Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages

What would it be like to put Richard Dawkins, probably the foremost atheist of our time, and Pope Benedict, "God's Rottweiler," in the same room and tape their conversation? In a recent interview on NPR, Dawkins was "unapologetic about his willingness to label as ridiculous beliefs rooted in faith rather than evidence," calling those beliefs "self-deluded ways of thinking." Meanwhile, in a recent Easter week sermon, Benedict blasted disobedience among a group of priests who had been calling for the ordination of women, the end of clerical celibacy, and the right of divorced parishoners to celebrate mass. Benedict criticized the priests as "driven by their own preferences and ideas and should instead turn toward a 'radicalism of obedience'...Christ's concern 'was for true obedience as opposed to human choice.'" As I read these two articles, I thought, "Holy crap! We're back in the middle of the twelfth century."

In Aristotle's Children, Richard Rubenstein traces this split between science and religion, reason vs. faith, back to the twelfth century and an attempt to incorporate the newly rediscovered works of Aristotle into western thinking. Most of Aristotle's thought was lost to the west with the decline of literacy in the former Roman empire and the dominance of the Church over all intellectual activity. After all, Aristotle "felt himself to be part of a living, integrated, self-sufficient universe--a place whose basic principles could be understood by reasoning." The thinking of the Church, especially after Augustine, saw man as a corrupt being who was incapable of knowing the truth without divine illumination. Reason and scientific knowledge were irrelevant and possibly harmful to salvation. The emperor Julian thought so in 527 when he closed the Academy in Athens: "Philosophical speculation had become an aid of heretics and an inflamer of disputes among Christians."

Julian's order marked the official end of pagan thought in the empire, but many of its former philosophers and scholars had already found a more welcoming environment in the Persian empire, taking their libraries with them. When Islam conquered the Persians and spread throughout the Middle East and across north Africa into Spain, many of its scholars and theologians struggled to incorporate Aristotle with the Qu'ran. Toledo, in particular, became an important library and learning center in Al-Andalus, the Islamic empire in Spain. The fundamentalist revival of al-Ghazali, however, brought an end to independent thinking in the Islamic world, and Aristotle appeared headed for oblivion again.

In the meantime, the Reconquista or "recovery" of Spain from its Islamic rulers brought Christian thinkers into contact with the Islamic translations and commentary on Aristotle, especially in the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Moses Maimonides. The Archbishop of Toledo, Raymund, encouraged and sponsored the translation of many of these works into Latin. As these manuscripts began to find their way into the rest of Europe, the material and social living conditions started to improve, leading, in Rubenstein's eyes, to a more optimistic world view that had a higher regard for man's ability to understand nature. With this came "a new demand for understanding--a demand to 'know' the truths of religion in addition to believing them." The so-called Medieval renaissance was underway, and its development led to massive tensions in western thinking over "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."

Church intellectuals hit a major crisis point in the Albigensian crusade. The Cathars, steeped in Aristotelian logic came to the conclusion that "God cannot be simultaneously good and omnipotent." Orthodox thinking had placed the problem of evil off limits to human thinking; some things can only be known by faith: "Reason must yield to revelation and logic to faith." The Pope promulgated the first Inquisition in 1184 to ferret out heresy, especially among the Cathars, and eventually preached a Crusade against them in 1215. The groups charged with administering the Inquisition, primarily the Dominicans (the Dogs of God) and Franciscans, soon found that they needed their own "preachers skilled in Aristotelian dialectics" to stand a chance in intellectual combat with the heretics.

This time also saw the first appearance of universities in Europe--the University of Paris was chartered in 1200 although it had been in existence as a cathedral school for quite some time--and one of the major issues that dominated the faculties at these schools was the incorporation of Aristotle's thought. Peter Abelard, for example, pushed the buttons of quite a few Church officials when he drew large crowds by debating issues like original sin and the trinity. Church authorities made various attempts to place Aristotle's works off-limits, but they failed to curb the influence of his thinking. Eventually, Thomas Aquinas achieved his great synthesis of Aristotle and theology in the Summa Theologica. He placed only three doctrines outside the realm of human reason: "the creation of the universe from nothing, God's nature as a trinity, and Jesus Christ's role in man's salvation." All of the other truths can be discovered by the use of natural reason, including the "moral standards that God requires of us." Thomas' system of natural theology--scholasticism--did not sit well with church conservatives, but in the end, he was canonized and his thought shaped subsequent Catholic theology.

