Was the West Saved by Islam?
April 7, 2011
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
One of your readers wrote, in respect of the Muslim period in Spain and the enthusiasm of the Reconquista: “A few voices of rationality managed to save some key texts which among other things introduced Europe to Greek and Roman knowledge.”
Another one of your readers wrote: “The Muslims were responsible for some great civilizations, exquisite art, the transfer and preservation of classical philosophy, and a civilization of tolerance (in Spain) for hundreds of years.”
This notion that the West owes its civilization to Islam is a complete falsehood notwithstanding that many otherwise intelligent and educated people continue to believe it. The continuity from Classical Mediterranean to Western European Medieval Civilization is patent, which is to say that knowledge of the Greco-Roman tradition never vanished, even though at times it contracted to a few monasteries and scriptoria. Many scholars have understood this since the nineteenth century, but a French researcher, Sylvain Gouguenheim, has recently and brilliantly restated the facts in a remarkable book Aristote au Mont-St, Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chretienne (2008). Regrettably Gouguenheim’s book has not yet been translated, but readers of The Thinking Housewife may access my review of it, at The Brussels Journal, here. In that review, I wrote:
Gouguenheim cites the fact that educated Latin-speaking westerners, even after Boethius, could command Greek as explaining in large part the dearth of Greek texts in Latin translation between 500 and 1100 AD. But Latin compendia of Platonist and Aristotelian teachings did circulate, as did medical handbooks in the tradition of Galen. The Latin-speaking Church Fathers thus undertook their reflections “with the help of the logical categories of Greek thought,” such that classical philosophy “impregnated” their arguments as a type of “intellectual matrix.” One could bolster Gouguenheim’s observations in this regard by a reference to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ recent study of The Fall of Rome (2005), in which he remarks that even among the Gothic usurpers of Roman sovereignty in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, civilized individuals emerged who prized classical learning and did their best to preserve it. Theodahad (he reigned as Ostrogothic king of Italy from 534 to 536) offers the outstanding case, having been “learned in Latin literature and Platonic philosophy,” even though he “kept his Gothic moustache.”
In Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel, Gouguenheim points out that a Greek demographic presence linked the culminating period of Late Antiquity with the incipient phase of the Middle Ages in the West; and that presence persisted for centuries. “In the Europe of the High Middle Ages, many regions sheltered knots of ethnic Hellenes: Sicily, Southern Italy, and again Rome.” These communities supported literate elites, who contributed actively to the Latinate majorities among whom they lived, giving rise to such notable figures as Gregory of Agrigento (born 559), who became bishop in his native city later in life; George, Bishop of Syracuse, killed by the Arabs while on a mission to them in 724; Saint Gilsenus (mid-Seventh Century), a Greek-born monk living in a Roman monastery who evangelized in Hainault with Saint Armand; and Simeon of Reichenau, known as “The Achaean,” who belongs to the Tenth Century. In men like Simeon this Byzantine Diaspora reached well beyond Mediterranean Europe into the Rhine and Danube regions. Not only Greek but also Syriac Christians became additional mediators of the classical heritage at this time, driven from their homeland by the Jihad. “Paradoxically,” writes Gouguenheim, “Islam from its beginning transmitted Greek culture to the Occident by provoking the exile of those who refused its domination.” So, to be fair, did the Puritanical spasms of Byzantine court-theology in its regular iconoclastic moods. The persecuted iconodules, like the Syriac Christians, often sought refuge in Italy, Spain, or France.
Gouguenheim makes clear the conscious and deliberate indebtedness of the Carolingian Renaissance to these sustained currents from the East; he emphasizes the importance of the Carolingian Hellenophile project to the preservation and recirculation of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought before the school of Aquinas. “From the court of the Carolingians to that of the Germanic emperors of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, one does not cease to encounter men who interested themselves in Greek knowledge and culture.” Gouguenheim mentions how Pépin le Bref (reigned 751-768) petitioned the Pope for Greek texts and how Paul I responded by committing to royal custodianship various “liturgical books, manuals of grammar and orthography, of geometry [and] works of Aristotle and pseudo-Dionysius” along with “men capable of translating them.” Charlemagne himself employed an Italian of Greek background, Paul Diacre (720-799), “to teach Greek to the clerics” at a moment when a marriage seemed possible between his daughter Rothrude and a Byzantine prince. Charles the Bald (reigned 840-877) “was fascinated by Greek culture, to the point that he asked the Irish savant Duns Scotus Erigena to translate the work of [pseudo-Dionysius] towards 855.
In the Islamic world at this time, the few proponents of Greek rationalism were suffering marginalization and outright persecution, as the very notion of a stable universe was in contradiction to the Koranic claim that cosmic existence depends moment by moment on the will of Allah, who obeys no laws, and may do one thing this second and the opposite thing the next second, as he pleases.
On Islamic Spain, about which falsehoods are also rampant, I recommend the sobering article by Dario Fernandez-Morera on “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” accessible here. When my critics have done their homework by reading Gouguenheim, or my review of Gouguenheim, and Fernandez-Morera, and when they stop romanticizing Islam and derogating the West – that will be the time for an informed discussion.
