Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 297
learning all over China and the Near West (from Cairo to Constantinople)
centuries before the creation of similar institutions in Oxford,
Paris, and Bologna.
If the Axial Age was the age of materialism, the Middle Ages were
above all else the age of transcendence. The collapse of the ancient empires
did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones.141 Instead,
once-subversive popular religious movements were catapulted into the
status of dominant institutions. Slavery declined or disappeared, as did
the overall level of violence. As trade picked up, so did the pace of
technological innovation; greater peace brought greater possibilities not
only for the movement of silks and spices, but also of people and ideas.
The fact that monks in Medieval China could devote themselves to
translating ancient treatises in Sanskrit, and that students in madrasas
in Medieval Indonesia could debate legal terms in Arabic, is testimony
to the profound cosmopolitanism of the age.
Our image of the Middle Ages as an "age of faith"-and hence, of
blind obedience to authority-is a legacy of the French Enlightenment.
Again, it makes sense only if you think of the "Middle Ages" as something
that happened primarily in Europe. Not only was the Far West an
unusually violent place by world standards, the Catholic Church was
extraordinarily intolerant. It's hard to find many Medieval Chinese,
Indian, or Islamic parallels, for example, to the burning of "witches" or
the massacre of heretics. More typical was the pattern that prevailed in
certain periods of Chinese history, when it was perfectly acceptable for
a scholar to dabble in Taoism in his youth, become a Confucian in middle
age, then become a Buddhist on retirement. If there is an essence to
Medieval thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather
in a dogged insistence that the values that govern our ordinary daily
affairs-particularly those of the court and marketplace-are confused,
mistaken, illusory, or perverse. True value lay elsewhere, in a domain
that cannot be directly perceived, but only approached through study
or contemplation. But this in turn made the faculties of contemplation,
and the entire question of knowledge, an endless problem. Consider
for example the great conundrum, pondered by Muslim, Christian, and
Jewish philosophers alike: What does it mean to simultaneously say
that we can only know God through our faculties of Reason, but that
Reason itself partakes of God Chinese philosophers were struggling
with similar conundrums when they asked, "Do we read the classics or
do the classics read us" Almost all the great intellectual debates of the
age turned on this question in one way or another. Is the world created
by our minds, or our minds by the world