there is. But the question immediately arises: why did the experiment occur first and most productively in what we call the West? The answer to this shows why the idea of Europe, the set of changes that came about between, roughly speaking, AD 1050 and 1250, was so important. These changes were covered in detail in Chapter 15 but to recap the main points here, we may say that: Europe was fortunate in not being devastated to the same extent as Asia was by the plague; that it was the first landmass that was 'full' with people, bringing about the idea of efficiency as a value, because resources were limited; that individuality emerged out of this, and out of developments in the Christian religion, which created a unified culture, which in turn helped germinate the universities where independent thought could flourish and amid which the ideas of the secular and of the experiment were conceived. One of the most poignant moments in the history of ideas surely came in the middle of the eleventh century. In 1065 or 1067 the Nizamiyah was founded in Baghdad (see above, page 274). This was a theological seminary and its establishment brought to an end the great intellectual openness in Arabic/Islamic scholarship, which had flourished for two to three hundred years. Barely twenty years later, in 1087, Irnerius began teaching law at Bologna and the great European scholarship movement was begun. As one culture ran down, another began to find its feet. The fashioning of Europe was the greatest turning-point in the history of ideas. It may seem odd to some readers that the 'soul' should be a candidate as the third of the most influential ideas in history. Surely the idea of God is more powerful, more universal, and in any case isn't there a heavy overlap? Certainly, God has been a very powerful idea throughout history, and indeed continues to be so across many parts of the globe. At the same time, there are two good reasons why the soul has been-and still is-a more influential and fecund idea than the Deity itself. One is that, with the invention of the afterlife (which not all religions have embraced), and without which any entity such as the soul would have far less meaning, the way was open for organised religions the better to control men's minds. During late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the technology of the soul, its relation with the afterlife, with the Deity, and most importantly with the clergy, enabled the religious authorities to exercise an extraordinary authority. It is surely the idea of the soul which, though it enriched men's minds immeasurably over many centuries, nevertheless kept thought and freedom back during those same centuries, hindering and delaying progress, keeping the (largely) ignorant laity in thrall to an educated clerisy. Think of Friar Tetzel's assurance that one could buy indulgences for souls in purgatory, that they would fly to heaven as soon as the coin dropped in the plate. The abuses of what we might call 'soul technology' were one of the main factors leading to the Reformation which, despite John Calvin in Geneva, took faith overall away from the control of the clergy, and hastened doubt and non-belief (as was discussed in Chapter 22). The various transformations of the soul (from being contained in semen, in Aristotle's Greece, the tripartite soul of the Timaeus , the medieval and Renaissance conception of Homo duplex , the soul as a woman, a form of bird, Marvell's dialogue between the soul and the body, Leibniz's 'monads') may strike us as quaint now, but they were serious issues at the time and important stages on the way to the modern idea of the self. The seventeenth-century transformation-from the humours, to the belly and bowels, to the brain as the locus of the essential self-together with Hobbes' argument that no'spirit' or soul existed, were other important steps, as was Descartes'reconfiguration of the soul as a philosophical as opposed to a religious notion.12 The transition from the world of the soul (including the afterlife) to the world of the experiment (here and now), which occurred first and most thoroughly in Europe, describes the fundamental difference between the ancient world and the modern world, and still represents the most important change in intellectual authority in history. But there is another-quite different-reason why, in the West at least, the soul is important, and arguably more important and more fertile than the idea of God. To put it plainly, the idea of the soul has outlived the idea of God; one might even say it has evolved beyond God, beyond religion, in that even people without faith-perhaps especially people without faith-are concerned with the inner life. We can see the enduring power of the soul, and at the same time its evolving nature, at various critical junctures throughout history. It has revealed this power through one particular pattern that has repeated
