Fjordman on Christian and Muslim Reactions to the Greek Philosophical Legacy
Fjordman, in "Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, But Muslims Did Not" in The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3934), said:
My main thesis in this essay is that Christianity was a Greco-Roman religion in a way which Islam never was or could be. Islam was founded outside of the Greco-Roman world. Christianity was founded within this world, and gradually grew accustomed to Greco-Roman culture. This had a major long-term impact on how the adherents of these two religions treated the Greco-Roman legacy.
Continuing to develop this theme, he points out that Rome tended to merely apply principles discovered by the Greeks: their genius lay in large-scale engineering rather than in art or even science as such. Their own culture was curiously vacant, the more so after the Republic became an Empire:
There was a notable decline in the confidence of traditional agrarian religions in the urban Roman Empire already before the rise of Christianity. This religious vacuum was strengthened in the third century AD, when a political, military and economic crisis with rapid inflation caused great turbulence and the Empire almost broke apart. The political crisis and the spiritual vacuum accelerated the growth of alternative religions and philosophies such as Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism and above all Christianity. It is not a coincidence that the worst persecutions of Christians took place at the turn of the fourth century, just prior to the official acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.
Fjordman doesn't go into this, but part of the reason may have been that traditional Classical religions had been agrarian and civic. With the farming being performed by slaves on latifundia, and the remnants of urban government existing increasingly only as a mechanism by which the Empire could extract work and money from the citizens, the heart went out of the old cults.
Fjordman points out that violence pervaded Roman life, from the heights of politics to recreation. He discusses the gladitorial games: I would add that, when the Romans adopted the Greek theatrical tradition, they sometimes "improved" it by including tableaux in which condemned criminals would actually be put to death to depict a character's death scene. As Fjordman explains, the games and the other deadly spectacles were not purely a Roman affair, but expanded throughout the Empire.
Roman politics, too, were frequently brutal. Caesar died at a meeting of the Senate, killed by senators. Pompey and Cicero died violent deaths at the hands of their political rivals. After the Republic, the cruelties of the emperors Nero and Caligula became legend.
... and Tiberius, and Domitian, and Commodus. Furthermore, before the time of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero, Sulla had set the precedent of violent dictatorship (in the modern as opposed to Roman sense of the word "dictator"). Sulla, because he was successful, was widely admired and respected even after his death by the Roman aristocracy ... a bad omen for the survival of the Republic. For all that could be said for Roman respect for the law, they also worshipped brute force in a way which modern Americans do not.
There is undeniably something dark about a culture where families go to watch people get killed for enjoyment.
Yes. And this pervaded their mentality. Even the good Emperors enjoyed the arena, and individuals who found the spectacle at least distasteful were expressing a decidedly minority opinion, like modern American men who don't like sports. Also note that the Roman women loved the arena as well, and took children to witness the games.
In this case, as with the widespread Roman slavery, Christianity was definitely a force for good ...
A point often missed, including by me when I was younger!
According to Charles Murray, “The Roman republic was also a slave state on such a scale that Gibbon estimated that the number of slaves may have outnumbered the free inhabitants of the Roman world. A proposal that slaves should wear a distinctive garment was rejected, Gibbon notes dryly, because ‘it was justly apprehended that there might be some danger in acquainting [the slaves] with their own numbers.’ Nor was Roman slavery kindly. Roman masters might dispose of the lives of their slaves at will, and were not reluctant to use that power. We know, for example, that the size of the slave force in the palace of a Roman noble family could number about four hundred souls. The reason we know that number is that the Roman archives record an instance in which the master in such a palace was murdered, and the household slaves were executed for failing to prevent his murder - all four hundred of them.”
This was directly destructive to the Republic, and the Empire, in several ways:
(1) Widespread slavery degraded the status of hard work, especially manual labor, which caused philosophers to shun experimentation and practical application of their ideas, because it was "demeaning to philosophy."
