The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of theEnlightenment

by Charles Freeman

A monumental and exhilarating history of European thought from the end of Antiquity to the beginning of the Enlightenment—500 to 1700 AD—tracing the arc of intellectual history as it evolved, setting the stage for the modern era. With more than 140 illustrations; 90 in full-color.Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times [London]), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.In this wide-ranging history, Freeman follows the immense intellectual development that culminated in the Enlightenment, from political ideology to philosophy and theology, as well as the fine arts and literature. He writes, in vivid detail, of how Europeans progressed from the Christian-minded thinking of Saint Augustine to the more open-minded later scholars, such as Michel de Montaigne, leading to a broader, more “humanist” way of thinking.He explores how the discovery of America fundamentally altered European conceptions of humanity, religion, and science; how the rise of Protestantism and the Reformation profoundly influenced the tenor of politics and legal systems, with enormous repercussions; and how the radical Christianity of philosophers such as Spinoza affected a rethinking of the concept of religious tolerance that has influenced the modern era ever since.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Politics, European History, World History

770 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 7, 2023

About the author

Charles Freeman is a freelance academic historian with wide interests in the history of European culture and thought. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Egypt, Greece and Rome, Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. He has followed this up with The Greek Achievement (Penguin 1999), The Legacy of Ancient Egypt (Facts on File, 1997) and The Closing of the Western Mind, a study of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity in the fourth century and beyond. His The Horses of St. Mark’s (Little Brown, 2004) is a study of these famous works of art in their historical contexts over the centuries. In 2003, Charles Freeman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Reviews

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Opening and Closing of the Western Mind

In short, my opinion, the closing of the western mind corresponds to the rise of Christianity, and the opening of the western mind corresponds to the decline of Christianity.

This book is in some ways the sequel to ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’ by Charles Freeman (2003) and in other respects, it is the companion chronicle, supplement to, or alternative narrative of the same history. Both books cover roughly the same historical period and place of 5th Century – 17th Century AD Europe. I highly recommend both books. Taken together, both books show that history is not all one thing or the other. There are examples of both the “closing” and the “opening” over the same period in the same places. This demonstrates that the story of western intellectual development is not a simple chronological progression starting with ancient wisdom/knowledge followed by a dark age of loss and regression giving way to a rebirth and rediscovery setting the stage for modern civilization leading to us. Progress is never inevitable and always reversable as we are currently seeing in America where the advancement of science, medicine and modernity are under threat. After all, science as we understand it is only 300 years old and religion/superstition is as old as humanity. The intellectual history of the west is a story of both “the closing of the mind” and “the opening of the mind”. As dominating, overbearing, and authoritarian as the Catholic Church was through the Middle Ages, it could not stamp out all dissent and diversity, it is in these cracks that the opening was found. In many ways the ‘The Opening of the Western Mind’ is the story of the bright exceptions to the ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’ making progress once again possible. Ironically, reading about the closing and the opening of the western mind is to read the history of Christianity and how the reopening of the western mind was directly proportional to the eroding of church authority even as Christian belief persisted in the face of observed reality counter to Christian dogma.

The Preying Open of the Western Mind

What becomes apparent is that there is no conflict between science and religion, the conflict has always been between religion and religion.

Early scientists could not help but be Christians in that Christianity held a monopoly on the social consensus and was fully embedded in political authority at the time science was developing. Same with Islam and Judaism outside the ‘West’. I would say that modern science was born in spite of Christianity and its monotheistic cousins. The progress in western thinking was not a product of western thinking. The ‘West’ would not be the ‘West’ if it relied only upon the ‘West’. As professor Freeman points out, there was nothing inevitable about the development of western civilization or the outcome of western thinking if left to draw upon its own resources. Much of what we are now pleased to call western thinking or the western mind was made possible by connection with older civilizations such as ancient Greece and Rome and by contact with other (nonwestern) societies such as the Arab world, India, and China as well as contact with the new world of North America. The western mind had to be pried open despite itself. The main obstacle of course being Christianity and its dogmatic insistence on the acceptance of fictitious and factious claims such as the Trinity. Christianity did not facilitate the birth of modem science.

The Reclosing of The Western Mind

Christianity would not be Christianity if did not have someone or something to hate.

My fear is that we are now entering a new “closing” or reclosing of the mind, at least the American mind. We are now seeing how war and tyranny distort values and contort morals. The same old villain is at work, Christianity, a beast returning from the depths of Medieval religious hell to assert aggression and war. After a period of secularization and thus moral, ethical, political, and social progress, the retrograde force of Christianity is once against asserting itself in society and politics to reverse social progress and impede scientific development. The concept of God is being repurposed once again to fit the times. From divine creator back to stern judge. Christianity is now weaponizing itself against non-conforming groups to find people to persecute and hate. The cultural damage is immense. The days of Christian toleration such that it was are rapidly fading away and being replaced by a persistent anger consistent with empowerment of Christianity in the 4th Century. Christian hate groups are intent upon dehumanizing and demonizing nonconforming groups by weaponing their religion. In the U.S., political decent is now heresy. Decenters from government policy infused with theocracy are the new religious heretics of the new American political theocracy. I am one of them. Enforcement has moved from behavior to belief. It is once again against the law to have opinions contrary to government policies infused with Christian theocracy. Decenters are now domestic terrorists, the new heretics of our time. I guess this now makes me a terrorist heretic. The witch hunts will soon begin. Don’t believe me, please see the NSPM-7 of 09-25-2025 (National Security Presidential Memorandum), which includes anti-Christian beliefs as domestic terrorism or as an indicator of a potential domestic terrorist.

