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The Moslems seem to have been better gentlemen than their Christian peers; they kept their word more frequently, showed more mercy to the defeated, and were seldom guilty of such brutality as marked the Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099.
The influence of Islam upon Christendom was varied and immense. From Islam Christian Europe received foods, drinks, drugs, medicaments, armor, heraldry, art motives and tastes, industrial and commercial articles and techniques, maritime codes and ways, and often the words for these things—orange, lemon, sugar, syrup, sherbet, julep, elixir, jar, azure, arabesque, mattress, sofa, muslin, satin, fustian, bazaar, caravan, check, tariff, traffic, douane, magazine, risk, sloop, barge, cable, admiral.
Arabic scientific terms—algebra, zero, cipher, azimuth, alembic, zenith, almanac—still lie imbedded in European speech.
Behind this borrowing smoldered an undying hate. Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope. Therefore his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed.
The West lost the Crusades, but won the war of creeds. Every Christian warrior was expelled from the Holy Land of Judaism and Christianity; but Islam, bled by its tardy victory, and ravaged by Mongols, fell in turn into a Dark Age of obscurantism and poverty;
Civilization is polygenetic—it is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed.
To this day no people so honors the student and the scholar as do the Jews.
Christianity sought unity through uniform belief, Judaism through uniform ritual.
A woman was considered unclean (not to be sexually approached) for forty days after bearing a son, eighty days after bearing a daughter.
Talmudic law, like the Mohammedan, was man-made law, and favored the male so strongly as to suggest, in the rabbis, a very terror of woman’s power.
The result was a sharpness of intellect, a retentiveness of memory, that gave the Jew an advantage in many spheres requiring clarity, concentration, persistence, and exactitude, while at the same time it tended to narrow the range and freedom of the Jewish mind.
The Jews, like the Christians, used excommunication too frequently, so that in both faiths it lost its terror and effectiveness.
The Moslems, living by Mohammed, resented the Jewish rejection of their prophet; the Christians, accepting the divinity of Christ, were shocked to find that His own people would not acknowledge that divinity.
Isolated and scorned, and yet influenced by their neighbors, the Jews of medieval Christendom took refuge in mysticism, superstition, and Messianic dreams; no situation could have favored science less.
a civilization passing from poverty to wealth tends to develop a struggle between reason and faith, a “warfare of science with theology.” In this conflict philosophy, dedicated to seeing life whole, usually seeks a reconciliation of opposites, a mediating peace, with the result that it is scorned by science and suspected by theology.
In an age of faith, where hardship makes life unbearable without hope, philosophy inclines to religion, uses reason to defend faith, and becomes a disguised theology.
Jehuda Halevi rejected all speculation as vain intellectualism; like al-Ghazali he feared that philosophy was undermining religion—not merely by questioning dogma, or ignoring it, or interpreting the Bible metaphorically, but even more by substituting argument for devotion.
When cohabiting, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.
Many Biblical terms and passages have several meanings; literal, metaphorical, or symbolical. Taken literally, some of them are a stumbling block to persons sincerely religious but also respectful of reason as man’s highest faculty. Such persons must not be forced to choose between religion without reason or reason without religion. Since reason was implanted in man by God, it cannot be contrary to God’s revelation. Where such contradictions occur, Maimonides suggests, it is because we take literally expressions adapted to the imaginative and pictorial mentality of the simple, unlettered
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In truth, says Maimonides (probably following the Mutazilites), we cannot know anything of God except that He exists. Even the nonphysical terms that we use of Him—intelligence, omnipotence, mercy, affection, unity, will—are homonyms; i.e., they have different meanings when applied to God than as used of man. Just what their meaning is in God’s case we shall never know; we can never define Him; we must not ascribe to Him any positive attributes, qualities, or predicates whatever.
He proceeds to interpret the creation story of Genesis allegorically: Adam is active form or spirit; Eve is passive matter, which is the root of all evil; the serpent is imagination.
evil is no positive entity; it is merely the negation of good. Most of our misfortunes are due to our own fault; other evils are evil only from a human or limited standpoint; a cosmic view might discover in every evil the good or need of the whole.
Is man immortal? Here Maimonides applies to the full his capacity for mystifying his readers. In the Guide he avoids the question, except to say that “the soul that remains after death is not the soul that lives in a man when he is born”;69 the latter—the “potential intellect”—is a function of the body and dies with it; what survives is the “acquired” or “active intellect,” which existed before the body and is never a function of it.
The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly.
Like every other culture of its time, it was cruel; the same man who knelt before the image of the Virgin could slaughter the children of Maurice before their father’s eyes. There was something shallow about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering a mass of popular superstition, fanaticism, and literate ignorance; I and half the culture was devoted to perpetuating that ignorance.
Oppressed by the fullness of its heritage, imprisoned in the theological labyrinths in which dying Greece had lost the Christianity of Christ, the medieval Greek mind could not rise to a mature and realistic view of man and the world;
Though the possessions of the caliphs were vaster than the Byzantine, their revenues were probably less; and the looseness of Moslem government, the inadequacy of its communications and its administrative machinery, allowed the Abbasid dominion to disintegrate in three centuries, while the Byzantine Empire endured through a millennium.