(2) Even when philosophers or engineers did devise useful labor-saving machinery, it was seen more as a threat to public order ("then what will we do with all those idle slaves") than as a potential boon.
(3) The accessibility of slaves to do their masters' bidding degraded morality, both in the obvious sense that slaves could be used for sexual or sadistic release, and in the subtler sense that masters became used to personal omnipotence.
(4) During the decline of the Republic, the destruction of the middle classes was accelerated by the fact that members of the lower middle classes faced the possibility of enslavement for debt, hence the stakes of political economy were monstrously high.
And, of course, it increased the overall brutality of Roman culture. Note that some of this applies to Classical Greek civilization as much as it does Roman.
... finally in 391 and 392 Theodosios, the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire before its division, forbade all pagan cults, in public and private. The law probably could not be strictly enforced and there was no such thing as a single “edict of Theodosios” that closed the pagan temples, but there can be no doubt that the rise of Christianity led to the abolishment of alternative religions. As a non-Christian I would like to compliment Christianity for having made numerous positive contributions to my civilization, from abolishing slavery to contributing greatly to Europe’s artistic and scientific culture. If I have to name one negative aspect of Christian teachings it would have to be the introduction of a type of doctrinal intolerance that was previously alien to Roman and European life.
This was especially costly to the Byzantine Empire, in which doctrinal disputes, whose stakes were mortal owing to official intolerance, greatly aided the Muslim conquest of the Levant.
Nevertheless, while Greco-Roman religions were suppressed, Christians were quite willing to use many Greek philosophical concepts and ideas.
Which was important. Even while denying many pagan philosophical conclusion, Christian writers from the start were making use of Greek logic and verbal formulations in doing so. The seeds of medieval philosophy were thereby planted.
... it is highly significant to see such an intimate connection between Roman military discipline and an institution that was to prove very influential in Christian and European history. In the post-Roman period, the most prominent Roman institution to survive in Western Europe was the Roman Church. The Church for centuries had a virtual monopoly over written communications and its network of monasteries was the sole educational outlet, instructing at least 90 percent of the literate men between 600 and 1100.
The monks could see themselves as soldiers of Christ against the works of Satan (an identification several times made explicit) and against Ignorance (which they perceived as being an ignorance of Christianity, but which they could also easily see as an ignorance of Classical culture, and sometimes did).
Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BC-ca. 50 AD) was a Hellenized Jew who wrote in Greek but knew little Hebrew, and arguably had a greater influence on Christians than on Jews. He is often considered the initiator of the handmaiden tradition, the idea that secular disciplines such as Greek natural philosophy could be utilized to understand and explicate Biblical theology. This attitude was adopted by Augustine and by many church fathers who made it respectable, even essential, for Christian authors to study Greek philosophy and science where these were thought to contribute to the advancement of Christianity. While they admittedly sometimes discouraged the study of Greek pagan thought for its own sake, they didn’t condemn all secular literature. This was to prove of great importance for the future.
Indeed. This development was to keep Classical learning alive throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in parts of Italy and in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Although apparently born in Bethlehem, Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth and the son of Mary, to Christians who believe in Jesus’ divinity and virgin birth known as the Virgin Mary.
Note: Jesus would be the son of Mary whether or not one also believes that he was the son of God.
Jesus is often portrayed as the founder of Christianity the way Muhammad was the founder of Islam. Both men came from humble origins and had a huge impact on world history, but this is also where the parallels end. Jesus is not the equivalent of Muhammad, who claimed to be a Messenger who brought the Koran, the word of his God Allah, to mankind. In Christianity, Jesus himself is the message, the Word become flesh, and the Gospels are inspired texts about Him.
Right -- rather than about his conquests.
According to Islamic sources, Muhammad and his followers pillaged their neighbors and killed some of their critics. Jesus and his apostles never did anything like this.
The closest to this in the life of Christ would be the Scourging of the Moneychangers. By contrast, Mohammed established an earthly empire that encompassed a good part of Arabia before his death.
