Overview

Full Product Details

9780712664981

Table of Contents

Reviews

Enjoyable and illuminating. . . . Clearly and plausibly argued . . . full of fascinating detail. - The Boston Globe <br> Entertaining. . . . An excellent and readable account of the development of Christian doctrine. - The New York Times Book Review <br> There is much here to admire. . . . It is a panoramic view that Freeman handles with grace, erudition and lucidity. - The Washington Times <br> A triumph. . . . Engrossing. . . . Successfully realized. . . . Wholly admirable. . . . Freeman is to be congratulated on a broad-brush approach that throws the main issue into sharp focus. . . . [He] has added a new level of understanding. - The Times Higher Education Supplement <br> A fascinating account. - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution<br> <br> Engrossingly readable and very thoughtful. . . . Freeman draws our attention to myriad small but significant phenomena. . . . His fine book is both a searching look at the past and a salutary and cautionary reminder for us in our difficult present. - The New York Sun<br> <br> One of the best books to date on the development of Christianity. . . . Beautifully written and impressively annotated, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the roots of Christianity and its implications for our modern worldview. . . . Essential. - Choice<br> <br> Engaging. . . . Refreshing. . . . A memorable account. . . . The author is always interesting and well informed. Freeman's study moves with ease between political and intellectual history. . . . The cumulative effect is impressive. - The Times Literary Supplement<br> <br> A fine book for a popular audience that enjoys history, clear writing, and subject matter that reflects our owntime. - Houston Chronicle<br> <br> The narrative is clear and fluent, the nomenclature is studiously precise . . . and the theological conflicts of the fourth century are analyzed with . . . subtlety. - History Today<br> <br> Ambitious, groundbreaking. . . . In the tradition of . . . Karen Armstrong's A History of God . . . a scholarly history that is accessible, passionate and energetic. - Hartford Advocate<br> <br> Freeman has a talent for narrative history and for encapsulating the more arcane disputes of ancient historians and theologians. . . . He manages not only to make these disputes interesting, but also to show why they mattered so much. It is a coup that few books on the early church pull off. - The Independent<br> <br> Engaging and clearly written. - The World and I<br> <br> [A] lucid account of an intellectual and social transformation that continues to shape the way Christianity is experienced and understood. - The Dallas Morning News<br>

A vigorous study of the death and rebirth of empirical thought in the Western tradition. English classicist Freeman (The Greek Achievement, 1999, etc.) charts two great strains of thought in antiquity. The first, exemplified by the work of Greek thinkers and artists such as Euripides and Aristotle, allowed that some things in the universe may well be unknowable, but that shouldn't stop humans from asking about them; the second, the province of Christian thinkers such as Jerome and Augustine, held that only God can know the unknowable, and humans have no business nosing around in such matters. The first Freeman dubs reason, the second faith, and even if the two often blended in the work of thinkers like Plato and Aquinas, they were often opposed to each other. With the ascendancy of Christianity in the Roman world, Freeman observes, the principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God and even, in the writings of Augustine, that the human mind, burdened with Adam's original sin, is incapable of thinking for itself. He notes at least part of the reason for the triumph of unquestioning faith was the inability of early Christian communities to agree on terms by which they could rationally explore the divine; part, however, was purely political: namely, the dawning awareness on the part of Constantine and other emperors that any dissension among the various Christian churches posed a source of jeopardy to their supposedly divinely sanctioned rule. (Thus, in due course, the doctrine of papal infallibility.) The strained competition between faith and reason played out over the centuries, Freeman shows, until by the end of the fourth century the freedom to explore the nature of God was becoming restricted to the point of extinction, essentially crushing the Greek tradition until its revival, a millennium later, in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. A lucid, accessible contribution to intellectual history, and a worthy companion to Elaine Pagels's recent Beyond Belief (p. 290). (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Charles Freeman is the author of The Greek Achievement and Egypt, Greece and Rome- Civilisations of the Ancient Mediterranean. He lives in Suffolk.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available