The Hardcover Book Itself

I purchased the book to serve as the main course in my Thanksgiving Holiday intellectual feast. I had leftovers. I was initially overjoyed by simply paging through the many lavish full-page full-color illustrations. I enjoy books with illustrations and this one has about 150 beautiful full color plates suitable for my magnifying glass. I have the hardcover edition (new) and am overjoyed with quality of book itself. It has an undeniable presence with door stopping weight, 4.3 lbs. Yes, I weighed it. This is a book of physical density densely packed with a wealth of highly readable contents. I love the feel and texture of the high-quality high-gloss pages, bold dual color inks of the chapter headings, and the superior print quality. The characteristics of the solid physical book augment my reading experience. Physical books offer an enhanced reading experience that is not possible with electronic formats. The book itself is a fine example of craftsmanship in the printer’s art, so here I am glad to quote Professor Freeman, “…the printed book is now holding its own against e-books.” P. 349. It is of course a joy to see the scholar, and the craftsmen come together in the same book.

The missing definite article.

One typographical error, p. 696, first new paragraph. “In face of such achievements…” I think this should be styled as: In the face of such achievements…

[Stan Prager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly two decades have passed since Charles Freeman published The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, a brilliant if controversial examination of the intellectual totalitarianism of Christianity that dated to the dawn of its dominance of Rome and the successor states that followed the fragmentation of the empire in the West. Freeman argued persuasively that the early Christian church vehemently and often brutally rebuked the centuries-old classical tradition of philosophical enquiry and ultimately drove it to extinction with a singular intolerance of competing ideas crushed under the weight of a monolithic faith. Not only were pagan religions prohibited, but there would be virtually no provision for any dissent with official Christian doctrine, such that those who advanced even the most minor challenges to interpretation were branded heretics and sent to exile or put to death. That tragic state was to define medieval Europe for more than a millennium.
Now the renowned classical historian has returned with a follow-up epic, The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, (a revised and repolished version of The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, previously published in the UK), which recounts the slow—some might brand it glacial—evolution of Western thought that restored legitimacy to independent examination and analysis, and that eventually led to a celebration, albeit a cautious one, of reason over blind faith. In the process, Freeman reminds us that quality, engaging narrative history has not gone extinct, while demonstrating that it is possible to produce a work that is so well-written it is readable by a general audience while meeting the rigorous standards of scholarship demanded by academia. That this is no small achievement will be evident to anyone who—as I do—reads both popular and scholarly history and is struck by the stultifying prose that often typifies the academic. In contrast, here Freeman takes a skillful pen to reveal people, events, and occasionally obscure concepts, much of which may be unfamiliar to those who are not well versed in the medieval period.
Full disclosure: Charles Freeman and I began a long correspondence via email following my review of Closing. I was honored when he selected me as one of his readers for his drafts of Awakening, the earlier UK edition of this work, which he shared with me in 2018—but at the same time I approached this responsibility with some trepidation: given Freeman’s credentials and reputation, what if I found the work to be sub-standard? What if it was simply not a good book? How would I address that? As it was, these worries turned out to be misplaced. It is a magnificent book, and I am grateful to have read much of it as a work in progress, and then again after publication. I did submit several pages of critical commentary to assist the author, to the best of my limited abilities, hone a better final product, and to that end I am proud see my name appear in the “Acknowledgments.” But to be clear: I am an independent reviewer and did not receive compensation for this review.
The fall of Rome remains a subject of debate for historians. While traditional notions of sudden collapse given to pillaging Vandals leaping over city walls and fora engulfed in flames have long been revised, competing visions of a more gradual transition that better reflect the scholarship sometimes distort the historiography to minimize both the fall and what was actually lost. And what was lost was indeed dramatic and incalculable. If, to take just one example, sanitation can be said to be a mark of civilization, the Roman aqueducts and complex network of sewers that fell into disuse and disrepair meant that fresh water was no longer reliable, and sewage that bred pestilence was to be the norm for fifteen centuries to follow. It was not until the late nineteenth century that sanitation in Europe even approached Roman standards. So, whatever the timeline—rapid or gradual—there was indeed a marked collapse. Causes are far more elusive. But Gibbon’s largely discredited casting of Christianity as the villain that brought the empire down tends to raise hackles in those who suspect someone like Freeman attempting to point those fingers once more. But Freeman has nothing to say about why Rome fell, only what followed. The loss of the pursuit of reason was to be as devastating for the intellectual health of the post-Roman world in the West as sanitation was to prove for its physical health. And here Freeman does squarely take aim at the institutional Christian church as the proximate cause for the subsequent consequences for Western thought. This is well-underscored in the bleak assessment that follows in one of the final chapters in The Closing of the Western Mind:

Christian thought that emerged in the early centuries often gave irrationality the status of a universal “truth” to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated and the miracle to the operation of natural laws … This reversal of traditional values became embedded in the Christian tradi¬tion … Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity, which lay at the heart of the Greek achievement, were recast as the dreaded sin of pride. Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation …

