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Charles Freeman. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. xxiii + 432 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 140004085X.
In recent years several works have appeared resurrecting the point of view of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), that Christianity was responsible for the dissolution of the Ancient World. One thinks of Ramsay MacMullen's 1997 work, Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries as a well-executed example of this genre. As the title suggests, Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason fits nicely into this category. Freeman's view is, however, much more than a neo-Gibbon one-simply blaming Christianity for the fall of Rome. He is going after much bigger game: the extinction of rational thought itself. In short, his thesis is that the exclusiveness of Christian thought choked off debate and eventually extinguished rationality not just in religious matters but across the spectrum of thought. Thus the great tradition of Greco-Roman science and philosophy was lost for a millennium until recovered by Aquinas, et al.
Freeman does an excellent job of marshaling his evidence, as would be expected from so gifted a textbook writer, yet that is not the problem. It all comes down to what Peter Brown has called the "angle of vision." If one is presupposed to see Christianity negatively, often the facts will bear that interpretation. They may just as often do service for an opposite presupposition, reminding one of the old cliché of the glass half empty or half full. His subtitle, "The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason," presupposes a zero-sum situation wherein one cannot have faith and be rational, nor rational with faith. It forces an anti-religious position and belies the complexity of late antiquity.
Despite his frequent claims to novelty (the dust jacket trumpets it as "a groundbreaking work of religious and cultural history"), Freeman often decries "conventional histories of Christianity" and opines that "the closing of the Western mind has been ignored for all too long"; his view on Christianity is in many ways standard stuff: a two-fold attack consisting of reasoning away any disagreeable verses in the Gospels and impugning the Apostle Paul...