C© 2008 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2008, The Historical Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

R o b e r t M . H a d d a d

Philosophical Theology andScience in Medieval Christianity

and Islam: A ComparativePerspective1

Introduction

FOR SOME TIME NOW, certain Western scholars and more casual observers

have pondered the question, What went wrong with Islam? Whatever mo-

tivates this query, its clear import is that Islamic development failed to

mirror the implicitly normative development of the West (the orbit of Latin

Christianity), notably in political evolution, science, and technology, the

essential bases of modern Western power.2 This question, shading into in-

dictment, might with little strain be directed against Greek Christianity as

well. Perhaps the answer, innocent of indictment, belongs to the medieval

period.

One may view the medieval period as a contest involving three intimately

related monotheistic civilizations. Greek and Latin Christianity, of course,

comprised a single Church until, depending on one’s choice of chronology,

the early thirteenth century. Islam, for its part, sees itself not as entirely

distinct from the Judeo-Christian tradition but rather as its purification.

Muslims hold that Jews and, later, Christians erred in claiming their special

election,3 while Christians also stumbled in imparting divinity to Jesus.4

For Muslims, Jesus probably ranks second only to Mu .hammad among the

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prophets; he was born of a virgin and worked miracles—qualities not at-

tributed to Mu .hammad himself—but Jesus was not God incarnate nor was

he crucified, God having substituted on the cross a “similitude” of Jesus

and raised the real Jesus unto himself.5 The Qur’an also charges Jews and

Christians with deleting from their scriptures references to the advent of

Mu .hammad.6 And these hardly exhaust the list of alleged scriptural cor-

ruptions by Jews as well as Christians: “O People of the Book! There hath

come to you Our Apostle, revealing to you much that ye used to hide in the

Book. . .”7

Greek Christendom, Islam, and Latin Christendom each claimed explic-

itly or implicitly to be the true heir to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome—the

perfection of Hebraic monotheism, the inheritor of classical Greek thought,

and the authentic heir to Roman political universalism. Yet around the

year 1000, roughly the midpoint of the medieval period,8 an objective, so-

phisticated observer from, say, China, witnessing the tripartite competition

pursued by Islam, Greek Christendom, and Latin Christendom, would not

likely have predicted a Latin Christian victory. In the arts of civilization,

not to mention military power, Greek Christendom and Islam would have

struck our Chinese spectator as so much richer and more powerful than

the agrarian and impoverished world of Latin Christendom, a world but

lately rid of centuries of invasion and unrelenting external threat. Our ob-

server could scarcely have foreseen the death of Greek Christian Byzantium

around the mid-fifteenth century, or the erosion of Islamic intellectual vital-

ity well before the recession of Islamic political power initiated around the

mid-seventeenth century.

Did something take place in the course of this tripartite medieval contest

that lay at the root of subsequent Islamic and Greek Christian material and

intellectual decline and Latin Christian Europe’s ability in modern times

to bring the entire world under its cultural and often its political domi-

nation? Did Islam and Greek Christianity fail ultimately to emulate Latin

Christian scientific and technological development, not because of some

intrinsic deficit but in large measure because of a peculiar turn in their

respective medieval theologies? Did a different turn in medieval Latin Chris-

tian theology set the Latin Church on another path—all this with immense

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consequences for subsequent world history? Did Latin Christendom emerge

from the medieval contest poised for ultimate seizure of global hegemony,

because of her greater fidelity to a philosophical theology derived most

prominently from Aristotelian thought?9 This essay argues that, in combi-

nation with certain more mundane factors, this was indeed the case.

The Challenge of Aristotle

But why, after all, did Aristotle (d. 322 BC) so engage our medieval

Christian and Muslim thinkers; why did they feel compelled to confront

the man revered as “the Philosopher” by Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the

central figure in medieval Latin Christian thought?10 Simply put, Aristotle

presented first to Eastern Christians, then to Muslims, and finally to Latin

Christians “a common theoretical framework in a common vocabulary, the

notion of a science as an organized body of knowledge with its own defining

principles and conclusions, and a comprehensive natural philosophy and

cosmology. . .”11 His explanation of the natural order, moreover, not only

seemed persuasive but derived solely from reason, without merest reference

to a personal, creator God. The unmoved mover or first cause postulated by

Aristotle was not even the creator of the natural order, which, according to

the philosopher, existed from all eternity.12

Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, rest on the bedrock of God’s

revelation to mankind—God telling his creatures about himself and what

he expects of them. The Christian revelation dwells in the Bible and in

the Incarnation of God in Christ—God descending into the muck of mat-

ter and becoming man. For Islam, divine revelation comprises the Qur’an,

the scriptures believed by Muslims to have been revealed by God to the

Prophet Mu .hammad between 610 and 632 AD through the angel Gabriel,

the same Gabriel who announced to the Virgin that she would conceive

the Son of God through the Holy Spirit. Hence in Islam the Qur’an rep-

resents the Word of God, the final revelation, while in Christianity it is

Jesus, the Word become flesh. Should one crave analogies, the appropriate

one pairs not Mu .hammad and Jesus but rather the Qur’an and Jesus and,

however jarring it may sound, Mu .hammad and the Virgin Mary, each the

agency through which God delivered to man his final revelation. And the

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Prophet, like the Virgin, reacted with stunned incredulity to the archangel’s

announcement.13

In Islam, as in Christianity, it is God’s revelation that makes possible

the sanctification of the believer and, in the view of many (though not

all), the sanctification of all human society. But while revelation would

remain the basis of Islam and Christianity, each would, for centuries af-

ter its birth, progressively expand the domain of reason, of rational argu-

ment, in attempting to elucidate divine truth. Christian thinkers, beginning

in the mid-second century, turned to philosophical theology in their ef-

forts to persuade pagans of the Christian verities, pagans who drew their

notions of universal truth from paideia, from Greco-Roman high culture.

Justin Martyr (d. 165), a Palestinian convert and perhaps the best known

of the second-century Church Fathers, extolled the rationality of Christian

monotheism and doctrine when set against pagan polytheism and myth.14

Another convert, Clement of Alexandria (d. circa 215), while asserting that

“The Knowledge of God Can Be Attained only through Faith,”15 insisted

nonetheless “that the same God that furnished both the Covenants was the

giver of Greek philosophy to the Greeks.”16 “There is then in philosophy,”

Clement added, “as stolen from the fire of Prometheus, a slender spark,

capable of being fanned into flame, a trace of wisdom and an impulse from

God.”17 Clement’s contemporary, Tertullian of Carthage (d. circa 230), a

convert who ranks as the first great Latin Christian theologian, may remain

best known for his derisive question: “What indeed has Athens to do with

Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?

What between heretics and Christians?” and for railing against “unhappy

Aristotle” as the inventor of dialectics, an art “embarrassing even to itself,

retracting everything, and really treating of nothing.”18 Yet the same Ter-

tullian affirmed that “Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there

is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained

by reason—nothing which He has not willed should be handled and under-

stood by reason.”19 The ambivalence typical of Tertullian finds little place

in the work of Clement’s student, Origen of Alexandria (d. 254). To Origen,

one of the most distinguished of the early Christian theologians, Athens and

Jerusalem need not be at daggers drawn, for

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if the doctrine be sound, and the effect of it good, whether it was made

known to the Greeks by Plato or any of the wise men of Greece, or

whether it was delivered to the Jews by Moses or any of the prophets,

or whether it was given to the Christians in the recorded teaching of

Jesus Christ, or in the instructions of His apostles, that does not effect

[sic] the value of the truth communicated.20

And while always nodding first in the direction of Scripture (“we maintain

that human nature is in no way able to seek after God, or to attain a clear

knowledge of Him without the help of Him whom it seeks”21), Origen does

not hesitate to add that “Since we hold that the great God is. . . Himself pure

intelligence, or something transcending intelligence and existence, we can

never say that God is apprehended by any other means than through the

intelligence which is formed in His image. . .”22 Justin, Clement, Tertullian,

and Origin were only among the first of many later Christian, and after

them Muslim, theologians to consider the God-given rational faculty another

means by which God taught man. And to these thinkers, the truth of reason

could not contradict the truth of revelation. Many (though not all) Muslim

and Christian thinkers would come to insist that reason leads to God with

all the certainty of revelation.

The new Christian intellectual, particularly in his appropriation of the

logos doctrine,23 sought to portray a Jesus whom the pagan intellectual,

by dint of his pagan intellectual heritage, could comprehend. The first ec-

umenical council, convened at Nicaea in 325 to confound the Arian claim

that Jesus was created by God, sanctioned implicitly the rational attempt to

understand and clarify revelation. For the Fathers there assembled agreed

that Christ as Son was of the same essence with the Father and, in so describ-

ing him, concurred in the insertion of the term homoousios (one essence)

into the Nicene Creed, marking the first time that an item of vocabulary,

originating not in scripture but in philosophy, would be introduced into a

formal and, time would reveal, enduring profession of Christian faith.24

The entire era of Christological controversy, indeed, from the inception of

the Arian dispute in the early fourth century to the conclusion of the Icon-

oclast Controversy in the mid-ninth, featured an increasingly sophisticated

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use of rational argument in the myriad attempts to define definitively the

nature of Christ, although only the iconoclasts, the icon smashers, saw fit to

elevate the rational argument over the tradition of the confessing commu-

nity.25 But if iconodules, the venerators of icons, shared with iconoclasts the

conviction that the truth of faith and the truth of reason were not contra-

dictory epistemologies, the icon smashers were prone to measure revelation

and tradition against reason, while the venerators of icons measured reason

against revelation and tradition.

John of Damascus: Iconodule and Early Christian Aristotelian

The iconodule victory proclaimed, among other things, that because God

in Christ had assumed material form, matter was deemed a fit vehicle for

divinity and was, therefore, both real and potentially good and, by im-

plication, worthy of study. By virtue of the Incarnation, that which had

been profane and, in the view of many dualists, evil and ultimately unreal,

could at last be made sacred. For John of Damascus (d. 752?), a Syrian

thinker who would prove to be of vital importance to the Latin as well as

to his own Greek Church, the iconoclast position represented a reversion

to the dualism that Manichaeans and Zoroastrians had elevated to perhaps

the dominant pre-Christian religious expression in the Mediterranean and

Middle Eastern world, and which for Christians had been annihilated by the

Incarnation, for God’s assumption of matter in Christ had made possible the

sanctification of matter. “You abuse matter,” John accused the iconoclasts,

“and call it worthless. So do the Manichees [sic], but the divine Scripture

proclaims that it is good.”26 “I do not venerate matter,” continued the

Damascene,

I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and

accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation. . .

I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which

my salvation came, because it is filled with divine energy and grace.27

Without dualism’s formal demise and the acceptance of matter as both

real and good, the systematic study of matter (i.e., science) could not have

become a salient aspect of Christian civilization.

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John of Damascus spoke on behalf of the iconodules, but to what ex-

tent would their Church really be prepared to sacralize profane knowledge?

Stated somewhat differently, to what degree would the Hellenic philosophi-

cal legacy be subsumed under sacred knowledge? John of Damascus offered

his answer but, as befits a Christian theologian, began with revelation:

Wherefore to search the scriptures is a work most fair and profitable

for souls. . . If we read once or twice and do not understand what we

read, let us not grow weary, but let us persist, let us talk much, let

us enquire. . . Let us draw of the fountain of the garden perennial. . .

Here let us luxuriate: for the scriptures possess inexhaustible

grace.28

Yet, after so exalting the study of scripture, John goes on to say:

But if we are able to pluck anything profitable from outside sources,

there is nothing to forbid that. Let us become tried money-dealers,

heaping up the true and pure gold and discarding the spurious. Let

us keep the fairest sayings but let us throw to the dogs absurd gods

and strange myths; for we might prevail most mightily against them

through themselves.29

John’s allusion to “outside sources” can only refer to the legacy of Athens,

to classical Greek, notably Aristotelian, philosophy and science. Christians,

John is saying, will “prevail most mightily against” Athens by expropriating

the congenial elements of pagan Greek learning, by “heaping up [its] true

and pure gold and discarding the spurious.” Here, John makes quite explicit

the Church’s dual appeal to reason as well as revelation in discerning divine

truth. While John grounds his proofs for the existence of God in the Bible—

“Now, the fact that God exists is not doubted by those who accept the

sacred Scriptures. . .”—he acknowledges that belief in God is also held “by a

majority of the [pagan] Greeks, for, as we have said, the knowledge of God’s

existence has been revealed to us through nature.”30 John then proceeds to

gird his argument by resort to Aristotle’s classic argument from mutability

(change and motion) and immutability: “Now whatever is itself moved

admits of being in a different state. . . But there is in fact something that

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moves without being itself moved. . . and this does not admit of being in any

way in another state.”31 Here is the Damascene’s elaboration:

All things, that exist, are either created or uncreated. If, then, things

are created, it follows that they are wholly mutable. . . But things that

are created must be the work of some maker, and the maker cannot

have been created. . . The Creator, then, being uncreated, is also wholly

immutable. And what could this be other than Deity.32

In brief, all things are mutable; all things are in motion in the sense that

nothing remains still or unaltered forever. For John of Damascus and the

multitude of Christian (and Muslim) disciples of Aristotle, these assumptions

presuppose a being, himself unchanging and unmoving, who is the cause of

all change and motion. John, like all Christian and Muslim Aristotelians,

would conveniently overlook Aristotle’s denial of a creator-God in favor

of an unmoved mover who presides over a world eternal.33 The God of

Christians and Muslims is, of course, the creator of the universe in time and

out of nothing.

