Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages by Richard E. Rubenstein. Harcourt Brace, $27, 368 pages.

The News & Observer

March 21, 2004

When books mattered: igniting the war between faith and reason

By Phillip Manning

It is dawn in 12th century Paris. Students have crowded into a narrow, twisting street, eating bread and drinking wine, awaiting their teacher. When Peter Abelard appears, they jockey for positions near this arrogant, pugnacious, and brilliant man. He carries a copy of Aristotle’s “Categories,” recently translated into Latin and the most popular book in Paris. Using the logical methods of Aristotle, Abelard debates question after question with his rowdy, excited students. “Enthralled by the power of ideas,” Richard Rubenstein writes, “... 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.”

In “Aristotle’s Children,” Rubenstein re-creates the revolutionary excitement sparked by the rediscovery of the great philosopher's works in medieval Europe, which shined a light that ended the Dark Ages. Aristotle taught reason and optimism to a people whose religion, Rubenstein says, held that “man is born to suffer in this world, and that his only real hope for happiness is in heaven.”

But reason ran headlong into religion. Aristotle’s ideas confused and irritated the Catholic Church, which was growing in power and attempting to assert its supremacy over secular authority. In his entertaining and thought-provoking book, Rubenstein, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University, tells how faith and reason tried desperately (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to live under the same roof.

Rubenstein begins by characterizing the Dark Ages as “half a millennium of endemic violence, poverty, and disorder.” It was, he writes, “Little wonder that, during this seemingly endless winter, those seeking comfort and meaning would turn to the certitudes of faith rather than the conundrums of philosophy.” In other words, people turned away from philosophy and toward faith because of the wretched conditions in Europe during the Dark Ages. Although religion did offer solace to downtrodden Europeans, Rubenstein appears to be putting the horse before the cart. In fact, the Dark Ages were caused, at least in part, by the rise of Christianity in the fourth and fifth century, when Christians played a significant role in banishing philosophy.

Rubenstein gives a stark example of the antipathy between Church and reason. Early in the fifth century, a gang of Christians in Alexandria seized the famous female philosopher Hypatia. They tortured her to death, dismembered her body, and burned the remains. The message was clear; philosophers were not welcome in Christian-dominated regions. Later, Peter Abelard was condemned by Pope Innocent II and lived the rest of his life in seclusion. But Rubenstein does not link the punishment of philosophers to the rising power of the Church. In fact, perhaps because he is a professor of conflict resolution, he minimizes the clash between faith and reason.

Surprisingly, it was Christians who helped bring Aristotle’s writings to Europe. By 1100, Christians had wrested the control of much of Spain from the Muslims. One of the conquerors, Archbishop Raymund of Toledo, was astonished to discover that Aristotle’s works, long lost to the West, had been translated into Arabic and preserved. The Archbishop employed a polyglot collection of Christians, Muslims, and Jews to translate these writings into Latin. The translations were quickly introduced into western Europe. Because the Church so dominated Europe, the educated classes (and therefore the earliest readers of the new translations) were church theologians. So, it was natural that Aristotle’s rediscovered logic was first applied to theology.

One of the foremost thinkers to use reason to interpret Christian theology was Peter Abelard’s intellectual heir Thomas Aquinas. Rubenstein summarizes Aquinas’s approach: “Through reason, not just Revelation, we can discover the moral standards that God requires of us.” Like Abelard, Aquinas was a devout Christian, but his “natural theology” was too radical for the theologians at the University of Paris. After numerous acrimonious disputes with the conservative faculty, Aquinas left Paris for Naples. Three years after his death in 1274, Pope John I launched an investigation that culminated in the condemnation of 219 Aristotelian propositions, including 12 written by Aquinas.

The Church later changed its mind about Aquinas and canonized him, but the damage was done. Although Aristotle’s views would prevail in natural philosophy, theologians became timid, and the application of reason to religion degenerated into Aristotelian scholasticism, in which scholars endlessly nitpicked minor points of theology. There is no record that these men actually argued about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, but disputations of a similar nature were the stock in trade of scholars in this era. By the middle of the 16th century, scholasticism would be cast aside when Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres,” in which he proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun in opposition to both the Bible and Aristotle. Copernicus’s book started a scientific revolution that Rubenstein believes divorced science from religion.

This brings us to Rubenstein’s two main theses. First, he asserts that religion and reason were happily wed for a few hundred years after the introduction of Aristotle to the West. And second that the partners in this former marriage still dream of reconciliation. Both of these theses are questionable. It seems unlikely that religion and science really did live together contentedly for a time at the end of the Dark Ages. Two major advocates of Aristotle, Abelard and Aquinas, were often in hot
water with a Church that repudiated their views and works. Furthermore, little evidence suggests that religion and reason want to get together today. In fact, religious fundamentalism and supernatural beliefs are on the rise. Many Americans don’t believe in evolution, and a 1999 Gallup poll showed that 47 percent of us believe that God created man in his present form about 10,000 years ago. On the other hand, few scientists (less than 10 percent according to a 1998 poll published in the journal “Nature”) believe in God or immortality.

Thus, it seems that Rubenstein’s dream of faith and reason trying to unite is, at best, premature. The late Steven Jay Gould, a former Harvard professor of paleontology, believed that science and religion should be considered as two separate domains operating side by side, equal but separate from one another. And this may be the closest reconciliation possible.

Nevertheless, Rubenstein’s book is a stimulating starting point for confronting issues of reason and religion, which are as important today (and as unresolved) as they were when Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas were attempting to combine them.
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