As a young Jew, Jesus’ main language was probably Aramaic, but he may well have been familiar with Hebrew, the language of the Hebrew Bible and a Semitic tongue closely related to Aramaic. It is also possible that he was competent in Koine Greek, although the details of his linguistic skills are disputed among critical scholars. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the founder of Christianity spoke Greek.
According to the traditions, Jesus was highly intelligent and very well educated, so it is quite likely that he spoke (and read) some form of Greek in addition to his birth language. He may well have been personally familiar with the writings of the philosophers. Note also the tradition of the flight to Egypt, which for a Jew in the 1st century would almost certainly have meant Alexandria -- the main center of learning in the Classical world.
We can be virtually certain that Muhammad, if he did indeed exist, did not speak Greek, nor did any of his prominent followers, immediate successors or those who first formulated Islamic legal doctrines.
Which would have meant, especially before the Arab expansion, that he dwelt within a much smaller intellectual world than did Jesus. The tradition is that Mohammed was illiterate, which would not have been the norm for an international merchant in the Hellenistic world. His cultural background was thus much more limited than that of Jesus.
Fjordman goes on to discuss how Christianity from the time of St. Paul on adopted Roman secular law as the basis for its religious law, which implied a universal and flexible legal system. By contrast, Islam adopted a basically religious code as the source for its secular law, indeed making no distinction at all between the two.
Moreover, according to Roger Scruton, “Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics. Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters - to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find our satisfaction. Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate society from the state, so removing politics from our private lives. Where there is no political process, this separation does not occur. In the totalitarian state or the military dictatorship everything is political precisely because nothing is…. The political process is an achievement - one that might not have occurred and has not occurred in those parts of the world where Roman law and Christian doctrine have left no mark. Even today most communities are held together in other ways - by tribal sentiment, by religion, or by force.”
Indeed. Without a distinction between political, economic, legal and private spheres, Muslims are essentially atoms exposed to the random whims of the most powerful within their community, and with absolutely no legal or even moral backing against the desires of their masters.
In the Islamic world, Greek natural philosophy was never fully accepted, and what initial acceptance there had been was largely nullified by the highly influential theologian al-Ghazali (1058-1111). He regarded natural philosophy as dangerous to Islam and was even skeptical of the concept of mathematical proof, one of the most important and unique contributions of ancient Greek scholarship to the modern world.
Which is to say that al-Ghazali abandoned logic in favor of the Word of God -- and in practice the Word of God merely means the naked whims of the powerful and popular.
As Ibn Warraq sums up in his modern classic Why I Am Not a Muslim, “orthodox Islam emerged victorious from the encounter with Greek philosophy. Islam rejected the idea that one could attain truth with unaided human reason and settled for the unreflective comforts of the putatively superior truth of divine revelation. Wherever one decides to place the date of this victory of orthodox Islam (perhaps in the ninth century with the conversion of al-Ashari, or in the eleventh century with the works of al-Ghazali), it has been, I believe, an unmitigated disaster for all Muslims, indeed all mankind.”
Indeed. The moment at which Islam defeated philosophy was also the moment at which the Muslim world was doomed to decline relative to both East and West. The Arabs became increasingly militarily and economically incompetent, and more and more Muslim culture was dominated by new peoples, such as the Turks and southern Mongols, who were still competent precisely because Islam was only a thin veneer over a pragmatic barbarism (and one which had adopted superior Chinese military organizational systems, to boot). And as the Islamized barbarians settled in to rule, they were increasingly infected by the meme of deliberate irrationality, and lost all but the most personal of their military skills. The day would come when this would mean howling hordes charging futilely into bolt-action and automatic weapons fire, as at Omdurman.
After the 11th century, Greek philosophy would be increasingly avoided by Muslim scholars, at the precise moment that it was increasingly studied in the West. The time lag required for a philosophical mistake to manifest itself in a loss of pragmatic skills meant that Muslim superiority in several areas, including chemistry, medicine and astronomy, would persist for centuries more, but the wellspring of logic had been choked by the weed of Islam, while in the West the stream flowed with ever-increasing power under the tending of the Scholastics.