John of Damascus goes on to define philosophy as “knowledge of the

nature of both divine and human things.”34 Theology the Damascene assigns

to the realm of “speculative” philosophy, there to rest in easy harmony with

mathematics and physiology (“the knowledge of the material things”), all

of which disciplines are proper concerns for Christian thinkers.35 In sum,

John of Damascus is a proud heir to Athens and Aristotle in holding the

rational to be godlike, a key to understanding nature and nature’s God. The

Damascene, of course, insisted that the essence, the essential nature, of God,

“ineffable and incomprehensible,” transcends all knowledge, including that

which could be ascertained through reason, and thus will ever elude us, but

“through nature the knowledge of the existence of God has been revealed

by Him to all men.”36 By studying “what relates to his nature,”37 we may

comprehend something of the author of nature. As the Muslim philosopher

Ibn Rushd would proclaim some four hundred years after John of Damascus:

“he who does not understand the art does not understand the product of

art, and he who does not understand the product of art does not understand

the Artisan.”38 We shall better understand God by studying his creation.

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While the tradition of Greek Christian philosophical theology continued

after John of Damascus, it did so with diminishing force and originality. At

least some of the responsibility for this reversal must be laid at the door of

the Iconoclastic Controversy. In positing a strict division between divinity

and matter, the iconoclasts had implicitly mocked the urging of John of

Damascus to study matter, to study nature that we may learn of the divine

creator of nature, the divine creator of matter.39 Although the iconoclasts

were bested by the iconodules, the struggle over the religious images so

shook the Greek Church that, in its aftermath, a high premium would be

placed on doctrinal stability and studied avoidance of the bleak rationalism,

not to mention the implied dualism, which had underpinned the iconoclast

position.

Growing suspicion of philosophical theology did not lead the Greek

Church to reject entirely the views of the very philosophical John of Damas-

cus. The Church did, after all, award him the saint’s crown, and the writings

of this Aristotelian theologian are even today regarded by the Greek as well

as the Latin Church as the summation of an Eastern Christian theological tra-

dition in which Aristotelian thought had its place.40 But John’s implicit call

to sacralize knowledge once deemed profane, his effort to make philosophy

and its derivatives, mathematics and the natural sciences, part of religious

knowledge and, so, an integral part of the religious curriculum, would be

heeded less by the Greek than by the Latin Church. John’s Aristotelian-

grounded philosophical theology would, in the hands of Thomas Aquinas,

transform the Damascene into the unique bridge between patristic Greek

and medieval Latin Christian thought.41

Although Greek Christendom would continue, at least into the fourteenth

century, to produce thinkers who shared John’s vision, they failed to make it

dominant within Greek Christian theology. By the mid-fourteenth century,

the Greek Church was left with revelation, a limited dose of philosophical

theology, and the mystic’s illumination as the preeminent means of gaining

knowledge of God. Philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences would

remain desacralized, would remain profane—hence excluded from the re-

ligious curriculum.42 It need hardly be emphasized that formal instruction

in our tripartite medieval world fell preeminently under the purview of the

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religious institution. The Greek Church would bequeath to herself an en-

during dichotomy between sacred and profane knowledge.

Islam and Aristotle

The development of Islam shadows that of Eastern Christianity. In their

logos, the Qur’an, their definitive expression of the divine word, Muslims

recognized the agency for transformation of the profane into the sacred, but

Muslims realized early on that the Qur’an, like the Bible and even Jesus for

Christians, required clarification, hence interpretation. Indeed, the attempt

to decree philosophical theology an alternate channel of revelation came

rather more rapidly in Islam than in Christianity. For Islam, while politi-

cally dominant almost from birth, governed a Middle East that remained

largely Christian for several hundred years after the Arab conquests of the

seventh century. Just as the conquered Greek and Semitic (Monophysite and

Nestorian) Christians43 had earlier been obliged to exploit philosophy so as

to render their faith intelligible to the pagan intellectuals, Muslims, in the

eighth century and after, had found it necessary when debating Christian in-

tellectuals to use philosophy, that the new Qur’anic revelation be made com-

prehensible to a still heavily non-Muslim society. One should perhaps add

that the use of rational theology also helped make the Christian and Muslim

revelations more coherent to Christian and Muslim intellectuals themselves.

At all events, we see a number of distinguished Muslim thinkers from

the ninth through the twelfth century whose view of Aristotle and the role

of reason in apprehending divine truth differed little from that expounded

by John of Damascus. A century after John, and perhaps influenced by

him, there emerged the first true philosopher in Islam, the Arab Abu Yusuf

Ya‘qub ibn Is .haq al-Kindı (c. 801–866). Born in Basra but drawn to Baghdad

as surely as medieval Latin theologians were attracted to Paris and Greek

theologians to Constantinople, al-Kindı wrote:

We should not be ashamed to recognize truth and assimilating it from

whatever source it may reach us, even though it may come from earlier

generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks truth there is

nothing of more value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases

him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him.44

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For al-Kindı, “The sublimest and noblest of human arts is the art of phi-

losophy, which is defined as the knowledge of things in their realities to the

limit of human power.”45 “Philosophy and religion,” moreover, “have iden-

tical aims, namely the knowledge of God and the pursuit of virtue.”46 Like

John of Damascus, al-Kindı includes under philosophy not only “theology

[and] ethics,”47 but goes beyond the Damascene in citing mathematics as the

only path to the true knowledge of things.48 Al-Kindı also echoes the Greek

Christian theologian in availing himself of Aristotle’s arguments from mu-

tability and immutability in proving the existence of God49 but, like John,

he must assign the quality of eternity solely to the God who created all

ex nihilo.50

Indeed, until Thomas Aquinas stormed Latin Christendom in the thir-

teenth century, Islam produced the most astute Aristotelians in the medieval

world.51 But throughout this period, Islam was also producing its antiphilo-

sophical Sunnı theologians, who held that reason was a poor instrument in

telling of God when set beside revelation—that is, the Qur’an, the literal

word of God—and its derivatives: the sayings of the Prophet ( .hadıth), the

divine law (sharı‘a), and the beliefs enshrined in the consensus (ijma‘) of

believers—a consensus expressed inevitably through the consensus of the

religious learned. “Sunnı Muslims,” let us remind ourselves, simply signifies

“the Muslim adherents of the Practice (Sunna) of the Prophet,” over and

against the competing claims of rational theology as well as those of Shı‘ı

doctrine.52

The Sunnı traditionalists came to assert their dominance in the course of

the controversy that pitted them against the rationalist theologians known as

the Mu‘tazila. Al-Kindı himself, if not a Mu‘tazilı, must have been strongly

sympathetic to their teachings.53 While the Mu‘tazila assigned to reason

considerable scope in yielding knowledge of God and his revelation, their

Sunnı opponents asserted the a priori supremacy of sacred tradition over

reason in elucidating the Qur’an and its divine Author.

Chronologically, the controversy between Sunnıs and Mu‘tazila not only

ran parallel to the Iconoclastic Controversy in neighboring Greek Chris-

tendom but also involved a number of similar issues. Would the state

(in the form of those Byzantine emperors who espoused iconoclasm, and

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Muslim caliphs who sponsored the Mu‘tazila) or the religious institu-

tion be the arbiter of orthodoxy? Was it legitimate to depict divinity

anthropomorphically—in Greek Christendom through representational art,

in Islam through the verbal descriptions of God contained in the Qur’an?

The rationalist Mu‘tazila insisted that a literal reading of those Qur’anic

passages that speak of God as possessing human attributes would compro-

mise the divine unity. There could be only one eternal principle, not the

multiplicity of eternal principles implied by divine attributes such as hands,

eyes, ears, etc. The Sunnıs, to the contrary, insisted on a literal reading of

the relevant Qur’anic passages, for that reading, they argued, had become

enshrined in the tradition of the faithful. As with Greek Christians, revela-

tion is to be interpreted primarily by tradition and easily trumps reason in

telling of divinity.

Emerging victorious from their struggle against the rationalist Mu‘tazila,

the Sunnı traditionalists would redouble their efforts to minimize the use

of reason in seeking knowledge of God and, ultimately, of God’s ordering

of nature. What we can know of God is confined to what he has told

us of himself, and we find that uniquely in revelation.54 The will of the

Sunnı God obliterates secondary causation;55 he remains utterly beyond

reason, and his ordering of nature is less to be explained than simply to

be accepted. In any case, no explanation advanced may claim inclusion in

the corpus of sacred knowledge. Such a jaundiced view of natural reason

hardly conduces toward the philosophical sciences that seek, after all, to

understand God’s ordering of nature as a means of understanding God.

Sunnı Islam desacralized the philosophical sciences, extruding them from

the realm of religious knowledge by insisting that rational exposition does

not necessarily explain God’s ordering of nature, which is merely “used as

an instrument by its Creator.”56

This is not to say that the defeat of the Muslim theological rationalists

by the mid-tenth century immediately throttled Islamic philosophy, math-

ematics, and natural science. Indeed, for several centuries thereafter, Islam

continued to produce some of the finest philosophers and most of the best

mathematicians and scientists in the tripartite medieval world. Even Abu

.Hamıd al-Ghazalı (d. 1111), the theologian who dealt philosophical theology

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in Sunnı Islam its death blow, never denied the validity, however qualified, of

mathematics and the natural sciences: “For the revealed law nowhere under-

takes to deny or affirm these sciences,”57 he wrote, “nothing in them entails

denial or affirmation of religious matters.”58 Born in northeastern Iran but

long a renowned teacher in Baghdad, and a man who, by his own modest ad-

mission, had mastered the full range of human knowledge, al-Ghazalı was

thoroughly versed in Islamic thought and more than casually acquainted

with classical Greek learning.59 But al-Ghazalı considered knowledge de-

rived from the philosophical sciences of little use in approaching the God

of the Qur’anic revelation. Al-Ghazalı merely confirmed Sunnı Islam’s de-

sacralization of these disciplines, placing them apart from the knowledge

necessary to believers, for they reveal nothing about God.

Al-Ghazalı identified two principal dangers lurking in the study of the

philosophical sciences. The first lies in the apparent clarity of logical and,

especially, mathematical reasoning, which tends to engender in philosophers

and mathematicians such a high regard for their disciplines that they slip

into “unbelief. . . and disdain for the [divine] Law”60 wherein no such logical

proofs are possible. “Rare are those who study mathematics without losing

their religion and throwing off the restraint of piety.”61 Yet there exists a

second danger, and that stems from those ignorant Muslims who, seeing the

unbelief of philosophers and mathematicians, proceed to reject the undeni-

able truths contained in their disciplines.62 But to understand the art is not

to understand the Artisan.

In his defining work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazalı

had launched a devastating attack against what he deemed the pretensions

of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists to preside over an alternate

channel of revelation.63 In the second half of the twelfth century, the best of

Muslim philosophers, the Cordoba-born Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a polymath

physician and jurist as well as a philosopher, delivered an equally imposing

response called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, the substance of which

is clearly implied in its title.64 In another work called The Decisive Treatise,

Averroes sought to demonstrate the harmony between philosophy and rev-

elation. In doing so, Averroes obviously retained the personal, creator God

who revealed himself in the Qur’an, but adopted from Aristotle the idea of

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a natural order, of natural phenomena explicable through reason. He went

further: because the God of the Qur’an authored the natural order, what we

learn of it, through reason, tells us about God. “He who does not under-

stand the. . . art,” wrote Averroes, “does not understand the Artisan.”65 Like

so many Muslims and Eastern Christians before him, Averroes considered

God-given reason another channel of revelation.

Averroes’ understanding of the relationship of reason to revelation resem-

bles closely that expounded by John of Damascus in the early eighth century.

But there exists a significant difference. The Damascene was summing up a

Christian tradition of philosophical theology, born in the mid-second cen-

tury and rarely questioned forcefully in Greek Christianity until the ninth.