Reopening picks up where Closing leaves off, but the new work is marked by far greater optimism. Rather than dwell on what has been lost, Freeman puts focus not only upon the recovery of concepts long forgotten but how rediscovery eventually sparked new, original thought, as the spiritual and later increasingly secular world danced warily around one another—with a burning heretic all too often staked between them on Europe’s fraught intellectual ballroom. Because the timeline is so long—encompassing twelve centuries—the author sidesteps what could have been a dull chronological recounting of this slow progression to narrow his lens upon select people, events and ideas that collectively marked milestones on the way, which comprise thematic chapters to broaden the scope. This approach thus transcends what might have been otherwise parochial to brilliantly convey the panoramic.
There are many superlative chapters in Reopening, including the very first one, entitled “The Saving of the Texts 500-750.” Freeman seems to delight in detecting the bits and pieces of the classical universe that managed to survive not only vigorous attempts by early Christians to erase pagan thought but the unintended ravages of deterioration that is every archivist’s nightmare. Ironically, the sacking of cities in ancient Mesopotamia begat conflagrations that baked inscribed clay tablets, preserving them for millennia. No such luck for the Mediterranean world, where papyrus scrolls, the favored medium for texts, fell to war, natural disasters, deliberate destruction, as well as to entropy—a familiar byproduct of the second law of thermodynamics—which was not kind in prevailing environmental conditions. We are happily still discovering papyri preserved by the dry conditions in parts of Egypt—the oldest dating back to 2500 BCE—but it seems that the European climate doomed papyrus to a scant two hundred years before it was no more.
Absent printing presses or digital scans, texts were preserved by painstakingly copying them by hand, typically onto vellum, a kind of parchment made from animal skins with a long shelf life, most frequently in monasteries by monks for whom literacy was deemed essential. But what to save? The two giants of ancient Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, were preserved, but the latter far more grudgingly. Fledgling concepts of empiricism in Aristotle made the medieval mind uncomfortable. Plato, on the other hand, who pioneered notions of imaginary higher powers and perfect forms, could be (albeit somewhat awkwardly) adapted to the prevailing faith in the Trinity, and thus elements of Plato were syncretized into Christian orthodoxy. Of course, as we celebrate what was saved it is difficult not to likewise mourn what was lost to us forever. Fortunately, the Arab world put a much higher premium on the preservation of classical texts—an especially eclectic collection that included not only metaphysics but geography, medicine, and mathematics. When centuries later—as Freeman highlights in Reopening —these works reached Europe, they were to be instrumental as tinder to the embers that were to spark first a revival and then a revolution in science and discovery.
My favorite chapter in Reopening is “Abelard and the Battle for Reason,” which chronicles the extraordinary story of scholastic scholar Peter Abelard (1079-1142)—who flirted with the secular and attempted to connect rationalism with theology—told against the flamboyant backdrop of Abelard’s tragic love affair with Héloïse, a tale that yet remains the stuff of popular culture. In a fit of pique, Héloïse’s father was to have Abelard castrated. The church attempted something similar, metaphorically, with Abelard’s teachings, which led to an order of excommunication (later lifted), but despite official condemnation Abelard left a dramatic mark on European thought that long lingered.
There is too much material in a volume this thick to cover competently in a review, but the reader will find much of it well worth the time. Of course, some will be drawn to certain chapters more than others. Art historians will no doubt be taken with the one entitled “The Flowering of the Florentine Renaissance,” which for me hearkened back to the best elements of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, showcasing not only the evolution of European architecture but the author’s own adulation for both the art and the engineering feat demonstrated by Brunelleschi's dome, the extraordinary fifteenth century adornment that crowns the Florence Cathedral. Of course, Freeman does temper his praise for such achievements with juxtaposition to what once had been, as in a later chapter that recounts the process of relocating an ancient Egyptian obelisk weighing 331 tons that had been placed on the Vatican Hill by the Emperor Caligula, which was seen as remarkable at the time. In a footnote, Freeman reminds us that: “One might talk of sixteenth-century technological miracles, but the obelisk had been successfully erected by the Egyptians, taken down by the Romans, brought by sea to Rome and then re-erected there—all the while remaining intact!”
If I was to find a fault with Reopening, it is that it does not, in my opinion, go far enough to emphasize the impact of the Columbian Experience on the reopening of the Western mind. There is a terrific chapter devoted to the topic, which explores how the discovery of the Americas and its exotic inhabitants compelled the European mind to examine other human societies whose existence had never before even been contemplated. While that is a valid avenue for analysis, it yet hardly takes into account just how earth-shattering 1492 turned out to be—arguably the most consequential milestone for human civilization (and the biosphere!) since the first cities appeared in Sumer—in a myriad of ways, not least the exchange of flora and fauna (and microbes) that accompanied it. But this significance was perhaps greatest for Europe, which had been a backwater, long eclipsed by China and the Arab middle east. It was the Columbian Experience that reoriented the center of the world, so to speak, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which was exploited to the fullest by the Europeans who prowled those seas and first bridged the continents. It is difficult to imagine the subsequent accomplishments—intellectual and otherwise—had Columbus not landed at San Salvador. But this remains just a quibble that does not detract from Freeman’s overall accomplishment.
Interest in the medieval world has perhaps waned over time, but that is, of course, a mistake: how we got from point A to point B is an important story, even it has never been told before as well as Freeman has told it in Reopening. And it is not an easy story to tell. As the author acknowledges in a concluding chapter: “Bringing together the many different elements that led to the ‘reopening of the western mind’ is a challenge. It is important to stress just how bereft Europe was, economically and culturally, after the fall of the Roman empire compared to what it had been before …”
Those of us given to dystopian fiction, concerned with the fragility of republics and civilization, and perhaps wondering aloud in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic and the rise of authoritarianism what our descendants might recall of us if it all fell to collapse tomorrow, cannot help but be intrigued by how our ancestors coped—for better or for worse—after Rome was no more. If you want to learn more about that, there might be no better covers to crack than Freeman’s The Reopening of the Western Mind. I highly recommend it.


NOTE: Portions of this review also appear in my review of The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, by Charles Freeman, previously published in the UK, here: https://regarp.com/2020/09/20/review-...

NOTE: My review of The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, by Charles Freeman, is here: https://regarp.com/2015/05/13/review-...


Review of: The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, by Charles Freeman https://regarp.com/2023/02/07/review-...

PODCAST LINK: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-u5xr6-1...

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought never exists in a vacuum and its relations, relativity and context are just as important for understanding as what is being said. The story of how humans shook-off the yoke of superstitions and believing in absurdities while embracing reason, the rational, logical and the consistence in the search for coherence is laid out clearly in this all too brief history book written for those who care and love intellectual history.

It’s not a straight shot from the fall of Rome to the reopening of the Western mind, and it’s clear we can always return to the myth believers who want to burn books, stifle creative thought, and return to a rigid thought system with a central overriding authority that creates truth as they see fit. It’s good history books like this one, that can keep us from falling back into that awful longing for the false myth of making-the-West-great-again.