One of the most important advantages Catholic Europe enjoyed during this period was the separation between church and state. While the West developed a lively natural philosophy, “in Islam natural philosophy became a peripheral and suspect discipline, whose study could even prove dangerous.”
This separation in the West can be exaggerated: this was still an era in which the wrong sort of conclusions could lead to execution for heresy, as Giordano Bruno discovered. But the principle was important -- Western dissenters could at least in theory and often in practice appeal to logical argument, and to powerful secular patrons, for protection against orthodox-thinking enemies in the Church. Muslim dissenters had no such protections.
In medicine, there is the phenomenon of “transplant rejection,” which happens when an organ is transplanted into another body and that body's immune system rejects it as an alien intrusion. This is a useful analogy to keep in mind when assessing how Muslims and Christians treated Greek natural philosophy during the Middle Ages. Muslims did engage the Greek heritage, but only parts of it, and eventually even this limited acceptance was rejected by conservative theologians such as al-Ghazali. The immune system of Islamic culture considered Greek philosophical ideas to constitute an alien intrusion into its body, fought them and ultimately rejected them. In contrast, for Christian culture, the Greek philosophical heritage did not constitute something alien. Christians did not accept all parts of the Greek heritage as valid for them, but most of them didn’t consider Greek logic, modes of thinking and philosophical vocabulary per se to be something alien and hostile.
This, I think, is key. Christianity emerged from and during the crucial medieval period remained attached to (through Constantinople) the Classical Greek tradition. Islam acquired Greek philosophy by conquest and was opposed to the Eastern Roman Empire. Christianity eventually accommodated itself to at least some sort of truce with reason, but Islam never did -- and has not to this day.
Which is why we're destined to win.
Fjordman is a really great and erudite writer, and hopefully we'll see the day when the barbarians have been sent whining back to their dens and he need no longer hide his identity.
My main thesis in this essay is that Christianity was a Greco-Roman religion in a way which Islam never was or could be. Islam was founded outside of the Greco-Roman world. Christianity was founded within this world, and gradually grew accustomed to Greco-Roman culture. This had a major long-term impact on how the adherents of these two religions treated the Greco-Roman legacy.
Continuing to develop this theme, he points out that Rome tended to merely apply principles discovered by the Greeks: their genius lay in large-scale engineering rather than in art or even science as such. Their own culture was curiously vacant, the more so after the Republic became an Empire:
There was a notable decline in the confidence of traditional agrarian religions in the urban Roman Empire already before the rise of Christianity. This religious vacuum was strengthened in the third century AD, when a political, military and economic crisis with rapid inflation caused great turbulence and the Empire almost broke apart. The political crisis and the spiritual vacuum accelerated the growth of alternative religions and philosophies such as Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism and above all Christianity. It is not a coincidence that the worst persecutions of Christians took place at the turn of the fourth century, just prior to the official acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.
Fjordman doesn't go into this, but part of the reason may have been that traditional Classical religions had been agrarian and civic. With the farming being performed by slaves on latifundia, and the remnants of urban government existing increasingly only as a mechanism by which the Empire could extract work and money from the citizens, the heart went out of the old cults.
Fjordman points out that violence pervaded Roman life, from the heights of politics to recreation. He discusses the gladitorial games: I would add that, when the Romans adopted the Greek theatrical tradition, they sometimes "improved" it by including tableaux in which condemned criminals would actually be put to death to depict a character's death scene. As Fjordman explains, the games and the other deadly spectacles were not purely a Roman affair, but expanded throughout the Empire.
Roman politics, too, were frequently brutal. Caesar died at a meeting of the Senate, killed by senators. Pompey and Cicero died violent deaths at the hands of their political rivals. After the Republic, the cruelties of the emperors Nero and Caligula became legend.
