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The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

New York: Vintage, 2005 $16.95 (paperback)

At a time when the avowal of religious principle is increasingly prominent in public life, and faith informs policy in the way ideology used to, Charles Freeman’s Closing of the Western Mind sheds light on the political impact of Christianity on its first adopters. This intellectual history of Mediterranean late-antiquity explains how the philosophical achievements of ancient Greece were superseded by Christianity following the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. His was an authoritarian religion wielded as an instrument of state, belief with political purpose, fashioned to impose its orthodoxy as a means of retaining control over a disintegrating empire. As Hellenic culture was absorbed into the new church and theology dispensed with reason, rational argument was effectively silenced by a system that called for no reasoning beyond faith, ultimately plunging Europe into a dark age from which it did not emerge until the fourteenth century. Clearly, Freeman’s sympathies are with the rationalists, but this by no means a secularist’s dismissal of religion as so much superstition. Rather, it is a deeply rich and well-researched book that attempts to return the events and personalities of the primitive church to their historical contexts and chart the connections between social forces and philosophical systems. Character sketches of impossibly distant personalities are exceedingly welcome: Hadrian hysterically mourning his boy love Antinous, and declaring him a god; St. Paul a visionary, indefatigable man who “could also be abrasive and deeply sensitive to any threat to his assumed authority” (p.109); an array of Byzantine bishops processing with all their ascetic quirks and pieties held up to view. Freeman’s is an enormous undertaking, and keeping up with its cast of minor philosophers, blood-soaked Romans, pagan and Christian communities and their sects and schisms can be as exhausting as it is overwhelming. Fortunately, the deep antiquarian past is Freeman’s territory and under his guidance the journey is fascinating.