Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
A very short incomplete list of individuals who shaped philosophical and theological thought from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance.
John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810–877): An Irish philosopher and theologian who integrated Neoplatonism with Christian theology.
Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) (c. 946–1003): A scholar and pope who introduced Arabic numerals and mathematical knowledge to Europe.
William the Conqueror (William of Normandy) (c. 1028–1087): The Duke of Normandy who conquered England in 1066, transforming its political and social landscape.
Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109): A philosopher and theologian known for his ontological argument for the existence of God.
Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160): A theologian whose Sentences became a standard theological textbook.
Adelard of Bath (12th century): A scholar who translated Arabic scientific works, introducing important knowledge to Europe.
William of Conches (c. 1090–1154): A philosopher and theologian who emphasized the importance of natural philosophy.
Bernard of Chartres (12th century): A philosopher who emphasized the importance of studying the works of past thinkers.
Peter Abelard (1079–1142): A philosopher and theologian known for his dialectical method and controversial love affair with Heloise.
Innocent II (died 1143): A pope who asserted papal authority and dealt with various religious and political conflicts.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274): A Dominican friar and theologian who synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology.
Bishop Siger (Siger of Brabant) (c. 1240–1284): A philosopher who championed Aristotelianism, leading to conflicts with traditional theological views.
William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347): A philosopher known for his principle of parsimony (Ockham's Razor) and his contributions to logic and political thought.
Vincent Ferrer (c. 1350–1419): A Dominican friar and preacher known for his fiery sermons and apocalyptic prophecies.
René Descartes (1596–1650): A philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who is considered the father of modern philosophy.
Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556): A Spanish nobleman who founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), an influential religious order.
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These writers and poets captured the imagination and chronicled the events of their times.
Gregory of Tours (c. 538–594): A bishop and historian who chronicled the history of the Franks.
Bede (c. 672–735): A monk and historian known as the "Father of English History."
Alcuin of York (c. 735–804): A scholar and advisor to Charlemagne who played a key role in the Carolingian Renaissance.
Beowulf Poet (Unknown, c. 8th–11th century): The anonymous author of the epic poem Beowulf.
Marie de France (c. 12th century): A poet known for her short narrative poems about love and adventure.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179): A Benedictine abbess, mystic, composer, and writer.
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321): The author of the Divine Comedy, an epic poem about a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
Petrarch (1304–1374): An Italian poet and scholar who is considered one of the founders of humanism.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400): The author of the Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told by pilgrims on a journey.
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Don Pelayo (c. 685–737): A Visigothic nobleman who initiated the Reconquista in Spain.
Charles Martel (c. 688–741): A Frankish leader who defeated the Muslims at the Battle of Tours, halting their advance into Europe.
Charlemagne (c. 742–814): King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor who united much of Western Europe.
Alfred the Great (849–899): King of Wessex who defended England against Viking invasions and promoted education and literacy.
Edward the Elder (c. 874–924): King of the Anglo-Saxons who continued his father Alfred's work of unifying England.
Athelstan (c. 894–939): King of the Anglo-Saxons who achieved the first unification of England.
El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar) (c. 1043–1099): A Castilian nobleman and military leader who fought both for and against Christian and Muslim rulers.
William the Conqueror (William of Normandy) (c. 1028–1087): The Duke of Normandy who conquered England in 1066.
Godfrey de Bouillon (c. 1060–1100): A leader of the First Crusade and the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Baldwin IV of Jerusalem (Baldwin the Leper) (1161–1185): King of Jerusalem who, despite suffering from leprosy, successfully defended his kingdom.
Richard the Lionheart (1157–1199): King of England, known for his military exploits in the Third Crusade.
Saint Louis IX of France (1214–1270): King of France known for his piety and his leadership in the Seventh and Eighth Crusades.
Ferdinand III of Castile and León (1199–1252): King of Castile and León who played a major role in the Reconquista.
Alfonso X of Castile and León (1221–1284): King of Castile and León known for his patronage of learning and the arts.
Edward I of England (1239-1307): King of England who reformed English law and administration and conquered Wales.
Edward III of England (1312-1377): King of England who initiated the Hundred Years' War with France.
Henry V of England (1386-1422): King of England who achieved major victories in the Hundred Years' War.
Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431): A French peasant girl who led French armies to victory in the Hundred Years' War.
Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516): King of Aragon who, with his wife Isabella, unified Spain and sponsored Columbus's voyages.
Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504): Queen of Castile who, with her husband Ferdinand, unified Spain and sponsored Columbus's voyages.
