aristotle into Christian thought. Aquinas held to the
predestination of God, but he also prepared the way for the
predestination by man, total planning and control by man as
man makes his knowledge correlative to being by controlling
evolution, society, and the entire social order.
6. Common Ground in Being
For Aquinas, there is a common world of God and man, for
“being is found to be common to all things, however otherwise
different.” From “one principle of being” all things have their
existence.41 The Archimedean point in this one world of being
40. Freemantle, Age of Belief, 149-150.
is the intellect of man, and the correlativity of knowledge and

being. In Nygren’s words with respect to the medieval idea of
love, so the Thomistic perspective “recalls a Gothic cathedral,
where the massive stone rests firmly on the earth and yet
everything seems to aspire upwards.”42
Nature, thus, is the starting point, the foundation, and, as we
have seen, “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.”43
Thus, “For Aquinas the natural is inherently defective; it par-
takes of the nature of non-being. Hence sin is partly at least to
be ascribed to finitude. For Kuyper the natural as it came from
the hand of God was perfect,” although liable to an ethical fall
as well as to development.44 Aquinas substituted for the Greek
form-matter dialectic, not the Christian view, but a similar di-
alectic of grace and nature. In this tension, one or the other had
to be sacrificed. For Thomism, “The two foundational tenets
of this system were the positing of the autonomy of natural
reason in the entire sphere of natural knowledge, and the thesis
that nature is the understructure of supernatural grace.”45
Aquinas’ attempt to reconcile a Greek dialectic to Christian
theology created insuperable problems:
The Greek form-matter motive in all its different conceptions
excludes in principle the Idea of creation in its Biblical sense.
The sum total of Greek wisdom concerning the Origin of the
cosmos is “ex nihilo nihil fit” (from nothing nothing can
originate). At the utmost, Greek metaphysical theology could
arrive at the Idea of a divine demiurg, who gives form to an
original matter as the supreme architect and artist. Therefore,
the scholastic accommodation of the Aristotelian concept of
God to the Church-doctrine of creation could never lead to a
reconciliation with the Biblical ground-motive. The unmoved
Mover of Aristotelian metaphysics, who, as the absolute
theoretical nous, only has himself as the object of his thought
in blessed self-contemplation, is the radical opposite of the
42. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, pt. 2, vol. 2 (London: SPCK, Macmillan,
1939), 432.
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.
living God Who revealed Himself as Creator. Thomas may

teach, that God has brought forth natural things according
both to their form and matter, but the principle of matter as
the principle of metaphysical and religious imperfection
cannot find its origin in a pure form — God.
Nor could the Aristotelian conception of human nature be
reconciled to the Biblical conception concerning the creation
of men in the image of God. According to Thomas, human na-
ture is a composition of a material body and a rational soul as
a substantial form, which, in contradistinction to Aristotle’s
conception, is conceived of as an immortal substance. This
scholastic view has no room for the Biblical conception of the
radical religious unity of human existence. Instead of this uni-
ty a natural and a supernatural aspect is distinguished in the
creation of man. The supernatural side was the original gift of
grace, which as a donum superadditum was ascribed to the ra-
tional nature.46
Man, a composite, finds his principle of individuality in mat-
ter, whereas the intellectual principle is the form of man. “This
means a fundamental deprecation of individuality, since in the
Aristotelian view matter is the principle of imperfection.”47
Thomas Aquinas seeks the principium individuationis in a
“materia signata vel individualis” (Summa Theologiae III, qu.
72, 2) a conception that frankly contradicts his scholastic
Christian view of individual immortality of the rational soul
as form and substance. In order to save the latter he had to take
refuge in the hypothesis of formae separatae that were individ-
ualized by their having been created in proportion to a mate-
rial body.48
7. The One and the Many in Aquinas
This means that Aquinas had a problem in maintaining any
proper relationship between the one and the many, since
particularity was an attribute of matter. First of all, Aquinas
tended to separate his universals from God, and he held that in
God there is neither universal nor particular.49 For Aquinas,
the one precedes the many. “Hence Plato said that unity must
46. Ibid., 180-181.

47. Ibid., vol. 3, The Structure of Individuality of Temporal Reality (1957), 17.
48. Ibid., vol. 2, The General Theory of Modal Spheres (1955), 419.
come before multitude; and Aristotle said that whatever is

greatest in being and greatest in truth is the cause of every
being and of every truth, just as whatever is the greatest in heat
is the cause of all heat.”50 This is the basis of Thomas’ doctrine
of “creation,” the one as the cause of the many because the
many must by definition originate in the one. For Aristotle,
this made man a creature of the state, the social one, and the
universe the creature of chaos, the cosmic one. The source for
Aquinas is the one, and the goal is also the one, unity, in which
the many find their perfection. He did, of course, try to
maintain a balance between the one and the many, between
universals and particulars, holding, that, to have real existence,
the universals must exist in the particulars as their essence, not
as abstractions beside them. He sought to maintain this balance
in every area.51
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 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.
54. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, vol. 3, 215.

Aquinas had earnestly sought a new weapon for the faith in

the Aristotelian thought of the Arabic and Jewish Enlighten-
ment of the Middle Ages. The immediate result was a new and
broader claim to power for the church. But, by introducing a
non-Christian foundation into the structure of the church, the
Scholastics also introduced this same pagan foundation into
the university, into the state, and into all of man’s life. In terms
of this foundation, non-Christian and anti-Christian motives
and directions were built into every area of late medieval life,
to the destruction of Christian order.
Chapter VIII
Frederick II and Dante:
The World Re-divinized
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
church and compelled him to recant the following Sunday.1

Much earlier, before the Norman Conquest, one can find, in a
major document, wherein the primacy of the papacy is af-
firmed, a thoroughly biblical and “Protestant” doctrine of the
nature of the church as stated in Matthew 16:15-19, wherein
Christ defines the “rock” on which He will build His church.
It is difficult to find as clear a statement in most Protestant
commentaries:
Jesus then said, “What say ye that I am?” Peter answered him,
“Thou are Christ, the living God’s Son.” The Lord to him said
for answer, “Blessed art thou, Simon, dove’s child,” &c....
Bede the expounder unveils to us the deepness of this lesson....
The Lord said to Peter, “Thou art rocken” (Note: Literally
stonen, having the same relation to stone as rocken to rock,
golden to gold, earthen to earth, &c.) For the strength of his
faith, and for the firmness of his confession, he received that
name; because he joined himself with steadfast mind to Christ,
who is called a Rock by the apostle Paul.
“And I will build my church upon this rock”; that is, upon the
faith which thou confessest. All God’s convocation is built
upon the rock; that is, upon Christ; because he is the
ground-wall of all the structures of his own church.2
The Roman Catholic approaches the so-called “medieval”
era believing that it possessed a modern papal unity and
authority which did not then exist. It was, indeed, the very
struggle for that unity which destroyed the culture and led to
the chronic conflicts of succeeding eras. The earlier unity of
Christendom had been a religious unity, a Christian unity
which was a reality in a decentralized civilization. The basic
localism of feudal culture governed both church and state. The
struggle of both the papacy and the empire was directed against
one another, but it was also directed against feudalism, and
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
both papacy and empire worked to subjugate church and state

to their own authority. They used feudalism to destroy
feudalism.
When the ultimacy of the particulars, of the many, becomes
progressively more and more immanent, and less and less tran-
scendent, then unity is denied as both bondage and fiction to
the same degree as particularity is affirmed. Conversely, when
unity moves from a transcendental to an immanent reality,
particularity becomes an oppressive violation of true order,
and the suppression of particularity becomes a necessity for
the realization of social order. The validity of the immanent
one and many, and of the creaturely one and many, is main-
tained only when the reality, primacy, and ultimacy of the
transcendental one and many are clearly and sharply main-
tained, upheld, and defined.
With Innocent III (1198-1216), the papacy asserted the su-
preme authority of one sphere over all other spheres. In his
consecration sermon on St. Peter’s Sunday, February 22, 1198,
Pope Innocent spoke on Matthew 24:45, “Who thinkest thou
is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath appointed
over his family, to give them meat in due season?” The sermon
“is the key to his statesmanship in the sixteen years to come,”
according to Clayton. Pope Innocent declared himself to be
“under God yet above man, less than God but greater than
man... appointed to judge all men but to be judged by none.”
You see then who is the servant placed by His Lord over His
household — he is the vicar of Jesus Christ, the successor of
Peter, the anointed of the Lord God of Pharaoh, one set as an
intermediary between God and man, under God yet above
man, less than God but greater than man. He is Peter in the
fullness of his power, appointed to judge all men but to be
judged by none, since as the Apostle has said “He that judgeth
me is the Lord” (I Cor. iv, 4).3
But the monarchs, and the emperor as well, increasingly made
similar claims for themselves. Their sacramental consecration
3. Joseph Clayton, Pope Innocent III and His Times (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1941),
43.
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
4. Geoffrey Barraclough, Mediaeval Germany, 911-1250, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1938), 64.
5. G. Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture
Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940), 149.
6. George Huntston Williams, The Anonymous of York (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1940), 149.
7. See R. J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic and The Nature of the American
System (both Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1964 and 1965 respectively).
other, are joined together in the theocratic order in such a way

that both are subordinate to God and to the Law. This funda-
mental conception will be fully discussed later; the point here
is that in the Middle Ages the monarchical principle (or the
monarch’s divine mandate) had not yet freed the monarch
from dependence upon popular will as the later theory of Di-
vine Right freed him. The monarchical principle was, indeed,
strong enough to hinder the emergence of a democratic prin-
ciple at a time when even the head of a local community was
conceded some measure of self-sufficiency in the exercise of
his functions, when he was entrusted with a mandate for
which he was responsible only to God, with a “guardianship.”
But the monarchical principle was an ideal concept rather
than one of positive law. It did not relieve the individual pos-
sessor of power from the particular legal obligations which he
assumed towards the community at the time of his admission
to office or afterwards. There was a transcendental element in
government as such, but the individual holder of power,
whether in a small community or in a monarchy, could not
base his personal and subjective claim to rule upon this entire-
ly general principle; a particular legal title was essential, and
such a title could, in the early Middle Ages, be obtained only
from the people.8
In addition, “It is the individual’s task to protect the law
against all, even against the State.”9 The concept that all men
were subordinated to one infallible, supreme, and super-hu-
man justice manifested on earth, whether in church or empire,
was alien to Christian Europe. Church, state, and empire in-
troduced this concept to the degree that Aristotelian and other
pagan thought infected their thinking. Some thinkers ascribed
a redemptive function to the state. John of Jandun held that
the promotion of the good life is the concern of the state.10
Both churchmen and monarchs began to identify themselves
very closely with God and Christ. Not only in their order but
also in their disorder they believed that they manifested God.
Of Henry II (1154-1189) of England, Heer says:
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.
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.
11. Ibid., 288.

12. W. R. Valentiner, The Bamberg Rider: Studies of Mediaeval-German Sculpture
(Los Angeles: Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, 1956), 139.
13. See Lionel Allshorn, Stupor Mundi: The Life and Times of Frederick II, Emperor
of Sicily and Jerusalem 1194-1250 (London: Martin Secker, 1912); Gertrude Slaugh-
ter, The Amazing Frederic (New York: Macmillan, 1937).
After he was Emperor, Frederick sang the praises of his birth-

place in a remarkable document. He called Jesi his Bethlehem,
and the Divine Mother who bore him he placed on the same
plane as the Mother of our Lord.14
The background to this thinking was the work of Abbot
Joachim of Flora (died 1202), a remarkable figure, possibly of
Jewish descent, who grew up in Greek southern Italy, whose
influence was extensive in the “medieval” world, and on Co-
lumbus, whose writings were printed in Venice during the Re-
naissance and Reformation eras, and who influenced the
modern era through Lessing. The modern usage, “Middle Ag-
es,” probably reflects Joachim’s influence. Joachim held to a
philosophy of history which was nominally trinitarian but ac-
tually anti-Christian. History was seen in three ages, one for
each member of the trinity. The first, the Age of the Father,
represented the Old Testament and pre-Christian world. The
second or middle age, the Age of the Son, represented the then
rapidly waning Christian era. The first was the age of creation,
the second of redemption, the third of universal peace and
brotherhood, the Age of the Spirit. Frederick announced him-
self as the one come to fulfil the law, to usher in the age of
peace. It was Frederick’s calling to reduce to peace the peoples
“by the might of Justice.” Frederick saw himself as Justice In-
carnate and as “the expected Messianic King.” His letters, when
wooing the populace of Rome,
are full of the belief that the fulness of time is at hand and the
world is about to be renewed. Renewal would mean recon-
struction of the world in exactly the state in which it stood at
the moment of the Redemption in the days of Augustus. The
Messiah-Emperor who is expected and who shall set up an
Empire of Justice must show himself the revivifier of the an-
cient Roman Empire, the reincarnation of Augustus, Prince of
Peace, restoring imperial Rome to her old position in the
world.15
14. Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194-1250 (New York: Unger,
1957), 5.
15. Ibid., 425; see also 395ff.
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
16. Ibid., 226.

17. Ibid., 231-232.
18. Ibid., 521ff; see also 534. For Frederick as the source of Justice and Law, see
231, 256ff. For Frederick’s self-deification and his “unquestionable” belief in it, see
250ff.; for the fact that “Frederick had allowed his followers to worship him as the
Son of God,” see 663-664; for Frederick as the Messiah of the Third Age, see 259-
260, 505, 513, 520-521; as Defender of the Faith, 263-264, 607ff; for Frederick, here-
sy was treason, 264-265; as “Son of God” and “Son of Earth” see 443.
19. Ibid., 233.
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.
The triumph of immanent power is the death of meaning. God

is “He Who Is,” beyond definition because He is himself the
definer and the source of all meaning. The world has meaning
because He created it and is separate from it. To the extent that
the world is absorbed into God, and to the extent that God is
absorbed into the world and sovereignty is transferred to the
world, to that extent the world loses meaning and becomes un-
definable and a mystery. The total triumph of immanence
would be the total loss of meaning.
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
23. “Vehement Soul,” Newsweek, 10 May 1965, 121.

Catholic piety, but the substance was subversive and modern,

belonging to the “third age.” The fires of heresy burn more
brightly in Dante than do the flames of Inferno. An historian
has cited some of Dante’s variations as they appear in his
treatise on Monarchy:
Dante makes favorable allusions to the Averroist doctrine of
the collective immortality of the soul, which stand in strange
contradiction to his view of personal immortality upon which
The Divine Comedy is based. He debates the traditional papal
interpretation of the Petrine Biblical text, claiming that from
Christ’s words to Peter “it does not follow that the pope can
loose or bind the decrees of the empire.” He denies the validity
of papal claims based on the Donation of Constantine because
“Constantine had no power to alienate the imperial dignity,
nor had the church the power to receive it.” Most significant
of all is Dante’s argument for imperial authority, not only on
the basis of tradition, law, and Biblical texts but also from a
simple and radical doctrine of pragmatic necessity: the welfare
of the human race, he says, is best advanced under monarchi-
cal rule. This represents a new departure in medieval political
thought. The implication of Dante’s argument is that political
power is based on the sanction not only of divine and natural
law but also of social necessity.24
Heer comments that “there is scarcely a ‘heretic’ of his times
whose message he [Dante] ignores.”25 Gilson granted that
Dante’s thought at points represented “a form of Averroism”
but held this to be “purely formal and devoid of content.”26
Dante’s philosophy, Gilson maintained, differed clearly from
Aquinas.27 Papini asserted that Dante, who believed that some
men are “almost as gods,” “almost certainly... believed himself
to be one of these men ‘most noble and divine,’ that is, almost
God.”28 Dante’s debt to Islamic thought has also been demon-
strated as at least formally important.29
24. Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization
(New York: Macmillan, 1963), 552.
25. Heer, Medieval World, 303-304.
26. Etienne Gilson, Dante and Philosophy, trans. David Moore (New York: Harp-
er Torchbooks, 1963), 303.
27. Ibid., 119-120.
28. Giovanni Papini, Dante Vivo, trans. E. H. Broadus and A. Benedetti (New
York: Macmillan, 1935), 273. Papini’s reference is to “Convivo,” canto 4, st. 20,
lines 3-4.
29. Miguel Asin, Islam and the Divine Comedy (London: John Murray, 1926).
4. Dante’s View of the State

In De Monarchia, Dante’s argument for imperial authority
was, as has been noted, based on pragmatism: the ultimate goal
of human civilization as a whole required this unity of power.
Dante wrote that “There is an ultimate goal for which the eter-
nal God, by his art, which is nature, brings into being the hu-
man race in its universality.” This ultimate goal is summarized
by Wicksteed: “It is the goal of civilization to realise all the po-
tentialities of humanity by developing in peaceful co-operation
all the several capacities of individuals, families, races, and so
forth.”30 The basic and first requisite for the realization of the
goal of human civilization is for Dante not faith but peace: “It is
evident that in the quiet or tranquillity of peace the human
race is most freely and favorably disposed to the work proper
to it.... Whence it is manifest that universal peace is the best of
all those things which are ordained for our blessedness.”31 This
separation of the faith from the realization of the goal of hu-
man civilization is not accidental. Dante radically separated
man’s spiritual goal, “the celestial paradise,” from the political
goal, “the terrestrial paradise,” as “two utterly different goals
of the human race,” to cite Kantorowicz’ judgment. There was
thus a “human” perfection and a “Christian” perfection, for
Dante “took the ‘human’ out of the Christian compound and
isolated it as a value in its own right.” The political paradise
could be attained by man through his own devices, through
natural reason and the four cardinal virtues alone.
Against that totality of mankind which fell guilty potentially
in the first man, Dante set the totality of mankind which
potentially can regain “its own dignities” and paradise as well.
It can achieve, by its own power and through the intellectual
virtues, its own actuation in the terrestrial paradise whence
Adam had been expelled, who, in the state of innocence,
himself was the actuation of humanitas without restriction.
Dante reversed, as it were, the potentialities: just as Adam
potentially bore mankind and sin in his limbs, so did mankind
30. A. G. Ferrers Howell and Philip Wicksteed, trans., De Monarchia: Translation

of the Latin Works of Dante Alighieri (London: Dent, 1940), 131, 135.
31. Ibid., 138.
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.
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.
cited Psalm 2, the messianic psalm concerning the world con-

spiracy against the Messiah, and applied it to Rome as Messi-
ah.43 The authority, righteousness, and justice of Rome was
upheld by Dante and affirmed to have been confirmed in the
execution of Jesus Christ. Pilate punished the sin of Adam in
crucifying Christ, so that, in Wicksteed’s summary, “the right-
ful authority of the Roman empire is essential to the whole
scheme of salvation.” In Dante’s words, “if the Roman empire
was not of right, the sin of Adam was not punished in
Christ.”44 The same point was emphasized in The Divine Com-
edy: “As for the penalty, then, inflicted by the cross, if it be
measured by the Nature taken on, never did any other bite as
justly.”45 The enemy of the empire is the church and the clergy.
The goal of the empire, and of the monarch, is the perfection
of the human race, and with this perfection the empire be-
comes obsolete and withers away. Man then needs neither ec-
clesiastical nor imperial guidance or authority, for “Such
regimens, then, are remedial against the infirmity of sin.” As a
result, “if man had remained in the state of innocence in which
he was made by God he would have no need of such directive
regimens.” “These regimens exist to direct men to certain
ends,” and they are then no longer needed.46 Hence, when
Dante in The Divine Comedy reached the entrance of the Gar-
den of Eden, Virgil declared, “I do crown and mitre thee over
thyself.”47 According to Wicksteed, “in Dante’s opinion man
would not have needed the Church, as an organized institu-
tion, any more than the Empire, had he not fallen from the
state of innocence. Accordingly, when he recovers that state he
is absolved from the spiritual as well as from the temporal
rule.”48 Dante placed an affirmation of communism in Virgil’s
counsel: “for by so many more there are who say ‘ours,’ so
43. Ibid., 173-176.

44. Ibid., 222.
45. Carlyle and Wicksteed, trans., “Paradiso,” in The Divine Comedy (New York:
Modern Library, 1932), 444.
46. Howell and Wicksteed, De Monarchia, 238; see Wicksteed’s note, 240.
47. Carlyle and Wicksteed, trans., “Purgatorio,” in The Divine Comedy, 358.
48. Ibid., 360.
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
49. Ibid., 284-285.

50. “Inferno,” in ibid., 153.
51. Jack Lindsay, A Short History of Culture (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939),
293.
52. Howell and Wicksteed, De Monarchia, 324-325.
church. The subject of The Divine Comedy is not ecclesiastical

and theological but rather historical and political. “The three
parts of the Commedia represent justice under three aspects.”53
Dante’s universe is the universe of the great chain of being.
“Everything in existence strives to return to its source. As fire
by nature is drawn upwards, so the human soul is drawn to
God.”54 This upward movement is not mystical but political.
The world state is the agency until man becomes perfected and
deified, when anarchism and communism take over. “The
blessed are made deiform.... The heavenly bliss is to participate
in the Godhead, and the soul becomes a partaker of divine
nature.”55
To summarize The Divine Comedy briefly, Dante is “lost”
and in deep distress. The disorders of the world, its political de-
cay and his own sufferings and despair on that account, have
grieved him and led him astray. “In the moment, it seemed, of
his final defeat he was confronted with Virgil, historically his
ideal poet, the model and inspiration of his verse, and symbol-
ically his reason and conscience, the primal authority for
man’s earthly life.” Virgil is “at once the prophet of the Roman
Empire and the supposed foreteller of Christ, who foretells the
coming of a deliverer of the world from the power of covetous-
ness, the wolf that came so persistently against Dante.”56 The
savior whom Virgil foretells is the Veltro. As Gilbert noted,
“Deliverance will come through the mysterious hound, the
veltro, which is the opposite of the wolf in freedom from ava-
rice, and devotion to wisdom, love and virtue. The veltro is ob-
viously also a political deliverer who will save Italy.”57 The
journey through hell is a journey through a world where sins
are sins against unity and wholeness, inordinate loves of the
partial or particular as against the one and the true object of
53. Allan H. Gilbert, Dante’s Conception of Justice (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1925), 180; cf. 21, 34, 43, 165, 181.
54. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, pt. 2, vol. 2 (London: SPCK, 1939), 399.
55. T. K. Swing, The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante’s Master Plan (Westminster,
MD: Newman Press, 1962), 107, 384, 401-402, 407.
56. John D. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, with translation and
comment (London: John Lane, 1939), 31-32.
57. Gilbert, Dante’s Conception of Justice, 69.
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.
tyranny over other powers.... Every sinful soul can find an

ideal kingdom in the Inferno for the perfect tyranny of its
sinful power. This is the irony of perfection in Hell.”62 Every
soul is in hell voluntarily and remains out of desire, Dante
stressed, in Canto 3, 124ff.: “they are eager to cross the river,
for divine justice so spurs them that fear turns to desire.” Hell
is the perfection of the partial and the limited, of individuality
and of particularity. It is also the perfection of matter: in hell,
the damned have bodies; in purgatory and paradise, they are
pure spirit.63 Dante damned churchmen for their materialism
and placed the church on the side of materialism, and the
empire on the side of spirit and idealism. The Donation of
Constantine is denounced in hell as an instrument of hell.
When Dante, in Canto 19, denounced the Donation, Virgil,
the voice of reason, at these “words of truth,” took Dante “in
both his arms.” In this Canto, Dante sets forth the “public
wrong” of Simony, but he includes in this sin the claims of the
church against the political order as a kind of simony, a
worship of gold and silver, a heathenism.
A singular and significant feature of the canto is that Dante is
not merely led and instructed by Virgil here as elsewhere, but,
after an ardent declaration of his discipleship, he is carried
down to Nicholas and up again and the narrative stresses
Virgil’s carefulness in the act. For here peculiarly Dante
claims to be identified with reason which is not merely his
own reason but reason itself. Virgil, besides, represents the
Empire, the righteous ordering of the earthly life of
humanity; and authority under God and its high obligation to
guard the frontiers of its jurisdiction against ecclesiastical
encroachment were fundamental in Dante’s thinking and are
the main matter of the De Monarchia.64
The deeper Dante takes us into hell, the more political the
sins become: those who make traffic of public office (Barra-
tors), the sowers of scandal and schism, rebels and traitors, and
the like. The offenses are all either against the great unity or in
favor of the particular and the limited, the divisive. The
62. Swing, Fragile Leaves, 82.
63. Ibid., 90, 111-114, 116ff.
64. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy, 245-246.
Arch-Traitor Satan represented the uttermost depth of hell for

his rebellion against God, and Satan was joined by Judas, Bru-
tus, and Cassius. The sins of Satan and Judas were against the
kingdom of God, those of Brutus and Cassius against the di-
vinely chosen instrument for the restoration of the earthly par-
adise, Rome. According to Sinclair, in speaking of Canto 28,
and citing Dante’s belief in “the essential organic unity of
men,” Dante condemned “fiercely these makers of discord” be-
cause he saw providence and every divine purpose working for
the unity of mankind.65
Each portion of The Divine Comedy ends with the word
“stars,”
for the stars mean for Dante all the good that is beyond the
world, all the perfect order and the working providence of
God, and it is into obedience to that order and assurance of
that providence that all his experience and all the leading of
Virgil and the memory and the hope of Beatrice are bringing
him.66
Having shown us the hell that churchly politics leads to, and
all divisive movements, whether based on personal lusts or po-
litical opposition, Dante now depicted purgatory, i.e., the
world restored, paradise regained, the Garden of Eden and pri-
meval anarchism reestablished, by means of the world state.
Wicksteed’s summary of the central idea of Dante’s Purgatorio
is to the point:
Therefore, when man fell he forfeited immediately the perfect
earthly life, and ultimately the perfect heavenly life. His first
task, then, must be to recover the life of the Earthly Paradise:
and as purgation, or recovery from the fall, consists primarily
in regaining Eden, the mountain pedestal of the Garden of
Eden becomes by a necessity of symbolic logic the scene of
purgation. Physically and spiritually man must climb back to
the “uplifted garden.” Hence the key-note of the Purgatorio is
primarily ethical, and only by implication spiritual. Cato, the
type of the moral virtues, is the guardian of the place; Virgil,
the type of human philosophy, is the guide; and the Earthly
Paradise, the type of the “blessedness of this life” (De Mon, iii.
65. Ibid., 356.

66. Ibid., 432.
16) is the immediate goal. Beatrice is only realized by Dante as

he had known her in the Eden-like “new life” of his youth,
and by no means as the august impersonation of revealed
truth. She appears to him in due course, surrounded by her es-
cort, when he has reached the state of earthly perfecton; and
the vacancy of that region of earthly bliss is explained to him
by the Vision of false and confused government, wherein is
portrayed the failure of Church and State to bring man back
to the life of Eden. To the Church as an earthly organization,
or regimen, the grace of God has committed by anticipation
such revealed truth as is necessary to help the enfeebled will of
man to recover the state of Eden. But the Church, as a regi-
men, is not to be confounded with Revelation (Beatrice) her-
self. The proper office of the Church, as a regimen, ends when
the proper office of Beatrice begins. See De Monarchia, iii. 4.67
The choice of Cato, a pagan, as the guardian of purgatory
and the road to the earthly paradise is a most significant one.
Cassius and Brutus are in hell for killing Caesar. Cato, another
great enemy of Caesar, is given high honor because he commit-
ted suicide, an act, according to Dante, of supreme devotion to
liberty.68 It was also in a sense an act of surrender to Caesar;
Caesar cannot be resisted, in Dante’s thought. Cato is the phi-
losopher of the Roman state and of civic virtue, and it is civic
virtue in terms of the world empire that will lead men to the
earthly paradise.
The culminating vision of the Purgatorio in Canto 33 is of a
political messiah who shall establish the proper relationships
of church and state and purge them both of their errors. Fred-
erick II shall have a true and holy heir: “Not for all time shall
be without heir the eagle that left the plumage on the cart,
whereby it became a monster and then a prey.”69
We have noted that in De Monarchia, Canto 3, line 5, Dante
stated that church and state were both products of the fall. The
goal of both must be to undo the fall, which means to undo
themselves, and to abdicate, so that man, without church and
67. Carlyle and Wicksteed, The Divine Comedy, 189-190.

68. “Convivo,” canto 3, line 5; Howell and Wicksteed, De Monarchia, canto 2,
line 5.
69. Carlyle and Wicksteed, The Divine Comedy, 392-397.
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
70. Rachel Blanche Harrower, A New Theory of Dante’s Matelda (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1926), 25.
71. Carlyle and Wicksteed, “Purgatorio,” 358.
72. Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 217.
Christ in Cantos 19 and 20. Aristotle’s philosophy is given high

status and authoritative character in Cantos 24, 26, and 28.
In the Inferno, we meet the perverse form of Homo Dei as
Cerberus; in the Purgatorio, Canto 23, the germ of the celestial
eagle is on the face of every penitent. In the Paradiso, Canto 18,
“the Celestial Eagle is the perfected form of the Homo Dei.”73
This is the symbol of Roman law and justice. According to
Swing, the Trinity is represented by Dante’s guides: “Virgil is
the symbol of the Son, Beatrice is that of the Holy Spirit, and
St. Bernard is that of the Father.”
The function of the Son is to show how to die and be buried
in sin and how to be reborn in grace. Virgil shows Dante the
way into the underground world of sin and takes him down
to the bottom of perdition. It is Virgil who wrenches Dante
from the bottom of the sinful grave and takes him out to the
world of grace. Virgil’s function is to show Dante the way of
the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Virgil wishes to make a
veiled announcement of his function, when he tells Dante at
his initial appearance that he was born sub Julio (Inf. i. 70). His
birth sub Julio is meant to help us to conceive his function in
the light of the visible mission of the Son, Who “sub Pontio Pi-
lato passus, et supultus est. Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum
Scripturas” (The Nicene Creed). Christ rose again on the third
day; Virgil emerges with Dante out of Hell on the third day.
On seeing Christ after His Resurrection, the disciples “came
up and embraced his feet and worshipped Him” (Matt. 28:9).
On meeting Virgil in the Purgatorio, his disciples in poetry try
to embrace his feet and worship him.74
If this be true, then the Paradiso involves Christ as a founda-
tion, as is also the empire, but both are transcended to achieve
the glory of the great unity. The culmination of the Paradiso,
in Canto 33, strongly resembles the unity of mystical thought,
for “substance and accidents and their relations, as though to-
gether fused, after such fashion that what I tell is of one simple
flame.” Dante clearly shared this perspective. His goal of unity
involved deification as the goal of man’s freedom.
73. Swing, Fragile Leaves, 271.

74. Ibid., 391. The perspective of Swing’s excellent study is not that of this writer.
... 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
6. Pope John XXIII

Dante had many allies now — modernism, modern Judaism,
free masonry, illuminism, and many other movements — all
aiming at creating paradise on earth on the foundation and in
the power of men of good will. The end of the Christian world
was openly desired by many, and a post-Christian era called for.
It was with great rejoicing that such forces hailed the encyc-
lical of Pope John XXIII, April 10, 1963, addressed, among
others, “to all men of good will, on establishing universal peace
in truth, justice, charity and liberty.” In Part IV of the encycli-
cal, Pope John declared modern states insufficient to ensure
the universal common good. More was clearly needed. But his
answer was not Christian law in these modern states, but rath-
er a world community:
As is known, the United Nations Organization (U.N.O.) was
established on June 26, 1945, and to it there were subsequently
75. Howell and Wicksteed, De Monarchia, 158.

76. Pappini, Dante Vivo, 154.
77. Heer, Medieval World, 304.
added intergovernmental agencies with extensive internation-

al tasks in the economic, social, cultural, educational and
health fields. The United Nations Organization had as its es-
sential purpose the maintenance and consolidation of peace
between peoples, fostering between them friendly relations,
based on the principles of equality, mutual respect, and varied
forms of cooperation in every sector of human society.
An act of the highest importance performed by the United
Nations Organization was the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, approved in the General Assembly of
December 10, 1948. In the preamble of that declaration, the
recognition and respect of those rights and respective liberties
is proclaimed as an ideal to be pursued by all peoples and all
countries.
Some objections and reservations were raised regarding cer-
tain points in the declaration. There is no doubt, however,
that the document represents an important step on the path
towards the juridical-political organization of the world com-
munity. For in it, in most solemn form, the dignity of a per-
son is acknowledged to all human beings. And as a
consequence there is proclaimed, as a fundamental right, the
right of free movement in the search for truth and in the at-
tainment of moral good and justice, and also the right to a dig-
nified life, while other rights connected with those mentioned
are likewise proclaimed.
It is our earnest wish that the United Nations Organization —
in its structure and in its means — may become ever more
equal to the magnitude and nobility of its tasks, and that the
day may come when every human being will find therein an
effective safeguard for the rights which derive directly from
his dignity as a person, and which are therefore universal, in-
violable and inalienable rights. This is all the more to be hoped
for since all human beings, as they take an ever more active
part in the public life of their own political communities, are
showing an increasing interest in the affairs of all peoples, and
are becoming more consciously aware that they are living
members of a world community.78
The Pope’s concern was the “world community,” not the
Christian community, and his hope was for a just world order
based on man as man rather than Christian man. The echoes
of Joachim, Dante, modernism, and Masonic ideas were clearly
78. New York Times, Western edition, 11 April 1963, 7.

in evidence. The Pope denied that an ongoing historical move-

ment such as a state and its history could be equated or identi-
fied with its false doctrine. The comment of Father J. F.
Cronin, S.S., on this passage, was that “Pope John notes that
even in Communism there are elements of truth and ideal-
ism.”79 Pope John did not refer to the U.S.S.R., although his
generalization very clearly included it, and his statement im-
plied more than Fr. Cronin stated:
It must be borne in mind, furthermore, that neither can false
philosophical teachings regarding the nature, origin and desti-
ny of the universe and of man, be identified with historical
movements that have economic, social, cultural or political
ends, not even when these movements have originated from
those teachings and have drawn and still draw inspiration
therefrom. Because the teachings, once they are drawn up and
defined, remain always the same, while the movements, work-
ing on historical situations in constant evolution, cannot but
be influenced by these latter and cannot avoid, therefore, be-
ing subject to changes, even of a profound nature. Besides,
who can deny that those movements, in so far as they con-
form to the dictates of reason and are interpreters of the lawful
aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are
positive and deserving of approval?
It can happen, then, that a drawing nearer together for a meet-
ing for the attainment of some practical end, which was for-
merly deemed inopportune, is useful.80
It is not surprising that “the major Communist parties of West-
ern Europe greeted the Pope’s call for peace and disarmament”
and regarded it with “immense satisfaction.”81 A little later,
Cardinal Suenen “represented Pope John at the United Na-
tions in early May by presenting Secretary General U Thant a
copy of the pope’s encyclical, Pacem in Terris....”82
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.
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.
The second circle includes all monotheists, as the pope clas-

sified them, and Paul assumed that the God of Judaism and of
Islam, and “of the great Afro-Asiatic religions,” is the same
God as the God of Scripture:
111. Then we see another circle around us. This, too, is vast in
its extent yet it is not so far away from us. It is made up of the
men who above all adore the one, supreme God whom we too
adore.
We refer to the children, worthy of our affection and respect,
of the Hebrew people, faithful to the religion which we call
that of the Old Testament. Then to the adorers of God accord-
ing to the conception of monotheism, the Moslem religion es-
pecially, deserving of our admiration for all that is true and
good in their worship of God. And also to the followers of the
great Afro-Asiatic religions.
Obviously we cannot share in these various forms of religion
nor can we remain indifferent to the fact that each of them, in
its own way, should regard itself as being the equal of any oth-
er and should authorize its followers not to seek to discover
whether God has revealed the perfect and definitive form, free
from all error, in which He wishes to be known, loved and
served. Indeed, honesty compels us to declare openly our con-
viction that there is but one true religion, the religion of
Christianity. It is our hope that all men who seek God and
adore Him may come to acknowledge its truth.
112. But we do, nevertheless, recognize and respect the moral
and spiritual values of the various non-Christian religions, and
we desire to join with them in promoting and defending com-
mon ideals of religious liberty, human brotherhood, good cul-
ture, social welfare and civil order. For our part, we are ready
to enter into discussion on these common ideals, and will not
fail to provide every opportunity for such discussion, con-
ducted with genuine, mutual respect, where it would be well
received.87
The third circle Paul cited is Christianity, and here the dia-
logue is “ecumenical.”
The position of Pope Paul came close to being a pan-Deism,
and pan-Deism is the logical development of the virus of Hel-
lenic thought.
87. Ibid., 63-64.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Pope Paul, in his jour-

ney to India, declared that all men must “begin to work togeth-
er to build the common future of the human race.” The pope
asked, “Are we not all one in this struggle for a better world,
in this effort to make available to all people those goods which
are needed to fulfill their human destiny and live lives worthy
of the children of God?”88 Dante’s dream was now the papal
hope. In responding to his welcome, Pope Paul declared,
We come here as a pilgrim, a pilgrim of peace, of joy, of seren-
ity and love.
We extend our greeting to all the nations of Asia, to every na-
tion in the world.
May they always remember that all men are brothers under
the fatherhood of the divinity. May they learn to love one an-
other, to respect one another, to avoid violating the natural
rights of others. May they even strive to respect these rights in
truth, in justice and in love.89
It was not surprising, moreover, that Pope Paul sent a personal
representative and a message to the Convocation of Religion
for World Peace in San Francisco, Sunday, June 27, 1965, a
union service of all religions celebrating the twentieth anniver-
sary of the United Nations Organization.90 The logic of his po-
sition called for it.
Centuries earlier, Frederick II had succeeded in electing a
friend to the papacy, only to find in Innocent IV, whom Kan-
torowicz has called “Frederick’s most remarkable pupil,” al-
most his most ruthless enemy. In shocked dismay, Frederick
exclaimed, “No Pope can be a Ghibelline!”91 To a degree, Fre-
derick was right. No pope can be a Ghibelline, a champion of
a world empire as the door to an earthly paradise, if he is a
knowing champion of the orthodox faith, or if he be interested
in protecting or advancing the power of his office and of the
88. George W. Cornell, “All One: Pope, Asian Leaders Talk,” Palo Alto (CA)
Times, 3 December 1964, 21.
89. “Pope Paul Gets Biggest India Welcome Ever,” Palo Alto (CA) Times, 2 De-
cember 1964, 1.
90. “The Pope’s Message,” San Francisco (CA) Chronicle, 28 June 1965, 14; cf.
Christian Beacon, Thursday, 8 July 1965, 4-5.
91. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 580.
church. But a sincere idealist, implicitly pan-Deist in faith,

deeply concerned with the problems of the world and of time,
can be a Ghibelline pope, and Dante’s Ghibellines have at last
triumphed. The world is being re-divinized.
Chapter IX
The Immanent One
as the Power State
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
particular person or gross sensual satisfaction, but again a

realization of a universal:
And therefore, to come out of this so narrow a room, he shall
gather in his thoughts by little and little so many ornaments
that mingling all beauties together he shall make a universal
concept, and bring the multitude of them to the unity of one
alone, that is generally spread over all the nature of man. And
thus shall he behold no more the particular beauty of one
woman, but a universal, that decketh out all bodies.2
The Romantic movement, centuries later, was one of the prod-
ucts of this Neoplatonic idealization; men were in love with
love and idealized the woman as the concrete realization of all
ideal qualities; for the Romantic, the beloved woman of the
moment was the incarnate universal. This meant, of course,
that on the masculine side the Romantic lover was his own in-
carnate universal, so that his love, passion, and grief had cos-
mic significance.
For Castiglione, the prince or ruler should set the pattern by
becoming himself an incarnate universal. The prince should in
every respect make himself the model man.
And that in thus doing he should not only be beloved, but, in
a manner, worshipped of his subjects; neither should he need
to commit the guard of his person to strangers, for his own,
for the better safeguard and profit of themselves, would guard
him with their own person; and each man would willingly
obey the laws when they should see him to obey them him-
self, and be, as it were, an uncorrupted keeper and minister of
them; and so shall he make all men to conceive such an assured
confidence of him, that if he should happen otherwhile to go
beyond them in any point, every one would know it were
done for a better intent. The selfsame respect and reverence
they would have to his will as they have to the laws.3
What is involved is thus more than being an example to the
people: it means the prince must be a living universal.
Moreover, the prince should seek to avoid extremes of wealth
and poverty in the citizenry as destructive of social order. The
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
citizens should be of moderate means, for the best way to

avoid sedition, “the most surest way is universally to maintain
a mean.”4 The prince, too, to attain universality, must seek to
attain this mean course, to avoid the extremism of intense
commitment to any vice or virtue, which means the
subordination of himself to something rather than the
subordination of virtues (and vices) to himself.
But you must understand that if he be not skilful in that I have
said he ought to have a knowledge in, and have not framed his
mind in that wise, and bent it to the way of virtue, it shall be
hard for him to have the knowledge to be noble couraged, lib-
eral, just, quick-spirited, wise, or to have any other of those
qualities that belong unto him. Neither would I have him to
be such a one for any other thing, but to have the understand-
ing to put in use these conditions; for as they that build be not
all good workmen, so they that give be not all liberal; for vir-
tue never hurteth any man; and many there be that lay hands
on other men’s goods to give, and so are lavish of another
man’s substance. Some give to them they ought not, and leave
in wretchedness and misery such as they be bound to. Others
give a certain ill will, and as it were, with a despite, so that it
is known they do it because they can do none other. Others
do not keep it secret, but they call witness of it, and, in a man-
ner, cause their liberalities to be cried. Others foolishly at a
sudden empty the fountain of liberality, so that afterward
they can use it no more. Therefore in this point, as in all other
matters, he must have a knowledge and govern himself with
the wisdom that is a companion unto all the other virtues
which, for that they are in the middle, be nigh unto the two
extremities that be vices. Wherefore he that hath not knowl-
edge runneth soon unto them.5
In Castiglione’s Neoplatonistic perspective, the prince, or
monarchy, best represents “nature” or God, because it is uni-
tary, “more like unto God’s, which one and alone governeth
the universal.” The prince should embody “the law of reason,
not written in papers or metal, but graven in his own mind,
that it may be to him always not only familiar but inward, and
live with him as a parcel of him.” The prince should be just,
and “on the care of justice dependeth the zeal toward God” of
4. Ibid., 321.
5. Ibid., 328-329.
prince and people.6 The world of Castiglione has as its back-

ground the Christian world of the church, but its reality is not
the binding law of God handed down to man, but rather the
incarnating structure or form of being materializing itself in
the courtier and moving the world forward and upward. “Na-
ture’s intent is always to bring forth things most perfect,” and
this perfection is not found in a materialistic fulfilment of lusts,
in “thinking it the true happiness to do what a man lusteth,”
nor is it found in asceticism, but in the mean, in an incarnation
of form with matter, of ideals into the times, and of purposes
into the social realities of the moment.7
Even in speaking, the courtier should avoid the coarse ab-
sorption in the rude language of the day, and also avoid archaic
language, or language out of touch with the idiom of the day.
“And truly it were no small travail for me, if I should use, in
this communication of ours, these ancient Truscan words that
are not in use among Truscans nowadays, and, besides that, I
believe every man would laugh at me.” Excellent words, now
somewhat shop-worn, should be avoided. To fall short in these
matters is a cause for “travail.”8
Some philosophies view the world as a struggle between
good and evil, in which evil must be destroyed and abolished.
Castiglione’s thinking is closer to the yang-yin philosophy,
which sees the contraries as complementing one another and
necessary to each other:
But, methink, they do full ill scan the cause of this difference,
and they be fond persons, because they would have all good-
ness in the world without any ill, which is impossible. For
since ill is contrary to good, and good to ill, it is, in a manner,
necessary by contrariety and a certain counterpoise the one
should underprop and strengthen the other, and where the
one wanteth or increaseth, the other to want or increase also;
because no contrary is without his other contrary. Who
knoweth not that there should be no justice in the world, were
it not for wrongs? No stoutness of courage, were there not
6. Ibid., 305, 310, 319.

