I recently finished reading Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages. Very interesting book. Much more focused on intellectual and cultural life than merely on kings and dates. It begins with the Roman Republic and ends well into the Renaissance, but the density of the material is more or less normally distributed over that period, i.e. the Roman coverage is general and quick, as is the Renaissance material, whereas the eighth through twelfth centuries are dense and detail-rich, as befits the subject of the book.
I was, of course, fairly well versed in the subject matter, but the book made for interesting reading nonetheless, filling in a lot of detail and presenting opinons and perspectives that were new to me. Some of them, such as Cantor's contention that the vikings were nothing more than a setback for western civilization, I disagreed with, but in general his perspective was interesting and provocative. Although dry and perhaps a bit dense for the general reader, I'd certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in the period, at least as regards Western Europe.
The book also presented a couple of very compelling theses in answer to some compelling historical questions. One of these in particular was an answer to a question that still echoes today:
Why did Islam fall so dramatically behind the West in scientific thought?
In the twelfth century, the Islamic world was unquestionably far in advance of the Western world in what would later come to be called scientific thought. Mathematics, medicine, astronomy, logic... the Islamic world had retained vastly more classical learning, and was making its own advances across the board.
By the Renaissance, such intellectual pursuits had collapsed in the Islamic world, leaving the natural philosophers of the West to make and capitalize on discovery after discovery; one could argue that Islamic scholarship has not caught up even now, although of course science has become a global institution open to members from any culture.
Why did this happen? Why did a culture that produced al-Khwarizmi (father of algebra), Averroes, Avicenna, a culture that kept alive the study of Aristotle and classical thought, get so dramatically overtaken by a culture that in the early Middle Ages was barely literate?
Cantor's hypothesis, and I find it compelling, is this: that when the advancing "scientific" thought came into conflict with religious dogma, as it did in every culture, the Christian world had one significant, ironic advantage over the Muslim world.
All the intellectuals were priests.
In the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, the only literate people were the clergy. The Roman tradition of secular education had entirely died out; for centuries, the only place one could get an education was at a monastic school.
This meant that, as increasing population and increasing prosperity allowed for intellectual pastimes, and the classical heritage of intellectual inquiry was rediscovered, the people making these advances and rediscoveries were all churchmen. And as such, right from the start they had to address how to combine this new learning with their faith; how to syncretize, to adopt, or to reject, what the new ideas had to say about the world with what the church had been teaching.
Thus, when the conflict between "scientific" thought and Christian dogma arose, which it did repeatedly, men such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, right from the beginning were not only involved in but deeply committed to resolving the conflict in a way which allowed for the value of both sides; even when the Church rejected new ideas, it had examined them and confronted them and presented its arguments against them, and thus the ideas themselves did not die.
In the Islamic world, the tradition of secular learning, inherited from the Classical world of the Persians and the Romans, had never died out. Thus, the intellectuals who were embracing the Aristotelian worldview and/or pursuing "scientific" inquiry were not focused on rapproaching these ideas with Islamic religious dogma, nor were they in a position to do so convincingly had they been. They pursued new intellectual courses without regard to any but their own religious convictions, which frequently diverged from those of the larger church.
This meant that, when the Islamic religious establishments found that new ideas rising from "scientific" thought conflicted with established dogma, they simply squelched them. By which I mean executed people, exiled them if lucky, and forbade any further inquiry along those lines. Witness Averroes himself.
The Christian church was not in a position to do the same because the very people engaged in advancing intellectual thought were the leaders of the church. Nor did it feel the same need to, because those individuals by their nature were already considering the new ideas in the light of established religious belief.
Which is not to say that the Christian church did not step on heterodox "scientfic" thought, mind you. I daresay the fact that it did in fact do so is in not in question. But it did not do so with the finality or the simplicity of the Islamic church, nor did it do so without considering, debating, and frequently internalizing the new ideas themselves.
Thus, because there was no intellectual life in the Christian world apart from the church, the new ideas proposed by advancing intellectual inquiry survived, whereas in the Islamic world during the same period they did not.
Interesting and more than a little ironic.
- Sun Ra
P.S. Galileo: