Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages - Paperback

by Richard E. Rubenstein (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

This book documents the intellectual explosion that transformed Europe in the Middle Ages and follows a set of ideas as they course through the West. These ideas triggered student riots and heresy trials, prompted Pope Innocent III to recognize the Franciscan and Dominican orders, and set the stage for today's rift between reason and religion.
The ideas came from Aristotle. His work, like the rest of Greek culture, had been lost in the centuries after the fall of Rome, when the Greek language was forgotten. But in the Muslim world, the wisdom of the Greeks was never lost and contributed to the flowering of Islamic culture.
Then in the twelfth century in Toledo, Spain, groups of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars collaborated on translating the ancient classics; and ideas long forgotten galvanized Europe, turning Western thinking away from the supernatural world and toward the world of nature. With their optimistic view of human nature, these ideas sparked fierce controversies in the universities and caused major changes in the Catholic Church.
Rubenstein, author of When Jesus Became God, takes the reader back in time, to the translation center in Toledo and to the great universities in Paris, Padua, and Oxford. He shows how the Catholic Church adopted these new ideas and struggled to reconcile science and religion and how Western thinking was set on the path it has followed ever since.
This is a feast for readers who are fascinated by medieval history, and a treat for all who want to understand the ideas that are fundamental to modern thought.

Back Jacket

A superb storyteller who breathes new life into such fascinating figures as Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Aristotle himself. --Los Angeles Times
The intellectual explosion that transformed Europe in the Middle Ages and coursed through the Western world, triggered student riots and heresy trials, and set the stage for today's rift between reason and religion. The ideas came from Aristotle. His work, like the rest of Greek culture, had been lost in the centuries after the fall of Rome, when the Greek language was forgotten. But in the Muslim world, the wisdom of the Greeks was never lost and contributed to the flowering of Islamic culture.
When scholars in the twelfth century collaborated on translating the ancient classics, they resurrected ideas that turned Western thinking away from the supernatural world and toward the world of nature. With their optimistic view of human nature, these ideas sparked fierce controversies in the universities and caused major changes in the Catholic Church. Rubenstein shows how the Church adopted these new ideas and struggled to reconcile science and religion and how Western thinking was set on the path it has followed ever since.
This is a feast for readers who are fascinated by medieval history, and a treat for all who want to understand the ideas that are fundamental to modern thought.
Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of When Jesus Became God, a Publishers Weekly Best Religion Book. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, he lives in Fairfax, Virginia.