7. Ibid., 209, 290.
8. Ibid., 43, 48.
fainthearted? No chastity, were there not unchastity? Nor

health, were there not sickness? Nor truth, were there not
lies? Nor happiness, were there not mischances?9
For an age to excel it is required that both good and evil be
present. To seek the one to the exclusion of the other is to di-
minish or abolish the thing sought:
Therefore may it be lawful for us to follow the custom of our
times, without controlment of these old men, which going
about to praise themselves, say: “Now children are not so
soon crept out of the shell, but they know more naughtiness
than they that were come to man’s estate did in those days.”
Neither be they aware, in so saying, that they confirm our
children to have more wit than their old men. Let them leave,
therefore, speaking against our times as full of vices; for in tak-
ing them away, they take also away the virtues. And let them
remember that among the good men of ancient time, whenas
the glorious wits flourished in the world, which in very deed
were many most mischievous, which if they still lived should
have excelled our ill men so much in ill, as those good men in
goodness, and of this do all histories make full mention.10
Castiglione, however, fights shy of a real commitment to the
philosophic premises of such a position: “you harp too much
upon your extremities.”11 It is not a philosophy but a man that
is the goal of Castiglione’s thinking, a universal man. And such
a man depends less on a philosophy than on “a certain wisdom
and judgment of choice.”12 Such a man follows a mean in terms
of all things, including philosophies. The purpose of the
courtier is social, not philosophical: he must “give a good
imprinting of himself.”13 Castiglione does not, of course,
condone evil. As a Neoplatonist, he sees the centrality of the
good, the true, and the beautiful, and he sees a correspondence
of each of these to the other. Moreover, man is a microcosm in
which the macrocosm reveals itself: “Think now of the shape
of man, which may be called a little world.”14 Castiglione’s
9. Ibid., 92-93.
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Ibid., 97.
12. Ibid., 98.
13. Ibid., 141.
14. Ibid., 348.
beatific vision is of man, not of God, and he concludes Book

IV with this vision of man as the incarnation of the good, the
true, and the beautiful.
But how is man to be judged successful in this quest for in-
carnating the universals in himself? Since the beatific vision is
of man, not of God, it is not a vision governed by the word of
God but rather by the word of man. The audience and the
judge of man’s performance is man, not God. Even in war, the
courtier must be aware of his audience:
... by our rule it may be also understood that where the Court-
ier is at a skirmish, or assault, or battle upon the land, or in
such other places of enterprise, he ought to work the matter
wisely in separating himself from the multitude, and under-
take his notable and bold feats which he hath to do with as lit-
tle company as he can in the sight of noble men that be of
most estimation in the camp, and especially in the presence
and, if it were possible, before the very eyes of his king or
great personage he is in service withal; for indeed it is meet to
set forth to the show things well done.15
John S. White has called Castiglione’s position “aesthetic in-
dividualism.” The individualism of Benvenuto Cellini and of
the princes was “autarchic individualism,” an activism in prac-
tice. The prince’s motto was “First my will, then the right.”
But, noted White, “In the courtier, this energetic activism is
sublimated into a passive aesthetic individualism.” This aes-
thetic “individual needs society, as a resonance box.... He is, in
a word, tied to his society, to his class. The medieval saint was
virtuous in the desert also. The invisible eyes of God hovered
above him. Universal Man needs society in order to display his
virtues. His realm is only of this world.”16
But this need for society is not limited to the aesthetic indi-
vidualist, although he reveals the need most plainly. If God’s
supernatural court and judgment are denied, then men require
a worldly court and judgment for their defense and vindica-
tion. They will create then a rigid and absolute judgment seat
15. Ibid., 199-200.

16. John S. White, Renaissance Cavalier (New York: Philosophical Library,
1959), 7-9.
out of society. This is as true of the anarchist as it is of the so-

cialist. The collective vengeance of anarchism is no less total
simply because the state has been abolished; it simply lacks due
process of law. Collectivism in some form is the alternative to
Christian theism. The assertion of anarchistic individualism is
the necessary condition for the creation of collectivism. When
the atomistic individual has denied God and has broken the
bonds of the family, he has thereby removed power from the
supernatural and from the family and rebased it on the state.
Power is an inescapable reality; its denial in one area leads to a
concentration of all power in another area. When sovereign
power is denied to God, it does not disappear; it is merely re-
located from eternity to time. When the power of the family
is broken, parenthood is then transferred to the state, however
ineptly. Atomistic individualism, because it denies all power to
the supernatural, and rebels against the family, claims for itself
both sovereignty and power. But, because the atomistic indi-
vidual is anarchistic only with reference to God’s law, and fam-
ily law, his need for a framework of reference is concentrated
on men at large — collective man, the state. The state becomes
his “resonance box,” his stage. Atomistic man calls the totali-
tarian state into existence as his source of morality, religion,
sovereignty, and power. The atomistic individualism of every
era, whether in antiquity, the Renaissance, or in the twentieth
century, has called into being the omnivorous power of the
state as its destroyer, for social atomism is inescapably suicidal.
By affirming the totally immanent one, the individual, it cre-
ates the greater concentration of immanence and oneness, the
totalitarian state.
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
Lerner, “Machiavelli sought to distinguish the realm of what

ought to be and the realm of what is. He rejected the first for
the second.”17 The temporal world was to Machiavelli the real
world. Man’s necessities are governed by that world, however
appealing and compelling ideals may be. A semblance of con-
formity to any ideal world men may believe in is advisable, but
the temporal world has its necessities, and man must observe
them. Machiavelli noted, “Prudent men make the best of cir-
cumstances in their actions, and, although constrained by ne-
cessity to a certain course, make it appear as if done from their
own liberality.”18
The basic and essential reality, then, is the temporal world.
Machiavelli was formally respectful towards the church but
personally contemptuous. He was not formally an atheist be-
cause he was too indifferent to God for such a stance. The basic
reality of Machiavelli’s temporal world is not God but power.
Sovereignty and power are inescapable realities of any system
of thought. If they are denied to God, they are not thereby
eliminated. Like all the attributes of God, sovereignty and
power, when denied to God, are simply transferred to the hu-
man order because they are inescapable aspects of reality.
Whether formally or informally, some aspect of the human or-
der is divinized. For Machiavelli, then, human power and sov-
ereignty are the realities which must govern man. The human
problem is the conflict of diversity, the disunity of states in It-
aly, the conflict of men struggling for power. This is Machia-
velli’s “many.” The source of unity is thus power, power
concentrated in able hands, and the mechanics of power are
necessary knowledge if unity is to be gained. As Machiavelli
observed, “A sagacious legislator of a republic, therefore,
whose object is to promote the public good, and not his private
interests, and who prefers his country to his own successors,
should concentrate all authority in himself.”19 “The public
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.
good” is social order, prosperity, and power. The “Virtues”

Machiavelli’s prince should cultivate are the virtues of power
wisely administered and retained. Machiavelli agreed with
Francesco Vettori that “All forms of Power have their roots in
usurpation.”20 To move in terms of “right” is to move in terms
of a myth: the reality is power. Because the ideal, Christian
morality, influences men, it must be formally upheld and for-
mally conformed to, but the true basis of power is power, nei-
ther good nor evil, but simply power wisely used and wisely
furthered. Hence Machiavelli’s admiration for Cesare Borgia:
“Reviewing thus all the actions of the duke, I find nothing to
blame, on the contrary, I feel bound, as I have done, to hold
him up as an example to be imitated by all who by fortune and
with the arms of others have risen to power.”21 Machiavelli
was fully aware of all the facets of Cesare Borgia’s career, but
to him the results were the criterion:
Cesare Borgia was considered cruel, but his cruelty has
brought order to the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to
peace and fealty. If this is considered well, it will be seen that
he was really much more merciful than the Florentine people,
who, to avoid the name of cruelty, allowed Pistola to be
destroyed.22
Terrorism to gain and consolidate power was thus sometimes
very necessary. Machiavelli did not call terror good: he simply
stated that it was a necessary evil towards a good end, a unity
productive of power and the unity and prosperity of power.
The Borgia terror had to be weighed against the Borgia gains:
After four years, the results of Cesare’s labors were unveiled.
It was then revealed that no Pope had ever been as powerful a
secular prince as Alexander VI. True, his successor to the
throne of Peter cursed the memory of the Borgias. Neverthe-
less, these Borgias had given the Church a gift which lasted for
three centuries. The walls of her cities, and the valleys, rivers
and hills of her territories remained. They had liberated the
Church from the dread of being driven out of her own land.
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.
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
23. Marcu, Accent on Power, 119.

24. Ibid., 91-92.
goodness must, among so many who are not good, eventually

be undone.”25 The reality is “the way men live,” in terms of
evil, but men like the façade of the good. Machiavelli did not
call evil good, but he did not struggle against evil; he merely
recognized and used it as the basic fact about man and as an
essential ingredient of power. The three basic aspects of life are
necessita, virtu, and fortuna, and power involves a recognition
and combination of all three.
Since evil rather than good is the “truth” about life, the basic
hypocrisy of Renaissance man was to claim power by ascribing
more evil to himself than he possessed. A vast realm of boast-
ing concerning the ability to lie, fantasies of sexual prowess in
adulterous relations, murders committed, and, so on, devel-
oped among Renaissance men. Machiavelli himself wrote, “In
hypocrisy, I have long since received baptism, confirmation,
and communion. In lying I even possess a doctor’s degree. Life
has taught me to temper falsehood with truth and truth with
falsehood.”26
Basically, however, Machiavelli’s position was one of honest
and forthright pragmatism, and his pragmatism was less pre-
tentious and more consistent than the formal pragmatism of
John Dewey, and without Dewey’s pious cant. Machiavelli did
not clothe his goal with the moralism of “the Great Society.”
He wanted a successful and working order for Italy, and
wished the same for any state, without any pretensions of par-
adise or of morality. His counsel was simple and direct:
Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so
doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons
which made him bind himself no longer exist. If all men were
good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are
bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are
not bound to keep faith with them. Nor have legitimate
grounds ever failed a prince who wished to show colourable
excuse for the non-fulfilment of his promise. Of this one could
furnish an infinite number of modern examples, and show
how many times peace has been broken, and how many
25. Ibid., 46.

26. Ibid., 281-282.
promises rendered worthless, by the faithlessness of princes,

and those that have been best able to imitate the fox have suc-
ceeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this char-
acter well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men
are so simple, and so ready to obey present necessities, that
one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves
to be deceived.
I will only mention one modern instance. Alexander VI did
nothing else but deceive men, he thought of nothing else, and
found the occasion for it; no man was ever more able to give
assurances, or affirmed things with stronger oaths, and no
man observed them less; however, he always succeeded in his
deceptions, as he well knew this aspect of things.
It is not, therefore, necessary for a prince to have all the above-
named qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have them.
I would even be bold to say that to possess them and always
to observe them is dangerous, but to appear to possess them is
useful. Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sin-
cere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind
so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may
be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be un-
derstood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot ob-
serve all those things which are considered good in men, being
often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against
faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion.
And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself
according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate,
and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible,
but be able to do evil if constrained.
A prince must take great care that nothing goes out of his
mouth which is not full of the above-named five qualities, and,
to see and hear him, he should seem to be all mercy, faith, in-
tegrity, humanity, and religion. And nothing is more neces-
sary than to seem to have this last quality, for men in general
judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for every one can
see, but very few have to feel.27
It is “necessary” for a ruler “to learn how not to be good, and
to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity
of the case.”28
27. Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 64-66.

28. Ibid., 56.
Machiavelli, despite his cutting insight, had democratic lean-

ings. For him there was truth in the saying, “The voice of the
people is the voice of God,” for “it would almost seem as if the
people had some occult virtue.”29 But Machiavelli was more
prone to such idealism in dealing with the ancient Rome he ad-
mired than in observing Italian realities. A wise ruler, he held,
who had “the public good” in mind, “should concentrate all au-
thority in himself.” However, to maintain this concentrated
power, the one should involve the many in the administration
of it to gain their support: “it will not endure long if the admin-
istration of it remains on the shoulders of a single individual;
it is well, then, to confide this to the charge of many, for thus
it will be sustained by the many.”30 Involvement binds men. “It
is the nature of men to be as much bound by the benefits that
they confer as by those they receive.”31
Fortune governs men extensively. The origins of various
forms of political order are in “chance,” and before states be-
gan, men lived “like beasts.” Instead of a goal or meaning, the
basic aspect of man’s life is “perpetual movement,” i.e., change
or flux. Religion is important, not because it provides mean-
ing, but because it is social cement: it binds the body politic
into a firm and workable unity. Machiavelli thus strongly ap-
proved of Roman religion, because it was a department of state
and an instrument of social order. The “fear of the gods...
greatly facilitated all the enterprises which the Senate or its
great men attempted.” Moreover, “religion served in the com-
mand of the armies, in uniting the people and keeping them
well conducted, and in covering the wicked with shame.” It
was this use of religion which gave Rome social cohesion, good
law and order, and success in all its enterprises.32
The one thus had become fully immanent, and all power
revolved around the one, the power state. Power in the state
had no transcendental critique, no God in judgment over it. Its
29. Ibid., 263.

30. Ibid., 138-140.
31. Ibid., 41.
32. Ibid., 91-94, 112, 129, 145-149, 277-281, 380-383.
only test was historical and pragmatic: did it succeed? And

power thus was power only if it maintained itself to its own
satisfaction and to the satisfaction of the subjects of the state.
Since a truly wise power in the state controlled, by the
judicious use of forms and of controls, the opinions of the
people, power was thus truly power when, with the uses of
terror, religion, good, evil, and all things else, it maintained
itself successfully. This, then, was a philosophy for the power
state and a political philosophy for the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment.
Chapter X
The Reformation:
The Problem Redefined
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
radical break implicit in the very nature of Luther’s opposition

to indulgences. Warfield’s analysis of the significance of the
Ninety-Five Theses of Luther pointed out that
It was one of the attractions of the indulgences which Tetzel
hawked about that they gave the purchaser the right to choose
a confessor for himself and required this confessor to absolve
him. They thus made his immunity from all punishment sure.
Marvellous to say, the vendors of indulgences were not satis-
fied with thus selling the justice of heaven; they wished to sell
the justice of earth, too. Luther, it is true, in a passage in his
“Resolutions” denies that “the Pope” “remits civil or rather
criminal penalties inflicted by civil law,” but he adds that “the
legates do this in some places when they are personally
present”; and in another place he betrays why he wishes to
shield “the Pope” from the onus of this iniquity, saying that
“the Pope” cannot be supposed to have the power to remit civ-
il penalties, because in that case “the letters of indulgence will
abolish all gibbets and racks throughout the world” — that is
to say, would do away altogether with the punishment of
crime. In point of fact the actual as distinguished from Luth-
er’s ideal Pope did issue indulgences embodying this precise
provision, and those sold by Tetzel were among them. Henry
Charles Lea remarks upon them thus: The power to protect
from all secular courts “was delegated to the peripatetic ven-
dors of indulgences, who thus carried impunity for crime to
every man’s door. The St. Peter’s indulgences, sold by Tetzel
and his colleagues, were of this character, and not only re-
leased the purchasers from all spiritual penalties but forbade
all secular or criminal prosecution.... It was fortunate that the
Reformation came to prevent the Holy See from rendering all
justice, human and divine, a commodity to be sold in open
market.”2
In this important analysis, Warfield presented dramatically
and clearly the inescapable conclusion of the Scholastic
philosophy: the determination of history had been shifted
from eternity to time, from God to man, so that the world of
eternity was subject to the control of man. The “fact” of this
controlling power was not and is not denied by Roman
2. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, “The Ninety-Five Theses in their Theologi-

cal Significance,” Studies in Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932),
497-498.
Reformation: The Problem Redefined 259
Catholic apologists; the form of the sale of this power is in

their perspective the error.
Tetzel’s sales thus brought to focus the philosophical impli-
cations of Scholastic philosophy. What Aquinas taught in the
classroom was now put on the level of the simplest peasant:
man could control God, and time could govern or overrule
eternity. Tetzel may have been personally distasteful to his
more philosophical Dominican brethren, but his philosophy
was simply the concrete application of what the order and the
church taught. Luther’s opposition was theological; if Luther
had not opposed the pope and indulgences, there would have
been, and already was arising, civil opposition. The state was
claiming the right to govern time and eternity, and its quarrel
with Rome was basically a family quarrel. The Reformation
did not bring the monarchs and national states into a new pow-
er. On the contrary, it sought, as against papacy, empire, and
crown, to restore sovereignty to God, to place crown and mi-
tre under God. Modern Lutheranism, deeply imbued with her-
esies, often derives civil authority from below, from natural
law. But Holl rightly noted, “because Luther derives the state,
not from below, but exclusively from above, from God’s plan
of salvation, he insists on its distinct character as a state whose
essence is authority.”3
Whether or not Luther knew how far his Ninety-Five The-
ses would carry him is beside the point. His opponents recog-
nized their radical nature. The entire authority of Rome had
been challenged. The whole world-order of Scholasticism was
denied by Luther. By denying that the power of the church ex-
tends beyond the grave (Thesis 13: “Death puts an end to all
claims of the church....”), and by denying that the church and
pope have anything but ministerial authority, and no power to
do more than declare what God’s word allows (Theses 6, 27,
28, etc.), Luther was clearly challenging every aspect of Scho-
lasticism and of the existing church.
3. Karl Holl, The Cultural Significance of the Reformation (New York: Meridian
Books, 1959), 51.
Luther’s intellectual pilgrimage began with his inability reli-

giously to find grace and forgiveness in the temporal church.
Salvation, spiritual health, meant, he knew, a good conscience
before God, but how could fallen man have a good conscience
before God? The remedies the church provided he found fu-
tile: sinful man was offering sinful substitutes for what God
alone could give. If the law came from man, then man could
forgive offenses against the law, but because God gave the law,
God alone could forgive the sin against the law. For Luther,
neither God nor the law could be set aside. As he wrote later
in his Small Catechism, in Question 90,
The Law has a threefold purpose:
First, the Law checks to some extent the coarse outbursts of
sin and thereby helps to keep order in the world. (A curb.)
Secondly, the Law shows us our sins. (A mirror.)
Thirdly, the Law teaches us Christians which works we must
do to lead a God-pleasing life. (A rule.)4
Luther’s conscience vindicated God’s law as against the law of
the church; accordingly, he sought a theology to vindicate God
and His law. This he found in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. It
is commonplace to speak of the subject of Luther’s Romans as
justification by faith alone; in this there can be no quarrel, pro-
vided that it is also made clear that for Luther this meant estab-
lishing God’s law. It was precisely because the law that man
sins against was for Luther God’s law that God’s salvation is
alone efficacious. Thus, commenting on St. Paul’s statement,
“Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid:
yea, we establish the law,” Luther said:
We establish the law (3:31). The Law is made void if its validity
and authority are denied, so that it is no longer obligatory and
men may transgress it. The carnally minded might have
accused the Apostle of making void the Law, since he said that
sinners are not justified by the Law, but that the righteousness
of God is manifested and imparted without the Law. On the
other hand, the Law is established and confirmed when its
4. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing
House, 1943), 85.
demands or injunctions are heeded. In this sense the Apostle

says: “We establish the Law”; that is: We say that it is obeyed
and fulfilled through faith. But you who teach that the works
of the Law justify without faith, make the Law void; for you
do not obey it; indeed, you teach that its fulfillment is not
necessary: The Law is established in us when we fulfill it
willingly and truly. But this no one can do without faith.
They destroy God’s covenant (of the Law) who are without
the divine grace that is granted to those who believe in Christ.5
There were times when Luther reflected the older blurring of
law and love, and he replaced law with love.6 Calvin also at
times underrated the law, calling it “coarse rudiments.”7 Calvin
also expressed a preference for “the common law of nations, as
against “the polity of Moses.”8 Despite these wretched state-
ments and tendencies, both Luther and Calvin undergirded the
sovereignty of God’s law as against the laws of men and na-
tions both by their emphasis on justification by God, and also
by their emphasis on God as Creator. In Calvinist circles, the
Puritans in particular gave prominence to God’s law.
Luther struck out sharply against Aristotle’s doctrine of or-
igins, and against the influence of Greek thought on Christian
thinkers. He strongly defended the doctrine of creation.9 The
doctrine of creation, faithfully held, leads directly to the doc-
trines of predestination and also to justification by God alone.
If the triune God is indeed the Creator of all things by His sov-
ereign decree, then all things are ordained by God, and salva-
tion is entirely the work of God because man is entirely the
creature of God. Man’s liberty, the liberty of the Christian
man, is, therefore, in God’s law and His grace, and in submis-
sion to God’s decree. By virtue of the sovereignty of God, man
is freed from slavery to man; by virtue of the law-word of God,
5. Martin Luther, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. J. Theodore

Mueller (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1954), 64.
6. See, for an example, Jaroslav Pelikan, Daniel Poellot, eds., Luther's Works, vol.
9, Lectures on Deuteronomy (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1960), 70.
7. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses in the Form of a
Harmony, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 265.
8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, trans. John Allen
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1963), 787-788.
9. Luther’s Works, vol. 1, Lectures on Genesis 1-5 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia,
1958), 1-6.
man serves men in obedience to the word that requires him to

obey God by means of his duties to neighbors and masters.
This is the ground of Luther’s “two propositions concerning
the liberty and the bondage of the spirit”:
A Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A
Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.10
Because God is sovereign, reason was denied its Scholastic
autonomy by Luther and placed in submission to God. Reason
was, for Luther as for Calvin, important as reason; it was rea-
son as a god sitting in judgment over God that was denied:
Dr. Henning asked: “Is reason to hold no authority at all with
Christians, since it is to be set aside in matters of faith?” The
Doctor replied: Before faith and the knowledge of God, rea-
son is mere darkness; but in the hands of those who believe,
’tis an excellent instrument. All faculties and gifts are perni-
cious, exercised by the impious; but most salutary when pos-
sessed by godly persons.11
Luther was replacing the pseudo-god of Aristotle and the au-
tonomous man and reason of Greek philosophy with the liv-
ing God of Scripture. The absolute priority of God was both a
theological foundation for Luther and a personal experience.
Very early in his struggle with Rome, Luther observed, “God
alone is in this business; we are seized so that I see we are acted
upon rather than act.” Luther’s activism was derived from this
faith: man, being an instrument of God, could not choose to
be a spectator.12
2. Against Erasmus
It was in his debate with Erasmus that Luther’s thinking
came to its sharpest focus. Erasmus, in his Diatribe or Sermon
Concerning Will, approached the subject moralistically, prag-
matically, and anthropologically.13 The approach of Erasmus
10. Martin Luther, “A Treatise on Christian Liberty,” in Vergilius Ferm, ed.,
Classics of Protestantism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 41.
11. Thomas S. Kepler, ed., The Table Talk of Martin Luther, no. 69 (New York:
The World Publishing Co., 1952), 49.
12. Cited in John M. Headley, Luther's View of Church History (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1963), 1-2.
13. See the comments of Ernst F. Winter, ed., Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free
Will (New York: Ungar, 1961), x.
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
14. Ibid., 45.

15. Ibid., 36.
16. Ibid., 6, 8.
17. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston, trans., “Historical and Theological Introduc-
tion” to Martin Luther on the Bondage of the Will (New York: Fleming H. Revell,
1957), 52.
been delivered to us from above in the Sacred Scripture.”

Moreover, “Take away assertions, and you take away Chris-
tianity.” As for Erasmus’ preference for the skeptic’s position,
“What Christian could talk like that?”18 The absolute God of
Scripture speaks with perspicuity in Scripture.
As for Erasmus’ definition of free-will, Luther declared:
This is the kind of definition that the Sophists call vicious —
that is, one in which the definition fails to cover the thing de-
fined. For I showed above that “free-will” belongs to none but
God only. You are no doubt right in assigning to man a will
of some sort, but to credit him with a will that is free in the
things of God is too much. For all who hear mention of
“free-will” take it to mean, in its proper sense, a will that can
do and does do, God-ward, all that it pleases, restrained by no
law and no command; for you would not call a slave, who acts
at the beck and call of his lord, free. But in that case how much
less are we right to call men or angels free; for they live under
the complete mastery of God (not to mention sin and death),
and cannot continue by their own strength for a moment.19
The issue was God or man. Does man have an autonomy from
God to any degree, or is man totally God’s creature, and en-
tirely under God’s government? When Erasmus spoke of free
will, he did not mean what is commonly understood by that
term, i.e., that man is a responsible creature. Instead, he meant,
as do all the tiresome intellectuals who trumpet “free will,” the
autonomy of man from God, a radically different concept.
Luther bluntly and discerningly cited the implications of Eras-
mus’ position:
Erasmus informs us, then, that “free-will” is a power of the hu-
man will which can of itself will and not will the word and
work of God, by which it is to be led to those things that ex-
ceed its grasp and comprehension. If it can will and not will,
it can also love and hate; and if it can love and hate, it can in
measure keep the law and believe the gospel. For, if you can
will and not will, it cannot be that you are not able by that
will of yours to do some part of a work, even though another
should prevent your being able to complete it. Now, since
death, the cross, and all the evils of the word, are numbered
18. Ibid., 66-68.

19. Ibid., 137.
among the works of God that lead to salvation, the human

will will thus be able to will its own death and perdition. Yes,
it can will all things when it can will the contents of the word
and work of God! What can be anywhere below, above, with-
in or without the word and work of God, except God Him-
self? But what is here left to grace and the Holy Ghost? This
is plainly to ascribe divinity to “free-will”! For to will the law
and the gospel, not to will sin, and to will death, is possible to
divine power alone, as Paul says in more places than one.
Which means that nobody since the Pelagians has written of
“free-will” more correctly than Erasmus! For I have said above
that “free-will” is a divine term, and signifies a divine power.
But no one to date, except the Pelagians, has ever assigned to
it much power. The Sophists, whatever their views, certainly
do not say anything like this! Why, Erasmus far outdoes the
very Pelagians; for they ascribe this divinity to the whole of
“free-will,” while Erasmus ascribes it to half only! The Pelagi-
ans posit two parts of “free-will,” a power of discernment and
a power of choice, attributing the one to the reason and the
other to the will; and the Sophists do the same. But Erasmus
sets aside the power of discernment and exalts the power of
choice alone. Thus he makes a lame “half-free will” into a
God! What do you think he would have done had he set out
to describe the whole of “free will”?20
To all practical intent, the “god” of Erasmus’ Diatribe was sim-
ply another name for “that idol, Chance, under whose sway all
things happen at random.” Luther pointed out that the divine
freedom implies human necessity. The primacy of determina-
tion is absolutely and wholly God’s, “Yet God does not work
in us without us; for He created and preserves us for this very
purpose, that He might work in us and we might cooperate
with Him, whether that occurs outside His kingdom, by His
general omnipotence, or within His kingdom by the special
power of His Spirit.”21
3. Luther and the One and Many

Now, let us analyze the implications of this for the problem
of the one and the many. The determination of eternity by
time, as dramatically evidenced by Tetzel, had reduced the
20. Ibid., 140-141.
21. Ibid., 199, 216-218, 268.
triune God to a position of subordination, and even to no

more than a limiting concept. By restoring the priority of
God, Luther again both restored the determination of time and
history to God, and placed the ultimacy of the one and the
many in the triune God.
With respect to the doctrine of the sacraments, Luther en-
dangered his position by retaining the confusion and intermin-
gling of the divine and the human in the sacrament of the
Lord’s Table, after the Roman Catholic pattern. Ephesus and
Chalcedon had barred the door to the confusion of the divine
and the human, but Luther retained the Catholic doctrine to a
large degree. The doctrine of the real presence is distinct from
and does not require either transubstantiation or consubstanti-
ation. Luther, whose reasoning against his opponents was usu-
ally so sharp and telling, at this point regularly fell back on
dogmatic denunciations and an appeal to experience: “They
imagine that they contribute a great piece of wisdom when
they submit the learning of their nursery and declare that wa-
ter is not fire. But if they ever experienced the power and effect
of Baptism, of the Sacrament, or of the oral Word, they would
indeed keep their mouths shut.”22 There was an element of the
doctrine of economic appropriation, as formulated at Ephesus,
present in Luther’s doctrine of the Lord’s Table, but, even
more, as Brilioth notes, in his favorable account, Luther, in his
view of the sacrament, was “treating the sacrament as a symbol
of the incarnation.”23 This is precisely Luther’s error: the sac-
rament is not a symbol of the incarnation, but it is a sign of the
atonement. To render it a symbol of the incarnation is radical-
ly to alter its meaning in the life of man, and also to alter the
doctrine of the incarnation. The failure of Lutheranism to de-
velop the implications of Luther’s position for the doctrine of
the one and the many rests not only with Lutheran scholars
but also with Luther himself. If the sacrament setting forth the
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.
atonement is a symbol of the incarnation, then incarnation it-

self is an act of atonement, and a dangerous door is opened
wide, leading to mysticism, pietism, and humanism.
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
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.
firm faith in the infallibility of Scripture and the divine sover-

eignty.28 With reference to God, Calvin wrote:
But he also designates himself by another peculiar character,
by which he may be yet more clearly distinguished; for while
he declares himself to be but One, he proposes himself to be
distinctly considered in Three Persons, without apprehending
which, we have only a bare and empty name of God floating
in our brains, without any idea of the true God.29
There is no God but the God of Scripture, the triune God, and
any and all Unitarian, Arian, or subordinationist views express
no faith but “only a bare and empty name of God floating in
our brains, without any idea of the true God.” To deny the or-
thodox doctrine of the Trinity is to fall into at least subordina-
tionism, as Arminianism did, and to entertain
subordinationism is to deny God’s sovereignty, as every sub-
ordinationist faith, including Arminianism, has done.30 The-
ism without orthodox trinitarianism quickly becomes no
more than a limiting concept.
Calvin saw the thrust of subordinationism: it was covert
atheism. For anyone to deny God the Father, and to reject
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, was to stand openly
condemned as a heretic and an atheist. But, by demoting
Christ, the determination of history could be transferred from
eternity to time. The man Jesus was confused in the union
with God the Son, and humanity mingled with deity, and this
union then lowered towards earth. Such men as profess this
doctrine of Christ, “Since they cannot openly rob him of his
divinity, secretly steal from him his eternity.”31 This is one of
Calvin’s most perceptive sentences: he was aware of the nature
of subordinationism in all its history, from the early church to
his day.
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.
God is beyond time and also beyond the mind of man:

How can the human mind, by its own efforts, penetrate into
an examination of the essence of God, when it is totally
ignorant of its own? Wherefore let us freely leave to God the
knowledge of himself. For “he alone,” as Hilary says, “is a
competent witness for himself, being only known by
himself.”32
Man does not discover and know God; God reveals himself to
man; this revelation is true and propositional knowledge, but
it is not exhaustive knowledge, nor can man have such a
knowledge of God. The philosophy of Servetus thus, while
formally retaining God, in actuality replaced God with man
and all creation.
But the most execrable blasphemy of all is, his (Servetus’) pro-
miscuous confusion of the Son of God and the Spirit with all
the creatures. For he asserts that in the Divine essence there
are parts and divisions, every portion of which is God; and es-
pecially that the souls of the faithful are coeternal and consub-
stantial with God; though in another place he assigns
substantial Deity, not only to the human soul, but to all cre-
ated things.33
“The bare and empty name of God floating in our brains, with-
out any idea of the true God,” attaches itself to man and to cre-
ation. The name of God without the biblical doctrine of the
Trinity is no God at all, but rather another name for man and
his world.
The true God, said Calvin, is distinguished from all fictitious
ones by the creation of the world.34 By His creation of all
things out of nothing, God is Lord and Sovereign over all.
In Jesus Christ, there is a true union of God and man
without confusion. In explaining that union, Calvin echoed
the doctrine of economic appropriation of the Council of
Ephesus.35
32. Ibid., 163.

