Bede

Charles Freeman is a freelance writer of popular history. In 1996, Oxford University Press published his Egypt, Greece and Rome (or via: amazon.co.uk). I bought this when it came out (there is now a second edition) and thoroughly recommend it as the best introduction to the ancient world in print. Reading it makes two things clear – that Freeman is a writer of exceptional talent and that he loves the ancient world with a passion. I share his passion and if I could go through life again, I’d want to be a classicist. So, if you don’t know your Attila from your Alexander or you think Tiglath Pilesar is a brand of lager, and you are worried this makes you seem like an uneducated ignoramus (which, incidentally, it does ) then, Egypt, Greece and Rome is the book for you.

Freeman’s next book was the now notorious The Closing of the Western Mind (or via: amazon.co.uk) (2002). It went down like a lead balloon among people who know something about late antiquity, but was rather popular with those who don’t. To his credit, Freeman wrote a rejoinder to his critics on Amazon.com which is humble, if unrepentant. The Closing of the Western Mind is also extremely well written and thoroughly enjoyable but its central thesis is completely wrong.

Here’s the story in brief: ancient Greeks were rational and tolerant, not given to pointless ethical strictures or getting worked up about dogma. Then, in the fourth century AD, the classical world was taken over by crazy Christians who rioted about stuff like whether Jesus was man or god, oppressed women and generally made life difficult for scientists. As a result, human development stopped and Christianity held back progress for a thousand years. To be fair to Freeman, a lot of people actually believe this and it passed as conventional wisdom among historians until about a century ago. But, we now know that it is wrong in general and in every detail. Freeman, if he had paid attention to a fraction of the books in his bibliography, should have realised this.

In 1949, E.R. Dodds gave a series of lectures at the University of Berkeley, California that have formed the basis of our understanding of Greek culture ever since. Essentially, Dodds marked the move away from an elitist reading of classical texts as somehow representative of what ordinary people thought to the realisation that hardly anyone would have come across the thought of Aristotle or Euclid. To understand what ancient Greece was really like, we have to turn to other evidence such as inscriptions, archaeology and non-elite texts like Menander’s comedy. Dodds called the book that resulted from his lectures The Greeks and the Irrational (or via: amazon.co.uk) and it totally demolished the idea that the ancient world was a hive of rational philosophers. Christianity could not have overturned the rule of reason in the Greek world because the Greek world was not reasonable. Sure, among a tiny literate elite the works of Lucretius and Aristotle were popular, but even most of their readers made their sacrifices to the household gods and hoped for healing in the Temple of Asclepius. When plague struck Rome in the reign of Antonius Pius the pagan faithful did exactly what medieval Christians would have done – went on processions to assuage the gods.

Of course, very little of this pagan irrationality has been passed down to us. The fact is that early Christians were not very interested in the details of pagan religion and preserved hardly any of its literature. They thought that the Greek myths were picturesque stories and we inherited that belief. Thus, we have now completely lost the ability to see them as part of a living religious tradition. However, Christians were very interested in Greek philosophy, science and medicine. This is what they preserved by the laborious process of hand copying. They handed down to us Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and Simplicius. Edward Grant calculated that an incredible 15,000 pages of Greek commentary on Aristotle dating from the 2nd to 6th centuries AD have come down to us. Every single one of those pages had to be copied and recopied by Christian scholars. So, the crowning irony of all this is that Freeman’s slanted view of the ancient Greeks as a supremely rational lot is almost entirely due to the activities of the very Christians he blames for defeating reason.

The destruction of pagan religion, then, had nothing to do with the elite activity of pagan philosophy. The closest link is in the work of the neo-Platonists. This was the dominant philosophy among pagan thinkers from the mid-third-century onwards (although it is quite hard to tell because again, we see things through a later Christian lens). Freeman’s not-very-original idea is that Christians picked up the mystical and supernatural elements of neo-Platonism and abandoned the more rational aspects of Greek philosophy. Well, Christian theology certainly absorbed aspects of neo-Platonism because theology is a study of the supernatural. But Freeman mistakes the history of theology for the history of everything else. In one sense, this is forgivable because many of our sources for the period are histories of the Church. Modern scholars must pick through these to try to work out what was really going on. Freeman just takes them all at face value and seems to think that the clerical writers’ priorities reflect reality. He believes this even though he has read Ammianus Marcellinus, a secular historian of the period, who finds Christian doctrinal disputes extremely boring and hardly mentions them.

