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
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