Highlights from Aristotle's Children

Preface loc: 51

In the twelfth century, I learned, Christian churchmen working in formerly Muslim Spain rediscovered the bulk of Aristotle's writings, which had been lost to the West for almost a thousand years. No intellectual discovery before or after had anything like the impact of this remarkable find. loc: 56

The Aristotelian Revolution transformed Western thinking and set our culture on a path of scientific inquiry that it has followed ever since the Middle Ages. loc: 61

Prologue: The Medieval Star-Gate loc: 105

After the fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of order in Europe, the works of Aristotle and other Greek scientists became the intellectual property of the prosperous and enlightened Arab civilization that ruled the great southern crescent extending from Persia to Spain. loc: 154

It was the sort of knowledge that is quite capable of overthrowing an existing world-view, revolutionizing science, and providing its readers with new models of human organization. loc: 161

Aristotle's recovered work was the key to further developments that would turn Europe from a remote, provincial region into the very heartland of an expansive global civilization. loc: 168

It is no exaggeration to say that its outcome largely determined the future of Western intellectual development. loc: 200

The controversy was really about the extent to which European intellectuals would commit themselves to the quest for rational understanding, and how they could do so without losing their religious and cultural identity. loc: 203

With irreversible social changes remaking European society, they realized that the Church would have to adapt to new currents of thought if it were to retain its position of intellectual and moral leadership. Farsighted popes and bishops therefore took the fateful step that Islamic leaders had rejected. By marrying Christian theology to Aristotelian science, they committed the West to an ethic of rational inquiry that would generate a succession of "scientific revolutions," as well as unforeseen upheavals in social and religious thought. loc: 215

Aristotle's cosmology was wrong, not "unscientific." Like the rest of his system, it was based on principles, highly controversial at first, that later became accepted pillars of scientific method: for example, the ideas that the world our senses show us is real, not just a shadow of reality; that humans using their reason are capable of discovering general truths about this world; that understanding phenomena means comprehending relationships of cause and effect; and that natural processes are developmental, revealing to skillful inquirers orderly patterns of growth and change. loc: 242

Chapter One "The Master of Those Who Know" ARISTOTLE REDISCOVERED loc: 262

Reconquista loc: 274

The very length of this campaign, and the fact that the cities and peoples conquered were among the most civilized on earth, made it more "a work of co-penetration and synthesis" than a simple military crusade. One commentator justly calls it "a long-term, sensible, humane, even liberal process of fusion between different faiths and races, which does great honour to the people of medieval Spain and Portugal." loc: 277

the Reconquest resembled the "barbarian" takeover of Rome centuries earlier, for the society that the conquerors acquired was far more developed than their own. loc: 281

scholarship flourished as in some dream of ancient Athens or Alexandria. loc: 297

How had the former horsemen of the Arabian Peninsula managed to develop such remarkable competence in science and philosophy? What were the sources of their wisdom? loc: 302

He also described the Arab scholars' method, which was "first to record in complete quotations all that the Ancients have said on the subject, secondly to complete what the Ancients have not fully expressed, and this according to the usage of our Arabic language, the customs of our age, and our own ability." loc: 312

the Arab philosophy movement (falsafah) generated works of great originality by thinkers like al-Farabi, the founder of Muslim Neoplatonism; the Jewish mystic, Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron, to Latin-speakers); the brilliant Persian, Ibn Sina (Avicenna); Moses Maimonides of Cordoba, the Jewish sage; and his fellow Cordoban, the boldest of all commentators on Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). loc: 316

All these authors' writings could be found in the libraries of Toledo, Lisbon, Segovia, and Cordoba ... and so could their original sources. loc: 319

Christian scholar-priests discovered that their new subjects were in possession of the vast corpus of Aristotle's works—not loc: 324

Taken together, these books represent the most important documentary discovery (or "rediscovery") in Western intellectual history. loc: 332

Archbishop Raymund of Toledo, one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture, who did more than any man to make the treasures of Greek philosophy and science available to the Latin world, and who opened the door to advanced Arab and Jewish ideas as well. loc: 343

it was his idea to create a translation center in Toledo and to recruit the best scholars available to work there, whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Latin, Greek, or Slav. loc: 346

One key figure was an archdeacon of the cathedral named Domingo Gundisalvo, a talented linguist with philosophical interests loc: 352

He had a close friend and colleague called Juan Avendeuth, a Jewish scholar who was an authority on Arabic language and literature. loc: 355

"It was from the example of Toledo," writes one historian, "that Europe first learnt to understand that learning knows no frontiers, that it is universal, global, and 'human,' and that it concerns mankind as a whole, without respect of race or religion."10 loc: 370

everywhere that Western Christians could mingle freely with Jews, Muslims, or Greeks, new centers sprang up. loc: 376

The richest amalgam of cultures, however, was to be found in Sicily, loc: 380

In the twelfth century, the Norman ruler, Roger of Sicily, consolidated his hold over southern Italy and ruled his polyglot kingdom from Palermo, loc: 382

Another reason for scandal, at least in some quarters, was the king's patronage of Byzantine Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars as well as Roman Catholics—an imitation of the Arab tradition of clustering scholars representing many cultures and religions around a "glittering" royal court. As a result of this tolerant policy, which encouraged Greek-speaking scholars to remain in the kingdom, Palermo soon became Europe's premier center for translating ancient manuscripts from Greek into Latin.12 loc: 385

in nearby Salerno, students and teachers from many lands (including a number of female students) were creating Europe's first medical school.13 loc: 389

Frederick II, loc: 396

Europe's most colorful and controversial ruler: the man known to his admirers as "Stupor Mundus"—the Wonder of the World. loc: 399

the effort to make all of Aristotle's work available to Latin-speakers was brought to completion by the greatest translator of the century, William of Moerbeke, a Dutch cleric who worked in Italy during the 1260s loc: 411

the translations that excited the greatest interest among Europe's new intellectuals were those of Aristotle's De Anima, his little-known Politics, and his Poetics. loc: 414

while Plato is clearly the school's most influential figure, Aristotle soon discovers that there is no orthodoxy to which he must conform. loc: 443

Aristotle remained at the Academy for twenty years, until the founder's death in 347 B.C.E. at the age of eighty. loc: 446

more like a club whose aim was to train privileged young men to reason well (and, eventually, to govern well) by exposing them to the best conversation in Greece. loc: 448

he was the son of a doctor, and not just any doctor but one of the new breed of physicians who believed that the causes of illness were natural, loc: 457

the high king of Macedonia have summoned him from Stagira to minister to the royal family at the Macedonian court? loc: 469

When he was ten or eleven years old (the date is uncertain), Nicomachus died suddenly, followed shortly thereafter by his young wife. loc: 486

His uncle, Proxenus, came up from Stagira to fetch him home, and he and his wife raised him for the next seven years with their own children loc: 489

Proxenus groomed Aristotle for advanced study, and, when he reached the age of eighteen, sent him to Athens to be educated at the Academy. loc: 493

Aristotle was inspired, most of all, by nature and the life sciences. A man basically at home in the world, he felt himself to be part of a living, integrated, self-sufficient universe—a place whose basic principles could be understood by reasoning from the data presented by sense impressions. Reality, for him, was composed of particular substances—the loc: 501

In his view, ideas cannot exist without the input of the senses, nor are the things of this world mere shadows or approximations of eternal concepts. On the contrary, they embody concepts. loc: 524

Rationalist to the core, neither philosopher doubted (as do some of their modern successors) that a depth analysis of experience would reveal fundamental principles of order intelligible to reason, loc: 530

WHEN PLATO DIED at the age of eighty, his prize student might have stepped into his shoes. loc: 545

the Academy's elders chose Speusippus instead, and Aristotle left Athens shortly thereafter to teach in Atarneus, a small Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor. loc: 548

Demosthenes, leader of the powerful anti-Macedonian party, lost no time in rallying the frightened citizens to defend (at least verbally) their city's threatened independence. So far as we know, Aristotle was not a direct target of the orator's wrath, but he was certainly vulnerable. He was not an Athenian citizen, and his family's Macedonian connections were well known. loc: 560

He would return happily married, philosophically independent, and politically influential—a leader ready to establish his own "Academy," the Lyceum, and guide it to the heights of philosophical and scientific achievement. loc: 565

Hermias, the "tyrant" of Atarneus, had been Aristotle's schoolmate at the Academy. After learning that his old chum would not succeed Plato as director, Hermias invited him to come to his court to lead a small Platonic circle that had been established there and to establish a school of philosophy. loc: 567

To Aristotle, the good life always meant living happily in the present world rather than renouncing temporal pleasures for the sake of eternal bliss. Moderation, as opposed to extremes of asceticism or sensuality, was his watchword. Friendship, family life, political participation, and study ("contemplation") were the keys to genuine happiness—a loc: 574

With Macedonian power ascending, one had to choose sides, and Aristotle would not have hesitated to cast his lot, as his father had, with Philip and Alexander. loc: 588

something in the Macedonian urge to stabilize Greece and to create a new world order that resonated with his own philosophical ambitions. loc: 589

Aristotle spent seven years at Philip's court while Alexander grew to manhood. Meanwhile, Philip forced the Greeks to accept Macedonian leadership, loc: 594

When the young monarch embarked on his campaign to subdue Asia, he took Aristotle's nephew Callisthenes with him as the expedition's official historian. And, if the story is accurate, Alexander ordered his navigators and soldiers to collect interesting biological specimens to send back to his old teacher at the Lyceum, loc: 599

The fifty or so treatises now called "the works of Aristotle" represent less than one third of his total output. Surprisingly, none of these extant writings was meant for publication in the form that has come down to us. Most are probably working drafts of his lectures that were preserved in his library, then privately copied, and finally reorganized two centuries later by the Roman scholar Andronicus.29 loc: 610

it is hard to think of a subject that he did not write on, save for those that did not yet exist, and there were several topics not yet conceived of or systematized—deductive logic, for example—which he virtually invented. loc: 619

Dante calls him, quite simply, "the master of those who know."32 loc: 623

The Lyceum's chief patron, Antipater, was Alexander's top representative in Athens, appointed to keep the untrustworthy Athenians in line while his sovereign proceeded to conquer the world. Aristotle made no secret of his friendship with the official, but if Alexander's campaign faltered, the relationship could prove to be a dangerous liability. loc: 630

A few men, including his nephew Callisthenes, had bravely but recklessly declined to recognize their general's divinity. In response, an overwrought Alexander had all of them tried for treason loc: 636

confirmation of Alexander's death triggered a massive rebellion in the city. The anti-Macedonian party overthrew Antipater, expelled him, and established a new government. Aristotle discovered that the new regime was preparing to indict him for impiety loc: 643

he fled for his life to the city of Chalcis, loc: 647

When the Philosopher died, the story goes, he left all his writings to his best friend and brightest student, Theophrastus, who had succeeded him as director of the Lyceum.35 Twenty-five years later, after a distinguished career as an administrator, teacher, and writer, Theophrastus passed away, bequeathing his personal library, including Aristotle's manuscripts, to his nephew Neleus, who lived in Skepsis, a Greek colony in Asia Minor. loc: 660

Around 70 B.C.E., however, the hundreds of tattered parchments secreted in Neleus's cellar were rediscovered by accident. The entire collection was brought to Athens, where a few Peripatetic philosophers still lectured, although to greatly diminished audiences. They passed the manuscripts on to Andronicus of Rhodes, a distinguished colleague who practiced in Rome, loc: 666

What is most striking about Aristotle's writing is its reasonableness. Whether the subject is as cold as syllogistic logic or as controversial as politics, his tone is one of calm, focused objectivity. loc: 683

Beneath the learned conversational style lies a bedrock assumption that would one day be considered highly controversial: the notion that human beings are, above all, thinking creatures, rational beings who, having discovered the truth, will accept it, and, having accepted it, will act upon it. loc: 692

Aristotle describes the power of thought as a gift belonging to humans as a species.38 loc: 696

he does not believe that sense perceptions are inherently misleading. On the contrary, they provide us with the evidence that permits us to reason with each other on the basis of common experience. loc: 702

People are not prevented by sensory data from understanding the universe, Aristotle insists. On the contrary, "common sense" experience is what makes consensual understanding possible. loc: 712

his conviction that the universe itself is meaningful. loc: 716

Aristotle held that the natural universe, although meaningful, is self-sufficient. loc: 722

he asserted that it is full of purpose. Everything that exists, he taught, strives to fulfill itself—to realize (or, in his language, to "actualize") its inherent potential. loc: 723

Wisdom is the knowledge of causes, but, consistent with Aristotle's emphasis on a developing universe, his definition of "cause" is broader than ours. It includes not only a thing's "efficient" cause—the preceding event or condition that ordinarily produces it—but its "material," "formal," and "final" causes—the stuff the thing is made of, the patterned way in which that material is transformed, and the purposes that guide its transformation. loc: 725

The lynchpin of his thinking—the idea that connects the meaning inside people with the meaning outside them—is the presence of form in nature. Every natural substance, he declared, whether a tree, a star, or a person, is a compound of matter and form.44 "Form," as he uses the word, means shape, but it also means that which makes a substance what it most truly is: the thing's internal structure and its animating force, the factor that realizes or actualizes a thing's potential to be the kind of thing that it is. loc: 735

the power to make sense of sense impressions in this way is reason, something divine. So powerful is reason, and so reasonable the universe, that we are able to grasp the form of everything that exists—even man, whose form is the soul. And, yes, even God, who is form and substance itself. loc: 744

