RISE OF FAITH, DECLINE IN REASON

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2003) ("This book deals with a significant turning point in western cultural and intellectual history, when the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. This 'closing of the Western mind' did not extend to the Arab world, where translated Greek texts continued to inspire advances in astronomy, medicine and science, and so its roots must be found in developments in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity. This book explores those developments." Id. at xv. "The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigor and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that.) Rather, in the fourth and fifth century A.D. it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire." Id at xvii-xviii. "So one finds a combination of factors behind 'the closing go the western mind": the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christiana theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order. The imposition of orthodoxy went hand and hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of 'mystery, magic and authority,' a substitute which drew heavily on irrational elements of pagan society that had never been extinguished. Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers." Id. at xviii-xix. "The struggle between religion and science had now entered a new phase. . . . What cannot be doubted is how effectively the rational tradition had been eradicated in the fourth and fifth centuries." Id, at xix. "I would reiterate the central theme of this book: that the Greek intellectual tradition was suppressed rather than simply faded away. My own feeling is that this is an important moment in European cultural history which has for all too long been neglected. Whether the explanations put forward in this book for the suppression are accepted or not, the reasons for the extinction of serious mathematical and scientific thinking in Europe for a thousand years surely deserve more attention than they have received." Id. at 340. Does one sense a closing of the American mind in the twenty-first century. Or, perhaps, it is more correct to suggest that, given American hyper-religiosity, the American mind has never really been open. "The impact of this fundamental change in approach on intellectual life was profound. One effect, noted by Averil Cameron, was the decline of book learning. 'Books ceased to be readily available and learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve; even those who were not ecclesiastics were likely to get their education from the scriptures or from Christian texts.' And one contemporary observer, questioned on the state of philosophy in that former great centre of intellectual life, Alexandria, replied that 'philosophy and culture are now at a point of most horrible desolation.'" Id. at 316-317. "[I]t was not until the twelfth century that a newly emerging investigative spirit in the west (usually referred to as Scholasticism) began to rediscover the classical tradition as it had been preserved in the writings of the Islamic east. Id. at 326. "[Thomas] Aquinas restored the relationship between reason and fat,; to him, the one sustained the other." Id. at 332.).