... and Tiberius, and Domitian, and Commodus. Furthermore, before the time of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero, Sulla had set the precedent of violent dictatorship (in the modern as opposed to Roman sense of the word "dictator"). Sulla, because he was successful, was widely admired and respected even after his death by the Roman aristocracy ... a bad omen for the survival of the Republic. For all that could be said for Roman respect for the law, they also worshipped brute force in a way which modern Americans do not.
There is undeniably something dark about a culture where families go to watch people get killed for enjoyment.
Yes. And this pervaded their mentality. Even the good Emperors enjoyed the arena, and individuals who found the spectacle at least distasteful were expressing a decidedly minority opinion, like modern American men who don't like sports. Also note that the Roman women loved the arena as well, and took children to witness the games.
In this case, as with the widespread Roman slavery, Christianity was definitely a force for good ...
A point often missed, including by me when I was younger!
According to Charles Murray, “The Roman republic was also a slave state on such a scale that Gibbon estimated that the number of slaves may have outnumbered the free inhabitants of the Roman world. A proposal that slaves should wear a distinctive garment was rejected, Gibbon notes dryly, because ‘it was justly apprehended that there might be some danger in acquainting [the slaves] with their own numbers.’ Nor was Roman slavery kindly. Roman masters might dispose of the lives of their slaves at will, and were not reluctant to use that power. We know, for example, that the size of the slave force in the palace of a Roman noble family could number about four hundred souls. The reason we know that number is that the Roman archives record an instance in which the master in such a palace was murdered, and the household slaves were executed for failing to prevent his murder - all four hundred of them.”
This was directly destructive to the Republic, and the Empire, in several ways:
(1) Widespread slavery degraded the status of hard work, especially manual labor, which caused philosophers to shun experimentation and practical application of their ideas, because it was "demeaning to philosophy."
(2) Even when philosophers or engineers did devise useful labor-saving machinery, it was seen more as a threat to public order ("then what will we do with all those idle slaves") than as a potential boon.
(3) The accessibility of slaves to do their masters' bidding degraded morality, both in the obvious sense that slaves could be used for sexual or sadistic release, and in the subtler sense that masters became used to personal omnipotence.
(4) During the decline of the Republic, the destruction of the middle classes was accelerated by the fact that members of the lower middle classes faced the possibility of enslavement for debt, hence the stakes of political economy were monstrously high.
And, of course, it increased the overall brutality of Roman culture. Note that some of this applies to Classical Greek civilization as much as it does Roman.
... finally in 391 and 392 Theodosios, the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire before its division, forbade all pagan cults, in public and private. The law probably could not be strictly enforced and there was no such thing as a single “edict of Theodosios” that closed the pagan temples, but there can be no doubt that the rise of Christianity led to the abolishment of alternative religions. As a non-Christian I would like to compliment Christianity for having made numerous positive contributions to my civilization, from abolishing slavery to contributing greatly to Europe’s artistic and scientific culture. If I have to name one negative aspect of Christian teachings it would have to be the introduction of a type of doctrinal intolerance that was previously alien to Roman and European life.
This was especially costly to the Byzantine Empire, in which doctrinal disputes, whose stakes were mortal owing to official intolerance, greatly aided the Muslim conquest of the Levant.
Nevertheless, while Greco-Roman religions were suppressed, Christians were quite willing to use many Greek philosophical concepts and ideas.
Which was important. Even while denying many pagan philosophical conclusion, Christian writers from the start were making use of Greek logic and verbal formulations in doing so. The seeds of medieval philosophy were thereby planted.
... it is highly significant to see such an intimate connection between Roman military discipline and an institution that was to prove very influential in Christian and European history. In the post-Roman period, the most prominent Roman institution to survive in Western Europe was the Roman Church. The Church for centuries had a virtual monopoly over written communications and its network of monasteries was the sole educational outlet, instructing at least 90 percent of the literate men between 600 and 1100.