The Aristotelian God, by contrast, is the eternal resident of an equally eternal cosmos. He/it has a knowable function, which is to inspire everything in the universe to actualize itself as far as its nature permits. loc: 753

serving as a force of attraction (or, as Aristotle says, as an "object of desire and of thought" 45). God is the great and necessary exception to the rule that every substance seeks to actualize itself. As pure actuality, the finished product, so to speak, he carries out his role simply by existing. loc: 755

Chapter Two The Murder of "Lady Philosophy" HOW THE ANCIENT WISDOM WAS LOST, AND HOW IT WAS FOUND AGAIN loc: 778

The City of God was the bishop's heroic attempt to make sense of the Roman Empire's catastrophic decline. Its essential message was that our life on earth, with its inevitable confusion and suffering, can only be understood aright from the standpoint of the truths revealed by God to his people. loc: 794

To the eyes of faith, declared Augustine, the distinction that matters most is not that between Romans and barbarians, or even between Christians and pagans, but between "two communities of men, of which the one is predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil."1 Only when Christ rules in glory can men and women realize their dreams of security, peace, love, and justice. loc: 800

The City of God represented a decisive rejection of Aristotle's worldview in favor of that of Plato and the Neoplatonists. Because the bishop's writing was so passionate and insightful, and because his Platonized Christianity made such good sense in the context of post-Roman society, western Christians came to believe that it was the only possible version of the true faith—that Augustine's doctrine was Christianity, period. loc: 810

In Aristotelian epochs, economic growth, political expansion, and cultural optimism color the intellectual atmosphere. People feel connected to each other and to the natural world. Confident that they can direct their emotions instead of being dominated by them, they are generally comfortable with their humanity. Proud of their ability to understand how things work, they believe that they can make use of nature and improve society. The natural world seems to them vast and harmonious, populated by highly individualized people and things, but integrated, purposeful, and beautiful. Aristotelian thinkers know that they will die as all nature's creatures do, but the environment that nurtures them seems immortal, and this gives meaning to their lives. Curiosity and sociability are their characteristic virtues, egoism and complacency their most common vices. loc: 816

Platonic eras, by contrast, are filled with discomfort and longing. The source of this discomfort is a sense of contradiction dramatized by personal and social conflicts that seem all but unresolvable. Society is fractured, its potential integrity disrupted by violent strife, and this brokenness is mirrored in the souls of individuals. People feel divided against themselves—not ruled by reason but driven by uncontrollable instincts and desires. The universe as a whole may not be evil, but it is far from what it should be—far, indeed, from what, in some other dimension, it truly is. Latter-day Platonists are haunted by a sense that the world people call real is, at least in part, illusory loc: 822

They believe that a better and truer self, society, and universe await them on the other side of some necessary transformation. Earthly life is therefore a pilgrimage, a stern quest whose pursuit generates the virtues of selflessness, endurance, and imagination. The characteristic Neoplatonic vices (the dark side of its virtues) are self-hatred, intolerance, and fanaticism. loc: 827

Around 200 C.E., the famous Christian apologist, Tertullian, staked out a position that rejected all classical philosophy as inherently anti-Christian and productive of heresy. loc: 831

Clement of Alexandria, advanced a more tolerant view. loc: 841

philosophy was a preparation, paving the way toward perfection in Christ."4 Augustine agreed. loc: 843

Milan was not only the Roman army's headquarters but also the home of the West's most powerful churchman, Bishop Ambrose, a strong-willed, intelligent, violently intolerant man who did not hesitate to defend the rights of the Church, as he defined them, against all threats, whether emanating from unbelievers, heretics, or emperors of Rome. Philosophically, Ambrose was a Neoplatonist. loc: 865

The first burst of Neo-platonist philosophizing had coincided with the military reversals and civic demoralization of the third century C.E. loc: 874

As Christian thinkers drew ever-sharper distinctions between the violent, sensual, disorderly world of the present and God's eternal kingdom, Plato's philosophy seemed to provide a natural corollary to their faith. loc: 877

In Milan, Augustine discovered parallels between Greek and Christian thought that he had not previously recognized. Not only did Plato affirm the existence of a Supreme Good—unitary, immaterial, perfect, and timeless—but he also gave precedence to spiritual over material values, argued for the immortality of the soul, and advocated a way of life aimed at refining human existence and opening the door to an experience of oneness with the Eternal. loc: 881

his most important contribution, from Augustine's point of view, was to insist that the world of appearances—the world of "facts" apprehended through sense impressions—is a kind of watered-down and distorted reality, a universe of imperfect copies rather than originals. loc: 887

Plotinus added the notion that the universe that proceeds originally from God yearns actively to return to him. Humans can therefore connect with the Absolute by meditating on the multiple things of this world and sensing their unitary, divine origins.13 loc: 891

At bottom, Plato's deity, called "the One" or "the Absolute" by the Neoplatonists, is no more personal a God than Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. For this reason, Neoplatonism had little to tell Augustine about the personal problem that most concerned him: the weakness of the human will, that soul-sickness that prevents us from doing the right thing even when we desperately want to. loc: 898

Augustine adopted Plato's definition of evil as an absence of good—not something created by God, but a "privation of being," a sort of ethical black hole brought into the universe by man's misuse of his free will.16 loc: 905

What God has created is wholly good. Evil, which exists only from an earthly perspective, is the voluntary choice of nonexistence over existence. loc: 909

To the bishop and his successors, human knowledge was the result of a divine "illumination," not the product of unaided human reason. Aristotle had been wrong, therefore, to suppose that rational thought alone could unlock the secrets of the universe. loc: 911

"Whatever information God intended us to have about the physical world, He wrote in plain language; whatever is not immediately obvious, God does not intend us to know." 17 loc: 914

It was not that science was illegitimate per se but that it was irrelevant, and possibly harmful, to men and women seeking salvation. loc: 918

thinkers like Aristotle had ignored man's natural depravity and his absolute dependence upon God's grace. loc: 922

Aristotle's work, meanwhile, vanished almost entirely from Western consciousness. loc: 927

more important cause of this disappearance was the apparent irrelevance of his optimistic worldview, with its high regard for human reason and its focus on the things of this world, to the problems facing men and women in post-Roman Europe. loc: 929

he dispatched representatives of the Roman senate to Constantinople to inform the eastern emperor that there would be no successor to Augustulus, and that, legally speaking, Zeno was now the ruler of an undivided Roman Empire. In exchange, Odoacer asked to be recognized as the legitimate king of Italy. loc: 954

territory—Odoacer would remain indefinitely in power, and the Roman Empire west of the Balkans would become a legal fiction. This is precisely what happened. loc: 959

Odoacer ruled Italy until 493, when he was overthrown by an even cleverer and more ruthless Ostrogoth named Theodoric, accounted by some the most formidable Western leader from the fall of Rome until Charlemagne. loc: 960

The Ostrogoth ruler named Boethius consul when he was thirty, and in his early forties, he attained the highest office in the kingdom: Master of Offices—in modern terms, prime minister. Under his leadership, Theodoric's kingdom expanded eastward to include much of modern Yugoslavia and westward to absorb most of southern France. loc: 990

The loss of literacy in Greek was therefore a potential catastrophe for Western society. It would mean the simultaneous loss of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and science. loc: 1004

Boethius set himself a Herculean task: "I will translate into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes into my hands, and all the dialogues of Plato." loc: 1007

Taken together, these writings would not fill one bookshelf in a modern public library. Yet for the next five centuries, as tribal migrations and raids, famines, plagues, and warlordism disrupted European society, the translations and essays of Boethius, along with two or three short summaries by other writers and a compendium of texts by Cassiodorus, would be all that the West would know of Greek philosophy. loc: 1016

As a devout Christian, he had no doubt that the truths proclaimed by faith were incontestable, and that reason alone could not encompass all of them. loc: 1024

But it was equally clear to him that reason (that is, philosophy) could be used to clarify religious concepts as difficult as the Trinity and the Incarnation. loc: 1027

Boethius rejected the idea that most religious doctrines are inexplicable (or, as Mark Twain was to put it, that "Faith is believing what you know ain't so" 29). But he was not at all interested in providing naturalistic reasons for supernatural events or divine ordinances—the loc: 1033

one ought to be able to make most religious doctrines comprehensible loc: 1038

The emperor Anastasius, a wise and moderate ruler, died and was replaced by Justin, an uneducated military man from the Balkans, whose fervently ambitious nephew, Justinian, dreamed of restoring Roman power from the Euphrates to the Atlantic. Anastasius had had no reason to oppose King Theodoric's accumulation of power in the West, but to Justin and Justinian, the Ostrogoth was an obstacle that would, sooner or later, have to be removed. loc: 1045

the king's agents informed him that elements of the old aristocracy in the Roman senate were plotting with Justin and the pope to undermine his power in Italy. loc: 1050

Shortly afterward, at Verona, the enraged king "tried to shift on to the whole Senatorial order the charge of treason laid against Albinus, since he was eager to do away with them all."33 Boethius stoutly defended the senate's innocence—but loc: 1062

Theodoric ordered him imprisoned at Pavia. The senate, no doubt to save its own members' skins, promptly issued a decree against him. loc: 1067

Theodoric's fear of a Byzantine plan to destroy him was hardly paranoid. Shortly after his death, Justinian's armies would launch a brutal twenty-year war that finally eliminated the Ostrogoth kingdom, wrecking the Italian economy in the process. loc: 1073

The Consolation of Philosophy is a meditation on the sudden change of fortune that hurled the author from the summit of power, fame, and wealth into the abyss. loc: 1076

Lady Philosophy, a beautiful Muse whose mission is to help Boethius regain his peace of mind despite the disaster that has befallen him. The Muse explains that what people call "fate" represents the workings of divine reason. Combining Neoplatonic with Aristotelian ideas, she then goes on to reconcile this belief with the apparent realities of worldly existence—unhappiness, evil, and injustice—and concludes by showing that God's foreknowledge is consistent with man's free will. loc: 1078

Cassiodorus retires from public office at the age of fifty and moves to Vivarium, a town in southern Italy. It is an epochal move, since to house his library he founds an abbey that begins the monastic tradition of preserving and copying ancient manuscripts. loc: 1091

Perhaps because of Cyril's evangelical militancy, there was bad blood during his episcopate between the city's Jewish and Christian communities. The Jewish community in Alexandria was very large—probably in excess of 200,000 people out of a total population of approximately one million—and very old. loc: 1138

In the year 415, for reasons that remain obscure, the archbishop incited a large crowd of Christians to attack the Jewish quarter. 40 The result was the worst anti-Jewish riot in the city's history—what one historian calls "history's first large-scale pogrom," with synagogues sacked, property looted, and many residents murdered or mistreated.41 loc: 1141

When Orestes came to Cyril's cathedral to express the emperor's displeasure with the disorders and to demand the restoration of the victims' homes and properties, he was confronted by a large group of stone-throwing monks loc: 1146

word spread among the monks and local militants that the philosopher was conspiring with the prefect and the Jews to undermine the archbishop's authority and to pollute Christian Alexandria with her pagan ideas. loc: 1151

while Hypatia was taking her evening walk, a gang of Christian men seized her and carried her off to a nearby church. There, they stripped off her clothes and tortured her to death, loc: 1153

Is it correct to say that God himself was born of Mary, and that he suffered, died, and rose again? Or did Jesus have these experiences in his capacity as a human being, while the divine aspect of his person remained untouched by them? loc: 1160

the Alexandrians, passionate, mystical, rigorous, and intolerant, who emphasized Christ's divine nature, while the more rationalist, worldly, and human-centered Antiochenes stressed his authentic manhood. loc: 1168

Jesus Christ therefore has two natures, the Nestorians concluded: one human, the other divine. Both reason and faith dictate that these natures be recognized as separate and distinct. For if Jesus did not have his own mind and body, his thoughts and feelings as reported in the Gospels would be nothing but playacting. loc: 1181

To preserve Christ's humanity, the Nestorians had divided his person into two contrasting, possibly even conflicting halves. To preserve the unity of his person, Cyril would take the chance of subordinating the man in Christ to the God. loc: 1193

Cyril saw his chance. In 431, he convened a Church council at Ephesus in Asia Minor and packed it with his supporters. loc: 1201

Cyril instructed the delegates already present to hear the case against Nestorius, after which they promptly excommunicated him for heresy and deposed him from office. loc: 1202

After the Alexandrian leader's death, his own movement split, with its more uncompromising "Monophysite" wing taking the position that Christ had only one nature, and that nature divine. loc: 1210

Council of Chalcedon (in 451) loc: 1212

The formula of "two natures in one person" was to become orthodox Catholic doctrine, but the Monophysites furiously rejected it as an insult to Christ loc: 1214

Despite the survival of Roman authority in Constantinople, the same shift from this-worldly to otherworldly concerns that marked post-Roman thinking in the West occurred in the East as well, loc: 1221

In 529, Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens for the reasons given three hundred years earlier by Tertullian—that philosophical speculation had become an aid to heretics and an inflamer of disputes among Christians. loc: 1227

many of the empire's independent thinkers, both Christian and pagan, had already left for Mesopotamia and Persia, loc: 1229