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Benedictines (6th Century, founded by Saint Benedict): A monastic order known for its Rule, which emphasizes prayer, work, and community life.
Cistercians (11th Century, founded by Robert of Molesme): A monastic order that emphasized a simpler and stricter interpretation of the Benedictine Rule.
Carthusians (11th Century, founded by Saint Bruno): A monastic order known for its eremitical lifestyle, with monks living in individual cells.
Premonstratensians (12th Century, founded by Saint Norbert): A monastic order that combines elements of contemplative and active religious life.
Franciscans (13th Century, founded by Saint Francis of Assisi): A mendicant order known for its poverty, preaching, and service to the poor.
Dominicans (13th Century, founded by Saint Dominic): A mendicant order known for its intellectual tradition and its role in combating heresy.
Augustinians (13th Century, various groups unified under Augustinian Rule): A monastic order that follows the Rule of St. Augustine, emphasizing community life and apostolic work.
Jesuits (16th Century, founded by Ignatius of Loyola): A religious order known for its missionary work, education, and intellectual pursuits.
Christianity is the only worldview and only religion in history to propound and expand natural philosophy into the sciences. Christianity is the only true religion of course, and so it is no surprise that early Christians wanted to uncover the secret of God’s created world. The perfect design they found in nature and their own bodies, compelled investigations.
The Christian worldview was premised as much on reason as faith. Saint Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century advocated interpreting scripture with reality as he synthesised Platonic philosophy with Catholic teaching. In the 13th century Saint Thomas Acquinas aligned Aristotle’s philosophy and Greek science with Catholic beliefs, using physics, scientific concepts and reason, to support the existence of the Christian God. In between Augustine and Acquinas, stretching some 800 years, the objective historian can see the great progress made from paganism and mystical beliefs to concrete experimentation and investigation.
Boethius (480 to 525 AD)
Romano-Christian aristocrat who wrote ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’, which discusses aspects of Christian-stoicism and why free will is necessary. Composed texts on music and mathematics which were used for almost a millennia in schools. Completed some translations of Aristotle from Greek into Latin. Boethius’ works were copied and translated by Alfred the Great in England during the middle to late 9th century.
Saint Augustine (354-430 AD)
Bishop of Hippo, synthesised Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy with Catholic teaching. Accepted pagan science as true even if it seemed to contradict scripture. Did not believe in a literal reading of every book in the Bible if it contradicted reason, common sense or observations. Ambivalent about free will.
Gerbert of Aurillac (940 to 1003 AD)
Born in the lower class, rose to become Pope and a significant contributor to science and mathematics. Wrote an instruction manual for astrolabes which the Byzantine Christians had been using since the 5th century. Built spherical models of the Earth and universe. Promoted both astronomy and mathematics to describe natural phenomena.
As with most people of his time, did not believe that the Earth had to be in the centre of the universe, and that if it was immobile (telescopes were long in the future), it should be raised up to the stars (exalted), not found ‘lower down’.
Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)
Italian born, a student of Lanfranc, Anselm became Bishop of Canterbury and used reason to support the existence of God. In the Proslogion, Anselm utilises pure logic, or ‘ontology’, to prove that God must exist. This work was to provide logical support for those who believed in God. His arguments use aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy. He marks a departure within European philosopher and metaphysics, from Plato to Aristotle. Anselm felt the best way to know God was through prayer, meditation and fasting.
Peter Abelard (1079-1142 AD)
Catholic intellectual who criticised scripture and texts which seem to contradict each other. His commentaries Sic ou Non (Yes or No), were mandatory reading for medieval students at the University of Paris and beyond. Abelard believed in logical rationalism in all spheres of life including faith. All Catholic dogma, including the Trinity, should be analysed and scrutinised for logical, rational or factual errors or misrepresentations.
William of Conches (1085-1154)
Educated at the Cathedral school of Chartres, Conches attempted to align Platonic philosophy found in Timaeus, one of the first and for a time, only translated work of Greek philosophy, with the creation account in Genesis. It was a difficult if impossible task, given that Plato who believed in a creator, had God using existing material and was a passive God, more of Newton’s divine clock maker, than the interactive God of Christianity. Conches developed ideas about the first mover (God) and secondary movers (events, or processes after God’s activity), and natural laws emanating from God’s creation.
Adelard of Bath (1080-1160)
After extensive travel to Syria and beyond, Adelard translated the Greek copies of Euclid’s Elements, into Latin. Euclid’s work (~300 BC) was the basis of advanced mathematics. Adelard’s work is an exhaustive study of geometry based on Euclid’s textbook.