Mr. Bertonneau adds:
Alexander did not conduct an annihilating jihad against Levantine, Egyptian, Persian, or Hindu civilization; he consistently respected the cultures that he conquered militarily and even openly, ostentatiously worshipped their gods. The result was Hellenism, a heady mixture of Greek with Anatolian, Levantine, Egyptian, Persian, and Hindu elements. In Alexandrian Hellenism, we find enthusiastic respect for Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The contrast with Islam is so stark that it knocks one to the floor.
— Comments —
Kristor writes:
I was recently reading a history of Catholic liturgy online – regrettably, I have lost the link – and learned that in the chapel of the Court of Charlemagne, at the very end of the “Dark Ages,” the Mass was celebrated in both Latin and Greek. Greek was in daily, spoken use by the Court.
Mr. Bertonneau writes:
My thanks go to Kristor for his remark. Charlemagne had important continuous diplomatic relations with the Byzantine court, so it’s not surprising that one would have heard a daily Greek service at Aachen. But here is the question that has got me wondering: Whence originates this pernicious falsehood that Islam preserved classical learning and transmitted it to the West – gifted it, so to speak, in an act of magnanimity and generosity? I can’t say what the origin is although I’ve heard the story all my life – I can remember reading a version of it in my high school “world history” text. Maybe it was Gibbon, who despite being superb scholar and writer was deeply, prejudicially anti-Christian. Maybe it was Voltaire, who liked to disparage the Middle Ages. I imagine that it was an Eighteenth Century invention. Should anyone in the Thinking Housewife readership know the answer to this question, I hope he or she will respond.
Dean Ericson writes:
Islam was born as a criminal enterprise. Mohammad got it going by raiding and looting caravans — the only major religion with rules for dividing booty! As Islam’s sword spread across the ancient world it battened on older civilizations, plundered their wealth, glutting itself on stolen jewels and women as well as stolen knowledge and culture. But a thief is not a producer. What culture and wealth did the jihadis bring with them out of Arabia besides camels and swords and an outsized lust for power and loot? So Islam shows up in the history books decked out in stolen goods, and we’re supposed to marvel at their amazing achievements? — give me a break. Once they were done sucking the life out of one victim they dropped it and moved on to the next. Always some new caravan to loot over the next hill, always another ship to pirate in the Mediterranean, another infidel head to chop, his women to ravish.
Belgian historian Henri Pirenne published Mohammed and Charlemagne in 1938. Its thesis is that it was Islam that finally destroyed the ancient world, and not the prior barbarian invasions. John O’Neill expands on this in his 2009 book Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization. O’Neill argues that the Mediterranean had carried the lifeblood of the ancient world, the trade route of wealth and civilization, and with its seizure by Islam that world collapsed. And it makes sense when you think about it. Islam never stopped being a pirate enterprise. Their success of late has been largely due to the happenstance of oil, a fortuitous new form of Islamic pelf. It’s not surprising Muslims would also seek to steal the prestige of the civilizations they looted and try to pass themselves off as the highest and most sophisticated civilization ever on planet earth.
Jeff W. writes:
I believe that the often-repeated lie that Islam preserved Western literature and science is based on the fact that libraries in Islamic countries were larger than those in Christendom during the Middle Ages, as this article in the 1893 Encyclopedia Britannica describes. Europe continued to have libraries, of course, throughout the Middle Ages, though they were smaller.
My impression is that twentieth-century leftists, as part of their effort to disparage traditional Western civilization and praise The Other, picked up this fact about libraries and exaggerated it into the idea that Europeans should be grateful to Muslims for preserving their civilization for them. Leftists have similarly hyped up the Islamic Golden Age.
In leftist world, everyone is wonderful except the European Christian heterosexual white male. He is the beast who must be crushed by The Others in their overwhelming numbers. Look at the stupid European Christians! They couldn’t even preserve their own civilization without Muslim help!
Mr. Bertonneau writes:
My thanks go to Dean Ericson and Jeff W. for their remarks. Ericson gives us a valuable reference in Henri Pirenne’s Mohammad and Charlemagne (1938), a useful discussion of which I found here. Pirenne’s thesis is entirely compatible with Gouguenheim’s or Ward-Perkins’. The Gothic successors of the Roman aristocracy in the West were largely romanized when the western Empire came to its formal end in 476 AD. The Gothic kings saw themselves as inheritors and continuators of Roman civic existence, and they were not unjustified in their prejudice; they were not destroyers, but conservators. On Jeff W.’s report, based on the 1893 Britannica, that libraries in the Muslim world were larger in the Seventh through Tenth Centuries than libraries in the West: This is likely true, but the qualification is that these libraries were heirlooms of classical civilization, not Muslim creations. I am not arguing with Jeff W. – I am merely expanding on his comment. Jeff W.’s analysis of the usefulness to the liberal view of the theory that Muslims gave the West its knowledge of classical civilization is perceptive. I now want to read Mohammad and Charlemagne and I will seek it out. On the Muslim blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean: This was a spur to Iberian, French, and English Atlantic exploration. In this way Islam inadvertently gave an advantage to the West, by forcing Columbus, Raleigh, and Champlain beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