As a consequence, John did not have to belabor the argument; many if not

most of his fellows in theology shared his assumption that, in arriving at

knowledge of God, reason and revelation were complementary, not contra-

dictory, paths. Averroes, by contrast, wrote some seventy-five years after

al-Ghazalı had delivered what time would reveal as the lethal blow to philo-

sophical theology in Sunnı Islam. Averroes had thus to devote much of his

energy to justifying the uses of reason in arriving at a knowledge of God.

As a Sunnı jurist, Averroes understood that any defense of the philosophical

sciences had somehow to be justified on the basis of Islamic law. Citing a

number of supportive Qur’anic verses, Averroes proceeded to argue that the

Qur’an itself implicitly bids Muslims to pursue these disciplines,66 a claim

that dovetails neatly with his conviction that knowledge of the art yields

knowledge of the Artisan. It is therefore imperative that the works of the

Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, be pondered, for their writings

have systematically and logically addressed questions that the Qur’an itself

enjoins the faithful to consider.67 Averroes counters al-Ghazalı’s argument

that the study of the philosophical sciences may have evil consequences by

pointing out that any harm engendered is accidental, not inherent. Imperfect

study of the divine law itself, after all, may yield evil results.68

Averroes was among the last Muslims to attempt to salvage the centrality

of philosophy in elaborating Islamic theology. It has been said of Averroes

that in his lifetime he was admired by Jews and after his death by Christians,

the implication being that Muslims failed fully to accommodate him. But

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while the Jewish philosophers of Spain saw him as kindred, for like him they

sought to advance reason as the legitimate complement of revelation, they

fared not much better in the Jewish mainstream than Averroes did in the

Islamic.69

Greek Christian philosophical theologians fared somewhat better, for

John of Damascus remains, but only formally, as salient as his antago-

nist, the antiphilosophical Gregory Palamas (d. 1357). Palamas, dwelling

within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, would decline to make sacred

the philosophical sciences. Greek Christianity would extrude from the reli-

gious curriculum such disciplines as mathematics and the natural sciences,

and so banish them from the domain of religious knowledge. We shall ob-

serve how Greek Christianity and Sunnı Islam would come to mirror one

another in cleaving to revelation and the mystic’s illumination as the surest

ways to knowledge of God. Reason, alas, does not lead to God as surely

as revelation.70 The Greek Church, then, retained only an abridged John of

Damascus, whose goal of securing a firm place for the philosophical sciences

within the Greek Christian curriculum was never realized.

So those Christians who admired Averroes after his death must be identi-

fied not as Greek but rather as Latin Christians, among the Spanish Muslim’s

followers surely the most steadfast, and among whom Aristotelian thought

would leave an indelible impress. Averroes’ fellow Muslims, while celebrat-

ing his brilliance as one might a museum piece, never conferred upon him

the stamp of orthodoxy. The victory of al-Ghazalı’s teaching in Sunnı Islam

would be even more sweeping than the later triumph of Gregory Palamas in

Greek Christendom.71 Reason would run a poor third to revelation and the

mystic’s intuition in ascertaining religious truth.

Latin Christianity and Aristotle

Certain Latin Christian thinkers learned from Aristotle, largely through

Averroes, that the phenomena set in motion by Aristotle’s unmoved mover

are governed in all respects by laws susceptible to rational explication.72

Never mind that Aristotle’s own “rational” explanations of many natural

phenomena—notably those contained in his cosmology—are mostly wrong.

The earth, we would learn, is not at the center of the universe. Nor does

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a heavier body hit the ground before a lighter body when dropped from

the same height, at least in a vacuum. But it would be idle to measure

the philosopher’s importance simply by the accuracy of his scientific ideas.

That which lends Aristotle immortality is precisely what many Muslim and

Christian thinkers found most compelling: his insistence that all natural

phenomena have rational explanations, which human reason, unaided by

anything as extraneous as revelation, is capable of apprehending.73 But as

the religious thinker fell under the sway of Aristotle’s natural reason, he

had, with considerable anguish, to ask himself, What is true: Aristotle, who

disallowed any role for the supernatural in creation, or my faith with its

personal, creator God, with its revelation and its supernatural explanations

of certain phenomena? “Both,” answered many Latin Christian thinkers!

Aristotle is true, revelation is true, therefore no contradiction between them

is possible. But the truth of philosophy and the truth of revelation stood

uneasily side by side until, to the satisfaction of many (but not all), they were

forged into a unity principally through the teaching of Thomas Aquinas.74

In his fateful passage from Islamic Spain to Latin Christendom, Aristotle

came in the company of Averroes. Aquinas recognized that Averroes, man

of faith and, more than any Christian or Muslim before him, the preeminent

commentator on the actual texts of Aristotle, had earlier confronted the

same question that now haunted Latin Christians to whom the tradition of

philosophical theology appeared less than vibrant between Augustine in the

fifth century and its revival in the ninth.75 Aquinas found the Muslim com-

mentator even more useful than John of Damascus. Where the Damascene

saw no great problem in embracing Aristotle, Latin Christians, like Averroes

earlier, saw a very great problem indeed. Finally, however, Aquinas and his

fellows would come to echo Averroes as well as John of Damascus in pro-

claiming that to understand the art is also to understand something of the

Artisan. Reason leads to God as surely as revelation.76

The acquisition, largely through Muslim sources, of the Aristotelian learn-

ing led to the first renaissance in Latin Christendom, an intellectual rebirth

quite as important as, and the basis for, those developments from the four-

teenth to the sixteenth century to which the label “Renaissance” is normally

applied. This earlier revival reached its culmination in Thomas Aquinas

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and fastened upon Latin Christendom a singular view of the relationship of

reason to revelation and of nature to nature’s God.

The Latin Christian fascination with Greek philosophy, particularly as

transmitted and glossed by Muslim thinkers, began innocently enough. Its

genesis lay in the desire to understand Christian doctrine, particularly as

enunciated by the Latin theologians of the Patristic Age, who flourished

long before the schism between the Greek and Latin Churches—many, in-

deed, antedating the separation of Monophysitism and Nestorianism in the

fifth and sixth centuries. These Church Fathers had all been, in varying

degrees, influenced by Greek, though not always Aristotelian, philosophy—

Augustine, for one, preferred the Platonic path.

In his dialectical method of juxtaposing conflicting theological author-

ities, the Brittany-born Peter Abelard (1072–1142)—al-Ghazalı’s antithet-

ical contemporary and probably the preeminent Latin Christian logician

and theologian of the twelfth century—aroused suspicion that he sought

through reason to understand that he might believe—a significant departure

from the more traditional affirmation that one must believe that one might

understand.77 For Abelard the teachings of the Church are true, but only

through dialectic, through philosophical logic, can we reconcile the mani-

fest contradictions scattered among patristic as well as Biblical and conciliar

authorities.78 “Certainly, no one in his senses would forbid rational inves-

tigation and discussion of our faith. . . and in any disputation the giving of

a reason is firmer than a display of authority.”79 But Abelard was bent on

using dialectic not only to confirm and shore up the doctrines of the faith,80

but also to sacralize all knowledge, to bring into the Christian curriculum

philosophy, mathematics, and physical science. In Abelard’s words,

Hence we are convinced that all knowledge, which indeed comes from

God alone and from His bounty, is good. Wherefore the study of every

science should be conceded to be good because that which is good

comes from it; and especially one must insist upon the study of that

doctrina by which the greater truth is known. This is dialectic, whose

function is to distinguish between every truth and falsity: as leader in

all knowledge, it holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy.81

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Peter Abelard’s desire reasonably to comprehend, logically to elaborate

and systematize, and rationally to defend was the scientific spirit already at

work. It could not have been merely fortuitous that science would receive

its fullest development in the realm of Latin Christendom.

Abelard immediately confronted Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), the

French abbot, primary builder of the Cistercian monastic order and im-

placable foe of philosophical theology. “For what is more against reason

than by reason to attempt to transcend reason?” railed Bernard,82 as if

echoing al-Ghazalı, his intellectual kinsman. In Abelard’s trial for heresy,

Bernard played enthusiastically the role of prosecutor.83

In his exercise of dialectic and embrace of rational thought, Thomas

Aquinas clearly trod in Abelard’s footsteps. The Angelic Doctor seemed to

make clear to Latin Christendom that the path of reason led to God as surely

as the mystic’s intuition, as surely as divine revelation itself. Thomas, like his

mentors, John of Damascus and Averroes, readily adopted Aristotle’s notion

of a natural order governed by laws that may be understood through reason.

(Aquinas acknowledges graciously his intellectual forebears—Aristotle, John

of Damascus, and Averroes—in the frequency of such phrases as: “accord-

ing to the Philosopher,”84 “as Damascene says,”85 and “as the Commen-

tator shows,”86 before conclusively enlightening his reader through what

“I say.”87) Like John and Averroes (and a host of Greek Christian and Mus-

lim philosophical theologians), Thomas exploits without qualm Aristotle’s

arguments from change and motion to prove the existence of God.88 But

like his predecessors, too, Thomas must substitute for Aristotle’s Unmoved

Mover, eternally coexistent with the universe, the uniquely eternal creator

God, since “Nothing except God can be eternal”89 and “Therefore there

must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being. . . and

this we call God.”90

Aquinas also taught that God, at the moment of creation, inscribed upon

his universe an Aristotelian-like order, a Natural Law, which man’s reason

could bring him to understand. Even revelation would seem to be an aspect

of the Natural Law—that portion designated by Thomas as Divine Law.

Since human reason is incapable of yielding all of the truth imparted by

revelation,

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. . . it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths

which exceed human reason should be made known to him by Di-

vine Revelation. . . Even. . . the Truth about God such as reason could

discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and

with the admixture of many errors. Whereas man’s whole salvation,

which is in God, depends on the knowledge of this Truth.91

So God, in his mercy, revealed the truth necessary for salvation. This is,

of course, the manifest role of revelation. But Natural Law, according to

Thomas, also includes Human Law—those laws that can be revealed by

human reason, unaided by revelation, and which encompass not only the

social and political spheres (marriage and kingship, for examples92) but,

certainly by implication, the physical laws governing the universe as well.93

And Human Law can in no way contradict Divine Law, both of them aspects

of the eternal Natural Law authored by God.

And even though the natural light of the human mind is inadequate to

make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely

taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with

by nature. One or the other would have to be false, and since we have

both of them from God, he would be the cause of our error, which is

impossible. . . So it is impossible that the contents of philosophy should

be contrary to the contents of faith, but they fall short of them.94

The English Franciscan friar and theologian Roger Bacon (d. 1294) is

yet more explicit on the subject of physical laws as aspects of the Natural

Law. He is equally explicit about the need for theologians to understand

mathematics and natural science, particularly astronomy,

For if we wish to consider the qualities of the study of theology, we

shall find mathematics wholly necessary. . . For theology is celestial by

divine will; and therefore no human speculative science will befit it to

the same extent as the science of the heavens.95

At the core of Bacon’s perspectiva (the science devoted to light, color,

and vision), the friar places mathematics, knowledge of which “prepares the

mind and elevates it to a certain knowledge of all things.”96

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Now, in conclusion, I wish to reveal how this science has inexpress-

ible utility with respect to divine wisdom. First, it must be understood

that. . . this science certifies natural things. . . and consequently it is ap-

parent that it explains and clarifies other sciences, therefore this science

necessarily serves divine truth, since the latter requires a knowledge of

the sciences and of mundane things.97

Predictably, Bacon joins the many in deeming Aristotle “the greatest

philosopher”98 but does not hesitate to acknowledge a number of Mus-

lim philosophers and scientists as his teachers.99 Averroes’ dictum that “he

who does not understand the. . . art does not understand the Artisan”100 is

affirmed in Bacon’s insistence that “the end of speculative philosophy is the

knowledge of the Creator through the creatures.”101 Averroes gained his

greatest victory not in Islam, but in Latin Christianity.

Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon may be said to have accelerated the

trend begun in the second century AD when, as we’ve seen, certain Christian

thinkers sought to adapt Greek philosophy to Christian uses in their effort

to reach out to the pagan intellectual, thus initiating, however indirectly, the

process by which all that had been profane would be made sacred, all that

dualism had kept distinct would become a unity, even as in the incarnate

Christ there dwelled in perfect harmony the human and the divine natures.

The world of matter and the profane knowledge explaining it were to be no

more despised than the assumption of matter by God himself.