Translators
From at least the 12th century onwards Catholics were eager translators of ancient, pagan and even Muhammadan texts. Gerard of Cremona (1114-87) translated Ptolemy’s Almagest, or compendium of astronomical and geocentric observations and calculations. Gerard also translated Arab works by Avicenna on medicine and Averroes on Aristotle’s philosophies. Gerard and other translators were able to produce copies of Aristotle’s enormous (if usually uncompleted) output. This had a profound impact on medieval ‘scholasticism’ in natural philosophy, and theology.
Universities
Universities began to form as educational corporations, with their own charters and laws, funded by the Catholic Church in the 12th century. The first universities in Bologna (medicine), Paris (theology), Chartres (physics, natural philosophy), were exemplary illustrations of how innovative and forward thinking the medieval mind could be. These environments provided an opportunity to educate, debate and investigate theology, nature, physics and pagan philosophies including Platonism and Aristotelianism. This Catholic obsession with education and knowledge has no other parallel from any other worldview in history.
Sources:
James Hannam, God’s Philosophers, 2017.
Context
The medieval era from roughly 500 AD to 1550 AD, was a millennia of great change and progress. The attacks on this epoch which in effect built the modern world, are provided by various groups opposed to the Catholic Church: Protestants, ‘Humanists’ or Atheists, 17th century self-promoters, Enlighteners, and 19th century philosophers posing as scientists (Darwin, Marx etc).
Medieval history is rarely taught, and even rarer is to find someone who understands how medieval philosophers and natural scientists built the foundations for mathematics, physics, astronomy, cosmology chemistry, engineering and even the comprehension of electricity. As if the telescope just popped into existence by itself, or the university built itself, or the enormous complexity of Magellan’s circumnavigation, was without a long pedigree of innovations.
Constraints
The constraints against any civilisation developing at all were significant. It is a miracle that Western Europe survived in any form. It is incredible that any civilisation of any value was created in what had to be the most difficult if not impossible of circumstances. Consider the following.
Rome:
The end of the Roman military empire over a 200-year period, and its white-slavery premised economy, stopped the financing of public works across Europe and the mediterranean. Without the military-economy and its wars, plunder and white slavery, the economic basis for much of this region was destroyed. This economic fracture had to be replaced and improved. This takes time.
90% of the population of Rome, or roughly 90 million out of 100 million people were poor, mostly peasantry, and largely illiterate. This is hardly a promising starting point when the empire inevitably collapses.
Governance in Rome was controlled by the military and aristocratic elite. When local government was replaced by Germanic leaders, there were few who could read, write, comprehend the laws, or attract public confidence. In the main, it was the Church who provided the foundations for law-and-order post 500 A.D. One of their great challenges was to improve the literacy of society and to instil peace and legal procedures over force and violence. This transition period would necessarily take time – in fact generations.
In 500 A.D. the legacy of Rome was not what the books and movies describe. It was an empire largely built on white slaving and war. Literacy was low, the currency devalued, terms of trade short, the Roman numerals inured to advanced mathematics, Latin was fragmenting into vernaculars, no social or welfare system existed, there was no public education, and the economy ran on slavery which prevented innovation and technology being developed.
Yet we are constantly told that somehow, such a civilisation, which exalted the barbarity of gladiatorial contests, slavery and violence, was the apogee of mankind’s civilisation, because the slaves and military could construct roads, some coliseums, or public baths. What a bloody nonsense. The point to be made is that by 500 A.D. Europe and the western Mediterranean were in a deep depression, bankrupted financially and morally, and even the rather limited public infrastructure was in the context of some 800 years of empire building, remarkable thin and scant. The Romans created no innovations in art, literature or even basic social services.
Byzantium:
Constantine quite rightly moved the focus and locus of the Roman empire, away from the corrupt barbarism of Rome to the East to Constantinople. He established Christianity as the state religion in about 315 A.D. The pagan barbarism of Rome with its culture of war and slaving was reduced. Christianity flourished in the East and the Byzantine empire was one of history’s greatest and most splendid creations. It is never taught because it was profoundly Christian and Greek. It upsets the settled narrative that Christianity post Rome led to nothing but ‘darkness’.
The Byzantines invented a wide variety of innovations in architecture, engineering, military technology, mathematics, astronomy and science, including the astrolabe, Greek fire, the translation of ancient Greek philosophers, and the creation of massive libraries and schools. Algebra for example, is an Arab word for maths which already existed in the 2nd century AD and can be found within Byzantine universities. The use of Hindu numerals was known to the Byzantines before the Muslims conquered, slaughtered and enslaved some 50 million Hindus and Buddhists starting in the 9th century. The narrative can’t handle this, so any Christian-Byzantine flowering in any domain must be allotted to a non-Christian group.
