The closing of the Western mind
I’m reading Charles Freeman’s very interesting The Closing of the Western Mind, and in a nice bit of serendipity I happened on a long review he did of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers at the New Humanist. Hannam is a Catholic and an apologist, and his book is apparently what one would expect from a Catholic apologist.
Yet for Hannam Catholic authority is never the problem. “However sympathetic we might be to his [Abelard’s] plight, the fact remains that he brought most of his problems on himself. His blatant hypocrisy and breathtaking arrogance ensured that he had a ready supply of enemies who were quite happy to see accusations of heresy to bring him down”. (P.59) Hannam has no understanding of the intellectual inhibitions that arise from ring-fencing large areas of knowledge as “faith”, or using the threat of heresy for those who transgressed, often unwittingly, the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. Inevitably these tended to arbitrary. The freedom of intellectual debate was bedevilled, literally – the punishment for heresy was eternal suffering at the hands of devils in hell fire, something unknown to the Greeks. One will never know what fruitful pathways of knowledge remained closed as a result. (I have detailed the process by which religious “truths” were declared to be absolute and challenges to them worthy of excommunication and eternal punishment in my The Closing of the Western Mind and AD 381. I see the fourth century as one of the most important, if still neglected, turning points in the history of European thought. Hannam’s discussion of “Heresy and the Inquisition”, (pp.52-6), never considers that the definition of heresy is problematic. He takes it for granted that orthodox Catholic Christianity must be defended.)
No Templeton money will be finding its way to Charles Freeman any time soon, I suspect.
After reading your post, I went looking for book reviews of “The Closing of the Western Mind”. Here are two that seem to give a flavor of what is in the book:
The Sunday Salon (blog)
Helium review (www.helium.com).
Thanks! Very helpful – I’ve been meaning to look for reviews.
Aw, man. What three weeks of ownership of a Nook have taught me is that it’s really reeaally easy to spend just $10 more. Now another $10 (more precisely, $9.99) is out the door.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: The closing of the Western mind http://dlvr.it/87j3r […]
Filioque.
I think Hannam’s reply to Charles Freeman shows how delusional many people are about their ability to compartmentalize the world:
Really? His religion has no effect on how he sees the world? He shows this clearly in his own muddling of the medieval world’s thought processes. In the first paragraph of his section Logic in the Middle Ages, he says:
Then in the last paragraph:
The thing he misses is that people didn’t compartmentalize the world the way we often do now. In the first paragraph he is trying to say religion had nothing to do with the study of logic, but in the last that religion was everywhere. If the medieval people didn’t think logic came from God, then where? Theirs was a much more seamless world with God in control. Now the only seamless world is one without God – then God was needed as an explanation for so many things, but today for what?
Great to hear the debate I am having with James Hannam is getting around. My reply to his reply has just gone out on the New Humanist blog. Enjoy Closing of the Western Mind –
although it is a bit dated by now! AD 381 has a different slant in the same topic and is shorter! Charles Freeman .
Oh now don’t tell me that! I am enjoying it, and I don’t want to go thinking it’s dated the whole time.
No but seriously, thanks for commenting; as soon as I started reading your book I started wanting to ask you about the historiography of science and religion. We’ve been discussing that a good deal here lately.
Thanks, Ophelia. I had seen your website some time ago and applauded your objectives.(I was for many years a Senior Examiner in the International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge programme so critical thinking has been one of my big things.) On Closing, I said to one critic that it was dated in that i would make my case more strongly if I was rewriting it! – so don’t worry. I did make some more focussed points in my AD 381. Reviews of both these books on Amazon.com are quite comprehensive and will give everyone further ideas about what I am trying to do.I am now working on the synopsis of ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’.
I knew of Hannam’s work because he published a totally misleading review of Closing – it has not been important I have only seen it cited twice in four years on the net- but I realized that his approach to these issues was ideologically/religiously motivated. i saw God’s Philosophers when it came out and dismissed it after ten minutes of browsing in that it was clearly in the same genre as his review. I only became really interested in it when it was placed on the shortlist of 6 out of 134 books for the prestigious Royal Society’s Book of the Year. This gave the impression that it was a work of some academic credibility. Someone has got to do something I felt and hence my lengthy first review that the New Humanist was good enough to host. I understand that the New Humanist have commissioned an independent article on these issues and I hope the debate will go wider. I have had quite enough to do with the book- there is so much more wonderful literature around and unread books of quality litter my study floor! Every good wish with your blog -I shall tune in more regularly from now on, Charles.