The next generation of thinkers disagreed with Aquinas, however, and pushed Aristotle's thought to the breaking point with church doctrine, with William of Ockham flourishing his famous razor to sever the ties between science and theology. "The patterns that we discover by reasoning abstractly about created things are the product of our mental processes, not evidence of divine intentions." Knowledge of the world was pursued for its own sake, divorced from having to support theological conclusions. Even as Aristotle's thought began to inform church thinking, the validity of his science was called into question. In time, thinkers like Francis Bacon vehemently rejected scholastic thought as Aristotle's thought became "an obstacle to all those who wished to break the power of the Catholic Church."

The big picture behind all of this are the questions of what we know and how we know what we know--the epistemic questions. Is it enough to use evidence based reasoning to discover the world and our place in it? Or is there more to heaven and earth than is in our philosophy? Richard Dawkins, of course, would tell us no. The conclusions of science are based on evidence that is rigorously examined in public inquiry and yield far and away the best knowledge of the world. Other thinkers, whether post modern theorists or fundamental creationists or radical skeptics are not so sure. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, argues that "from a naturalistic point of view, we have every reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Therefore we can't seriously believe naturalism....Our cognitive faculties have evolved to maximize our fitness, not to represent the world accurately." So, is the quest for the Higgs boson really worth the billions of dollars that we have poured into research when only theoretical physicists can comprehend what's going on? Or are faith, dogma, and authority equally valid responses to finding the meaning of life, the universe and everything? If so, which faith, which dogma, whose authority? Or, is there a point where, like Montaigne, we throw up our hands and cry, "What do I know?"

Rubenstein is skeptical of science's ability to answer the big picture questions: "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." It's the same point made many times over by Karen Armstrong--when logos dominates our thinking and our knowledge, we ignore mythos at our peril. Like a repressed dream or memory, mythos will re-emerge in some fairly ugly and misshapened ways, resistant to change and closed to dialogue. Richard Rubenstein thinks that by looking back to the twelfth and thirteen century we might be able to reopen that dialogue: "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....A world hungry for wholeness yearns" Frankly, I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Author: Rubenstein, Richard

Date Published: 2003

Length: 384 pp

electronic print

Empire of the Summer Moon

The whole concept of a homeland is total bullshit. I don't care if it's the Nordic race, the Jewish people, the Serbs of eastern Europe, the Hispanic southwest, or the Comanches of the Comancheria, from the staked plains of New Mexico to the Arkansas River. It was also taken from someone else a bit earlier. Towards the end of S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon, Quannah Parker is asked how the Comanches came to lose their "ancestral homeland." He responds by steadily pushing his questioner down the log that they are sitting on until that person falls off the log. That's how, he says. Yet that's how the Comanches themselves came to be the "Lords of the South Plains." They came down out of Wyoming sometime between 1625 and 1750, breaking off from the main Shoshoni tribe, and pushed the Apache and all other tribes off the southern plains until they had it all to themselves.

The Comanche were an ugly people, not only or even primarily physically ugly--"short, dark-skinned, heavy-limbed, squat-legged and ungraceful"--but culturally and spiritually ugly as well. Gwynne describes them as the most primitive of the primitive. Prior to their emergence on the south plains, they were culturally impoverished and pushed into marginal living conditions by the more powerful tribes of the northern plains. But then they became the baddest bad-ass motherfuckers on the block. Gwynne ties this transformation back to Pope's rebellion in 1680 when the Spanish hightailed it back to Mexico, leaving most of their horse herds behind. Somehow the Comanche developed the skill and the culture to become better horse warriors that anyone else. "Few nations have ever progressed with such breath-taking speed from sulking pariah to dominant power."

The Comanche became so powerful that they chased the Apache off the plains and out of Texas. They kept the Mexicans from expanding further from the Rio Grande River, and they kept the Tejanos from venturing east of what is now Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Dallas. Even that was risky, as the Parker clan found out when they tried to homestead over 10,000 acres on "the absolute outermost edge of the Indian frontier." They were soon raided--in 1836--by a Comanche party that left five men dead and five women and children captured. One of the kidnapped girls was Cynthia Ann Parker who was adopted into the tribe, became the wife of the powerful leader Peta Nacona, and gave birth to Quannah Parker, the last of the great Comanche leaders.