The main point here is that there was an early split between the ‘West’ and Latin, and the ‘East’ and Greek. This is rarely remarked upon. The ancient sources including early Bibles, were found in Greek. The language gap precluded an easy translation into Latin. This issue was compounded by the internal challenges faced by the ‘Western Roman empire’ after 500 AD. Much in the way of science and learning did not make its way into the West because of the language barrier. This was remediated in part, when Byzantine Christians fled the Muslim Jihad in the mid-15th century and brought back copies of Greek manuscripts and books. This helped stimulate the so-called Renaissance or rebirth, which was just an extension of what already existed – medieval civilisation, premised on Byzantium’s 1000 year history of learning.
Invasions:
The Muslim invasions destroyed Christianity. Staring in 632 AD the eastern, southern and Spanish western mediterranean basin, was conquered by the moon cult of Mecca and Christianity was pulled asunder. Trade routes, cultural exchanges, travel and information sharing in the once Christian empire was destroyed. Spain was largely conquered, except for Don Pelayo and the Asturias, by 720 A.D. France was invaded by huge Muslim armies (40 to 80.000 men) now called ‘raids’ by revisionist Christophobic historians and almost succumbed to the Muslim Jihad.
War is bad for just about everything. The Muslim desecration and destruction of Christianity was evidenced everywhere from the killing of its men and the rapes of its women, to the plunder and effacing of its cities, towns, libraries, aqueducts, irrigation systems, schools and ecclesiastical buildings which provided welfare and social support. Building ‘civilisation’ when it is being destroyed is rather difficult.
As written above, by 500 A.D. the Western rump of the Roman empire was in dire straits to begin with. The Musulman incursions against an unprepared population further retarded civilisation’s development. There is no factual basis to any of the claims for Muslim ‘civilisation’. The Muslim empires invented nothing of note. Any so called discoveries already existed, or in the case of their meagre philosophical and astronomical outputs, were rendered by non-Muslims with Muslimified names.
Having said that, based on Musulman sources, Visigothic Spain and indeed North Africa amazed the Muslims with its wealth, sophistication, glittering cities, libraries, learning and welfare. From the low point of 500 A.D. the Romano-Christian culture of Spain and North Africa had gone to great lengths to repair and expand civilisation.
This was eradicated by Muslims who took over these rich areas, which were later declared by Christophobic ‘intellectuals’ to have been built by Moslems. Absurd to say the least. In fact North Africa, once the granary of the Roman empire became a desert. Its irrigation systems annihilated by Muslims, the world’s biggest library in Alexandria set to fire by the Muslims. Wheeled carts once plentiful on the roads of North Africa largely disappeared for 300 years replaced by donkeys.
The Muslim irruption was just one. Huns or Avars had been plundering central and Western Europe since the 5th century (Attila the Hun for example). Magyars (Huns) fell upon Europe in waves starting in the 9th century. The Saxons, pagans before their forcible conversion by Charlemagne in the 9th century, emanated from Germany and plundered areas of Francia, Frisia and England. The Anglo-Saxon-Jute takeover of England was followed by the Viking plundering of the island, France, Ireland and other North Sea targets starting in the late 8th century and lasting until the reign of Canute in the early 11th century. We have here endless war stretching from the Musulman invasion of 710 AD (Spain) to William the Conqueror (1066). Almost every region in Western Europe was enveloped in war and subject to the dislocations caused by war, invasion, disease and social unrest.
Summary
A normal person, with a normal intellect, understands that ‘science’ or ‘mathematics’ in such a context would not be a priority. Creating a telescope (optics begin in the 12th century), is not really a priority when your land is ravaged, and your family threatened with death. It is only after the defeat of the Muslims in Spain, which becomes evident in 1200 AD, the end of the Viking invasions (roughly 1000 AD), and the defeat of the Magyars in central Europe (early 11th century); that Western Europe even has a chance at rebuilding the civilisation that was in repair and proceeding to greatly surpass that of Rome, in 700 A.D.
One of the greatest miracles in history is simply this: How did the Romano-German-Christian civilisations of Western Europe survive from 500 to 1000 AD? If there is a logical proof for God's existence, it is surely the fact that Western Europe somehow survived the pagan assaults of Muslims, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Saxons and Vikings from 500 AD to 1000 AD.