Yet he starts by describing the darkness from which we started, including the bizarre religious concept that god has a full insight of every feeling and every thought of every individual at any moment: a terrifying concept that already convinced me as a child that I would never ever be allowed to heaven.
"If human beings are inherently sinful, as Augustine taught, there had to be definition of what was sinful and what was not. St John Cassian, who is credited with bringing the ideals and practices of eastern monasticism to the West, outlined eight vices in his influential Institutes, among them any expression of sexuality. It is interesting that in addition to fornication, self-glorification and avarice, Cassian includes what he considers unhealthy moods such as sadness and apathy (acedia). In the Irish Church, the clergy used Penitentials, handbooks that listed sins and the correct penance for each one. Crucially, as Augustine had already argued, the inner mind became accessible to God. 'Let us consider how severe a judge is coming; who will judge not only our evil deeds but our every thought,' preached Pope Gregory the Great. This was a psychological transformation of enormous importance. Nothing was invisible to God. Furthermore, the church itself defined what was sinful or not. The opportunities to manipulate its control over its congregations were magnified. No ancient religion had enjoyed this power and its appearance marks a revolutionary development in the history of European thought. The Christian was required to live in a permanent state of alert, something unknown in the classical world". (p. 70)
This was further reinforced with the obligation to confess.
"Prominent was the council's requirement that the faithful had to take communion once a year and also make a confession. This was, as one medievalist has described it, 'perhaps the most important legislative act in the history of the Church'. The dialogue between confessor and sinner forced the individual to search his or her own conscience, discuss the nature of their intentions and so the extent to which they should take personal responsibility for their guilt. The distinguished German historian Johannes Fried argues that 'the history of the psyche and human attitudes, and hence the entire history of the West, was profoundly affected by this change.' This may be too sweeping an assessment and assumes that the medieval mind was ready to he so subservient. Even so, taking personal responsibility for one's guilt was only part of the impact of the church's teaching on the probability of damnation at the Last Judgement. (p. 97)
Luckily, the religious dogma and often bizarre practices and behaviour (see first paragraph below) gradually started to crack by the insights and courage of individuals, even from within the Church.
"As far back as the second century the earliest 'Latin' theologian, Tertullian, from Carthage in North Africa, had asked the question 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic; and dialectic composition. We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.' Instead, one should simply be receptive to God's word, a view that was often repeated by the Church Fathers. Gregory the Great's saying that 'Faith has no merit for which human reason offers proof' suggested that praise should be given to those who do not question, a view that has persisted in the Catholic Church throughout its history. lntrusion into faith was, in Bernard's (of Clerveaux) graphic phrase, simply 'tearing out the guts of God's secrets' and in a specific condemnation of Abelard, he protested, 'Let him who scanned the Heavens go down into the depths of Hell'. Offering his mind directly to the heavens, Bernard valued the Virgin Macy as an intercessor with Christ and even reported that once when he was ill a statue of the Virgin came alive and offered her breasts for him to suck healing milk" (p. 112)
"In Sic et Non Abelard hit on the original - if provocative idea of quoting the Church Fathers on specific theological issues, some 158 of them, so that one could see that they often contradicted each other. Although Abelard stated that much could be resolved by a careful analysis of the language of different texts, it was inevitable that readers would be unsettled by this presentat·ion of opposing views. Abelard did not seem to care. Doubting was healthy in itself, as he put it in the Prologue to Sic et Non: 'For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning and in a state of questioning we arrive at the truth.' He went on to suggest that anyone, not just experienced theologians, could grapple with the issues of logic in Christian doctrine. This was bound to offend conservatives who argued that doctrine was coherent and beyond challenge, esp·ecially by the ordinary faithful. Even if the importance of this approach was not grasped at the time, Abelard's championing of doubt was an important moment in the awakening of the western mind. Progress in knowledge is impossible if conventional thinking is never doubted."(p. 107)
Gradually, reason and democracy join hands and become part of the system. The Magna Carta is a prime example of this.