33. Ibid., 165.
34. Ibid., 177-201.
35. See Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order, 50-51, 54, 57-59, 61-62, 144-145.
The error of Eutyches, the absorption of Christ’s humanity

into His divinity, had become the Lutheran error in their
doctrine of the Lord’s Table. The doctrine of the real presence
had been confused with the doctrine of unity, and union with
unity:
There are two words commonly used, Union (unio) and Uni-
ty (unitas); the first is applied to the two Natures, and the sec-
ond to the Person alone. To assert the unity of the flesh and
of the Divinity, those would be ashamed to do, if I am not de-
ceived, who yet inconsiderably adopt this absurdity; for, ex-
cept the flesh differs and is distinct in its own peculiar
properties from the Divine Nature, they are by blending to-
gether become one.36
The Lutheran doctrine of “ubiquity” and communion of prop-
erties confused the two natures; it read union as unity, and it
fell into ancient and deadly heresies:
I speak not of the Romanists, whose doctrine is more tolera-
ble, or at least more modest; but some are so carried away with
the heat of contention, as to affirm that, on account of the
union of the two natures in Christ, wherever his Divinity is,
his flesh, which cannot be separated from it, is there also; as if
that union had mingled the two natures so as to form some in-
termediate kind of being, which is neither God nor man. This
notion was maintained by Eutyches, and since his time by
Servetus. But it is clearly ascertained from the Scriptures, that
in the one person of Christ the two natures are united in such
a manner, that each retains its peculiar properties undimin-
ished. That Eutyches was justly condemned as a heretic, our
adversaries will not deny; it is surprising that they overlook
the cause of his condemnation, which was, that by taking
away the difference between the two natures and insisting on
the unity of the person, he made the Divinity human and de-
ified the humanity. What absurdity, therefore, is it to mingle
heaven and earth together....
... It is a distinction common in the schools, and which I am
not ashamed to repeat, that though Christ is every where en-
tire, yet all that is in him is not everywhere. And I sincerely
wish that the schoolmen themselves had duly considered the
meaning of this observation; for then we would never have
36. “Dedication to Prince Frederick,” in John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book
of the Prophet Jeremiah, vol. 1, trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1950), xx.
heard of their stupid notion of the corporeal presence of

Christ in the sacrament. Therefore, our Mediator, as he is ev-
ery where is always near to his people; and in the sacred sup-
per exhibits himself present in a peculiar manner, yet not with
all that belongs to him; because, as we have stated, his body
has been received into heaven, and remains there till he shall
come to judgment.37
All the gains of the Reformation could be lost, Calvin saw, in
this mingling of heaven and earth together. The confusion of
man and God would restore determination and sovereignty to
man: man as a part of the union with God, by virtue of man’s
union with Christ, could thereby govern God. Worldly sover-
eignties, divine monarchs could then again rule the earth as lit-
tle gods. The church of the incarnation would be a church
governing eternity as well as time; it would be a church with
authority of a godlike nature. The confusion of the natures in
the Roman Church had given the pope authority over heaven:
Who can now wonder that the Pope claims primacy over ev-
ery description of mortals, since he here makes himself the
president of angels also?38
Christ in His incarnation was still as God the Son reigning in
heaven.39 For Calvin, God was not exhausted in the incarna-
tion; that is, God the Son was truly incarnate in the flesh, but
he was not exhaustively incarnated:
Nor do we, as they pretend, imagine two kinds of seed in
Adam, notwithstanding Christ was free from all contagion.
For the generation of man is not naturally and originally im-
pure and corrupt, but only accidentally so, in consequence of
the fall. Therefore we need not wonder, that Christ, who was
to restore our integrity, was exempted from the general cor-
ruption. But what they urge on us as an absurdity, that if the
Word of God was clothed with flesh, it was therefore confined
within the narrow prison of an earthly body, is mere impu-
dence; because, although the infinite essence of the Word is
united in one person with the nature of man, yet we have no
37. Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, 683-684.
38. Calvin, “Remarks on the Letter of Pope Paul III,” in Tracts Relating to the Ref-
ormation, vol. 1, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society,
1844), 281.
39. See Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1957), for an excellent analysis of Calvin’s position here.
idea of its incarceration or confinement. For the Son of God

miraculously descended from heaven, yet in such a manner
that he never left heaven; he chose to be miraculously con-
ceived in the womb of the virgin, to live on the earth, and to
be suspended on the cross; and yet he never ceased to fill the
universe, in the same manner as from the beginning.40
It is for this reason, among others, that modernism and neo-or-
thodoxy are so hostile to Calvin: his doctrine of Christ cannot
be absorbed into their systems. Neo-orthodoxy exhausts God
in His revelation, so that God is humanized and time triumphs
over eternity, but not so in Calvin’s doctrine. He spoke sharp-
ly against this “alchemy” as “cursed blasphemies”:
Here again the devil tries to stir up the coals of strife by per-
verting or disguising the doctrine which St. Paul teaches us.
For there have been heretics who have endeavored to main-
tain that the majesty and Godhead of Jesus Christ, His heav-
enly essence, was forthwith changed into flesh and manhood.
Thus did some say, with many other cursed blasphemies, that
Jesus Christ was made man. What will follow hereupon? God
must forgo His nature, and His spiritual essence must be
turned into flesh. They go on further and say Jesus Christ is
no more man, but His flesh has become God.
These are marvelous alchemists, to make so many new natures
of Jesus Christ. Thus the devil raised up such dreamers in old
times to trouble the faith of the church; who are now renewed
in our time.41
Thus, Calvin, by his doctrine of the incarnation and of the
Trinity, retained the integrity of the doctrine of God. The one
and the many are maintained in their equal ultimacy in the tri-
une God, and man is barred from participation in that ultima-
cy. Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Table strictly maintained
the real presence while denying either confusion or any ab-
sorption or assimilation of man into the Godhead. The sacra-
ment sets forth the membership and participation of the
believer in the new and redeemed humanity of Jesus Christ,
the last Adam. In his comment on John 6:51, “The bread

41. Calvin, “The Mystery of Godliness,” Sermon on 1 Timothy 3:16, in The Mys-
tery of Godliness and Other Selected Sermons (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950),
19.
which I shall give is my flesh,” Calvin delighted in the fact that

through Christ, flesh, humanity, which once conveyed death
to us, now conveys life. It is not the humanity or flesh of
Christ which in itself or intrinsically conveys life to us, but it
is the humanity of Christ, which, by union with the divinity
of Christ, makes us partakers of the divine nature, its righ-
teousness, which is life itself:
But an objection is brought, that the flesh of Christ cannot
give life, because it was liable to death, and because even now
it is not immortal in itself; and next, that it does not all belong
to the nature of flesh to quicken souls. I reply, though this
power comes from another source than from the flesh, still
this is no reason why the designation may not accurately ap-
ply to it; for as the eternal Word of God is the fountain of life
(John 1, 4) so his flesh, as a channel, conveys to us that life
which dwells intrinsically, as we say, in his Divinity. And in
this sense it is called life-giving, because it conveys to us that
life which it borrows from another quarter. This will not be
difficult to understand if we consider what is the cause of life,
namely, righteousness. And though righteousness flows from
God alone, still we shall not attain the full manifestation of it
any where else than in the flesh of Christ; for in it was accom-
plished the redemption of man, in it a sacrifice was offered to
atone for sins, and an obedience yielded to God, to reconcile
him to us; it was also filled with the sanctification of the Spirit,
and at length, having vanquished death, it was received into
the heavenly glory. It follows, therefore, that all the parts of
life have been placed in it, that no man may have reason to
complain that he is deprived of life, as if it were placed in con-
cealment, or at a distance.42
Calvin’s doctrine of the sacrament thus barred a metaphysical
doctrine of salvation: man was not made God by his redemp-
tion; he was renewed as a man. Salvation is an ethical, not a
metaphysical, fact. And the sacrament celebrates an ethical,
not a metaphysical, change. A change of substance in the com-
munion elements means a change of substance in man: a meta-
physical concept of salvation is attested in such a doctrine. This
Calvin firmly denied. The whole Christ is in a sense given in
the sacrament,43 but it is not in any sense other than an ethical
42. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, vol. 1 (Grand Rap-
ids, MI: Eerdmans, 1949), 262-263.
one. Jesus Christ communicates to us by His atoning work,

celebrated in the sacrament, the righteousness of God unto sal-
vation. The Lutheran doctrine, as Calvin noted, calls for “par-
ticipation” in all of Christ, in His deity as well as His
humanity:
We say, that though Christ is in heaven, yet through the hid-
den and incomprehensible power of his Spirit, this favour
comes to us — that His flesh becomes life to us, so that we be-
come flesh of his flesh and bones of his bones (Eph. v. 30). By
them, on the contrary, it is maintained, that except Christ
comes down on earth, there is no participation. That they
may, however, get rid of the absurdity of a local presence, it
has been found necessary to fabricate the strange notion of
ubiquity; which, if we think it not possible to reconcile to the
principles of faith, we must beg them at least to pardon our ig-
norance. Here we follow not our own understanding; but ac-
cording to the knowledge given us from above, we cannot
comprehend that it is at all agreeable to Scripture to say that
the body of Christ is everywhere. Both Christ himself and His
Apostles clearly show that the immensity of God does not be-
long to the flesh; a personal union is what they teach; and no
one, except Eutyches, has hitherto taught, that the two natures
became so blended, that when Christ became man, the at-
tributes of Deity were communicated to his human nature.44
The humanity of Christ, being made ubiquitous, shares the at-
tributes of His divinity and is everywhere! And the believer, in
the sacrament, literally partakes of a body that is mingled with
divinity. From ethics to metaphysics, from biblical salvation
to deification, such is the direction of this doctrine. But for
Calvin, from first to last, salvation is an ethical act, and the pur-
pose of the sacrament “is to have part and portion in all the
graces which he purchased for us by his death”:
Moreover, if the reason for communicating with Jesus Christ
is to have part and portion in all the graces which he pur-
chased for us by his death, the thing requisite must be not only
to be partakers of his Spirit, but also to participate in his hu-
manity, in which he rendered all obedience to God the Father,
in order to satisfy our debts, although, properly speaking, the
43. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine, 201.

44. Calvin, “Dedication to Prince Frederick,” xvii-xviii.
one cannot be without the other; for when he gives himself to

us, it is in order that we may possess him entirely.45
Some, however, seeking a metaphysical doctrine of salvation,
misread the words of Peter (2 Peter 1:4) concerning being made
“partakers of the divine nature” in a metaphysical rather than
an ethical sense. Calvin condemned this “delirious dream.”46 In
commenting on the phrase, Calvin wrote:
But the word nature is not here essence but quality. The Man-
icheans formerly dreamt that we are a part of God, and that
after having run the race of life we shall at length revert to our
original. There are also at this day fanatics who imagine that
we thus pass over into the nature of God, so that his swallows
up our nature. Thus they explain what Paul says, that God
will be all in all (I Cor. xv. 28) and in the same sense they take
this passage. But such a delirium as this never entered the
minds of the holy Apostles; they only intended to say that
when divested of all the vices of the flesh, we shall be partakers
of divine and blessed immortality and glory, so as to be, as it
were one with God as far as our capacities will allow.
This doctrine was not altogether unknown to Plato, who ev-
erywhere defines the chief good of man to be an entire confor-
mity to God; but as he was involved in the mists of errors, he
afterwards glided off into his own inventions. But we, disre-
garding empty speculations, ought to be satisfied with this one
thing — that the image of God in holiness and righteousness is
restored to us for this end, that we may at length be partakers
of eternal life and glory as far as it will be necessary for our
complete felicity.47
Calvin underscored the sovereignty of God in his great writ-
ings on predestination. The doctrine of predestination is in
particular associated with the name of Calvin, although it was
Luther, in reply to Erasmus, who gave the first and great Ref-
ormation statement of the doctrine. The unity of the God-
head, the reality of the three persons, and the absolute God as
the absolute and only first cause of all things was strongly af-
firmed by Calvin. To allow any liberty with respect to first
45. John Calvin, “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper,” in Calvin’s Tracts and
Treatises, vol. 2, trans. T. F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 170.
46. Calvin, “Last Admonition to Joachim Westphal,” in ibid., 381.
47. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-
mans, 1959), 371.
causes to the creature is to erect a god out of the creature and

to “make, like the Manichees, two ruling principles.”48 Either
God’s will is the absolute and only first cause, or else two or
more ruling principles or gods are admitted into one’s faith.
Men seek to void God’s sovereignty, Calvin pointed out, in the
name of asserting their reason and their justice in judgment
over God. “Yet, on this hinge turns the whole question: Is
there no justice of God, but that which is conceived by us?” In
reply to Pighius, Calvin wrote:
Marvellous, indeed is the madness of man! who would more
audaciously set himself above God than stand on equal ground
with any Pagan judge! It is intolerable to you, and hateful, that
the power and works of God should exceed the capacity of
your own mind; and yet you will grant to an equal the enjoy-
ment of his own mind and judgment.49
Thus, with respect to the doctrines of God and man, Calvin
blocked the door to any temporal power, or to any temporal
one, as well as a temporal many, seizing ultimacy and sover-
eignty. The weak link in Calvin came elsewhere.
5. Calvin on Law and Love

We have seen how Calvin at times underrated the law, as did
Luther also, and that Calvin expressed a preference for “the
common law of nations” as against “the polity of Moses.”50
With this, without realizing it, Calvin reopened the door to
natural law, and also to common grace, a concept he would not
have recognized. The idea of common grace has become,
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.
however, the chief doctrine of modern neo-Calvinism, and the

state is grounded on common grace as its sphere.51 Moreover,
Calvin saw man as “the subject of two kinds of government”;
an inner one, relating to eternal life, is the province of the
church; the other is civil government, “which relates to civil
justice, and the regulation of the external conduct.”52 For this
outer world, virtually all the world, Calvin rejected biblical
law.53 The world was thus in effect sundered from God and at
this point given its own sovereignty and independence.
But Calvin did not apply these ideas. Instead, he surpassed
Luther and insisted that the state must enforce both tables of
the law, that the state, in short, must be Christian, not “natu-
ral” or “neutral,” a possibility he denied. Civil government, he
held, must enforce God’s law.54 For Calvin, “the rule of life”
which God has given us is “His law.”55
At the same time, Calvin strongly emphasized the duty of
love. Men are so used to reviling Calvin for his belief in predes-
tination that they fail to notice the very heavy emphasis he
placed on loving and doing good to all men. Thus, Calvin
wrote:
Whoever, therefore is presented to you that needs your kind
offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance. Say
that he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a char-
acter which ought to be familiar to you; for which reason he
forbids you to despise your own flesh (Isaiah lviii. 3). Say that
he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to
be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image. Say
that you are obliged to him for no services; but God has made
him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge
yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important
benefits. Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest
exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is
51. H. Henry Meeter, Calvinism, 2nd ed., rev. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
n.d., c. 1948), 168.
52. Institutes, vol. 2, 770.
53. John T. McNeill, “John Calvin on Civil Government,” in George Hunt,
John T. McNeill, eds., Calvinism and the Political Order (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1965), 35.
54. William A. Mueller, Church and State in Luther and Calvin (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1965), 128.
55. Calvin, “Catechism of the Church of Geneva,” in Tracts and Treatises, 56.
recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and

all that you possess. If he not only has deserved no favour, but,
on the contrary, has provoked you with injuries and insults,
— even this is no just reason why you should cease to embrace
him with your affection, and to perform to him the offices of
love. He had deserved, you will say, very different treatment
from me. But what has the Lord deserved? who, when he com-
mands you to forgive men all their offenses against you, cer-
tainly intends that they should be charged to himself. This is
the only way of attaining that which is not only difficult, but
utterly repugnant to the nature of man to love them who hate
us (Matt. v. 44), to requite injuries with kindnesses, and to re-
turn blessings for curses (Luke vii. 3, 4). We should remember,
that we must not reflect on the wickedness of men, but con-
template the Divine image in them; which, concealing and
obliterating their faults, by its beauty and dignity allures us to
embrace them in the arms of our love.56
This is virtually a doctrine of unconditional love; it has a vein
of antinomianism in it. It is close to the position of modern lib-
erals who believe in salvation by love. This undue and dispro-
portionate emphasis on love appears at times in Calvin.
Combined with the inconsistent attitude on law, it gave
ground for the development of a liberalism out of Calvin. On
the one hand, some English and American Puritans used one
element of Calvinism to develop a concept of society grounded
on God’s sovereignty and biblical law. On the other hand,
however hopelessly in error Fairchild’s theology is, his point
is well taken that Calvinism in England also led to sentimental-
ism and a naturalistic humanism.57
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:
56. Institutes, vol. 1, 758-759.

57. Hoxie Wale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vols. 1-4 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939-1962).
Seeing therefore the Father alone is originally that Deity

which Christ originally is not, (for Christ is God by being of
God, light by issuing out of light,) it followeth hereupon that
whatsoever Christ hath common unto him with his heavenly
Father, the same of necessity must be given him, but naturally
and eternally given, not bestowed by way of benevolence and
favour, as the other gifts both are. And therefore where the
Fathers give it out for a rule, that whatsoever Christ is said in
Scripture to have received, the same we ought to apply only
to the manhood of Christ; their assertion is true of all things
which Christ hath received by grace, but to that which he
hath received of the Father by eternal nativity or birth it
reacheth not.58
However much Hooker tried to claim the church fathers for
his position, it was clearly heresy. Hooker, while trying to em-
phasize grace as the ground of man’s deification in Christ, still
defied Chalcedon to insist that in Christ “man is really made
God”:
The union therefore of the flesh with Deity is to that flesh a
gift of principal grace and favour. For by virtue of this grace,
man is really made God, a creature is exalted above the dignity
of all creatures, and hath all creatures also under it.59
When challenged by a Calvinist to prove how his position dif-
fered from that of Arius, Hooker’s answer was:
The Godhead of the Father and of the Sonne is no way denied
but granted to be the same. The only thing denied is that the
Person of the Sonne hath Deitie or Godhead in such sort as
the Father hath it.60
Having introduced man into the Godhead, Hooker plainly
made man God’s associate in the government of all things.
Thus, the British monarchy now had indeed a divine right of
amazing dimensions. As Hooker stated the doctrine of man’s
divinity,
Finally, sith God hath deified our nature, though not by turn-
ing it into himself, yet by making it his own inseparable hab-
itation, we cannot now conceive how God should without
58. The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 2, Keble ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1963), 232-233.
59. Ibid., vol. 2, 233.
60. Ibid., 1, lxxxii; cited in Keble’s preface.
man either exercize divine power, or receive the glory of di-

vine praise. For man is in both an associate of Deity.61
It is not surprising that the British monarchs loved their Mr.
Hooker! Hooker introduced man into the Godhead, subordi-
nated British subjects firmly to an absolute monarch on reli-
gious grounds, and saw the monarchy, and the English
church-state, as a divine order. The monarch, as head of the
church as well as head of the state, had a vast power over the
lives of his subjects. Had not the Puritan commonwealth al-
tered the course of the monarchy, England’s lot would have
been a fearful one. The divine one and many had been denied
in favor of a divine-human order. Hooker no less than Loyola
represented a form of Counter-Reformation.
61. Ibid., 2, 235.

Chapter XI
Utopia:
The New City of Man
1. Humanism and Utopia

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and ev-
ery other movement of the modern mind have one common
characteristic: anti-Christianity. As Santillana observed of ear-
ly and later Renaissance figures, “What came under criticism
was the central dogmatic complex built around original sin, in-
herited corruption, and divine atonement.”1 The humanism
which had saturated the church manifested itself in numerous
ways. When Nicholas of Cusa (b. 1401) dreamed of reconciling
Christianity with Mohammedanism, he was simply applying
the logic of the age. Paracelsus (1493?-1541) saw a great “be-
coming” unfolding itself in man. As Santillana wrote:
The religious emotion of Paracelsus centers on growth and
delicate unfolding from the womb of time; he teaches “respect
for the divinely appointed moment,” for the “hour of God”
that the physician-alchemist alone can discern.
It is only in such a scheme, on the other hand, that things can
be conceived as really independent beings, having their reason
and their principle of growth in themselves. Gone is the neat
1. Giorgio de Santillana, ed., in into. to The Age of Adventure (New York: Mentor
Books, 1956), 29.
281
hierarchy of intelligible causes, ending up in the already

achieved design in the mind of the Unmoved Mover. There is
here a true “becoming” and also protean metamorphosis.
In the Great Chain of Being, God and Man are mystically
equivalent. “I under God in his office, God under me in
mine.” This might sound like satanic pride, but it is a mystical
intuition which is to be more strongly and paradoxically
expressed later by Angelus Silesius in many of his doggerel
couplets: “I know that without me God could not live a
second — Turned if I were to nothing, He’d give up the ghost
in despair.”2
Basic to the Renaissance perspective was the concept of a finite
God, limited and non-determinative in nature. The corollary
of this premise was a belief in an infinite universe. As Gior-
dano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote, “I hold the universe to be infi-
nite, as being the effect of infinite divine power and goodness,
of which any finite world would have been unworthy.”3 The
reference to “infinite divine power” met the requirement of
logic and science: the infinite universe was the product of an in-
finite divine power, a source or cause commensurate with its
effect. But beyond this formal presence, the divine power had
no role. With some, it was absorbed into its effect; with others,
as with later Deism, it remained as a now obsolete cause.
An infinite universe means that man, the crown of the uni-
verse, is infinite also. Renaissance man saw himself as a new
god in process of becoming. Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois felt
shock at the realization that he could die and was dying:
Is my body, then,
But penetrable flesh? And must my mind
Follow my blood? Can my divine part add
No aid to th’ earthly in extremity?4
In any other era, for a man to express amazement at his mor-
tality would be ridiculous; in this Renaissance play, it is thor-
oughly credible and in keeping with the temper of the day.
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
The Bussy D’Ambois type man of the Renaissance has been

accorded the veneration his philosophy called for. His “ge-
nius” has been the subject of adulation, and his egoism has been
taken at face value. A telling example of this is the pathetic and
impotent figure of Leonardo da Vinci. A chronic dabbler and
procrastinator, Leonardo found it difficult to finish anything.
His notes occasionally record good observations, his jottings
of the comments of wiser men, but he was unable to bring
these gleamings to focus. His one area of real ability was paint-
ing, or, more accurately, drawing, but here his total produc-
tion was limited and haunted by the specter of his weakness
and impotence. But, because of his singular avoidance of any
personal religious expression, this man has been especially
highly esteemed, although, amusingly, the experts find it diffi-
cult to establish what was great about him!5
But, Renaissance man being by self-definition a species of di-
vinity, it was impossible to regard his actions as folly; what had
been folly was now tragedy. The dramatic concern for tragedy,
most notable in England, is a telling illustration of this fact.
Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois is one of many examples, more ex-
plicit than most. For a man’s “divine part” to follow his blood
into death or disgrace was tragedy now, not sin or folly.
The Renaissance also planted the seeds of Romanticism. If a
man is a god, then his loves must be god-like. As a result, the
Renaissance poet converted his love into a goddess, the divine
Laura, Cynthia, or Jane. Thus, Michelangelo could declare,
“The pow’r of one fair face spurs me to heaven,” in a sonnet,
and of his love-filled thinking, he could add, “my conceptions
high become divine.” The woman he called, “fair lady, proud
and heavenly,”6 a description made necessary by his own
self-exaltation, for how can a man shot through with Neopla-
tonist divinity love anything other than a woman who is
“heavenly” or divine? Later, Shelly and Byron were to call ev-
ery slut they took up with a goddess, until they left her, when
5. See Morris Philipson, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Aspects of the Renaissance Genius
(New York: George Braziller, 1966).
6. Santillana, Age of Adventure, 155.
she became a witch. A witch, after all, represents a kind of su-

pernatural power also!
Shakespeare, in his sonnets, equates his love’s favor (and
there are indications that both a man and a woman were the
objects of his love)7 with a religious experience which lights up
his life and makes him rich. Sonnets 29, 30, 66, 106, and others
reveal this plainly.
Another aspect of man’s new “divinity” was Utopianism.
Christian orthodoxy produces no utopian dreams or plans: in
God’s law-word, the believer already has God’s purposes for
the future declared, and the way thereto, faith and God’s
law-word, are plainly set forth. The believer moves towards
God’s predestined future with confidence.
But the new god, man, must create his own decree, and pre-
destine his own future, and, as a result, he must draw up plans
for a utopia. Utopianism is thus a renunciation of God’s sov-
ereignty and eternal decree in favor of a new god, man, and a
new decree, man’s plan. The new city of man is set forth, and
the power is then sought to institute this decree.
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
7. Edward Hubler, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Commentators,” in E.

Hubler, etc., The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Basic Books, 1962),
13-16; Northrop Frye, “How True a Twain,” in ibid., 28-29, 37, denies the homo-
sexual element; Leslie A. Fiedler, “Some Contexts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in
ibid., 59, 62, 65, 71-72, 77, 82-84, 87-88.
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
8. Santillana, Age of Adventure, 90.

9. James J. Greene, in intro. to James J. Greene, John P. Dolan, eds., The Essential
Thomas More (New York: New American Library, Mentor-Omega, 1967), 11, 13, 16.
10. H. van Riessen, The Society of the Future (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
11. Greene, The Essential Thomas More, 1, 17.
12. William Dallam Armes, ed., The Utopia of Sir Thomas More (New York:
Macmillan, 1912), 134, 286.
the nature the Romantics later had in mind: it is nature gov-

erned, molded, and totally controlled by statist man. Manuel’s
analysis is to the point:
The order of happiness is within human capacity but it is not
innate. Thus Utopian man is not natural — he has been fash-
ioned by institutions — but the result is not unnatural since
the founders of Utopia utilized benign instincts and repressed
harmful ones through education and the dictates of the law. In
contrast to our contemporary absorption with the problem as
a major source of dolorous psychic disturbance, the utopian
conception of repression envisages a process that is neither
very painful nor very complicated. As a consequence, the so-
cial environment in which every new-born utopian first sees
the day is uniformly pleasurable and his whole existence will
be passed in the same mild emotional climate.
Tranquillity is the highest good. Since only moderate
pleasures are deemed to be pleasures at all, there is nothing to
disrupt the order of calm felicity, once it has been instituted,
as long as the world endures. More’s utopia is not even subject
to the natural decay that Plato considered inevitable for his
Republic.13
More was thus a very modern figure: his god and nature was
the state, man’s recreator, preserver, and providence. More ab-
sorbed man into a totally immanent one, the state. Thus unity
was for him the supreme virtue, and serenity in that oneness.
His Utopia was a communist regime in which man was manip-
ulated into place, and the thought of any division in terms of
religious faith was anathema. In terms of this, More’s hatred of
anything that made for separatism was intense. Himself hun-
gry for wealth, he hated wealth in others. In his Utopia, he
wrote of gold, “But they make chamber pots and other com-
mon vessels for both their dining halls and homes out of gold
and silver.”14 From this passage, Lenin derived his famous idea
of using gold to build public urinals in the Marxist utopia.
But what of More’s own death for autonomy of conscience?
How does this jibe with his totalitarianism? More, like most
humanistic intellectuals, saw himself as one of the elite rulers
13. Frank E. Manuel, ed., Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1966), 75.
14. Greene and Dolan, The Essential Thomas More, 66.
of the total order. After all, Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), in

Looking Backward (1888), called for an equal annual income of
$4,000 per person, so that the ablest of men as well as the least
received an equal amount. One exception was made by Bel-
lamy: the writer, who could name his own royalties and live in
wealth! More denied the citizens of Utopia the right to treat re-
ligion seriously enough to divide over it, but he retained the
right for himself to die for conscience’ sake. He had not been
inconsistent earlier in burning Protestants at the stake, nor in
defending the practice.15 His unitary state, England, failed
him in that the monarch used the unitary powers for his own
ends. Earlier, More had warned a devoutly Catholic Henry
VIII from too great an obedience to the pope; but he could
not prevent Henry from following his royal will. Henry, the
great hope of Renaissance scholars, was, for better or worse,
his own man.
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
15. Ibid., 208ff.

16. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Saxe Commins, Robert N. Linscott,
eds., Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science (New York: Random House,
1947), 148.
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.
Frye, Bacon, in his New Atlantis, “anticipates Marx by

assuming that the most significant of social factors is
technological productivity.”21 Polak sees a direct strain which
“leads on from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (from which the
Royal Society in England descended in a straight line) towards
ideals of technical progress which later blended with the
American Creed and finally may lead to an enslaving
technocracy.”22 Sears observes,
Beginning with Bacon’s New Atlantis, or perhaps earlier, there
has been a significant change of emphasis in the visions of uto-
pia. The older writings, as we have noted earlier, concerned
themselves heavily with moral and political factors. Gradually
there has been an increasing preoccupation with man’s ability
to manipulate his environment and rely upon technological
devices. At one extreme, this has resulted in the absorbing
faith in science as a guarantee against any emergency we may
create for ourselves. At the other, there has developed an im-
pressive literature of satire and disillusionment, at least some
of whose writers are better versed in science than the uncriti-
cal optimists.23
These discerning comments help bring to focus a central aspect
of Bacon’s utopianism and of a great strand of thought after
him. The one great One is now totally immanent; it is man-
kind organized as the state; its instrument in issuing a new ul-
timate decree, a new predestination for man and nature, is
technology and science. Science is thus cast into a messianic
role and becomes progressively basic to utopianism.
4. Campanella
Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), a Dominican monk
more interested in physics than in theology, was, in his City of
the Sun, still more concerned with politics than science, al-
though the scientific aspect was present. Andrews wrote, of
the City of the Sun, “it formulated for the first time a complete
socialistic system on a scientific foundation, and, in France es-
pecially, furnished a model for later ideal communities.”24 In
21. Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in ibid., 26.
22. Frederick L. Polak, “Utopia and Cultural Renewal,” in ibid., 289-290.
23. Paul B. Sears, “Utopia and the Living Landscape,” in ibid., 147.
24. Charles M. Andrews, Famous Utopias, viii.
Campanella’s ideal order, all things are socialized or commu-

nized, including marriage, which is completely governed by
the state in terms of scientific breeding. The historic biblical
pattern of marriage is condemned, as is private property, as
leading to “self-love.” “But when we have taken away self-love,
there remains only love for the state.” Crime is abolished by
abolishing traditional marriages and private property. “More-
over, the race is managed for the good of the commonwealth
and not of private individuals, and the magistrates must be
obeyed.... For children are bred for the preservation of the spe-
cies and not for individual pleasure, as St. Thomas also asserts.”
“And thus they distribute male and female breeders of the best
natures according to philosophical rules.”25 And why not? For
Campanella said, “The world is a great animal, and we live
within it as worms live within us.”26 Campanella was, curious-
ly, imprisoned by the state and defended by the church. The
king of Spain imprisoned him for twenty-seven years; Pope
Urban VIII defended him and later gave him refuge for a
time.27
The basic form of utopianism was now shaped for modern
man to apply to the social order: the state, or better, the scien-
tific socialist state, is the great and ultimate order, the order of
unity and man’s savior. Because the one is now totally imma-
nent, there is no escape from its “truth” nor appeal against it.
Truth being incarnate and present in the form of the state, man
in any conflict with the state can only be evil.
5. Hobbes, Locke, Harrington

Hobbes’s utopianism made this point. Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) wrote his Leviathan (1651) as “a vindication of the
absolute rights of whatever government happens to be in pow-
er.”28 The state incarnates true order. In Hobbes’s words, “the
25. Ibid., 282, 291-292.

26. Ibid., 316.
27. Henry Morley, Ideal Commonwealths (London: George Routledge & Sons,
1885), 8.
28. A. D. Lindsay, in intro. to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J. M. Dent,
1937), ix.
Law of Nations, and the Law of Nature, is the same thing.”29

The state comprehends all orders, so that “a Church, such a
one as is capable to Command, to Judge, Absolve, Condemn,
or do any other act, is the same thing with a Civil Common-
wealth.”30 Nothing can exist outside of this One, the state. The
great condemnation of heresy for Hobbes was that it is “a pri-
vate opinion, obstinately maintained, contrary to the opinion
which the Publique Person (that is to say, the Representative of
the Commonwealth) hath commanded to be taught.” Moreover,
“Haeretiques are none but private men, that stubbornly de-
fend some Doctrine, prohibited by their lawfull Soveraigns.”31
The state in Hobbes’s order is the only good; man is virtually
nothing.
Hobbes brings us to the brink of total environmentalism.
John Locke placed man within that realm by his psychology.
Locke (1632-1704), in his An Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing, with his tabula rasa concept, reduced the mind to a
passive blank sheet on which an elite planner or teacher could
write the future. Man was now a passive creature, acted on
rather than acting, and the state became progressively the ac-
tive, creating agent.
Another major contribution to utopianism had come
already in the concept of economic man, and economic
determinism, a note which appeared in James Harrington
(1611-1677), in his Oceana. Its fundamental thesis was simple:
“Dominion is property.”32 Oliver Cromwell recognized the
basic secularism of Harrington’s thesis.33 Harrington held that
power is property; hence, society should be reordered in terms
of a realistic recognition of this “fact.” In terms of this,
Harrington wanted a “government of laws, not of men.”34
29. Ibid., 189.
30. Ibid., 252.
31. Ibid., 316.
32. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (London: George Rout-
ledge & Sons, 1887), 18.
33. H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and His Oceana: A Study of a 17th Century
Utopia and Its Influence in America (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,
1914), 75-76.
34. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 42.
There was nothing new in Harrington’s thesis, as Baxter

pointed out.35 Men have always known of the power property
gives; the issue for some centuries was this: would power be
governed by the higher power of God? The whole concern of
Christendom had been the subjection of all powers to Christ.
The novelty in Harrington’s thesis was that power was again
being paganized, freed from the restraint of the higher power
of the triune God. A new higher power had come into the
picture: the sovereign power of the scientific socialist state
which itself moves eventually to possess property and become
the focal point of all power. The road to utopia led straight to
the Marxist hell.
35. Smith, Harrington and His Oceana, 108.

Chapter XII
Autonomous Man
and the New Order
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
of Descartes was characteristically French, for he demanded

the same return to an uncorrupted nature for the understand-
ing that Rousseau many years later demanded for the heart.”1
For Descartes, the mind of man is normative; instead of hold-
ing, in terms of Christian faith, to a fallen man, corrupt in all
his being, including his mind, Descartes has no provision for
the fall in his philosophy and science. He begins and ends with
the autonomous mind of man, an autonomous mind which is
neither fallen nor corrupt. But the philosophy of Descartes is
not without its contradictions. For Descartes, there are three
substances, the Self, God, and matter. God is the primary sub-
stance, and matter and the Self or Soul (or mind) are created or
relative substances. And God is very necessary to Descartes’
system, because without God the two worlds of mind and mat-
ter fall apart into a radical dualism. But, necessary as God is to
Descartes, God is neither scientifically nor rationally prior to
the autonomous mind of man. Priority clearly belongs to the
autonomous mind, to the uncorrupted and capable reason of
man: hence Descartes’ rationalism. But this autonomous mind
must make contact with other minds, and also with that other
world of substance, matter. To verify empirical knowledge, to
give Descartes a valid epistemology, God becomes necessary.
Autonomy and priority belong to the mind of man; validation
of knowledge belongs to God, who provides Descartes’ system
with a built-in insurance policy.
Both empiricism and rationalism presuppose autonomous
man. Their methodology in providing knowledge for this au-
tonomous man varies, but in both cases the presupposition is
the autonomous ability of man. The quarrel between empiri-
cism and rationalism is a family affair; they are together allies
at war against a Christian epistemology.
Descartes’ purpose in his Discourse on Method (1635-1637)
was scientific, not philosophical. This again is of particular im-
portance. It was not with the logical analysts that philosophy
renounced its own territory for science; logical analysis and
1. Herbert Ernest Cushman, A Beginner's History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 70.
Autonomous Man and the New Order 295
positivism generally renounced the historic disciplines of phi-

losophy for a role as handmaiden to science, but with Des-
cartes philosophy began to rethink its grounds scientifically.
For Descartes, philosophy had produced nothing but doubt;
“there is not a single matter within its sphere which is not still
in dispute, and nothing, therefore, which is above doubt,”
whereas science he saw as productive of verifiable knowledge,
unless they “borrow their principles from philosophy.”2
In order to attain a valid scientific knowledge, Descartes saw
as the valid method a studied rootlessness: “The single design to
strip one’s self of all past beliefs.”3 Descartes looked to logic,
geometrical analysis, and algebra for guidance and formulated
a four-point method:
The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not
clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid pre-
cipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my
judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and
distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examina-
tion into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary
for its adequate solution.
The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by com-
mencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I
might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step,
to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a
certain order even to those objects which in their own nature
do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete,
and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing
was omitted.4
In the first of these four points, Descartes’ rationalism is appar-
ent in the demand for clear and distinct ideas, but it is a ratio-
nalism linked to the scientific temper: nothing is to be accepted
unless it is fully and clearly understood. The next three points
2. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, pt. 1, in Saxe Commins and Robert N.