Philosophical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and natural philoso-

phers such as Roger Bacon must also be seen as progenitors of the modern

science whose fullest development constituted Western Europe’s chief in-

strument in its rise to world dominance by the late nineteenth century. This

view of Aquinas, Bacon, and their fellows, however, is contested by those

who accept the thesis advanced by Pierre Duhem a century ago concerning

the Condemnation of 1277, promulgated by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne

Tempier. According to Duhem, Tempier designed his condemnation of 219

philosophical and theological propositions102 to wean the faculty of Arts at

the University of Paris from the suffocating influence of Aristotelian teach-

ing. Aristotle’s stultifying grip over the Parisian masters thus broken, Duhem

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argued, the way was cleared for the emergence of the methods of modern

science, the birth of which in the seventeenth century, then, was not born

of the scholasticism associated with Aristotelian Thomism but, rather, by

its mitigation.103 Scholarship addressing the Duhem thesis abounds,104 but

the better part of it belongs to those who, like Edward Grant, maintain that

the occasional reactions against Aristotelian thought, such as that expressed

by the Condemnation of 1277, “ought to be interpreted as relatively minor

aberrations when viewed against the grand sweep of the history of Western

Christianity.”105

Grant rightly postulates three preconditions for the development of mod-

ern science in the seventeenth century: the translation of Greek and Arabic

works into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the rise of the me-

dieval university; and the emergence of the theologian-natural philosophers

utilizing the translations, the heart of which comprised the works of and

commentaries on Aristotle.106 Irrespective of the truth or falsity of Aris-

totelian science, these three preconditions “laid a foundation for the emer-

gence of modern science because they provided an environment that was

conducive to the study of science.”107 “Students of natural philosophy in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the beneficiaries of the spirit of

free inquiry nurtured by medieval natural philosophers.”108 Thinkers such

as Abelard, Aquinas, and Bacon helped consecrate philosophy and science

in Latin Christendom, according them a religious function and making them

part of the Latin Christian curriculum even as these disciplines were receding

from the Greek Christian and Islamic curricula.

The Curriculum in Islam and Greek Christianity

Of Latin Christendom’s intellectual evolution, the towering Muslim

philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), resident in North Africa,

was well aware. “We further hear now,” he wrote in the late fourteenth

century,

that the philosophical sciences are greatly cultivated in the land of

Rome and along the adjacent northern shore of the country of the

European Christians. They are said to be studied there again and to

be taught in numerous classes. Existing systematic expositions of them

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are said to be comprehensive, the people who know them numerous

and the students of them very many.109

In Ibn Khaldun’s own disregard of the philosophical sciences, we may

detect what had become the representative position of Sunnı Islam. Taking

to task those Muslim “speculative theologians [who] confused the problems

of theology with those of philosophy,” Ibn Khaldun merely confirmed al-

Ghazalı’s separation between theology and the philosophical sciences in

insisting that:

The problems with which the science of speculative theology deals

are articles of faith derived from the religious law as transmitted by

the early Muslims. They have no reference to the intellect and do not

depend on it in the sense that they could not be established except

through it. The intellect has nothing to do with the religious law and

its views.110

Hence, “It should be known that the (opinion) the (philosophers) hold is

wrong in all its aspects. . . they disregard all the degrees of divine creation

beyond the (first intellect).”111 In administering his coup de grace to philoso-

phers, Ibn Khaldun went beyond al-Ghazalı in his blanket assertion that

“The problems of physics are of no importance for us in our religious affairs

or our livelihoods. Therefore, we must leave them alone.”112

Again, this is not to assert that philosophy and the sciences simply died

in the Greek Christian and Islamic East before the fourteenth century. To

the contrary, these disciplines continued for a time to sway individual Greek

Christians and Sunnı Muslims. In late thirteenth-century Constantinople,

for example, George Akropolites (d. 1282), Byzantine statesman, scholar,

and sometime astronomer, calculated and predicted the time of an eclipse

of the sun.113 In the fourteenth century, Theodore Metochites (d. 1332) not

only followed suit but produced treatises on physics and astronomy, as well

as commentaries concerning Aristotle’s writings on natural history.114 Not

long after, his student Nicephoras Gregoras (d. 1360) also calculated the

timing of an eclipse and, in addition, sought to introduce reforms to the

calendar—reforms rejected by the Byzantine emperor only to be adopted in

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large measure by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 in producing the Gregorian

Calendar.115 Up to the eve of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman

Turks in 1453, moreover, private schools in the city continued to dispense

Aristotle to a few eager Greek Christians.116

But it is important to observe that long before the Muslim conquest of

the Second Rome, the profane instruction available at the Imperial Univer-

sity had been kept distinct from the studies provided to future clergy at the

Patriarchal School,117 a development in stark contrast to clerical education

in Latin Christendom. And neither in Greek Christendom nor Islam would

the religious academies enjoy the far-reaching autonomy vis-a-vis the secu-

lar powers characteristic of the Latin Christian universities. The latter also

profited intellectually from employment of formal disputation as their salient

teaching method.118 Still, the educational arrangements for the Greek Chris-

tian clergy that appear to have emerged early in the twelfth century, how-

ever innocent of philosophy and philosophical theology,119 did not wholly

keep individual clergy, Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century for one,

from privately pursuing studies in the suspect disciplines, if only to refute

them.

Similarly, in Sunnı Islam, “the most fateful distinction that came to be

made in the course of time was between the ‘religious sciences’. . . and the

‘rational or secular sciences’. . . , toward which a gradually stiffening and sti-

fling attitude was adopted.”120 The religious sciences comprised the Qur’an

and the disciplines related to it, while “a subject considered heretical, such

as Greek philosophy—a ‘foreign’ science outside the pale of religious ortho-

doxy, was kept out. . .”121 Yet philosophy and its derivatives, “prohibited

from being taught in public, [were] taught privately”122 and, much more

than in Greek Christendom, produced some very impressive results. Re-

cent research reveals, for example, that although Copernicus (d. 1543) may

rightly claim as his own the theory of a heliocentric universe, the Latin Chris-

tian’s “adoption of heliocentricity was confirmed only after he had already

cleansed Ptolemaic astronomy of the same defects that the earlier Arabic

astronomers were pointing to, and by using the same techniques they had

used.” 123 And we find in fourteenth-century Damascus, now like the rest of

Syria transformed from Christian to largely Muslim,124 the majestic Muslim

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astronomer/mathematician Ibn al-Sha.tir (d. 1375/76), whose name means,

appropriately enough, “the son of the smart one,” and in whose prodigious

production we witness the climax of Islamic observational astronomy.125

The lunar theory generally credited to Copernicus was, two centuries be-

fore him, developed by the Damascene Muslim.126 “In face of the array

of similarities, the conclusion seems inescapable that, somehow or other,

Copernicus was strongly influenced by the work of these people,” particu-

larly Ibn al-Sha.tir and certain Muslim astronomers of the Maragha school,

notably the Shı‘ı savant, Na.sır al-Dın al-.Tusı.127 We know of Ibn al-Sha.tir’s

achievement, however, less because it proved fruitful in the work of Muslims

after him than because of the research of an American mathematician with

firm control of Arabic, whose publications, followed by those of others,

would confer upon Ibn al-Sha.tir an imperishable, if largely posthumous,

fame.128

Nor did the passing of this Syrian sage render barren the Muslim scientific

landscape. Well into the fifteenth century, self-taught and privately educated

Muslims could gain exposure to the intellectual legacy drawn originally

from ancient Greece and subsequently enriched by Islam. With regard to

enrichment, it is enough to note that the concept of “zero” and the so-called

“Arabic” numerals, although of Hindu origin, were adopted and modified

by Muslims and, through them, introduced into Christendom.129 The word

algebra derives from the Arabic al-jabr,130 and comes to us through the

treatise authored by the greatest scientific mind of his time, Mu .hammad

ibn Musa al-Khwarizmı (c. 780–c. 850),131 whose surname also gave us

“algorism.” In mathematics and physical science generally but especially in

astronomy and optics, our tripartite medieval world belonged to Islam and

not to either branch of Christianity.132

The hard truth remains, however, that well before the close of the me-

dieval period, mathematics and the sciences and their mistress, philosophy,

had lost whatever place they had enjoyed in the religious curriculum of

Sunnı Islam as well as that of Greek Christianity. Given the apparent lack

of systematic instruction and training which in Islam could only have been

the prerogative of the madrasa, in its several levels the principal institution

of learning, a question nags and Anton Heinen has phrased it: “How could

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science flourish in Islamic culture, to the extent that it did and for as long

as it did, if it had no or hardly any support from the educational estab-

lishment?”133 The answer would seem to reside in two facts: (1) most of

the scientific advances in Islam, subsequent to the madrasa’s extrusion of

philosophy and science from its curriculum, occurred in astronomy, with

its attendant mathematics; and (2) astronomy was encouraged because it

served a distinct and important religious function. Many astronomers, in-

cluding Ibn al-Sha.tir, found employment in mosques as muwaqqits, time

keepers responsible for determining the months and days of the lunar cal-

endar and its relationship to the solar, the times of daily prayer, and the

many calculations necessary for proper observance of Rama.dan, the month

of fasting.134 Since the most original Islamic astronomy began to emerge

almost one hundred years after al-Ghazalı’s demise in 1111, culminating

in the works of Ibn al-Sha.tir in the fourteenth century, there is truth in

the contention of George Saliba, an authoritative scholar of Islamic science,

that the decline of Islamic science can no longer be blamed entirely on the

Sunnı theologian.135 But it is a truth that is to be qualified by two consid-

erations: the effects of the writings of even such a giant as al-Ghazalı are

never instantaneous; and, as just observed, the science that flourished was

largely confined to astronomy, a discipline that enjoyed a religious purpose.

Nor is there evidence that astronomy constituted any part of the religious

curriculum; it appears rather to have been carried forth through the writings

of the astronomers and personal contacts with their fellows. One searches

the madrasa in vain for any sign of the physical sciences, not to mention

Aristotle.

One might also observe that briefly in the fifteenth century, with the

encouragement of the quite liberal Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II (1451–81),

logic, mathematics, astronomy, and even philosophy were introduced into

the curriculum of the Ottoman madrasas. The philosophical texts utilized,

however, were neither translations of the original Greek nor the works of

the great Muslim authorities themselves but, rather, later summaries and

commentaries.136 The decline of the “new” learning, moreover, was rapid,

the crippling blow administered in 1580 by the destruction of the Galata

observatory, located just outside Istanbul, at the behest of the Sunnı religious

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learned, who vigorously denounced this untoward effort “to penetrate God’s

secrets.”137 Provision of private instruction in the sciences and philosophy

may have continued, but it lacked the wider audience and enduring legiti-

macy that could only be achieved through inclusion within the curriculum

that produced the religious leaders.

Only in the schools of Latin Christendom did the intellectual tradition in-

timately associated with Aristotle capture the religious curriculum. Though

written over a century ago, Rashdall’s generalization needs no amendment:

“By the genius of the great Dominicans all that was Christian or not unchris-

tian in Aristotle was woven into the very substance and texture of what was

henceforth more and more to grow into the accredited theology of the

Catholic Church.”138 The “great Dominicans” are, of course, preeminently

Thomas Aquinas and his teacher, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280). It is note-

worthy that while the latter’s canonization was unaccountably delayed until

1931, Pope Pius XII, on December 16, 1940, “constituted him the heavenly

patron of all who cultivate the natural sciences.”139

The last Greek Christian attempt to make all knowledge part of sacred

knowledge occurred in the fourteenth century under the aegis of the theolo-

gian Barlaam the Calabrian (d. 1350), whose familiarity with Latin theology

and involvement in “humanist” circles in Byzantium had led him to enthu-

siastic endorsement of Aristotle and other classical authors as “criteria of

Christian thought.”140 The Calabrian echoed John of Damascus, al-Kindı,

Averroes, and Aquinas, in holding that

one cannot acquire perfection and sanctity without seeking knowledge

from all quarters, above all from Greek culture, which is also a gift of

God—just as were those insights granted to the prophets and apostles

through revelation.141

Barlaam’s effort to place reason on a par with revelation in arriving at

“perfection and sanctity”142 fell before the stark antithesis, advanced by Gre-

gory Palamas, that Greek wisdom “arouses quarrels and contains every kind

of false teaching,” and is “alienated from its proper end, that is, the knowl-

edge of God. . .”143 Palamas, like al-Ghazalı, was well trained in philosophy,

and conceded that “insofar as it is natural, [philosophy] is a gift of God,”

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and “may have some participation in the good in a remote and inchoate

manner.”144 However reluctantly, the theologian recognized that “there is

something of benefit to be had even from the profane philosophers. . .” 145

Athens, however, could hardly claim parity with Jerusalem.