"In Plantagenet England a constitutional conflict between the barons and King John resulted in the remarkable Magna Carta of 1215, which is still recognized today in English law as a fundamental statement of liberty from arbitrary rule. Its original Larin title, Magna Carta Libertatum ('The Great Charter of Liberties') proclaims its purpose. The personal and political freedoms it listed applied not only to the barons but to all freeborn men and to cities, notably London. There were now to be limits on royal authority, extraordinary taxes were only to be raised with the approval of 'the general council of the kingdom' (the word parliamentum appears for the first time only in 1237), and the barons would be able to supervise the actions of the king. One of its most famous articles, Clause 39, stated that 'no free man shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or exiled or injured in any way ... except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. Rights of the individual to inheritance and chattels were also protected." (p. 140)
In short, this book is highly recommended to understand the incredible struggle that Western civilisation has fought to emancipate itself from theocracy and dictatorship. Today, the most prosperous countries in the World, happen also to be the ones with the best democratic systems, the best education and the least percentage of believers. To me the recipe is clear, yet the dark forces of zealots, oligarchs and theocrats are still very much alive, including in the West.
"The issue that weighs on anyone who sees the importance of fostering tolerance, accepting that science has achieved more for the welfare of humanity than institutional religion, and being open to more profound thinking about the human condition' is that these values are still under threat 300 years later. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama was seriously mistaken in assuming that liberal democracy had triumphed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and that a high point of civilization had been reached. Every passing year seems to throw further doubt on this assessment. It is all the more vital to learn how painful was the birth of such values and how vulnerable their survival. But it is also right to applaud the cultural riches that they have provided. I do think I am justified in describing the long centuries from the fall of the Roman empire to 1700 as a process, often fitful and haphazard, of an 'awakening of the Western mind'.
Here are some more worthwhile excerpts, yet I recommend to buy and read the whole book.
"Between 750 and 900 they translated most of the known works of Aristotle into Arabic. Aristotle was particularly valuable because he looked at a question from all angles and emphasized that issues were up for discussion that could only be resolved through reason. This led to sophisticated debates on the relationships between philosophy and theology and an awareness of the key issues in ethics and the sciences. Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna (980-1037) was an intellectual superstar. (...) His Metaphysics, which arrived in the west at much the same time, was a massive commentary on the works of Aristotle that reinterpreted them to present a coherent system of Avicenna's own making. In the words of the contemporary scholar Peter Adamson: Avicenna went out of his way to be innovative, deliberately overthrowing centuries of tradition to forge a new and distinctive philosophy. This was an essential step forward if the scattered and heterogeneous works of the great Greek philosopher were to be at all comprehensible, but Avicenna went beyond Aristotle in providing original arguments for the nature of the existence of God. This made his works relevant for some western theologians but infuriated others who felt that Aristotle's texts were too authoritative to be tampered with. Aristotle's authority was further enhanced by Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averroes (1126-98), from Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, where he practised as a judge. He was also the court physician to the Almohad caliphate, but his real passion was philosophy. Like Abelard, he came under pressure from conservative theologians for his insistence that theology and philosophy could be used equally as alternative and perhaps divergent approaches to finding the truth (what Averroes termed the 'double truth'). There was always the fear, and it would return in the Paris schools of theology; that philosophy, based on pagan Greek sources, would overthrow theological orthodoxy (whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian), but Averroes, like Abelard, did not believe that it should do so. He admired Avicenna but felt that he had been too radical in diverting from Aristotle's original works. These were the gold standard, 'the highest truth, since his spirit was the highest point of the human spirit - it is justly said that he was created and delivered to us by the providence of God, so that we may come to know everything that can be known'.(p. 145)
In 268 Aquinas returned to Paris to find that a number of the arts teachers had gone further than he had, in preferring Aristotle's views on the soul and the eternity of the world over orthodox Christianity. The two most prominent were masters of arts, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They relied so heavily on the Islamic Averroes' adulation of Aristotle that they are known as the Latin Averroists. While they accepted Christian teaching, their support for Aristotelian philosophy as a means of finding the truth was so enthusiastic that it was as if they were ignoring theology. So they argued that God could not do something that Aristotle had shown to be physically impossible. One example was that God could not move the cosmos in a straight line as this would leave a vacuum, and Aristotle had taught (erroneously, as would later be discovered) that a vacuum could not exist. This contrasted with the orthodox Christian view that God could do anything short of a logical contradiction.