Linscott, Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science (New York: Random
House, 1947), 164.
3. Ibid., pt. 2, 169.
4. Ibid., 171-172.
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.
my practice conformably to the opinions of those with whom

I should have to live.” Next, said Descartes,
My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions
as I was able, and not to adhere less steadfastly to the most
doubtful opinions, when once adopted, than if they had been
highly certain.... We ought to act according to what is most
probable, and even although we should not remark a greater
probability in one opinion than in another, we ought
notwithstanding to choose one or the other, and afterwards
consider it, in so far as it relates to practice, as no longer
dubious, but manifestly true and certain, since the reason by
which our choice has been determined is itself possessed of
these qualities.6
Then “My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer
myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than
the order of the world.”7 There is more than pragmatism in ev-
idence here: this is the scientific posture, the ostensible con-
cern with working hypotheses rather than truth. The way was
being paved for Comte’s sociology.
This general approach was already in evidence in Descartes’
Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1629). His Rule 6 called for
the study of data from the simple to the complex, as did Rule
9 and others; the approach was clearly to be from atoms
upward.
But more was involved in the Cartesian methodology. St.
Anselm said: I believe, in order that I might understand. Des-
cartes, to the contrary, held: I doubt, in order that I may un-
derstand. Although Descartes’ “proof” of God from the idea of
perfection has a superficial resemblance to that of St. Anselm,
they are radically different. St. Anselm began with the auton-
omous God, Descartes, with man’s autonomous mind.
In Part 4 of the Discourse on Method Descartes stated his well-
known starting point: cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I
am the autonomous consciousness of man. Although both
philosophical necessity and piety later led Descartes to intro-
duce God, at the starting point Descartes’ concept of the mind
6. Ibid., pt. 3, 175-177.
7. Ibid., 177.
is of an autonomous entity which in its essence is an indepen-

dent thinking mind. Descartes defended this autonomy:
The first objection is that it does not follow from the fact that
the human mind reflecting on itself does not perceive itself to
be other than a thing that thinks, that its nature or its essence
consists only in its being a thing that thinks, in the sense that
this word only excludes all other things which might also be
supposed to pertain to the nature of the soul. To this objection
I reply that it was not my intention in that place to exclude
these in accordance with the order that looks to the truth of
the matter (as to which I was not dealing), but only in accor-
dance with the order of my thought (perception); thus my
meaning was that so far as I was aware, I knew nothing clearly
as belonging to my essence, excepting that I was a thing that
thinks, or a thing that has in itself the faculty of thinking. But
I shall show hereafter how from the fact that I know no other
thing which pertains to my essence, it follows that there is no
other thing which really does belong to it.8
In his “Reply to the Fourth Set of Objections” to his
Meditations, Descartes stressed the concept of mind as a
complete substance: “thinking substance is a complete thing.”
He spoke also of the body as a separate substance.9 As
Descartes noted, in “The Seventh Set of Objections with the
Author’s Annotations,”
I established also by reasoning the fact that these two things
are substances really distinct from one another. One of these
substances I called mind, the other body; and if my critic
doesn’t like these names he can invent others, and I shall not
mind.10
Thus Descartes has two substances which must be linked but
cannot, in and of themselves, be linked. For this linkage, God
is necessary, so that a third substance is added to Descartes’
“science.” Another reason requires that God be posited: Des-
cartes had not abandoned the idea of causality, which was still
basic to science. Because of this scientific requirement, God
was needed as a first cause, and, to avoid “regression into infin-
ity,” a perfect and necessary first cause was necessary. The God
8. Descartes, Spinoza’s Works (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 71.
9. Ibid., 99, 120, 154.
10. Ibid., 248, annotation 4.
of Descartes’ philosophy was not the God of Scripture but the

necessary God of Cartesian science.11 Thus, while the mind
and the body were made derivative from God, it was a causal
derivation which pointed ahead to Deism, to an absentee God,
who, having performed His scientific causal function, quietly
retires to the sidelines to let man and nature take over. Here
again the argument for God’s existence from the idea of perfec-
tion is radically different from Anselm’s argument: Descartes’
argument has a scientific function, to further scientific knowl-
edge; Anselm’s argument is a philosophical exploration of a re-
ligious presupposition.
Descartes gave to the mind an innate idea of God. This again
is a significant fact. The knowledge of God comes, not from
God’s revelation, but from the mind’s revelation of itself. Ex-
istentialism was thus assured a birth: the transcendental and ab-
solute God could on such a presupposition be dropped in favor
of an autonomous mind which is itself the god it innately
knows and reveals. God was thus, in Descartes’ system, a sci-
entific presupposition, or perhaps simply a hypothesis, which,
however necessary for the science of an age, could thereafter be
discarded as having served its purpose.
Descartes’ analysis of God is a significant one:
For in order to know the nature of God (whose existence has
been established by the preceding reasonings), as far as my
own nature permitted, I had only to consider in reference to
all the properties of which I found in my mind some idea,
whether their possession was a mark of perfection; and I was
assured that no one which indicated any imperfection was in
him, and that none of the rest was awanting. Thus I perceived
that doubt, inconstancy, sadness, and such like, could not be
found in God, since I myself would have been happy to be free
from them. Besides, I had ideas of many sensible and corporeal
things; for although I might suppose that I was dreaming, and
that all which I was or imagined was false, I could not,
nevertheless, deny that the ideas were in reality in my
thoughts. But, because I had already very clearly recognised in
myself that the intelligent nature is distinct from the
corporeal, and as I observed that all composition is an
11. “Meditations,” in ibid., 87-88.

evidence of dependency, and that a state of dependency is

manifestly a state of imperfection, I therefore determined that
it could not be a perfection in God to be compounded of two
natures, and that consequently he was not so compounded;
but that if there were any bodies in the world, or even any
intelligences, or other natures that were not wholly perfect,
their existence depended on his power in such a way that they
could not subsist without him for a single moment.12
There are a number of important assumptions and implica-
tions in this statement. First, for Descartes, God is one, of a sin-
gle nature or substance. God is not a composition of mind and
body, for “all composition is an evidence of dependency.”
Since “the intelligent nature is distinct from the corporeal,”
God has no body and is not matter. The implication, thus, is
that, second, God is mind, a higher, uncreated mind than man,
but still mind. For Descartes, there are three substances, mind,
body, and God, and of these two, mind and God, have some-
thing in common, intelligence. But, third, as Cushman noted,
with respect to the implications of consciousness for Des-
cartes, “For Descartes reality lies within the Self; and the next
question before him is how to get out of the Self.” Even more,
“The existence of God is an implication of human conscious-
ness.”13 From this, it is not too great a step to calling God an
aspect of human consciousness, to moving from an absolute
God to an absolute man. Ultimately, the given of a philoso-
phy, the presupposition of a viewpoint, is the total world of
that philosophy. A philosophy beginning with the ontological
Trinity is a philosophy which is by presupposition inclusive of
all that the triune God is and does. Similarly, a philosophy
whose given or presupposition is the autonomous mind of
man finds itself either with no God and world but only the
mind of man, or else with a God and world which are merely
aspects of the mind of man. The given is the total world of any
philosophy and its comprehending order. Modern philosophy
having begun with Descartes’ autonomous consciousness has
12. Descartes, Discourse on Method, pt. 4, 184-185.

13. Cushman, History of Philosophy, vol. 2, 72, 75.
been driven to reducing reality to that autonomous conscious-

ness.
Fourth, the influence of Descartes was very great, and it made
possible the strong reintroduction of pagan evolutionary con-
cepts into Western culture. Descartes’ philosophy was forbid-
den at Oxford, placed on the Index by Rome, and proscribed
by the Calvinists of Holland, but it still reshaped the outlook
of Western culture. As Cushman noted,
It spread over Europe in a somewhat similar way to the Dar-
winian evolution theory in modern times. Its success was im-
mense, many standard men rallied to its support, and
everything before Descartes was considered to be antiquated.14
Descartes looked to the simple for the key, not to the complex,
to the primitive, not the developed. The key to origins thus
came to be sought downward, not upward, in the atom, not in
God. The acceptance of Cartesian premises made necessary fi-
nally the acceptance of social and biological evolution. Truth
lay in dissection downward to the simplest component.
Fifth, this all had great repercussions on the problem of the
one and the many. Instead of a transcendental one and many,
a purely immanent one and many was again enthroned.
Moreover, because Descartes emphasized the autonomous
consciousness of man as his scientific and social atom and as his
given, the necessary emphasis of social philosophy came to be
individualistic and atomistic. Man in society was seen as a
prisoner in chains. Kings, powers, and authorities had to be
overthrown, as well as God and priestcraft, because
Cartesianism had atomized the world. The immanent many,
man, became the new ultimate of creation, and any form of
unity, of the one, came to be seen as tyranny. But, when the
Cartesian autonomy of the many, of autonomous men, began
to run into serious problems, the alternative now was simply
an immanent one, a collection of autonomous men into an
omnipotent state. Men and society have been reshaped by
Descartes’ philosophy.
14. Ibid., 80.

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,
15. Ibid., 154.

however got, will serve to set conscience at work; which is

nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral
rectitude or pravity of our own actions; and if conscience be a
proof of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles;
since some men with the same bent of conscience prosecute
what others avoid.”16 The idea of God is not innate either, and
is absent in many cultures, Locke stated.17 If the idea of God is
not innate, then how can any idea be innate?
Ideas, Locke held, are not a given factor, not innate to the
mind, but rather a product of the mind and its thinking. He
used his famous image (original probably with Aquinas, who
used it before him by implication), of the mind as “white pa-
per, void of all characters, without any ideas,” deriving its “ma-
terials of reason and knowledge... from EXPERIENCE. In
that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately
derives itself.” The “two fountains of knowledge” are thus sen-
sations and reflections, i.e., our sensory experiences and our
thinking about them.18 Some French followers of Locke re-
duced knowledge to sensations and the mind to a radical pas-
sivity. Those who defend Locke against the charge of passivity
ascribe it to the French misinterpretations; Locke held to the
power of the mind to reflect and to operate on its experience
or sensations. This explanation does not absolve Locke’s doc-
trine from the charge of passivity; the mind reacts rather than
acts; ideas are reflex phenomena, and Locke’s very word is re-
flection. Locke plainly stated that “The mind thinks in propor-
tion to the matter it gets from experience to think about.” “I
conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensa-
tion; which is such an impression or motion made in some part of
the body, as produces some perception in the understanding.” 19
Locke’s universe was thus one of the individual minds with-
out innate ideas all receiving impressions or sensations and
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.
then reflecting on them, a world in which the particulars are

primary and central. Not surprisingly, great attention was
therefore paid to the liberty of the particular or the individual,
and one of Locke’s most notable works was his A Letter Con-
cerning Toleration, followed by the Second and Third Letter
Concerning Toleration. But Locke’s world is not Hume’s uni-
verse; Locke still assumed God as the one who gives unity and
order to the world of sensations, so that Locke posited a one as
counterbalance to his many. God is simply assumed by Locke
as creator; the beginnings of Deism are clearly apparent; a uni-
fied world of experience requires a creator, whose basic func-
tion is to insure the validity of experience. This judgment is
somewhat unfair to Locke’s personal faith and intentions, per-
haps, but it is just to the practical outcome.
Since Locke’s concern is man, he is thus interested in man’s
happiness. “What is it moves desire? I answer, — happiness,
and that alone.”20 Locke’s man is thus implicitly good or wise,
in that he desires pleasure, not pain. Man the sinner,
masochistic and sadistic, is not in Locke’s world at this point
or at any time.21 Locke’s man is rational and sensible even in
egoism. The egoism of men, the particulars, thus produces the
welfare of the whole, or the one, society; the foundations of
laissez faire were thus established: “The necessity of pursuing true
happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest
perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant
pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves,
that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the
necessary foundation of our liberty.”22 Thus we have a
correlation between the true happiness and the true liberty of
man in terms of the egoism of man. In his own way, Locke was
affirming the same doctrine as Leibniz, despite their real
differences: pre-established harmony. Leibniz objected to a
20. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 42.

21. According to Locke, “No one chooses misery willingly, but only by wrong
judgment,” ibid., bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 64.
22. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 21, 52.
hint of dualism in Locke, but they were together in assuming

pre-established harmony.23
Briefly to summarize Locke’s thinking in relation to the
problem of the one and the many, first, for Locke the
particulars, the many, are prior, and these particulars are men.
Second, in spite of their priority, these particulars are passive in
their reaction to the natural world and the sensations derived
from it. Book 4 of the Essay, “Of Knowledge and Probability,”
makes this quite clear. The mind, Locke said, is like a dark
room, and sensory experiences are like windows letting light
into that dark room from the natural world.24 Third, Locke
posited a unified world of nature, created by God, as formally
required by his philosophy to make experience and hence the
ideas produced by experience valid. The one was thus a formal
but necessary addition to his system. Fourth, Locke’s priority
of the many made for a philosophy of individualism, or
modern liberalism, but, fifth, because his individual is passive,
a determining agency creating experience was necessary, and
this the state, the enlightened despots of the Age of Reason,
provided. The state became the immanent one, and liberalism
moved from individualism, by revolting against old
authorities, to statism, by requiring a new one, the immanent
unity of the state.
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.
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.
Berkeley, amidst the Enlightenment confidence, saw its Achil-

les heel:
The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of nature are
called real things: and those excited in the imagination being
less regular, vivid and constant, are more properly termed
ideas or images of things, which they copy and represent. But
then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are
nevertheless ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are per-
ceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas
of sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to
be more strong, orderly, and coherent than the creatures of
the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the
mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or thinking
substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by
the will of another and more powerful spirit: yet still they are
ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist
otherwise than in a mind perceiving it.28
Berkeley denied, not the reality of knowledge, but the reality
of matter, as his solution: “The only thing whose existence we
deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal sub-
stance.”29 The sun, moon, and stars still remained real for Ber-
keley, but not material, nor did he see the old, materialistic
conception of the world as necessary to science. Berkeley did
not deny the reality of material objects, but he did deny that
matter as substance existed behind or in those material objects.
Material objects existed apart from the mind of man in the
mind of God.
Locke’s position was that a dualism existed of spiritual sub-
stance, the mind or soul of man, which is passive, and material
substance, which is active. These two substances are linked by
ideas in the mind, and their link is made possible and its verac-
ity assured by positing God as their creator. Locke’s position
was thus clearly dualism, a new variation on a Greek theme.
Berkeley recognized the danger in Locke’s system while ac-
cepting it. He retained the spiritual substance, dropped material
substance, and retained God as the linking power between ideas
and reality, reality now being the mind of God. For both
28. Ibid., 38-39.
29. Ibid., 40.
Locke and Berkeley, man is a soul, and represents freedom as

against nature, the world of necessity.
Berkeley recognized that dualism was hostile to biblical
faith.30 He failed, however, to overcome dualism, because he
began with Lockean man as his presupposition. The mind of
man now had radical autonomy which Berkeley, and Hume af-
ter him, only underscored. Because of man’s autonomy, there
was now a dualism between ideas and the process of knowing.
Man was set apart from the world like a god, but unlike God,
was not the creator of his world and therefore could not com-
prehend the world as his idea and law-order. Thus man, by as-
serting his autonomy, asserted also a radical dualism between
himself and reality which could be overcome only by either
denying that reality, or by making that reality a part of him-
self, his own idea. This step was later to be taken.
Berkeley retained that reality by positing “that ETERNAL
INVISIBLE MIND which produces and sustains all things.”31
God was Berkeley’s one, but his many, the race of man, was his
true presupposition and starting point. Autonomous man
needed God, not as Savior, but as his mainstay in epistemology
to retain true knowledge. As a result, the given for Berkeley
was the mind of man and man’s ideas, not God.
4. Alexander Pope
The primacy of man appeared extensively in the literature of
the age. Thus, Alexander Pope (1688-1744), in his “An Essay
on Man,” wrote what he called “a general map of MAN.”32
Pope’s “Essay on Man” has been called superficial and half-di-
gested philosophy, but it is important in its echoes of the age’s
thought. The “chain of being” concept was revived by Pope.33
This chain of being included God and man, as well as all na-
ture, in one common being:
30. Ibid., 648.

31. Ibid., 71.
32. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Al-
exander Pope (New York: Crowell), 146.
33. Ibid., ep. 1, st. 8-9.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul.34
This unified world of being, therefore, has no fall; it is norma-
tive, and it is one.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
A partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.35
Infallibility was thus transferred from God to the entire chain
of being: that which is, is inevitably right because it is a part of
that perfect whole. Man, thus, is not a sinner; he is right as he
is. And because he represents a high point of the great chain of
being, “The proper study of mankind is Man.” Vice still existed
in Pope’s world, by way of contradiction, but there was no
fall, only an upward growth. “The God within the mind”
guides man.36 “The chain of love” works to bring all the world
together and upwards. But “self-love” works to fulfill the glo-
rious purpose of the whole also.37 Pope concluded,
I turn’d the tuneful art
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit’s false mirror held up Nature’s light;
Show’d erring pride, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT;
That REASON, PASSION, answer one great aim;
That true SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the same;
That VIRTUE only makes our bliss below,
And all our knowledge is, OURSELVES TO KNOW.38
Pope’s philosophical self-satisfaction and superficial optimism
characterized much of the Enlightenment; with God simply an
insurance agent, man was free to go his own way in a world
where nothing can go wrong, because “whatever is, is right.”
34. Ibid.,ep.1, st. 9.

35. Ibid., ep. 1, st. 10.
36. Ibid., ep. 2, sts. 1 & 4.
37. Ibid., ep. 3, sts. 1 & 6.
38. Ibid., ep. 4, st. 7.
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.
the contrary, all impressions, that is, all sensations, either

outward or inward, are strong and vivid.”40 Man, therefore,
can affirm neither the reality of spiritual substance nor of
material substance; all he has are impressions and ideas. Hume
thus limited the known world to the mind of man with its
impressions and ideas.
Ideas are related to one another by the three laws of
association: resemblance, contiguity in time and space, and
causation. But how are these laws derived from impressions,
which must be the case, or else empiricism cannot be
maintained? These three, resemblance, contiguity, and
causation, “are the only bonds that unite our thoughts
together.”41 Contiguity association has to do with outer
impressions and descriptive sciences, causation association
with inner impressions and metaphysics, and resemblance
association with inner impressions and mathematics. Because
impressions continually conjoin, we believe in a necessary
cause, i.e., that water is wet and that fire will burn. Continual
repetition of experienced impressions leads to the conclusion
of necessity, but the necessity is in the mind, not in the outside
world. Mathematics deals with resemblances within the mind
and is thus valid unless it claims to be valid for an outside
world. Contiguity association rests on a conclusion from the
order and relationship of impressions, but any order can occur,
so that there is at best a probability concept available, not a law
concerning outside reality. “There is certainly a probability,
which arises from a superiority of chances on any side.”42
In Hume’s strict empiricism, there is no place whatever for
God, and only a slim place for science in terms of probability
concepts, not laws. There is no place either for the self of man
as a spiritual substance; instead of the self, there are only per-
ceptions. “I never can catch myself at any time with a percep-
tion, and never can observe anything but the perceptions.
When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound
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.
sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said

not to exist.”43
In view of these things, it is not surprising that Hume found
less reason to believe in miracles than in a material world.
Hume did not deny belief; he denied the validity of the objects
of belief. As a result, he was ready to commend an ethics which
furthered certain social qualities, and he thus laid the founda-
tions for the utilitarian and the pragmatic ethics of later eras.44
Virtue for Hume was simply “every quality of the mind which
is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others.”45 In
terms of his own definition, Hume was a moral man.
Since Hume could give no objective validity to science, he
could give none, of course, to God, for, as he noted, “While we
cannot give a satisfactory reason, why we believe, after a thou-
sand experiments, that a stone will fall, or fire burn; Can we
ever satisfy ourselves concerning any determination, which we
may form, with regard to the origin of the worlds, and the sit-
uation of nature, from, and to eternity?” The “only objects of
the abstract science or of demonstration are quantity and num-
bers, and... all attempts to extend this more perfect species of
knowledge beyond these bounds are mere sophistry and illu-
sion.”46 The only valid sciences are those of quantity and num-
ber, but this does not mean that these sciences reach an outside
world. Thinking must be firmly rooted in impressions. “If we
reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce any-
thing.” The foundation of thinking about God is “faith and di-
vine revelation,” and of ethics as grounded upon such a faith
the same must be said. Morality, like beauty, is really a ques-
tion of taste. Hume concluded,
43. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 2, sec. 6.

44. We are so assured of the sterling character of Hume that it is worth noting
that, in 1734, Agnes Galbraith was subjected to church discipline by the Rev.
George Home (David Hume’s uncle) for being with child out of wedlock: she
named David Hume as the father, and despite attempts to shake her story, main-
tained it. The obese bachelor, Hume, did little in his life to give any substance to the
sterling character attributed to him by his proponents.
45. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, bk. 9, pt. 1, sec.
226.
46. Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 130-131.
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles,

what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any vol-
ume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us
ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity
or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning con-
cerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the
flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.47
The humanistic faith of Hume thus ended as a principle of
bookburning.
Hume rejected a priori thinking, he felt, but did he? There is
an a priori assumption at the heart of Hume’s system, the pre-
supposition of the autonomy of the mind of man. This a priori
characterizes modern philosophy. It is at the heart of Des-
cartes’ “I think therefore I am.” At the end, with Hume, this a
priori is almost all that remains. The “I” of Descartes has been
greatly reduced; it is no longer a soul, a spiritual substance;
there is neither spiritual nor material substance, but only
thinking. This thinking can be divided, or must be, into two as-
pects — impressions and ideas — so that a dualism remains, be-
tween ideas and the knowing process. There is no longer even
a formal one, only the particulars, autonomous men; hence the
individualism of Hume. The world of man is greatly reduced,
however; man is little more than a nexus of ideas. The world
of nature is also reduced; it is now only a series of impressions.
Freedom is associated with autonomous man, but how signifi-
cant is the liberty of a mind without substance and without
contact with anything else? Hume’s world is one of a reduced
particular and a reduced unity, and, like his world, Hume him-
self was a reduced man.
Hume’s application of his philosophy to politics is revealing.
His politics was somewhat conservative, but his political phi-
losophy was not. In his study, “Of the Original Contract,”
Hume pointed out that there are basically two kinds of politi-
cal philosophy. The first school traces civil government direct-
ly to God, the second to “the consent of the people,” assuming
some kind of original social contract. Pragmatically, Hume
47. Ibid., sec. 12, pt. 3, para. 132.

saw virtues in both; realistically, he saw no evidences for either

origin in existing states: “Almost all the governments which
exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story,
have been founded originally, either on usurpation or con-
quest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or vol-
untary subjection of the people.”48 This is very true, but is
usurpation and conquest the truth of the matter, or is there a
true order, or is there no truth at all in any social order? Hu-
me’s answer is important:
We shall only observe, before we conclude, that though an ap-
peal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative sciences
of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy, be deemed
unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to
morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard,
by which any controversy can ever be decided.49
The inclusion of moral questions is of note. The truth of poli-
tics and morality is thus derived from “general opinion.” The
humanism of such a philosophy is of course transparent. Hu-
me’s a priori is here also the autonomous mind of man. Because
Hume’s humanism was so radical, he was dubious of the social
contract idea; it meant a binding law from the past. Similarly,
Hume was skeptical of pure reason; it implied some kind of
law and knowledge from the mind basic and innate within
man. Hume’s free, autonomous man has no ties on him from
the past and only the impressions of his own experience from
the present. In one sense, this is a severe limitation and a very
narrow world, but, in another, within these narrow walls,
man, bound by neither reason nor the past, is his own god, rul-
ing in proud autonomy in a nonexistent realm.
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.
reason. The opening words of Rousseau’s “A Dissertation on

the Origin and Foundations of the Inequality of Mankind” are
fitting for all his writings: “It is of man that I have to speak.”
Better known is his first sentence in Chapter 1 of “The Social
Contract”: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
How can a man be born free if he is in chains? Here an unre-
solved problem appears, much debated by scholars. Rousseau
did not want to ascribe man’s freedom to any source other
than man, because he believed in man’s autonomy. Thus, the
state of nature is not entirely trusted by Rousseau: his confi-
dence is in man, not nature. Hence his trust in the will of man,
and, in social orders, in the general will of man. This concept
of the general will clearly has led to the democratic totalitari-
anism of the French and Russian Revolutions, of fascism and
national socialism, and of democratic socialism. The general
will of the people is sovereign; it is sovereign for all and is in-
divisible and inalienable. Since sovereignty is a theistic idea, to
ascribe sovereignty to the general will is to make the locale of
the general will the god of the order. Since infallibility is an as-
pect of the doctrine of God, it is not surprising that Rousseau
ascribes a like doctrine to the general will: “the general will is
always right and ever tends to the public advantage.” Not all
deliberations of “the People” are inerrant. “There is often con-
siderable difference between the will of all and the general
will.” Thus, the general will and pure democracy are not equiv-
alent. To avoid leading “the will of all” into errors alien to the
general will, “it is essential that there be no subsidiary groups
within the state.”51 The new inerrant God is thus for Rousseau
the democratic state; it is the immanent and absolute one and
many, and the particulars or individuals in that unity have no
freedom to withstand the inerrant general will, the one. Rous-
seau was the hero of his day, despite his moral degeneracy, be-
cause he made man the moral center and arbiter of the
universe.
51. Rousseau, The General Contract, in ibid., 274-275.

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.
the results of a mere creation of our poetic imagination, and

that therefore they cannot be referred with assurance to actual
objects; but rather that they are necessarily valid of space, and
consequently of all that may be found in space, because space
is nothing else than the form of all external appearances, and
it is this form alone in which objects of sense can be given. Sen-
sibility, the form of which is the basis of geometry, is that
upon which the possibility of external appearance depends.
Therefore these appearances can never contain anything but
what geometry prescribes to them.
It would be quite otherwise if the senses were so constituted
as to represent objects as they are in themselves. For then it
would not by any means follow from the conception of space,
which with all its properties serves to the geometer as an a pri-
ori foundation, together with what is thence inferred, must be
so in nature. The space of the geometer would be considered
a mere fiction, and it would not be credited with objective va-
lidity, because we cannot see how things must of necessity
agree with an image of them, which we make spontaneously
and previous to our acquaintance with them. But if this image,
or rather this formal intuition, is the essential property of our
sensibility, by means of which alone objects are given to us,
and if this sensibility represents not things in themselves, but
their appearances: we shall easily comprehend, and at the same
time indisputably prove, that all external objects of our world
of sense must necessarily coincide in the most rigorous way
with the propositions of geometry; because sensibility by
means of its forms of external intuition, viz, by space, the
same with which the geometer is occupied, makes those ob-
jects at all possible as mere appearances.53
This remarkable passage, like every work of Kant’s on
knowledge, makes it clear that it was not Kant’s concern to
“save” knowledge. Rather, Kant followed after Hume in
seeking the destruction of historic rationalism and empiricism,
because they were still linked to God and to
things-in-themselves. In their place, Kant sought to introduce
a new kind of knowledge, together with a new kind of
rationalism as well as a new kind of empiricism. Space and time
were for Kant mental realities rather than either illusions or
objective realities. “My doctrine of the ideality of space and of
time, therefore, far from reducing the whole sensible world to
53. Ibid., 40-41.
mere illusion, is the only means of securing the application of

one of the most important cognitions (that which mathematics
propounds a priori) to actual objects, and of preventing its
being regarded as mere illusion.” Kant thus espoused a
transcendental or critical idealism. “My idealism concerns not
the existence of things (the doubting of which, however,
constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense), since it never came
into my head to doubt it, but it concerns the sensuous
representation of things, to which space and time especially
belong.”54 “It never came into my head to doubt” the existence
of things, Kant said; then why the systematic separation of
knowledge from things-in-themselves? Again, the answer is
that God is bypassed thereby, and the autonomous mind of
man is enthroned as the fountainhead of a new kind of
knowledge and science, one which a priori rejects God insofar
as any necessary connection to knowledge is concerned. Kant
said that therefore, “The understanding does not derive its laws
(a priori) from, but prescribes them to, nature.”55 For Calvin,
God is the source and principle of the interpretation of all
things. For Kant, the autonomous mind of man is the source
and principle of the interpretation of all things and of the laws
of being. A Kantian interpretation of religion is thus
inescapably and radically humanistic. Having first replaced
God with Nature, enlightenment man was now replacing
Nature with Man. The old metaphysics was thus as obsolete
for Kant, in the face of his critique, as alchemy is in
relationship to chemistry.56 A new “objectivity” was claimed
by Kant: not what the mind of God has decreed, but what the
mind of man reveals a priori as the objective truth. In Kant’s
words, “we shall be rendering a service to reason should we
succeed in discovering the path upon which it can securely
travel.”57 This path must exclude God, of course, and reason’s
dependence on things-in-themselves. Where God is concerned,
54. Ibid., 47, 49.
55. Ibid., 82.
56. Ibid., 140.
57. Norman Kemp Smith, trans., Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1934), preface to 2nd ed., 11.
“I have found therefore it necessary to deny knowledge, in

order to make room for faith.”58 Instead of being made
complementaries, faith and knowledge are given separate
domains, so that faith by definition is not grounded on, nor a
form of, knowledge. Knowledge must be purged of God, and
it must also be purged of any necessity of corresponding with
objective reality, with things-in-themselves. Only then is it
pure:
If, therefore, we seek to discover how pure concepts of under-
standing are possible, we must enquire what are the a priori
conditions upon which the possibility of experience rests, and
which remain as its underlying grounds when everything em-
pirical is abstracted from appearances. A concept which uni-
versally and adequately expresses such a formal and objective
condition of experience would be entitled a pure concept of
understanding.59
We are often told that Kant spoke to a crisis in the problem of
knowledge. This is true, but not in the usual sense; the crisis
was this: is knowledge possible without God? Philosophy was
trying to eliminate the God-concept inherited from biblical
theism, but not very successfully. The importance of Kant was
that he gave a new answer to the problem: true knowledge was
defined in terms which eliminated the old problem. God and
all things-in-themselves were now irrelevant to man, whereas
autonomous man was made totally relevant. Kant called his
position “transcendental philosophy,” because he held that
man himself, by virtue of the universal rules of the autono-
mous mind, transcended himself, and man was able to escape
the dilemma of verification of knowledge. Its advantage “is due
to the fact that it deals with concepts which have to relate to
objects a priori, and the objective validity of which cannot
therefore be demonstrated a posteriori, since that would mean
the complete ignoring of their peculiar dignity.”60 Kant thus
turned philosophy upside down.
58. Ibid., 22.

59. Ibid., 81-82.
60. Ibid., 106.
Having “freed” the mind from God, Kant logically worked

to free man’s morality from God also. This meant affirming
the autonomy of the will by means of the concept of freedom.
Freedom was “presupposed,” and the word is Kant’s, as a
“property of the will.”61 The fundamental act of faith no long-
er has reference to God but rather refers to man. As a result,
the moral ought, the moral law, is now derived from man, not
from God.
The nature of moral issues was thus revolutionized by Kant.
The generations which followed Kant may have been ignorant
of his philosophy or even his name, but, increasingly, they
reflected Kant’s revolution. In a Stanford University sit-in,
Friday, April 18, 1969, one speaker was Paul Bernstein,
graduate student in political science from New York City.
Striking a dramatic pose, naked to the waist, and bearded,
Bernstein declared:
We should not keep talking about anything, but we should
look inward to ourselves.
But it is not enough merely to look inward. The whole pur-
pose of this movement has been not only to get us to look in-
ward, to realize what our moral concerns are, but to call upon
us not to sit with those moral concerns, but to take action —
so that we can still respect ourselves as human beings.62
What the Stanford students proudly believed was their young
revolution was the tail-end of an old revolutionary tradition
which had a classic formulation in the hands of Immanuel
Kant. “We should look inward to ourselves,” Bernstein said.
Long before, Kant wrote, “It is a priori (morally) necessary to
produce the summum bonum by freedom of will.”63 In The Science
of Right, Kant therefore defined the right in terms of man’s au-
tonomy rather than God’s nature: “Act externally in such a
manner that the free exercise of thy will may be able to coexist
with the freedom of all others, according to a universal law.”64
61. Immanuel Kant, “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in

Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason; The Critique of Practical Reason, and Other Ethical
Treatises; The Critique of Judgment (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 280.
62. “The Issues Behind the Sit-in,” Stanford Observer, May 1969, 3.
63. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Critique of Pure Reason, etc., 340.
64. Kant, “The Science of Right,” in ibid., 398.
Thus, when twentieth century humanists defend the morality

of any acts of perversion between consenting adults because no
coercion is involved, they are reasoning from Kantian pre-
mises, logically and consistently.
Kant eliminated from philosophy a transcendental one and
many. Autonomous man was now his own lord and universe.
As a result, the one and the many had to be relocated in
history. This relocation was not utopian; it had no reference to
a future order but rather represented an ostensibly present
reality. History, therefore, progressively was to become a clash
between atomistic, anarchistic man and the totalitarian state,
two rival gods alike at war with the triune God and with each
other.
Descartes’ autonomous man still needed the props of spiritu-
al and material substances, and God as well, but Kant’s auton-
omous man needed none of these things and, indeed, found
them more than irrelevant; they presented a problem to the
new knowledge rather than a need. Truth, for Descartes,
meant empirical science. Truth, for the pragmatism of
post-Kantian man, is what works, that which satisfies. Truth,
defined by Scripture as God the Son, now has come to mean
the mind of man. The new one and many provided for
post-Kantian man the principle of meaning.
Chapter XIII
War Against the Beyond
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
1. Norman Kemp Smith, trans., Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

(London: Macmillan, 1934), preface to 2nd ed., 16.
323
a logical inconsistency. The total decree of God permits

nothing to exist in and of itself. All factuality is God-created
and therefore God-interpreted factuality. For humanistic man,
God’s decree had been replaced by man’s decree. Even as God
permits nothing to exist in and of itself, so man now took the
same stand. In terms of man’s total decree, in terms of man’s
independence and sovereignty, things in themselves must not
exist. Thus, it became imperative for the new philosophy to
eliminate them: things in themselves must be bludgeoned to
death. Kant’s toleration of them was intolerable and
represented an element of immaturity in his system. Hegel
desired to eliminate the thing in itself.2 It left philosophy with
an unhappy dualism. Hegel’s answer to it was Spirit or Mind,
the only reality:
That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that sub-
stance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which rep-
resents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) — the grandest
conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and
its religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the
world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objec-
tive, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself —
it is externality (otherness), and exists for self; yet, in this de-
termination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself — it
is self-contained and self-complete, in itself and for itself at
once.3
Since this great social spirit or mind is evolving and develop-
ing, it follows that history is of central importance. Indeed,
Maier could speak of the Hegelian philosophy putting “history
forward as that new substance....”4 The Kantian dualism was
overcome by Hegel’s concept of mind:
He takes the Kantian dictum that all knowledge begins with
experience but does not arise from experience, and carries it to
its ultimate conclusion. He builds the philosophy of con-
sciousness to its apogee. His contention is that since it is pre-
posterous to say anything at all about an object that can have
2. Josef Maier, On Hegel's Critique of Kant (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1939), 5-6, 43ff.
3. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 85-86.
4. Maier, On Hegel’s Critique of Kant, 71.
War Against the Beyond 325
no relation to our consciousness, in other words, to speak of

a reality apart from a subject, the mind (rational subjectivity)
must itself be proclaimed the ultimate unconditioned reality,
the only true and real being.5
This Mind, Spirit, or social mind is “God” struggling to find
himself in history; it is also man realizing himself in freedom,
as he struggles from necessity to freedom. It is also called “the
world-spirit” by Hegel. Hegel saw this world-spirit working or
evolving in his day to realize itself in “the Protestant princi-
ple,” which in reality had little to do with Luther or Calvin but
meant “placing the intellectual world within one’s own mind
and heart, and of experiencing and knowing and feeling in
one’s own self-consciousness all that formerly was conceived as
a Beyond.”6 The Protestant principle means overcoming that du-
alism between man and the Beyond which Kant failed to over-
come. As Hegel described the plight of philosophy,
The present standpoint of philosophy is that the Idea is
known in its necessity; the sides of its disremption, Nature
and Spirit, are each of them recognized as representing the to-
tality of the Idea, and not only as being in themselves identi-
cal, but as producing this one identity from themselves; and in
this way the identity is recognized as necessary. Nature, and
the world or history of spirit, are the two realities; what exists
as actual Nature is an image of divine Reason; the forms of
self-conscious Reason are also the forms of Nature. The ulti-
mate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought
or the Notion with reality.7
It was Hegel’s self-imposed task to overcome this dualism, and
he saw it as the duty of philosophy and the demand of history
to do so:
This is then the demand of all time and of Philosophy. A new
epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-
spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien
objective-existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute
Spirit, in developing from itself what for it is objective, and
keeping it within its own power, yet remaining at rest all the
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.
while. The strife of the finite self-consciousness, with the ab-

solute self-consciousness, which last seemed to the other to lie
outside of itself, now comes to an end. Finite self-conscious-
ness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute self-con-
sciousness has, on the other hand, attained to the reality which
it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in gen-
eral up to the present time, and the history of philosophy in
particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now,
indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute
self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has
ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as
spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing it-
self to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real scientific
knowledge.8
Hegel maintained a façade of “religion” and “conservatism.”9
This was necessary for the promotion and position he desired.
In his early writings, Hegel had been openly anti-Christian as
well as bitterly hostile to Judaism. He saw the task of philoso-
phy as one of establishing “a new religion.”10 He strongly pre-
ferred Socrates to Christ as the more rational man. Although
in his later writings the anti-Christianity is not openly stated
but rather thinly disguised, Hegel’s thought moved progres-
sively to the left even when his activities sometimes moved
pragmatically to the right.
Hegel’s radicalism was developed fragmentarily by his heirs.
Marx developed one facet, the revolutionary political aspect.
From Kierkegaard through Sartre, the existential facet was
steadily developed and exploited. The pragmatism of Hegel’s
philosophy was clearly set forth in Dewey, the philosophical
concern with the analysis of contemporary meanings in the
school of logical analysis, the priority given to history, in a
wide spectrum of followers, and so on. Hegel’s radical human-
ism made man ultimate and freed him from the past as well as
from the Beyond.
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.
Development or evolution is central to Hegel’s thought.

Hence his major concern with history. His philosophical
works are in part historical commentaries. This is true not
merely of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and of the
Philosophy of History, but also of his other works as well. His
Phenomenology of Mind cannot be properly understood except
as a historical commentary. In his Science of Logic, Hegel
viewed language as the expression of man’s form of thinking
and thus again approached his subject from an evolutionary or
historical perspective, as he did also in the Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy. His Philosophy of Right is declared to be “the science of
the state.” There is nothing in Hegel to suggest “a final philos-
ophy.” Hegel saw all philosophy historically, as stages in the
growth of man’s freedom. The growth of geist, mind, man,
God, spirit, or world-spirit is towards freedom, not towards a
system. This freedom means the eradication of the Beyond and
the radical independence of man as himself true and total be-
ing. In his early writings, Hegel made clear “his prime con-
cern,” to quote Kaufmann’s phrase. Hegel stated it plainly: it
was “to restore the human being again to his totality.”11 Some-
thing of Hegel’s own spirit is best seen in Heinrich Heine’s
Confessions (1854):
It was easy for me to prophesy which songs would be whistled
and twittered one day in Germany, for I saw the birds hatched
that later sounded the new tunes. I saw how Hegel, with his
almost comically serious face, sat as a brooding hen on the fa-
tal eggs, and I heard his cackling. To be honest, I rarely under-
stood him, and it was only through subsequent reflection that
I attained an understanding of his words. I believe he really did
not want to be understood; hence his delivery, so full of claus-
es; hence perhaps also his preference for persons whom he
knew would not understand him and on whom he bestowed
the honor of his familiar company that much more readily....
Altogether, Hegel’s conversation was always a kind of mono-
logue, sighed forth by fits and starts in a toneless voice. The
baroqueness of his expressions often startled me, and I remem-
ber many of them. One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two
11. Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary (Garden

City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 60.
stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of

twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, en-
thused about the stars and called them the abode of the
blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum!
hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.” For
God’s sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there
to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his
pale eyes, said cuttingly: “So you want to get a tip for having
nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your
dear brother?” — Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but
he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was
only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to
play whist....
I was young and proud, and it pleased my vanity when I
learned from Hegel that it was not the dear God who lived in
heaven that was God, as my grandmother supposed, but I my-
self here on earth. This foolish pride did not by any means
have a corrupting influence on my feelings; rather it raised
them to the level of heroism. At that time I put so much effort
into generosity and self-sacrifice that I certainly outshone the
most brilliant feats of those good Philistines of virtue who
merely acted from a sense of duty and obeyed the moral laws.
After all, I myself was now the living moral law and the source
of all right and sanctions. I was primordial Sittlichkeit, im-
mune against sin, I was incarnate purity; the most notorious
Magdalens were purified by the cleansing and atoning power
of the flames of my love, and stainless as lilies and blushing
like chaste roses as they emerged from God’s embraces with
an altogether new virginity. These restorations of damaged
maidenhoods, I confess, occasionally exhausted my
strength.... 12
Hegel wrote on January 23, 1807, to one of his best students,
stating, “Science alone is the theodicy,”13 an idea common to
his works. Science, by its study of development or evolution,
can best enable man to understand and develop his freedom.
Philosophy as a science must investigate the history of philos-
ophy and of all thought to trace the growth of concepts. The
self-consciousness of mind in its sense of autonomy and its de-
velopment therein is its freedom. Hegel wrote that
12. Ibid., 358-359.