Palamas’s reservations, like al-Ghazalı’s, thus focus on the abuses in-

evitably engendered by philosophy: its tendency to arouse quarrels and

inspire false teachings; the intellectual arrogance of philosophers; and their

propensity to assume the superiority of reason over revelation. “In Palamas’s

view, Barlaam. . . considered scientific knowledge of the natural world the

way to spiritual knowledge, and claimed that it is only through such ‘nat-

ural’ knowledge that we are assimilated to God.”146 Palamas, of course,

detected no health in Barlaam’s position. Like al-Ghazalı, Palamas sought

to avoid the transformation of a universalist religious creed into an elitist

doctrinal system fully accessible only to philosophers relying rather more

upon reason than revelation.147 For good or ill, the forces represented by

Palamas defeated those marshaled by Barlaam.148 Without disavowing John

of Damascus, Palamas would reject a central postulate of the Damascene’s:

the Church’s need to sacralize profane knowledge. The eclipse of Barlaam by

Gregory Palamas ensured that, several decades later, another Greek Chris-

tian theologian, Demetrios Kydones (d. 1397/98), would be forced on the

defensive by an unsympathetic Greek Church for his interest in the works of

Thomas Aquinas and, thus frustrated, would join the Latin Church.149 Not

surprisingly, the road to Rome had been taken earlier by Barlaam, whom

the Palamites, in any case, had always associated with Latin teaching.150

Aquinas and Bacon, on the other hand, canonized Aristotle metaphorically

by insisting that there could be no ultimate quarrel between the tenets of

the faith and those of reason. All truth is essentially religious truth. The

necessary foundation of the scientific revolution in Latin Christendom is

to be located in the thirteenth century, despite the disquieting circumstance

that most of the science produced then was, in its slavish adherence to

Aristotelian dicta, not science in the modern sense at all. And science and the

rational quest would remain consecrated in the realm of Latin Christendom

even after many of its prominent thinkers—Protestants mainly, but certain

Roman Catholic thinkers as well, notably the English Franciscan, William of

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Ockham (d. 1349)—drew nearer the Greek Christian and Islamic positions

in seeking to sever the philosophical sciences from the religious. Ockham

did, indeed, effect a divorce between the two, relegating the latter to the

province of faith, thereby shredding the Thomistic effort to gain a rational

understanding of faith.151 Human reason is to be applied only to observable

phenomena. Ockham’s hostility to Thomism and its Aristotelian base surely

colored the thinking of Martin Luther. “Briefly,” wrote the Great Reformer,

“the whole [of] Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light. This in

opposition to the scholastics.”152

The separation of the philosophical from the religious sciences, however,

did not imply disregard of either set of disciplines, for when the rift occurred,

the philosophical sciences had become too firmly established to be cast aside.

And, although the seventeenth-century practitioners of the philosophical

sciences could draw breath independently of the formal structure of the

Latin Church, men like Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Johannes Kepler (d. 1630),

Robert Boyle (d. 1691), and even the Arian-inclined Isaac Newton (d. 1727)

were hardly free of religious concern and commitment.

Ockham certainly may be said to have furthered the scientific quest by in-

sisting that “Assertions especially concerning natural philosophy, which do

not pertain to theology, should not be solemnly condemned or forbidden to

anyone, since in such matters everyone should be free to say freely whatever

he pleases.”153 Thomas’s Natural Law, wholly apprehensible through rea-

son, would, in the hands of Ockham’s nominalists, encourage the desacral-

ization of philosophy and precisely that separation between faith and reason

that Aquinas had labored to avoid. Still, Ockham shared with Aquinas the

same technical language, born largely of Aristotle, and his swerve should

not be attributed to the effects of the Condemnation of 1277 but rather to

a new self-generated way of interpreting the writings of the philosopher154

that foreshadowed the thinking of the seventeenth century. In free and rea-

soned inquiry and in many of the questions asked, the natural philosophers

of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were heirs to the legacy of their

medieval forebears.155

In any event, the canonization of Thomas Aquinas by Pope John

XXII on July 18, 1323, a mere forty-six years after promulgation of the

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Condemnation of 1277, testifies to the fact that, in determining the religious

verities, neither the Condemnation nor Ockham drove Thomas from the

field. It is to be observed, too, that the same pope who canonized Aquinas

excommunicated Ockham156 shortly thereafter, and that in 1341 new mas-

ters of arts at Paris were required to swear that they would teach “the system

of Aristotle and his commentator Averroes [sic], and of the other ancient

commentators and expositors of the said Aristotle, except in those cases that

are contrary to the faith.”157

Once more, it is to be stressed that neither Palamas nor al-Ghazalı ever

denied the uses of philosophy and its derivatives: mathematics and the

physical sciences. These disciplines do provide knowledge that is not to

be scorned but they do not lead us to God with anything like the cer-

tainty of revelation. By the fourteenth century, Greek Christianity and

Islam had reduced reason to near total subservience to revelation as an

instrument for knowing God, an outcome signaled by the rise of mysti-

cism to a commanding position in the theological and devotional life of

both faiths.158 Mysticism, the knowledge of God obtained by the individ-

ual worshiper through that sudden illumination, during which he somehow

enjoys direct experience of the divinity—“More than cool reason ever com-

prehends”159 —-displaced reason as the alternate channel to revelation. In

the process, philosophy and the sciences were relegated to the intellectual

periphery.

Latin Christendom, on the other hand, while boasting its own mystical

theologians and practitioners, would have to nominate Thomas Aquinas

as its characteristic theologian.160 But whether in Thomistic or Ockhamite

guise, Latin Christianity would never emulate its Eastern cousins in subvert-

ing reason-propelled philosophical theology in favor of near total depen-

dence upon revelation and the mystic’s intuition. Greek and Latin Chris-

tianity may have subscribed to essentially the same faith, and the former

certainly influenced the latter in a number of important ways, but begin-

ning with the iconoclast debacle of the eighth and ninth centuries, Greek

Christian theological evolution resembled more the Islamic than the Latin

Christian. In sum, only in Latin Christendom, and with the acquiescence of

the religious institution, would philosophy and science claim their place in

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the curriculum, at least for the crucial four hundred years between Aquinas

and Galileo (d. 1642).

Why This Outcome?

How is one to explain the radically different treatment accorded

Aristotelian-based philosophical theology by Greek Christianity, Islam, and

Latin Christianity? We have already noted the dampening of philosophical

enthusiasm wrought by the Iconoclastic Controversy in Greek Christen-

dom, and this in the face of the irony that the Greek philosophical texts

had been preserved in Byzantium and were readily accessible to educated

native speakers of Greek, a linguistic advantage not enjoyed by either Latin

Christians or Muslims. Analogously, the Mu‘tazilı-Sunnı dispute did much

to abort philosophical theology in Islam. Indeed, the iconodule and Sunnı

triumphs161 established a theological trajectory that led directly to Palamas

and al-Ghazalı, respectively, and minimized the Greek Christian and Muslim

affinity to philosophy generally.

We might, moreover, liken Greek philosophy to a plague-inducing bac-

terium or virus, sustained exposure to which yields immune or genetic resis-

tance in the afflicted population. In Greek Christendom, the classical Greek

tradition had never been lost. So, too, in Islam, which after all developed in a

heavily Eastern Christian environment in which Greek philosophy made up

a staple of intellectual life—witness the intellectual predilections of John of

Damascus. Perhaps the long, unbroken, and intimate exposure to the infec-

tion of Greek philosophy had wrought among Greek Christian and Islamic

thinkers a certain immunity to philosophical theology’s claims to speak

tellingly of God, the infinite, the incomprehensible. For Greek Christianity

and Islam, the classical Greek heritage remained useful, notably in astron-

omy and medicine, but not in religious studies. Ultimately, religious truth

could originate only in revelation. Sunnı Islam’s annihilation of secondary

causation,162 moreover, helped dislodge the underpinning of scientific

endeavor.

It need scarcely be emphasized that the Islamic and Greek Christian po-

sition is entirely plausible and was articulated by thinkers, many of whom

were well versed in ancient Greek thought. If, after all, God is what Muslims

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and Christians say he is—the only self-subsistent being, omnipotent and om-

niscient, the creator of all that is out of nothing, the deity for whom a billion

years are but a moment—then it is not irrational to conclude that human

reason is a poor instrument for telling his creatures much about him. All

that we can know with certainty of such a God is what he has deigned to tell

us of himself. Though a rational enough position, it does little to encourage

scientific inquiry. The fundamental task of religious institutions, a Sunnı

Muslim or Greek Christian might reply, is the pursuit of salvation rather

than science.

In sharp contrast to Islam and Greek Christendom, Latin Christendom

had little opportunity to develop immunity to the Aristotelian virus, for in the

wake of the Roman Empire’s collapse in the West, continuity with Athens—

with the classical tradition—would be effectively broken for centuries. The

shock administered to Latin Christendom because of its relative lack of

immunity to Aristotle may help explain Abelard’s almost sophomoric delight

in sporting with the Church Fathers once he had succumbed to the virus of

philosophy.163 Perhaps a more sophisticated Greek Christianity and Islam

understood the dangers to revelation and faith that might be posed by a near

total Aristotelian victory.

Islam’s subordination of philosophy and its derivatives, mathematics and

science, to the margin of intellectual concern may also have been encouraged

by the largely Semitic Christian environment in which Islam developed its

characteristic definitions. There is truth to the notion that Mu .hammad repre-

sented the answer of the Semitic Middle East to the challenge of Alexander—

which is to say, to the challenge of Greek or Greco-Roman political and

cultural hegemony. Did Islam’s neglect of so much of the literary and artis-

tic achievement of the classical Greek world, and Sunnı Islam’s dismissal of

Greek philosophy, represent an extension of the attitudes of the pre-Islamic

Semitic Christian and Zoroastrian Iranian Middle East? Muslims, after all,

proved to be as restrained in their embrace of Athens as the Semitic Chris-

tians and the Iranians, both of which populations would rapidly come to

constitute the majority of Muslims in the Middle East.

It must also be observed that the crucial decision against Aristotle was

made by Sunnı Muslims sorely beset on two fronts: from the west by the

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Fa.timı Isma‘ılı Shı’a, centered in Egypt (969–1171), who entertained a more

benign view of philosophical theology than did their Sunnı opponents;164

and from the east by nomadic expansion—specifically that of the Turkomens

in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the Mongols in the thirteenth.165

Nor should one overlook the threat, although confined largely to coastal

Syria and Egypt, posed by Crusaders from 1099 to the mid-thirteenth cen-

tury. In a beleaguered Sunnı Middle East the classical Greek question, What

is the nature of the universe? (not to mention the inevitable next ques-

tion, How is man to control the universe?) came to be less compelling than

the Semitic question, What are man’s duties toward the God knowable only

through revelation, through what he has told us of himself—the same jealous

God who, for his own unfathomable reasons, has sanctioned such temporal

disasters upon his people? A similar attitude no doubt prevailed in Greek

Christendom, which had been under almost constant Muslim threat since

the Arab conquests of the seventh century, as the Turkomens and then their

Ottoman heirs moved inexorably through Asia Minor and into southeastern

Europe before plucking, in 1453, the fabled city of Constantine itself. Latin

Christians, by contrast, fell under the Aristotelian spell when they were at

last free of the external threat initiated by the Germans in the latter half of

the third century and thereafter continued by Muslims, Vikings, Slavs, and

Magyars. By around 1050, the worst was over. The onset of the Crusades

on the very eve of the twelfth century is to be seen as an early manifestation

of Latin Christendom’s expansive optimism.

Is there a point at which mundane threat ceases to spur creative innovation

but, rather, encourages a disintegrative insularity in the intellectual as well

as the mechanical arts, and fosters the conviction that the great voyages of

the mind have already been made? Or, on the contrary, is the conviction

that reason leads to God as surely as revelation, as surely as the mystic’s

illumination, apt to have greatest appeal in a society made optimistic by

worldly circumstance? Are the infinite, unknown, and perhaps threatening

possibilities in probing Natural Law more apt to find favor in a society

such as Latin Christendom early in the second millennium, a society able

for the first time in centuries to look outward and contemplate a new range

of worldly possibilities? It is also to be observed that the system of Natural

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Law advanced by Thomas Aquinas, precisely because of its rationality, lends

itself admirably to the development of a secular society, the fate awaiting

Latin Christendom in the modern period. The moment would come when

a Natural Law intelligible through reason would survive the exile of its

Author. Could this danger, however dimly perceived, have helped turn Islam

and Greek Christianity away from philosophical theology?

Latin Philosophical Theology and Technology:

A Parallel Development

While this is not the place fully to develop the theme, there surely exists a

correspondence between the enthusiastic adoption of Aristotle by the Latin

Church and the sheer inventiveness in technology that simultaneously char-

acterized Latin Christendom and led to its assumption of global leadership

in technology by the fourteenth century166 and in science by the sixteenth,

a leadership that Western Europe and its transatlantic offspring, the United

States, have yet fully to relinquish, a leadership that still manifests itself in the

political, economic, and cultural domination against which many Muslims

currently rebel.