itself every so often, albeit each time in a somewhat different form. This may be characterised as a repeated 'turning inwards' on the part of mankind, a continual and recurrent effort to seek the truth by looking 'deep' within oneself, what Dror Wahrman calls our 'interiority complex'. The first time this 'turning in' took place (that we know about) was in the so-called Axial Age (see Chapter 5), very roughly speaking around the seventh to fourth centuries BC. At that time, more or less simultaneously in Palestine, in India, in China, in Greece and very possibly in Persia, something similar was occurring. In each case, established religion had become showy and highly ritualistic. In particular a priesthood had everywhere arisen and had arrogated to itself a highly privileged position: the clerisy had become an inherited caste which governed access to God or the gods, and which profited-in both a material and sacred sense-from its exalted position. In all of the above countries, however, prophets (in Israel) or wise men (the Buddha and the writers of the Upanishads in India, Confucius in China) arose, denounced the priesthood and advocated a turning inward, arguing that the way to genuine holiness was by some form of self-denial and private study. Plato famously thought that mind was superior to matter.13 These men led the way by personal example. Much the same message was preached by Jesus and by St Augustine. Jesus, for example, emphasised God's mercy, and insisted on an inner conviction on the part of believers rather than the outward observance of ritual (Chapter 7). St Augustine (354-430) was very concerned with free will and said that humans have within themselves the capacity to evaluate the moral order of events or people and can exercise judgement, to decide our priorities. According to St Augustine, to look deep inside ourselves and to choose God was to know God (Chapter 10). In the twelfth century, as was discussed in Chapter 16, there was another great turning inward in the universal Roman Catholic church. There was a growing awareness that inner repentance was what God wanted, not external penance. This was when confession was ordered to be made regularly by the Fourth Lateran Council. The Black Death, in the fourteenth century, had a similar impact. The very great number of deaths made people pessimistic and drove them inwards towards a more private faith (many more private chapels and charities were founded in the wake of the plague, and there was a rise in mysticism). The rise of autobiography in the Renaissance, what Jacob Burckhardt called the 'abundance of pictures of the inmost soul' was yet another turning in. In Florence, at the end of the fifteenth century, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, convinced that he had been sent by God 'to aid the inward reform of the Italian people', sought the regeneration of the church in a series of Jeremiads, terrible warnings of the evil to come unless this inward reform was immediate and total. And of course the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century (Chapter 22) was conceivably the greatest 'turning in' of all time. In response to the Pope's claim that the faithful could buy relief for their relatives' souls 'suffering in purgatory', Martin Luther finally exploded and advocated that men did not need the intervention of the clergy to receive the grace of God, that the great pomp of the Catholic church, and its theoretical theological stance as 'intercessor' between man and his maker, was a nonsense and nowhere supported by the scriptures. He urged a return to 'true inward penitence' and said that above all inner contrition was needed for the proper remission of sins: an individual's inner conscience was what mattered most. In the seventeenth century, Descartes famously turned in, arguing that the only thing man could be certain of was his inner life, in particular his doubt. Late-eighteenth-century/early-nineteenth-century romanticism was likewise a turning-in, a reaction against the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century attitude/idea that the world could best be understood by science. On the contrary, said the romantics, the one unassailable fact of human experience is inward human experience itself. Following Vico, both Rousseau (1712-1778) and Kant (1724-1804) argued that, in order to discover what we ought to do, we should listen to an inner voice.14 The romantics built on this, to say that everything we value in life, morality above all, comes from within. The growth of the novel and the others arts reflected this view. The romantics in particular show very clearly the evolution of the idea of the soul. As J. W. Burrow has observed, the essence of romanticism, and one might say of all the other 'turnings in' throughout history, is the notion Homo duplex , of a 'second self', a different-and very often a higher or better-self, whom one is trying to discover, or release. Arnold Hauser put it another way: 'We live on two different levels, in two different spheres...these regions of being penetrate one another so thoroughly that the one can neither be subordinated to nor set against the other as its antithesis. The dualism of being is certainly no new conception, and the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum is quite familiar to us...but the double meaning and duplicity of existence...had never been experienced so intensively as now [i.e., in romantic times].'15