13. Ibid., 318.
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:
14. Hegel, History of Philosophy, vol. 1, see intro., 23.

15. Ibid., 32.
16. Ibid., 54-55.
17. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 70-71, 81, 115; cf. 18.
18. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: P. F. Collier
& Son, 1901), 52, 81.
Matter possesses gravity in virtue of its tendency toward a cen-

tral point.... Spirit, on the contrary, may be defined as that
which has its centre in itself. It has not a unity outside itself,
but has already found it; it exists in and with itself. Matter has
its essence out of itself; Spirit is self-contained existence.... Now
this is Freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is re-
ferred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist inde-
pendently of something external. I am free, on the contrary,
when my existence depends upon myself.19
Quite naturally, Hegel saw the “Jealous God” of Scripture (al-
though he ascribed him to “Judaism”) “as the negation of the
Individual.”20
But reason is not the goal, nor is the life of reason. For Hegel,
reason is a stage of mind, not merely a function of mind.21 It is
man’s self-consciousness as a self-contained existence which is
the goal. “I am I in the sense that the I which is object for me
is sole and only object, is all reality and all that is present.”22
Meanwhile, “the shape which the perfect embodiment of
Spirit assumes [is] — the State.” In fact, “The State is the Divine
Idea as it exists on Earth.” The reason for this importance
given to the state is that the state in the modern age has been
the instrument whereby humanistic man has declared his
progressive independence from God. “Substantial freedom is
the abstract undeveloped Reason implicit in volition,
proceeding to develop itself in the State.” The state is thus a
stage, like reason, in the development of freedom; in the state
“Freedom has found the means of realizing its Ideal — its true
existence. This is the ultimate result which the process of
History is intended to accomplish.”23 Hallowell’s analysis of
Hegel’s statement is able and to the point,24 but it must be
added that the state is not a final institution but simply a stage
in the development of freedom. The state can give way, as
19. Ibid., 62.

20. Ibid., 181.
21. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 271-280.
22. Ibid., 273.
23. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 61, 87, 164, 171.
24. John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (New York:
Henry Holt, 1959), 254-277.
Marxism was later to declare, to a newer form of freedom,

anarchism, for example.
Meanwhile, “Morality is a political affair,”25 and ethics is
“the science of the state.”26 “The State is the actuality of the eth-
ical ideal,” because it is man’s creation, a product of the activity
of self-consciousness.27 True personality is the goal, man
knowing himself “as something infinite, universal, and free.”
Personality is not our awareness of finitude or of dependence,
“but rather man’s consciousness of himself as a completely ab-
stract ego in which every concrete restriction and value is ne-
gated and without validity.”28 Thus, Hegel’s concern lies
beyond politics, with “the living Spirit, the concrete human
soul.”29
Meanwhile, man suffers from alienation due to his knowl-
edge of good and evil, to his consciousness:
Consciousness occasions the separation of the Ego, in its
boundless freedom as arbitrary choice, from the pure essence
of the Will — i.e., from the Good. Knowledge, as the
disannuling of the unity of mere Nature, is the “fall,” which is
no casual conception, but the eternal history of Spirit. For the
state of innocence, the paradisiacal condition, is that of the
brute. Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not men, can
remain. For the brute is one with God only implicitly (not
consciously). Only Man’s Spirit (that is) has a self-cognizant
existence. This existence for self, this consciousness, is at the
same time separation from the Universal and Divine Spirit. If
I hold to my abstract Freedom, in contraposition to the Good,
I adopt the standpoint of Evil. The Fall is therefore the eternal
Mythus of Man — in fact, the very transition by which he
becomes man. Persistence in this standpoint is, however,
Evil.... 30
Both Marx and Freud were spiritual heirs of Hegel.
25. Ibid., 124.

26. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Know (Chicago: Ency-
clopaedia Britannica, 1952), 6.
27. Ibid., 80.
28. Ibid., 21.
29. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 552; cf. 408, 425ff., 414-415.
30. Ibid., 411-412.
The real world for Hegel was the world of consciousness,

but this world of consciousness was essentially a developing,
struggling, evolving, and contradictory world. The one was
the Spirit, the world mind, but the Spirit was also the many.
Both the one and the many for Hegel were essentially
descriptive, historical terms. Because Hegel was at war with
the Beyond, determined to obliterate it, there was for him no
transcendence, only pure description. His effort to introduce a
note of transcendence by making freedom the direction of
history meant little, because a descriptive philosophy can only
analyze historically. Freedom for Hegel meant the state; for
medieval man, it probably meant the church and his faith. For
post-modern man, the definition may again change. What
meaning does freedom have then? At this point, Hegel was
insistent: freedom meant autonomy for man; it meant man’s
self-consciousness of himself as infinite, universal, and free, as
his own god, in brief. It was the sovereignty and the eternal
decree of the triune God which Hegel insistently excluded.
This autonomy is the essence of spirit, mind, freedom, and
reason; but it is also this autonomy which makes man
incapable of more than bare description, and that bare
description fails, because all factuality, being God-created,
collapses into brute, meaningless data apart from Him. Hegel
laid the foundations for revolution for revolution’s sake, not
for a world of meaning. Hess expressed the spirit of Hegel ably
in his call to revolution:
The point is that revolution today — coming as it does after a
long development of democratic governance — not only does
not require a goal, in the established sense, it could not tolerate
such a goal. Any such goal — of simply making government
more democratic — would be, actually, counter-revolutionary
and not revolutionary at all.
Revolution today must be against such goals. Revolution to-
day must be against the state and not for any form of the state.
Revolution today must have as its goal the abolition of every
agency of power which can or would be able to force stan-
dards, goals, or any arbitrarily normative values upon persons
who do not voluntarily hold or seek such values, standards, or
goals. (Persons in such a concept would not renounce self-de-

fence or self-control, just coercion.)31
The 1969 heirs of Hegel were only beginning to develop the
radicalism of their master.
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
31. Karl Hess, “The Act of Revolution,” Libertarian Connection, 10 February

1969, 8.
32. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, ed. and abr. E. Graham
Waring and F. W. Strothmann (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), 3.
33. Ibid., 10.
34. Ibid., 12.
Thus man, while he apparently humiliated himself to the low-

est degree, is in truth exalted to the highest, for in and through
God, man aims at himself.35
Briefly stated, “God is the mirrored image of man.”36
Feuerbach thus saw religion as an illusion and a dream. Marx
and Freud were later to develop these concepts of religion as
the opium of the masses and an illusion. For Feuerbach, “To
live in projected dream-images is the essence of religion.
Religion sacrifices reality to the projected dream: the ‘Beyond’
is merely the ‘Here’ reflected in the mirror of imagination.”37
Feuerbach openly abolished the Beyond; Hegel had done it in
veiled terms, but Feuerbach bluntly stated his practical
conclusion:
If the nature of Man is man’s Highest Being, if to be human is
his highest existence, then man’s love for Man must in practice
become the first and highest ethics. THIS IS THE TURNING
POINT OF WORLD HISTORY.38
3. Max Stirner
Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity was published in 1841; in
1844, there appeared Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own,
which showed how religious Feuerbach and the other
left-wing Hegelians still were! The communists exalted “soci-
ety” and Feuerbach exalted “Man.” In Erdmann’s summary
words,
From their superstitious standpoint they forgot the main
thing, the individual. It is not Feuerbach’s “Man,” which is
just such another spectre as the God of the orthodox, but this
one Ego that is what is true. Therefore, long live the Egoist!
Whoever respects anything, unless his respect has been
bought, has a soft place in his head. To set up ideals, but also
to set up any kind of community, is to be religious. The com-
munists, therefore, are “common” men. The egoist is the only
man.39
35. Ibid., 17.
36. Ibid., 30.
37. Ibid., 40.
38. Ibid., 65.
39. Johann Eduard Erdmann, History of Philosophy, vol. 3 (London: Swan Sor-
menschein, 1880), 97.
Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt, 1805-1856), in

The Ego and His Own, gave a classical expression of anarchism.
Instead of agreeing with those who said, “Shame on the egoist
who thinks only of himself!,” Stirner made it clear that this
was his proud position, for “All things are nothing to me,” for
“Nothing is more to me than myself!”40 Feuerbach had said,
“Man is to man the supreme being,” and Bruno Bauer had de-
clared, “Man has just been discovered,” i.e., as independent of
God. Well, then, said Stirner, let us look more carefully at this
supreme being and be sure we see him without religious pre-
suppositions from the past.
Stirner turned his contempt on the ideas of God, spirit, law,
and morality. If there is no God, then there is no law; if man
is the supreme being, then man is his own law. For man to con-
tinue obedience to the old morality is to practice idolatry.
Stirner stated his case plainly and bluntly:
Take notice how a “moral man” behaves, who today often
thinks he is through with God and throws off Christianity as
a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted
that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monog-
amy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty,
etc., then a moral shudder will come over him at the concep-
tion of one’s being allowed to touch his sister as wife also, etc.
And whence this shudder? Because he believes in those moral
commandments. This moral faith is deeply rooted in his
breast. Much as he rages against the pious Christians, he him-
self has nevertheless as thoroughly remained a Christian — to
wit, a moral Christian. In the form of morality Christianity
holds him a prisoner, and a prisoner under faith. Monogamy
is to be something sacred, and he who may live in bigamy is
punished as a criminal; he who commits incest suffers as a
criminal. Those who are always crying that religion is not to
be regarded in the State, and the Jew is to be a citizen equally
with the Christian, show themselves in accord with this. Is
not this of incest and monogamy a dogma of faith? Touch it,
and you will learn by experience how this moral man is a hero
of faith too, not less than Krummacher, not less than Philip II.
These fight for the faith of the Church, he for the faith of the
State, or the moral laws of the State; for articles of faith, both
40. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York:
Modern Library), 3, 5.
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
41. Ibid., 45-46.

42. Friedrich Nietzsche, My Sister and I, trans. and intro. Dr. Oscar Levy, ed., The
Complete Works of Nietzsche (New York: Bridgehead Books, 1954).
43. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 60-61.
44. Ibid., 80-81.
is theft,” has “put a brand on property” and assumed a priestly

role, asserting that “theft is always a crime, or at least a mis-
deed.” “Man and justice are ideas, ghosts, for love of which ev-
erything is sacrificed.” Persons alone exist, not man as an idea,
or justice, law, and theft. The revolutionists, by serving Man,
“cut off the heads of men.”45
The law of these non-Christian revolutionists is more abso-
lute and tyrannical than that of the old Christian monarchs:
The monarch in the person of the “royal master” had been a
paltry monarch compared with this new monarch, the “sover-
eign nation.” This monarchy was a thousand times severer,
stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch there
was no longer any right, any privilege at all; how limited the
“absolute king” of the ancient regime looks in comparison!
The Revolution effected the transformation of limited monar-
chy into absolute monarchy. From this time on every right that
is not conferred by this monarch is an “assumption”; but ev-
ery prerogative that he bestows, a “right.” The times demand-
ed absolute royalty, absolute monarchy; therefore down fell
that so-called absolute royalty which had so little understood
how to become absolute that it remained limited by a thou-
sand little lords.46
The purpose of the French Revolution was simply to replace
an old and limited Establishment with a new and absolute
Establishment.47
The new absolutism of the liberals and socialists left no
room for man. Because it defined Man in terms of its ideal, it
denied the status of man to the individual and ruthlessly de-
stroyed him to make way for its ideal. Stirner ably summarized
the steps in the liberal and radical syllogism since Rousseau:
First, the individual is not man, therefore his individual per-
sonality is of no account; no personal will, no arbitrariness, no
orders or mandates!
Second, the individual has nothing human, therefore no mine
and thine, or property is valid.
45. Ibid., 82, 84.

46. Ibid., 107.
47. Ibid., 116.
Third, as the individual neither is man or has anything hu-

man, he shall not exist at all; he shall, as an egoist with his ego-
istic belongings, be annihilated by criticism to make room for
Man, “Man just discovered.”48
The destruction of men is thus the logical conclusion of this
worship of Man. The Hegelians had abolished God, the God
of Christianity, but they had not abolished the Beyond. A new
and more deadly Beyond had been created in ideal Man, an im-
manent and perfect one who obliterated the immanent but im-
perfect many. As against this, Stirner held, “there is no right
outside me.” It follows, therefore, that “Every State is a despo-
tism, be the despot one or many, or (as one is likely to imagine
about a republic) if all be lords, i.e., despotize one over anoth-
er.” There is a way of changing this: “Only by recognizing no
duty, i.e., not binding myself nor letting myself be bound. If I
have no duty, then I know no law either.” No law, truth, per-
son, or thing can be higher than the individual. “For me there
is no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my essence,
not even the essence of man is more than I!”49
In 1846, The Realm of Understanding and the Individual,
probably written by a clergyman, Dr. Karl Schmidt, according
to Erdmann, held that “Max Stirner is the one who really rep-
resents the culminating point of the tendency begun by Hegel.
In him the self-consciousness of the egoist has the highest
place, and to this self-consciousness all abstractions have to
yield. What now, if the egoist, described by a nomen appellati-
vum, were, just for this reason, an abstraction himself!”50 Stirn-
er logically denied the Beyond of God and of Man in terms of
Hegel; he denied any idea or ideal as belonging to this mythical
Beyond. He was thus left with nothing by way of definition
for man. The starting point of Descartes’ philosophy and of
the modern age, I am, was now its conclusion also, but, be-
tween Descartes and Stirner, because the whole world of God
and meaning had been declared null and void, neither I nor am
48. Ibid., 145.

49. Ibid., 198, 204-205, 374.
50. Erdmann, History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 100.
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
51. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 387.

52. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1964), 330, 357.
53. Ibid., 267.
would best effect the domination of chance and circumstances

by the individual:
The transformation of the individual relationship into its op-
posite, a merely material relationship, to distinction of indi-
viduality and chance by the individuals themselves, as we have
already shown, is a historical process and at different stages of
development assumes different, even sharper and more uni-
versal forms. In the present epoch, the domination of material
conditions over individuals, and the suppression of individu-
ality by chance, has assumed its sharpest and most universal
form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite task.
It has set them the task of replacing the domination of circum-
stances and of chance over individuals by the domination of
individuals over chance and circumstances. It has not, as San-
cho imagines, put forward the demand that “I should develop
myself,” which up to now every individual has done without
Sancho’s good advice; it has instead called for liberation from
one quite definite mode of development. This task dictated by
present-day conditions, coincides with the task of the commu-
nist organization of society.54
To all practical intent, the central difference between Stirner
and Marx is one of choice. Chance is ultimate at present, but
man must dominate chance and circumstances with his own
decree. For Stirner, the method is the individual’s radical au-
tonomy; for Marx, the method is “the communist organiza-
tion of society.” Marx did not disprove Stirner’s anarchism; he
denied its utility for the humanist’s goal.
4. Karl Marx
Stirner was not as radical as he believed himself to be. Stirner
had denied God, Man, law, and spirit, but he had not denied
logic. His whole exercise of reason was a logical development
of the implications of Hegel. But why should logic be any
more binding on man than God? Stirner had simply created a
new Beyond in terms of which he appealed to all men. Why
should reason compel men? If the compulsions of God be de-
nied, then the compulsions of reason can be equally denied as
alien to man’s will.
54. Ibid., 482-483.

In terms of this, Karl Marx (1818-1883), in his many writ-

ings, simply bypassed Stirner. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,”
he gave his reason: “The philosophers have only interpreted the
world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”55
Logic was thus irrelevant as a binding force; logic and reason
are merely tools, instruments of man as he changes the world.
Action is thus basic, not thought. Stirner belonged to Feuer-
bach’s world; in Gary North’s words, “it conceived of man as
a plastic, observing creature, totally subject to the material re-
ality about him.” In striking at Feuerbach, whose work Stirner
and Engels had welcomed, Marx struck at all philosophy.
Marx’s “truth” was not in man nor in philosophy: it was in his-
tory. Hegel had brought the Beyond down to earth; Stirner
placed the Beyond in reason and logic; Marx followed Hegel
more closely, in that he placed meaning in history.56 Above the
individual man was now the Beyond of history, history as the
source of meaning and of authority. The creation of a new so-
ciety is the goal: to that purpose, reason is instrumental. Marx
was a pragmatist in this respect. John Dewey (1859-1952) saw
reason and man in instrumental terms. Dewey’s Beyond was
“The Great Community.” He differed from Marx only in
methodology. For Dewey, “the Public will remain in eclipse,”
i.e., man will not truly be man, until the Great Community ar-
rives; “the public will remain shadowy and formless.”57 Man is
not truly man until the planners achieve their purpose. Dew-
ey’s works underlined the truth of Stirner’s analysis of the lib-
eral and radical Syllogism.58 Stirner had denied an ultimate or
immediate one; Marx and Dewey denied the many.
For Marx, it was the duty of philosophers to chart the
necessary course of action, and for the proletariat to execute
that action. The requirement for action by the proletariat was
55. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), 72.
56. Gary North, Marx's Religion of Revolution: The Doctrine of Creative Destruc-
tion (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1968), 40, 44, 91.
57. John Dewey, The Republic and Its Problems (New York: Minton, Balch,
1930), 142.
58. For an analysis of Dewey’s “Great Community,” see R. J. Rushdoony, The
Messianic Character of American Education (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1968), 144-161.
simply this: since the proletariat had nothing at stake, it would

assent most readily to the total dissolution of existing society
by revolution.59
In his call to revolution as historical action, Marx said, “Let
us revolt against the rule of thoughts.”60 The purpose of this re-
volt is freedom. Here the ghost of Hegel again prevails. Hegel’s
goal was the freedom of the individual from jealous Jehovah,
and history was for Hegel the new area of determination. Marx
was faithful to this aspect of Hegel; he simply stripped Hegel’s
verbiage from Hegel’s goal. In the process, however, he also
dropped the world of Christian meaning with which Hegel
cloaked his terms. Like Stirner, Marx now had a problem of
meaning. What is freedom? North has brilliantly exposed
Marx’s embarrassment over this problem: Marx, after strug-
gling with the problem of the meaning of freedom, could only
lamely conclude: “The shortening of the working day is its
fundamental premise.”61 North’s comment on this answer is
telling:
The paucity of the answer is staggering, incredible! If so much
misery had not been launched by Marx’s labors for the forces
of revolution, and if so many lives had not been destroyed in
the name of Marx, that answer would be amusing in its pathet-
ic quality.62
Marx denied the rule of reason in favor of historical action.
As a result, because all reasoning is class conditioned for Marx-
ists, the use of logic is futile against Marxists. “What use is it to
go and say to a Marxist, ‘Your ideas don’t make sense’? One
might as well talk to a deaf man.”63 Talk to a Marxist of free-
dom, and he redefines freedom to fit the needs of the Marxist
regime.64 But God having made man, it is God’s definition
59. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,”
in T. B. Bottomore, trans. and ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), 58-59.
60. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1947), preface, 1.
61. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1909), 55.
62. North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution, 117.
63. Jean Ousset, Marxism Leninism (Quebec: International Union of Societies for
Civic Education, 1962), 44.
64. See the case of Russian wives of foreign persons in Lewis B. Sohn, ed., Cases
on United Nations Law (Brooklyn, NY: Foundation Press, 1956), 670-692.
which lingers in men’s hearts in the Soviet Union, not that of

Karl Marx. Marxist freedom has meant longer working hours
— and a meaningless life.
5. Nietzsche
In Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), philosophy
very definitely abandoned the clouds of the Beyond for the
practical considerations of the present, and for eleven years of
insanity. Nietzsche observed, “As I have written, If there were
Gods, how could I endure it to be not God! Therefore there are
no Gods.”65 Nietzsche was here quoting a fundamental sen-
tence and concept from Thus Spake Zarathustra. In that work,
he went on to say, “what would there be to create if there were
— Gods!”66 The point is an important one: it is not the truth
about God that matters, but simply that Nietzsche cannot tol-
erate the God-concept unless he himself is god. Even more
than Marx, Nietzsche has no use for reason and logic. Why as-
cribe meaning and truth to reason and logic and thereby estab-
lish a new Beyond over man? Accordingly, Nietzsche, to
express bluntly his break with traditional religion and philos-
ophy, affirmed the pragmatic value and utility of what was re-
garded as a lie or as falseness:
The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it
is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.
The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,
life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing;
and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest
opinions (to which the synthetic judgment a priori belong),
are the most indespensable to us; that without a recognition of
logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the
purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable,
without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of
numbers, man could not live — that the renunciation of false
opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To
recognize untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to
impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner,
65. Nietzsche, My Sister and I, 171.

66. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche
(New York: Modern Library), 99.
and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone

placed itself beyond good and evil.67
Truth is thus irrelevant; more than that, it is a nuisance, in that
man needs a lie to live and to realize himself as god.
To live, this is the goal, and to live without God means to
will to be god. Thus, the life-force is the will to power, the will
to be superman, more, to be god. As Foster, in his admiring
study of Nietzsche recognized, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is
hard, egotistical, knowing neither love nor justice. “He knows
but one law; and that law is his own law, the law of his own
force, the law which is at once its own sanction and its own
delimitation.”68
Ostensibly, now, the Beyond is abolished, and God is dead.
Man is freed from truth and can be himself, without regard to
either the absolute of truth or the new absolute of history. But
no, Nietzsche has introduced another Beyond, a most ruthless
one who promises only destruction to man: “I teach you the
Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What
have ye done to surpass man?”69 A choice is given to men:
would they “rather go back to the beast than surpass man?”70
Nietzsche was thus the prophet of a new order, or, as his friend
Lou Andreas-Salome stated it in her diary, “the prophet of a
new religion.”71 If man must be surpassed, then man has a hard
and ruthless Beyond breathing down his neck and decreeing
his destruction.
But what ground was there for this belief? Nietzsche had
followed the Hegelians in outlawing truth, reason, and the
Beyond. He himself wrote, with respect to “The Starting-Point
of Epistemology”:
The hypothesis that, at bottom, things proceed in such a mor-
al fashion that human reason must be right, is a mere piece of
67. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in ibid., 4.

68. George Burman Foster, Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Macmillan, 1931),
189.
69. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 27.
70. Ibid.
71. H. F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salome (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 123.
good-natured and simple-minded trustfulness, the result of the

belief in Divine truthfulness — God regarded as the Creator of
all things, — These concepts are our inheritance from a former
existence in a Beyond.72
In such a case, what Beyond makes Nietzsche’s opinions right?
If everything is beyond good and evil, beyond truth and un-
truth, what criterion of judgment is left? Nietzsche wrote:
“The value of life.” — Every life stands by itself; all existence
must be justified, and not only life, — the justifying principle
must be one through which life itself speaks.
Life is only a means to something: it is the expression of the
forms of growth in power.73
Clearly, a Beyond is governing life, but it is an illegitimate Be-
yond. There is no ground left for assuming that life is better
than death, or that the life of tomorrow (superman) is better
than the life and man of today.
Nietzsche admitted that “The ‘conscious world’ cannot be a
starting-point for valuing: an ‘objective’ valuation is neces-
sary.” Nietzsche is here sneaking in a disguised God and a
veiled Beyond. In fact, he denies that man or man’s conscious-
ness can be normative, or that “happiness, intellectuality, or
morality, or any other individual sphere of consciousness” can
be “the highest value.”74
If we wished to postulate an adequate object of life it would
not necessarily be related in any way with the category of con-
scious life; it would require rather to explain conscious life as
a mere means to itself.
The “denial of life” regarded as the object of life, the object of
evolution! Existence — a piece of tremendous stupidity! Any
such mad interpretation is only the outcome of life’s being
measured by the factors of consciousness (pleasure and pain,
good and evil). Here the means are made to stand against the
end — the “unholy,” absurd, and, above all, disagreeable
means: how can the end be any use when it requires such
means? But where the fault lies is here — instead of looking for
72. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power in Science, Nature, Society & Art (New
York: Frederick Publications), 5.
73. Ibid., 175.
74. Ibid.
the end which would explain the necessity of such means, we

posited an end from the start which actually excludes such
means, i.e., we made a desideratum in regard to certain means
(especially pleasurable, rational, and virtuous) into a rule, and
then only did we decide what end would be desirable....
Where the fundamental fault lies is in the fact that, instead of
regarding consciousness as an instrument and an isolated phe-
nomenon of life in general, we made it a standard, the highest
value in life; it is the faulty standpoint of a parte ad totum, —
and that is why all philosophers are instinctively seeking at the
present day for a collective consciousness, a thing that lives
and wills consciously with all that happens, a “Spirit,” a
“God.” But they must be told that it is precisely thus that life
is converted into a monster; that a “God” and a general senso-
rium would necessarily be something on whose account the
whole of existence would have to be condemned.... Our great-
est relief came when we eliminated the general consciousness
which postulates ends and means — in this way we ceased
from being necessarily pessimists.... Our greatest indictment
of life was the existence of God.75
In this passage Nietzsche flails at the opposition every time his
own bankruptcy becomes apparent. He needs a criterion, but
he will not, of course, accept God. He denies the individual
consciousness, and he also denies the collective consciousness.
He wants to avoid creating a God as judge over man, but he
cannot accept any criterion from individual or collective man.
The criterion is thus not in man nor beyond man, nor in God.
Nietzsche, moreover, denies the concept of Being in favor of
Becoming, but a Becoming which is eternal process, never
reaching a final state.
I should like to have a concept of the world which does justice
to this fact. Becoming ought to be explained without having
recourse to such final designs. Becoming must appear justified
at every instant (or it must defy all valuation: which has unity
as its end); the present must not under any circumstances be
justified by a future, nor must the past be justified for the sake
of the present. “Necessity” must not be interpreted in the
form of a prevailing and ruling collective force or as a prime
mover; and still less as the necessary cause of some valuable re-
sult. But to this end it is necessary to deny a collective con-
75. Ibid., 176-177.

sciousness for Becoming, — a “God,” in order that life may not

be veiled under the Shadow of a being who feels and knows as
we do and yet wills nothing: “God” is useless if he wants noth-
ing; and if he does want something, this presupposes a general
sum of suffering and irrationality which lowers the general
value of Becoming. Fortunately any such general power is
lacking (a suffering God overlooking everything, a general
sensorium and ubiquitous Spirit, would be the greatest indict-
ment of existence).
Strictly speaking nothing of the nature of Being must be al-
lowed to remain, because in that case Becoming loses its value
and gets to be sheer and superfluous nonsense.76
Neither thought nor existence has value or meaning; indeed,
nothing does. Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, was both affirm-
ing nihilism and trying vainly to transcend it. He affirmed a cy-
clical view of history, an eternal recurrence, as he did
extensively in Thus Spake Zarathustra, as the alternative to
God’s meaning and eternal decree, but this eternal recurrence
is a blind, destroying monster, although Nietzsche tried to give
it meaning.77 In the concluding words of The Will to Power, Ni-
etzsche admitted his inability to find meaning: he could only
describe. “This world, do you want a name for this world? A
solution for all its riddles?... This world is the will to power —
and nothing more. And you yourself are this will to power and
nothing more.” Van Riessen comments:
That this will is not free, that this infinity of circular processes
is a speculation, that it is difficult to see how man, driven by
these processes, can ever move forward, or how he can desire
such processes — all this only emphasizes that nihilism, no
matter what motif it takes up to save itself — can end only in
a decadent ruin. But the most important thing is that
Nietzsche did find in his last motif a cultural principle which
would be followed in actual practice. He expected that it
would bring victory over decadence and passive nihilism. We
have seen this “victory” in our present century. It is the
worship of power, the value-less activism, always restless,
76. Ibid., 177-178.

77. Ibid., 107.
driven by the fear of meaninglessness, and finally pouring

itself out in annihilation and self-annihilation.78
Nietzsche saw the consequences of his ideas: he regarded him-
self as “a Man of Destiny” whose works would shake and rear-
range the world: “All the mighty forms of the old society are
blown into space for they all rest on falsehood: there will be
wars, whose like have never been seen on earth before. Politics
on a grand scale will date from me.”79
Van Riessen’s comment is very much to the point, when he
observes that
When Nietzsche comes to the root of the question, he knows
that he must choose between Jesus and himself. And then he
becomes the prophet of the Antichrist; then he wants to be-
come the Antichrist himself. He applies Ecce Homo, Behold
the Man, to himself. It would thus appear as if Nietzsche con-
cerned himself only with Jesus. While he parodied him and
sought his opposite, still Nietzsche was in fact nothing else
than a parasite feeding on the gospel. Brom has rightly re-
marked that Zarathustra would be unthinkable without the
Bible. The framework, the use of language, the comparisons,
the didactic questions, the walks, the search for solitude, the
frequent use of texts (literally, paraphrased, or transposed) —
all these things which help make of Zarathustra the opponent
of the gospel are borrowed from that same gospel.
Nietzsche demolished everything, so that he would not have
to capitulate. And when he set about building, he could build
nothing new, nothing else than a heterogenous mixture of that
which Jesus had been and the negation thereof.... Gide says,
and with good grounds, that Nietzsche can never be under-
stood without considering his jealousy of the gospel.80
Thus Nietzsche, who sought to create a new religion, could
only ape the old one. Instead of a brave new world, he ended
with none at all. There was no meaning left in his world, no
one, no many, only negation and nihilism. He had tried to af-
firm life, but he ended by affirming nihilism and death. He
claimed to hate God in the name of man, but he waged war
78. H. Van Reissen, Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publish-

ing Co., 1960), 45.
79. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 134.
80. Van Riessen, Nietzsche, 50-51.
against man also in the name of the superman. A system which

denies God will then deny man: no God, no man. The boastful
Nietzsche, who spoke of the need of taking a whip to women,
was humbled even in his prime: Lou Salome harnessed Paul
Ree and Nietzsche to a cart, sat in it with a whip, and had the
scene photographed!81 There was thus no superman, either; in-
deed, there was scarcely a man. In Nietzsche’s own, honest but
self-pitying words,
What I tried to do was to stand on my own shoulders, to su-
perimpose nature upon nature, denying a Creator God, insist-
ing that the world lives on itself; feeds on its own excrement, as
I say somewhere among my notes. Where did Titanism of de-
fiance lead me? To the same pit as Schopenhauer’s Titanism of
denial — to moral and spiritual exhaustion, to the nothingness
of the Abyss!82
Levi’s description of Nietzsche’s “will to illusion which he
exalts almost into a metaphysical instance,” is most telling.83
Levi sees this will to illusion as a strand in modern thought, cit-
ing Otto Rank, the Freudian, as an example of the same tem-
per. According to Rank, “It is to the effect that our seeking the
truth in human motives for acting and thinking is destructive.
With the truth one cannot live. To be able to live one needs il-
lusions.... The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance
as essence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he
be. At the moment when we begin to search after truth we de-
stroy reality and our relation to it.”84 The appeal of Nietzsche
rests on a will to illusion.
One of Nietzsche’s most revealing passages touches on the
reason for the “murder” of God:
But he — had to die: he looked with eyes which beheld
everything, — he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden
ignominy and ugliness.
81. In Peters, My Sister, My Spouse., after 160.

82. Nietzsche, My Sister and I, 213.
83. William Albert Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana
Uni-versity Press, 1959), 40.
84. Ibid., 186.
His pity knew no modesty: he crept into my dirtiest corners.

This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die.
He beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge — or
not live myself.
The God who beheld every thing, and also man: that God had
to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.85
Nietzsche, a pathetic, boastful figure, decreed God’s “death”
because he could not bear to have an omnipotent God see into
his heart and know his sin and “ugliness.” By this step Ni-
etzsche doomed himself: there was soon no other side to him
than sin and “ugliness.” Nietzsche had decreed his own death.
The “death” of God was an illusion; the collapse and death of
Nietzsche was the reality.
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
85. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 267.

86. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1966),
5-9.
87. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontol-
ogy, trans. Hazel E. Barns (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 599.
88. Ibid., 16, 22, 24.
Sartre’s doctrine of nothingness is a parallel to the biblical

doctrine of creation out of nothing. If man as the new god is to
create his own essence, then he must do so out of nothingness.
As Reinhardt noted,
Christianity teaches not only that everything that is was cre-
ated out of nothing but also that everything would sink back
into nothingness the moment God were to withdraw His
all-sustaining creative power. This is why Nietzsche’s or Sar-
tre’s “man without God” moves in a meaningless void which
he vainly and desperately tries to populate with the still born
creatures of his own whims and fancies. And since in Chris-
tianity, as in no other religion, man’s existence is absolutely
grounded in God, the atrophy of faith in God must of neces-
sity lead to the most horrible experience of the abyss of anni-
hilation and nothingness.89
Nothingness is thus a necessity for Sartre’s being in order to
ensure man’s freedom to be god, but it also haunts being and is
a continuing plague to it.
Sartre’s philosophy seeks to be realistic in terms of man in
the modern world. In regarding with approval Castro’s Cuban
Revolution, Sartre titled a chapter, in part, “Death to Abstract
Principles!”90 These words echo, in part, the temper of the
modern mind, and Sartre’s existentialism. But the reality is
that a new set of abstract principles prevails.
Sartre’s being is one of these new abstractions. Sartre intro-
duces a Cartesian dualism between Being-in-itself and Be-
ing-for-itself. Being-in-itself is the self-contained being of a
thing, whereas being-for-itself “is coextensive with the realm of
consciousness, and the nature of consciousness is that it is per-
petually beyond itself.”91
Add to this the fact that existence precedes essence. As Sartre
points out,
Atheistic existentialism... states that if God did not exist, there
is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a
89. Kurt F. Reinhardt, The Existentialist Revolt, new enlarged ed. (New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1960), 155.
90. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 61.
91. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 245.
being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and

this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What
is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It
means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the
scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the
existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first
he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he
himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no
human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only
is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only
what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the
first principle of existentialism.92
Sartre defines existentialism as the belief “that existence pre-
cedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the
starting point.” “Man is nothing else but what he makes of
himself.”93 Because man is alone in the world, man is both to-
tally free and totally responsible, in that he is the new maker
of himself:
Dostoievsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be
possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. In-
deed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a
result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without
does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excus-
es for himself.
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining
things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature.
In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is
freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no
values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct.
So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us,
nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.
That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is
condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create
himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown
into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The
existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will
never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which
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.
fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse.

He thinks that man is responsible for his passion....
Ponge, in a very fine article, has said, “Man is the future of
man.” That’s exactly it.94
To maintain this radical freedom and responsibility, Sartre de-
nied the validity of the concept of the unconscious and of
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.95 It cannot be true, because
“man is freedom,” not a product of the id. Man is freedom be-
cause there is no God who created him, determined man’s na-
ture and history, or established a law over man.
The freedom of man is his urge to be God, to be his own
maker and determiner. “Thus the best way to conceive of the
fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the
being whose project is to be God.”96
To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you pre-
fer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.
It may be asked, if man on coming into the world is borne to-
ward God as toward his limit, if he can choose only to be God,
what becomes of freedom? For freedom is nothing other than
a choice which creates for itself its own possibilities, but it ap-
pears here, that the initial project of being God, which “de-
fines” man, comes close to being the same as a human “nature”
or an “essence.” The answer is that while the meaning of the
desire is ultimately the project of being God, the desire is nev-
er constituted by this meaning; on the contrary, it always rep-
resents a particular discovery of its ends.... The only being
which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.
Moreover we know that nihilation is lack of being and can not
be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which makes it-
self a lack of being.97
The threat is clearly seen by Sartre: to say that “man is the be-
ing whose project is to be God” is in effect to ascribe a nature
or essence to man. Only by placing a nothingness between
man and his goal, the desire to become God, does Sartre escape
94. Ibid., 22-23.

95. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 50-51.
96. Ibid., 566.
97. Ibid., 566-567.
rather dubiously from giving man a nature. For Sartre, “Man

makes himself man in order to be God.”98
Sartre is at great pains to avoid giving man a nature. Because
man is in process of making himself, it becomes difficult to af-
fix responsibility to this ostensibly totally responsible being.
The man guilty of a crime yesterday is not the same man who
we face today. If it is demanded that a homosexual frankly ad-
mit that he is one in the name of sincerity and truth, have we
not identified an act and the man? “The critic asks the man
then to be what he is in order no longer to be what he is. It is
the profound meaning of the saying, ‘A sin confessed is half
pardoned.’ The critic demands of the guilty one that he consti-
tute himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him
as a thing.” Thus, bad faith and sincerity are for Sartre not very
different.”99
There is thus freedom, and there is responsibility, but no
guilt, since man is responsible to himself. Instead of an antith-
esis between good and evil, there is a Hegelian synthesis as the
road to freedom realized as God. Not surprisingly, Sartre
found a hero or saint in a criminal who denied guilt and af-
firmed his freedom in acts against God’s order.100
God in Christian philosophy is the principle of definition
because He is the sovereign lord and creator. All facts being
created facts have their true meaning only in and through God.
Sartre’s man, like God, is the principle of definition. This
means that man cannot define himself because of his freedom.
Much of Sartre’s painstaking labor in Being and Nothingness is
his attempt to analyze man without defining him, to know
man without ascribing a nature or essence to man. God’s
freedom is that He is the sovereign God; He has an absolute,
perfect, uncreated, and unchanging being and essence. Man’s
freedom in Sartre is negative in essence. Man’s freedom is from
God for Sartre; this freedom leaves man without essence,
98. Ibid., 626.

