The Passion Of The Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View

That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the West's rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle's writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now translated into Latin. With these texts, which included the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima. (On the Soul), came not only learned Arabic commentaries, but also other works of Greek science, notably those of Ptolemy. Medieval Europe's sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries. Yet Aristotle had such extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement. His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of the human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West -- and were attractive to many Church intellectuals, men whose reasoning powers had been developed to uncommon acuity by their long scholastic education in the logical disputation of doctrinal subtleties. The arrival of the Aristotelian texts in Europe thus found a distinctly receptive audience, and Aristotle was soon referred to as "the Philosopher." This shift in the wind of medieval thought would have momentous consequences.

Under the Church's auspices, the universities were evolving into remarkable centers of learning where students gathered from all over Europe to study and hear public lectures and disputations by the masters. As learning developed, the scholars' attitude toward Christian belief became less unthinking and more self-reflective. The use of reason to examine and defend articles of faith, already exploited in the eleventh century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the discipline of logic in particular, championed by the fiery twelfth-century, dialectician Abelart Ranidlv ascended in both educational popular and theological importance. With Abelard's Sic et Non (Yes and No), a compilation of apparently contradictory statements by various Church authorities, medieval thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the possible plurality of truth, with debate between competing arguments, and with the growing power of human reason for discerning correct doctrine. It is not that Christian truths were called into question; rather, they were now subject to analysis. As Anselm stated, "It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe."

Moreover, after a long struggle with local religious and political authorities, the universities won the right from king and pope to form their own communities. With the University of Paris's receipt of a written charter from the Holy See in 1215, a new dimension entered European civilization, with the universities now existing as relatively autonomous enters of culture devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. Although Christian theology and dogma presided over this pursuit, these were in turn increasingly permeated by the rationalist spirit. It was into this fertile context that the new translations of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators were introduced.