The scholarly exiles found among strangers a freedom to inquire that had become obsolete in their own homelands. As a result, the works of Greek philosophy, science, and theology ignored, condemned, or simply preserved in Byzantium were actively interpreted and applied to current issues in Persia.49 loc: 1236

The Nestorians, who were famous linguists, had already translated much of Greek philosophy, as well as their own school's writings, into Syriac, the lingua franca spoken in Syria and Mesopotamia. Now they retranslated these materials into Persian for the use of their new hosts. When Muslim invaders seized control of the Fertile Crescent and Persia in the seventh century, they asked the Nestorians to help them translate the famous books of wisdom into Arabic loc: 1240

Two centuries later, having absorbed all this new material, the Arabs and Persians were ready to produce their own Peripatetic philosophy, a blend of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Islamic ideas that they called falsafah. loc: 1245

In Aristotle's view (here the Christian might be tempted to cross himself), time and space exist eternally. Nature governs itself without divine interference, and human reason, far from being crippled, is perfectly adequate to secure man's knowledge, good behavior, and happiness. But if this is so—if the universe itself contains all that we need to understand and enjoy it—what need is there for Holy Scripture, the Church, or any other source of revealed truth and divine guidance? loc: 1265

the Aristotelian corpus, troubling though it might be, represented the most comprehensive, accurate, well-integrated, and satisfying account of the natural world that medieval readers had ever encountered. loc: 1273

The first European scholars to confront the apparent clash between Aristotle's perspective and their own orthodox Christianity were the translators in Toledo. Scholars like Domingo Gundisalvo, Daniel of Morley, and Michael Scot understood that converting an ancient philosopher's map of reality into language understandable by those living in a different time and culture was far more than a mechanical task—that it really meant mediating between cultures. 51 The work of translation therefore carried over naturally into that of commenting on the newly translated material. loc: 1283

Centuries before Archbishop Raymund established his translation center, the masters of falsafah had summarized Aristotle's ideas and commented on them, criticized and modified them, and used them to solve a wide variety of theological and scientific problems. Like the Christians, they were serious monotheists, which meant that they had already recognized and dealt with certain aspects of Aristotelian thinking that priests and monks were bound to find disturbing. loc: 1293

Avicenna's method, in a word, was to spiritualize Aristotle at certain key points by reading Platonic ideas into his thinking. If the Philosopher's this-worldly system could be "corrected" by incorporating in it the notion that the material universe is a reflection of eternal Spirit, it might be made acceptable to orthodox monotheists. loc: 1299

The effect of all this was to portray the Greek sage as a Christian without portfolio, a transcendently wise philosopher whose view of the world could be made acceptable to the faithful merely by updating it and putting it in the proper supernatural context. loc: 1320

Over a longer run, however, the disjunction between reason and revelation, Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian faith, could not be papered over. loc: 1328

Could Christian believers make sense of the universe, as Aristotle had attempted to do, and still remain believers? loc: 1335

In fact, the Muslim and Jewish philosophers had not answered this question to the satisfaction of their own religious authorities. For this reason (among others), the movement of falsafah was dying in the Islamic world just as it reached a takeoff point in Europe. loc: 1337

An Aristotelian philosopher could be a convinced monotheist, but he could not believe in a simpleminded way in doctrines like divine miracles, the resurrection of the body, or the immortality of the individual soul.57 Either these doctrines were true in a way that was unprovable by reason, or they were true in ways more complex than what was generally understood. loc: 1346

instinctive aversion to Aristotle's worldview was given hard-edged expression by the mystical philosopher al-Ghazali, considered by some experts the most influential figure in Islamic intellectual history. According to al-Ghazali, for example, the very idea of cause and effect is a man-made illusion, since God, not nature, produces every effect, loc: 1350

His book attacking both Aristotle and Avicenna, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, "broke the back of rationalistic philosophy and in fact brought the career of philosophy ... to an end in the Arabic part of the Islamic world."59 loc: 1353

Chapter Three "His Books Have Wings" PETER ABELARD AND THE REVIVAL OF REASON loc: 1390

Shortly after arriving at the Cloister School of Notre Dame, he disagreed publicly with its teacher, the famous logician William of Champeaux; trounced him in debate; and left to found his own school, loc: 1402

Wielding his copy of Aristotle's Categories like a sword, he helped make logic the most exciting subject in the medieval curriculum. loc: 1412

Most scholars of his time tiptoed gently around doctrines like the Holy Trinity and Original Sin, since it seemed virtually impossible to say anything new and interesting about them without falling into heresy. Abelard found this sort of challenge as irresistible loc: 1419

"The question," said Abelard, immediately silencing the chatter, "is whether the Jews who killed Christ sinned by doing so." loc: 1430

The year was 1136. loc: 1435

The lecturer referred to the method of reasoning described in his famous book Sic et Non.5 In that work he had collected conflicting statements of the Church Fathers and arranged them in groups arguing for and against 158 different propositions: loc: 1451

The purpose of the book was to show students a wide range of alternative arguments, to help them decide by close analysis which disagreements among the authorities were real and which were only apparent, and to encourage them to reconcile opposing positions. loc: 1455

Abelard's critics complained that his propositions were unduly provocative, and that his failure to harmonize the opposing statements himself emphasized the inconsistency of the authorities and brought them into disrepute. loc: 1458

The discrepancies which these texts seem to contain raise certain questions which should present a challenge to my young readers to summon up all their zeal to establish the truth and in doing so to gain increased perspicacity. For the prime source of wisdom has been defined as continuous and penetrating inquiry. loc: 1461

For by doubting we come to inquire, and by inquiring we perceive the truth. loc: 1464

Previous thinkers had fudged the issue by defining sin as a weakness of the will or an impulse to do forbidden things. loc: 1486

But all humans were prone to weaknesses of the mind as well as of the body. All were wracked at times by lust, anger, jealousy, rebelliousness, and other destructive impulses. These were the preconditions for sin, the lecturer argued, not sin itself. Were "evil" impulses sinful even if one resisted and conquered them? Could an act be sinful even if the actor believed it in good faith to be the will of God? Common sense and logic said "No." Sin was a matter of intention. It required "consent"—an act of the intellect as well as of the will. The sinner must understand that the act to which he consented was wrong. loc: 1488

When the Jews gave Jesus up for crucifixion, they thought they were punishing a rebel against the authorities, not God's Son. Their understanding was nonexistent. They had no wrongful intention. Therefore, they committed no sin. loc: 1492

But if individual consent is needed to make an act sinful, what becomes of Original Sin? loc: 1501

Not at all. The idea of hereditary sin makes no sense. Since we don't have Adam and Eve's intentions, we can't inherit their sin. But we can inherit their punishment, loc: 1502

But aren't the Jews and others outside the Church damned? A: Not if they have tried, in their ignorance of the Savior, to please God with all their might. loc: 1507

Those who learn to love God, not just to obey him mechanically, may be saved whether they are Christians or not. loc: 1509

Enthralled by the power of ideas, stirred by the thrust and parry of debate, fascinated and a bit frightened by logical reasoning that challenged long-accepted truths, the students understood that they were participating in something new, important, and potentially dangerous. loc: 1517

his autobiography makes it clear that he was as innocent as she was in matters of the heart, and utterly swept away by his first great love. loc: 1527

Years later, Heloise wrote him a touching letter in which she confessed that she was still haunted by "longings and fantasies" caused by memories of their youthful passion.17 His all-too-priestly response was to condemn the "wretched, obscene pleasures" in which they had once engaged, and to implore her to stop complaining, since their fates clearly represented the judgment of a just God.18 loc: 1552

Pope Gregory VII had astonished all Europe by asserting the Church's supremacy over the secular authorities. The pope made it clear that he would not hesitate to excommunicate any prince who refused to recognize the rights of the Church and declare that the ruler's subjects were freed of their obligation to obey him. loc: 1561

Gregory's successors continued his efforts to strengthen Christian institutions by revitalizing the monasteries, reforming the clergy, and developing an educated class of lawyers and scholars to extend the Church's influence throughout society. loc: 1566

cultural and moral values in the new, more civilized Europe were being feminized. In these years, the cult of the Virgin Mary attained its greatest influence among the laity, Jesus was adored as "the bridegroom of the soul," and compassion became one of the primary Christian virtues.21 loc: 1574

Peter Abelard's autobiography provides evidence of a cultural revolution. Abelard's book was a new sort of document—not a generic morality play but a story emphasizing the individual personalities of the lovers and revealing the intimate details of their relationship. One historian calls it "the critical turning point in the twelfth-century rediscovery of personality." loc: 1576

Abelard wished to reveal himself to the world as a unique individual whose biography could not be confused with anyone else's. It is not the universal and ideal that he wished to portray, but the particular and individual."22 loc: 1579

beginning in the eleventh century, the material and social conditions of life in Europe changed dramatically. loc: 1582

Improvements in agricultural techniques increased food production and permitted a huge percentage increase in population. loc: 1584

As the incessant waves of migrations and invasions that had made European life so dangerous and disorderly slowed and then stopped, the pace of economic expansion accelerated. loc: 1585

in this same "century of great progress,"24 the troubadours invented European love poetry, a fervent movement of moral reform moved from the monasteries into city streets, and young people hungry for knowledge poured into the church schools that were soon to become Europe's first universities. loc: 1590

A new demand for understanding—a demand to "know" the truths of religion in addition to believing them—drew students from all across the Latin world to cities like Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, where pioneer thinkers such as Abelard were creating a new fusion of philosophy and religion that they called theology. loc: 1600

In his essays, called Monologion and Proslogion, he adopted "the role of someone who reasoning silently to himself investigates things he does not know." Anselm knew, of course, that God existed; this was not the question that concerned him. The question was whether this fact—God's existence—was knowable by faith alone, or "whether it might be possible to find a single argument that needed nothing but itself alone for proof, that would by itself be enough to show that God really exists."26 loc: 1614

to have the idea of an absolutely perfect being means that such a being must exist, since, if it did not, there would be a being more perfect than the one we have conceived. loc: 1622

The actions that Anselm took in response to this attack were easily as important as the content of his answer. He published Gaunilo's blunt criticism as an addendum to his essay, and appended a rejoinder of his own in which he defended his position against the monk. loc: 1630

What mattered was the quest for truth. Having established this precedent for principled debate among future theologians, Anselm answered his adversary point by point. loc: 1632

the debate exposed one of the central problems of the new theology: how to talk about God in terms that were "reasonable"—that is, in terms that made sense when talking of beings other than God—when the Supreme Being was, by definition, unique. loc: 1639

also opened up a related issue that became something of an obsession among medieval thinkers, and that has continued to interest philosophers ever since: the relationship among words, mental concepts, and things that exist outside the mind. loc: 1640

Anselm's method of argument provided a model for disputation in the new schools now springing up all over Europe. It was not enough to make a reasonable argument. One must also recognize the opposing arguments, state them strongly, answer them point by point, and then use these answers to restate the original argument more fully and convincingly. loc: 1642

The activity to which they applied the new tools of logical reasoning was therefore interpretation—a matter far less "academic" than it sounds, since changes in society had produced a desperate need for new interpretations. loc: 1648

This particular problem of interpretation—the meaning of the apostolic virtues in a commercializing, urbanizing Europe—would wrack Christendom for centuries, producing heretical, anticlerical movements outside the Church and passionate reform movements within it. loc: 1655

What to do when, because of unexpected social changes, sacred texts seemed to conflict or to produce controversial results when applied to real-life situations? loc: 1658

The motto that best defined the new spirit of inquiry was Saint Anselm's: "Faith in search of understanding." loc: 1663

Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, and the other books of the Organon analyze what we know, the way we categorize things that can be thought about, and the relationship of words to reality, as well as the major types of reasoning, the uses and misuses of logic, and how to spot a fallacious argument. For ambitious thinkers like Abelard, reading them must have been a thrilling experience. loc: 1676

these ancient translations became the basis for what scholars called the logica modernorum, "the fastest growing and most creative area of medieval philosophy."33 loc: 1679

Anselm of Canterbury's work suggested that God himself was not exempt from rational analysis, and Abelard agreed. "Man ought to direct his reason to nothing more readily than to the God in whose image he was made," he said, "since it is through his reason that he is like unto God."34 loc: 1683

Abelard appreciated the French scholar's insistence that when the views of the authorities are in conflict, one must decide which view makes more sense by using the tools of reason developed by Aristotle. loc: 1705

"[It] is clearly the property of a great heart to have recourse to dialectic in all things," Berengar had written, "because to have recourse to dialectic is to have recourse to reason; and he who refuses this recourse, since it is in reason that he is made in the image of God, abandons his glory, and cannot be renewed from day to day in the image of God." loc: 1707

Some mysteries, insisted conservatives like the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, were too delicate and holy to be profaned by the application of Aristotle's logic. loc: 1710

there was for a short time something quite close to a free market in higher education. loc: 1720

What was the subject of this argument? The great questions then agitating teachers and students in Paris (as one might expect) were those of epistemology: the theory of knowledge. How, other than by reading sacred books and meditating or praying, do we learn about reality? What is the reality we learn about by using our reason this way? And what is the relationship between the language that we use to describe things and the things that language describes? loc: 1734

traditional Christian answers, which were based on Plato's ideas, as developed by the Neoplatonists and by Saint Augustine. We learn by a divine illumination that permits us to grasp general concepts like Goodness and Justice, Man and Woman, and, for that matter, Apple and Pear. Learning these "universals" first is what permits us to recognize individual examples of each type or species: loc: 1737

when we apprehend the universals, we apprehend Reality. loc: 1740

individuals are imperfect copies or approximations lacking the permanence and perfection of the universals. If we contemplate these universals, really focus on them, we can sense that they are One—that they have a common source in the even more universal reality of God. loc: 1741