As mentioned in this book, modern philosophy starts with Descartes as he assumes away the world outside of himself and makes truth only by first assuming away the world beyond the mind (cogito ergo sum), the nexus of Truth for Descartes is within the individual while not actually being-in-a-world. When certainty is assumed, there is no need for further understanding since everything is known. The author takes the discussion through Locke and Hume up to Leibnitz, and stops before the Enlightenment thus not getting to Kant. The author does give a special shoutout to one of my favorites, Pierre Bayle.

The whole journey that the author takes is a fun journey and he tells the story well. I never tire of learning about the scholastics, or Bede, Boethius and so on. The story is a necessary one, and I would say that I’m on the side of the debate which holds that Thomas Aquinas changes everything, because by placing Reason before faith the way he does opens a window that never gets shut and leads to Occam’s nominalism and the irrelevance of universals. Just remember that when the author tells this story that ‘realism’ really means Platonic Realism (i.e. the Ideal is real) and that Occam and Duns Scotus know that ‘entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily’ is just a fancy way of saying Aristotle has superfluous categories since we only really need quality, quantity and substance.

I read a lot of the books that the author cites. It’s nice to see Freeman’s take on them. I guess I disagree with his viewpoint of Jonathan Israel’s book Radical Enlightenment. I think that Spinoza is as relevant as Israel thinks he is, and Spinoza’s Ethics and TPP are the Enlightenment and are as influential as Israel thinks. Freeman summarizes Israel’s take on Spinoza, and Spinoza’s ‘substance’ can also just mean reality, or in other words a reference to the world or universe that we live in, and as Israel says there is a lot of baggage that comes with Spinoza’s formalation that ‘God is nature and nature is God’.

Overall, an incredibly fun intellectual history book, and is the kind of book that makes me realize that I should stop reading history books written by bloggers who are non-historians when quality books like this one are still to be found.

[Stan Prager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of: The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, by Charles Freeman
by Stan Prager (9-20-20)


Nearly two decades have passed since Charles Freeman published The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, a brilliant if controversial examination of the intellectual totalitarianism of Christianity that dated to the dawn of its dominance of Rome and the successor states that followed the fragmentation of the empire in the West. Freeman argues persuasively that the early Christian church vehemently and often brutally rebuked the centuries-old classical tradition of philosophical enquiry and ultimately drove it to extinction with a singular intolerance of competing ideas crushed under the weight of a monolithic faith. Not only were pagan religions prohibited, but there would be virtually no provision for any dissent with official Christian doctrine, such that those who advanced even the most minor challenges to interpretation were branded heretics and sent to exile or put to death. That tragic state was to define medieval Europe for more than a millennium.
Now the renowned classical historian has returned with a follow-up epic, The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, recently published in the UK (and slated for U.S. release, possibly with a different title) which recounts the slow—some might brand it glacial—evolution of Western thought that restored legitimacy to independent examination and analysis, that eventually led to a celebration, albeit a cautious one, of reason over blind faith. In the process, Freeman reminds us that quality, engaging narrative history has not gone extinct, while demonstrating that it is possible to produce a work that is so well-written it is readable by a general audience while meeting the rigorous standards of scholarship demanded by academia. That this is no small achievement will be evident to anyone who—as I do—reads both popular and scholarly history and is struck by the stultifying prose that often typifies the academic. In contrast, here Freeman takes a skillful pen to reveal people, events and occasionally obscure concepts, much of which may be unfamiliar to those who are not well versed in the medieval period.
The fall of Rome remains a subject of debate for historians. While traditional notions of sudden collapse given to pillaging Vandals leaping over city walls and fora engulfed in flames have long been revised, competing visions of a more gradual transition that better reflect the scholarship sometimes distort the historiography to minimize both the fall and what was actually lost. And what was lost was indeed dramatic and incalculable. If, to take just one example, sanitation can be said to be a mark of civilization, the Roman aqueducts and complex network of sewers that fell into disuse and disrepair meant that fresh water was no longer reliable, and sewage that bred pestilence was to be the norm for fifteen centuries to follow. It was not until the late nineteenth century that sanitation in Europe even approached Roman standards. So, whatever the timeline—rapid or gradual—there was indeed a marked collapse. Causes are far more elusive. But Gibbon’s largely discredited casting of Christianity as the villain that brought the empire down tends to raise hackles in those who suspect someone like Freeman attempting to point those fingers once more. But Freeman has nothing to say about why Rome fell, only what followed. The loss of the pursuit of reason was to be as devastating for the intellectual health of the post-Roman world in the West as sanitation was to prove for its physical health. And here Freeman does squarely take aim at the institutional Christian church as the proximate cause for the subsequent consequences for Western thought. This is well-underscored in the bleak assessment that follows in one of the final chapters in The Closing of the Western Mind:

Christian thought that emerged in the early centuries often gave irrationality the status of a universal “truth” to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated and the miracle to the operation of natural laws … This reversal of traditional values became embedded in the Christian tradi¬tion … Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity, which lay at the heart of the Greek achievement, were recast as the dreaded sin of pride. Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation … [p322]