The monks could see themselves as soldiers of Christ against the works of Satan (an identification several times made explicit) and against Ignorance (which they perceived as being an ignorance of Christianity, but which they could also easily see as an ignorance of Classical culture, and sometimes did).
Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BC-ca. 50 AD) was a Hellenized Jew who wrote in Greek but knew little Hebrew, and arguably had a greater influence on Christians than on Jews. He is often considered the initiator of the handmaiden tradition, the idea that secular disciplines such as Greek natural philosophy could be utilized to understand and explicate Biblical theology. This attitude was adopted by Augustine and by many church fathers who made it respectable, even essential, for Christian authors to study Greek philosophy and science where these were thought to contribute to the advancement of Christianity. While they admittedly sometimes discouraged the study of Greek pagan thought for its own sake, they didn’t condemn all secular literature. This was to prove of great importance for the future.
Indeed. This development was to keep Classical learning alive throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in parts of Italy and in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Although apparently born in Bethlehem, Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth and the son of Mary, to Christians who believe in Jesus’ divinity and virgin birth known as the Virgin Mary.
Note: Jesus would be the son of Mary whether or not one also believes that he was the son of God.
Jesus is often portrayed as the founder of Christianity the way Muhammad was the founder of Islam. Both men came from humble origins and had a huge impact on world history, but this is also where the parallels end. Jesus is not the equivalent of Muhammad, who claimed to be a Messenger who brought the Koran, the word of his God Allah, to mankind. In Christianity, Jesus himself is the message, the Word become flesh, and the Gospels are inspired texts about Him.
Right -- rather than about his conquests.
According to Islamic sources, Muhammad and his followers pillaged their neighbors and killed some of their critics. Jesus and his apostles never did anything like this.
The closest to this in the life of Christ would be the Scourging of the Moneychangers. By contrast, Mohammed established an earthly empire that encompassed a good part of Arabia before his death.
As a young Jew, Jesus’ main language was probably Aramaic, but he may well have been familiar with Hebrew, the language of the Hebrew Bible and a Semitic tongue closely related to Aramaic. It is also possible that he was competent in Koine Greek, although the details of his linguistic skills are disputed among critical scholars. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the founder of Christianity spoke Greek.
According to the traditions, Jesus was highly intelligent and very well educated, so it is quite likely that he spoke (and read) some form of Greek in addition to his birth language. He may well have been personally familiar with the writings of the philosophers. Note also the tradition of the flight to Egypt, which for a Jew in the 1st century would almost certainly have meant Alexandria -- the main center of learning in the Classical world.
We can be virtually certain that Muhammad, if he did indeed exist, did not speak Greek, nor did any of his prominent followers, immediate successors or those who first formulated Islamic legal doctrines.
Which would have meant, especially before the Arab expansion, that he dwelt within a much smaller intellectual world than did Jesus. The tradition is that Mohammed was illiterate, which would not have been the norm for an international merchant in the Hellenistic world. His cultural background was thus much more limited than that of Jesus.
Fjordman goes on to discuss how Christianity from the time of St. Paul on adopted Roman secular law as the basis for its religious law, which implied a universal and flexible legal system. By contrast, Islam adopted a basically religious code as the source for its secular law, indeed making no distinction at all between the two.
Moreover, according to Roger Scruton, “Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics. Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters - to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find our satisfaction. Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate society from the state, so removing politics from our private lives. Where there is no political process, this separation does not occur. In the totalitarian state or the military dictatorship everything is political precisely because nothing is…. The political process is an achievement - one that might not have occurred and has not occurred in those parts of the world where Roman law and Christian doctrine have left no mark. Even today most communities are held together in other ways - by tribal sentiment, by religion, or by force.”
Indeed. Without a distinction between political, economic, legal and private spheres, Muslims are essentially atoms exposed to the random whims of the most powerful within their community, and with absolutely no legal or even moral backing against the desires of their masters.
