Richard E. Rubenstein
Amazon Price: $10.20
List Price: $15.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Harvest Books
Amazon Marketplace: 52
new & used starting at $4.75
|
Buy at Amazon.com
|
Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> World -> Medieval
Subjects -> History -> World -> General
Subjects -> History -> World -> General AAS
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
Root of a Modern Problem 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.
When researching works of fiction set in 14th Century France, as I am doing, one doesn't necessarily want the kind of exhaustive detail that one finds in tomes written by historians for historians. No, one really desires a more populist and popular history. Yet, at the same time, one really can't approach one's work with the cavalier attitude of the dilettante, either. So, one tries, as much as is possible, to immerse one's self into the period without getting bogged down in it.
Such books as Richard Rubenstein's "Aristotle's Children" are an immense help. Written for the popular audience, it still provides a wealth of information about that most tumultuous period just after the first millennium when the newly "discovered" works of the Macedonian Materialist, Aristotle, hit Medieval Europe like an intellectual bomb!
Classical literature, it is well known, was preserved by the Byzantines and the Muslims, eventually finding fertile ground in the great learning centers of Cordoba and Toledo in Muslim occupied Spain.
Although it was the Church that sponsored the translations from Arabic into Latin, it became quite picky about which of his ideas it would allow to be read and discussed. Yet, these works, as much as any other influence, fueled the Church Reform that would culminate in the Protestant Reformation and eventually fuel the Age of Reason in the 18th Century. Rubenstein tells us how.
It began, Rubenstein writes, in the 12th Century with Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, a city newly re-taken from the Muslims, who set up a center in that city for the translation of The Philosopher from Arabic into Latin. According to Rubenstein, Muslim, Jew and Christian all worked together in Toledo with no attempt at censorship or judgment as to what ideas would be beneficial to the faith and what would be dangerous. Kudos to Archbishop Raymond!
The effect of these translations, and Arabic commentaries, was a bifurcation of the Catholic faith with Neo-Platonists on one side and Aristotelian reasoners on the other. Although Plato and Aristotle admired and respected each other (Aristotle gave a moving eulogy at his master's funeral), the same cannot be said for their Medieval disciples who were, more often than not, at each others throats; many honest Aristotelians found themselves with their backs to the stake.
One really cannot fully appreciate the medieval mind without some grounding in the intellectual struggles that molded it. Rubenstein here has presented a lively, funny, informative and readable analysis of the impact that Aristotle, the proponent of reason over faith, had on the Church, an impact that is still very much in evidence in the 21st Century.
"Aristotle's Children" is an important work, not just for the specialist in medieval history, but also for anyone wishing to understand the roots of the modern struggle between reason and faith.
Editorial Review:
Europe was in the long slumber of the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire was in tatters, and the Greek language was all but forgotten, until a group of twelfth-century scholars rediscovered and translated the works of Aristotle. His ideas spread like wildfire across Europe, offering the scientific view that the natural world, including the soul of man, was a proper subject of study. The rediscovery of these ancient ideas sparked riots and heresy trials, caused major upheavals in the Catholic Church, and also set the stage for today's rift between reason and religion.
In Aristotle's Children, Richard Rubenstein transports us back in history, rendering the controversies of the Middle Ages lively and accessible-and allowing us to understand the philosophical ideas that are fundamental to modern thought.