Awakening picks up where Closing leaves off as the author charts the “Reopening of the Western Mind” (this was the working title of his draft!) but the new work is marked by far greater optimism. Rather than dwell on what has been lost, Freeman puts focus not only upon the recovery of concepts long forgotten but how rediscovery eventually sparked new, original thought, as the spiritual and later increasingly secular world danced warily around one another—with a burning heretic all too often staked between them on Europe’s fraught intellectual ballroom. Because the timeline is so long—encompassing twelve centuries—the author sidesteps what could have been a dull chronological recounting of this slow progression to narrow his lens upon select people, events and ideas that collectively marked milestones on the way that comprise thematic chapters to broaden the scope. This approach thus transcends what might have been otherwise parochial to brilliantly convey the panoramic.
There are many superlative chapters in Awakening, including the very first one, entitled “The Saving of the Texts 500-750.” Freeman seems to delight in detecting the bits and pieces of the classical universe that managed to survive not only vigorous attempts by early Christians to erase pagan thought but the unintended ravages of deterioration that is every archivist’s nightmare. Ironically, the sacking of cities in ancient Mesopotamia begat conflagrations that baked inscribed clay tablets, preserving them for millennia. No such luck for the Mediterranean world, where papyrus scrolls, the favored medium for texts, fell to war, natural disasters, deliberate destruction, as well as to entropy—a familiar byproduct of the second law of thermodynamics—which was not kind in prevailing environmental conditions. We are happily still discovering papyri preserved by the dry conditions in parts of Egypt—the oldest dating back to 2500 BCE—but it seems that the European climate doomed papyrus to a scant two hundred years before it was no more.
Absent printing presses or digital scans, texts were preserved by painstakingly copying them by hand, typically onto vellum, a kind of parchment made from animal skins with a long shelf life, most frequently in monasteries by monks for whom literacy was deemed essential. But what to save? The two giants of ancient Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, were preserved, but the latter far more grudgingly. Fledgling concepts of empiricism in Aristotle made the medieval mind uncomfortable. Plato, on the other hand, who pioneered notions of imaginary higher powers and perfect forms, could be (albeit somewhat awkwardly) adapted to the prevailing faith in the Trinity, and thus elements of Plato were syncretized into Christian orthodoxy. Of course, as we celebrate what was saved it is difficult not to likewise mourn what was lost to us forever. Fortunately, the Arab world put a much higher premium on the preservation of classical texts—an especially eclectic collection that included not only metaphysics but geography, medicine and mathematics. When centuries later—as Freeman highlights in Awakening—these works reached Europe, they were to be instrumental as tinder to the embers that were to spark first a revival and then a revolution in science and discovery.
My favorite chapter in Awakening is “Abelard and the Battle for Reason,” which chronicles the extraordinary story of scholastic scholar Peter Abelard (1079-1142)—who flirted with the secular and attempted to connect rationalism with theology—told against the flamboyant backdrop of Abelard’s tragic love affair with Héloïse, a tale that yet remains the stuff of popular culture. In a fit of pique, Héloïse’s father was to have Abelard castrated. The church attempted something similar, metaphorically, with Abelard’s teachings, which led to an order of excommunication (later lifted), but despite official condemnation Abelard left a dramatic mark on European thought that long lingered.
There is too much material in a volume this thick to cover competently in a review, but the reader will find much of it well worth the time. Of course, some will be drawn to certain chapters more than others. Art historians will no doubt be taken with the one entitled “The Flowering of the Florentine Renaissance,” which for me hearkened back to the best elements of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, showcasing not only the evolution of European architecture but the author’s own adulation for both the art and the engineering feat demonstrated by Brunelleschi's dome, the extraordinary fifteenth century adornment that crowns the Florence Cathedral. Of course, Freeman does temper his praise for such achievements with juxtaposition to what once had been, as in a later chapter that recounts the process of relocating an ancient Egyptian obelisk weighing 331 tons that had been placed on the Vatican Hill by the Emperor Caligula, which was seen as remarkable at the time. In a footnote, Freeman reminds us that: “One might talk of sixteenth-century technological miracles, but the obelisk had been successfully erected by the Egyptians, taken down by the Romans, brought by sea to Rome and then re-erected there—all the while remaining intact!” [p492n]
If I was to find a fault with Awakening, it is that it does not, in my opinion, go far enough to emphasize the impact of the Columbian Experience on the reopening of the Western mind. There is a terrific chapter devoted to the topic, “Encountering the Peoples of the ‘Newe Founde Worldes,’” which explores how the discovery of the Americas and its exotic inhabitants compelled the European mind to examine other human societies whose existence had never before even been contemplated. While that is a valid avenue for analysis, it yet hardly takes into account just how earth-shattering 1492 turned out to be—arguably the most consequential milestone for human civilization (and the biosphere!) since the first cities appeared in Sumer—in a myriad of ways, not least the exchange of flora and fauna (and microbes) that accompanied it. But this significance was perhaps greatest for Europe, which had been a backwater, long eclipsed by China and the Arab middle east. It was the Columbian Experience that reoriented the center of the world, so to speak, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which was exploited to the fullest by the Europeans who prowled those seas and first bridged the continents. It is difficult to imagine the subsequent accomplishments—intellectual and otherwise—had Columbus not landed at San Salvador. But this remains just a quibble that does not detract from Freeman’s overall accomplishment.
Full disclosure: Charles Freeman and I began a long correspondence via email following my review of Closing. I was honored when he selected me as one of his readers for his drafts of Awakening, which he shared with me in 2018, but at the same time I approached this responsibility with some trepidation: given Freeman’s credentials and reputation, what if I found the work to be sub-standard? What if it was simply not a good book? How would I address that? As it was, these worries turned out to be misplaced. It is a magnificent book and I am grateful to have read much of it as a work in progress, and then again after publication. I did submit several pages of critical commentary to assist the author, to the best of my limited abilities, hone a better final product, and to that end I am proud see my name appear in the “Acknowledgments.”
I do not usually talk about formats in book reviews, since the content is typically neither enhanced nor diminished by its presentation in either a leather-bound tome or a mass-market paperback or the digital ink of an e-book, but as a bibliophile I cannot help but offer high praise to this beautiful, illustrated edition of Awakening published by Head of Zeus, even accented by a ribbon marker. It has been some time since I have come across a volume this attractive without paying a premium for special editions from Folio Society or Easton Press, and in this case the exquisite art that supplements the text transcends the ornamental to enrich the narrative.
Interest in the medieval world has perhaps waned over time But that is of course, a mistake. How we got from point A to point B is an important story, even it has never been told before as well as Freeman has told it in Awakening. And it is not an easy story to tell. As the author acknowledges in a concluding chapter: “Bringing together the many different elements that led to the ‘awakening of the western mind’ is a challenge. It is important to stress just how bereft Europe was, economically and culturally, after the fall of the Roman empire compared to what it had been before.” [p735]
Those of us given to dystopian fiction, concerned with the fragility of republics and civilization, and wondering aloud in the midst of a global pandemic and the rise of authoritarianism what our descendants might recall of us if it all fell to collapse tomorrow cannot help but be intrigued by how our ancestors coped—for better or for worse—after Rome was no more. If you want to learn more about that, there might be no better covers to crack than Freeman’s The Awakening. I highly recommend it.

