A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

is no progress... This is the sure result of the fact that one is never allowed to
investigate what should be believed among one’s own people, or to escape
punishment for raising doubts about what is said by everyone... People profess
themselves to believe what they admit they cannot understand, as if faith
consisted in uttering words rather than in mental understanding.’ The problem
could hardly be stated more clearly. 7
One of the most interesting features of Abelard’s thought was his
determination to return to the classics. As yet the texts from classical authors
available to him were pitifully few. Two works of logic by Aristotle, Plato’s
Timaeus and a couple of texts by Cicero made up the main sources. (There was
no way of discovering what classical texts still existed at this time, and it needed
determined scholars such as Petrarch (1304-74) to scour monastic libraries for
survivors.) Abelard had to have recourse to Augustine’s City of God, which had
disparaged ancient philosophy, and recast Augustine’s views to show the
importance of what had been rejected. He even attempted to show that the pagan
philosophers had grasped the concept of the Trinity. If he had lived a few
decades later, he would have been delighted with the flood of classical texts now
entering from the Arab world. The link between Islam and Christianity was
sustained by the famous commentaries on Aristotle by the Muslim philosopher
Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-98), which were adopted by many Christian
theologians of the thirteenth century and helped bring Aristotle, and the reasoned
thought he championed, back into the European consciousness. By now,
universities had developed from the medieval schools. While Bologna retained
its pre-eminence in law, it was the university of Paris (the successor of the
cathedral schools) that offered the most sophisticated school of theology.
Learning was boosted by the two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, who between them provided most of the great thinkers of the age.
The challenge of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the primacy of reason and
empirical experience, could be met in three ways. One was to adopt his
philosophical insights independently of Christianity. This was the response of
some Parisian theologians such as Siger of Brabant, who were dubbed the ‘Latin
Averroists’ on account of their adulation of the Muslim philosopher. Naturally
such an approach, which might have led to genuine intellectual freedom of
thought, was abhorrent to the Church, and a large number of specific
propositions attributed to Averroes and other rationalists were condemned
officially by the Bishop of Paris in 1277. ‘The most significant outcome’, writes
the historian of science Edward Grant, ‘was an emphasis on the reality and