They are spiritual realities created by God when he brought the universe into existence. loc: 1744

Roscelin wheeled out Aristotle's logic, which asserted that the first things we learn, and the primary realities in our universe, are the individual things that we apprehend through our senses—not loc: 1748

The universal exists, but only as a name. What is really "out there" is the individual. loc: 1754

When Abelard challenged William after his return to Paris, however, he offered a new solution to the problem of universals—one loc: 1755

First, he demolished William's ultra-realism by showing that it was absurd to maintain that the individual members of a universal class—men, say—were essentially the same. loc: 1757

Abelard's solution (called "conceptualism" by some) untangled the knot. Roscelin was right about one thing: universal words represent mental concepts, not ultimate realities. But he was wrong to maintain that these concepts exist only in language. The similarities between individual members of a species or a class constitute a fact, not just a word or a totally subjective perception. loc: 1769

First, through our senses we become conscious of concrete individual things. Then, through a process of abstraction we arrive at general classifications. In a way that traditionalists could not help considering subversive, Abelard launched a typically Aristotelian attack on the idea that universals could somehow exist even if they had no individuals to "attach" to. loc: 1777

Earlier Christians had been taught to consider themselves members of a race: not just a biological but a moral species, so unified in spirit and in destiny that the sin of Adam and Eve, their original father and mother, could be attributed directly to each of them. The "really real" universal, Man, implied that people's individual differences were nonessential, unimportant, even an obstacle to their salvation—a loc: 1781

one's salvation or damnation was considered not so much an individual reward or punishment for good or bad behavior as a consequence of one's membership in the Christian community and God's unfathomable justice.39 loc: 1785

a person's unique character counted for very little in comparison with his or her membership in a general class like the peasantry, the priesthood, or the nobility. loc: 1788

In an age of increasing sophistication and growing interest in the natural universe, many scholars were aware that the Creator and Sustainer of everything could not be conceived of, except by simple people or poets, as a human being writ large. loc: 1793

On the other hand, though, the members of this rapidly changing society craved more than ever a personal relationship with God, and Christianity had long flourished by satisfying this need. loc: 1796

To Christians, it went without saying that God was a Trinity. But how could inquiring people using the tools of reason make sense of this Three-in-Oneness? Were the three hypostases, as the Greeks called them, or personae, as the Latins said, separate individuals? If so, what did the universal word "God" represent? loc: 1801

Roscelin, the extreme nominalist, dared to draw the logical conclusions of his own philosophy. He apparently maintained that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were individuals, and that "God" was a term expressing their unique likeness and integration. loc: 1803

A philosopher taking the hard "realist" position that only the universal was truly real could easily fall into another heresy directly opposed to Tritheism. This was "Sabellianism," the doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were mere aspects or behaviors of God, rather than real persons mysteriously united in a single divine Reality. Not only that, since the greater universals were thought to contain and to exude the lesser universals, ultra-realists often skirted the edge of the heresy known as Pantheism: the idea that the universe is part of God rather than something separated from him by the act of Creation. loc: 1809

Abelard began by affirming the idea that God must be a single, unified being. The real issue, he declared, was how to define the differences among the three persons of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cannot differ in substance or in number, for God is One. loc: 1826

the primary differences among the divine persons that we can recognize are those noted earlier by Saint Augustine: the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. The three are separate persons, but not in the same sense that three men or women are separate. loc: 1829

Abelard's enemies would leap on them as evidence of his incurable heterodoxy. On the one hand, his insistence that the persons of the Trinity could not be thought of as truly separate exposed him to the charge of Sabellianism: reducing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to mere names or functions of God. On the other, his analogies, if taken too seriously, could be seen as evidence of Arianism: the heresy that ranks the Father above the Son and both above the Holy Spirit. loc: 1838

What was really at stake here was the whole theological enterprise, which some traditionalists bitterly opposed on the ground that the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity could only be accepted on faith, not reason. loc: 1841

IN 1121, A COUNCIL of bishops and scholars assembled in the city of Soissons to rule on the orthodoxy of Abelard's treatise on the Trinity. loc: 1846

condemned the treatise without a hearing on the grounds that Abelard had not received the permission required to publish it. Despite the impropriety of this procedure, Peter was compelled to throw the book into the flames with his own hands. loc: 1852

he was damaged in a knight's most sensitive spot: his reputation. Returning to his former teaching position was impossible. Peter would spend the next ten years at a series of inhospitable monasteries far from his beloved Paris, an exile in his own country. loc: 1857

By the early 1130s, he was back in Paris, corresponding frequently with Heloise and teaching at the monastery on Mont-Sainte-Genevieve. Since the contents of his work on the Trinity had not been condemned, he felt free to expand and publish it, with a lengthy discussion of other doctrines, loc: 1866

his writings came to the attention of another popular teacher, William of Saint-Thierry. Convinced that his rival's views were deeply subversive of traditional Christianity, William fired off salvos of letters to his good friend Bernard of Clairvaux, loc: 1876

Bernard read the accompanying documents carefully, studied Abelard's writings, and made up his own mind. In the winter of 1139–1140, he wrote a series of letters denouncing Abelard as a heretic, bound them into a treatise called Against the Errors of Abelard, and sent the document to the pope with a request that Peter be investigated and disciplined by the Church. loc: 1883

The idea of exposing sacred mysteries like the Holy Trinity to glib analysis and classroom discussion seemed to him nothing less than a form of impiety—a loc: 1886

He presumes to imagine that he can entirely comprehend God by the use of his reason.46 loc: 1894

Peter asked Archbishop Henry of Sens to arrange a public disputation between Bernard and himself before the assembled notables. loc: 1920

Once ensconced in the archbishop's quarters, Bernard prevailed upon him to call a secret meeting of the bishops on the night of June 2. There, in Abelard's absence, he read out a list of nineteen charges against the philosopher based principally on his Christian Theology, discussed them, and almost certainly gained the bishops' promises to support Abelard's condemnation. loc: 1927

Abelard arrived the next morning for the disputation, only to find that the format was that of a trial, and that he was expected to play the role of the defendant. loc: 1931

Bernard read the list of alleged heretical propositions, and, according to the custom of heresy trials, demanded that Abelard either defend them, renounce them, or deny that they were his. loc: 1932

He declined to participate in the proceedings and appealed directly to the pope to decide the issues presented. loc: 1936

Innocent II condemned him as a heretic, excommunicated his followers, ordered his books to be burned in Saint Peter's Square, and commanded him to retire to a monastery, there to be perpetually silent. loc: 1950

Chapter Four "He Who Strikes You Dead Will Earn a Blessing" ARISTOTLE AMONG THE HERETICS loc: 1969

Beginning in the 1150s, Latin editions of the rediscovered writings began to flood the libraries of Europe's scholars. By medieval standards, the output of the translation centers in Spain, Provence, and Italy was enormous, numbering in the thousands of manuscripts. These books appeared in waves, beginning in mid-century with the works of the "new logic," and continuing decade after decade with Aristotle's metaphysical and scientific books, the treatises on psychology and ethics, and, finally, the essays on politics and aesthetics, each accompanied by relevant Arab commentaries. loc: 1980

a far more immediate danger to the Church's authority was gathering strength in the streets. A vast movement of popular evangelism hostile to the "corrupt" Catholic clergy had begun to make its presence felt throughout Europe. loc: 1987

urgent need to reform the Catholic clergy, a fast-growing agglomeration of priests, monks, nuns, church officials, teachers, and other employees that, in urban areas, amounted to some 10 percent of the population. loc: 1993

a great wave of religious fervor swept the population at large, particularly those living in Europe's burgeoning towns and cities. loc: 2010

The dramatic changes transforming the West—the explosion in population, the growth of cities, the revival of trade, and the circulation of new ideas—were exciting, but profoundly disturbing. loc: 2012

wandering preachers appeared in the streets of Europe's thriving towns and cities, calling both clergy and laypeople to account for their sins, and announcing the advent of a new era of spiritual renewal. loc: 2022

Henry the Monk was one such wanderer. loc: 2024

He preached against luxury, linked simplicity with salvation, and urged his listeners to make bonfires of their fancy clothes and ornaments. loc: 2027

condemned the new, onerous rules that forbade marriages between distant cousins and that made marriage a sacrament of the Church, to be controlled (and taxed) by the priesthood. loc: 2028

Arnold of Brescia was as controversial a figure as Abelard, and in many ways far more dangerous to the established order. He came from his native Lombardy to study with Abelard in Paris when the great dialectician was in mid-career. loc: 2074

Arnold used his scholarly training to develop a sharp critique of the Church's entanglement with society. According to him, the Gregorian reforms had been hamstrung by the prevailing definition of ecclesiastical office as a form of property (or "benefice"), and the insistence by popes and bishops on playing the role of great feudal landlords. loc: 2088

those who ought to have taken the lead in spiritual renewal and the care of the poor (the monastic orders, for example) were paralyzed by their all-consuming dedication to maintaining and increasing their wealth. loc: 2092

All these contradictions, Arnold boldly declared, were a product of the Gregorian popes' misguided efforts to establish their supremacy over Europe's secular rulers. In their efforts to bring the nobility to heel, the princes of the Church had succeeded only in making themselves princes of the earth. loc: 2094

In short, the Church should surrender its power and property to secular rulers, who were to distribute these lands and possessions to laymen. loc: 2100

In 1146, under Arnold's leadership, the Roman citizenry expelled Eugenius from the city. For the next three years, Rome was a democracy ruled by an elected senate, while Arnold convinced or compelled the clergy to abandon their possessions and adopt an apostolic way of life.16 loc: 2131

Arnold's movement was splitting along class lines. While the poor and many of the inferior clergy continued to support him, wealthier citizens, most of the nobility, and priests resentful of their new poverty turned against him. loc: 2141

The election of Adrian IV as pope in 1154 sealed his fate. When the new pontiff crowned Frederick Barbarossa emperor, Frederick promised to compel Arnold's protector to hand him over to imperial soldiers. loc: 2146

the volatile abbot had managed to combine three elements that, cleverly mixed, were capable of igniting a violent explosion: anticlerical anger, evangelical zeal, and secular political ambition. loc: 2157

the official responses to dissent during most of the twelfth century were relatively moderate. It was the popes, after all, who had launched the campaign to reform the clergy and who still supported the movement of popular piety, loc: 2160

the formation of a large, belligerently anti-Catholic sect with its base in southern France. In the Midi, northern Italy, and the Rhineland, a dualistic doctrine imported from the Byzantine Empire inspired tens of thousands of believers who called themselves Cathari—the Pure Ones—to organize what was, in effect, a counter-Church. loc: 2168

evangelical groups, some of them quite large, that practiced voluntary poverty and service to the poor, revered selfless leaders, lived communally, translated the Bible into vernacular tongues, and preached without authorization to all who would listen. loc: 2175

This demand for a public disputation, as well as the believers' thirst for martyrdom, represented something new. loc: 2188

refused to consume milk, meat, or any other products of procreation, and they condemned marriage, which they considered fornication. They consecrated their food and drink as the body and blood of Christ by saying the Lord's Prayer, and baptized by the simple laying on of hands loc: 2189

Determinedly nonviolent, they considered all wars unjust and opposed capital punishment. And, most shockingly, they denied the authority of the Catholic Church and the efficacy of the sacraments, loc: 2193

The Cathars took one giant step further, however. According to their leaders, there had been two Creations, not just one. At the same time that the good God created the universe of the spirit, an evil God co-eternal and co-equal in power with him created a parallel material universe. loc: 2200

Satan raided heaven to capture and imprison the angels in the human bodies that he had fashioned for that purpose. 22 Thus were human souls imprisoned in inhospitable, mortal flesh. And thus began the war between Good and Evil, loc: 2202

The inclination to define body and soul as separate and conflicting entities led some Cathars to believe in the transmigration of souls, with each soul's progress in self-purification rewarded by its rebirth in a more worthy body, and the souls of the Perfect Ones returning to God. loc: 2214

In Languedoc, and to a lesser extent in Provence and northern Italy, the new church commanded strong support among all social classes—so much so that Catharism quickly became the unofficial religion of the south. loc: 2222

nobles saw Catharism as an expression of the regional autonomy that they wished to defend against the ambitions of "foreign" popes and princes. loc: 2226

Rome dispatched several teams of Cistercian missionaries to preach in the "infected" regions, the results of these campaigns were negligible. loc: 2233

not prepared for the disputations to which learned heretics challenged them at every opportunity. loc: 2235

The Third Lateran Council of 1179 not only condemned the Cathar heresy but also added that "The whole body of the faithful must fight this pestilence vigorously, and even at need take up arms to combat it. The goods of such persons shall be forfeit, and all princes shall have the right to enslave them." The council promised that anyone fighting against the heretics would earn two years' remission of penance and be in a position to be awarded their forfeited property, "exactly like a Crusader."26 loc: 2243

Calling to their aid the methods and concepts of Aristotle's rediscovered philosophy, they threw the Catholics on the defensive and unwittingly sealed their fate. loc: 2255

their ability to support their doctrines with convincing arguments that brought educated Christians into their camp, loc: 2259