That said, Freeman’s exposition of the arguments about Arianism and the Trinity are probably the most lucid ever written. Gibbon deliberately made the whole thing even more obscure than it was, to emphasise his point that the whole dispute was trivial. Freeman instead carefully explains what was at issue and why it was at issue. He also resists the temptation to laud Pelagius (usually applauded purely because he was Augustine’s foe), painting him as the uncompromising fanatic that he was. Compare that with the favourable mention Pelagius gets in the recent film King Arthur. A minor quibble is that Freeman writes as a Protestant-raised humanist. This means that he can simultaneously attack the Trinitarians for not basing their theology on a clear reading of the Bible, while elsewhere complaining about biblical literalists.

So when did the western mind close? Well, the downfall of classical civilisation in the West was due to wave after wave of barbarian invasions that shut down intellectual life for four centuries or so. We have Christianity almost entirely to thank for its reappearance. In the East, minds remained open or closed depending on prevailing conditions. There was no intellectual stagnation in the fourth or fifth centuries about which Freeman bases his book. There was in the sixth and eighth centuries, due largely to the belligerent policies of Justinian and the Islamic invasion. Many Greek Christians found themselves ruled by the Caliphs and kick-started Arabic science and maths. A surprising number of early Arabic science writers were Christians not Moslems.

So, The Closing of the Western Mind explains something that never happened and manages to get the explanation wrong. I’m going to indulge in a little armchair psychology to try and explain how Freeman managed to make the catastrophic mistake of writing fiction and calling it history. As mentioned at the start of this review, Freeman and I both share a passion for the classical world. I get the impression that Freeman sincerely regrets its passing and cast around for someone to blame. Like many other humanists, he settled on the Christians and set out to write the indictment. From there it all started to go wrong. Freeman put the hypothesis before the research and ended up with a brilliantly written piece of anti-Christian polemic.

A classics don once said to me of Tacitus’s histories, “enjoy it, but don’t believe it.” The same applies to The Closing of the Western Mind.

Malachi151

I'm sorry, but your analysis is a complete crock.

Yes, it is true that the general public was superstitious and unreasonable, however the Christians did NOT "Christians were very interested in Greek philosophy, science and medicine. This is what they preserved by the laborious process of hand copying. They handed down to us Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and Simplicius".

Most of the works of these people, plus especially the materialists such as Epicurius, were declared as heretical and banned, burned, or left untranslated.

The works survived in the Islamic region and in Ireland, where the Church was separate from the mainland.

We have tons after tons of writings by the Early Christians declaring all of the reasonable ideas of the Greeks heretical and denouncing them. I have collected a few in my article on evolution. There wasn't ONE SINGLE Early Christian fathers who supported the idea of atoms, and most claimed that the world was not round and denounced the idea of gravity!

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...stic_Worldview

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...nst_Naturalism

Bede

Nope. Neither Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen or Simplicius were ever burnt or banned AFAIK. Sources for your contention please. I doubt any turned up in Ireland either given they were wrtten in Greek. The vast majority of these writers works have been preserved by Christian scribes in the original Greek langauge. They were all translated into Latin by Christians in the 12th and 13th century.

Almost all Christians accepted the earth was round - even Augustine whom you quote. In all likelihood Lactaneus did too although he feared that the Aussies would fall off, like I did when I was very young. His ideas on this had no influence. As for atoms, what is scientific about postulating something you cannot see or give any evidence for? Besides, you misread the texts - it is the atheism of the atomists that they object to, not atomism per se.

