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

To begin with, the story itself is incredibly interesting and important. When Aristotle's complete works, lost to the West for 700 years, were rediscovered in "reconquered" Spain, European thinking was changed forever. As Rubenstein says, it was as if some document discovered in our own time were found to contain the science of the future -- the secret of time travel, or a cure for AIDS.

Catholic officials were therefore forced to decide whether to ban the new learning, which contained all sorts of ideas at odds with traditional Christian thought, or to try to reconcile faith with reason. Surprisingly, after a ferocious struggle involving "superstars" of Christian learning like Peter Abelard, Saint Bernard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and William of Ockham, they opted for reconciliation. The result was Europe's first Scientific Revolution -- and a creative dialogue between reason and religion that, Rubenstein suggests, might serve as a model for us modern folk.

What makes this book so appealing is the author's ability to make complex debates crystal-clear to ordinary readers, and his gift for vivid historical narrative. We are there when Peter Abelard goes on trial before his nemesis, Saint Bernard;
when Pope Innocent III calls down the fires of Crusade upon the heretical Cathars; and when Aquinas fights it out with enemies to his left and right at the tumultuous University of Paris.
You don't have to know much about medieval history to enjoy this story, but reading it made me want to learn more about the origins of modern Western thinking -- and about ways of healing the split between what Rubenstein calls "the culture of the heart" and "the culture of the head."


Civilizations clashed before-- Dark Ages Illumined   January 7, 2004
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

Aristotle's Children is one of those rare books dealing with potentially dry historical narratives that electrifies the dust of the past and brings vividly to life intellectual and human struggles of antiquity through the efflorescence of Christian and scientific Europe. Surfing waves of pagan philosophies through their translations and migrations within the orthodoxies and heresies of Christian, Jewish and Muslim contexts, Rubenstein renders accessible and gripping such diverse subjects as epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), the origins of Christian theology as a discipline, and many other threads of human thought crisscrossing landscapes of time, cultures, religions and thinkers. He commands the voice of a lively yet neutral narrator throughout, making this an excellent read for people of any or no faith tradition. While historical, this page turner naturally calls us to reflect on our own struggles with reconciling Faith and Reason, and our own troubled times, with deeper understanding. Contrary to some whacky interpretations of this solid work, there is no hatred or minimization of Catholicism, Europe, or Jewish scholars in this book, subconscious or otherwise, but a real appreciation of scholasticism at its best, and a fabulously true story with important implications for constructively engaging today's world.


Science versus Religion   February 11, 2005
George R Dekle (Lake City, FL United States)
18 out of 21 found this review helpful

Once upon a time not so very many centuries ago, Europe was the "third world" and the Islamic world stood at the pinnacle of civilization. How did Western culture transform itself from uncivilized backwater to what it is today, while Islamic culture became the modern "third world"? Rubenstein doesn't set out to answer this question, but his work stands as authority for the proposition that ancient wisdom, specifically the works of Aristotle, changed the balance in favor of the West.

During the early Middle Ages, while Europeans were beating each other over the heads with poorly forged swords, Islamic civilization was at its zenith, and Arabic "falsafa" (philosophy) was the reason. Europe had completely forgotten Aristotle, but the Arabs knew his works and studied them earnestly.

During the 1200 to 1400's, the "Reconquista" recovered both Spain and Aristotle from the Arabs. Over the next few centuries, both cultures struggled to reconcile science with religion. Religion won an unconditional victory in the Moslem world and Islamic civilization went into decline.

Rubenstein records the initial enthusiastic acceptance of science by Europe, the uneasy truce that developed between science and religion, and the ultimate "victory" of science over religion. Ironically, the men whose work formed the foundation for that victory were almost uniformly men of religion. Rubenstein argues for a modern detente between science and religion similar to Stephen Jay Gould's concept NOMA (which is described in Gould's book "Rocks of Ages"). Zealots from the camps of both science and religion would do well to read these two books.

Since reading this book, I have read Rodney Stark's "The Victory of Reason" and "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" by Thomas Woods. Taken together, these books give a quite different perspective on Aristotle, Christianity, and the Middle Ages. Stark also wrote "One True God" and "For the Glory of God," which further elaborate some of the ideas put forth in "The Victory of Reason" and "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization."


Aristotle's Children in current perspective.   May 1, 2006
Gene C. Bammel (Tucson, Arizona)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

GNPR XXVIII: "Aristotle's Children."
A good book review should accomplish two things: it should accurately summarize the basic themes of the book, and it should help the reader determine if they need to read the book. Richard E. Rubenstein's Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages is a great book, which will richly reward all those who read it. The last chapter, "Aristotle and the Modern World," is alone worth the price of admission, being a brilliant statement of how a balance between faith and reason, so critical to today's global problems, might be restored, if only we could re-awaken the great Aristotelian vision.
The book is a superb study of how Aristotelian wisdom developed, was lost, and then rediscovered in the Middle Ages, initially by Moslem scholars, then by Jews, and finally by Christians. The book's principal weakness is that while it is long on medieval Christian philosophy, it skips too lightly over the Moslem sages, from Al-Farabi to Al-Ghazzal, and does not give Moses Maimonides, the greatest of medieval Jewish sages, nearly the attention he deserves.
There are, however, good reasons for the selections Rubenstein has made. The Christian writers had the advantage of the Herculean labors of their predecessors, and not only did Christian teaching benefit from seeing how a variety of philosophical and theological problems had been formulated by Moslems and Jews, they also had the benefit of seeing how proposed solutions had fared in the various marketplaces of ideas.
Rubenstein also wishes to focus on how the medieval synthesis of religion and science, faith and reason, fell apart, and this happened most visibly in the hands of Christian philosophers like William of Ockham. William epitomizes the ills that befell Moslem and Jewish philosophy. Here is Rubenstein's summary: "(Ockham) liked to argue that God could, if he wished, condemn the innocent and reward the guilty, or make two solid objects occupy the same place at the same time. The point was to demonstrate that God's absolute freedom and power are not limited by our notions of justice or common sense." (p. 260).
The point of Rubenstein's book is that it is always a mistake to give up on the power of human reason. Does this put him in the camp of those who say faith has had its day, and scientific rationalism precludes all religious views? Hardly. Without being nostalgic for the Middle Ages, Rubenstein suggests that it is once again time for rationalist thinkers and people of faith to engage each other in a "continuous dialogue productive of new insights for both sides."
Far from the pessimism that has prevailed in the aftermath of Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Rubenstein asserts that a return to the healthy Aristotelian vision offers a favorable pathway into a much better future. "The West's destiny, it seems clear, is to become part of a diverse, yet integrated global civilization." (p. 291). Other books may do a better job of illuminating certain parts of the medieval heritage, but no other book is as good at pointing to the current relevance of the Medieval Synthesis to our current dilemmas. Rubenstein is professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, and this book is a superb expression of how Conflict Resolution might be applied to our most current and pressing problems. This is a brilliant book. If you choose to read it, do not be put off by the lengthy analysis of the development and decline of Christian theology in the Middle Ages. Every single fact fits into the crossword puzzle of the solution proposed in the final chapter. This is a brilliant book, and you should read it.