A great awakening rooted in Aristotle’s ‘rediscovery’

“Aristotle’s Children” opens in the Middle Ages when Christians from across Europe were trying to wrest control of Spain from the Moors and encountered great cities like Toledo and Cordoba that were in many ways more civilized and cultured than their own.

They found splendid architecture, gardens, fountains and, most wondrous of all, a treasure trove of ancient classical knowledge and flourishing scholarship. The astonished Christians found long-lost works of Ptolemy, Galen, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates and Aristotle that had been translated from the Greek into Arabic. And much of it had been augmented by commentaries, interpretations and fresh discoveries by Muslim and Jewish linguists, philosophers, mathematicians, theologians, scientists and physicians, writes author Richard E. Rubenstein.

Why were these classic texts so unknown to the Christians? A quotation from St. Augustine reveals the attitude behind the wide-scale destruction of “un-Christian” books and libraries and the growing contempt for learning, free inquiry and rationality itself that led to the eclipse of ancient wisdom in the Christianized Roman Empire: “There is another form of temptation.... This is the disease of curiosity ... which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”

During the Dark Ages, learning languished across most of what had been the Roman Empire. Scholars fled to Mesopotamia and Persia, where in due course, the Arabs who conquered these areas encountered, imbibed and preserved the writings of Aristotle and others. Arab scholars went on to make discoveries of their own in mathematics, astronomy and medicine, joined by such Jewish thinkers as Moses Maimonides. Of special interest to the Christians were the efforts made by philosophers of the two monotheistic faiths to reconcile Aristotelian knowledge of the material world with religious beliefs. Maimonides attempted this for Judaism, while Avicenna and Averroes worked on a grand synthesis for Islam.

Nowadays, many people assume that religion has always been hostile to science and rational inquiry, particularly the Roman Catholic Church of medieval times. In fact, it was only recently that Pope John Paul II -- 400 years after the fact -- admitted that Galileo had been right in saying the Earth was not the center of the cosmos.

One of Rubenstein’s aims is to challenge this prevalent notion of an inevitable conflict between faith and reason. For, unlike those 17th century Inquisitors who forced Galileo to recant, 12th century Archbishop Raymund I of Toledo was 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 ... opened the door to advanced Arab and Jewish ideas,” Rubenstein writes. Establishing a translation center in Toledo, he recruited “the best scholars available ... whether ... Christian, Jew, Muslim, Latin, Greek, or Slav.”

The most exciting and influential rediscovery was Aristotle, only a few of whose writings had been known in Christian Europe before then. Underlying all his works -- whether on politics, poetics, ethics, logic or natural science -- was the conviction that human beings were rational creatures, capable of making intelligent choices and using their intelligence to examine the world, discern patterns in nature and figure out how things work. This common-sensical, nonmystical view of the world, Rubenstein argues, is inherently optimistic and seems to fare better in good times. When things fall apart, people tend to find comfort in otherworldly religious faiths and philosophies.

Rubenstein is a superb storyteller who breathes new life into such fascinating figures as Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Aristotle himself. Aquinas’ brilliant synthesis of faith and reason in the 13th century is for Rubenstein an ideal. Yet at the time, it engendered doubt: among mystics like Meister Eckhart, on the one hand, who felt that it demystified religion, and among rigorous minds like William of Ockham, who felt that it clouded clear thinking in science.

A professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University in Virginia, Rubenstein regrets the Enlightenment’s “divorce” between faith and reason and would invite a rapprochement. But has he made his case? Certainly, he is right to remind us of the wisdom, humanity, tolerance and sheer intellectual brilliance of so many religious believers -- Christians, Muslims and Jews (although the bulk of the story he tells here is about the Christians). Indeed, we live in a time when people are seeking something beyond materialism and when scientists also are concerned about values, as is evident in the emerging field of bioethics. But Rubenstein’s call for a synthesis is undermined by much of the very story he tells: The works of the great Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians were soon repudiated and condemned by their respective communities, and tolerance and openness among the Christians was all too often overwhelmed by the burning of books and heretics, as well as the massacre of Muslims, Jews and heretical Christian sects such as the Cathars of southwestern France. Perhaps an amicable divorce is the best we can hope for, after all.