99. Ibid., 64-67.
100. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet (New York: Mentor, 1964).
without meaning, with only being. There is, therefore, no

possibility of definition.
Medieval philosophy sought with precision to define the na-
ture of God. Sartre seeks the same precision to understand man
without defining him, an amazing effort. Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness is “the theology of man” spelled out with preci-
sion, if the word precision can be used for the undefined. Sig-
nificantly, Part 1 is titled, “The Problem of Nothingness.” The
old question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a
needle?,” is more relevant than much of Sartre’s philosophy.
Significantly, as Sartre deals with man’s nature without call-
ing it a nature, he considers shame in reference, not to God,
but to “the Other”: “Shame is by nature recognition. I recog-
nize that I am as the Other sees me.”101 The other is, of course,
other men, here designated and capitalized as “the Other.”
Man’s freedom is arbitrary; man’s only responsibility is to
himself. In Spier’s summary words, “Man is the only measure
of all value and all truth” in Sartre. Since every man has this
same arbitrary freedom, the freedom of the Other is a threat to
man’s freedom, and a man’s neighbor is his greatest problem
and threat.102 At the same time, the Other can cause man to
know shame, and in this sense is like the God of Scripture,
who brings man to shame with the self-knowledge of his na-
kedness before God. Sartre’s Individual is a being in process of
making himself God. Until that process is realized, “the Oth-
er” functions as man’s God and devil.
Man’s being is without essence for Sartre, and there is no Be-
yond; God, if he exists, is irrelevant, because man’s being is still
by definition without essence, i.e., uncreated and undeter-
mined by that God.103
Sartre’s man cannot know himself, because he has no essence
or nature. He is in process of becoming God, but in that pro-
cess he is still beyond definition. How then can man even
101. Ibid., 222.
102. J. M. Spier, Christianity and Existentialism, trans. David Hugh Freeman
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1953), 60, 66.
103. Sartre, Existentialism, 61.
know that he is in process? At this point, “the Other” enters as

the new god, in effect, the new principle of definition, insofar
as any definition can exist:
The philosophies of Descartes and Kant to the contrary,
through the I think we reach our own self in the presence of
others, and the others are just as real to us as our own self.
Thus, the man who becomes aware of himself through the
cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the
condition of his own existence. He realizes that he can not be
anything (in the sense that we say that someone is witty or
nasty or jealous) unless others recognize it as such. In order to
get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another
person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as
well as to my knowledge about myself. This being so, in dis-
covering my inner being I discover the other person at the
same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks
and wills only for or against me. Hence, let me at once an-
nounce the discovery of a world which we shall call intersub-
jectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and
what others are.
Besides, if it is impossible to find in every man some universal
essence which would be human nature, yet there does exist a
universal human condition. It’s not by chance that today’s
thinkers speak more readily of man’s condition than of his na-
ture. By condition they mean, more or less definitely, the a
priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation in the
universe.104
God is no longer the condition of man’s existence; “Others”
are. Man does not have a “universal essence which would be
human nature”; he does have a condition, i.e., his “fundamental
situation in the universe.” It would be easy to say that this con-
dition imposes limitations and governments on man, internal-
ly and externally, so that a nature of man can be spoken of, but
let us grant Sartre his intense desire to escape a nature or es-
sence. Let us also grant him his meaning for man’s freedom and
responsibility:
The essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that man
being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole
world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for
104. Ibid., 44.

himself as a way of being. We are taking the word “responsi-

bility” in its ordinary sense as “consciousness (of) being the in-
contestable author of an event or of an object.”105
It is strange that this man who is “condemned to be free,” and
whose freedom it is to become God, should find “the Other”
so great a threat: “The appearance of the Other in the world
corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe,
to a decentralization of the world which undermines the cen-
tralization which I am simultaneously offering.”106 As Streller
summed it up in his analysis of Sartre, “The Other robs me of
my world.”107 It is through the individual that the world exists,
but this is not true of “the Other.” “Human reality remains
alone because the Other’s existence has the nature of a contin-
gent and irreducible fact. We encounter the Other; we do not
constitute him.”108 The world exists through me, but “the Oth-
er” alters that world, for “the Other’s look as the necessary
condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity
for me. The Other’s look touches me across the world and is
not only a transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis
of the world. I am looked-at in a world which is looked at.”109
All this is not surprising. Having removed God as the Beyond
of his philosophy, Sartre has a new and immanent “beyond” to
threaten and determine him, to fill him with shame and
self-consciousness. Sartre cannot escape into a world where he
is not looked at.
How much “the Other” is a threat to Sartre appears in his
treatment of sex. Sex is not for him a harmless matter. Again,
the man-woman relationship is not seen in Christian terms,
with the woman as man’s helpmeet in his calling. The sexual
act is loaded with a desire for communication which is meta-
physical; in common with much modern thought, Sartre is in
quest of cosmic coition.
105. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 52.

106. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255.
107. Justus Streller, Jean-Paul Sartre: To Freedom Condemned; A Guide to His Phi-
losophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 39.
109. Ibid., 269.
But the act is dangerous. “The hole” is a nothingness to be

filled with man’s flesh; it calls for a sacrifice of a man’s body to
bring into existence the plenitude of being. In Sartre’s words,
It is only from this standpoint that we can pass on to sexuality.
The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which
“gapes open.” It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself
woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her
into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution. Con-
versely woman senses her condition as an appeal precisely be-
cause she is “in the form of a hole.” This is the true origin of
Adler’s complex. Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a
voracious mouth which devours the penis — a fact which can
easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the cas-
tration of the man; but this is above all because sex is a hole.
We have to do here with a pre-sexual contribution which will
become one of the components of sexuality as an empirical,
complex, human attitude but which far from deriving its ori-
gin from the sexed being has nothing in common with basic
sexuality, the nature of which we have explained in Part III.
Nevertheless, the experience with the hole, when the infant
sees the reality, includes the ontological presentiment of sexu-
al experience in general; it is with his flesh that the child stops
up the hole and the hole, before all sexual specification, is an
obscene expectation, an appeal to the flesh.110
In No Exit, Sartre has Garcin declare, “Hell is — other peo-
ple!” As Levi has very aptly observed,
Hell is other people for Sartre because in his quaint universe
of appropriation and domination (a kind of Hobbesian state
of nature where the stakes are not the externals of wealth and
deference but purely internal states of consciousness like nau-
sea, shame, pride, and alienation) all contact with the Other
implies a latent contest.111
In order to eliminate God, Sartre makes nothingness prior to
being. In a basic sense, nothingness is the given, and it ultimate-
ly governs his philosophy. The attempt of man to be God is a
futile one. Sartre concludes, in a famous passage,
Every human being is a passion in that it projects losing itself
so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the
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.
In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own founda-

tion, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the pas-
sion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses
himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of
God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a
useless passion.112
Sartre’s philosophy gives us no reason for staying alive, and
no reason for suicide either. Not only his man but also his phi-
losophy is a futile passion. His individual is the one and the
many in a strange sense. Sartre’s man is the one in existence,
and the one as against the many “Others.” But Sartre’s man is
also the many in that he has no essence; he is a miscellaneous
collection of anguish and agony seeking to be God, and all of
it a useless passion.
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,

113. Henry Veatch, “For a Realistic Logic,” in John Wild, ed., The Return to Rea-
son (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), 183.
114. Barrett, Irrational Man, 300-301.
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61 Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also
its limits. So we cannot say in logic, “The world has this
in it and this, but not that.” For that would appear to
presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities
and this cannot be the case, since it would require that
logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only
in that way could it view those limits from the other side
as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what
we cannot think we cannot say either.
5.62 This remark provides the key to the problem, how much
truth there is in solipsism.
For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it can-
not be said, but makes itself manifest.
The world is my world; this is manifest in the fact that
the limits of language (of language which alone I under-
stand) means the limits of my world. The world and life
are one.115
For such a philosophy, the traditional problems of philosophy
are irrelevant, and the questions troubling existentialism are
also irrelevant. True, Wittgenstein speaks of objects and facts,
but these terms have no reference, as Levi pointed out, to an
outside world:
So quixotic is this usage that it is not always easy to remember
that Wittgenstein is not talking about a material but a logical
space, and that this universe has more in common with Leib-
niz’ universe of logical possibilities than with a Newtonian
universe of spatio-temporal actualities. Only such a distinc-
tion permits us to recognize that the efforts of the Tractatus
are not directed toward the establishment of specifications for
an adequate ordinary language, but for an artificial language
analogous to that of Principia Mathematica.116
Wittgenstein himself made this clear: “Laws like the principles
of sufficient reason, etc., are about the net and not about what
the net describes” (6.35). In fact, “All propositions are of equal
value” (6.4). However, Wittgenstein recognized that “The
sense of the world must lie outside the world” (6.41).
However, that “sense,” if the term can be used, lies outside and
115. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. P. Pears and
B. P. McGuinness, intro. Bertrand Russell, 115.
116. Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World, 465.
beyond the world to the point of being irrelevant: “And so it

is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing of what is higher” (6.42).117
The charge of mysticism, accepted by some and rejected by
other Wittgensteinians, rests on this assumption. Wittgenstein
stated that his propositions were steps to be transcended to
“see the world aright” (6.54) and then enter, apparently, into
“silence” (7).118
Wittgenstein’s philosophy is thus not concerned with truth
but rather with “a pursuit of meaning and sense,” to cite
Maslow’s phrase.119 Wittgenstein worked to limit the scope of
language and to make it precise within those limits. Engel-
mann’s statement of that achievement, intended as favorable,
is especially telling:
The “positive” achievement of Wittgenstein, which has so far
met with complete incomprehension, is his pointing to what
is manifest in a proposition. And what is manifest in it, a prop-
osition cannot also state explicitly. The poet’s sentences, for
instance, achieve their effect not through what they say but
what is manifest in them, and the same holds for music, which
also says nothing.120
It is true that Wittgenstein’s insistence on a logical language
makes it militate, as High pointed out, against the verbal games
played by neo-orthodox theologians.121 But it must be added
117. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 141, 145.
118. Ibid., 151. On Wittgenstein’s mysticism, see Alexander Maslow, Study in
Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 159-160;
see also Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir (New
York: Horizon Press, 1967), 114, 135. “Wittgenstein passionately believes that all
that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent
about,” 97.
119. Maslow, Study in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 137-138; cf. 147.
120. Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, 83. It is of interest to note that
Wittgenstein applied this attitude towards religion. According to Engelmann, “The idea
of a God in the sense of the Bible, the image of God as creator of the world hardly ever
engaged Wittgenstein’s attention... but the notion of a last judgment was of profound
concern to him,” 77. On one occasion, when Wittgenstein was toying with the idea of
suicide, he wrote, “Of course it boils down to the fact that I have no faith!,” 351.
Wittgenstein, in his Notebooks, 1914-1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1961) wrote, “How things stand, is God.
God is, how things stand,” 79c.
121. Dallas M. High, Language, Persons, and Belief: Studies in Wittgenstein’s Philo-
sophical Investigations and Religious Uses of Language (New York: Oxford Universi-
ty Press, 1967).
that it militates even more against the language of Christian or-

thodoxy and its insistence on propositional truth. In no sense
can Wittgenstein be seen as congenial to Christian orthodoxy.
Wittgenstein’s hand is raised against all those champions of
truth who are “blessed possessors,” who have a deposit of truth
as their foundation. According to Wittgenstein, “At bottom
the whole Weltanschauung of the modern involves the illusion
that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural
phenomena” (6.371).122 This he restated in the Tractatus: “The
whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illu-
sion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of
natural phenomena.”123 According to Wittgenstein, “There are
two godheads, the world and my independent I.”124 Thus, a ba-
sic dualism appears, but it does not trouble Wittgenstein; the
dualism he has worked to overcome is, “that there are abstract
entities called meanings which exist above and over the words
that express them and the people who utter them.”125 The
world and man exist independently, both without any truth.
Wittgenstein’s interest is not in truth but in language, and
“Language is an instrument” (569). In fact, “Look at the sen-
tence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment”
(421). Just as a hammer, pliers, saw, and other tools each has its
function, so all words have their varying functions.126 But what
is their function? It is not truth but rather meaning and sense.
But what meaning and sense exist without truth? “Language is
an instrument.” But for what purpose? Granted his original
premises, the paranoid patient of a mental institution is strictly
logical, and his language is instrumental to his presuppositions.
In Wittgenstein, philosophy ended in a sick monologue; “the
Other” is no threat. The gate to “the Other” and to the Beyond
has been shut, and man remains inside himself, sick and dying.
Wittgenstein apparently saw this himself:
122. Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 72c.

123. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 143.
124. Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 74c.
125. Morton White, The Age of Analysis (New York: Mentor Books, 1955), 227.
126. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), 6e, 11e, 126e, 151e.
On the flyleaf of Moritz Schlick’s copy of the Tractatus Wit-

tgenstein wrote, “Jeder dieser Satze ist der Ausdruck einer
Krankheit” (“Every one of these propositions is the expres-
sion of an illness”). My guess is that this Frankheit was due, at
least on the philosophical level, to the conflict between Wit-
tgenstein’s growing positivistic convictions and his metaphys-
ical tendencies. In the background of his pithy
pronouncements one hears not only the clear voices of Frege
and Russell but the muffled voices of Kant, Schopenhauer,
Plato, and even St. Augustine. And this conflict is reflected
even in Wittgenstein’s vocabulary.127
Maslow pointed out that, for Wittgenstein, a significant lan-
guage means simplicity, simple elements and atomic facts, but
Wittgenstein provides no satisfactory criterion for simplicity.
The only criterion of simplicity is one “established by our-
selves, not found in the world.”128 Wittgenstein’s “my indepen-
dent I” reigns all alone, over nothing. But his success is due
precisely to the fact that his philosophy “is the expression of
an illness.” In the modern world, there are many sick minds.
In 1918, Sherwood Anderson observed of Edgar Lee Masters,
author of Spoon River Anthology, “I got the notion fixed in my
mind that his [Masters’] successes had been founded on ha-
tred.”129 Not only Masters’ success, but also that of many oth-
ers since, has been founded on hatred and illness. In the world
of the sick, the sickest are kings.
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.
us.” What does he mean by “negation,” the central category of

dialectic?130
The “power of negative thinking,” what does this mean? What
is it that must be negated? “The world contradicts itself.” Neg-
ative thinking is the tool by which the contradictions are re-
solved. “Dialectical thought invalidates the a priori opposition
of value and fact by understanding all facts as stages of a single
process — a process in which subject and object are so joined
that truth can be determined only within the subject-object to-
tality.”131 More plainly, the determinism of the world contra-
dicts man’s belief in his freedom, and negative thinking
institutes a negation of thought and action against the world to
bend it to man’s revolutionary reason. After Hegel, the real is
the rational; that is, it is “progress in the consciousness of free-
dom” (Hegel’s phrase) as it remakes the world to conform to
man’s freedom. This means revolution. “Dialectical thought
starts with the experience that the world is unfree; that is to
say, man and nature exist in conditions of alienation, exist as
‘other than they are.’” Reason or thought sees the contradicto-
ry nature of reality and transforms it. Because “Freedom is the
innermost dynamic of existence,” it is essentially negative to-
wards an unfree world and works to master alienation. “For
the history of mankind, this means attainment of a ‘state of the
world’ in which the individual persists in inseparable harmony
with the whole, and in which the conditions and relations of
his world ‘possess no essential objectivity independent of the
individual.’ As to the prospect of attaining such a state, Hegel
was pessimistic,” but Marcuse is not. It means shattering the
present world order to create a totally man-made world and or-
der which has “no essential objectivity independent of the in-
dividual.” Thus, dialectical philosophy, entering a world it did
not create, is of necessity destructive in thought and action. It
looks ahead to a “whole” which is “beyond good and evil,
truth and falsehood,” i.e., beyond God. The Reason of the free
130. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), vii.
131. Ibid., vii-viii.
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
132. Ibid., viii, ix, xii-xiv.

133. Ibid., 9.
134. Ibid., 51.
135. Ibid., 136
136. Ibid., 100.
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:
137. Ibid., 113.

138. Eric Norden, “The Strange Death of Dag Hammarskjold,” Fact 2,
(March-April 1965): 4. The matter is also hinted at by Auden in his introduction to
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, trans. and ed. Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden, trans-
lators and editors of Dag Hammarskjold, Markings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1965), xiv.
139. Norden, “Strange Death,” 3-11.
that life should have a meaning.”140 It was therefore necessary

for him to provide the meaning: “You are your own god.”141
Hammarskjold cited Scripture extensively in terms of this
identification of himself with “God”: “Not I, but God in
me.”142 It should be noted that he recognized no God out there,
no God beyond himself.143 In a famous and central passage,
Hammarskjold wrote,
Your responsibility is indeed terrifying. If you fail, it is God,
thanks to your having betrayed Him, who will fail mankind.
You fancy you can be responsible to God; can you carry the
responsibility for God?144
He spoke of “the holiness of human life, before which we bow
down in worship.”145
Hammarskjold’s faith was existential. “His modern-day
prophet was Martin Buber, whose book, I and Thou, expressed
almost his own view.”146 Goldman felt that Hammarskjold
“confused himself with God,” but gave the Markings on the
whole a friendly review,147 as did most reviewers.
One of the harshest criticisms came from a man who said,
“His Christ is not Christianity’s Saviour, the Son of Man who
died for our sins, but rather a brother who had gone ahead of
Hammarskjold along the same path.” This same critic (Bar-
tels) said that Hammarskjold saw himself as a saviour-figure
who desired to sacrifice himself for mankind through death.148
Norden’s study documented this latter charge. In the face of
Hammarskjold’s statements in Markings, which records his
views up to the time of his death, an associate of Billy Graham
assured the world that Hammarskjold was a Christian!
140. Hammarskjold, Markings, 86.

141. Ibid., 15; cf. 69.
142. Ibid., 90.
143. Ibid., 56; cf. 165.
144. Ibid., 156.
145. Ibid., 99.
146. J. R. Hestenes, review of Sven Stolpe, Dag Hammarskjold: A Spiritual Por-
trait, in Book News Letter of Augsburg Publishing House, October 1966, 6.
147. Eric F. Goldman, in “Book Week,” San Francisco Examiner, 18 October
1964, 1, 23.
148. Hestenes, Book News Letter, 6.
Writing a review of Henry P. Van Dusen’s Dag Hammarskjold:

The Statesman and His Faith (1967), Wirt declared,
This is a moving book about a great spirit of our time. As far
as I know, only one man was fully aware of Dag Hammar-
skjold’s secret faith before the appearance of the spiritual diary
he kept for thirty years. That man was Billy Graham. The
evangelist had learned in private conversation what none of
the personnel of the United Nations secretariat, over which
Hammarskjold presided for nearly a decade, had apparently
discovered: that the lonely Swede had a strong personal faith
in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. This fact was brought out
in Graham’s statements at the time of the African plane trag-
edy, when the evangelist’s tribute, unlike others from around
the world, referred to Hammarskjold’s deep devotion to
Christ.149
With these words, we conclude our analysis of the war against
the Beyond. As Wirt’s words make clear, it is also a war against
truth, and against meaning.
This is the way the world goes, both with a bang and a
whimper.
149. Sherwood E. Wirt, “A Statesman’s Secret Faith,” Christianity Today, 31

March 1967, 664.
Chapter XIV
The Christian Perspective
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
1. Andrew K. Rule, “Liberalism,” in Lefferts A. Loetscher, ed., Twentieth

Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book
House, 1955), 660.
369
The decline of the naïve modernism of the pre-World War I

era did not mean a return to orthodoxy. Cornelius Van Til
rightly termed it The New Modernism in his study of that sub-
ject, calling attention to the identity of the basic premises of
modernism and neo-orthodoxy:
... the Theology of Crisis is to be classified with modern the-
ology rather than with orthodoxy in its choice of fundamental
distinctions. Both Modernism and Dialecticism hold to the ex-
istence of two equally original worlds: the world of brute fac-
tual existence and the world of meaning. The differences
between them... are such as to leave this basic distinction un-
touched.2
In the 1960s, the theologians began to write about “the death
of God” theology, as though a new day had dawned. Accord-
ing to Altizer,
Hopefully a new day has dawned for theology, a revolution-
ary day in which the gradual but decisive transformation of
faith that has occurred in the modern world will be recog-
nized, even though doing so may promise the end of most if
not all of the established religious forms of the West. At the
moment, and for perhaps well into the future, the most radical
theological revolution is promised by the death of God theol-
ogy, a theology grounded by one means or another in the
death of the Christian God.3
Altizer and his “death of God” associates are more than a cen-
tury or two behind the times. Philosophy had long before
them proclaimed the “death of God,” and Nietzsche’s work
was an insane dance of premature jubilation. Altizer has not
entered into the world’s “new day,” nor is he the witness to a
new dawn. Like C. S. Lewis’ inhabitants of hell in The Great
Divorce, who confuse the grey of coming eternal night with
the coming of dawn, so the “death of God” school of theology
is likewise confused. They have entered the day of man in its
twilight. Nietzsche’s new day was madness, and the new day
facing the world of modernity is a day of reckoning.
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
There have, however, been other voices whose philosophy,

because it has run against the grain of modernity, has not been
as widely publicized as have been the preachers of humanism;
but their influence has still been very important. The school of
presuppositionalists, including H. Dooyeweerd, D. H. Th.
Vollen-hoven, K. Schilder, and others, has been notable in its
work and influence. Our concern here is with its leading
American thinker, Cornelius Van Til, whose work, The Meta-
physics of Apologetics (1931), was written prior to Vollen-
hoven’s The Necessity of a Christian Logic or Methodology.4
2. Van Til
Cornelius Van Til (b. 1895) presents us with a systematic and
rigorously biblical philosophy. In terms of this biblical com-
mitment, Van Til’s philosophy begins with certain clear-cut
presuppositions. First, the sovereignty of the triune God and
His ultimate decree are presupposed rather than the autonomy
of man and man’s mind. There is no less a given, a basic faith
and presupposition, in modern philosophy than there is in
Van Til. As Van Til, Dooyeweerd, and others have shown, a
basic pre-theoretical and religious faith is the presupposition of
every philosophy. Every philosophy is a development of the
premises of its particular faith. Van Til’s premise is the God of
Scripture. Van Til makes clear the significance of this fact:
That issue may be stated simply and comprehensively by say-
ing that in the Christian view of things it is the self-contained
God who is the final point of reference while in the case of the
modern view it is the would-be self-contained man who is the
final point of reference in all interpretation.
For the Christian, facts are what they are, in the last analysis,
by virtue of the place they take in the plan of God.5
Facts are inseparable from a principle of interpretation; the
facts we know are interpreted facts. The question is this: is the
principle of interpretation the triune God of Scripture, or is it
the autonomous mind of man? The mind of man is not
4. Van Til’s Metaphysics of Apologetics was republished in 1969 under the title, A
Survey of Christian Epistemology, by the Den Dulk Christian Foundation.
5. Cornelius Van Til, intro. to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Inspiration
and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel G. Craig (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
neutral; man is either a covenant-keeper or a covenant-breaker.

Man has an “axe to grind,” and as a result the covenant-breaker
man is “anxious to keep from seeing the facts for what they
really are,” God’s handiwork. For non-Christian philosophy,
“all predication that is to be meaningful must have its reference
point in man as ultimate.”6 We thus have “two mutually
exclusive systems, based upon two mutually exclusive
principles of interpretation.” If man assumes himself to be
ultimate rather than created, he will work to undercut
God-given factuality:
And in our day the non-Christian principle of interpretation
has come to a quite consistent form of expression. It has done
so most of all by stressing the relativity of all knowledge in
any field to man as its ultimate reference point. It would seem
to follow from this that Christians ought not to be behind in
stressing the fact that in their thinking all depends upon mak-
ing God the final reference point in human predication.7
The sovereign God and His ultimate decree are thus basic.
Second, Van Til’s premise is the God of Scripture because
Van Til accepts the Bible as the infallible word of God. “The
self-contained God is self-determinate. He cannot refer to any-
thing outside that which has proceeded from himself for cor-
roboration of his words.”8 The word of God must, therefore,
be our appeal and authority. The non-believer claims to be a
new man by virtue of his independence from God and his dec-
laration that he is his own reference point.9 He therefore op-
poses his word to God’s word. Each position has a radically
different epistemology. As Van Til sums it up,
It is now apparent in what manner we would contend in our
day for the philosophical relevance of Scripture. Such philo-
sophical relevance cannot be established unless it be shown
that all human predication is intelligible only on the presup-
position of the truth of what the Bible teaches about God,
man and the universe. If it be first granted that man can cor-
rectly interpret an aspect or dimension of reality while mak-
ing man the final reference point, then there is no justification
6. Ibid., 22-23.
7. Ibid., 25.
8. Ibid., 36.
9. Ibid., 24.
for denying him the same competence in the field of religion.

If the necessity for the belief in Scripture is established in
terms of “experience” which is not itself interpreted in terms
of Scripture it is not the necessity of Scripture that is estab-
lished. The Scripture offers itself as the sun by which alone
men can see their experience in its true setting. The facts of na-
ture and history corroborate the Bible when it is made clear
that they fit into no frame but that which Scripture offers.
If the non-believer works according to the principles of the
new man within him and the Christian works according to
the principles of the new man within him then there is no in-
terpretative content of any sort on which they can agree.
Then both maintain that their position is reasonable. Both
maintain that it is according to reason and according to fact.
Both bring the whole of reality in connection with their main
principle of interpretation and their final reference points.
It might seem then that there can be no argument between
them. It might seem that the orthodox view of authority is to
be spread only by testimony and by prayer not by argument.
But this would militate directly against the very foundation of
all Christian revelation, namely, to the effect that all things in
the universe are nothing if not revelational of God. Christian-
ity must claim that it alone is rational. It must not be satisfied
to claim that God probably exists. Nor does it say that Christ
probably rose from the dead. The Christian is bound to be-
lieve and hold that his system of doctrine is certainly true and
that other systems are certainly false. And he must say this
about a system of doctrine which involves the existence and
sovereign action of a self-contained God whose ways are past
finding out.10
Because God is the sovereign, not man, it is the word of God
which governs our thought rather than the word of man. Our
presupposition, then, is that, “whatever Scripture teaches is
true because Scripture teaches it.”11 For the modernist, the ul-
timacy of the autonomous mind of man leads him to deny in
principle the possibility of an infallible word of God, his frame
of reference being himself, not God.
In the last analysis every theology or philosophy is personal-
istic. Everything “impersonal” must be brought into relation-
ship with an ultimate personal point of reference. Orthodoxy
10. Ibid., 37-38.
11. Ibid., 49.
takes the self-contained ontological trinity to be this point of

reference. The only alternative is to make man himself the fi-
nal point of reference.12
Third, in terms of the doctrine of the sovereign, uncreated
God and His infallible word, Van Til affirms the doctrine of
creation. Instead of one great chain of being, there is, rather,
the uncreated being of God on the one hand, and created being
on the other. The doctrine of creation means that God as cre-
ator of all things is therefore of necessity the only true princi-
ple of interpretation for all things. Creationism means a
different doctrine of immanence and transcendence than we
find in non-biblical thought.13
Fourth, the doctrine of the trinity is fundamental to ortho-
dox Christianity and to Van Til’s philosophy. “The three per-
sons of the trinity are co-substantial; not one is derived in his
substance from either or both of the others. Yet there are three
distinct persons in this unity; the diversity and the identity are
equally underived.”14 God is thus ultimate, and the three per-
sons of the Godhead have equal ultimacy.
Fifth, it follows that, because all ultimacy is ascribed to God
by the doctrine of creation, and equal ultimacy to the triune
Godhead, the answer to the problem of the one and the many
is to be found in God:
In the first place we are conscious of having as our foundation
the metaphysical presupposition of Christianity as it is
expressed in the creation doctrine. This means that in God as
an absolutely self-contained being, in God as an absolute
personality, who exists as the triune God, we have the
solution of the one and the many problem. The persons of the
trinity are mutually exhaustive. This means that there is no
remnant of unconsciousness of potentiality in the being of
God. Thus there cannot be anything unknown to God that
springs from his own nature. Then too there was nothing
existing beyond this God before the creation of the universe.
Hence the time-space world cannot be a source of independent
particularity. The space-time universe cannot even be a
12. Ibid., 66.

13. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
14. Ibid., 28.
universe of exclusive particularity. It is brought forth by the

creative act of God, and this means in accordance with the
plan of the universal God. Hence there must be in this world
universals as well as particulars. Moreover they can never exist
in independence of one another. They must be equally ultimate
which means in this case they are both derivative. Now if this
is the case God cannot be confronted by an absolute
particularity that springs from the space-time universe any
more than He can be confronted by an absolute particularity
that should spring from a potential aspect of His own being.
Hence in God the One and the Many are equally ultimate
which in this case means absolutely ultimate.15
Because God is the creator of all things, the temporal one and
many can never exist either in isolation from or in contradic-
tion to one another, nor in isolation from or in contradiction
to the triune God, the ultimate one and many. The exclusive
ultimacy of the one and the many is in God.
Because of the fact of creation, the temporal one and many
are not essentially alien things. In non-Christian thought, the
one and the many are alien and are held in dialectical tension
lest the one reduce the other to nothing and itself to
meaninglessness. The temporal one and many are absolutely
under God and His law and absolutely subject to His creative
purpose.
Sixth, there is no tension between the temporal one and
many because they are alike under God, and because of the
equal ultimacy of the eternal one and many in the triune God.
The plurality and the unity of the Godhead are both equally
ultimate. God is one God, three persons, and equal ultimacy is
to be ascribed to both God’s unity and particularity. The doc-
trine of the ontological trinity thus brings to an end the ten-
sion between the one and the many. It is not the one nor the
many which is more important, and ultimacy is not the at-
tribute of one alone; it is, rather, the equal ultimacy of the one
and the many in the triune God.
Non-Christian thought seeks to hold the one and the many
in dialectical tension; failing this, it falls into dualism or mo-
nism. Van Til, distinguishing between the eternal
15. Cornelius Van Til, Psychology of Religion: Syllabus (Philadelphia: Westminster

Theological Seminary, 1935), 49-50.
One-and-Many and the temporal one and many, points to the

fact that Christian philosophy is thus able to give a compre-
hensive and unified picture of reality without doing any injus-
tice either to unity or particularity, or ascribing ultimacy to
man and history:
Using the language of the One-and-Many question we con-
tend that in God the one and the many are equally ultimate.
Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, and di-
versity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The per-
sons of the Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another.
The Son and the Spirit are ontologically on a par with the Fa-
ther. It is a well-known fact that all heresies in the history of
the church have in some form or other taught subordination-
ism. Similarly, we believe, all “heresies” in apologetic method-
ology spring from some sort of subordinationism.
It may be profitable at this juncture to introduce the notion of
a concrete universal. In seeking for an answer to the One-and-
Many question, philosophers have admittedly experienced
great difficulty. The many must be brought into contact with
one another. But how do we know that they can be brought
into contact with one another? How do we know that the
many do not simply exist as unrelated particulars? The answer
given is that in such a case we should know nothing of them;
they would be abstracted from the body of knowledge that we
have; they would be abstract particulars. On the other hand,
how is it possible that we should obtain a unity that does not
destroy the particulars? We seem to get our unity by general-
izing, by abstracting from the particulars in order to include
them into larger unities. If we keep up this process of general-
ization till we exclude all particulars, granted they can all be
excluded, have we then not stripped these particulars of their
particularity? Have we then obtained anything but an abstract
universal?
As Christians we hold that there is no answer to these prob-
lems from a non-Christian point of view. We shall argue this
point later; for the nonce we introduce this matter in order to
set forth the meaning of the notion of the concrete universal.
It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are
bound to believe, that we really have a concrete universal. In
God’s being there are no particulars not related to the univer-
sal and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in
the particulars.16

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.
17. Ibid., 43.

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
18. Ibid., 44.

19. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1947), 7-8.
When man seeks to find the meaning of history in history, he

ends up denying the validity of history. When he seeks to ex-
plain the one and the many in terms of history, he ends up ne-
gating one or both, and destroying meaning in either case.
Concrete thinking means a positive approach.
The ontological trinity will be our interpretative concept ev-
erywhere. God is our concrete universal; in Him thought and
being are coterminous, in Him the problem of knowledge is
solved.
If we begin thus with the ontological trinity as our concrete
universal, we frankly differ from every school of philosophy
and from every school of science not merely in our conclu-
sions, but in our starting-point and in our method as well. For
us the facts are what they are, and the universals are what they
are, because of their common dependence upon the ontologi-
cal trinity. Thus, ...the facts are correlative to the universals.
Because of this correlativity there is genuine progress in histo-
ry; because of it the Moment has significance.20
History is rescued from meaninglessness and man from its de-
spair by means of this biblical philosophy. Such a philosophy
differs sharply in kind from its rivals. It is not another varia-
tion on a common theme, nor another form of idealism.
Here is neither nominalism nor realism nor a combination of
the two. Here is thinking done on the basis of the self-authen-
ticating revelation of God. Here is a theology in which the pri-
macy of faith over reason means that reason or intellect is
saved from the self-frustration involved in the denial, virtual
or open, of such a God and of such a Christ. Only those who
know that they are not infallible, but are, by virtue of ever
present sin within them in spite of their regeneration by the
Holy Spirit, inclined to suppress this revelation, also know
that they need such a God, such a Christ and his infallible
word to tell them the truth which alone can set them free. For
theirs is the knowledge that only by having such a God as
their personal God does their search for knowledge have any
meaning.21
20. Ibid., 64.

21. Cornelius Van Til, The Case for Calvinism (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1964),
24.
The premises of such a philosophy are thus clearly and radical-

ly different than those of all non-biblical philosophy. It means
a radical break and division also as far as non-biblical attempts
at theism are concerned, for such attempts “can allow for noth-
ing that is not in principle penetrable to the human mind.”
Such a view “implies that we, as human beings, are to be our
own ultimate judges.”22
If the facts which face man are already interpreted by God
man need not and cannot face them as brute facts. If the facts
which man faces are really God-interpreted facts, man’s inter-
pretation will have to be, in the last analysis, a re-interpreta-
tion of God’s interpretation.23
The new theology gives us a so-called sovereignty of grace
which creates a “sovereignty that is common to God and
man.”24 It tries to give us a Jesus who is separated “from the
all-inclusive providence of God.”25 The new theology culmi-
nates in the death-of-God theologians, who can rightfully
claim Kant as their father, as can liberal theologians before
them:
We have set ourselves free from the God who is transcendent,
but to do so we have had to make ourselves transcendent. To
keep the transcendent God from hemming us in through the
laws of the created universe we must ourselves take the place
of that God by acting as the source of all law in that universe.
We must speak the language of freedom, of creation, of sin,
and of ethical advance of the individual and of the race in
terms of our own free self, that is, in terms of our self as whol-
ly transcendent. We have now to learn to speak two languag-
es, the language of faith and the language of science. We have
to speak the language of pure indeterminate ethical freedom
and the language of pure determinate science.26
22. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Idealism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
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.
Because of their rejection of the triune God, of the eternal one

and many, the new theologians find themselves, despite their
vaunted liberation, still boxed in by the dialectical tension of
nature and freedom, the universal and the particular. They
have not advanced the problem towards any solution.
Rene Descartes tried to explain how he himself was the final
source of predication when he said “Cogito ergo sum.” But
soon enough he found that he could say nothing about himself
except in terms of God and the world which he had first ex-
cluded. Mindful of this failure of Descartes, Kant sought for
his self-identity by asserting his freedom from all dependence
upon the laws of the space-time world or of the laws of moral-
ity as revealed by God. But then he found that his freedom
was merely a negative freedom. As a result he could not find
himself. His noumenal man is free but free in an unintelligible
vacuum.
When, after that, Kant, too, sought for a renewed relationship
of his free self with God and the world, it was in both cases at
the expense of his freedom. The famous aphorism of Goethe,
the great German poet, illustrates the predicament of the free
self who wants to be free by being a law unto himself. Goethe
said, “When the individual speaks it is, alas, no longer the in-
dividual that speaks.”27
These men have denied metaphysics in the name of a new
metaphysics. In ethics, “In the place of Christ, they have sub-
stituted the assumption that right is right because man, as eth-
ically autonomous, says it is right, and that wrong is wrong
because man, as ethically autonomous, says it is wrong.”28 The
issues have been made sharper and clearer by the writings of
the death-of-God theologians:
All reasoning and all verification in which any man engages
rests ultimately either on the authority of man himself as au-
tonomous, as ultimately self-interpreting, or upon the author-
ity of the Christ of the New Testament who says that he alone
knows whence he came and whither he is going...
The self-attesting Christ is the presupposition of all intelligible
predication. The God-is-dead theologians have helped us to
see this fact more clearly than ever. Their negations negate
27. Ibid., 36.

28. Ibid., 38-39.
themselves. Or, we may say that their negations cannot even

negate themselves because they have nothing to stand on
when they make their predications. The Christ of the Scrip-
tures as the Son of God upholds them in his hand even as they
deny him.29
Society does not speak of the matter of the one and the
many; most people are ignorant of the problem, even though
it is basic to all life and thought. But because of man’s failure
to solve the problem, society is caught in the continuing ten-
sions of alternating anarchy and totalitarianism, between anar-
chic individualism and anarchic collectivism. Philosophy has
in recent years abandoned the battlefield for the academic ste-
rilities of logical analysis. If there is to be any kind of Christian
reconstruction, then, in every area of thought, the philosophy
of Cornelius Van Til is of critical and central importance.
3. At the End of an Age

Philosophy at the end of an age reveals a characteristic ex-
haustion in that it works its mined-out vein of thought into ev-
er-receding corners of philosophy. Today there is an extensive
surrender of the historic disciplines and problems of philoso-
phy because of this exhaustion. The era of humanism or mo-
dernity, the belief in the present moment as its own truth and
in man as his own ultimate, is rapidly facing radical collapse.
As against this, the Christian philosopher must assert the
doctrine of the triune God as the only answer to the problem
of the one and the many and to every aspect of man’s life. Ev-
ery attempt to answer the problem on any other premise not
only confuses and compounds the problem but also denies the
common facts of life and experience. Apart from God, as Van
Til pointed out, man negates himself; man as a law unto him-
self has then neither a law nor any identity nor any principle
of identity.
29. Ibid., 40-41.