Their principal subject (amounting almost to an obsession) was the problem of Evil. How could a good God have created a universe as beset as ours is by death, decay, and moral failure? How could an all-powerful, just, and loving Creator allow plagues, natural disasters, and sinful impulses to exist? loc: 2265

Most believers tended to accept the explanations originally offered by Saint Augustine, who declared that evil is not a thing created by God, indeed, not a thing at all but an insufficiency or "privation" of being.27 Sin, or rebellion against God, said Augustine, is the product of our own free choice, not of the divine will. And—the clincher—God's inscrutable plan, if we could but understand it, would demonstrate that apparently evil events actually serve some higher purpose.28 loc: 2268

Evil is not an illusion, they insisted; it is a reality just as substantial as the material world which embodies it. Augustine himself identified sin not just with an absence of being but with concupiscence: the misuse of man's perverted will. But how could a good and omnipotent God have produced such a defective product? And how, in justice, can he damn his own sinful creatures (the vast majority of humans, according to Augustine) to eternal hellfire? loc: 2276

If God's plan is unknowable, how do we know that it aims at our good? Indeed, how can we know anything about it at all? loc: 2280

The orthodox conclusion, then, is that humans using reason alone cannot make sense of the events and impulses they call evil. Here reason must yield to revelation, and logic to faith. Christians must simply accept the idea that since God is good and all-powerful, his infinite power and knowledge will be accompanied, in due course, by infinite justice and mercy. loc: 2290

Cathars replied that there was one explanation of the phenomena that could be arrived at by using one's reason: God cannot be simultaneously good and omnipotent. loc: 2293

The existence of good and evil implies the existence of two creative principles, or Gods, neither of them omnipotent. loc: 2295

The God portrayed in the Book of Job and elsewhere in the Old Testament, a tyrannical brute infatuated with his own power, is the creator of the material universe, the source of all evil. The God of the New Testament, the source of mercy and love, is the creator of the spiritual realm, which includes his Son, the angels, and the souls of human beings. loc: 2296

But this [evil existing without a cause] would seem to be impossible, that is, that anything can begin without a cause, as it is written: "For whatever happens, it is impossible for it not to have a cause." loc: 2302

The argument is pure Aristotle. loc: 2307

The notion of an uncaused or self-caused event is an absurdity, since, as Aristotle says, everything that happens in the natural world has a cause. And since the Philosopher has demonstrated that the cause of something so general and fundamental as good must be a First Cause—a God—it stands to reason that the cause of evil must be a God as well. loc: 2314

the rationalist method that the Cathars were applying was one that many Catholic theologians had also embraced. They, too, believed that religious doctrines ought to make sense in the way that Aristotle's theories made sense. That is, they ought to be comprehensible; they ought to explain (or at least be consistent with) observed phenomena; and they ought to be justifiable by the same sort of logical arguments that were used to prove other sorts of propositions. loc: 2319

Weren't the very evils whose origin was being debated by Catholics and Cathars normal features of the natural world? What sense did it make, then, for orthodox believers to declare that they were too mysterious for human beings to comprehend? loc: 2324

The apparent conflict between science and religion could be resolved by admitting the possibility of miracles as occasional exceptions to the regularities of nature, and the existence of a Divine Kingdom in which the laws of nature were abrogated. loc: 2332

In some areas of inquiry, the task of separating the natural from the supernatural was far more difficult, and serious conflicts could therefore occur. The problem of evil was located squarely in this disputed territory, along with certain other issues, for example, the eternity of the world, the invariability of natural laws, and the nature of the soul. loc: 2338

This was the second lesson of the Cathar disputations. If Catholics wished to defeat heretics skilled in using Aristotle's arguments in debate, they had better use preachers skilled in Aristotelian dialectics—specialists loc: 2343

one such specialist, a thirty-five-year old Spanish theologian named Domingo de Guzman, loc: 2345

His first act was to advise the legates that preachers against the heretics must immediately abandon their horse-drawn coaches, dismiss their cooks and valets, discard their fine clothes, and adopt the austere lifestyle of their opponents. Shortly thereafter, he would petition the pope for permission to found a new order of preachers in order to carry the struggle against Catharism across Europe. loc: 2347

Innocent III had preached a crusade against the Cathars, and all Languedoc was in flames. loc: 2351

When he assumed the throne of Saint Peter, Innocent III was only thirty-seven years old. Three great challenges confronted the new pope and his administration: the persistence of Catharism in southern France and Italy, the spread of evangelical protest movements throughout the West, and the "invasion" of Europe's new universities by Aristotelian ideas. loc: 2358

On one side of the line he placed those who directly challenged the spiritual and organizational hegemony of the Church, or who were unrepentant heretics. Their fate was to be physically exterminated. On the other side were those whom the Church might use to its benefit, even though their ideas and attitudes seemed dubious or troublesome. Their fate, if they accepted it, was to be incorporated into the Catholic hierarchy under appropriate rules and regulations. loc: 2364

Castelnau induced a number of local barons, technically Raymond's vassals, to form a league dedicated to capturing and eliminating Cathar heretics. When invited to join the new organization, Raymond (quite predictably) refused to participate, and Castelnau retaliated by excommunicating him, loc: 2380

"He who dispossesses you will be accounted virtuous," he announced to Raymond, "he who strikes you dead will earn a blessing." loc: 2384

The following morning, just as Castelnau and his colleagues were leaving the city, one of Raymond's men accosted them and ran the papal legate through with his sword. loc: 2388

Innocent III had not planned the assassination, of course, but it was the act of war he had been waiting for. loc: 2390

The call to Crusade went out in the spring of 1208, promising the barons of Europe all the benefits of the Crusades against the Saracens, including a moratorium on their debts, remission of sins, and a right to claim properties forfeited by the heathen enemy. loc: 2392

In the end, of course, the depopulated and war-ravaged south had to give way. His army and resources exhausted, Raymond VII signed a peace treaty in 1229 that effectively ceded Languedoc to France. That same year, a great Church council in Toulouse established a new university in that city under papal control and gave the newly founded Inquisition vast powers to root out and destroy heretics. loc: 2403

Western Europe after the suppression of the Cathars was not the same society that it had been when Innocent III first assumed the papacy. An era of toleration and openness to new ideas had ended, and a new period of "strict normalization" and repression had begun.36 loc: 2413

Fourth Lateran Council convened by the pope in 1215, which not only condemned every major Cathar belief but required Jews and other non-Catholics to wear special clothing (in most places, a yellow badge) in order to warn good Christians against fraternizing too closely with them. loc: 2416

the pope remained a Gregorian, deeply devoted to radical reform of the clergy. His most remarkable achievement was to incorporate into the body of the Church many of the mass-based evangelical organizations that had terrified older conservatives like Bernard. Ignoring previous anathemas against them, Innocent negotiated compromise agreements that recognized certain groups as agents of the Church and sanctioned their activities, on condition that they reorganize their religious houses, moderate some excessive practices, and avoid preaching on theological matters. loc: 2424

what it permitted—popular preaching in the towns and cities by self-appointed evangelists—was a practice that was spreading throughout the West despite the assault on Catharism, and that was probably unstoppable. loc: 2428

Innocent's greatest triumph was the incorporation of the group led by Francis of Assisi, loc: 2430

since the impulses that motivated him—the urge to live apostolically, to serve the poor, to experience God's presence, and to preach his Word—were shared by significant numbers of zealous Catholics throughout Europe, the answer was to incorporate his followers in the body of the Church, where they might become a spiritually revitalizing and, in the long run, politically stabilizing force. loc: 2437

During Innocent's episcopate, the long period of scholastic silence that accompanied the "digestion" of Aristotle's writings came to a close. Now everyone wanted to talk about the Philosopher's works, especially those known as the "nature books": Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, and the treatises on natural science. This reception was part of a great revival of literary interest among educated Westerners, loc: 2447

The universities were also a new development. loc: 2454

Their main purpose was to train privileged young men (and a few women) to be religious leaders, public servants, teachers, lawyers, and physicians, and—a particular interest of Rome's—to produce intellectual warriors loc: 2456

they were legal corporations empowered to admit or reject members, define standards of workmanship, regulate internal promotions, and determine their own codes of conduct. loc: 2458

they exercised a high degree of day-to-day self-governance, with considerable power in the hands of the faculty and students. This structure created an intellectual and political space in which new ideas and research techniques could be generated and refined. loc: 2460

attempts to discipline or "correct" them were often met by passive resistance, shutdowns of classes, or breakaway movements that created new universities. loc: 2465

The basic education there, as in other universities, took place in the faculty of arts, whose masters offered courses in grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music—and, increasingly, in Aristotelian "natural philosophy." loc: 2471

The cornerstones of educational method were the lecture and the disputatio—a formal debate that demonstrated the student's command of the materials and ability to argue all sides of a disputed issue. loc: 2472

The University of Paris, chartered in 1200, was immediately recognized as Europe's premier center for the study of theology. Bologna, founded some sixty years earlier, was best known for its law school, which had virtually created the profession of canon lawyer. Salerno and Montpellier were generally considered to have the best medical faculties, and Oxford soon achieved a reputation for expertise in natural science. Within the century, Europe would boast some one hundred universities, loc: 2477

Paris—the most exciting and troublesome community was the liberal arts faculty, loc: 2481

"the masters of arts were the permanent element of intellectual unrest and the driving force of intellectual revolutions." loc: 2485

As the Philosopher's works became available in Latin, the masters modified the curriculum to include them, and the faculties of arts at leading universities soon became, in effect, schools of Aristotelian philosophy. loc: 2487

conflict blossomed with the appearance of his "nature books." loc: 2489

Courcon drew up new university statutes that expressly permitted the reading of Aristotle's logical books in the faculty of arts, but that proscribed his "books of metaphysics and natural philosophy and summaries of these."44 loc: 2496

the three men named by Cardinal Courcon were scholars whose beliefs were identified with Aristotle's metaphysics and natural science, and whose condemnation was intended to warn others not to follow their example. loc: 2509

the Paris masters taught that the material universe was good, and that it was God.48 loc: 2513

David of Dinant loc: 2514

The conclusion that he reached—his own fusion of Aristotelian and Christian doctrine—was that existence itself was the common feature. God, who is pure Being, created the universe out of himself. Its form, or spirit, is his Spirit, and even its matter partakes of his Being. In the last analysis, David concluded, God, matter, and the soul are One. loc: 2520

The distinction was especially important for Christians, who believed that the natural world was a fallen world, separated from the Kingdom of Heaven by sin and mortality. If the world was God, what would become of man's immortality and the hope of heaven? loc: 2526

According to Amalric, however, the men and women of earth did not require salvation in the afterlife. Since their souls (at least those of his disciples) participated in God's Spirit while alive, they were incapable of sinning, no matter what thoughts or actions they undertook. 49 loc: 2532

Apparently the Amalricians believed that the inauguration of the Third Age was imminent or that it had already begun—not very good news for the Roman Catholic Church, since that eventuality would make organized religion unnecessary.51 loc: 2538

But with the Cathars using Aristotle's writings to support their heretical dualism and masters of philosophy at Paris using the same works to support their heretical pantheism, the bishop of Paris and his confreres at the university concluded that the Philosopher's books were far too dangerous to be read and interpreted by the masters and their undergraduate students. loc: 2548

Domingo de Guzman, the scourge of the Cathars, was clamoring for recognition of his proposed Order of Friars Preachers and insisting at the same time that Aristotle could be—must be—studied and used by Christian intellectuals in the continuing struggle against heresy. loc: 2557

Chapter Five "Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark" ARISTOTLE AND THE TEACHING FRIARS loc: 2563

in situations of conflict, the Parisian masters and students tended to unite against all other sources of authority, from the city council to the pope. loc: 2587

Blanche of Castile, the ruler of France during the minority of her son, King Louis IX, intervened to demand that the students be punished. loc: 2592

The response from the university community was instantaneous. The masters of arts suspended their classes loc: 2596

they issued a decree suspending all teaching for a period of six years, and forbidding anyone to reside in Paris for the purpose of attending the university. loc: 2602

Other universities, meanwhile, rejoiced at the sudden influx of Paris-trained students and masters, and at the damage being inflicted on their haughty competitor. Some even attempted to take advantage of the ban on Aristotle's scientific works, which remained in effect in Paris but had not yet been extended to other universities. loc: 2610

Pope Gregory IX, loc: 2615

On April 13, 1231, he promulgated a solemn decree called Parens Scientarum ("The Mother of Sciences"), which has been called the Magna Carta of the University of Paris, since it guaranteed the school a large measure of independence loc: 2616

the Dominican friars—a group resented and feared by many in the university community—had obtained important teaching positions in the school of theology, loc: 2621

Students and teachers returning to Paris from Oxford reported that its first chancellor, the well-known (and quite conservative) scholar and theologian Robert Grosseteste, had made the Philosopher's books of natural philosophy required reading. loc: 2634

in reiterating the ban he added the crucial words "until [the books] have been examined and purged of all suspicion of error." loc: 2639

What finally caused the breakthrough was not, as one might expect, the students' demands for a scientific education or protests by the masters of arts, but the dramatic appearance on campus of two highly controversial groups of monks: the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers and the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor. loc: 2644