In the Islamic world, Greek natural philosophy was never fully accepted, and what initial acceptance there had been was largely nullified by the highly influential theologian al-Ghazali (1058-1111). He regarded natural philosophy as dangerous to Islam and was even skeptical of the concept of mathematical proof, one of the most important and unique contributions of ancient Greek scholarship to the modern world.
Which is to say that al-Ghazali abandoned logic in favor of the Word of God -- and in practice the Word of God merely means the naked whims of the powerful and popular.
As Ibn Warraq sums up in his modern classic Why I Am Not a Muslim, “orthodox Islam emerged victorious from the encounter with Greek philosophy. Islam rejected the idea that one could attain truth with unaided human reason and settled for the unreflective comforts of the putatively superior truth of divine revelation. Wherever one decides to place the date of this victory of orthodox Islam (perhaps in the ninth century with the conversion of al-Ashari, or in the eleventh century with the works of al-Ghazali), it has been, I believe, an unmitigated disaster for all Muslims, indeed all mankind.”
Indeed. The moment at which Islam defeated philosophy was also the moment at which the Muslim world was doomed to decline relative to both East and West. The Arabs became increasingly militarily and economically incompetent, and more and more Muslim culture was dominated by new peoples, such as the Turks and southern Mongols, who were still competent precisely because Islam was only a thin veneer over a pragmatic barbarism (and one which had adopted superior Chinese military organizational systems, to boot). And as the Islamized barbarians settled in to rule, they were increasingly infected by the meme of deliberate irrationality, and lost all but the most personal of their military skills. The day would come when this would mean howling hordes charging futilely into bolt-action and automatic weapons fire, as at Omdurman.
After the 11th century, Greek philosophy would be increasingly avoided by Muslim scholars, at the precise moment that it was increasingly studied in the West. The time lag required for a philosophical mistake to manifest itself in a loss of pragmatic skills meant that Muslim superiority in several areas, including chemistry, medicine and astronomy, would persist for centuries more, but the wellspring of logic had been choked by the weed of Islam, while in the West the stream flowed with ever-increasing power under the tending of the Scholastics.
One of the most important advantages Catholic Europe enjoyed during this period was the separation between church and state. While the West developed a lively natural philosophy, “in Islam natural philosophy became a peripheral and suspect discipline, whose study could even prove dangerous.”
This separation in the West can be exaggerated: this was still an era in which the wrong sort of conclusions could lead to execution for heresy, as Giordano Bruno discovered. But the principle was important -- Western dissenters could at least in theory and often in practice appeal to logical argument, and to powerful secular patrons, for protection against orthodox-thinking enemies in the Church. Muslim dissenters had no such protections.
In medicine, there is the phenomenon of “transplant rejection,” which happens when an organ is transplanted into another body and that body's immune system rejects it as an alien intrusion. This is a useful analogy to keep in mind when assessing how Muslims and Christians treated Greek natural philosophy during the Middle Ages. Muslims did engage the Greek heritage, but only parts of it, and eventually even this limited acceptance was rejected by conservative theologians such as al-Ghazali. The immune system of Islamic culture considered Greek philosophical ideas to constitute an alien intrusion into its body, fought them and ultimately rejected them. In contrast, for Christian culture, the Greek philosophical heritage did not constitute something alien. Christians did not accept all parts of the Greek heritage as valid for them, but most of them didn’t consider Greek logic, modes of thinking and philosophical vocabulary per se to be something alien and hostile.
This, I think, is key. Christianity emerged from and during the crucial medieval period remained attached to (through Constantinople) the Classical Greek tradition. Islam acquired Greek philosophy by conquest and was opposed to the Eastern Roman Empire. Christianity eventually accommodated itself to at least some sort of truce with reason, but Islam never did -- and has not to this day.
Which is why we're destined to win.
Fjordman is a really great and erudite writer, and hopefully we'll see the day when the barbarians have been sent whining back to their dens and he need no longer hide his identity.