[My review of Freeman’s earlier work, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason appears here: https://regarp.com/2015/05/13/review-...]

Review of: The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, by Charles Freeman https://regarp.com/2020/09/20/review-...

PODCAST LINK: https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-mq5ps-e...

[Lady Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of the audiobook narrated by Mark Bramhall

This is a magnificent book. The subtitle tells it all: “The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment.” Perhaps I first should have read this author’s earlier book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, covering the thousand years following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 368 CE, but I had read other books about what used to be called the Dark Ages.

There is no way I can write a thorough review of this twenty-seven hour audiobook. If the subject matter sounds of interest to you, I suggest taking a look at the chapter titles. I also suggest reading one chapter at a time, and sometimes rereading the ones that really intrigue you.

I have only two complaints. There is a great deal of discussion about both ancient and modern philosophers, and my knowledge of philosophy is so meager that I was easily lost at times. Second, unless you are a dedicated audiobook listener, you may prefer reading to listening.

I now have several titles that Mr. Freeman mentions to add to my TBR list.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an outright tour-de-force for Professor Freeman. When you write cultural history it takes a lot to balance the politics, the art, the music, the religions, the areas of the world (Yes, Arabia was miles ahead of Western Europe while Spain was Muslim) - all those things. And yet he did. Okay, science was an afterthought, but it was included, so that's all that matters, and I learned that Isaac Newton was a proto-Unitarian two centuries before there were others. I'm mining this book for lecture notes.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I preface this by saying I disagreed with a number of his judgments and characterizations. He was skeptical of, at times hostile to, the role of religion in intellectual history. His judgments seemed too idiosyncratic for the scope of his ambition and detracted from the overall quality of the work as an argument. His appreciations for Byzantium and even for Alexandria were modest at best, and his emphasis for much of the book was on Renaissance Italy.

But as a primer on Western intellectual tradition, detailed but popularly accessible, it has few peers. And the beautiful, timely illustrations help to guide the journey and keep it visually stimulating. A gorgeous book, chock full of stunning religious and secular art, cartography, portraiture, and more.

[John Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reject the secular myth--that of how wonderful, rational, and enlightened everything was in the classical world, only for Christianity to thrust Europe into the dark age, until finally, freethinkers cast off the shackles of Christianity and brought enlightenment, progress, and science. I did not get the sense that Freeman was peddling this overly simplistic narrative, but he does challenge the opposite interpretation. He is in opposition to folks like Holland, who see Christianity as essential to the positive transformations of Western civilization.
I am pretty mixed. I do think there are elements tied in with the "Christian" worldview that may help explain why science developed in Christian Europe, and Holland has a point about how different our values are now, compared to the classical world. I've heard it convincingly argued that how Christianity developed in the Middle Ages laid the groundwork for methodological naturalism. I've heard it pointed out how some atheists today ignore how superstitious the "secular saints" were in the classical period--it sounds like making ancient Romans and Greeks the proto-free-thinking rationalists and secular scientists, is done largely by cherry-picking the data, to create a golden age, a paradise of secular reason, enlightened government, freedom, and science for Christianity to undermine.
The degree to which Christianity is the cause of the "closing of the Western mind" seems pretty debatable. The glories, learning, art, and technology of ancient Rome and Greece were bound to be largely lost regardless of the religion of the empire, due to the waves of barbarians and wars. Sadly, it would seem that Christianity did little to nothing to tame the bad tendencies of the rich and powerful--politics, violence, and evil seemed to continue undaunted.
Anyhow, it is a challenge to determine what degree Christianity played in this "reopening", for Freeman, I think he feels it happened more despite Christianity than because of it. When looking at the messiness and the nastiness of Christians, the superstitions and toxic doctrines, the powerplays, the large number of nominal Christians, the many among the elite who were enemies of reason, and the ambiguity, antiquity, and diversity of Christian scriptures that could lead to an infinity of opinions, and the fact that so few Christians seemed to embody or imitate Christ, then yes, it to think Christianity had any positive role seems highly doubtful. Even if Christianity did led to the opening of some minds, it just as often led to the closing of others.
It is obvious to me that the bible and the dogma from tradition are in no way a sufficient cause, but maybe Christianity was a necessary condition. I am inclined to think that Christianity, scripture, and church doctrines, when mixed with these people, living where they were, is part of the recipe that led to great scientific progress. I suspect that if we removed Christianity, then there is a chance that modern science would never have been developed and life today could be like it was (for better and for worse) a thousand years ago. At the same time, I believe that Christianity, scripture, and church doctrines, if inserted into other people, wouldn't have led to the rise of modern science and the values many of us hold today. It is not a sufficient cause. Maybe Christianity wasn't necessary either, but something like it may have been necessary. I do not think Freeman really wrestles with the mystery of why modern science only arose in Christian Europe. This is where I think other intellectuals and historians have a legitimate argument that worldview elements that grew out of Christianity were a necessary component

[Alexei · Rating 4 out of 5]

A massive and well written book describing the opening of the Western mind (as opposed to its previous closing in the eponymous book by the same author), from the Dark Ages to the brink of the Enlightenment, but somehow evading a clear answer as to what were its primary causes.
Where the author is successful is in showing that Christianity was not such a cause, rather the opposite - both in its monolith Catholic phase and in the subsequent various reformed denominations. The discovery of the classical heritage helped but was not decisive. There are several respectful objections to Jonathan Israel’s theory that the whole project was single-handedly launched by Spinoza. The only remaining candidate is the Age of Discovery to which the author pays cautious tribute. In fact, there are clear parallels in antiquity, what with Alexander the Great and Roman conquests. But this way lies a danger, because the alternative term is imperialism.

