Customer Reviews

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

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I am grateful for the care with which Amazon readers have reviewed my book whether they have agreed with my argument or not. The reviews are worth a reply.
My thesis is that Christianity was heavily politicised by the late Roman empire, certainly to the extent that it would have been unrecognisable to Jesus. Note the linking of the church to the empire's success in war, opulent church building and an ever narrowing definition of what beliefs one had to hold to be saved. (Hand in hand with this went an elaboration of the horrors of hell, a radical and unhappy development which can only have discouraged freedom of thought.) My core argument is that one result of the combination of the forces of authority (the empire) and faith (the church) was a stifling of a sophisticated tradition of intellectual thought which had stretched back over nearly a thousand years and which relied strongly on the use of the reasoning mind.
I did not depend on Gibbon. I do not agree with him that intellectual thought in the early Christian centuries was dead and I believe that the well established hierarchy of the church strengthened not undermined the empire. After all it was the church which survived the collapse of the western empire. Of course, Gibbon writes so eloquently that I could not resist quoting from him at times but my argument is developed independently of him and draws on both primary sources and recent scholarship.
On the relationship between Christianity and philosophy I argue that there were two major strands of Greek philosophy , those of Plato and Aristotle. The early church did not reject Greek philosophy but drew heavily on Platonism to the exclusion of Aristotle. In the thirteenth century Christianity was reinvigorated by the adoption of Aristotelianism , notably by Thomas Aquinas. It seems clear that Christianity needed injections of pagan philosophy to maintain its vitality and a new era in Christian intellectual life was now possible. I don't explore it in this book. Even so, when one compares the rich and broad intellectual achievements of the `pagan' Greek centuries with those of the Middle Ages, it is hard to make a comparison in favour of the latter. Where are the great names? (The critic who mentioned the ninth century philosopher Erigena should also have mentioned that he was condemned as a heretic.)
When one reads the great works of second and third century AD thinkers such as Plutarch, Galen, Ptolemy and Plotinus, which are remarkable for their range and depth, one cannot but feel that much has been lost in the west by the fifth century. Something dramatic happened in the fourth century. In 313 Constantine brought the traditional policy of Roman toleration for different religious beliefs to its culmination by offering Christians (who had condemned the pagan gods as demons) a privileged place within the empire alongside other religions. By 381 the Christian emperor Theodosius when enforcing the Nicene creed condemns other Christians as `foolish madmen.. We decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious names of heretics . . .they will suffer in the first place the chastisement of divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment which our authority , in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decided to inflict'.If this is not a `closing of the western mind' it is difficult to know what is. It goes hand in hand with a mass of texts which condemn rational thought and the violent suppression of Jewish and pagan sacred places. There is no precedent for such a powerful imposition of a religious ideology in the Greco-Roman world. The evidence of suppression is so overwhelming that the onus must be on those who argue otherwise to refute it.
Some readers have related my book to the present day- I leave it to them to do so if they wish -it is important to understand ANY age in which perspectives seem to narrow and religion and politics become intertwined as they certainly did in the fourth century. After all American Christianity was founded by those attempting to escape just such political straitjackets. Christianity has never been monolithic or static. In fact,as my book makes clear, one of my heroes is Gregory the Great who, I believe, brought back spirituality, moderation and compassion into the Christian tradition after the extremes of the fourth century. It is the sheer variety of Christianities which make the religion such an absorbing area of study.
I hope Amazon readers will continue to engage with my arguments whether they agree with them or not. Keep the western mind open and good reading! Charles Freeman.
N.B. Amazon insist I award my book some stars! I have chosen ''four' because since I wrote it I have come across a lot of new material which I think could improve its argument further.

This is a book with an interesting perspective, pity it is too long. The basic thesis is that Christian faith pushed aside Greek rationality aside for more than a millennium, until Thomas Acquinas finally reconciled faith and rationality again.

The first one third of the book, the best, attempts to demonstrate how the Christian faith is a collection of beliefs from various sources. Only a small but obviously very important part of the Christian faith has come to us from Christ through the gospels. Paul was another major source for Christianity, for example in his hostility to sexuality and in particular homosexuality (about which Christ seems to have said little). A third source were the four oecumenical councils in the fourth century which settled on numerous detailed and often formal questions, such as the theory of the Holy Trinity. In many cases the Roman emperor had to intervene between squabbling rival factions within Christianity to take decisions in religious issues, subsequently ratified by the Church fathers, more on the basis of political expediency than on any other basis. The consequence of this pyramid of sources is that, although the main principles had been formulated by Christ - most notably, love thy neighbour -, Paul and the early Church have added so much to this body, that Christ might not have recognised his own faith by the fourth century. And it gets worse.