Fundamental to the evolution of technology in Latin Christendom was

the agricultural revolution sparked by the exploitation of the heavy-wheeled

plow—a device that would make extensive and efficient cultivation of the

dense and moist soil of the northern plains of continental Europe at last pos-

sible. This innovation would come to yield a food surplus that eventually

made possible the revival of town life.167 In the words of Lynn White Jr.,

“The psychological shock involved in making the social adjustments neces-

sary to use the heavy-wheeled plow may help us to understand the openness

of the later [Latin Christian] mentality towards technological change or

towards change in general.”168

But although the heavy-wheeled plow had been introduced before the late

eighth century, its beneficial effects were delayed until the end of invasion

toward the close of the tenth.169 In brief, the same circumstance that opened

the way to the philosophical theology of the Latin scholastics enabled the

new agricultural technology to revolutionize Latin Christian agrarian and

ultimately town life. If the end of invasion helped induce such radical change

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in the material and intellectual life of Latin Christendom, it may perhaps

be argued conversely that the onset of invasion inhibited the material and

intellectual development of Greek Christendom and Islam.

White later modified his argument by insisting that attitudes toward tech-

nological change “depend upon what people in a society think about their

personal relation to nature, their destiny, and how it is good to act. These

are religious questions.”170

In this regard, let us note that just as the cessation of invasion fertilized the

agricultural revolution and generated further changes in military technology

and industrial processes, Latin philosophical theologians such as Abelard

entered the scene, harbingers of the enduring Latin preoccupation with Aris-

totle’s natural reason, exaltation of which would yield theological warrant

for innovation in all areas of human concern, a justification that would bear

the imprimatur of the Latin Church itself. The Saxony-born cleric Hugh of

St. Victor, who spent most of his life in France, made this quite explicit

when, in the early twelfth century, he asserted that philosophy subsumes

the mechanical—on the face of it a striking affirmation coming from this

initiator of the mysticism associated with the school of St. Victor.171 Clearly,

however, Hugh had scant quarrel with Latin Christianity’s impending sub-

scription to a divinely authored Natural Law graspable by human reason.

That which White terms “a mood without historical precedent”172 must

have been at once cause and, in its post-tenth-century intensity, effect of

the theological position adopted by thinkers such as Abelard, Aquinas, and

Bacon. Even the monastery of Clairvaux in the time of Bernard, Abelard’s

chief antagonist, displayed a series of waterwheels lauded by a contemporary

for generating power for several industrial processes.173 And could it have

been simply fortuitous that in 1248—just as Aristotle, John of Damascus,

and Averroes were completing their conquest of Thomas Aquinas—a Latin

archbishop wrote, praising certain monks as “men after my own heart. . .

Not only do they give witness of unblemished religion and a holy life, but

also they are very active and skilled in building roads, in raising aqueducts,

in draining swamps. . . and generally in the mechanic arts”?174 And when the

Dominican Giordano da Rivalto, preaching in Florence in 1306, applauded

recent technological development—that which White terms the “invention

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of invention”175 —was not the friar celebrating in the realm of technology

the endless vista that his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, had, with

equal enthusiasm and optimism, celebrated in the realm of an Aristotelian-

generated philosophical theology?

Epilogue

We have observed Peter Abelard, more than a century before Thomas

Aquinas, articulating the emerging consensus of Latin Christian thinkers

in insisting that “. . . all knowledge, which indeed comes from God alone

and from his bounty, is good. Wherefore the study of every science should

be conceded to be good. . .”176 Abelard’s contemporary, Bernard of Clair-

vaux, on the other hand, fearing the growing preoccupation with philosophy

evinced by the likes of Abelard, warned Pope Innocent II (1130–1143) that

Peter Abaelard [sic] is endeavoring to destroy the virtue of the Christian

faith, inasmuch as he thinks that he is able to comprehend the whole

that God is by his unaided human reason, he is ascending to the skies

he is descending to the depths. There is nothing which can escape him,

either in the heights above or in the depths beneath. He is a man great

in his own eyes, a disputer of the faith against the faith, a man who

busies himself about great and wonderful matters which are out of his

reach, a prier into the Majesty of God, a manufacturer of heresies.177

It would fall to Latin Christendom alone fully to “[ascend] to the skies”

and “[descend] to the depths.” As a beleaguered Islam and Greek Chris-

tendom retrenched intellectually, Latin Christendom began its movement—

admittedly with a few detours178 —toward global hegemony, brandishing as

its paramount weapons science and technology, the intellectual climate for

whose development had been created by medieval Latin Christian theology’s

greater fidelity to Aristotle.

Many modern heirs to medieval Latin Christian theology, not to mention

their numerous acolytes in contemporary Greek Christendom and Islam,

appear little disturbed as the art becomes clearer and the Artisan recedes

from view.

This essay is for Stanley Rothman

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NOTES

1. I am indebted to my colleagues at Smith College: John M. Connolly, Professor of Philosophy;Douglas L. Patey, Sophia Smith Professor of English Language and Literature; and StanleyRothman, Mary H. Gamble Professor Emeritus of Government, for their critical reading ofthis essay. Thanks too, to my daughter Josette H. Haddad and my wife Helen R. Haddadfor their editorial efforts. Obviously, any flaws that have survived this collective scrutiny aremy own.

2. Bernard Lewis, to take the most widely read example, while noting the rather abrupt declinein Islamic science at the close of the medieval period, assigns most of the responsibilityfor that development to Islam’s failure to respond successfully to the advances in science,technology, and economy that attained prominence in Latin Christendom in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. Neither in explaining Latin Christendom’s rise nor Islam’s declinedoes Lewis make much of the medieval theological factors emphasized in this essay; seeBernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2002), especially 14, 20, 23, 78. For other exegeses of LatinChristian and Islamic divergence, see below, n. 9.

3. Qur’an, 5:20.4. See, for example, ibid., 5:75–76, 78; 9:30–31.5. Ibid., 4:157.6. On the Christian deletion, see ibid., 61:6; on the Jewish, ibid., 7:157; 46:10.7. Ibid., 5:16.8. This, according to the Western reckoning, representing the middle period between the clas-

sical or Greco-Roman period, ending with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in thefifth century, and the early modern period initiated in the fifteenth century and capped bythe Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth. Of course, this “middle period” marks Islam’sclassical period, while Greek Christian Byzantium is characterized by continuity with theGreco-Roman period. Extinguished in 1453, however, Byzantium possesses no early modernexistence. These caveats noted, we retain “medieval” for its obvious convenience.

9. Whitehead was perhaps the first to cite medieval Latin Christian theology as essential to thedevelopment of Western science, since “. . . the habit of definite exact thought was implantedin the European mind by the long dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic divinity.”See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (NewYork: Macmillan, 1947), 17. Rodney Stark, in his recent study, concurs, tracing the genesisof Western science, not to mention freedom and capitalism, to medieval theological roots,but his treatment of Aristotle and Islam is faulty (see below, nn. 73, 132) and he pays scantattention to Greek Christianity; see Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How ChristianityLed to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005). Jakialso identifies medieval Latin Christian theology as integral to the rise of Western sciencebut says little of Islam and Greek Christendom: Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation: FromEternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (New York: Science History Publications, 1974),219–43. In another work, Jaki places less emphasis on medieval scholasticism than onfundamental Christian doctrine: Stanley L. Jaki, The Savior of Science (Washington, D.C.:Regnery Gateway, 1988). David C. Lindberg in his The Beginnings of Western Science: TheEuropean Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Edward Grant in hisThe Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, andIntellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and in his Science andReligion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Westport, Connecticut:Greenwood Press, 2004) have the virtue of seriously considering Greek Christianity andIslam (on Lindberg, see below nn. 134, 157; on Grant, see below, 369 and nn. 105–108).Toby E. Huff, in his ambitious The Rise of Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, Sec-ond edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), takes scant account of GreekChristianity and, in my view, deemphasizes the theological factor (on Huff, see below, n.165). Jared Diamond, asked to produce a brief summary of his now famous book, wrotethat “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among

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peoples’ environments. . .”: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of HumanSocieties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 25. The differences he stresses, however, arerooted largely in geographic factors. My essay focuses mainly on the intellectual environ-ment, spawned only in part by some of the more mundane considerations advanced byDiamond (see below, 379–383), and I have tried to accord more or less equal attention toeach of the three medieval civilizations.

10. Below, 366.11. Gordan Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies,” Universities in the Middle Ages,

vol. 1, A History of the University in Europe, 4 vols., ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 319. I have generally used “science” and“natural philosophy” synonymously.

12. Below, 356 and n. 33.13. This is the inescapable conclusion enshrined in Muslim tradition and derived from the

Qur’anic insistence upon Mu .hammad as “unlettered” (Qur’an, 7:157) and twice com-manded by God through Gabriel to “recite” (ibid., 96:1, 3). The relevant New Testamenttext is Luke 1:28–38.

14. Note particularly “The First Apology of Justin” and “The Second Apology of Justin,” TheApostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, 163–93, in Alexander Roberts and JamesDonaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers downto A.D. 325, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926).

15. Clement of Alexandria, “The Stromata, or Miscellanies,” bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 348, Fathers ofthe Second Century, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2.

16. Clement, “Stromata,” bk. 6, chap. 5, ibid., 489.17. Clement, “Stromata,” bk. 1, chap. 19, ibid., 320.18. Tertullian, “On Prescription against Heretics,” chap. 7, Latin Christianity: Its Founder,

Tertullian, 246, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.19. Tertullian, “On Repentance,” chap. 1, in ibid., 657.20. Origen, “Origen against Celsus,” bk. 7, chap. 59, Origen, Parts First and Second, 634, The

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4.21. “Origen against Celsus,” bk. 7, chap. 42, in ibid., 628.22. “Origen against Celsus,” bk. 7, chap. 38, in ibid., 626.23. Logos, Greek for “word” or “utterance,” was widely employed in Greek philosophical

writings. For Plato it signified the expression of truth, for the Stoics the divine principle andcause of the world that penetrates all that exists. Christians adopted logos and applied it toJesus, the divine “word” or “utterance” become flesh, the expression of truth incarnate, theembodiment of the divine mind and will. For its pre-Christian uses and its expropriationby Christians, see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1977), especially 28, 48.

24. For a succinct summary of Arianism and the Orthodox refutation, see Jaraslav Pelikan,The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 4 vols., vol. 1, TheEmergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1971), 191–205. Arianism’s denial of Christ’s divinity would later be reasserted by Islam.

25. Iconoclast “rationalism” consisted largely in holding that an icon of Christ, in failing todepict his divine nature, could not be a true representation of Christ, the tradition of theconfessing community notwithstanding. To which John of Damascus replied: “That thisinvention of images and their veneration is nothing new, but an ancient tradition of theChurch. . .”: Treatise 2, p. 20, in St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the DivineImage, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 75.

26. Treatise 2, p. 13, in ibid., 69.27. Treatise 1, p. 16, in ibid., 29.28. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, bk. 4, chap. 17, p. 89, in Philip Schaff

and Henry Wace, eds., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the ChristianChurch, vol. 9, reprint (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983). For a more recenttranslation, see Frederic H. Chase Jr., trans., Saint John of Damascus: Writings, 373–75, inThe Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 37 (Washington, D.C.: The CatholicUniversity of America Press, 1958).

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29. John of Damascus, Exposition, bk. 4, chap. 17, p. 89; see also Writings, 375.30. Ibid., 168; John of Damascus, Exposition, bk. 1, chap. 3, p. 2. Romans 1:19–20 provides

the salient New Testament text in support of this position.31. The philosopher’s main argument is to be found in bk. Lamda, 6 and 7 of his Metaphysics.

See, for example, the translation by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1998),368–75, particularly 373–74.

32. John of Damascus, Exposition, bk. 1, chap. 3, p. 2; Writings, 169.33. “It is, however, impossible that movement should either come-to-be or be destroyed. It

must always have been in existence. . .”: Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Lamda 6 (p. 369 inLawson-Tancred’s translation).

34. John of Damascus, Writings, 11.35. Ibid., 12.36. Ibid., 166.37. Ibid., 172.38. George Hourani, trans., Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (London:

Luzac and Co., 1976), 47. Known in Latin and its derivatives as Averroes, the philosopher’sArabic name is Abu’l-Walıd Mu .hammad Ibn A .hmad Ibn Rushd (1126–1198). See alsobelow, 361–64.

39. Above, 354–56.40. “I shall add nothing of my own,” insisted the Damascene, “but shall gather together those

things which have been worked out by the most eminent teachers and make a compendiumof them” (John of Damascus, Writings, xxv).

41. Below, 366.42. Below, 370–71 and nn. 117, 119.43. Monophysites and Nestorians differed from Latin and Greek Christians in their respec-

tive Christologies. The former comprised a majority in Egypt and Syria, the latter inMesopotamia (Iraq), at the time of the Muslim conquests and for several centuriesthereafter.