Their kings and upper classes accepted the Jewish religion; hemmed in between a Moslem and a Christian empire, they probably preferred to displease both equally rather than one dangerously; at the same time they gave full freedom to the varied creeds of the people.
Western Europe in the sixth century was a chaos of conquest, disintegration, and rebarbarization. Much of the classic culture survived, for the most part silent and hidden in a few monasteries and families. But the physical and psychological foundations of social order had been so disturbed that centuries would be needed to restore them.
In the ninth and tenth centuries the Moslem control of the Mediterranean, the raiding of European coasts and towns by Normans, Magyars, and Saracens accelerated this localism of life and defense, this primitivism of thought and speech. Germany and Eastern Europe were a maelstrom of migrations, Scandinavia was a pirates’ lair, Britain was overrun by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes; Gaul by Franks, Normans, Burgundians, and Goths; Spain was torn between Visigoths and Moors; Italy had been shattered by the long war between the Goths and Byzantium, and the land that had given order to half the
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Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died.
divided against itself, Christian Spain achieved its slow reconquista only because Moslem Spain finally surpassed it in fragmèntation and anarchy.
History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die;
God is beyond our understanding; we can only say what He is not, not what He is; “almost everything that is said of God is unworthy, for the very reason that it is capable of being said.”
the Greeks prayed standing, the Latins kneeling; the Greeks baptized by immersion, the Latins by aspersion; marriage was forbidden to Latin, permitted to Greek, priests; Latin priests shaved, Greek priests had contemplative beards. The Latin clergy specialized in politics, the Greek in theology; heresy almost always rose in an East that had inherited the Greek passion for defining the infinite.
The Romans were too proud to be impressed by kings, and too familiar to be awed by popes; they saw in the Vicars of Christ men subject like themselves to sickness, error, sin, and defeat; and they came to view the papacy not as a fortress of order and a tower of salvation, but as a collection agency whereby the pence of Europe might provide the dole of Rome.
The rulers of Spoleto, Benevento, Naples, and Tuscany, and the aristocracy of Rome divided into factions as of old; and whichever faction prevailed in the city intrigued to choose and sway the pope. Between them they dragged the papacy, in the tenth century, to the lowest level in its history.
Many bishoprics became in the eleventh century the hereditary patrimony of noble families, and were used as provision for bastards or younger sons;
The Church had long since opposed clerical marriage on the ground that a married priest, consciously or not, would put his loyalty to wife and children above his devotion to the Church; that for their sake he would be tempted to accumulate money or property; that he would try to transmit his see or benefice to one of his offspring; that an hereditary ecclesiastical caste might in this way develop in Europe as in India; and that the combined economic power of such a propertied priesthood would be too great for the papacy to control.
The Greek Church drew strength and pride from the revived wealth and power of the Byzantine state, won Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia to the Eastern observance, and resented more sharply than ever the claims of a debased and impoverished papacy to the ecclesiastical monarchy of the Christian world.
The papal rejection of the Byzantine emperor for the king of the Franks, the papal appropriation of the exarchate of Ravenna, the papal coronation of a rival Roman emperor, the papal drive into Greek Italy—these galling political events, and not the slight diversities of creed, severed Christendom into East and West.
it is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy.
Roads injured by war, neglected by poverty, and endangered by highwaymen, could no longer maintain adequate communication and exchange. State revenues declined as commerce contracted and industry fell; impoverished governments could no longer provide protection for life, property, and trade.
In the fifth century the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris show us rural lords living in luxury on spacious holdings tilled by a semiservile tenantry; they are already a feudal aristocracy, possessing their own judiciary1 and soldiery,2 and differing from the later barons chiefly in knowing how to read.
The Saracen, Norse, and Magyar invasions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries repeated and cemented the results of the German invasions six centuries before: central protection failed, the local baron or bishop organized a localized order and defense, and remained possessed of his own force and court. Since the invaders were often mounted, defenders who could afford a horse were in demand; cavalry became more important than infantry; and just as in early Rome a class of equites—men on horseback—had taken form between patrician and plebs, so in France, Norman England, and Christian Spain a
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Feudalism was the economic subjection and military allegiance of a man to a superior in return for economic organization and military protection.
The Church denounced the sale of Christian captives to Moslems, but permitted the enslavement of Moslems and of Europeans not yet converted to Christianity. Thousands of captured Slavs and Saracens were distributed among monasteries as slaves; and slavery on church lands and papal estates continued till the eleventh century.
The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire.
Typically the serf tilled a plot of land owned by a lord or baron who gave him a life tenure and military protection as long as he paid an annual rent in products, labor, or money.
Perhaps in general the misery of the medieval serf has been exaggerated; the dues exacted of him were largely in lieu of a money rent to the owner, and taxes to the community, to maintain public services and public works; probably they bore a smaller proportion to his income than our federal, state, county, and school taxes bear to our income today.