Christianity moved in two directions. Firstly, following the proclamation by Constantine, turning Christianity into the State religion of the empire, the Church became materialistic, in contrast to its early roots which emphasized poverty and abstinence. In some ways this is reminiscent of what happened with communist parties, many of which probably started with the best intentions, but soon the party degenerated into an institution which was used by its leaders to gain wealth and prestige while at the same time the original beliefs became dogma to beat up heretics. Freeman does not focus on subsequent reactions to the materialism of the Church (from within the Catholic Church, starting in Cluny, and by Protestantism).

The second direction of Christianity, the move away from Greek rationalism to a belief in miracles and making science subservient to faith, gets most of Freeman's attention. Augustine comes in for most of the blame : he advocated an unquestioning acceptance of faith and believed that rationality - and therefore science - was a threat to the true faith. Augustine was perhaps the most influential figure in Christianity after Paul, so when we look at the Middle Ages and see the Church fighting science, people believing in superstitions, persecuting witches etc... more than one and a half millennium after Aristotle advocated rational explanations for every phenomenon, we have to blame Augustine to a large degree. Augustine - and the Church - borrowed heavily from Plato who believed that body and soul were separate worlds and that the soul was paramount. This implied that knowing about the material world, i.e. science was unimportant, if not dangerous.

Freeman cites the example of astronomy, where the last recorded observation by the Greeks was by the Proclus in AD 475, after which there are no recorded observations for over a thousand years, until Copernicus in 1543. A similar gap exists in many sciences.

Contrary to Plato's teachings, Aristotles' books had been lost in Europe until the renaissance and in fact came back to Europe through Islamic philosophers in Andalusian Spain. (A graphic illustration of this crucial period in Europe, the break between ignorant and superstitious Middle Ages and the rebirth of Greek rational thinking, when the Church was desperately trying to prevent the subversive translations of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from spreading, can be seen in the film In the Name of the Rose.)

The Christian philosopher who finally reconciled rational thought and Christian faith, and whose theories were largely accepted by the Church itself, was Thomas Aquinas, as such perhaps the most influential person in the western world after Aristotle himself. According to Thomas, rationality was not to be feared, because it would strengthen faith. This meant that after more than 1000 years of hostility to science, the Church suddenly accepted science and rationality. It is ironic though that only a few hundred years later, many scientific discoveries would undermine established Christian dogma and indeed threaten if not the faith, then at least the Church, but by then this movement had become unstoppable.

Given the huge impact on Western history and culture of the Church's attitude to science, I think this book paints a very interesting perspective. I do not think this book is blaming the Church of today; it merely illustrates that until Thomas, Christian faith for over a thousand years had been Platonic, with an emphasis on the soul and a rejection of rationality, but the Church itself quickly embraced Aristotle's rationality following publication by Thomas of his Summa Theologiae.

I must disagree with the other reviewer in comparing this book to Gibbon. Rather than asserting that Christianity contributed to the end of the Roman empire, Freeman suggests that Christianity may in fact have preserved it well beyond its sell-by date. It is beyond any reasonable historical doubt that the average citizen of medieval Europe was far more restricted in what their society would allow them to believe and indeed to think about - with the penalties for error being corporal on earth and eternal in the fires of hell.

It is certainly true that from a technological point of view, invention did continue throughout the middle ages, but free intellectual & scientific progress was certainly stunted by the church's insistence on reliance on scripture as the only valid source of knowledge, supported by an atrophied smattering of classical texts. Ironically of course the church integrated the very same old masters (esp Ptolemy, Galen and Aristotle) that would have espoused a practical and experimentalist scientific tradition completely at odds with the church's view of reality.

Freeman, while clearly an admirer of the classical world (most of his other books have that focus), is far from a church-basher, though once you've read the book you mightn't feel like being so kind. Gregory of Tours and Ambrose of Milan, two pivotal figures of the early medieval church, receive treatments that are fairly balanced (though it is clear that any admiration Freeman has for Ambrose are along the same lines as Machiavelli might have had for Stalin).

A really excellent book, especially if want a thorough, thought-provoking, erudite but not overly academic treastise on the late Roman/Early medieval period.

This is one those books I bought with high expectations and then promptly left on my bookshelf, unread, for almost a year. My only regret after reading it is that I waited so long to do so.