"Marsilius, however, rejects 'natural' hierarchies, in particular the concept that good birth is related to the ability to govern. Within the next few years many of Marsilius's ideas were supported by the lawyer Bartolus da Sassoferrato,(...). Bartolus was as concerned as Marsilius was with the internecine disputes between and within the Italian cities. The two agreed that the sovereignty of the people can never be alienated and that religion should be kept separate from politics. This approach was to prove especially fruitful. In their own time it provided a riposte to those who wished to retain the authority of the Church over secular rulers. Not since the era of the Roman empire had anyone reflected as probingly and effectively as this on the ways in which the citizenry (though only males) as a whole could he involved in government. The influence of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the harmonious order of the city through the collective, and natural, will of the citizens to achieve civil happiness, is clear."
"Petrarch never overcame his detestation of the scholastic obsession with Aristotle. He was responsible for coining the term 'Dark Ages' to describe the medieval period he believed he was still living in following the extinction of the 'light' of classical antiquity. Several of his works dwell on how the moral corruption of his age allowed a lust for wealth to transcend spiritual values. He believed he was restoring the light and continuously harked baek in his writings ro the superiority of Rome. (...) Petrarch championed tolerance, echoing ancient beliefs when he noted that 'many can be forced to confess, but not to believe. No liberty is gre-ater than the liberty to think. As I claim it for myself, so I do not deny it for others ... I am unwilling to be the judge of the human conscience which is something hidden and deep.' This acceptance of intellectual diversity was an important moment in Renaissance thought. It ensured that humanism was never a homogenous movement : rather, it opened up intense debates on 'the condition of man'.
"(Gentili) recognized that there had to be some basis for evolving the rules governing their relationships, but in a falous saying - silete theologi in munere alieno - ' Silence theologian, in matters that do not concern you' - he insisted that theology must be kept out of it. Where Gentili and his followers differed from the theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, was in assuming that natural law was not necessarily to be interpreted as having been founded by God. (...) For Gentili, a legal system needed to be based, pragmatically, on the actual practice of civilized nations. Religion was a private matter between individuals and their God. What was important for Gentili was to find a way in which traditional natural law, 'the set of principles that are true for all peoples at all times' and which regulate the desire to live in a peaceful and rational social order, could be incorporated into the law of nations."
"Philosophically, Grotius made an impo·rtant contribution to the concept of natural law. While he was prepared to accept that natural law might show the will of God, he claimed (controversially for many of his contemporaries) that its precepts would hold true even if God did not exist. Natural law is so intrinsic to human existence that even God cannot change it. 'Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not equal four, so he cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be n.t evil.' As a result Grotius has been seen by some as marking a new beginning in moral philosophy, 'th.e secularization of virtue'. He narrowed the precepts of natural law down to two: the right of self-preservation and the right to live socially with others."
"In the Novum Organon, Bacon elaborates on what he calls the 'idols', the hindrances that come between the mind and reality. The senses, he says, are always unreliable: we can be led astray by information that conforms with what we already believe and we can easily be swayed by the opinions of the marketplace. It is important to separate scientific knowledge from theological belief, which is based on textual authority rather than material evidence. Ultimately, however, there was a place for God in Bacon's system: certain knowledge could be found in 'the true signatures and marks set upon the works of [divine] creation as they are found in nature... all knowledge appeareth to be a plant of God's own planting'. The trick was to mend 'the cracked mirror; of the mind so as to distinguish what God had actually created from what were vain imaginings. (...) Once sufficient material has been gathered to form the basis of a reasonable hypothesis, the hypothesis itself has to be tested. For Bacon, it was as important to find evidence to refute it as it was to find evidence to confirm it. This was one of Bacon's most important contributions to scientific method."
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