44. Quoted in George N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: The Philosopher of the Arabs, 2nd reprint (Islam-abad: Islamic Research Institute, 1985), 21.

45. Quoted in ibid., 17.46. Quoted in ibid., 22. It follows for al-Kindı that “the utterances of Mu .hammad the truth-

ful and the message that he transmitted from the Almighty are ascertainable by intel-lectual arguments” (quoted in ibid., 25). Still, the Muslim philosopher concedes, hu-man knowledge is inferior to the prophetic since the latter is revealed directly by God(ibid., 30).

47. Ibid., 22.48. Ibid., 37. Al-Kindı is known to have authored a treatise entitled That Philosophy Cannot

Be Attained Except by the Science of Mathematics (ibid., 37).49. Ibid., 68, 73.50. Ibid., 52.51. Notably al-Razı (Rhazes), d. 923 or 932; al-Farabı (Alpharabius), d. 950; ibn Sına (Avi-

cenna), d. 1037; and, of course, ibn Rushd (Averroes), d. 1198.52. Shı‘ı Muslims, of course, also uphold the Practice of the Prophet but supplement this with

the pronouncements of the imams in direct descent from the Prophet through his daughter,Fa.tima, and her husband and Mu .hammad’s paternal first cousin ‘Alı.

53. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi, 41; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), 207.

54. The striking analogies between the Iconoclasts and Mu‘tazila are developed at length inRobert M. Haddad, “Iconoclasts and Mu‘tazila: The Politics of Anthropomorphism,” TheGreek Orthodox Theological Review 27 (1982): 287–305.

55. In this respect, Sunnı Islam goes well beyond Christianity, Greek as well as Latin, in itsdeference to determinism. A succinct summary, with representative theological statements,of the struggle between Muslims upholding free will and those defending determinism maybe found in John Alden Williams, Themes of Islamic Civilization (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1971), 161–86.

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56. Richard J. McCarthy, trans., Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translation of Al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, vol. 4, Library of Classical Arabic Literature (Boston:Twayne, 1980), 76.

57. Ibid., 74.58. Ibid., 73.59. We ought to believe him when he writes: “I would scrutinize the creed of every sect. . . I

would never take leave. . . of a philosopher without seeking to become acquainted with theessence of his philosophy. . .” (ibid., 62).

60. Ibid., 73.61. Ibid., 74.62. Ibid.63. Sabih Ahmad Kamali, trans., Al-Ghazzali’s Tahafut al-Falasifa: Incoherence of the Philoso-

phers (Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963).64. Simon van den Bergh, trans., Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Inco-

herence), 2 vols. (London: Luzac, 1954).65. Hourani, Averroes, 47.66. Ibid, 44–48.67. Ibn Rushd echoes John of Damascus and al-Kindı in the following passage: “But if someone

has already examined that subject [intellectual reasoning and its kinds], it is clear that weought to seek help towards our goal from what has been said by such a predecessor on thesubject, regardless of whether this other shares our religion. . . By ‘those who do not shareour religion’ I refer to those ancients who studied these matters before Islam.” See ibid,46–47.

68. Ibid., 48–49.69. The Jewish ambivalence surrounding the central figure in medieval Jewish philosophical the-

ology, Maimonides (Moses Ben Maimon), d. 1204, is nicely delineated in Isadore Twersky,ed., A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 21–25. While he is undoubt-edly “the greatest philosophical thinker in the world of traditional Judaism. . . Maimonideshas been a central figure in the world of religious Jewry for the last eight hundred yearsbecause he is the greatest authority in the field of Jewish law, the halachah”: YeshayahuLeibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides (New York: Adama Books, 1987), 11. Historically,then, reverence for his titanic achievement in Jewish law has always exceeded that accordedhis philosophical theology.

70. Below, 370–75 and nn. 109–122.71. On Palamas, see below, 374–75.72. These thinkers, of course, do not preclude effects (miracles) wrought by God that are apart

from the natural order.73. If there is anything to Rodney Stark’s charge that “Greek learning was a barrier to the rise of

science” (Stark, The Victory of Reason, 20), it lies only in the fact that the Greeks, includingAristotle, did not fully share the Muslim and Latin Christian urgency to study how thingswork.

74. Even some contemporaries of Aquinas, however, including Siger of Bramant (d. c. 1281),persisted in delivering lectures devoted purely to “an Aristotelianism influenced by Averroesand on some points contrary to the Christian faith,” an activity which led to the Con-demnation of 1277: see “Siger of Brabant,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second edition.(Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003) 13:112. On the Condemnation of 1277, see below,368–69.

75. John Scotus Eriugena, who flourished in the mid-ninth century and could read Greek, wasacquainted with Aristotelian logic and stressed that “authority proceeds from true reason,[while] reason certainly does not proceed from authority. . . true reason is kept firm andimmutable by her own powers and does not require to be confirmed by the assent of anyauthority.” Eriugena adds quickly, however, that “true authority is nothing else but thetruth that has been discovered by the power of reason and set down in writing by theHoly Fathers. . .”: John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), ed. andtrans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams; revised by John J. O’Meara (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987), 110.Roscelin (c.1045–c.1120) sounds distinctly the rationalist note (“Roscelin of Compiegne,”

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New Catholic Encyclopedia, 12: 377) and would be followed by, among others, his studentand then antagonist, the more sophisticated Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and later, of course, byThomas Aquinas (d. 1274).

76. Like John of Damascus (see above, 356, and n. 36), Aquinas acknowledges that while reasoncannot yield knowledge of God’s essence, a major aspect of which is, of course, the Trinity,“God is known by natural knowledge [reason] through the images of His effects. . . eitherreceived from sense in the natural order, or divinely formed in the imagination”: ThomasAquinas, The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, Second edition, 22 vols., trans.Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd.,1912–1925), 1:146–147, question 12.

77. Above, 352–54. Augustine, for example, inveighs against Manichaeans who condemn Chris-tians “who, following the authority of the Catholic faith, before they can gaze upon thattruth which pure minds behold, are, by believing, both fortified in advance and preparedfor God who will enlighten them”: see “On the Advantage of Believing,” chap. 1, (2), inWritings of Saint Augustine, vol. 2, Roy J. Deferrari et al., eds., The Fathers of the Church(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 392. The Bishop ofHippo argues that only a few are “capable of grasping the reasons by which the humanmind is led to understand the divine” (ibid., chap. 10, [24]). None of this is to suggest, ofcourse, that Augustine, an enthusiastic Platonist, held reason in disregard, only that reasonremained subordinate to faith.

78. These are revealed at length in Abelard’s Sic et Non, characteristic passages from whichmay be found in English translation in Brian Tierney et al., eds., Great Issues in WesternCivilization, 2 vols., Third edition (New York: Random House, 1976), 1:396–400.

79. Peter Abelard, A Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew, and a Christian, trans. Pierre J.Payer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 86.

80. The “wisdom of God” is, after all, the origin of both the power to reason and “the per-fect teaching” necessary for salvation: see Peter Abelard, Collationes, ed. and trans. JohnMarenbon and Giovanni Orlandi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 89, par. 71.

81. This passage from Abelard’s Dialectica may be found in Tierney et al., Great Issues inWestern Civilization, 1:402–403.

82. This sentence is drawn from Bernard’s extensive and ferocious critique of Abelard’s writings,contained in his letter to the Pope, written in 1140, for which see Samuel. J. Eales, ed., Lifeand Works of St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 4 vols. (London: John Hodges, 1889–1896),2:566. See 565–93 for the full text of Bernard’s letter.

83. “Abelard,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1:18.84. Aquinas, Summa, 1:4, question 1 et passim.85. Ibid., 1:20, question 2 et passim.86. Ibid., 1:37, question 3 et passim.87. Or “I answer that” (ibid., 1:6, question 1 et passim).88. Ibid., 1:24–26, question 2.89. Ibid., 2:244, question 46.90. Ibid., 1:26, question 2.91. Ibid., 1:2, question 1; see also ibid., 8:40–52, question 94.92. Ibid., 8:53–58, question 95. On marriage as part of Natural Law, see ibid., 19:76–79, ques-

tion 41. On kingship as part of the Natural Law, see Thomas Aquinas, On the Governanceof Rulers (De Regimine Principum), rev. ed., trans. G. B. Phelan (London: Sheed & Ward,1938), especially 33–48.

93. “Natural science does not treat of the First Mover as its subject or as part of its subject, butas the end to which natural science leads”: see Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methodsof the Sciences, Fourth edition, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute ofMedieval Studies, 1986), 30 (question 5, art. 2, reply to 3).

94. Thomas Aquinas, Faith, Reason and Theology: Questions I-IV of His Commentary on theDe Trinitate of Boethius, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of MedievalStudies, 1987), 48 (question 2, art. 3).

95. Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus, trans. Robert B. Burk, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1928), 1:200.

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96. Ibid., 1:116.97. David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A

Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s Perspectiva with Introduction andNotes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 321.

98. Bacon, Opus Majus, 1:48; “Aristotle, on the testimony of all great philosophers, is thegreatest of them all. . .” (ibid., 1:63).

99. “Alpharabius [al-Farabı] makes it clear in his book on the sciences that grammar and logiccannot be known without mathematics. . .” (ibid., 1:118). “. . . Avicenna [ibn Sına] andAverroes [ibn Rushd] and others recalled to the light of full exposition the philosophy ofAristotle” (ibid., 1:63). “After him [Avicenna] came Averroes, a man of sound wisdom,correcting many statements of his predecessors. . .” (ibid., 1:64).

100. Above, 356 and n. 38.101. Bacon, Opus Majus, 1:49.102. For the text of the Condemnation, see Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, Philosophy in the

Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic and Jewish Traditions, Second edition (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 584–91.

103. “Mais a la suite des condemnations portees. . . contre une foule de theses qui soutenaient<Aristote et ceux de sa suite>, voici qu’un grand mouvement se dessine, qui va libererla pensee chretienne du joug du Peripatetisme et du Neoplatonisme, et produire ce quel’archaısme de la Renaissance appellera la Science des <Modernes>”: Pierre Duhem, Etudessur Leonard de Vinci, 3 vols., troisieme serie, Les Precurseurs Parisiens de Galilee (Paris: F.De Nobele, 1955), 1:vii.

104. For valuable recent examples, see Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery Jr., and Andreas Speer, eds.,After the Condemnation of 1277: Philosophy and Theology at the University of Paris inthe Last Quarter of the Thirteenth Century; Studies and Texts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,2001).

105. Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 175.106. Ibid., 170–74.107. Ibid., 176.108. Ibid., 201.109. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., trans. Franz Rosenthal

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 3:117–18.110. Ibid., 3:153–54.111. Ibid., 3:250.112. Ibid., 3:251–52.113. Deno John Geanakopolos, Byzantium: Church, Society, and Civilization Seen through Con-

temporary Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 437.114. Ibid.; see also “Metochites, Theodore,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth edition,

vol. 8, 71,72.115. Geanakoplos, Byzantium, 437–38; on the matter of the calendar, see “Gregoras, Nicephorus

[sic],” The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth edition (2000), 1188.116. Geanakoplos, Byzantium, 408.117. See John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence (Crestwood,

N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1964), 29. It is to be noted that during the reign of Em-peror Alexios I (1081–1118), John Italos, the most famous teacher of philosophy of his day,was condemned for heresy—his writings allegedly “crammed with Hellenic ungodliness”—and lost his teaching position. See Michael Angold, The Byzantine Empire, 1025–1204: APolitical History (London: Longman, 1984), 117. On Italos’s trial and some of its polit-ical aspects, see J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1986), 144–46. For the wholly jaded description of Italos provided by theemperor’s daughter, see Anna Comnena, The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena, trans.Elizabeth A. S. Dawes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928), 132–37.

118. Makdisi argues that this method not only originated earlier in Islam but that it was bor-rowed from the Muslims by the Latin Christians. See George Makdisi, The Rise of theColleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-sity Press, 1981), especially 239, 245, 250–60. Makdisi does concede, however, that the

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Mu‘tazilı-inspired mi .hna (inquisition), launched in the ninth century, “brought in the sup-pression of speculation, and its banishment from the legal movement in Islam” (ibid., 263).Suppression was hardly immediate or complete but it is to be emphasized that formal dis-putation, whether in law or theology, comprised an integral aspect of “speculation.”

119. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, 146.120. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 33.121. George Makdisi, “Muslim Institutions of Learning in Eleventh-Century Baghdad,” Bulletin

of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) 24 (1961): 6. “Philosophy proper. . .disappeared from the mosques. . . The madrasas were mainly established to teach the systemsof fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence]”: R. Hillenbrand, “Madrasa,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam,new edition, eds. C. E. Boswell et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), 5:1129. With regard tothe curriculum of the madrasa in Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517), another scholar writes:“The rational sciences—such as philosophy, logic, and mathematics—had little part inthe curriculum of the schools of higher religious education. . .” See Jonathan Berkey, TheTransmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13.