The Comanche were a warlike and vicious people who employed brutal tactics against their victims. Anyone who has read the Lonesome Dove saga, especially Dead Man's Walk or Comanche Moon, knows the detail: torture, rape, murder, mayhem. It worked. The Comanche stopped western expansion in Texas until a new technology changed the balance of power, again. With repeating revolvers and eventually repeating rifles, first the Texas Rangers (under John Coffee Hays) and later, after the Civil War, the U. S. Cavalry (under Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson Miles) learned to take the fight to the Comanche. More importantly, the annihilation of the southern buffalo herds starved the remaining Comanche into submission.

Empire of the Summer Moon is a sordid tale. The savagery of the Comanche was matched on numerous occasions by the anglo culture determined to wrest the land away. It was in retaliation to the Council House treachery in 1840, when 25 Comanche leaders were killed and another 30 taken hostage (later to be killed) in San Antonio under the pretence of peace negotiations that Buffalo Hump led his famous raid through the heart of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, vividly described in Comanche Moon. In any case, after the Civil War, the Comanches had a few tricks left, such as Quannah's eluding Mackenzie's forces in the Palo Duro with his whole village, but it only became a matter of time until the remaining Comanche were competing for space in Oklahoma with the other tribes that had been removed there. And the whites eventually took most of that land as well. How soon will it be until another people arise and dispossess the culture that claims the land now? Really, it is only a matter of time.

Author: Gwynne, S. C.

Date Published: 2010

Length: 15h 4m

Narrator: Drummond, David

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

Why did the book of Revelation make it into the New Testament? After all, it is a strange nightmarish tale of the end of life, the universe, and everything, and it wasn't based on anything that Jesus said or did. He certainly thought that the end of the world was coming very soon, as did Paul a few years later. But the end of the world didn't happen very soon, and then here's John of Patmos writing of the imminent destruction of the world 50 or 60 years later, telling how it was all going to come down. So, if John didn't get his info from Jesus or any of the other apostles, where did it come from? He had a vision: "The gospel I have preached is not of human origin…I have received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." How is John's vision, then, different from that of Wovoka, the Paiute prophet who had a vision of white men leaving America and Paiutes reclaiming their ancestral lands? Or from the mathematical calculations of the end of times worked out by Mayan priests? Or of Marshall Applewhite's receiving messages from the Hale-Bopp comet and convincing the members of the Heaven's Gate cult to commit suicide in a posh San Diego neighborhood?

As the findings from Nag Hammadi make clear, there were a lot of competing manuscripts vying for usage by the different Jesus movements in the decades following Jesus' death. Many of these manuscripts had very different messages than those have come down to us through the centuries. Why did a few of these books make it into the New Testament while most did not? I think Elaine Pagels makes it clear that it comes down to a couple of early church bully boys that were seeking to consolidate their own power and their own vision of the gospel. Not only did they get the Revelation of John into the New Testament, but they managed to stand his message on its head. Pagel's book on the writing and inclusion of the Revelation of John makes for a marvelous tale of intrigue and politics in the early church.

John may have thought that he was actually experiencing the end of the world when the Romans destroyed the temple at Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and then burned the city down. The center of Jewish culture and religion was gone, and Jews began to scatter about the Mediterranean either voluntarily or as slaves. John was a practicing Jew who believed that Jesus was the long sought Messiah, and he was convinced that he was watching the pollution of the Jewish culture and religion from two different sources. Jews were increasingly being forced to pay homage to the foreign gods of the dominant Roman empire, an act which destroyed the integrity of Israel's status as a chosen people. But John also saw the spreading of the Christian message among the gentiles, as begun by Paul, as equally repellent.

In trying to answer the eternal question of why good people suffer while the wicked flourish, John projected a fairly tale future in which the Roman Empire—the infamous Whore of Babylon—would be destroyed and the righteous eventually triumph. (It only took another 1400 years or so for the Romans to finally pass from the scene.) And no, the number 666 does not refer to Barak Obama, Saddam Hussein, or John F. Kennedy (as W. A. Criswell told us in 1960). It's pretty clear that the Emperor Nero, who used Jews and Christians as human torches shortly after the burning of Rome, is the intended designee. John also makes clear in his messages to the seven churches that those who have listened to the false prophets Jezebel and Balaam—those in the churches who had fornicated with gentiles and eaten unclean meat which had been sacrificed to the foreign gods—were going to get it in the end as well. Since Paul was one of those who ate unclean meat and who relaxed the requirements for circumcision, his followers, the "spiritual Israel" were among the doomed. "Those whom John says Jesus 'hates' look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teachings."