Freeman's thesis is straightforward, in the quest to explain the central concept of the Trinity, early Christianity moved away from seeking truth through empirical thought to receiving truth from authority or, if you prefer, through faith. The story behind this thesis is truly fascinating and it is a great tribute to Freeman that the controversies surrounding Arianism, Monophysitism, etc become vital and comprehensible.

It would be easy to read this book as a criticism of Christianity or the Early Church, etc. For me that misses the point. Freeman is tackling something far more subtle that nature of religious faith and its coexistence with empirical thought AND governmental authority. Can they coexist? Can they coexist with equal vigor and independence? Do they cancel each other out automatically? Whether one believes Constantine was in fact truly inspired by God or was "merely" a very canny politician, the one-minded reader is confront with the controversies created by a state sanction religion. A religion that the state ultimately comes to rely upon for legitimacy and authority.

I greatly enjoyed this book and have returned repeatedly to many of the ideas and arguments in it since reading it last year. I do not agree with all of Freeman's contentions but I am grateful for this book and his incredible achievement. You may want to follow this book with MacCulloch's The Reformation to further trace the impact of these seemingly obscure controversies and their lasting impact.

Not an easy read but very very worth the effort. Highly recommended.

Charles Freeman succeeds in communicating in great detail the history and varying ideas of Christianity as it was transitioning from one of many religions in the Roman Empire to the official religion. The book concludes, as the title implies with the "Fall of Reason," that is, with the closing by the now Christian authorities of all the pagan schools of philosophy. Freeman identifies the cause of this intolerance with the involvement of the state in church. As a result of the Emperors wishing to grant Christianity a priviliged status in the empire, heretics had to be exposed and excluded from the priviliges. The differing interpretations of Christianity ultimately derived from relying on opposing philosophical bases for the interpretation of fundamental Christian truths, such as the nature of the trinity and the status of the material world. Ultimately, by the time of St. Augustine, the choice was made to rely on what amounts to a Platonic (strictly, neo-platonic) philosophy as the intellectual base of the religion. Further debate was viewed as not only unnecessary but dangerous so all the schools were shut down. The book is quite technical at times, in terms of the detail in which it examines the theological ideas of the time. Prospective readers should be prepared for some challenging readings.

While the premise (from the title) is to tie the rise of Christianity with the decline of reason (rational/empirical approach) this book is actually better seen as a history of aspects of the early church. Freeman spends some time delineating Greek philosophy and background before relating some of the history of the early church and Roman empire. He then describes the events and controversies relating to Christian doctrine within the Roman empire. Toward the end, there is a brief mention of Islam's tolerance of reason and a small amount relating to the recrudescence of critical inquiry in the middle ages.
The value of this book for me was the detailed history of the early church with its fervent arguments over doctrine. A history which was later suppressed. While there are a number of quotations and some events relating to suppression of a rational/empirical approach, these are not fully drawn in support of the title argument. It is left for the reader to draw this conclusion from references such as the empty library shelves and absence of debates in one ancient city.
This book is worth the time for someone interested in seeing the suppressed history of early Christian/Catholic beliefs and how they actually developed.

By and large, this book seems to have been met with ovation by reviewers at Amazon. There are, however, a small handful of negative reviews of this book. After reading all of them, I noticed there is one major problem with the negative reviews. Most of the negative reviewers are clearly responding to a different book. These reviewers seem to think that Freeman is blaming Christians for the complete demise of "Greek Philosophy," which is a strange idea indeed, since that is not Freeman's argument at all.

Freeman acknowledges right off the back that Christians largely embraced Platonic philosophy. And, why shouldn't they? Plato himself, with his concept of "forms," was directly in competition with both the concepts of empirical evidence and logical deduction. I sincerely doubt whether these negative reviewers read Freeman's book at all. If so, they wouldn't have made the silly and incorrect assumption that Freeman was arguing Christianity caused the demise of Greek philosophy in general. Freeman never makes such a claim. Instead, Freeman argues that Christianity (as a movement, on the whole) embraced Platonic philosophy as a means to marry faith and reason. The problem, of course, being that Platonic philosophy was then and still is inferior to the principles of empirical knowledge and logic. Again, these reviewers are setting up a straw-man argument against Freeman. First, they put words in his mouth by claiming he argued something he didn't. Then, they attempt to disprove an argument, which Freeman never made in the first place. What this all has to do with Freeman's actual argument I can't say. Reviewers who engage in such devices could themselves be cited as evidence of the lingering effects on contemporary society of the Christian destruction of reasonable thought.