APPENDIX
Observations
on the End of an Age
1. The End of an Age

A cartoon by Von Riegen tellingly sums up an aspect of the
modern mood. A bearded and unhappy prophet of doom is
pictured walking the sidewalk with a picket sign bearing this
grim message: “We’re doomed! The world will not end!”1 The
humor of this lies precisely in the fact that the end of the world
is no longer a frightening fact, whereas the continuation of the
present world order is.
This is a mood which characterizes men at the end of an era.
Faith in the ability of that civilization to maintain the necessi-
ties of a bearable life, let alone fulfil its promises, is lost. The
Presbyter Salvian, writing in the fifth century A.D., gives a
vivid picture of the collapse of Roman morality and morale.
Because of the decay of Rome, its citizens lost all desire to de-
fend it. Higher and higher taxes, ever-increasing welfarism, the
steady centralization of power, the lack of justice and of mo-
rality, all these things more and more led the people increasing-
ly to lose all desire to defend Rome. The very people who
could have defended Rome, the healthy element within the
1. True, August 1969, 88.
383
empire, finally felt they had nothing left to defend. As Salvian

described it,
But what else can these wretched people wish for, they who
suffer the incessant and even continuous destruction of public
tax levies. To them there is always imminent a heavy and re-
lentless prescription. They desert their homes, lest they be tor-
tured in their very homes. They seek exile, lest they suffer
torture. The enemy is more lenient to them than the tax col-
lectors. This is proved by this very fact, that they flee to the
enemy in order to avoid the full force of the heavy tax levy.
This very tax levying, although hard and inhuman, would
nevertheless be less heavy and harsh if all would bear it equally
and in common. Taxation is made more shameful and burden-
some because all do not bear the burden of all. They extort
tribute from the poor man for the taxes of the rich, and the
weaker carry the load for the stronger. There is no reason that
they cannot bear all the taxation except that the burden im-
posed on the wretched is greater than their resources.2
The Roman world was given to a sick appetite for amusement.
As Salvian observed, “It is dying, but continues to laugh.” The
Roman theatre and circus catered increasingly to a depraved
taste, and “the impurities of the theatre,” Salvian noted, “are
singular in that they cannot be honestly denounced in public.”
Salvian was an eyewitness to the fall of Trier, and he saw the
crowds continuing to cheer at the games while the raped and
dying cried out in the streets. But their “madness” was such
that, “A few nobles who survived destruction demanded
circuses from the emperor as the greatest relief to the
destroyed city.”3
Bark, in citing Salvian’s observations, has called attention to
their essential accuracy:
Few observers of this period of history can have failed to pon-
der the fact that millions of Romans were vanquished by
scores of thousands of Germans. According to Salvian, it was
not by the natural strength of their bodies that the barbarians
conquered, nor by the weakness of their nature that the Ro-
mans were defeated. It was the Romans’ moral vices alone that

Writings of Salvian, the Presbyter (New York: Cima Publishing Co., 1947), 138.
3. Ibid., 156-157, 178, 187.
Observations on the End of an Age 385
overcame them (VII, 108). Narrow as it is, this judgment by

one very close to the event remains respectable.
As for the men of more exalted position, the well-educated no-
blemen, who fled to the barbarians in order to escape the per-
secution and injustice that prevailed among the Romans (V,
21, 23), it is clear that they, like their poorer compatriots, had
given up hope of obtaining justice and protection from the
Roman state and its laws. Their flight confirms the fact that in
large areas of the Western Empire public spirit and public jus-
tice had disappeared, and that men were obliged to act private-
ly and locally in matters that had formerly been regulated by
central governmental authority.4
Rome thus was a society oppressed by welfarism, without
faith, over-taxed, immoral, and without sufficient will to de-
fend itself properly.
Are these and other marks of the end of an age with us to-
day? But, first of all, what is the spirit of the modern age, and
why is it failing?
The modern age reveals itself in no small measure by its
name, modern. The concept of modernity is not common to all
history. It is a belief in the relativism of all truth, coupled with
an evolutionary concept of man and history. Modernity means
that the present moment is its own truth, and that true free-
dom requires that the spirit of an age and of the people of that
era be free to fulfil itself without reference to past laws and
truths. Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822-1895), Unitarian
and Transcendentalist, defined this humanistic faith in these
terms:
The interior spirit of any age is the spirit of God; and no faith
can be living that has that spirit against it; no Church can be
strong except in that alliance. The life of the time appoints the
creed of the time and modifies the establishment of the time.5
Thus, for Frothingham, the spirit of an age is the god of that
age, and its spirit is beyond judgment by that age, being infal-
lible and inspired because of its modernity. The roots of this
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.
faith in Hegel’s philosophy are obvious, as well as its connec-

tion with modern existentialism. Existential philosophy, ac-
cording to von Fersen,
Determines the worth of knowledge not in relation to truth
but according to its biological value contained in the pure data
of consciousness when unaffected by emotions, volitions, and
social prejudices. Both the source and the elements of knowl-
edge are sensations as they “exist” in our consciousness. There
is no difference between the external and internal world, as
there is no natural phenomenon which could not be examined
psychologically; it all has its “existence” in states of the mind.6
Modernity thus exalts the moment; because it is thereby hostile
to the past, and to any higher law, it is also characterized by
the religious “spirit of transgression,” to use Bataille’s phrase.7
This means perpetual revolution as the means to paradise.
To illustrate this modernity, let us examine again a statement
made on Friday, April 18, 1969, at Stanford. A mass meeting
was called by the student body president to discuss the
nine-day sit in, and more than 8,000 students and faculty “over-
flowed Frost Amphitheater.” Paul Bernstein, graduate student
in political science from New York City, was one of the speak-
ers. Bernstein, bearded, long-haired, naked to the waist, began
as follows:
We should not keep talking about anything, but we should
look inward to ourselves.
But it is not enough merely to look inward. The whole pur-
pose of this movement has been not only to get us to look in-
ward, to realize what our moral concerns are, but to call upon
us not to sit with those moral concerns, but to take actions —
so that we can still respect ourselves as human beings.8
This is a clear expression of modernity. Look within, not be-
hind or above, for the law. The interior spirit of the age is the
6. Sigmar von Fersen, “Existential Philosophy,” in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., Dic-

tionary of Philosophy, 15th ed., rev. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 102-
103.
7. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969),
112-113.
8. “The Issues Behind the Sit-in,” Stanford Observer, May 1969, 3.
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).
A popular reaction to such a crisis is the dropout reaction.

The dropout is in a very real sense a true-believer in his age, but
he is bitter against it for its failure to deliver on its promises.
As a result, he shows his bitterness by conspicuous acts of of-
fense and non-participation in order to register his protest. At
the end of the “medieval” era, the dropouts became non-stu-
dents, commuting from university to university as a hostile
force. The Goliards developed their own “folk songs” to regis-
ter their cynicism with respect to Christian law and order, and
Christian morality. Similarly, today the dropouts are emphat-
ically involved in registering their protest against the Modern
Establishment.
The drop-out is still an intense part of the Modern Establish-
ment, in spite of his intense protest. First, it is the real stage for
him, so that he acts at all times with reference to that Establish-
ment. He demonstrates against it; he haunts the university and
political world, because this is the important world to him. If
he creates a colony in the woods, he publicizes it, invites the
Life photographer in, in order to pose for pictures,10 and makes
sure again that the world of modernity is aware of him. More-
over, his philosophy of dropping-out is simply modernity car-
ried to its logical conclusion. As Levi observed of Sartre, “The
heart of Sartre’s strategy for freedom is an attempt to destroy
the decisiveness of the past.”11 This means simply to cut off and
drop out with respect to the past, including its institutions.
The dropout is thus more modern than the Modern Establish-
ment; he is very much a part of and child to the very thing that
he hates. The dropout would resent being called past-oriented
and being described as a part of the Establishment, but this is
the reality concerning him. He is ridden by his past, the dream
of modernity, and he is a child of the Modern Establishment,
demanding that the house be reordered by the child and heir.
In contrast to the drop-outs, the drop-ins are those children
of modernity who are eager to cash in on its promises and
10. See Life, 18 July 1969.

11. Albert William Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1959), 421.
resent any rocking of the boat. A major spokesman for the

drop-in mentality is Playboy. Playboy believes in the Utopia of
modernity, and Hugh Hefner feels himself to be evidence of its
reality. It offers a world of irresponsible sexuality, no ties of
family and faith, the prospects of a lush, rich life for all, and a
world of endless play and preening. The obvious success of this
magazine makes it clear that a large number of people want to
be drop-ins, to cash in on the promises of modernity, but it is
equally obvious that the magazine appeals to daydreamers who
have none of these things.
The non-pictorial content of Playboy is alternately conserva-
tive or radical as is needed to defend the dream. Playboy is hos-
tile to orthodox Christianity, to legislation against non-marital
sexuality, and to other similar causes which would infringe
upon its dream of a sexual and social utopia; this is the radical
aspect of Playboy. Its conservative phase is apparent in its hos-
tility to higher taxes, to controls by the civil government, to
inflation, and to any other restrictive acts against its economic
liberty. Both phases or aspects of Playboy’s editorial policy are
basically in agreement, in that a utopian dream is demanded by
means of either emphasis. The drop-in in effect tells the mod-
ern age to deliver on its promises and then get out of the way.
But the order being created by modernity is more than a deliv-
ery-boy order: it is a drop-in order, one which delivers only to
claim everything. Not the dream of liberty but slavery to the
state is the end result of the drop-in’s irresponsibility.
Meanwhile, the economic, political, religious, ecological,
and educational crises of the modern world are increasing. Ev-
ery age has its problems, and many eras have had more difficult
problems than the modern age, but the test is the ability of a
culture to cope with its problems. The modern age has lost
even one of the most elementary abilities of any culture, name-
ly, the ability to discipline its children and maintain its author-
ity. Without this elementary ability, a culture is very soon
dead. The modern age gives every evidence of approaching
death. This is a cause, not for dismay, but for hope. The death
of modernity makes possible the birth of a new culture, and
such an event is always, however turbulent, an exciting and

challenging venture. The dying culture loses its will to live.12 A
new culture, grounded in a new faith, restores that will to live
even under very adverse circumstances.
2. The Religious Foundations of Culture

In 1954, Bernard Baruch found the modern mentality in-
creasingly evidencing fears concerning the future. “Every-
where we look we find further evidences of this dread of
breakdown.”13 No era lacks its fears and problems, but, when
the fears of an age outweigh its hopes and confidence, then that
culture is in process of disintegration.
Every culture is a religion externalized, a faith incarnated
into life and action. The mainspring of every culture is its basic
faith, its religious beliefs which undergird its hopes, action, and
perspective. When that faith begins to decay, the culture
decays.
St. Paul cited the meaning of hope:
We were saved with this hope ahead. Now when an object of
hope is seen, there is no further need to hope. Who ever hopes
for what he sees already? But if we hope for something that we
do not see, we wait for it patiently (Rom. 8:24-25, Moffatt
translation).
But we wait patiently for our hope only as long as we have
faith in that hope. When the faith perishes, the hope is gone.
This makes clear the nature of the growing internal crisis
within the Soviet Union, among the Communist elite. Both
Communist students and leaders are losing hope because they
are disillusioned with Marxism. The 1969 defection of one of
the most prominent writers of the Soviet Union gave evidence
of this. Anatoly Kuznetsov left the Soviet Union, his mother,
son, and wife, as well as a position of affluence and promi-
nence, to seek asylum in England. To indicate the meaning of
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.
this step to him, he took a new name, A. Anatol, to signify a

new life. In his public statement, he declared:
You will say it’s hard to understand. Why should a writer
whose books have sold millions of copies, and who is extreme-
ly popular and well-off in his own country, suddenly decide
not to return to that country, which, moreover, he loves?
The loss of hope: I simply cannot live there any longer. This
feeling is something stronger than me. I just can’t go on living
there. If I were now to find myself again in the Soviet Union,
I should go out of my mind.... So long as I was young, I went
on hoping for something.... Finally, I have simply given up....
I came to the point where I could no longer write, no longer
sleep, no longer breathe.14
The mood of flight is a major one; no sane man wants to re-
main in a burning building. As a result, many Americans and
Europeans also look for a country to run to: Canada, Austra-
lia, New Zealand, South Africa, all these and more are cited,
but all prove to be a part of the same general conflagration.
It is not surprising that the moon-flight of 1969 commanded
so wide and popular an attention. Many of the remarks made
were revealing: “No life there, but no riots either!”
This general disillusionment is caused by the failure of the
age to sustain man spiritually. The faith of the modern age is
humanism, a religious belief in the sufficiency of man as his
own lord, his own source of law, his own savior. Instead of
God and His law-word as the measure of all things, humanism
has made man the measure of reality.
Humanism has had a measure of success because it
preempted Christian civilization; it captured an existing
culture and claimed the fruits thereof as its own. In terms of
orthodox Christianity, man is under God’s law, and man’s
only true liberty is under God’s law. For humanism, man is
not under law but over or beyond law as his own source of
law. Liberty in humanistic terms is from law, in particular, in
deliverance from God’s law. As a result, humanism rapidly
erodes a culture as the implications of humanism develop and
14. “I Could No Longer Breathe,” Time, 8 August 1969, 30.

come to maturity. Humanism calls for perpetual revolution,

because, with every man his own law, and with evolution
producing new heights each generation, freedom from the past
is a necessity. But this perpetual revolution is the deliberate
destruction of the capital of a civilization, and its consequence
is the ultimate impoverishment of all.
“A faith for men to live by” is the necessity and need of every
race and nation. This faith must give meaning to man’s life, to
his past, present, and future. Man requires a world of total
meaning, and humanism, as it comes to flower, gives instead a
world of total meaninglessness. Orthodox Christianity, with
its faith in the triune God and His sovereign predestinating de-
cree, alone gives that total meaning.
The church can depart from that faith only at the risk of its
life.
If a religion is isolated from its world and is confined to its
church or temple, it is irrelevant to that world because it is not
its motive force. The religion of a culture is that motive force
which governs human action in every realm and embodies it-
self in the life, institutions, hopes, and dreams of a society.
Christianity has ceased to be the motive force of society. Not
only has Christianity been opposed by humanism, but also,
from within its ranks, false eschatologies — premillenialism
and amillenialism — have led to a retreat from the world and a
denial of victory therein. This is a surrender of culture to the
enemy.
However, if the religion of a culture cannot maintain order
in the institutions of its societies, then that religion is finished.
The established or accepted religious faith of a society must un-
dergird it with the necessary social order to make progress and
communication possible. Modern culture, however, is seeing
the radical erosion of church, state, school, family, and all
things else, so that very obviously the humanistic faith of mo-
dernity is ceasing to provide a workable faith for society. Thus,
in this day and age, Christianity, the older religion of the West,
is irrelevant, and humanism, the present faith, is collapsing
rapidly. Humanism in its every form — Marxist, Fabian, dem-

ocratic, republican, monarchist, or otherwise — is in radical de-
cay and unable to further a culture. Christianity, in its biblical
declaration a world religion calling for world dominion in
terms of Jesus Christ, is now unwilling to think in terms of do-
minion. Schilder has called attention to those Christians who,
to use Vriend’s summary of Schilder, believe that they have no
higher task than to eat the crumbs that fall from the cultural
tables of the unregenerate.15 Crumb-pickers are content to let
the devil attempt to establish a culture but refuse to believe
that God requires it of His people. The stern warning of one
prominent clergyman against all attempts at establishing
Christian reform leading to a Christian culture is this: “You
don’t polish brass on a sinking ship!” If, indeed, the world is a
sinking ship, then all brass-polishing is futile. But if the world
is destined to fulfil all the prophecies of Isaiah, and of all Scrip-
ture, and culminate in a glorious peace (Isa. 2:4) and a joyful
reign of Christian law and order, then crumb-pickers are op-
posing Jesus Christ.
Culture has been defined very simply as “the way of life of a
society.” When that way of life sees life as meaningless, then so-
ciety either stagnates and declines, or it collapses. To see life as
meaningless is to make death your “way of life.” Oriental soci-
eties adopted philosophies of world and life negation; they de-
clared that nothingness and meaninglessness are ultimate. The
consequence for them was stagnation and ultimate conquest
by the West, first by Islamic forces, then by Christian powers.
The luxury of stagnation is now gone; history’s more rapid
pace brings swifter judgment to those who fail. As a result,
when the culture, the way of life of a society, is unable to pro-
vide either order or meaning to life, its destiny is death.
Facing, thus, the end of an age, particularly one which
deserves to die, the Christian must again reassert Christianity as
a total way of life. This means that the Christian and the
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.
churches are derelict in their duty if they do not rethink every

field of life, thought, and action in terms of Scripture.
Christian schools are an excellent beginning, but no area of
thought can be permitted to remain outside of the dominion
of Christ. To the extent to which the churches and Christians
pursue a crumb-picking operation rather than an exercise of
dominion, to that extent the world will flounder in its own
decay and ruin before renewal comes.
Henry Van Til has given an able statement of Schilder’s view
of Christ as the key to culture:
Since the Christian is one who partakes of the anointing of
Christ (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 12), his concern
with culture is inescapable. For, by his anointing Christ was
declared the legitimate heir of the first Adam and commis-
sioned as God’s officer of the day to do the work which our
first father failed to perform, namely, to glorify God in his
handiwork. But Christ was not only empowered, he was also
enabled by the Spirit. His anointing was the guarantee of
achievement, for he came to reconcile all things to the Father
(Col. 1:20). As such Christ does not bring something altogeth-
er new, but he restores what was from the beginning, and ac-
tually brings to pass what God designed from the first. Adam
as a living soul was indeed the father of human society, but
Christ is the life-giving spirit, who calls men into his fellow-
ship and fashioned them for the fulfillment of the obligation
given at creation to the first Adam. The latter must be seen
primarily as image-bearer and consequently office-bearer of
God, a servant-son who as prophet, priest and king received
the cultural mandate to cultivate the ground, to replenish the
earth and have dominion over it. This was for man the service
of God, true religion. This was the original cosmic order, in
which the idea of vocation, of being commissioned and called
was determinative for the nature of culture.
But man rebelled and denied his relationship to the Father, be-
coming an ally of God’s enemy, the Devil. As part of the cre-
ated world of nature man had both consciousness and
conscience, was both letter and reader (interpreter) in God’s
book. He was called to cultivate the good earth and to bring
to expression what was implicit, to fruition what was latent,
and thus to be a co-worker with God, the creator. For al-
though God pronounced his creation good, it was not a fin-
ished product; there was to be an evolution and a development
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
Androgynous being, 74 Armes, William Dallam, 285

Anglicanism, 2, 17 Arminians, Arminianism,
Anscombe, G. E. M., 361-362 199, 268, 276, 278
Anselm, 198, 297, 299 Armstrong, J. Cyril, 88
Anthes, Rudolph, 48 Art, 5, 31, 86
Anthropological religion, Artabanus, 57
333 Artaxerxes, 57
Antichrist, 348 Aryans, 57
Antinomianism, 278 Asceticism, 28, 101, 110, 118,
Antiphon the Sophist, 75-76 122-123, 174, 178-179,
Antithesis, 149 184, 193, 198
Antonine, 127 Assurbanipal, 54
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, Assyria, 41, 53, 55, 62, 69
126, 143 Astrology, 55
Antony, Mark, 113, 118 Astronomy, 314
Anu, 42, 50 Atargatis cult, 26, 120
Apocrypha, 180 Athanasius, 18, 160-162, 164,
Apollo, 72 167-168, 171
Apologetics, 156 Atheism, atheists, 1, 7, 154,
Apostolical Canons, 145 161, 168, 239, 250,
Apullius, 110 267-268, 306, 351
Aquinas, Thomas, 4, 198- Athenagorus, 125
203, 205-211, 223, Athene, 78
234, 259, 290, 303 Athens, Athenians, 68, 75,
Arabic Enlightenment, 212 78, 83, 125, 149-150
Architecture, 68 Athletes, 77
Arianism, 18, 160-161, 163- Atomism, 27-29, 173, 301,
164, 189, 268, 278 321
Aristophanes, 74 Atoms, 296
Aristotle, 4, 18, 60, 71, 75, 77, Atonement, 180, 187, 266
82, 87-92, 143-144, Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius,
150, 198, 203, 205- The, 101
207, 209-210, 217, Atticus, 112
226, 261-262, 287 Atum, 45
Arius the Presbyter, 158, 190 Auden, W. H., 366
Armenia, Armenians, 126, Augury, 103
174 Augustales, 220
Index 401
Augustine, 125, 153, 179, Barns, Hazel, 350

186, 190, 205, 210, Barraclough, Geoffrey, 216
267, 363 Barrators, 231
Augustinian laws, 138 Barrett, William, 351, 359
on the Pelagians, 182-184 Barrow, R. H., 98
Augustinianism, 12, 17 Bartels, 367
Augustus, 219-220 Barth, Karl, 161, 200, 369
Aurelius, Marcus, 121-125 Baruch, Bernard, 390
Australia, 391 Barzini, Luigi, 243
Autarkeia, 77 Basil of Caesaria, 145
Authority, 1-3, 20-21, 389 Basilides, 136
Autonomy, 19-20, 25, 30, 37, Bataille, Georges, 386
198-199, 203-205, 207- Bauer, Bruno, 335
208, 210, 262, 264, Baum, Gregory, 239
285-286, 293, 313-315, Baxter, 292
320-321, 332, 365, Beatrice, 230, 232-235
371, 373, 381 Beauty, 312
Avarair, 173 Becoming, 346
Averroism, 223 Being, 2-3, 5-6, 9-12, 14, 16,
18, 24, 31, 33-37, 68,
Babylon, 15, 21, 52, 55, 57, 71-72, 76-77, 79-80,
68-69, 71 85, 87, 92, 196-197,
Bacchanalia, 100 201, 206-207, 282,
Bacchus, 120, 127 333, 346-347, 350-351,
Bacon, Francis, 287-289 354
Badcock, F. J., 157 and society, 64-65
Bailey, 116 biblical concept of, 62, 64
Bailey, Cyrus, 98 continuity of, 39-65
Bainton, Roland H., 257 Being and Nothingness, 350,
Banquet, The, 226 355
Baptism, 157, 165, 181, 253, Bell, George, 106
266 Bellamy, Edward, 287
Barbarism, 156 Benedetti, A., 223
Bark, William Carroll, 100, Bennett, John C., 204
384 Bergson, Henri, 207
Barker, Sir Ernest, 314 Berkeley, George, 305-308
Barmby, James, 178 Bernard, 197
Bernstein, Paul, 320, 386 Brutus, 108, 115, 120, 232-233

Bestiality, 32, 110 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 112
Bethune-Baker, J. F., 157, 166 Buber, Martin, 367
Beveridge, Henry, 271 Buckler, F. W., 58, 61, 185
Beyond, 366 Buddhism, 2, 5
Beyond (the), 325, 327, 338, Budge, E. A. Wallis, 42, 45,
340-341, 343-345, 357, 47
362, 365-366 Burckhardt, Jacob, 175
Beza, Theodore, 38 Bureaucracy, 252
Bible, 372, 378 Burke, Edmund, 33
Bigamy, 335 Burrows, Eric, 41
Bisexuality, 74 Burton, Sir Richard, 110
Bishop of Ely, 58 Burtt, Edwin Arthur, 30
Bishops, 159 Byron, 283
Blasphemy, 190, 269 Byzantine emperors, 188
Body, 177 Byzantium Russia, 17
Body and soul, 124
Boethius, 195-198 Cadier, Jean, 267
Bogomiles, 170 Caesar worship, 98, 154
Bonwick, James, 48 Caesar, Augustus, 118, 122
Book News Letter of Augsburg Caesar, Julius, 46, 93, 100,
Publishing House, 367 102, 104, 106-109,
Bookburning, 313 111, 113, 115, 117,
Borgia, Cesare, 251 122, 127, 233
Bottomore, T. B., 342 Caesaropapism, 189
Bowra, C. M., 69, 92 Caillois, Roger, 46
Breckenridge, James D., 185 Calvin, John, 12, 35, 261,
Bredvold, Louis I., 7, 30 267-278, 318, 325
Breeding, 290 Calvinism, 2, 17, 36, 38, 278,
Brilioth, Ingve, 266 301
Broadus, E. H., 223 Campanella, Tommaso, 289-
Brodribb, W. J., 143 290
Brown, John, 14 Canada, 391
Bruno, Giordano, 282 Cannibalism, 27, 147
Brute facts, 380 Cantor, Norman F., 210, 223
Brute factuality, 16, 32, 204, Capital punishment, 111
288, 332, 370 Capitalism, 25
Index 403
Capitula, The, 186 chaos-order dialectic, 72,

Capuan Gateway, 218 74, 78, 100
Carlyle, 233 cults of, 110-111, 127
Carthage, 148 power of, 121, 126
Carus, Dr. Paul, 316 reason-chaos dialectic,
Cassius, 232-233 121
Castiglione, 243-249 Chapman, George, 282
Cato, Marcus, 101, 121, 140, Charidemos, 57
232-234 Charlemagne, 157
Catullus, 118-119, 139 Children, 74, 83, 86, 89-90,
Causality, 298 389
Celestius, 174 Chinese, 296
Celibacy, 178 Christ, 13
Celsus, 132 and culture, 394
Ceres, 128 and Socrates, 326
Cervantes, Lucius F., 142, born of Mary, 172
178 crucifixion, 235
Chain of being, 9, 59, 88, 137, de-divinizes the world,
229-230, 282, 308-309, 131-194
374 dominion of, 393
Chalcedon, Council of, 131, eternity of, 268
165, 170, 172-174, flesh of, 273
182, 186, 189, 192 God, 163, 172
Canon XXVIII, 184 humanity of, 191, 268
Champdor, Albert, 54 hypostatic union, 169,
Chance, 16, 103, 114, 124, 191
152, 183, 255, 265, 339 incarnation, 151, 182, 187
Chang, Garma C. C., 6 incarnation of, 163, 167,
Chaos, 40-41, 43-44, 46-52, 269
55-56, 71-77, 79, 81, king and priest, 216
83, 85, 93, 100-101, King of kings, 185
104-105, 108-110, 117- knowledge of, 381
120, 125, 127-128, last Adam, 63, 272
136, 151-152, 160-161, Light of light, 163
164, 168, 194, 210 Lord, 151
chaos-creation dialectic, man, 172
49, 53, 56 Mediator, 271
Nietzsche’s view of, 348 Chrysippus, 140

pictures of, 190 Church, 1-2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 17,
prophet, priest, king, 37 99, 131, 137, 144, 149-
resurrection, 235 150, 157, 159, 162,
Savior, 367 164, 171, 175, 180-
sinless, 271 182, 185, 188-189,
Son of God, 63, 214, 268 192, 208, 214-217,
Son of man, 367 222, 233, 236, 239,
theophorus, 169 243, 246, 259-260,
Truth, 151 263, 271-272, 277,
two natures, 169-173, 280, 284-285, 291,
187, 190-192, 270 335, 385, 392
very God, very man, 37, and State, 188, 193
170, 172 and state, 210-211, 233,
vicarious atonement, 37 280
virgin birth, 218 as New Rome, 184-186
will of, 186 Church triumphant, 230
Word of God, 155, 159, Church of England, 278
161-163, 169, 187, Church, A. J., 143
190 Churchmen, 29, 124, 158,
world de-divinized, 131- 160, 189, 217, 230-231
194 Chydenius, John, 230
Christian Church, 98 Cicero, 97, 101-104, 106-108,
Christian reconstruction, 111-114, 116, 120-121,
395 123, 285
Christian schools, 394 Circuses, 129, 384
Christianity, 339, 351, 391, Citizenry, 75, 83-84, 90-91
393 City of God, 186, 188, 205
Christianity and Classical City of God, The, 153
Culture, 95, 114, 125, City of Man, 95-129, 281-292
152 City of the Sun, 289
Christianity Today, 368 City-state, 67, 75-78, 83, 85,
Christians, 121 87
Christology, 34 Civil government, 249, 313
Christology and Barthianism, Civil magistrates, 62
34 Clark, Gordon H., 80
Christomimesis, 185 Clark, R. T. Rundle, 45
Index 405
Classical Journal, The, 75 Consolation of Philosophy,

Clayton, Joseph, 215 The, 195
Clemency, 115, 122 Constantine, 156-160, 162-
Clementia, 115-116 163
Cleopatra, 93 Constantine’s prayer, 158
Clericalism, 336 Constantinople, 184, 190
Cloacina, 99 Constitutionalism, 104
Clodian upheaval, 103 Consubstantiation, 266
Cochrane, Charles Norris, Contiguity association, 311
95, 114, 125, 152 Continuity, 151, 181, 187,
Code of Hammurabi, 52 192
Cogito ergo sum, 297, 381 of being, 132, 152
Cole, Henry, 12, 276 pagan principle, 187
Colet, 284 Convention of Paris, 193
Collectivism, 36, 249 Convocation of Religion for
Colonial America, 216 World Peace, 241
Colonnesi, 252 Copley, Frank O., 116
Commins, Saxe, 295 Cornell, George W., 241
Commodus, 125-127 Cornford, Francis
Common grace, 276 Macdonald, 77, 84-85,
Common law, 261 107
“Communications gap”, 387 Cosmic coition, 357
Communion, 253 “Cosmic Mountain”, 54
Communism, communists, Cosmos, 40-41, 49, 55, 59, 71,
17-18, 86, 90, 204, 76, 78, 80, 82-83, 86-
227-229, 238-239, 252, 87, 93, 134
267, 285-286, 288, Coulanges, Fustel de, 26, 75-
290, 334, 336, 339- 76, 96, 137
340, 390 Coult, Elsa, 54
Communist International, 6 Council of Ancyra, 144
Community, 17 Council of Chalcedon, 18,
Comte, 288, 297 34, 37, 170-174, 189,
Confessions, 327 192, 266, 279
Confirmation, 253 Council of Constantinople
Connolly, Dom R. H., 180 (1st), 165
Conscience, 285-286, 302 Council of Constantinople
Consciousness, 331 (2nd), 186, 190
Council of Constantinople Cultural mandate, 36, 394

(3rd), 186, 193 Culture, 284, 392
Council of Ephesus, 168-170, Cumont, Franz, 101, 121
266, 269 Curia, 252
Council of Frankfort, 193 Curio, 108
Council of Jerusalem, 153 Cushman, Herbert Ernest,
Council of Nicaea, 157, 162- 294, 300, 302
163, 188 Cyclical view of history, 39,
Council of Nicaea (2nd), 188, 48, 124, 152, 347
192 Cynicism, cynics, 26-28, 30-
Council of Orange, 184 31, 135, 142
Council of Tours, 176 Cyril of Alexandria, 169
Counter-Reformation, 280
Courtesans, 107 D’Ambois, Bussy, 282-283
Courtier, The, 243 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 283
Covenant, 124, 204, 372 Dag Hammarskjold: The
Cowell, F. R., 106, 116 Statesman and His
Craig, Samuel, 371 Faith, 368
Crassus, 112 Dante, 175, 222, 239, 241-242
Creation, 29, 33-35, 37, 39-40, Darius III, 57
43, 49, 53, 56, 73, 92, Darius the Mede, 57
151-155, 176, 179-180, Darwinism, 301
193, 196, 199, 202, Davies, John Llewelyn, 84
208, 210, 219, 261, De Corpore, 29
269, 301, 351, 374, De Fato, 114
377, 380, 394 De Fide Catholica, 196
Creed, 385 De Finibus, 285
Crime, 335 De Finibus Bonorum et
Crime(s), 98, 100, 105, 112, Malorum, 113
119, 258, 290 De Gaulle, 91
Cromwell, Oliver, 291 De Mar, Alexander, 120
Cronin, Father J. F., 238 De Monarchia, 224, 231, 233,
Crucifixion, 235 236
Crumb-pickers, 394 De Officiis, 113
Cults, 28, 100, 109, 120-121 De Principatibus See The
of chaos, 110 Prince
Cultural death, 393 Dea Roma cult, 98
Index 407
Death of God, 370 Dickinson, John, 104, 116

Debt, 117, 121 Dictatorship of proletariat,
De-divinization, 146 14, 60
Definition, 356 Didymus, 193
Definition of Faith, 187 Diogenes of Appollonia, 76,
Deification, 42, 136, 165, 176, 93
235 Diogenes of Sinope, 27
Deism, 6, 174, 282, 299, 304 Dionysius, Dionysian, 77,
Delcourt, Marie, 74 120
Delitzsch, F., 151 Dioscorus, 190
Demiurg, 208 Disarmament, 204
Democracy, 1, 18, 59, 67, 82, Discourse on Method, 294, 297
103, 255, 315, 332 Discourses on the First Ten
Democritus, 81-82 Books of Titus Livius,
Demosthenes, 138 249
Descartes, Rene, 288, 293- Dissipation, 139
301, 313, 321, 338, Dithyramb, 73
351, 356, 381 Divination, 103
Despotism, 338 Divine Comedy, The, 222-223,
Determinism, 11 225, 227-230, 232, 236
Devil, 179, 394 Divine Right, 217
Dewey, John, 4, 19, 253, 288, Divinity College, 13
326, 341 Divinization, 173
Dialectics, 24-26, 28-32, 34, Divorce, 138
36-38, 41, 47, 53, 55, Docetism, 17
71-72, 78-79, 81, 100, Dodds, Eric Robertson, 67,
121, 125, 133-134, 74-75
136, 140, 149-150, Dods, Marcus, 152-153, 179,
152, 166, 195-212, 186
293, 363-364, 370, Dolan, John P., 285
375, 381 Dolcino, Fra, 228
chaos-creation, 56 Dominic, 234
dialectical materialism, 8 Dominicans, 257, 259, 289
dialectical philosophy, 6 Dominion, 37, 291, 394
Diatribe or Sermon Donaldson, James, 144
Concerning Will, 262, Donation of Constantine,
265 221, 223, 231
Donna, Julia, 148 111

Donum superadditum, 209 culture of, 133
Dooyeweerd, Herman, 6, 23, garden gods of, 40
29, 33-34, 208, 211, worldview, 48
371 Elagabalus, 127
Doresse, Jean, 135 Elamites, 50
Dostoievsky, 352 Elea, 78
Doubt, 295 Election, 276
Dowland, John, 58 Eliade, Mircea, 41, 43
Dragoons, 36 Eliot, George, 333
Dream-cures, 123 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13-
Drekmeier, Charles, 56 14
Dresden, M. J., 57 Empedocles, 75-76, 80-81
Drop-ins, 388-389 Empire, 121
Dropout reaction, 388 Empiricism, 3, 197, 199, 293-
Drugs, 5, 145 294, 305-306, 310-311,
Dualism, 30, 34, 72, 81, 134- 317, 319, 321, 369
136, 166, 170, 173, Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
177, 293-294, 305, 327
307, 310, 313, 324- Engelmann, Paul, 361
325, 350-351, 362, 375 Engels, Friedrich, 341-342
Duns Scotus, John, 19, 198 England, 287
Duothelites, 186 English school system, 284
Enlightenment, 6, 23, 29, 34,
Ecce Homo, 348 38, 58, 65, 76, 230,
Ecclesiam Suam, 239 256, 281, 302, 307,
Economical Trinity, 9 309-310
Economics, 77, 85 Enlil, 52, 55
Ecumenical movement, 240 Ens causa sui, 359
Ecumenicity, 7 Ephesus, 170, 172, 174
Edman, Irwin, 73, 75, 77, 85 Epicurus, 116
Education, 1, 4, 8, 11, 13, 19, Epiphanes, Antiochus, 132
73, 86, 90-91, 132, 149 Epistemology, 205, 294, 308,
Edward VII, 243 344, 372
Ego and His Own, The, 335 epistemological self-
Egoism, 338 consciousness, 37
Egypt, 3, 39-62, 68-69, 71, 93, Erasmus, 262-265, 275, 284
Index 409
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
Fiedler, Leslie A., 284 Frederick the Great, 157

Findlay, J. N., 326 Free masonry, 236
Finley, M. I., 83 Free will, 12, 139, 183, 263-
Fire, 79-80, 88 265, 276
First Cause, 88 Freedom, 6, 11, 17, 19, 29-30,
Fite, Warner, 26, 83 86, 104, 113, 133, 136,
Flamininus, Lucius, 107 152, 184, 225, 235,
Flamininus, Titus, 107 313, 320, 325, 327,
Flesh, 179 329, 331, 342, 350,
Fletcher, William, 177, 189 352-356, 364, 380,
Flora, 109 385, 388, 392
Florentines, 251 Freeman, David Hugh, 208,
Fontenrose, Joseph, 40 355
Foreign aid, 8 Freeman, Kathleen, 68, 75,
Foreknowledge, 12 77, 79-81
Forgiveness, 181 Freemantle, Anne, 200, 207
Form, 78, 83 Frege, 363
Form of Prayer, 158 French Revolution, 28, 36,
Form-matter, 26, 28, 195-196, 111, 315, 337
200, 202, 208-209 Freud, 19, 41, 334
Fornication, 119, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 331, 353
Fortune, 99, 255 Fromm, Erich, 204
Foster, George Burman, 344 Fronto, 122-123
Four elements, 80 Frost Amphitheater, 386
Fragment 8, 81 Frothingham, Octavius
Fragment 9, 82 Brooks, 385
Fragment 18, 80 Frye, Northrop, 289
Fragment 34, 82 Frye, Richard N., 57
Fragment 270, 82 Fundamentalists, 7
France, 289 Furies, 77
Francis, 234 Furnas, J. C., 14
Franciscans, 198, 220
Francke, Karl, 204 Gabriel, 182
Frankfort, Henri, 40, 43, 47, Galbraith, Agnes, 312
56 Gallienus, 128
Fraser, Sir James George, 42 Games, 129
Frederick II, 218-222, 241 Greek, 123
Index 411
Roman, 109 decrees of, 12, 37, 152,

Garcin, 358 167, 193
Garden of Eden, 227, 232, determiner, 377
234 eternal, 156
Garvey, Sister Mary Patricia, existence of, 346
156 first cause, 12
Gasset, Jose Ortega y, 33 foreknowledge of, 12
Geist, 324, 327 goodness of, 202
Gellius, Aulus, 119, 138-141 Governer, 163
General will of man, 315 grace, 380
Geneva, 267 grace of, 63, 183, 233
Genius, 98-99, 154, 156-157 image of, 11, 209, 394
German Ideology, The, 339 immensity of, 274
Ghibellines, 241 in man’s image, 334
Gibbon, Edward, 126, 164 independence of, 92
Gide, 348 jealous, 330
Gilbert, Allan H., 229 judgment, 361
Gilgamesh Epic, 49 knowledge of, 299
Gilson, Etienne, 223 law, 21
Ginsberg, Allen, 19, 31 love of, 228
Gnosis, 135 murder of, 349
Gnosticism, 74, 135-136, 180 mutable, 263
God, 9 nature of, 299
attributes of, 9, 333 omnipotent, 62, 152-153,
authority of, 372 168, 193, 350
Caesar as, 116 personal, 151
contingent, 263 power of, 250
Creator, 16, 35, 148, 151, predestinating, 183
153, 163, 179, 181, predestination of, 267
202, 209, 261, 304, proofs of existence, 206
307, 345, 349, 353, self-conscious, 9
361, 377 self-contained, 371, 373-
death of, 344, 349, 370, 374
381 sovereignty of, 16, 21, 62,
decree of, 204, 261, 302, 148, 152, 158, 160,
324, 332, 347, 372, 183, 185, 187, 193,
378, 392 204, 216, 250, 259,
261, 267, 269, 275, 341