[Becky Loader · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many books, so little time.

[Sherrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chewy, gorgeous tome that I took my time savoring.

[Doug Newdick · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book of the year. A beautiful book - the wonderful images of the art, architecture and books bring to life the detailed argument of Awakening. This isn't an easy read, but it is only as difficult as the subject matter that Freeman covers in great depth, but very well. He makes the subject matter alive and relevant in a way that few historians of ideas can. If you are interested in where the enlightenment came from, or in the course and tides of western intellectual history then you will enjoy this book. It reminds us that western history is not monolithic or homogenous. Nor isolated from other cultures - the contribution of Arabic culture to the Renaissance is explored in detail. Regional currents in thought are presented, and the tensions in medieval Christianity discussed. These are not ornamental, but central to the development of Western thought. Freeman also makes the grand story comprehensible with digressions into the lives and careers of individuals - many famous, but many relatively unknown. The chapters contrasting Montaigne and Hamlet are particularly interesting. A book to read slowly, to ponder and enjoy leisurely.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author blames the rigidity of the Church and Christianity generally for the long dark ages, making this a good counterpoint to authors like Rodney Stark or Tom Holland (who is discussed in the book)

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 / 5.0

Wonderful stimulating broad survey. Starts mostly religiuos but this is just beginning and introduction to diverse exploration.

[Ron Housley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Reopening of the Western Mind — The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
by Charles Freeman, ©2020, 803 pages

a short Book Report by Ron Housley, 8 February 2025

This volume published by Alfred A. Knopf weighs in at hefty 4.3 pounds(!), on glossy paper, with tiny font and tons of maps and illustrations. At the time of my reading, it was averaging a 4.7 out of 5 on Amazon and a 4.25 on Goodreads. Such ratings clearly don’t reflect the casual American reader

“Reopening” at first glance threatened to be a daunting tome, but I had a few queries in mind which I was seeking to resolve. I wanted further explication on how mankind gradually came to differentiate the real from the imaginary, and the First Millennium was a time rich with mythical and mystical beliefs.


ANGELS DANCING ON THE HEAD OF A PIN
The “hot topics” of the day, back in that first millennium, included “predestination; the nature of the soul; the reality of evil; the relationship of Christ to God; the validity of icons; and creation ex nihilo, ‘from nothing.’” (pp 70-71) I am on the lookout for how preoccupation with these kinds of questions was somehow able to give way to science in the centuries that followed.

Along the way I would have to learn about how ancient texts were able to survive; about how early Christianity developed and gained power; about Constantine and Charlemagne; about papal corruption leading to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation; about Church sponsored Inquisitions and official tortures; about how Aquinas became known for having re-introduced the West to Aristotle; about a slew of writers, poets, would-be scientists and artists; about architects and about Brunelleschi’s famous dome; about how the Italian Renaissance either did or did not lay the ground work for the Scottish Enlightenment; about the chorus of philosophers that gradually gave rise to the “Age of Reason.”

The crux of all the advancements appeared to be the gradual embrace of reason into the process of cognition, along with the minimizing of mystical elements.

Wherever reason was given short-shrift, human progress seems to have slowed or reversed. I wish that Freeman had more explicitly identified that point as he escorted us through the centuries prior to the breakthroughs of Descartes, and then Newton and Locke.


“DARK AGES” VS. MEDIEVAL OR MIDDLE AGES
Today’s postmodernist “scholars” insist that “Dark Ages” is an inappropriate negative value judgment levied upon an entire culture. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) coined the term, “Dark Ages,” when he gave us the metaphor of light and dark to contrast ancient Greece and early Rome with the darkness which had enveloped Europe in his own time. After slogging through Freeman’s 803 pages, it is not a stretch for me to view the period after Rome’s fall as, indeed, a dark ages — even though there were instances of new thinking which would ultimately usher mankind out of the cognitive muck. Nonetheless, my own bias at this juncture is that the postmodernists are wrong, and that the label, “Dark Ages,” is entirely appropriate and not some failure to submit to multiculturalist dogma.


ARISTOTLE, AQUINAS, A….
The story of how Aquinas brought Aristotle back from the dust bin of forgotten antiquity is the story of reason vs. faith. Pope Gregory IX banned Aristotle’s works, even as those works were bursting on the scene in Europe’s newly evolving universities (13th century), as new translations directly from the Greek. The Pope apparently caught wind of Aristotle’s contention that existence was eternal, in contrast to the Church’s absurd contention that existence popped into being out of nothing, ex nihilo.

Behind the scenes, the Dominican friars (think: Albert the Great) were contending that Aristotle’s version of reality and the Church’s version could co exist in parallel, and never the twain shall meet.


THEOLOGY VS. EPISTEMOLOGY
Until Aquinas came upon the scene, Medieval culture was darkened by Catholic insistence that knowledge of reality was possible as a revelation from God and did not have to comport with our perceptual observations — and — there was profound confusion over the role of concepts in the discovery of knowledge, stemming from miscasting what concepts are, in the first place.

Confusions about “Universals” were introduced to the world by Plato, then advanced a bit by Aristotle, but continued to muddy the Medieval waters, as theologians representing the Church clashed with would-be philosophers. The Church launched inquisitions and handed down excommunications, charging heresy against thinkers who questioned Church dogma (e.g., William of Ockham).

Ockham’s razor would ultimately be part of the “Reopening” of the Western mind, and would be a first step in demonstrating that knowledge involves forming mental integrations from the perceived similarities and differences among things we observe. But it would be mankind’s long struggle to untangle mystical-supernatural, theological issues from the basic epistemology needed to develop scientific advances that would eventually come to pass.

Mankind would have to come to terms with the “problem of Universals” (e.g., where is the man-ness in man? and where is the horsiness in horses?) and would have to discover that a mental grasp of reality (i.e., knowledge) (i.e., a non material mental construct and thus “spiritual”) is both contextual and hierarchical — in other words, man would have to confront head-on the matter of faith vs. reason. Man would have to abandon the notion that knowledge could occur in the absence of reason.