This is a very well written and well researched book. Some of the arguments may not be entirely new, but I have not yet found a single book which deals so extensively with this topic. A must read for anybody interested in church history, philosophy or Christianity.

I particularly like the style of the book, which is not too academic, but nevertheless written with authority. The extensive references allow a even deeper study of the topic. Also, Freeman is a very fair author. Many writers might have been much harsher with the "church fathers". Freeman does not allow emotions or polemic muddle his facts. Orthodox Christians may not like his conclusions, and - as with all historical topics - you will find scholars who disagree with certain parts.

But this is just the usual academic discussion and argument of "reasonable" people!

Charles Freeman has taken an thousand years of ecclesiastical history and formulated a well thought out theory on the impacts of the church on Roman society. For the truly devout, this book may tend to bring to light facts that don't necessarily warm the heart. However, he does relay a strong sense of the times and places all events into their proper context. Freeman has obviously spent painstaking hours in the research and formulation of this book, and in doing so, provides the reader with a vibrant understanding of both the glory and instability of Rome. The Empire itself is shown with all its vulnerabilities, which after "Christianization", seem to waver on the strengths and weaknesses of a developing Christian church. For the unbiased reader, this book is a refreshing insight into an area of Roman history that is commonly overlooked and blindingly waived aside. I recommend this book to any that are interested not only in ancient / medieval history, but in the aspects of ecclesiastical history that seldom are expressed without a slanted sentiment.

Charles Freeman gives a meticulously detailed look into what happened after a significant event occured when Emperor Constantine declared a policy of toleration for Christianity in the Roman Empire.

It was prior to this event and a little while afterwards that a culture of reason and free inquiry existed in the Ancient world which was influenced by the ancient Greeks.

With the fall of Alexander the Great, the Romans acquired Greece. Upon doing so, Greek ideas and culture were adopted by the Romans and flourished in which the Roman Republic and Empire not only absorbed but also expanded upon Greece's intellectual tradition in terms of science, art and philosophy.

As Mr. Freeman points out, Emperor Constantine and his successors thought that by institutionalizing Christianity with the Roman state the religion would act as a unifying force in conjuction with other favored polytheistic faiths at times when the empire was threatened by hostile forces, both internal and external, as well as be an effective means of social control.

According to Freeman, because the Christian bishops at the time acquired political power as a result of church-state union, once the Roman Empire began to collapse its culture of free inquiry was crushed and replaced with 2 centuries of dogmatism and repression. More commonly known as The Dark Ages.

However, Charles Freeman states in the latter part of his book, the reason why the church acted in this manner was to maintain order in the region due to the turmoil within the Roman Empire. Since the church was the strongest political authority then, its leadership felt that suppressing Rome's intellectual culture was the best way to prevent chaos as it saw it.

I disagree with this conclusion as Freeman's example of bishops such as Ambrose of Milan clearly demonstrate that the bishops of the Christian church wanted to hold on to their power at all costs. Once attained they moved to minimize competition via the force of law exploiting its ties with the Roman monarchy.

Charles Freeman makes a vivid link between philosophical, political and cultural shifts while providing many historical details. He also makes a compelling connection between the writings of many notable religious figures and how their influences resulted in Christianity subverting reason and free inquiry then like it is doing now.

Three theologians that stick out in my mind are Paul of Tarsus who had an avowed hatred of reason, knowledge and philosophy; Athanasius of Alexandria who laid the foundation of Christianity's hatred of human life with his guilt-ridden writings condemning human existence; John Chrysostom who spoke out against material wealth and was anti-Jewish; and Augustine of Hippo who provided a rationale for the persecution of heresy.

I have a religious background and what I found most fascinating about this book are the details that took place then and how they are repeating themselves today. Especially with how religious sects (like Christianity) are trying to hinder scientific inquiry about the existence of God and evolution while religions of all beliefs are in conflict with each other today just like they have been many times in the past.

We are seeing the remnants of religion's actions then even more so today. Because of acquiring power and control (of any kind), religions in all parts of the world, act in a manner detrimental to man's ability to think.

The question that people should ask is "why" when any country or culture dumps reason and inquiry (i.e. Aristotelianism) for faith and force (i.e. Platonism).

Charles Freeman provides answers to this and many other philosophical questions in this well researched, lucid, and excellent book that delves into a period of human history that many theologians and historians would rather forget.