I just pulled out my old copy of Closing. It’s a fine book and I’m going to appreciate it even more now. I’ll have to get AD 381, maybe this weekend.
Thanks Charles, that’s very interesting. The academic credibility issue is key – I’ve been fretting about the same thing with regard to the Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, and Thomas Dixon’s BBC programme on the same subject, and various institutes and centres like the Faraday Institute and the Ian Ramsey Centre.
I have recently been considering the causes of the long ‘Sleep of reason’ in Europe, as discussed by Charles Freeman in “Closing of the Western Mind” (which I have not yet read).
It was my initial, naive, position that surely it must be due to the stifling influence of Christianity.
However, I have revised that position somewhat following listening to the audio book of Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason” which is a history of ancient and medieval philosophy.
This brings out the fact that heyday of Greek science with the atomists Leucippus (early-mid 5th century BC) and Democritus (late 5th century BC) was a long time (900 years) before (for example) the closure of Plato’s Academy by Justinian I in 529AD.
Between these two points much occurred: the movement of philosophy in to considerations of how to live with Socrates, the Platonic (& Pythagorean) notion that there is a higher plane to existence, the conquering of Athens, the fall of the Roman empire, the rise of Christianity (to name a few).
During these 900 years, and the subsequent 1000, there does appear to be an unfortunate lack of progress but can we really blame Christianity?
(To get to the point …)
I live near Bath in England site of the famous Roman baths, which represent a standard of living and cleanliness that Britain would not see again until, say, the 18th century.
If instead of bemoaning the lack of scientific and philosophical progress in this period we instead consider the lack of such facilities as this, would we still blame Christianity?
Is it reasonable to expect a society where one can’t get a decent bath, and has to walk through cities whose streets are covered in human ordure to be capable of maintaining the necessary intellectual environment to produce great thinkers like the ancient Greeks?
Felix. Thanks for your interest. You really do have to read my Closing of the Western Mind to get the full debate but I recommend people to start with the shorter AD 381 which focuses on one important moment in the debate. If you enjoy that return to Closing.
Contrary to what some reviewers on the Christian right, such as James Hannam, have suggested, I do not argue that Christianity, as such, stifled science. I deal with the wider perspectives of rational thought and show that there were two crucial factors.
1) The imposition of one form of Christianity, the Trinitarian, by the emperor Theodosius in 381, and the condemnation of all alternatives as heretical. This stifled Christian debate which had been lively and sophisticated until then. I have yet to find a Christian apologist who has taken this point. Christians suffered just as much from Theodosius’ decree as anyone else. Once you say there is one way of thinking defined as correct by law, rational thought as a means of finding truth goes out of the window. Theodosius followed this with a massive campaign against paganism in the 390s.
2) There were two major strands of Greek thought- the Platonic and the Aristotelean, the latter concentrating on empirical approaches to the natural world and the use of logic. The Platonists believed that there were eternal truths which could only be discerned by an elite who had studied them long enough. I argue in Closing that Christian intellectuals followed Platonism and rejected Aristoteleanism. I always know if a critic has not read Closing if they say that I argue that Christianity rejected Greek philosophy. Far from it, Augustine was a Platonist.
Greek science was going strong in the second century AD and a rational approach to knowledge and thinking well into the fourth century. You can see the vanishing of reason in Augustine’s work. He starts off as a rationalist, after all he had a traditional education before his conversion, by the end of his life he is deeply into miracles and the need for faith as a source of authority. This is the Closing of the Western Mind – a still underestimated turning point in the history of western thought. (I am working at the moment on a book which shows how medieval and theological thinking was challenged in Europe so that rational debate again became possible.)
I take your point about civilized living. Debates on Greek science often neglect the technological achievements that kept the roads built, the water running,etc, in a way not seen for many,many centuries. (See now The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson, Oxford, 2008, with over 800 pages of text and vast reading lists.) Don’t ever believe anyone who runs down the Greeks!