122. George Makdisi, “Interaction between Islam and the West,” Medieval Education in Islamand the West, eds. George Makdisi et al. (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1977), 297.

123. George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden Ageof Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 26–27. On the two theoremsin question, both articulated around the mid-thirteentth century, see p. 27, and the fullertreatment provided in George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the EuropeanRenaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007), 197–201.

124. The Christians had certainly been reduced to a minority by the end of the Crusades in themid-thirteenth century. They number perhaps 10 percent of the population today.

125. Saliba, History, 11.126. On Ibn al-Sha.tir, see Victor Roberts, “The Solar and Lunar Theory of Ibn ash-Sha.tir:

A Pre-Copernican Model,” Isis 48 (1957): 428–32; E. S. Kennedy and Victor Roberts,“The Planetary Theory of Ibn al-Sha.tir,” Isis 50 (1959): 227–35; E. S. Kennedy, “LateMedieval Planetary Theory,” Isis 57 (1966): 365–78. The three foregoing articles have beenreprinted in E. S. Kennedy et al., Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences (Beirut: AmericanUniversity of Beirut, 1983). A younger contemporary of Ibn al-Sha.tir also sought to throwoff the restraints of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology: see “Ubayd Allah ibn Mas‘udMa .hbubı,” An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy: Kitab Ta‘dıl Hay’at al-Aflaq of .Sadral-Sharı‘a, ed. and trans. Ahmad S. Dallal (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995).

127. E. S. Kennedy, “Late Medieval Planetary Theory,” 377. It was at Maragha, the old capital ofAzarbayjan, that the Mongol Ilkhan, Hulegu I (1256–1263), ordered an observatory builtfrom plans by al-.Tusı (V. Minorsky, “Maragha,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed.,6:501). It has been observed that a Byzantine Greek manuscript that entered the Vaticancollection in 1453 clearly indicated al-.Tusı’s crucial theorem, now known as the .Tusı Couple.One can only note that Copernicus resided in Italy for a few years and could read Greek(Saliba, History, 269–70). The most extensive treatment of the likely influence of al-.Tusıand Ibn al-Sha.tir on Copernicus is provided in Saliba, Islamic Science, 196–214.

128. The mathematician was Edward S. Kennedy, then Professor of Mathematics at the AmericanUniversity of Beirut. On the possible circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s discovery, seeSaliba, History, 260.

129. Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin: Univer-sity of Texas Press, 1995), 45–46.

130. In its primary meaning: restoration of balance, equilibrium, or setting (as of broken bones).131. Al-Kitab al-Mukhta.sar fı .Hisab al-Jabar w’al-Muqabala (The Concise Book on Calculation

by Balance and Collation).132. Ibid., 47–48. Turner’s Science in Medieval Islam provides an easily digestible general intro-

duction to the Islamic scientific achievement. See also E. S. Kennedy, “The Arabic Heritagein the Exact Sciences,” in Kennedy et al., Studies, 30–47; reprinted from Al-Abhath, De-cember 1970 (Beirut: American University of Beirut), 23:327–44. For an empathetic and

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informed survey by a distinguished Muslim scholar, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science andCivilization in Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Second edition (Cam-bridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1987). It is strange indeed that Rodney Stark, who rightlyseeks to demonstrate that the Latin Christian predilection for science rested on medievaltheological foundations, can dismiss the Islamic achievement by claiming that “. . . manysocieties [including Islam] developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe didastrology lead to astronomy. . .” (Stark, The Victory of Reason,14).

133. Anton M. Heinen, “An Unknown Treatise by Sanad ibn ‘Alı on the Relative Magnitude ofthe Sun, Earth and Moon,” in David A. King and George Saliba, From Deferent to Equant:A Volume of Studies in the History of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East inHonor of E. S. Kennedy, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (New York: TheNew York Academy of Sciences, 1987), 500:167. Heinen’s question is also posed by Sabra,although his speculations on a possible answer differ somewhat from mine. See A. I. Sabra,“The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: APreliminary Statement,” History of Science, eds. A. C. Crombie et al. (Cambridge: UniversityPrinting Services), xxv (1987), 234, 238–42.

134. On the institution of al-muwaqqit, see D. A. King, “Mıkat,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam,7:27–30; Saliba, History, 32–33. The significance of al-muwaqqit in advancing Islamicastronomy has also been noted by Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 179, and DavidC. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 263–67, especially 263.

135. Saliba expands at length on this subject in his Islamic Science, 233–55.136. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz

and Colin Imber (New York: Praeger, 1973), 176–77.137. Ibid., 179.138. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, new edition, eds. F. M.

Powicke and A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 1:368. For a surveyof the division of the disciplines taught in the Latin schools, see Leff, in Universities inthe Middle Ages, 333–35, concerning the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic); on theQuadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy), see John North, “The Quadriv-ium,” in ibid., 337–58. A useful survey is also to be found in David L. Wagner, ed., TheSeven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

139. “Albert the Great, St.,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1:225.140. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle (New York:

Paulist Press, 1981), intro., 11.141. Ibid., 25. There is no reason to question this paraphrase by Palamas, Barlaam’s arch-

opponent. It was in reply to Barlaam’s attack against the Hesychasts, the mystically inclinedmonastics, that Palamas composed his “Triads for the Defense of the Holy Hesychasts.”See John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, trans. Adele Fiske(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 92. Of his sojourn among theHesychasts, Barlaam wrote: “I have been initiated by them in monstrosities and absurddoctrines that a man with any intelligence or even a little sense, cannot lower himself todescribe. . .” (quoted in Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas, 89).

142. Palamas, Triads, 25.143. Ibid., 27–28.144. Ibid.145. Ibid., 28.146. Ibid., 120, n. 31.147. According to Palamas, Barlaam wrote that “the observance of the commandments cannot

remove the darkness of ignorance from the soul; that can be done only through learning andthe perseverance in study that this entails” (ibid., 61).

148. Two Councils, held in Constantinople in June and August of 1341, condemned Barlaamin favor of Palamas (Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas, 96). On the first Sunday of Lent,moreover, all Orthodox churches repeat anathemas against “those who follow the foolishopinions of the Hellenic disciplines. . .” (Palamas, Triads, intro., 11).

149. On Kydones, see Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium: Its Ecclesiastical History and Relationswith the Western World (London: Variorum, 1972), 1:335–37; 7:69, 81–82, 95; 12:54–55.

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A passage from Kydones’s apologia for his interest in Aquinas is found in Geanakoplos,Byzantium, 378–79. In contrast to Kydones, the pro-Latin Greek hierarch Bessarion, securein his Italian residence, wrote a treatise around 1466, comparing Plato to Aristotle andarriving at the conclusion that Plato rather than Aristotle could more readily be assimilatedby Christianity (ibid., 399).

150. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), 270.151. See, for example, Ockham’s answer to his question, “Can it be proved by natural reason that

there is only one God?”: First Quodlibet, question 1, in William of Ockham, QuodlibetalQuestions, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1991), 1:5–12. Analogously, secular government should normally function indepen-dently of the religious institution. This is the burden of William of Ockham, A Letter to theFriars Minor and Other Writings, eds. Arthur S. McGrade and John Kilcullen, trans. JohnKilcullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

152. Martin Luther, “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” #50, in Timothy F. Lull, ed.,Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 16.

153. William of Ockham, Dialogue, I:ii. 22, quoted in Mary Martin McLaughlin, IntellectualFreedom and Its Limitations in the University of Paris in the Thirteenth and FourteenthCenturies (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 96.

154. Large portions of Ockham’s Quodlibetal Questions read like a dialogue between the Fran-ciscan and “the Philosopher.” For a list of specific examples, see 2:665.

155. This view is developed by Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 201–202, 367 et passim.156. Ockham’s excommunication, although based upon his disobedience to the pope, could only

have compromised his theology.157. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 239.158. With regard to Sunnı Islam, the works of al-Ghazalı represent the turning point; for Greek

Christianity, the writings of Gregory Palamas. Palamas, however, followed in the wake ofSymeon the New Theologian (949–1022), whose struggle against philosophical theologymay, with some justification, be likened to that waged by Bernard of Clairvaux againstAbelard in Latin Christendom. See Symeon, The Discourses, trans. C. J. de Catanzaro (NewYork: Paulist Press, 1980), 1.

159. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1.160. The enthusiastic revival of Aquinas associated with the “neo-Thomism” of the late nine-

teenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in no way implies prior disregard of theAngelic Doctor.

161. On the former, see above, 353–54; on the latter, above, 359–60.162. Above, 360.163. Above, 365.164. Admittedly, the Fa.timıs, particularly in their cosmology, tended more toward the Neo-

Platonic than the Aristotelian model. See Farhad Daftary, The Isma‘ılıs:Their History andDoctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 239–49. It is doubtful, moreover,that Isma‘ılı cosmology disturbed Sunnıs like al-Ghazalı nearly as much as the Isma‘ılıdoctrine of esoteric knowledge (al-Ba.tiniyya) of the Qur’an, on which see Henry Corbin,“The Isma‘ılı Response to the Polemic of Ghazalı,” in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed., Isma‘ılıContributions to Islamic Culture (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977),69–95; and the philosophic roots of the Isma‘ılı doctrine of the Intellect, on which see WilferdMadelung, “Abu Ya‘qub al-Sijistanı and the Seven Faculties of the Intellect,” in FarhadDaftary, ed., Medieval Isma’ili History and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), 85–89.

165. The Turkomens entered the Middle East proper through Khurasan, the northeasternprovince of Iran. In the wake of their advance, the situation of the Iranian peasantry andthe agrarian economy in general was less than happy. See Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlordand Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (1953repr., London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 70–76. The subsequent movement of the Turkomens intonorthern Iraq and Syria resulted in similar disruption, and before 1100 the Turkomens hadbegun their drive into Byzantine Asia Minor. No sooner had the Turkomens succumbed,in some measure, to the civilizing pressures of urban Islam than the Mongol forces of

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Genghis Khan (d. 1227) descended from Central Asia upon Iran in 1221 and administered anear-mortal blow to medieval Islamic civilization. Although the Mongols’ westward thrustwas stopped in Syria in 1260 by the Mamluks of Egypt, “The immediate effect of the Mon-gol invasion of Persia was widespread devastation and depopulation, and, owing to themassacre or flight of the inhabitants, much land became vacant. . .” (ibid., 77). In 1258,the Mongols captured Baghdad, killed the reigning caliph, and extinguished the ‘Abbasiddynasty. Toby Huff rejects invasion as an explanatory factor but does focus on the Mon-gol intrusion and the Christian reconquest of Iberia; he mentions neither the Turkomenand Crusader onslaughts nor the Sunnı-Fa.timı divide (see Huff, Rise of Modern Science,211–15).

166. “From the later Middle Ages onward, world technology was increasingly European Tech-nology”: Lynn White Jr., “Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the MiddleAges,” Viator (1971): 2:173.

167. This analysis is developed at length in Lynn White Jr.’s seminal monograph, MedievalTechnology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 39–78.

168. Lynn White Jr., “The Expansion of Technology, 500–1500,” in Carlo Cipolla, ed., TheFontana Economic History of Europe, 26 vols., The Middle Ages (London: Collins/Fontana,1972), 1:148. This chapter, like the article “Cultural Climates,” is largely a distillation ofWhite’s Medieval Technology and Social Change.

169. White, “Expansion of Technology,” 146–47.170. White, “Cultural Climates,” 186.171. Jerome Taylor, trans., The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1961), 62. Also see White, “Cultural Climates,” 196. While true that the studyof mechanics never penetrated the university classroom, the schoolmen certainly expressedno hostility toward the subject.

172. White, “Expansion of Technology,” 159.173. White, “Cultural Climates,” 194–95.174. Quoted in White, “Expansion of Technology,” 170.175. “Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them. . . indeed they

are being found all the time. It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art ofmaking spectacles. . .” (quoted in ibid., 174). Nine hundred years earlier, Augustine hadsaid much the same thing: man’s “rational nature” applied to “human industry” has led to“marvelous, stupendous results in the production of clothing and buildings; in agriculture,statues, paintings, poetry, and musical instruments; in poison, drugs, weapons and enginesof war; in navigation and in the laws of heavenly bodies”: see St. Augustine, The City ofGod against the Pagans, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1972), bk. 22, chap. 24, pp. 327, 329.

176. Above, 365.177. Eales, Life and Works of St. Bernard, 592.178. Notably that erected by the Ottoman imperium from roughly 1400 to 1750.

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