From this point forward, both orders extended their academic reach until they had established themselves as an important presence in all of the major European universities. loc: 2655

it would have been difficult to prevent the new orders, both of them strongly evangelical, from recruiting existing students and masters. In 1236, an experienced and well-known master of theology, Alexander of Hales, joined the Order of Friars Minor, thereby becoming the first Franciscan professor of theology at Paris. One of his students, Giovanni di Fidanza, who took the name Bonaventure, would rise to a position of great eminence in the faculty of theology as well as becoming minister-general of the Franciscan Order. loc: 2663

Intellectually, their interests were considerably more focused and mission-oriented than those of the other masters, and they pursued them with a fierce passion that many deemed incompatible with the spirit of open, reasoned inquiry. loc: 2669

both orders recruited avidly among the talented liberal arts students, who, once "caught" in their nets, owed their loyalty henceforth to their order rather than to the university. The newcomers were viewed, in short, as agents of outside forces—creatures of the pope who had empowered them, loc: 2673

vital role played by the mendicant orders in overthrowing the ban on Aristotle's natural philosophy. loc: 2679

The Church's intellectual knights needed Aristotle's metaphysical and scientific books—properly interpreted and "corrected," of course—as weapons in their ongoing struggle against the enemies of Christianity. loc: 2685

the most militant and confident defenders of the faith, at this crucial juncture in Western intellectual history, were also the most committed advocates of the new learning. loc: 2692

William of Auvergne, loc: 2696

William's key move was to identify the natural world, as Aristotle analyzed it, with the good Creation described by Scripture (such as Genesis 1:31: "God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good"). What inspired his work was the realization that Aristotle's account of the natural universe could provide convincing answers to the Cathars' heretical doctrine that good and evil are equally potent forces, with matter constituting the root of all evil and spirit the source of all good. loc: 2704

Aristotle had argued (opposing the dualists of his own time) that attempts to split the universe along such lines are senseless, since reality does not "contend" with itself in any fundamental sense. loc: 2708

a system that, looked at as a whole, is magnificently integrated. Every part of nature is interdependent with every other part. All opposites in nature imply some common underlying reality, like black and white existing on a common surface. That reality, Aristotle said, is Being, loc: 2712

God, who is pure form, is the most perfectly realized Being of all, but this does not mean that less perfect substances are defective or evil. On the contrary, everything in the universe is in the process of realizing its true form or essence—of becoming as perfect as possible, given the limitations of its structure. In this sense, the natural universe—the world of Being—is not only not-evil, it is positively good.10 loc: 2716

Aristotle did not have much to say about the problem of evil, loc: 2720

One conclusion, a bit abstract but comfortably Augustinian, was that evil is not a form of Being at all, but an absence or "privation" of Being. loc: 2724

A second conclusion is that sin describes something that human beings do in the exercise of their free will, not something inherent in the natural order. loc: 2727

it takes a significant step away from the traditional Christian idea that sin is the product of a human nature so corrupted as to require a supernatural Redeemer. loc: 2731

To Saint Augustine, the archetypal sin was lust or "concupiscence," a desire for forbidden pleasure that seemed impossible to control without divine assistance. loc: 2732

Aristotle asserted quite confidently that the material universe had no beginning and has no end.12 Nothing is created from nothing—isn't loc: 2743   • Delete this highlight

Note: And, really, the big bang is just another myth trying to explain creation ex nihilo Edit

"The issue of the eternity of the world was to the relations between science and religion in the Middle Ages what the heliocentric system of Copernicus was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what the Darwinian theory of evolution has been since its inception in the nineteenth century." 13 The problem was that the doctrine could lead thinkers in either of two directions. One road led toward pantheism—the confusion of the Creator with his creation. The other led toward secularism—the removal of God from active involvement with the universe. loc: 2749

another, equally disturbing implication of Aristotle's doctrine. This was the idea that the things that comprise the universe change and move according to principles or laws inherent in their own nature, not because the Creator made them and chooses continuously to maintain them that way. loc: 2763

Not only does the idea of exclusively natural causation eliminate the possibility of miracles, it pretty much eliminates divine providence in any form loc: 2766

what becomes of God's freedom to do absolutely as he pleases? And what becomes of human beings' freedom to choose good or evil? loc: 2770

William of Auvergne's number-one target. This was the great Persian Neoplatonist Avicenna, who maintained that God had created the universe by necessity and through a process of "emanation," or overflow of his God-nature, into successive spheres of Being, loc: 2773   • Delete this highlight

Note: Is this also the driving force behind Zohar and Kabbalah? Edit

Rather, creation is a continuous process, the work of an omnipotent God who can do anything he pleases, short of creating a genuine contradiction. (For example, since God is absolutely good, he cannot sin.) All this becomes clear, said William, if one reads the "book of nature" aright, understanding that the universe is the product of an Intelligence and a Will that preexist it and remain outside it—in short, that it is "one skill, or work, one discourse or meaning, one sign or designation of Himself, one book or scripture, placed in the sight of the human intellect so that, reading, it may become wise in it and as far as possible learn about its creator."15 loc: 2785

We cannot understand the universe on the basis of its internal workings alone. The book's deeper meaning can be grasped only by discovering its author's intentions, and for this we need more than Aristotle's natural philosophy. We need divine philosophy, beginning with the Word of God as revealed in his Holy Scriptures and interpreted by the Fathers of the Church. loc: 2791

Albertus Magnus—Albert the Great. loc: 2804

Albert was a vehement opponent of heresy, but his interest in Aristotelian thought extended far beyond the specific doctrines needed to conduct disputations with the Cathars or the Joachimites. loc: 2805

"conceived the almost fantastic plan of making the complete works of Aristotle, with their wholly new theory of reality, accessible to the Latin West," and carried it out by commenting on all of the Philosopher's extant books.17 loc: 2807

the blunt Swabian was an extraordinary observer and collector—the most accomplished botanist and zoologist of his day, and a pioneer in the methods of empirical research. loc: 2810

when it came to understanding the particulars, Albert maintained that "only experience provides certainty."21 He insisted, therefore, that research into natural processes should proceed without being diverted by irrelevant theological considerations. loc: 2830

creation means that God gives each created thing its own reality or being. Therefore, our religious duty is to understand things as they really are—a loc: 2833

The proper concern of natural science is not what God could do if he wished, but what he has done: that is, what happens in the world "according to the inherent causes of nature."25 loc: 2854

This notion of "dual causation"—the idea that a creative God causes the things of the world to operate as causes in themselves—was to become one of the principal doctrines used by Dominican theologians like Aquinas to reconcile science with religion. loc: 2856

Bacon was probably the first master in more than thirty years to lecture on Aristotle in the faculty of arts—another loc: 2865

probably the most learned man in Europe, as well as one of the most imaginative thinkers in history. loc: 2869

certain that scientific knowledge would someday give humanity mastery over nature, and envisioned "the technical world of the future: loc: 2871

the leading intellectual voice of the Franciscan movement. loc: 2875

Some think that he was punished, perhaps even imprisoned, because of his sympathies for the Joachimite wing of the Franciscan movement, later to be known as the "Spirituals," a radical group that criticized the worldliness and corruption of the Church (including the Franciscan leadership), and that anticipated the coming of the Third Age of the Holy Spirit.30 loc: 2880

many shared his conviction that the Dominicans were too cerebral and "academic" in their theology, too close to the sources of power in the Church, loc: 2884

What most displeased him was the older man's failure (as he saw it) to achieve a genuine reconciliation of natural science with Christianity. On the one hand, he argued, this was because the Dominicans were not scientific enough. What was needed was analysis, not just description; testable theories, not just sweeping generalities; experimentation, not just observation. On the other hand, the Dominican approach seemed overly intellectual and essentially soulless. loc: 2889

The "gate and the key" of all the sciences, said Bacon, was "mathematics, loc: 2899

the treasure chest to be unlocked by this key—"the flower of the whole of philosophy"—was the science of light, later to be called optics but known as "perspective" in Bacon's time. loc: 2901

He believed that mathematics (by which he meant geometry) gave access to the mind of the Creator, and that light was the purest expression of the Holy Spirit. loc: 2911

To know light scientifically, therefore, was a step on the road to knowing God personally. loc: 2916

As Albert and his young friend Thomas Aquinas saw it, the theory of light as a universal cause—a mystical belief that could not be verified by experiment or observation—turned science from the study of particular causes into a study of occult relationships. loc: 2930

One of the most striking features of the conflict, however, is that it did not represent a war between "science" and "religion." Neither side questioned the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Not until the appearance of a group of radical Aristotelians at the University of Paris in the 1260s could a major participant even be accused of being antireligious. Nor did either side take the position, associated with certain modern "fundamentalisms," that scientific inquiry is inherently hostile to religious faith. loc: 2940

The great issue, in other words, was not whether inquiring into nature's workings was a good thing or a bad thing. It was a good thing, since both reason and nature were from God. loc: 2956

Exercising his fancied rights as a feudal lord and Roman paterfamilias, Landulf demanded that Thomas return home. loc: 2977

The brothers ran him down, imprisoned him in one of the family's castles, and held him there for almost two years while his parents waited for him to relent. loc: 2981

Thomas studied with Albert for eight years, first in Paris and then in Cologne. loc: 2988

He knew, of course, that he would be involved in intellectual controversies at the university, especially with the Franciscans, who were then led by a fellow Italian some four year his senior, the redoubtable and multitalented Bonaventure. loc: 2989

Bonaventure and his colleagues were especially disturbed by Aristotle's insistence that, although God is the First Cause of everything that exists, natural beings have their own causes and effects that operate without divine participation or intervention. loc: 2995

he also proposed a series of "amendments" to the definitions of form, matter, substance, and causation whose effect was to make God an immediate participant in every natural event—a divine cause operating actively behind each natural cause. loc: 2999

Aristotle's view of nature was perfectly adequate as far as it went, Thomas insisted, and should not be tampered with by spiritualizing matter, adding supernatural to natural causes, or anything of the sort. loc: 3007

Where the Philosopher fell short—seriously short—was in failing to recognize that all created things, with their built-in tendencies to behave or develop according to their natures, owe their entire being to God. God did not create things once upon a time and then step back while nature took over. Creation is constant. loc: 3008

Thomas startled his contemporaries and initially earned the reputation of being a dangerous radical by extending the realm of reason deep into the territory of theology and creating what he called a "natural theology." According to him, there are only three doctrines that cannot be proved by using natural reason: the creation of the universe from nothing, God's nature as a Trinity, and Jesus Christ's role in man's salvation. loc: 3016

Through reason, not just Revelation, we can discover the moral standards that God requires of us in this life and our need for knowledge of Him in the afterlife. loc: 3021

the situation at the University of Paris was transformed almost beyond recognition. The change began happily enough, with the end of the ban on studying Aristotle's natural philosophy. loc: 3026

Many outsiders, however, linked the Order of Friars Preachers' power to the Inquisition, which had become extremely unpopular in many parts of Europe, or to the papacy, whose political machinations aroused bitter opposition in regions subject to long-running disputes between popes and secular princes. loc: 3054

Even the Order of Friars Minor, however, became the target of hatred in some quarters because of a second change in the mendicants' fortunes—the grant of lucrative privileges previously reserved for the "secular" clergy. loc: 3059

the masters insisted that one of the two Dominican chairs of theology be eliminated. The Franciscans, who had only one chair, nevertheless saw the demand as a threat to their position and formed a bloc with the Dominicans, loc: 3072

although William did not mention the Dominicans and Franciscans by name, he had accused the friars of being precursors of the Antichrist. He ridiculed their intellectual pretensions, excoriated their clannishness, blasted their morals, and declared that their position as "wealthy beggars" was both hypocritical and antiChristian. loc: 3096

During the next few years, through the good offices of the papacy, compromises were worked out, first with the Franciscans and then with the Dominicans, by which the university accepted the teaching friars as part of the consortium of masters but excluded them from teaching in the faculty of arts and limited their participation in university decision making. loc: 3106

Chapter Six "This Man Understands" THE GREAT DEBATE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS loc: 3127

The hallmark of his teaching was to present Aristotle's ideas about nature and human nature without attempting to reconcile them with traditional Christian beliefs. In fact, Siger seemed to relish the discontinuities between Aristotelian scientia and Christian faith. loc: 3172

he and his colleagues taught their students that, according to the Philosopher and his Arab interpreter Averroes, the world and the human race are eternal, the behavior of natural objects is governed by the laws of their nature, man's free will is limited by necessity, and all humans share a single active intellectual principle, which is a substance separate from their individual bodies. loc: 3174

If the universe, including all the species in it, is eternal, then there never was a Creation or an Adam and Eve, nor can there be a Last Judgment. If all natural activities are governed exclusively by natural laws or tendencies, this leaves no room for divine providence and ordinary miracles like the Eucharist, much less the once-in-an-eternity miracles of Christ's incarnation, atonement, and resurrection. The doctrine that all people share one intellect (an idea associated with Averroes, and known as "monopsychism") seems clearly to negate the immortality of individual souls. And if free will is an illusion, what becomes of sin, grace, and the rewards or punishments of the afterlife? loc: 3191

The radicals replied (with some justification) that they were not theology professors but teachers of the arts and sciences, which now included the entire Aristotelian corpus. They were neither qualified nor permitted to determine theological questions. Therefore, they simply taught Aristotle, loc: 3203

Double Truth meant that a proposition could be true scientifically but false theologically, or the other way round, and that there was no way of using one type of truth to falsify the other type. loc: 3224