The essential point I am making here is that it was the political programme of Theodosius, and other Christian emperors, and the adoption of more authoritarian classical philosophies that caused the Closing of the Western Mind, as you will see if you read my books. Of course, later, the Church did become highly authoritarian but that is a new phase in its history. There is little I can do when people misrepresent my books!
You will find my critique of James Hannam’s book on the New Humanist blog- ‘Charles Freeman God’s Philosophers’ will bring it up. The book’s argument collapses as soon as it comes into contact with historical evidence. Stick to the mainstream historians, especially on Renaissance humanism, and you will not go far wrong.
Good luck with your reading. Charles.
Charles, many thanks for your reply which I was thrilled to receive when I was expecting no response at all on this aged thread.
I have just been looking around to see if Closing had been made in to a audiobook, but alas it seems that it has not. I find it quite difficult to read actual books since they tend to put me to sleep. But I like to take hour long walks by the canal in my lunch break and this is perfect for paying attention to a book. They are of course also good for exercising and driving which people do a lot of these days. Try to persuade your publisher!
I don’t think that I disagree with you on anything, so instead I will respond to my own question:
Yes, after all it is not the case that during the medieval period there was no higher thought but rather that it was directed and constrained by Christian orthodoxy.
If we look to the golden age of the Muslim world we can see that a religious worldview and scientific advancement can coexist. If the monks in the abbeys had been religiously inspired to scientific research this conversation would not be happening.
Also, remember that the Greek philosophers were largely privileged members of a society based upon slavery and that the Romans who built in Britain were conquering overlords. Thus is it is not the average citizen to whom we should look in order to produce great works whilst they toil in the fetid streets but to the ruling classes, the ‘gentlemen’ who have the leisure to pursue such activities. These fortunate inhabitants of the royal courts and palaces did (I presume) have the convenience of clean water provided for them and some form of toilet facilities.
Thus it is reasonable to expect progress in matters of science and philosophy despite the lack of great public buildings. The lack of such progress can then be attributed to the following:
(i) the stifling of habits and practice of rational enquiry by religion
(ii) the loss of the works of previous generations since genius is rarer than appreciated
(iii) the veneration of of those works (e.g. Aristotle) that are extant rather than any attempt to go beyond them (presumably caused by the religious state of mind)
What do you think?
Dear Felix- I had not realised I was still inked to this debate so your post came as a surprise!
Certainly only a small elite in the Greek world enjoyed the full benefits of healthy living but a greater proportion would have shared in the feeling that they were part of a great civilization ( the downside being that they regarded everyone else as barbarians).There is some link between high thinking and clean streets in that Greeks and Romans both possessed great technological abilities that were used to that effect. i spend time taking study tours around the Mediterranean and I was showing a group the sophisticated system by which water was siphoned into the Greek city of Aspendos in November. This led to a continuous flow of clean water not only for domestic use but for the fountains that graced the city. You also have to see the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (third century AD) where great boilers provided hot water for 4,000 bathers a day. There are bizarre claims made on the Amazon.com blurb for James Hannam’s The Genesis of Science that medieval technology was somehow superior to classical technology. Well, shall we just start with roads. . . .!
People will always be religious ( in many different ways ,of course,) -it when Christianity was transformed, by the Roman imperial state in the first instance, into an institution that had great wealth and power and which claimed, on hopelessly weak philosophical/theological foundations that it held ‘the truth’ that trouble started. I am am working on how all this was disentangled so that rational thought ,etc, could be used effectively again.
Hope this provides some form of adequate response, best wishes, Charles.
I just finished reading your book Closing for the second time. Both times I found it to be intriguing and analytical (even if a little difficult to get through at times). I am not qualified enough as a historian to comment on the accuracy of your points in the book but it did appear to be documented well enough that I accept the points as factual. What I found myself doing throughout my reading was comparing current Christianity to Christianity of the earlier centuries of its formation (the time frames in your book). I believe I see the same stifling thing happening today through the dogmatic intolerance of many Christian leaders, particularly evangelical Christian leaders. It is the ‘you either believe what I say is right or you are wrong and probably headed to hell’ mentality. Therefore I have no reason to doubt that the same thing happened in the early formation of the Christian church. Again I thoroughly enjoyed the book and will probably read it many more times.