Best wishes

Bede

dongiovanni1976x

And many more works were simply washed off and written over with useless Christian hymns etc

example source

Bede

Palimpsests (which are what you are talking about) are another interesting case. The ruinous cost of parchment combined with its ability to withstand centuries of wear and tear meant that it was frequently reused. The old writing was scrapped off and the new written over the top. However, the process left faint images of the original text which later scholars have been able to read. Some important pagan works have been accidentally preserved in this way such as part of Cicero's De Republica and the recently rediscovered Archimedes palimpsest that you mentioned. There is no evidence that the monks doing the scrapping were deliberately targeting pagan texts although we may sometimes find their priorities unfortunate. The text they were scrapping off had, itself, been transcribed by earlier Christians and a perusal of a manuscript catalogue (such as the British Library's on-line) shows that in most cases the underlying material on a palimpsest is Christian as well. One of the earliest known bibles, the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, had the sermons of Ephraemus written over the top of it.

(adapted from my own website: http://bede.org.uk/literature.htm)

Best wishes

Bede

Jack the Bodiless

Seems like a classic strawman argument. I never imagined that the Greeks did NOT do such things.

The Greeks built several of the Wonders of the World, including the Temple of Ephesus and a humongous statue of Zeus. They also consulted the Oracle of Delphi rather often. You thought we imagined them to be a nation composed exclusively of atheists and rationalists?

Bede

Jack, I'm sure you didn't think that. But I can assure you that is the clear subtext of Freeman's book. It explicitly tells how reason was closed down by Christianity so by implication, the previous culture must have been reasonable.

Best wishes

Bede

Malachi151

Absolute nosnese. Try reading "How the Irish Saved Civilization (or via: amazon.co.uk)", its from a Christian perspective mind you.

As for your other claims, Aristotle and Plato were both considered heresy, from around the 5th century through the 12-13th century.

As for your attempts to explain away the Christian attacks on philosophy, it simply doesn't fly:

After having denounced Epicureianism and other Greek philosophies and explanations for the origin of the universe and earth, etc:

I'm sorry, but the facts clearly refute your claims.

Bede

I've read it. I don't recall anything about the Greek authors on the list you quoted. Can I have a page reference please. I am glad, though, you accept that Christian monks helped rebuild civilisation after the fall of the Western Empire to the barbarians.

Sources please. I also asked for sources for the banning and burning of the other authors. I await these too. It is poor form to refuse to back up your previous allegations and simply move on to new ones. FWIW, Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's Organon circulated in Western Europe in Latin during the period you cite. Timaeus was quite popular.

Regarding your quotations, I am concerned that you are using them again when they have been previously shown wanting by Andrew Criddle and others. The two bolded at the end do not say what you seem to think. Hippolytus is clearly attacking the heretics subversion of Greek thought and not Greek thought itself. The passage of Origen is entirely allegorical. Origen is famed for his justification of using pagan philosophy whenever it is useful.

Best wishes

Bede

Malachi151

In addition to that, BTW, where are the works of Democritus? Where are the works of Epicurus? Where are the works of Hero of Alexndria?

All gone of course, save a few scraps from Epicurus, because they were atomists who poisted purely NATURALISTIC explanations for all phenomena.

Even teh survival of the works from Plato, Aristotle, etc. don't say much, because Plato, by all acounts was one of the inspirations for Christianity in the first place. Both Plato and Aristotle held worldviews that were almost completely compatable with Christianity, indeed Christian philosphy was IN PART based on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, though eventually, even this became too much for them.

And, BTW the barbarians WERE CHRISTIANS!

Your account, and the account of other like you, is like saying, "See, the Communist Party did help bring Russia into an open democratic capitalist soceity, because Gorbachev was a member of the Communist Party!"

:banghead:

The next thing they will be telling us the Catholics led the advsances in astronomy because Copernicus and Galileo were Catholics, and the Christians developed the theory of evolution too, because Charles Darwin was a clergyman for the Church of England and was educated in biology from a semenary school....