Not only would Double Truth produce logical contradictions (the same statement could be true and false simultaneously), in practice it would force people to choose between faith and reason. loc: 3228

the bishop of Paris banned the teaching of certain Aristotelian and Averroist doctrines at Europe's greatest university. The Condemnations of 1270 threw down the gauntlet to Siger de Brabant and his radical colleagues in the faculty of liberal arts. loc: 3278

WHEN THE IDEAS of Siger de Brabant became a cause celebre in the mid-1260s, Aquinas was no longer at the University of Paris. loc: 3312

in 1268, however, he received a summons from the Dominican director-general ordering him to return immediately to Paris to reassume his chair at the faculty of theology. loc: 3316

To these conservatives, the eruption of radicalism among the masters of arts proved that Aristotle's natural philosophy, embraced too enthusiastically, represented a serious threat to Christian orthodoxy. loc: 3320

Controversy swirled around Thomas's allegedly "unchristian" attitude toward worldly happiness. Traditionally, the Church had taught that man is born to suffer in this world, and that his only real hope for happiness is in heaven. But Aristotle had asserted that our earthbound existence offers many opportunities for joy, the most lasting and reliable of which is the joy of using our reason to learn and understand. loc: 3338

Thomas, it was the essence of Christianity to assume that human nature, like nature generally, moves by its own inherent principles of development toward God. loc: 3351

The natural world is not in any respect evil. Ultimately, it is not even incomplete, since the nature of all things is to move continuously and harmoniously toward their completion in God. loc: 3353

Even human social institutions, of which Augustine despaired in The City of God, are capable of becoming decent houses for the human spirit, since, as Aristotle says, "man is by nature a political animal."23 And—here is where Thomas joined battle with both Siger and the Franciscans—the human being is not merely a soul temporarily inhabiting a corrupt and insignificant body. We are a fusion of soul with body that outlasts even death. loc: 3357

For Aristotle and his medieval readers, the soul was a perfectly suitable subject for scientific inquiry, since the Philosopher's anima was not merely some sort of ethereal "spirit," but included all the faculties that we would study under the headings of human physiology, psychology, and cognitive science: a capacity for nutrition, growth, and reproduction; a capacity to register and process sense impressions; and a peculiarly human capacity to understand things and to will them. loc: 3362

All agreed that while some functions of the anima are too closely connected to the senses to survive the death of the body, a person's "rational soul" or intellect does survive. loc: 3373

Aristotle bitterly opposed the idea that the soul is an immortal substance trapped in an alien body, and that matter and spirit, body and soul, are at war with each other. He insisted, on the contrary, that the soul is the "form" or animating principle of the human being, which means that body and soul together form one integral substance. loc: 3381

Siger saved the unity of man's body and soul by redefining immortality as a collective, not an individual, end state. The intellect can survive while the man dies, he maintained, because it is not an integral part of the individual soul but a capacity external to us, loc: 3385

It was this monopsychic doctrine, above all, that drove the conservative theologians wild, for its obvious implication was that there was no individual immortality, and thus no possibility of reward or punishment for individuals in the afterlife. loc: 3391

But, said Thomas, it is possible to harmonize the ideas of individuality and immortality loc: 3401

The key is to recognize that the intellect is not just an ordinary form fused with matter but something capable of independent subsistence, a form that is like a substance, loc: 3402

it is only by uniting with a human body that it becomes individualized, obtaining an identity that persists even after the body dies. loc: 3405

Conservatives steeped in the Augustinian tradition, however, saw the idea as more Greek than Christian—another piece of evidence that Thomas, like the radicals, had been drinking too deeply of Aristotelian wine. Of course the soul and the body were at war! To lose sight of this fact would be to turn one's back on a thousand years of Christian asceticism. loc: 3414

Siger and the radicals insisted that from the point of view of reason the universe is without beginning or end. loc: 3419

Thomas took the position that it was impossible to prove either position in this debate by scientific reason. 40 Clearly Siger was wrong to say that the eternity of the world was the better argument, but he was quite right to say that the Christian doctrine of creation is a matter of faith, not something that can be proved by reason. loc: 3426

Aquinas pretended to oppose Siger and his cohorts as vigorously as they did, but when one looked under the surface, weren't he and the radicals really saying the same thing? Nature was governed by natural laws that worked without God's intervention. Men and women could be happy in this life, despite their fallen state. The soul received its individuality from the body. And now, at least as a theoretical possibility, the material world could be co-eternal with God. loc: 3430

convinced the conservative theologians that Thomas was a dangerous enemy in disguise. loc: 3434

"I will write no more." Later, when Reginald pressed him to continue his work, he said, "I can do no more. After what I have seen, everything that I have written seems like straw." loc: 3452

Alberic's regime adopted new statutes forbidding the arts masters either to reach theological conclusions in their lectures or to "teach against the faith" loc: 3473

the papal legate, Simon of Brioni, came to the university, held hearings, and imposed a settlement on the arts faculty that favored the conservatives. loc: 3478

The radicals were not heretics, but they were fascinated "with the truly amazing potentialities of human reason to acquire new knowledge and insight." For them, "in the face of this new plethora of knowledge about the natural world, theology simply became uninteresting." 49 loc: 3503

With the radicals weakened by the loss of their leaders, the bishop and his cohorts could not resist the temptation to smash their movement completely, and, as a significant bonus, to bring the Thomists into disrepute. loc: 3514

His aim this time was to outlaw an impious, secularist attitude, and this meant banning every dubious Aristotelian proposition advanced by the radical masters, as well as those possibly implicit in their teachings loc: 3522

The picture which emerges ... is one of able and devout Christian philosophers and theologians being attacked for largely non-doctrinal reasons, and condemned by a dishonest and vengeful committee of theologians loc: 3542

This tendency to assume that nature's workings could be described and even predicted on the sole basis of what Aquinas had called "secondary causes" produced a series of condemnations that were really warnings against considering natural laws absolute, and thus replacing God with Nature. loc: 3554

Bishop Tempier's intention. His purpose was to reassert the supremacy of traditional Christian doctrines and attitudes over natural philosophy—a loc: 3562

Dominicans mobilized immediately, adopting internal rules that provided for the punishment of any member of the order who, like the English archbishop, criticized Aquinas's views publicly. loc: 3576

After that debacle, the Dominicans, who made Thomas's theology the basis for the curriculum in their own schools, steadily gained ground. In 1323, less than fifty years after his views were condemned at Oxford, the controversial Italian was canonized by Rome. Two years after that, in a most unusual document, the bishop of Paris retracted the Parisian condemnations that "concerned or are claimed to concern the doctrine of Blessed Thomas," thus clearing the Thomists of any suspicion of heresy. loc: 3583

But the notable fact is that the condemnations had so little effect, even in the short run, on the development of Thomist theology, rationalist thinking, or scholarly interest in natural science. loc: 3590

Radicalism never conquered at Paris, but it became a strong influence at Bologna and a dominant force at the University of Padua. Once unleashed on European society, the idea that the truths of natural philosophy deserved as much attention and credence as those of theology could not be suppressed. loc: 3600

After 1277, the split between reason and faith that everyone but the radicals had attempted to avoid seemed to develop with a force of its own. loc: 3607

Chapter Seven "Ockham's Razor" THE DIVORCE OF FAITH AND REASON loc: 3623

POPE BONIFACE VIII declared the year 1300 a Jubilee Year loc: 3627

One historian calls the celebration "perhaps the first example of the manipulation of the masses for a political end, in this case the demonstration of the power of the papal theocracy and the full authority of papal rule over all Christian people."1 Boldly, the pope declared himself the final arbiter of conflicts between princes and a fountain of justice to the common folk—a leader whose will in disputed cases must be obeyed, since he was Christ's representative on earth. loc: 3636

alarming increase of violent warfare among Europe's noble families. Across the continent, the aristocratic solidarity that had been nurtured for centuries by diplomatic marriages, codes of courtly behavior, and crusades was giving way to a struggle for power more intense and uninhibited than anyone had believed possible. loc: 3656

Hundred Years War—a desperate struggle for European supremacy fought largely by mercenaries, in which both monarchs were compelled to tax the Church to defray their military expenses. loc: 3661

To restore peace and protect the Church's interests, he intervened in Italy, Spain, Scotland, Hungary, Poland ... and, of course, England and France. In virtually every case, however, his actions proved either fruitless or counterproductive. loc: 3667

More than two centuries of economic growth had ended in depression and stagnation, inflaming conflicts between lords and peasants, great and petty nobles, mercenary soldiers and civilians, townspeople and country folk. The population boom had ended as well, with growth declining to near zero.7 Even the climate went bad, as Europe entered a "little ice age" of cold winters and short growing seasons. loc: 3684

The turn of the century saw an upsurge in apocalyptic prophecies and expectations, a new growth of "enthusiastic" spiritual movements (some of them flirting with heresy), and a revival of mysticism involving laypeople as well as the clergy. loc: 3690

in 1302, the beleaguered pope issued his famous bull, Unam Sanctam, claiming the power to depose disobedient kings, and stating, "We declare, proclaim, and define that subjection to the Roman Pontiff is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature." loc: 3700

Philip's response was to convene a council in Paris attended by French clerics loyal to him, which promptly branded Boniface a heretic, robber, simoniac, and practitioner of black magic, loc: 3702

Philip's minister, Nogaret, arrived in Italy and, with the help of the pope's hereditary enemies, the Colonna family, raised an army of two thousand mercenaries for an attack on the papal palace in his home city of Anagni. Resistance was useless. The pope's retinue of cardinals deserted him, and he was captured alone, loc: 3706

The unprecedented brutalization of a sitting pope was a sign that the balance of power between secular and ecclesiastical forces in Europe was undergoing a tectonic shift. This became obvious when Boniface's successor, Clement V, moved the papal headquarters to Avignon and permitted the French monarchy to establish effective control over the Church's finances and politics. loc: 3713

At the dawn of the new century, the Franciscan friars found themselves embroiled in conflicts on two fronts. loc: 3731

According to spokesmen like the charismatic monk from Narbonne, Peter John Olivi, the Friars Minor had relaxed the founder's prohibition against holding communal property, and were drifting with the rest of the Church toward the values of materialism, legalism, and power politics. As an antidote, the Spirituals advocated communal as well as individual poverty, spontaneity, and spiritual inwardness. loc: 3733

Thanks to the Dominicans' ferocious advocacy of their champion, Thomas Aquinas, as well as a shift in the European political climate, Rome recognized that Thomas's thinking was not nearly as radical or threatening as had been feared. loc: 3743

Franciscans—especially those of radical bent—who saw Thomism as the theological expression of a Church too much at home in the world, too far removed from the core of religious experience, and too confident of its ability to understand and enforce God's will on earth. loc: 3752

The Franciscan innovators had little interest either in glorifying reason or debunking it. The problem, as they saw it, was that the older generation of theologians, both Dominican and Franciscan, had misconceived what we know and how we know it, and had therefore drawn an improper boundary between faith and reason. What was urgently needed, in their view, was no mere correction of Thomism, but an entirely new map of knowledge. loc: 3757

Thomas believed that by understanding the laws governing nature, we perceive, even if dimly, the creative intentions of God. According to Duns Scotus, this was a serious mistake. Our minds have some powers of which Thomas was unaware—for example, the power to understand the form of individual things intuitively, without mechanically "abstracting" their general characteristics from sense impressions.15 But we cannot look into the "mirror of nature" and reach valid conclusions about God's intentions, desires, or plans. Nor, on the basis of what we observe in the natural universe, can we deduce the truths of religion. loc: 3778

That sort of knowledge, the Franciscan insisted, can only be acquired through faith. loc: 3783

the patterns we apprehend in nature—in particular, what Thomas called "intelligible species"—represent the designs of the Creator. And it is also through his will that we gain certain knowledge of them through the power of our "active intellect." loc: 3791

What he found entirely unacceptable, however, was the implication that God's power is self-limited by being channeled into the "secondary causes" that we see operating in nature. Since God is absolutely free to do as he wishes, Duns Scotus insisted, everything that he does is contingent, not necessary, and he is not bound in the slightest by the natural laws that humans discover. loc: 3796

Nothing exists necessarily except God himself. But if this is true, everything that science discovers must be provisional. God's absolute freedom makes the laws of nature merely probable rather than certain. loc: 3801

Note: Is this what Heisenberg is getting at, without the theology, of course?

Using hindsight, one can see Thomas Aquinas supplying the first part of a scientific worldview by emphasizing the existence of knowable causal patterns in an integrated, interdependent natural universe. Duns Scotus supplies a second element: the recognition that our understanding of how these causes operate must always be provisional. A third component—what might be called the metaphysical simplification of the universe—was the achievement of William of Ockham, loc: 3804

Ockham vehemently denied the independent reality of hypothetical entities like "man" and "animal." loc: 3815

"intelligible species" are merely mental concepts or linguistic terms abstracted by humans from the primary objects of knowledge: real existing individuals.20 loc: 3815

unnecessary metaphysical complications (assigning separate "final causes" to every substance in the universe, for example) do not help us to understand the natural world. In fact, they are obstacles to clear understanding. loc: 3817

Ockham's razor, on the other hand, implied that the task undertaken by Thomas—the attempt to construct a unitary system capable of explaining both natural and divine things—was impossible. Behind his call for simplicity, in other words, lay a conviction that natural science and theology must go their separate ways. On the science side, there are concepts and methods derived from experience and processed by reason that help us to understand the natural world and the world of human society. On the theology side, there are doctrines revealed by Scripture or the Church that help us to understand God and what he requires of us. From Ockham's point of view, Thomas had made a hash of things by conflating the two realms of understanding. loc: 3823

The result was a split in the Aristotelian movement which opened a great gap between faith and reason, religious experience and scientific endeavor. loc: 3833

God creates the universe, said William of Ockham, but the patterns that we discover by reasoning abstractly about created things are the products of our mental processes, not evidence of divine intentions. Reason is not inherent in nature, which obeys God's unfathomable will, but in our own minds. loc: 3843

Note: Anticipating Hume?