So not only did John's revelation not come through Jesus' teachings, it attacked the very group of believers that became the mainstay of the Christian church. Of course, Pauls's message also depended on his own "revelation" of what Jesus taught, so you have another line of teaching that lies outside the direct apostolic lineage as. But then, so much of what is "apostolic" comes from the 40 days of Pentecost after Jesus died, so there are at least three different "vision quests" at work in determining the "authentic" message of the Jesus movement. But that's just based on the material that actually made it into the New Testament. It doesn't include most of the Nag Hammadi material nor the "New Prophecy" movement of Montanus or Valentinus that was inspired by John's revelation. So who gets to decide what is right and what is bogus?

Into the breach step at least two of the most unpleasant but also most influential of the early church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexander. Somehow they found a way to cobble together the seemingly contradictory messages of Paul and John to a few of the gospel stories and manage to tell everyone else what is acceptable and what must be tossed. At the same time, they managed to close down any further revelation or direct contact with the divine spirit except through what became the Catholic church.

It really comes down to politics. Skip back to Ignatius, who styled himself as the Bishop of Antioch (ca 67-108 AD) and is given credit by Pagels for being the first person to call himself and his followers "Christians." He begins to enforce the power structure of the "apostolic" church with the emphasis on bishops, deacons, and priests. At the same time, he elevates Paul's letters into a central pillar of the church: "Ignatius declares the primary sources are not the Hebrew scriptures but what he finds in Paul's letters: 'for me, the primary sources are [Christ's] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him.'"

Irenaeus of Lyons picks up on Ignatius' message in the late second century—he may have been one of the first of the church fathers to insist on the authority of the Bishop of Rome--and begins to formulate what we now accept as the New Testament canon, although a number of the other bishops and priests were also pushing for inclusion or exclusion of certain texts as being "scriptural." In attacking the Gnostic messages of Valentinus, Marcion, and the "new prophets," Irenaeus condemned many of the documents that were in circulation among the different churches, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Revelation of John, the Revelation of Ezra, the secret Revelation of James. Whereas many of the other bishops condemned the Revelation of John in response to the "new prophecy" movement, Irenaeus insisted that the spirit of God was speaking through the book. First off, he believed that both the Revelation and the Gospel of John were written by John of Zebedee, one of Jesus' original followers. But Irenaeus also saw that the vision of the horrific end times gave him a handle on making sense of the increased prosecution of Christians in the middle of the second century. Then he went a step further and interpreted the Revelation of John as an attack on heretics, that is, anyone who disagreed with him. In fact, as far as we know, Irenaeus is the first writer to use the word "heresy" in connection with Christian doctrine. What counts for salvation from the horrific ending is right belief: those disagree with Irenaeus will be destroyed along with the Romans who are prosecuting the Christians. This includes those messianic Jews to whom John of Patmos directed his message.

Irenaeus also coupled the Old Testament concept of the anti-messiah to John's Revelation, calling the beast of the Revelation the AntiChrist, an idea not found in John's Revelation. "By linking 'the beast' with 'AntiChrist'—namely that 'the beast' who embodies alien ruling powers is also inextricably linked with false belief and false belief in turn with moral depravity, Irenaeus makes a crucial interpretation of John's prophecies. Irenaeus wants to show that God's judgment demands not only right action but right belief…'the beast' works not only through outsiders who prosecute Christians but also through Christian insiders, the 'false brethren' whom he calls heretics."

The real villain in this piece, for me, even more than Irenaeus, is Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (328-373 AD). Athanasius came to prominence during the Arian crisis that led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Since Christianity had just been declared the favored religion of the emperor Constantine, those Christians who did not espouse the particular relationship of the Father and the Son, designated by the term homoousia—that Jesus was of the same substance, coeternal with the Father—were decreed heretics by Constantine. They could have their property confiscated and be expelled from the empire. Athanasius won the battle against Arius, but he had a long war ahead of him.

After essentially stealing the election to become the bishop of Alexandria, Athansius sought to consolidate all of the power of the Egyptian church under his control. John's Revelation became one of his favorite tools to bust the heretics' chops. It took him 45 years to accomplish his mission, but when he was done, the New Testament canon was set, the rebellious desert monks had been brought to bear, and the central doctrine of the church was the Nicene Creed. "Athanasius interpreted John's Book of Revelation as condemning all 'heretics' and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any other 'books of revelation' which he branded heretical and sought to destroy—with almost complete success." By 367, Athanasius had determined what Christians could read and what must be censored, and most of the censored books were destroyed. He also condemned "original human thinking" as evil so that nothing could be added or changed from his list of books.