THE PAGANS AND HEATHENS
I was taught in Sunday School that there was a certain tension between Christians and Pagans, and between the Old Testament God and the Pagans who worshipped idols. In reading Freeman’s book, it occurred to me that Plato was an example of one of those feared and dreaded Pagans everybody was talking about.

It turns out that “Pegan” was simply a pejorative term pointing to anyone holding a different belief than that held by the majority. The first five centuries AD involved non-stop conflict between Christians and Pagans, as if the Pagans were somehow fundamentally different in how they deployed their mental powers — but in fact both Pagans and Christians fabricated their own set of beliefs built upon their own arbitrary set of presumptions. They were like peas in a pod, in terms of their flimsy relationship to reality.


UTOPIA, WHO KNEW?
Half-way through the Freeman’s massive cavalcade of characters and events leading up to the Reopening of the Western Mind, I found out about Utopia — which was a term I recall from junior high school all those many years ago, when it was a stand-in for “a perfect society.” So I was told.

Now Freeman informs me that “Utopia” was a 1516 creation of Thomas More, a famous work of fiction, which in keeping with current-day educational protocol, I didn’t actually read, but glancingly heard about.

I finally now learn that “Utopia” is about a fictitious island state “brought into being by a king, King Utopus, an idyllic wonderland where there was no private property, where suicide is forbidden but euthanasia is permitted, where luxuries are despised, an austere society with communal eating in barns, listening to lectures and being in bed by 8pm” (P. 466)

The relevance to the “Reopening” story is that Utopia “…follows Plato in seeing all evil originating in the possession of private property” (p 462) and it pretty much ignores “Aristotle’s argument in favor of private property, as encouraging the owners to keep good order and take responsibility for the wellbeing of society.” (p 466)

In my own mind, “Utopia” went from a fuzzy word, to a work of fiction, to a condemnation of private property — steps in the story of mankind’s journey out of primitive mysticism, which is what the “Reopening” is all about. If recollection serves, mankind prospered most during the brief period when private property was revered.


THE AUTHOR
Charles Freeman is an academic historian and is certainly not a light-weight. I can barely comprehend what must be the enormity of Freeman’s mental content, the volumes he must have digested in order to cobble together a history of such scope as the “Reopening.” It has the flavor of multiple Ph.D. dissertations all rolled into one work. How does one mind have the capacity to integrate such vastness?

“The Reopening of the Western Mind” is a history of many details with many threads, but it is NOT as its title hints: an explication of “how” there came to be a reopening of the Western mind.

Rather, it is an explication that there “was” a reopening. It addressed major trends and developments, and related the trends to particular events, places, and people.

It is the history textbook I should have read decades ago, but suffered my entire life without(!).

In in the final analysis, I had a better picture of how “the Platonic tradition had been absorbed into Christianity” (p. 336), and of how the Platonic mystical notions were given prominence and used as the foundation for an entire religion. Plato’s mysticism was a natural precursor to Christianity’s mysticism.

Freeman then clarified how Plato and his anti-reason mysticism finally rose to prominence in the 19th century European universities, securing “a prominent and enduring place in the curriculum” (p. 345), in an era when the Enlightenment’s “Age of Reason” was under attack.

As we move farther into the 21st century, we could all find insight from Charles Freeman’s impressive accounting of how mankind has vacillated between the imaginary and the real in the quest to discover actual knowledge. It would pay dividends for us to ask where we are today in this centuries long struggle.

[Andrew Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great summary of the evolution of European politics, theology, philosophy, engineering and art, from the re-discovery of ancient texts to the shaping of the new world. Wonderfully done and comprehensive enough for me to narrow down where to learn further. I think the conclusion on the role of Christianity in the re-opening of the western mind is a bit unfair, though reasonable. The only distraction in this book was the fact that negative outcomes were clearly traced to some religious source, rarely were the positive outcomes attributed to Christian thinking, and it was reluctant where done. A more appropriate perspective, it seems to me, would be to compare the influences of the different sources of the arts and sciences, there were a lot of errors made in this new world and are more to do with the flaws of humans than anything Christ and his disciples teach. Putting the argument against positive Christian influence aside, the breadth of history is the main point here and it is splendid.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I’m not a historian, but have read many layman history books and historical novels over the years. The Reopening really put a lot of puzzle pieces together. The semi-chronological, topical organization really worked well. I liked it so much that I bought my own copy after reading the library’s, and also purchased The Closing of the Western Mind to learn more.

My only question for the author is why the development of music was not included … it seems to me that the journey from chants to baroque to Opera was a real ‘reopening’ and a good story in and of itself.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Underwhelming.

[Gregor Mchardy]

Too much covered, the premise of the book was lost to way too many details

[Joey Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

freeman gets funnier after “the closing of the western mind” brilliant run through of european history, religious thought, and philosophy.

[Kevin Christiansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable survey of the latter Middle Ages through the beginning of the Enlightenment. Particulalry like the discussion of the Renaissance.

[Russell Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

[Phillip Sawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous account of the struggle to bring back thought and reason in the centuries after the Fall of Rome. Highly recommended! At 803 pages it is a big history and literally heavy reading!

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book, providing a detailed history of Western intellectual thought, from the early medieval period to the beginning of the Age of Reason. The author, English historian Charles Freeman, continues the story begun with his previous work, “The Closing of the Western Mind.” In this sequel, Freeman covers more than just philosophical development following the Dark Ages. His narrative includes the statecraft, economic, science, and cultural elements of Western intellectual life. Together this creates a cumulative understanding of the advances made in Europe and the Mediterranean world from 1200 to 1700. Freeman carefully explains how development in one area affected others, creating a continual intellectual evolution. I especially appreciated his study of the ‘mechanics’ of the process, with in-depth chapters on university life and the “republic of letters.” A great book for anyone interested in the West’s intellectual history. Highly recommended for those looking to better understand the linkage between philosophic thought and practical application.