For the natural relationships that people can describe using their powers of observation and reason are not unreal in the sense of being illusory or meaningless. Not at all. They are simply probable rather than certain, "contingent" rather than necessary, limited to explaining natural processes rather than capable of explaining God. loc: 3846

Freed of the burden of making theological sense of scientific findings, "we can approach nature with a new optimism, a new strength, and a new technique." loc: 3851

Moses Maimonides set out the extreme position by declaring that we can know God only negatively—that is, we can know what he is not, not really what he is.27 Of course, the sacred writings describe him as good, just, wise, all-powerful, merciful, and so forth, but this raises a further question: What does God's goodness or justice have to do with ours? Maimonides felt that to impose human definitions of such attributes on God was a sort of idolatry, and many medieval Christian thinkers agreed.28 loc: 3867

This created an obvious problem. If God is completely "other," we may have no way of understanding him at all. loc: 3871

Ockham's razor had struck again, with the result that the sources of knowledge of God were reduced to two: sacred writings (as interpreted by the theologians) and mystical experience. loc: 3884

its effect would be to drive a wedge between thinking and believing. Ultimately, it threatened to narrow the business of the Church to praying, theologizing, and administering the sacraments. loc: 3887

The pope immediately appointed a commission to investigate the charges, ordered William to come to Avignon, and told him to remain there until the commission was ready to hear his testimony. loc: 3902

Philosophically speaking, the abyss that yawns beneath him is a permanent divorce between faith and reason. loc: 3916

He liked to argue that God could, if he wished, condemn the innocent and reward the guilty, or make two solid objects occupy the same place at the same time. The point was to demonstrate that God's absolute freedom and power are not limited by our notions of justice or common sense. loc: 3934

Finally, in 1327, they issued fifty-one articles of censure describing his ideas (depending upon the treatise being examined) as "heretical," "false," "dangerous," "erroneous," "rash," or "contradictory."35 loc: 3942

William decided to take advantage of a new alternative created by the unrelenting warfare between the pope and certain secular rulers: flight to the territory of a hospitable, antipapal prince. loc: 3950

King Ludwig of Bavaria was just such a ruler—one of the new breed of princes not at all impressed by the pope's power to excommunicate his enemies. loc: 3952

Pope John then excommunicated Ludwig, and the German ruler retaliated by having "his" bishops declare that the pope himself was a heretic who should be deposed. loc: 3959

In April 1328, cardinals loyal to Ludwig elected a pope of their own and seated him at the Vatican. Once again, scandalously, the Church had two popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome. loc: 3963

Munich a community of scholars who disagreed strongly among themselves, but who were united in opposing papal claims to infallibility in matters of doctrine and absolute obedience in matters of Church law and politics. loc: 3971

He upheld the Franciscan ideal of a poor clergy, denied the pope's power to rule over secular sovereigns, and argued that the ultimate source of religious authority was the people of the Church rather than the hierarchy. loc: 3978

Some have called William the first Protestant, yet he remained intensely Catholic. loc: 3981

In the same year that the papal commission condemned Ockham's fifty-one propositions, the great German mystic Meister Eckhart appeared in Avignon to defend himself against twenty-eight counts of heresy. loc: 3988

Eckhart's favorite theme was the ability of Christian believers to know God personally, and it was his effort to explore that mystical theme in theological language that had landed him, near the end of a distinguished career, in the defendant's chair at Avignon. loc: 3998

To Eckhart, on the other hand, what experience meant, above all, was the immediate, intuitive knowledge of God—a "datum" that could be used, like the data of natural science, to test and reinterpret accepted doctrines. loc: 4006

he even seemed to suggest that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was merely a mental concept that did not express the more fundamental unity of the Godhead experienced by mystics. loc: 4009

feared the impact of the preacher's teachings in the inflamed German atmosphere. Northern European cities were seeing a rapid proliferation of pietistic groups known as Beghards (men) and Beguines (women)—communal associations of laypeople who practiced apostolic living, preached a gospel of spiritual perfection, and sometimes lapsed into various forms of mystical heresy. The hierarchy's great fear—realized in later years by John Wycliffe in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia, and, finally, Martin Luther in Germany—was the emergence of a charismatic "insider" like Eckhart, a member of the educated elite, at the head of a massive, independent religious movement. loc: 4018

"We are nothing" suggests that God is the only reality and that Creation is an illusion—an ancient error. And the idea that humans can actually become God in this life would immediately remind the papal commissioners of current popular heresies loc: 4059

In 1329, the commission condemned both of these doctrines "as stated" along with twenty-six of Eckhart's other teachings. loc: 4072

In these two scholastics, the Dominican preacher and the Franciscan logician, we can see the split emerging that would henceforth divide Western culture into two divergent currents: a culture of the heart and a culture of the head—a loc: 4083

The question was always to what extent a genuine reconciliation was possible between the visions of an autonomous, self-sufficient universe and a universe dependent upon a personal God. Aristotelian Christianity did not resolve the conflict between these perspectives, but it had held them in creative tension. With the passing of the Aristotelian tradition, Western culture—and the individuals who created it—would find itself increasingly torn between the ideals of the reasoning head and the questing heart. loc: 4092

Note: This sentence probably comes as close to expressing the theme of the book.

Chapter Eight "God Does Not Have to Move These Circles Anymore" ARISTOTLE AND THE MODERN WORLD loc: 4096

The idea of a medieval "dark age" is a corollary of the origin myth of modern science: the notion that scientific research could not emerge as a respected and productive activity until it had liberated itself from the clutches of a dogmatic, authoritarian faith. The dramatic theme is rationality versus religion, with religion playing the role of the oppressive censor or persecutor, and selected scientists and freethinkers that of the hero or martyr. loc: 4121

Note: And this is his axe to grind

In the case of the heavenly spheres, Aristotle thought that each sphere was moved by an "Unmoved Mover," or by what some philosophers called an "intelligence," with God, the Prime Mover, responsible for keeping the whole system in motion. 8 Buridan's remarkable insight was to recognize that one could do without these "intelligences" if one simply assumed that things once set in motion remain in motion unless they meet resistance. loc: 4140

Aristotle's theory seemed almost Christian, since it made motion dependent upon a sort of divine intervention (the "intelligences"), while Buridan's post-Aristotelian approach seemed ... well ... godless. loc: 4148

Near the end of his life, however, Oresme changed his mind. He did not announce that the earth rotated while the heavens stood still, but declared with astonishing aplomb that the case for a rotating earth was as good or better than the case for immobility. The initial basis for this was a thought experiment that supported his conclusion that all motion is relative to the position of the observer. loc: 4175

Moreover, he argued, the concept of a rotating earth was far more elegant and economical than the Aristotelian paradigm involving multiple rotating spheres. Applying Ockham's razor to this problem, one would have to favor the simpler, less cluttered explanation. loc: 4188

Based on the available evidence, neither hypothesis was clearly preferable to the other. The only reason to favor the paradigm of a rotating earth was its simplicity. In this case, he decided, one ought to interpret the Bible literally. Under the circumstances, the best thing to do was to accept the traditional view of the unmoving earth. loc: 4195

Once Oresme had broken with Aristotle by asserting that the earth's immobility could not be proved by reason, the cat was out of the bag. In a flash, the stationary earth also became a mere hypothesis that could be proved or disproved by later evidence. loc: 4200

With the remarkable work of the Parisian Ockhamists, the Aristotelian revolution reached its limit and began to self-destruct—or, to speak more accurately, to self-transform. loc: 4215

But the new discoveries made in Aristotle's questing, this-worldly spirit, while using some of his basic concepts, now tended to undermine many of his conclusions: loc: 4217

Out of the interplay of Aristotelian science, Christian doctrine, and new developments in European social life, something new was being born: a science increasingly alienated from religion, and a faith seeking a foothold in "a mechanical world of lifeless matter, local motion, and random collision." 18 loc: 4219

Their attempts to resolve these contradictions were inevitably unstable, producing further dialogue, criticism, and revision. And this very instability was the key to further progress. While differing strongly among themselves, the scholastics maintained the idea of an integrated, explicable, and interesting universe that they had extracted from Aristotle. loc: 4233

In retrospect, at least, the project seems to have been doomed to fail.20 The scholarship of the universities reflected the interests and aspirations of an intelligentsia formed and nurtured by the Church in order to maintain its intellectual and moral leadership at a time of dramatic social changes in Europe. loc: 4241

Rationalists and believers might then feel free to ignore each other's views and concerns, except where competing claims to the same intellectual territory made conflict inevitable. In the modern period, faith and reason would enter upon a new relationship—no longer a turbulent marriage, but a fractious divorce in which the alienated parties, greatly changed by their separation, meet periodically to argue about the terms of their separation, and, on rare occasions, to take inspiration from each other. loc: 4253

What could be more Aristotelian in spirit than these remarks of Einstein's? The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking ... it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order.24 loc: 4269

extraordinary vehemence with which thinkers like Bacon rejected scholastic thought—a vehemence amounting to a denial that Aristotle's ideas and those of his medieval interpreters played any progressive role at all in the course of human enlightenment. loc: 4293

To obliterate the Aristotelian revolution has the advantage of disguising the West's enormous debt to a more advanced Islamic civilization. loc: 4325

Aristotelian Christianity was an obstacle to all those who wished to break the power of the Catholic Church and to end its monopoly of educational resources: loc: 4327

most brilliant spokesman of the new ruling class was Thomas Hobbes, loc: 4334

For the sake of their security, people must yield up all their other rights to the state, thereby granting it a monopoly of force and unlimited legal power over its citizens. The law of the state is the law, he declared; all other laws, like the natural law, moral law, and international law asserted and defined by the Church, are laws in name only, without binding effect on the subjects of sovereign states.34 loc: 4336

Aristotle, whose treatise Politics is a defense of the principle that politics is a branch of ethics, and that the purpose of the state is not just security but justice. loc: 4340

Hobbes glorified the will of the sovereign, which is sufficient by itself to make valid laws. Will and power alone are real. Reason and morality are dangerous fantasies. loc: 4349

Martin Luther. loc: 4352

Aristotle's optimism about human reason was a dangerous delusion. Since people were incurably willful and disobedient, the only solution was to subject them to the dictates of a far greater will: that of a sovereign God. loc: 4356

Let the state take care of legal matters; a church's concern should be its members' eternal salvation. loc: 4361

the attack on scholastic theology would tend to put questions of belief beyond the realm of rational argument. loc: 4369

Eliminating the Church as the sole authorized interpreter of Scripture opened the door to the fundamentalist approach, loc: 4378

Aristotle was discredited, in part, because the Catholic Church had used his ideas to maintain its cultural hegemony in Europe—a supremacy that many Westerners considered oppressive, and that was now obsolete.41 loc: 4394

The Aristotelian project, which seemed irrelevant in an age of political and religious fragmentation, may serve in the next phase of human history as an inspirer of creative, integrative thought. loc: 4407

Note: This is a huge jump, to say what might have worked in the past might work in the future.

The underlying fallacy, it seems to me, is the notion that because scientific rationalism has gained intellectual preeminence in certain fields, it must therefore be hegemonic in culture. loc: 4431

Note: This, of course, is Karen Armstrong's theme.

Scientific rationalism emerged from the wreckage of scholasticism strengthened in technique but greatly impoverished in scope—unable to command the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and politics as Aristotle had done; unable to answer the "why" questions about the universe that his doctrine of "final causes" had supplied; and unable to encompass philosophical issues like the eternity and intelligibility of the universe. loc: 4449

Note: And yet, it seems that that is exactly been the direction of science with evolutionary psychology and expansionist cosmology, and even standard model physics.

The Catholic Church was no more compelled to oppose Copernican cosmology than Protestant churches were to oppose Darwinian evolution. Given the leeways of textual interpretation, the reasons for such opposition often lie more in a religious organization's social and political commitments than in Holy Writ itself. loc: 4460

Agreement on such matters may not be possible between people holding strong convictions on either side. But a humane dialogue can take place between those committed, as the Aristotelians were, to the search for norms that are both ethical and reasonable. loc: 4485

Note: Si Aristotelianism is just another term for "reasonable dialog"? Edit

Answers that make sense require the sort of dialogue between a rationally influenced faith and an ethically interested reason that took place a few centuries ago in the medieval universities. loc: 4500

Note: But this doesn't really address the problem that most faiths can be considered fairy tale beliefs.

Reason could transform the earth, if only science and technology were inspired and guided by a new global morality. Faith would expand and mature, if only the world's religions addressed themselves to long-term trends in society and nature, and helped to create that global morality. loc: 4515

Note: But where is the truth in faith, especially with so many competing claims for it?

a world hungry for wholeness yearns loc: 4521