And so, we can ultimately thank Athanasius every time we hear some two-bit preacher on the radio who characterizes Barak Obama as the AntiChrist or listen to Harold Camping tell his followers to sell their possessions and gather in the desert for the "Rapture" or even remember a James Watt who declined to protect the environment because "I don't know how much longer we'll be around." His personal politics have become the widespread beliefs of so many.

Author: Pagels, Elaine

Date Published: 2012

Length: 256 pp

electronic print

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Montaigne seems like the cool kind of guy that you'd like to sit down and bullshit with over a few beers. At least, that's the portrait of him that comes through Sarah Blakewell's biography of him in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers. He liked good conversation, he liked to discuss what it means to live well, and he didn't take himself or his opinions too seriously. What more could you hope for in a good friend?

Blakewell says that Montaigne adopted this attitude in response to two major events in his life. First, after obsessing about death for a number of years--"He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it"--his own near death experience gave him the attitude that it wasn't really a big deal: "'Don't worry about death' became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live." The other event was the death of his great friend Etienne La Boetie. Montaigne felt compelled to continue their dialog, internalizing La Boetie's voice as a counterpoint to his own, "He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication." La Boetie became an ever-present audience for Montaigne, holding him to exalted standards of thought and conduct.

But there was another event that Blakewell says really started Montaigne's wheels turning, the famous moment when he looked his cat in the eyes and wondered just who is playing with whom. "When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" That moment becomes the central emblem of his essays--taking notice of the particular and small moments in his life and looking at them from a slightly different point of view. "The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience--but as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."

Blakewell takes great pains to put Montaigne in the middle of his times--not only 16th century France, torn by Reformation strife between the Catholic League of Henri Guise and the Huguenots of Henri Navarre, but also as a writer coming soon after the recovery of the three great Hellenistic traditions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism, which are "held together above all by their shared pursuit of eudaimonia or human flourishing, and by their belief that the best way of attaining it is through equanimity or balance." While his contemporaries were destroying each other in savage and brutal ways--think Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre--Montaigne was seeking meaning and joy in reflecting on the "familiar, uncertain, and ordinary" events of his own life. How could he do it?

First off, he learned not to take himself or his opinions seriously. His famous motto, of course, was "What do I know?" and he extended that to all human knowledge. "In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of." Our knowledge of the world and even our ourselves is empty compared to what is unknown, and it is subject to all the foibles and mistakes in such an incomplete creature as man. Without a need to find a definite answer to everything, Montaigne could relax and enjoy life as it came to him. "Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary—for that is all we have."

And that includes pain, suffering, and what most of us would call evil. In addition to the sectarian violence that raged around him, Montaigne experienced the death of a number of close friends and family, including all but one of the children born to him. He also suffered debilitating attacks of kidney stones frequently as he aged (the picture of a stone in the book is positively gruesome—it looks like the jacks I used to play with as a kid), one of which eventually became infected and led to his death by suffocation. But "'bad spots' were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to 'slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.'" Shit happens. As Don Henley says, "Get Over It," and get on with your life as the best you can. What else you gonna do?

In the end, Blakewell's Montaingne sounds rather like a Buddhist. Life is suffering—dukkha—but learning to pay attention to the moment and learning to look at things with different points of view gives us back out ability to live fully. Montaigne even seems to echo the doctrine of anicca—the impermanence of things: "If we could see the world at a different speed, he reflected, we would see everything like this, as a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms.' Matter existed in an endless branloire: a …sixteenth century peasant dance, which meant something like 'the shake.' The world was a cosmic wobble: a 'shimmy.'" How much of this Buddhist Montaigne is Montaigne and how much is Sarah Blakewell is another matter, for as she points out, every generation has its own reading of Montaigne, critics remixing and remaking a Montaigne who resembles themselves, "not only individually but as a species." Readers take from Montaigne what they want to take, which, Montaigne and his heirs, feels is as it should be. Virginia Woolf felt this way: Montaigne's readers were "a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it cooperatively. All share a quality that can simply thought of as 'humanity'… minds threaded together—how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's and Euripides…it is this common mind that binds the whole world together." It ought to be worth a beer or two to find out.

Author: Blakewell, Sarah

Date Published: 2011

Length: 387 pp

electronic print