I have to confess-- I'm a fan of history, philosophy, theology and science. When this book was published, I had to have it. So my friend bought it for me for my birthday in 2011. After all, it combined my interests together.
Basic premise
[God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science has another title. It was released as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution in the United States]
This book challenges the paradigm that the medieval ages of Europe as the "Dark Ages" were a period of ignorance and regress when nothing of technological and philosophical importance happen. Listing over 100 medieval scholars, the author James Hannam protrays the medieval ages as some sort of Golden Age, where Christian Europe was supreme in both science and thought.
Furthermore, he brings into contention whether the Roman Catholic Church stifled free enterprise and research. According to the author James Hannam, the Roman Catholic Church did not ban zero, forbid human autopsy or even persecuted Galileo for his scientific views (they persecuted him for other reasons). However these modern myths continue to persist.
In this post I want to bring up some things I found enlightening in God's Philosophers.
European Languages
One of the practices of Christianity is the sending of missionaries. As Christian beliefs are rooted in the Bible, there was need to invent languages and translations of the Bible to make Christianity accessible to much of Europe.
Having a common root, most European languages contain about 25 letters and have similar grammar. The ease of learning such languages allowed the facillitation of ideas across Europe. Hannman constrasted this with Asian languages (such as Mandarin). Despite a unified written language across China, the pictorial Chinese language had more than 500 symbols that made the communication of ideas more tedious across Asia. Furthermore, China had little motivation to increase its literacy rate (unlike Europe, which had a religious basis).
Spectacles
Another key invention in the medieval period was the eye-glasses, or rather spectacles. With the development of glass and the studies of light in Europe, corrective lenses were inevitably invented. Spectacles allowed ageing scholars and workers to continue reading and working, allowing the retention of knowledge within the European populations.
Logic
Another aspect that was further developed was logic. Formal logic was first introduced by the ancient philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), and medieval philosophers had little qualms about incoporating Aristolian logic to Christianity. Hannam records St. Anselm of Cantebury (1033-1109)'s ontological argument as one of the earliest attempts to rationalise Christianity. The famed St. Thomas Aquinas (1225- 1274) also features as a champion of Aristotle.
However, the medieval scholars also showed that they weren't just blindly following to Aristotle and the other classical Greek philosophers. The Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) often challenged Aquinas's (and hence Aristotle's) view on morality and the Roman Catholic Church had once declared Aristotle's works heretical in the Condemnation of 1277.
These challenges to the Greek's idea of the world eventually led to experimentation and the development of science. Hannam advocates the idea that the philosophy of science emerged from the rationality of Christianity. [While other civilisations came up with great scientific discoveries like gunpower, they failed to come up with a philosophy of science which pushed for improvements.]
Overall
While I'm no historian, theologian or philosopher, I really enjoyed God's Philosophers. I highly recommend it to anyone with at least an interest in church history. Hannam's style of writing is simple and engaging, and supported with diagrams for better understanding. I give it a 92/100.
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