Book Review: John Freely and 'Before Galileo'

A recommended book is one written by Physicist and Professor John Freely, named 'Before Galileo'. It outlines the fantastic, startling, and largely unknown development of science in Europe from the 'Fall of Rome' [it was more of a mutation into 3 Germanic kingdoms]; to 1500. A few observations from this work.

First, the idea that the 'scientific age' is premised on what came before it, namely a thousand years of development and ferment, is only a surprise to those who believe Protestant and anti-Church propaganda as being related to 'facts'. It is truly discouraging that a modern society can be so ignorant about its own civilizational antecedents.

Second, the anti-science dogma of many cults, makes the 'Middle Ages' in many ways, superior in thought, method and contribution. Darwinian theology has retarded true science by 150 years. Cults of warming and 'weather' have forever impaired and degraded the very name 'scientific' by their outlandish fraud and deceit. Any quack wanting to sell something uses the appellation 'scientific' knowing that a culture which immediately bends a knee to 'scientism', is one devoid of critical faculties and independent thought.

Freely's book dispels the myth of a 'dark age', a thoroughly 'eye-opening' theme to modern Marxists and acolytes of various non-scientific cults which strut upon the daily landscape.

After the Moslem irruption in the 7^th century and the destruction of the library of Alexandria, along with Judeo-Christian and Romano-Berber culture; much learning was lost. The only 'dark age' was a contraction in trade, commerce, and culture as Islam wiped out a superior civilization and almost conquered Europe. Add to this the Magyar and Viking assaults in the 9^th century and it is a wonder that Catholic Europe survived.

Yet as Freely writes some fragments of classical learning did survive the Moslem Jihad especially within Western monasteries and within the Church. It was the Church which of course saved Western Europe. This monastic-Catholic inheritance would in good time flourish and create between 500-1500 AD science, integrated philosophy, a reassessment of all Greek philosophers, a new naturalism, anatomy, biology, physics, higher mathematics, and experimentation. These processes were never duplicated in any other culture including and most especially that of the totalitarian cult of Islam. By 1500, Europe, with 80 universities, had undergone “a tremendous intellectual revival”, according to Freely.

Some truly smart men mentioned by Freely include: Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gerard of Cremona all of whom disseminated ancient Greek ideas, heavily influencing medieval thinkers. Aristotle’s cause-and-effect reasoning impacted theologians like Thomas Aquinas to synthesize rationality with faith, though much of Aristotle was revealed to be wrong, and simply dogmatic. It is to the benefit of Europe that much of the Aristotleian universe was easily dispatched by curious Catholics, as was Galen's [2^nd century AD doctor]. From physics to medicine the Middle Ages make significant improvements superseding anything from the past.

Monumental innovations in everything from understanding the human body, to farming, to wind and water power usage, to calculating the rotational speed of the earth using mathematical theorems were developed. By the 12^th century From Bologna to Oxford church-funded universities began to flourish, nourishing the roots of what became Grosseteste's or Roger Bacon’s 'scientific method' [entirely over-stated and not comparable to modern techniques it should be mentioned]; and Copernicus’s heliocentric solar system. Freely recounts these developments in detail and links them to the 17^th century of scientific advance. This factual history only surprises the bigots, the Marxist, the revisionist and those who know little about their own civilization.

More from Freely later.