278, 332, 354, 371- “Great Society”, 253
373 Greco-Roman, 26, 29, 185
transcendence, 21, 50, Greece, Greeks, 67-72, 112,
133, 148, 161, 167- 284
168, 186, 380 culture, 26, 132-133, 137,
Triune, See Trinity/ 307
Ontological gods, 132
Trinity love, 73
ultimacy, 375 naturalism, 70
unchangeable, 9, 156, 168 philosophy, 6, 133
uncreated being, 9 rationality, 67
wholly self-conscious, sexuality, 72
168 thought, 3, 26, 28, 60, 67-
God without Thunder, An 68, 70-71, 92
Unorthodox Defense of Greek Philosophers, The, 68
Orthodoxy, 33 Greene and Dolan, 286
Godhead, 165, 170, 172, 180, Greene, James J., 285
187, 190 Gregory the Great, 178
Gods, 63, 343 Gregory, Horace, 119
Goethe, 65, 381 Grene and Lattimore, 78
Gold, 286 Grene, David, 72
Golden age, 120, 159 Grimal, Pierce, 97-98, 109,
Golden Ass, 110 120
Goldman, Eric F., 367 Groseclose, Elgin, 8
Goliards, 388 Guardianship, 83-86
Good, 201-202, 204, 207 Gurney, O. R., 52
Gordon, Cyrus H., 53, 57, 69 Guterbock, Hans Gustan, 52
Gorgias, 83 Gwatkin, H. M., 161
Government, 1, 4, 10-11, 14, Gyara, 119
17, 20-21 Gymnastics, 73, 75
Graham, Billy, 368
Grant, Michael, 95, 110, 113, Hacker, Andrew, 20
126 Haines, C. R., 122
Great Community, 4 Hallowell, John H., 330
Great Divorce, The, 370 Hamitic faith, 45
“Great Community, The”, Hammarskjold, Dag, 366-368
Index 413
Hammurabi, 52-53 Hercules, 126

Hannibal, 100 Heresies, 166-168
Happiness, 67, 234, 304 Heresy, 162, 165, 169, 171,
Harmony, 47 191
Harper, Robert Francis, 56 Hermaphrodites,
Harrington, James, 290-291 Hermaphroditism,
Harrison, Jane E., 43, 73 74, 138
Harrower, Rachel Blanche, Hermits, 174
234 Hess, Karl, 333
Haskell, H. J., 112 Hestenes, J. R., 367
Haskins, George Lee, 104 High, Dallas M., 361
Hays, H. R., 119 Hilarian, 146
Headley, John M., 262 Hilfer, Anthony Channell,
Hebert, A. G., 201 363
Hedonism, 27 Hills, Edward F., 144
Heer, Friedrich, 217, 223, Hinduism, 5
236 Hippolytus, 136
Hefner, Hugh, 389 History, 6, 16, 23, 25, 30, 37-
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 39, 48, 56, 60-61, 67-
Friedrich, 323, 332- 69, 78, 80, 103, 109,
334, 338-342, 363-366, 111, 114, 118, 128,
386 151-154, 162-164, 167-
Hegelianism, Hegelians, 14, 168, 183, 193, 219,
338-339, 344, 354 226, 266, 325-326,
Heidegger, 352 330, 339, 341, 379
Heidelberg Catechism, 394 cyclical view, 347
Heine, Heinrich, 327 cyclical view of, 39, 48,
Heliopolis, 42 78, 80, 124, 152
Hell, 229-233, 235, 358 deprecation of, 180-182
Hellenism, 135, 196-197, 202- Greco-Roman view, 152
203, 240, 293 Hittite religion, 52
Hellenization, 132 Hobbes, Thomas, 29, 290-
Henning, Dr., 262 292, 358
Henry II, 217 Hocart, A. M., 44, 56
Henry VIII, 287 Hodge, H. Grose, 104
Henry, Patrick, 25 Holdane, E. S., 325
Heraclitus, 77-78 Holl, Karl, 259
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 61 Hypostatic union, 169, 191

Holmes, Peter, 137, 149, 156
Holy Barbarians, 31 I and Thou, 367
Holy Roman Empire, 18, 218 Iconoclastic Conciliabulum,
Holy Spirit, 180, 214, 394 definition of, 190
Home, Rev. George, 312 Icons, iconoclasm, 188
Homeric man, 68 Idea(s), 310, 325, 330
Homo Dei, 235 Idealism, 318, 379
Homoousion, 163-164, 172 Ideals of Greek Culture, The,
Homosexuality, 27, 73-75, 67, 76
82, 108, 119, 284, 354, Ides of March, 106
366 Idolatry, 335
Hoogstra, Jacob T., 267 Il Principe. See Prince, The
Hooke, S. H., 41 Image of God, 11, 36, 209,
Hooker, Richard, 278-280 220, 225, 275, 277, 394
Hope, 390-391 Images, 189
Horizon, 83 Immanence, 3, 18, 34, 48, 53,
Horus, 42 59, 64, 88, 92, 98-99,
Howell, A. G. Ferrers, 224, 122, 215, 221-222,
236 249, 255, 286, 289-
Howl, 31 290, 301, 305, 315,
Hubler, Edward, 284 338, 374
Hubris, 68 Immensity, 274
Human rights, 237 Immortality, 49, 223
Humanism, humanists, 29, Imperialism, 163
38, 63, 95, 168, 176, In Praeclara, 236
198, 267, 278, 281, Incarnation, 104, 128, 131,
286-292, 314, 318, 166-168, 171-173, 182,
321, 323-324, 326, 186-188, 190-192, 221,
330, 340, 369, 371, 266
382, 385, 387, 391-392 Incest, 46, 108, 111, 119-120,
Humanitarianism, 176 147, 335
Hume, David, 30, 58, 304, Indeterminacy, 32
306, 308, 310-314, 317 Index, 236, 301
Hunt, George, 277 India, 241
Hylozoistical, 151 Individualism, individual(s),
Hypostases, 165 2, 8, 13, 17, 24-25, 67,
Index 415
133, 135, 248-249, Jewish Enlightenment, 212

305, 313, 337, 382 Jews, 7, 335
Individuation, 26 Joachim of Flora, 219, 234,
Indulgences, 257-259 237
Infallibility, 268, 315, 372- Joachimitism, 221
373, 379 Joan of Arc, 74
Inferno, 175, 228, 231, 235 John of Jandun, 217
Innate ideas, 303 John the Baptist, 107
Innocence, 227 Johnston, O. R., 263
Innocent III, 215, 218 Jonas, Hans, 135-136
Innocent IV, 241 Josephus, 132
Inquisition (the), 34, 218 Journal of Politics, The, 20
Institutes of Justinian, The, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
185 Society, 61
Instrumentalism, 104 Jowett, Benjamin, 69, 80, 86,
Intellect, 197, 200, 202-203, 88-89, 143
205-207, 209 Judaism, 236, 240, 326, 330
Interest, 112 Judas, 232
Interpretation, 372 Judges, 62
Iranian history, 61 Judgment, 248
Ireland, 306 Julian the Apostate, 92, 133
Irrationalism, 200 Julianus, General Didius, 127
Isis, Isis cult, 48, 120, 126 Jupiter, 101, 185
Islam, 11, 223, 240, 393 Justice, 53, 63, 75, 77-79, 83-
Italian history, 230 86, 88, 90-92, 217-221,
Italy, 250 227-228, 231, 235-236,
241
Jacobsen, Thorkild, 49, 55 Justification by faith, 260-261
Jaeger, Werner, 67, 76 Justinian II, 185
Jalland, Trevor, 171, 185 Juvenal, 119, 138-139
James, E. O., 47
James, William, 19, 207 Kabbalism, 44, 136
Japan, 68 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 38, 302,
Jayne, Walter Addison, 99 316-321, 323-325, 356,
Jefferson, Thomas, 8, 14 363, 369, 380
Jerusalem, 149 Kantian thought, 161, 203,
Jewish culture, 133 321
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 219,

224-225, 241 L’Estrange, Sir Roger, 120
Kaufmann, Walter, 327 Labor, 170
Keil, C F., 151 Lactantius, 177, 189
Kepler, Thomas S., 262 Ladder, 45
Kern, Fritz, 216-217 Ladner, Gerhart B., 188
Keynes, 19 Lais, 138
Khalifah, 61 Laissez faire, 304
Khensu, 42 Language, 327, 359-363
Khepera, 42 Lattimore, Richmond, 72
Khnum, 45 Law, 3, 7, 10, 12, 18, 20, 24,
Khrushchev, 60 27-31, 36-37, 48, 52,
Khu, 42 55, 59, 61-62, 64, 82,
99, 101-103, 112, 114,
Kidd, B. J., 185
118, 120, 125, 133,
Kiefer, Otto, 100
137, 142-146, 170,
Kierkegaard, 326, 378 175, 183, 185, 216,
King Nicomedes, 108 220, 236, 246, 249,
Kingdom of God, 61, 63 261, 277, 284, 320,
Kings of Kings, 64 328, 335-338, 340,
Kingship, 46, 49, 52, 58, 61, 344, 353, 360, 377,
99, 116, 132 382, 387-388, 391
Kinsey, 5, 27, 30 and liberty, 36-38
Kitto, H. D. F., 69-70, 77, 87 and reason, 101
Know, T. M., 326, 331 biblical, 278
Knowledge, 77, 82, 177, 294- common, 276
296, 299, 302-303, God’s, 142, 145
305-310, 312, 314, Mosaic, 111
316-317, 319, 321, of God, 260
323-324, 326, 329, of Nature, 291
331, 372, 379, 386 Laws, The, 83, 86, 113-114
Kramer, Samuel Noah, 48, Lea, Henry Charles, 258
50, 57, 73 Lecler, Joseph, 210
Kroner, Richard, 77, 82, 134, Lectures on the History of
326 Philosophy, 327
Krummacher, 335 Leeuw, Gerardus Van Der,
Kuznetsov, Anatoly, 390 65
Index 417
LeFevre, Robert, 4 Livy, 107

Left-Wing Communism, an Lloyd, Roger, 214
Infantile Disorder, 252 Lloyd, Seton, 52
Legge, Francis, 99, 126 Locke, John, 290-292, 302-
Leibniz, G. W., 304, 360 305, 307
Leith, John H., 157, 163-164, Loetscher, Lefferts A., 369
173, 184 Logic, 29, 295, 341-342, 359
Lenin, 252, 286 Logos, 80, 167-168
Lent, 178 Looking Backward, 287
Leo III, 188 Lord’s Table, 180, 266, 270,
Lerner, Max, 88-89, 91, 143, 272
250 Love, 73, 80-81, 137, 241,
Lesbianism, 119 244, 261, 290, 309, 336
Lessing, 219 Loyola, 280
Leucippus, 80 Lucretius, 106, 108, 116
Levi, William Albert, 349, Luther, Martin, 29, 257-267,
358, 360, 388 275-277, 325
Leviathan, 290 Lutheranism, 2, 38, 259, 266,
Levy, Dr. Oscar, 336 270, 274
Lewinson, Richard, 142 Luxury, 85
Lewis, C. Day, 95 Lycurgus, 72
Lewis, C. S., 370
Liber Pater, 120 Maccabees, 132
Liberals, liberalism, 278, 305, Machiavelli, 34, 243, 249-256
337, 369, 380 Mackenna, Stephen, 134
Libertarianism, 4, 23, 32-33 Macmahon, H., 136
Libertines, 267 Macrinus, 127
Liberty, 4, 12, 19, 21, 23-38, Magic, 47, 65
48, 52, 58, 64, 233, Maier, Josef, 324
261, 275, 304, 313, 391 Mami, 54
Life, 40-41, 47, 49, 63, 345 Mamigonian, Vartan, 173
Life, 388 Man, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13-14, 18-
Lindsay, A. D., 290 19, 25, 27-29, 32, 36-
Lindsay, Jack, 228 37, 184, 247, 249, 279,
Linscott, Robert N., 287, 295 282, 304, 308-309,
Lipton, Lawrence, 31 315-316, 318, 331,
Literature, 28, 31 333-338, 340, 352-356,
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
Mettrie, Julien Offray de la, Monotheletism,

310 Monothelites, 186,
Michael, 182 189
Michelangelo, 283 Moon-flight, 391
Microcosm, 82 Moore, David, 223
Middle Ages, 19, 28, 212, 219 Moore, G. E., 4
Milarepa, 5, 18 Morality, 320, 331, 335
Milesians, 70, 78 Morals, 296, 314
Miletus, 68 More, Sir Thomas, 284-288
Miller, Gerald, 238 Morley, Henry, 290
Miller, Henry, 19, 32 Mosaic law, 111
Mind, 107, 120, 122-123, 125, Moscati, Sebatino, 49
136, 307, 327, 329 Moslems, 23, 240
Mind (Spirit), 324 Mother’s Day, 65
Minoan culture, 68-69 Mueller, J. Theodore, 261
Miracles, 312, 377 Mueller, William A., 277
Mithras-worship, 126 Muller, Herbert J., 57
Modalism, 167 Multiverse, 24
Modern age, 385 Mumford, Lewis, 288
Modern Establishment, 388 Muncey, R. Wateverille, 146
Modernism, 7, 17, 145, 236- Murder, 139, 144, 157, 165
237, 272, 369-370, 373 Murray, Gilbert, 75, 92
Modernity, 385-386 Murray, John, 268
Mohammedanism, 11, 281 Murray, Margaret A., 47
Mohenjo-daro, 68 Music, 28
Monarchianism, monarchy, Mylonas, George Emmanuel,
59, 166-167, 225, 227, 71, 77
279-280, 337 Mysteries, 182
Monarchy, 223 Mystery religions, 44
Monasticism, 174, 176 Mysticism, 5, 12, 26, 28, 31,
Monism, 78, 134, 166 73-74, 76, 93, 133,
Monitor, 238 174, 267, 361
Monogamy, 335
Monophysitism, Naive experience, 24, 26
Monophysites, 40, Nakedness, 141
170, 172, 189, 191 Narsai, 180
Monotheism, 40, 161, 240 Natural law, 185, 223, 259,
276, 314 New Rome, 184

Naturalistic religion, 64 New York Times, 238
Nature, 7, 13-14, 24, 26, 28- New Zealand, 391
32, 34, 37, 46-48, 88, Newsweek, 222
98, 102, 107, 114-115, Newton, Sir Isaac, 360
122-124, 139, 152, Nicene Creed, 163, 165, 235
165, 170, 186, 199, Nicholas, 231
208, 210-211, 226, Nicholas of Cusa, 281
239, 244-246, 255, Niebuhr, Reinhold, 34, 369
285-286, 305-306, 309, Niemeyer, Sister Mary
312, 315, 318, 325, Fredericus, 210
331, 349, 362, 378 Nietzsche, Friedrich
and freedom, 29-30 Wilhelm, 336, 343-
and grace, 6, 28, 199, 211 350, 370
Nazi thought, 28 Nihilism, 135, 347-348
Neander, Augustus, 190 Nile, 44
Nebuchadnezzar, 21, 55 Ni-maat-Re, 44
Necessity, 346 Ninety-Five Theses, 258
Necessity of a Christian Logic Ningal, 50
or Methodology, The, Nippur-Duranki, 52
371 Nirvana, 6
Negative thinking, 364 No Exit, 358
Neo-orthodoxy, 7, 203, 272, Noetics, 202-207
361, 370 Nominalism, 3-7, 14, 20, 28,
Neoplatonism, 26, 29, 174, 34
178, 244-245, 247, 283 Non-Christian religions, 240
Nero, 120, 143, 336 Norden, Eric, 366
Nestorius, Nestorians, North, Gary, 341-342
Nestorianism, 169- North, Lord, 58
170, 172, 174, 180, Nothingness, 350, 355, 358,
189-191 393
Neutrality, 76, 202-203, 205, Noumena, 316
277, 372 Noumenal man, 381
New Academy, 156 Nous, 81, 85, 88
New Atlantis, 288 Novum Organum, 287
New Modernism, The, 370 Nudism, 28
New Order, 293-321 Nygren, Anders, 208, 229
Index 421
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
Parochial education, 4 Petrie, W. M. Flinders, 39

Parrot, Arthur, 51 Petrine Biblical text, 223
Parthians, 64, 117 Pharaoh, 44-48
Particularity, 374, 376 Phenomenology of Mind, 327
Particulars, 24, 35, 194, 196- Philebus, 86
197, 209, 305, 313 Philip II, 335
Paul (apostle), 60, 230, 390 Philippics, 113
Paul of Samosata, 167 Philipson, Morris, 283
Peace, 121, 218-221, 224, 236, Philosopher-kings, 77, 84-86,
238 104, 123, 128
Pears, D. P., 360 Philosophers, 65, 68, 70, 74,
Pederasty, 73 86, 91, 95, 105, 113,
Pei, Mario, 15 116, 123, 126, 341
Peirce, Charles S., 4, 8, 19 Philosophy, 68-70, 73, 76, 80,
Pelagius, Pelagians, 82, 92-93, 133, 136-
Pelagianism, 174-179, 137, 148-150, 152,
182-184, 263, 265 174, 177, 295, 300,
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 261 313-314, 316, 319,
People’s Party, 104, 116 323, 325, 328, 355,
Percival, Henry R., 144, 157, 360, 366, 369, 379, 382
166, 185-186, 192 Philosophy of History, 327
Percivale, Sir John, 305 Philosophy of Right, 327
Perfection, 224 Phrygian liberty cap, 120,
Perkson, Axel W., 71 126
Perowne, Stewart, 127, 147 Pickman, Edward Motley,
Perpetua, 146 176
Persecution, 156 Pieper, Josef, 197
Persia, Persians, 56-59, 61, Pierce, Roy, 17
173, 296 Pietas, 98
Personalism, 373 Pietism, 267
Personality, 331 Pighius, 276
Personhood, 150 Pilate, 227
Perspicuity, 264 Pindar, 71
Pertinax, 126 Pistola, 251
Peter (apostle), 214, 234 Plancius, Gnaeus, 105
Peter the Great, 157 Plato, 3-4, 26, 69, 71, 73-75,
Peters, H. F., 344 77, 80, 82-88, 90, 105,
Index 423
112, 116, 123, 143, Positive law, 217

209, 275, 286-287, 363 Positivism, 295
Platonism, 149-150, 179 Potentiality, 156, 160
Playboy, 389 Poverty, 85
Plotinus, 3, 85, 134, 174 Power, 99-100, 103-106, 108,
Pluralism, 2, 81, 91 110-111, 113, 115,
Plurality, 90, 134, 211 118, 120-121, 124-128,
Plutarch, 46, 48, 57, 101, 108, 224-225, 249-250, 253,
141 292, 344, 347
Pneumatomachi, 165 Pragmatism, 31, 61, 91, 97,
Poellot, Daniel, 261 112, 224, 253, 287,
Poimandres, 136 296, 321, 326, 341, 343
Polak, Frederick L., 289 Prayer, 170
Polis, 67-93, 131 Predestination, 12, 15, 153,
“Political animal”, 87, 89 182, 199, 205, 207,
Political philosophy, 313 275-276
Political Science Quarterly, 17 Premillenialism, 392
Politics, 80, 86-87, 89, 366 Premises, 24
Polycarp, 154 Prestige, G. L., 174
Polytheism, 40, 161, 164-165 Presupposition(s), 1-3, 8, 15,
Pompey, 104, 112 21, 26, 35, 38, 299
Ponge, 353 Presuppositionalism, 371-
Pontifex maximus, 159 374, 378, 381
Pope (the), 257-259, 271 Priests, 180
Pope Benedict XV, 236 Prime Mover, 88, 92
Pope Celestine V, 230 Prince (the), 244-246, 248,
Pope Gregory II, 188 251, 253-254
Pope Gregory IX, 198 Prince Frederick, 270
Pope John XXIII, 236-239 Prince, The, 243, 249
Pope Paul III, 271 Principia Mathematica, 360
Pope Paul VI, 239-242 Principles and Problems of
Pope Urban IV, 198 Right Thinking, 30
Pope Urban VIII, 290 Pritchard, James, 43, 45, 47,
Pope, Alexander, 7, 308-309 49, 52
Population control, 89 Private property, 285
Pornography, 32 Privation, 201, 205
Porphyry, 174 Probability, 305
Process, 366 Rationalism, 197, 200, 294-

Progressive education, 4 295, 317
Property, 88, 97, 115, 117, Rationality, 323, 329
285, 290-292, 337 Rawlinson, George, 64
Propositional truth, 263, 269, Raymond, Irving
361-362 Woodworth, 155
Prostitutes, prostitution, Raymond, Irvings
111, 139 Woodworth, 186
“Protestant principle, The”, Re, 44, 93
325 Real presence, 272
Protestant(s), 214, 287 Realism, 3-7, 13-14, 19-20, 31,
Protten, B. P., 152 379
Providence, 12, 16, 124-125, Reality, 2-5, 7-8, 11, 13-14, 18-
127, 155 19
Psychoanalysis, 41 Realm of Understanding and
Psychology, 387 the Individual, The,
Ptah, 47 338
Ptolemy, 93 Reason, 1-2, 13, 16, 25, 28, 30,
Purgatorio, 232-233, 235 80, 84, 92-93, 97, 101-
Purgatory, 231-233, 257 106, 108-109, 112-114,
Puritans, 261, 278, 280 118, 120-123, 125,
Purver, Margery, 288 128, 200, 202, 211,
Pyramid, 43-45, 51 226, 231, 238, 262,
Pythagoras, Pythagoreans, 314, 325, 329, 344,
76, 80-81 365, 373, 379
autonomous, 198-199,
Queen Elizabeth, 58-59 203-205, 208
Quinisext Council, 145 reason-chaos dialectic,
Quirinius, 99 121
Reconciliation, 394
Ra, 42, 93 Reconstruction, 382, 395
Rackham, H., 104 Redemption, 110, 219
Ramsay, G. G., 40, 119 Reductionism, 18
Rand, E. K., 195 Ree, Paul, 349
Rank, Otto, 349 Reformation (the), 7, 38, 219,
Ransom, John Crowe, 33 257, 267, 271, 275-280
Rational thought, 68 Reformed church, 21
Index 425
Reformed thought, 12 Romagna, 251

Regeneration, 37, 62, 104, Roman
109-110, 125-126, 202, circus, 32
379 coins, 116, 118, 120, 127
Reinhardt, Kurt F., 351 culture, 133, 137
Relativism, 65, 79, 81, 133, emperors, 17
142, 385 games, 109
Religion, 255, 324, 326, 333- gods, 99
336, 343-344, 348, 361 law, 142
Remus, 96 peace, 155
Renaissance, 29, 58, 219, 243, philosophy, 133
249, 253, 256, 281- religion, 110
283, 287 senate, 127
Republic, The, 77, 84-86, 90, Roman Catholicism, 2, 7, 28,
103 266, 284-285, 293
Resurrection, 43, 60, 180, 235 Roman Empire, 142, 155-
Revelation, 199-200, 207, 157, 160, 164, 226
296, 299, 312 Roman Synod, 187
Revolution, 109, 111, 113, Romanists, 270
115, 117, 120-121, Romanticism, 244, 281, 283,
127, 147, 332, 342, 286
366, 386, 392 Rome, 95, 106, 108, 112-129,
Revolutionists, 337 216, 219, 221, 226,
Rex el sacerdos, 216 232, 255, 383-385
Rice, Tamara Talbot, 64 and Greece, 95-96, 112
Richardson, Ernest Cushing, burning of, 143
174 Romulus, 96, 99, 113
Rights, 150 Rootlessness, 30, 295
Rimbaud, 19 Rousseau, 337
“Robber barons”, 4 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 294,
Roberts, A., 144 314-315
Robespierre, 336 Royal absolutism, 58
Robinson, Archibald, 161 Royal Society, 288-289
Robinson, J. Armitage, 157 Royce, 19
Robinson, William Childs, Rubicon, 108
267 Rufinus, 74
Rolfe, John C., 101, 139 Rule, Andrew K., 369
Rulers, 244 San Francisco Chronicle, 241

Rules for the Direction of the San Francisco Examiner, 367
Mind, 297 Sancho, 339
Runes, Dagobert D., 386 Sanctis, Giuseppe de, 222
Runner, H. Evan, 36 Sanders, Thomas Collett, 185
Rushdoony, R. J., 16, 34, 41, Santillana, Giorgio de, 281,
61, 64, 144, 166, 175, 283-285
192, 216, 268-269, Sappho, 74
341, 390 Sarmatia, 126
Russell, Bertrand, 359, 363 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 326, 350-
Russia, 18, 204 359, 388
Russian Orthodoxy, 2 Satan, 232, 234, 263
Russian Revolution, 28, 315 Saturnalia, 100
Saw, Ruth Lydia, 305
Sabbath, 395 Sayes, Elizabeth Price, 226
Sabellius, 165, 167 Scepticism, 306
Sabine women, 96 Schaff, Philip, 157
Sabine, George Holland, 103 Schilder, K., 371, 393
Sacerdotalism, 178, 182, 184 Schlick, Moritz, 363
Sacraments, 180, 266 Schmidt, Albert-Maine, 267
Sadism, 110 Schmidt, Dr. Karl, 338
Saggs, H. W. F., 54 Schmidt, Kaspar, 335
Salamis, 112 Schoeck, Helmut, 8
Sallustius, 92 Scholasticism, 3-4, 6, 34, 38,
Salome, 107 197-199, 212, 258-259,
Salome, Lou Andreas, 344, 262, 287
349 School, 392
Salvation, 10, 114, 118, 128, Schoolmen, 270
136, 148, 156, 162- Schopenhauer, 349, 363
163, 166, 171-172, Schur, Edwin M., 145
174, 176-177, 181, Schweitzer, Albert, 350
187, 190, 220, 259- Science, 5, 15, 30, 32, 68, 70,
261, 265, 273-275, 278 282, 287-289, 293-299,
Salvian, 129, 154, 178, 383- 301-302, 306-307, 311-
384 312, 318, 321, 327-
Samsara, 6 328, 331, 369, 380
San Francisco, 241 Science of Logic, 327
Index 427
Science of Right, The, 320 Shelly, 283

Scientific presupposition, Shepherd of the Stars, 126
299 Sherwood, Polycarp, 176-177
Scott, Hugh M., 176 Sibree, J., 329
Scott, Nora E., 47 Siculus, Diodorus, 57
Scott, Sir Walter, 36 Siger, 234
Scottish Dragoons, 36 Silesius, Angelus, 282
Scythia, 64 Simony, 231
Sears, Paul B., 289 Simson, Frances H., 325
Second cause, 12 Sin, 100, 153, 155, 179, 183,
Second Letter Concerning 193, 203, 205, 208,
Toleration, 304 227, 380
Secret Six, 14 Sinclair, John D., 229
Secularism, 67, 291 Sjoberg, Leif, 366
Security, 25 Slaughter, Gertrude, 218
Sedition, 132 Slaves, slavery, 14, 82, 106,
Self-government, 4 133, 139, 184-185
Seligman, C. G., 45 Small Catechism, 260
Seneca, 119 Smith, H. F. Russell, 291
Sensations, 303, 305-307, 311 Smith, Norman Kemp, 318,
Sense impressions, 203, 205 323
Sensory experience, 303 Smith, Stanley, 103
Sensuality, 105, 107, 118 Smith, Thomas, 152
Sentimentalism, 278 Smith, William Raymond, 33
Serapis, 175 Snyder, John W., 75
Servetus, 269-270 Social atomism, 296
Servilia, 108 Social contract, 29, 315
Severus, Septimius, 127, 143, Social engineers, 145
148, 190 Social gospel, 62
Sex, 5, 27-28, 72, 100-101, Socialism, socialists, 17, 290,
105-107, 110, 117-118, 292, 315, 337
138, 165, 178, 357-358 Socialization, 4
Sex, sexuality, 389 Sociology, 297
Sextus, 122 Socrates, 77, 82, 85, 206, 326
Shakespeare, 284 Sodom, 155
Shalmaneser, 53 Sohn, Lewis B., 342
Sheeler, Charles, 47 Solomon’s House, 288
Sondheimer, Janet, 217 142-143, 145, 147,

Sonnini, C. S., 110 150, 159, 162, 164-
Sophists, 75-76, 264-265 165, 167, 173, 186,
Sophocles, 107 189, 193, 210-212,
Soul, 4, 7, 13, 19, 177, 179 217, 221, 224-228,
South Africa, 391 232-233, 243, 249,
South, Robert, 149 255, 259, 286, 288,
Sovereignty, 148, 315 290, 301, 305, 315,
Soviet Union, 204, 343, 390- 321, 330-332, 335,
391 338, 389, 392
Space and time, 317 Statism, 11, 14-15, 17, 19, 23,
Spain, 290 26, 32, 34, 38, 52, 165,
Spier, J. M., 355 218
Spinther, Lentulus, 116 Stauffer, Ethelbert, 93, 115,
Spirit, 175, 179, 329, 339 117, 120, 126, 159
Spirit (Mind), 324 Stewart, H. F., 195
Spoon River Anthology, 363 Stirner, Max, 334-340
St. Bernard, 235 Stoicism, 27, 113, 122, 149-
St. Francis, 220 150, 168, 176
St. Gregory of Nyssa, 192 Stolpe, Sven, 367
St. Just, 336 Streller, Justus, 357
St. Leo the Great, 170-171, Strife, 80-81
177-178 Stromata, 178
St. Lucy, 230 Strothmann, F. W., 333
St. Maximus the Confessor, Stylites, Simon, 26
176 Subarians, 50
Stalin, 60 Subordinationism, 11, 17,
Stanford Observer, 320, 386 216, 268, 278, 376
Stanford University, 320, 386 Suenen, Cardinal, 238
“Stars”, 232 Suetonius, 46, 107, 120
State, 2, 4, 7-8, 11, 13-14, 18, Suicide, 108, 141, 145, 233,
20, 29, 36, 41, 47-55, 366, 387
58-59, 61, 63-64, 75- Sumer, Sumerians, 50-52, 57
76, 78, 84-93, 95-99, Superman, 344, 349
101, 103-104, 107, Swing, T. K., 229, 235
111, 113-114, 124, Symonds, Henry Edward,
128, 131, 133, 137, 185
Index 429
Symposium, 73, 75, 83 202

Syncretism, 132, 147-148, 173 Thomson, E., 214
Syria, 120-121, 133, 135 Thomson, J. A. K., 88
Thoreau, 4
Tabula rasa, 291 Thoth, 42
Tacitus, 143 Thrasymachus, 84
Talmud, 74 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 343,
Tatian the Assyrian, 152 347
Tatius, Titus, 96 Tillich, Paul, 136, 369
Taxes, 384, 389 Time, 99, 103, 114, 128, 135,
Technocracy, 289 137, 153, 155, 160,
Teleology, 81, 378 164, 167, 172, 179,
Tellenbach, G., 216 193, 221, 249, 257-
Temple prostitution, 55 259, 265-266, 268,
Temporal world, 250 271-272
Terrorism, 251 Time, 391
Tertia, 108 Timinianus, Minucius, 146
Tertullian, 144, 149, 156, 267 Titanism, 349
Tetzel, 265 Toplady, 276
Thales, 68, 78 Torch and Trumpet, 393
Thalia, 160 Torrance, T. F., 275
Thanatos, 41 Totalitarianism, 59, 173, 226,
Theatre, 384 249, 286, 315, 321, 382
Theism, 166, 168, 249, 315, Tower of Babel, 43
380 Tractatus Logico-
Themistocles, 57 Philososphicus, 360,
Theodicy, 328 362
Theological Tractates, 195 Tranquillity, 286
Theology of Crisis, 370 Transcendence, 3, 18, 21, 75,
Theophorus, 169 84, 88, 91-92, 301,
Theoretical thought, 25-26, 321, 374
29, 36-37 Transcendental philosophy,
Theosophy, 136 319
Third Letter Concerning Transcendentalism, 385
Toleration, 304 Transmigration of the soul,
Thomas, E. Crewdson, 206 153
Thomistic Dialecticism, 199- Transubstantiation, 191, 266
Trask, Willard R., 41 United Nations, 6-7, 18, 59,

Treatise on Human Nature, 65, 77, 204, 222, 236-
310 238, 241, 366, 368
Tredennick, Hugh, 87-88 United States, 2, 8, 18, 21
Treves, 129 Unity, 67, 72, 74-76, 79-81,
Tribune, 238 87, 90, 93, 134, 214-
Trier, 384 215, 218, 220, 224-
Trinity, 9-10, 12, 15, 17, 35, 226, 229-231, 234-235,
131-132, 150, 165-166, 250
172-173, 187, 193, Universals, 26, 28, 35, 194,
195-196, 207, 219, 196, 209, 243-245,
225, 235, 267, 269, 247-248, 375, 378-379
275, 292, 300, 332, Universe, 24, 35, 37, 102, 122,
371, 374-375, 377-378, 124-125, 128, 193,
382 282, 377
Tropic of Cancer, 32 Unknown Soldier, 65
Troy, 284 Unmoved Mover, 208, 282
True, 383 Utimacy, 374
Truscan, 246 Utopia, 16, 85, 281-292, 321,
Truth, 2-4, 7, 13, 15, 60, 70, 387, 389
81, 84, 135, 151, 155, Utopia, 285
160, 164, 173, 175,
179, 287, 290, 293, Vahanian, Gabriel, 136
321, 329, 338, 341, Valentiner, W. R., 218
349, 361, 365-366, Valerian, 128
369, 386-387 Van Dusen, Henry P., 368
Turner, J. E., 65 Van Riessen, H., 38, 285, 347
Tyranny, 4, 16, 64, 73 Van Til, Cornelius, 9-10, 15,
24, 33-35, 37, 60, 92,
U Thant, 238 132, 134, 194, 200,
Ubique Pax, 128 202, 204, 208, 370-
Ubiquity, 270, 274 372, 374-376, 378-380,
Unconditional love, 278 382
Unconscious, 359 Van Til, Henry, 394-395
Unger, Merrill F., 52 Van Zandt, Roland, 8
Unitarianism, 11, 13-15, 268, Vaughan, David James, 84
385 Veatch, Henry, 359
Index 431
Vecchio, Palazzo, 222 Weil, Simone, 16

Velikovsky, Immanuel, 46 Welfarism, 383, 385
Veltro, 229, 236 Weltanschauung, 362
Veneration of images, 192- Westbury-Jones, J., 132
193 Western culture, 2, 17, 25, 34,
Venereal disease, 29 111, 301
Venus, 118 Western history, 67-68
Verminus, 99 Westminster Confession, 12,
Verres, 112 302
Vettori, Francesco, 251 Westminster Theological
Vicar of God, 185, 215 Journal, 64
Vice, 105, 309 White, John S., 248
Vicegerent, 37 White, Morton, 362
Victoria and Albert Museum, Wicksteed, Philip, 224, 232-
126 233, 236
Virgil, 95-96, 114, 227, 229- Wiggins, James W., 8
232, 234-235 Wilhelm, Eugen, 57
Virgin Mary, 58 Wilkinson, L. P., 103-104,
Virginity, 174 106
Virtue, 107, 234, 245, 247- "Will to illusion", 349
248, 251, 255, 309, 312 Will to Power, The, 345, 347
Vita Nuova, 230 William of Moerbeke, 198
Voegelin, Eric, 60, 75, 83, 86, William of Ockham, 198
132 Williams, Charles, 230, 234
Vollenhoven, 371 Williams, George Huntston,
Von Fersen, Sigmar, 386 216
Von Riegen, 383 Williams, Robert R., 156
Vriend, John, 393 Williams, Theodore C., 95
Willoughby, Westal
Wallace, Ronald S., 271, 274 Woodbury, 86
War, 69, 79-80, 85 Wilson, Elkin Calhoun, 58
Warfield, B. B., 174, 182, 258, Wilson, John A., 40, 47
267 Wine, 140, 175, 180, 191
Waring, E. Graham, 333 Winston, Richard, 251
Warner, Rex, 68, 76, 81, 95 Winter, Ernst F., 262
Warner, Samuel J., 387 Wirt, Sherwood E., 368
Weigall, Arthur, 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 359-
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
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ist in order to support the efforts of all orthodox denominations
and churches. Chalcedon derives its name from the great ecclesias-
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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.
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whose thoughtful role in the furtherance of

The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. I

For a complete listing of available books by

ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

II — The Ground of Liberty

III — The Continuity of Being

IV — The Unity of the Polis

VI — Christ: The World De-divinized

VII — The Return of Dialectic Thought

VIII — Frederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized

IX — The Immanent One as the Power State

X — The Reformation: The Problem Redefined

XI — Utopia: The New City of Man

XII — Autonomous Man and the New Order

XIII — War Against the Beyond

XIV — The Christian Perspective

APPENDIX — Observations on the End of an Age

Scripture Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .397

1. The Nature of the Problem

between Buddhism and Christianity. Russian Orthodoxy,

1. Pre-theoretical suppositions or axioms are religiously held and unproved prop-

And one such basic presupposition is with reference to the one

individuals. God, law, government, church, and morality are

one and many problem can be seen in art. In the seventeenth

How then can I have the Impulse-of-Two —

All are parts of one stupendous whole

6. For an account of the implications of the Enlightenment, see Louis I. Bred-

7. Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The

Raising these questions immediately makes apparent the fact

3. The Trinitarian Answer

9. Cornelius Van Til, Apologetics (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed

implicit or explicit. Evil is non-being, and man either moves

10. Cornelius Van Til, A Letter on Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian

Father. It is a well-known fact that all heresies in the history

4. The Unitarian Failure

reality. The tendency of Mohammedan thought, when not

12. Chap. 5, sec. 2.

sons of God, their growth within the structure of God’s law

apparent.” This is a parallel development to the Hegelian and

doctrine of ancient Babylonian statism and a continuing foun-

5. Faith and Science

21. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 43; 26 in 1963 ed.

that makes history.”23 Van Til has summarized the matter

In such a society, everyone would be in a position to control

Arianism and other subordinationist views as essential to the

modern champions of this exclusive universal, humanity as a

7. Implications for Education and Freedom

enthusiastically proclaimed by liberal theorists. Autonomy

8. The Question of Authority

27. Andrew Hacker, “Dostoievsky’s Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political

As against this impasse, orthodox Chalcedonian trin-

religious premises.1 These premises are not always recognized;

1. See Dooyeweerd, Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought (Grand

The history of thought and culture testifies to the continual

2. Liberty and Dialectics

dialectical cultures; let us now examine the cultural motives of

however, always has as its counterpart the materialistic con-

mysticism and asceticism on the one hand, and materialistic at-

Ages, and medieval historians have estimated that, at Luther’s

5. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, 67.