Since Petrarch’s (in)famous description of the period after the fall of Rome as the period of “darkness”—later simply put as “the Dark Ages” in English, there have been attempts by scholars to locate the blame for the descent of Western thought to the allegedly reactionary and superstitious period of the Middle Ages. Many thinkers—including Petrarch himself—have laid the blame at the feet of the Germanic barbarians who toppled Roman civilization. Moreover, there are (progressive) post-Reformation scholars who attempt to chart a “decline” of Christianity into authoritarianism and rigidity during the Medieval period. One of the figures who bear the strongest blame is St. Augustine of Hippo. In this argument, the noble ideas of Christ were ultimately obfuscated by the uptight and rigid Weltanschauung of St. Augustine only to be rediscovered by later progressive Christians.

In his new work, The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of Enlightenment, Oxford historian Charles Freeman lays out a vision of the rebirth of intellectual activity after the fall of Rome. First and foremost, it must be said that Freeman’s work does have a slightly Enlightenment-Whiggish taint that sees the Middle Ages as a “decline” (although Freeman does recognize the achievements of Medieval thinkers). However, his work is (usually) fair to medieval thinkers, and there are only a few points in the work with which some Christians would quarrel. Like many twenty-first-century histories of the emergence of the Enlightenment and Renaissance (such as Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve and A Most Dangerous Book), Professor Freeman’s The Reopening of the Western Mind begins with the narrative of the rediscovery of a classical book. In this case, it is Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographike Hyphegesis (Guide to Drawing the Earth). From this work, Europeans later developed the notions of longitude and latitude.

The Geographike was rediscovered in 1295 by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planude who brought the work to the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II Palaigos who, in turn, had several copies translated. The Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras brought the work to Florence where it was first translated into Latin in 1410. The work had a tremendous development on Western map-making, but the Geographike was soon superseded by the findings of figures like Bartolemeu Dias who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.

As Freeman points out, however, another copy of Geographike existed in the Islamic world—it was translated into Arabic in the 800s. The cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, a member of the Sicilian court of the Norman King Roger II, used Geographike to create several maps. However, the maps of al-Idrisi did not have a great deal of impact in Europe. This is one of Freeman’s minor but important points. It is true that European historians have often in the past presented European intellectual achievement with an air of chauvinism. Moreover, recent works have rightly noted some Islamic contributions to the development of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but these works sometimes overemphasize Islamic contributions to European thought. The situation is much more complicated, as Freeman implies, than simple, politically charged “West is the best” or “West stole from the rest” narratives.

Freeman sees the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographike, which would later be built upon by the discoveries of European explorers, as being an intellectual recovery that began in the time of Charlemagne. With somewhat tongue-in-cheek humor, Freeman pins the fall of Rome on the day of December 31, 406, when the Germanic tribes crossed the frozen Rhine. The Germanic tribes (in)famously ravaged the Roman Empire causing a collapse in the social as well as economic structure of the city. This collapse, as Freeman notes, was chronicled in real-time by figures such as Sidonius Apollinaris the bishop of Clermont. Sidonius came from an aristocratic family that included a Praetorian prefect. In his letters to figures, such as a “Hesperius” as well as a “Johannes,” Sidonius laments the loss of the Latin language. Freeman sees Sidonius’s writings as the beginning of the end of a classical culture that began in sixth-century Greece.

Following the tradition of the Enlightenment (and rejecting popular, internet-based reaction), Freeman ties Greek science with Greek democracy. He also links what would be called in the Enlightenment, “freedom of speech” with Greek science, noting that fifth-century debates among the Sophists. Freeman notes how this Greek culture developed throughout the Mediterranean and then was appropriated by the Romans who, in turn, developed their own political and architectural genius. It is this world that, for Freedman, fell into decline in the fifth century AD and was chronicled by figures such as Sidonius Apollinaris.

As was made popular with Thomas Cahill’s 1995, How the Irish Saved Civilization, there is a general sense among educated people that Christian monks preserved Greek and Roman works that were later “re-discovered” in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Freeman recognizes this achievement of Benedictines and other monastic orders. Boethius and Cassiodorus famously helped preserve Aristotle and Plato’s texts for posterity with their books On the Consolation of Philosophy and Institutiones respectively.

Furthermore, Charlemagne, known in our day as the “father of Europe” as well as a Frankish King who became the first Holy Roman Emperor, was also a tremendous patron of the arts. Known for his aggressive suppression of the pagan Saxons, the Frankish king was famously made “emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800. This act irritated the Byzantines who considered themselves heirs of the Roman Empire—however, the Byzantines were then experiencing a crisis of legitimacy as Empress Irene had come to power through the murder of her own son. Established as the Christian heir of the Roman emperors, Charlemagne established a Christian society as well as a Christian educational system, creating manuscripts of the Bible, St. Augustine’s City of God, and Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. He also revived the liberal arts with the help of the monk Alcuin drawing from Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville.

While he does praise Medieval authors, Freeman, like others before him, sees St. Augustine as the principal culprit in establishing an allegedly rigid, authoritarian, and monolithic version of Christianity. Freeman does praise Augustine’s Confessions; however, his view on Augustine as a curmudgeon who corralled a diverse and liberal Christianity is a point to which orthodox Christians will object. Freeman appears to primarily criticize St. Augustine’s strong morality, emphasis on the eternal punishment of hell, and exploration of the concept of Original Sin.

Freeman argues that St. Augustine introduced the notion of an existential or moral anxiety into the West that allegedly was not present in classical Rome and Greece (this point could be argued; the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius appears to try to answer such an anxiety in his De Rerum Naturam). Freeman further sees Christianity struggling with the notion of including those outside the faith—an exclusionary worldview that Freeman appears to reject, comparing Christianity with what he sees as the more tolerant Stoic idea of a universal humanity. Freeman sees Christianity as becoming further authoritarian through the medieval papacy with works such as Gregory VII’s 1075 Dictatus Papae, which affirmed papal authority. Again, this is a point with which Christians may take issue.

While Catholics especially might object to elements of Freeman’s narrative, it would be a mistake, however, to classify The Reopening of the Western Mind as entirely unfair to the Middle Ages. The work recognizes with careful and admirable detail the contributions of Medieval thinkers to the Western tradition, and Freeman praises positive elements of those Western Christian figures with whom he appears to disagree. 

Our age is an age of “unreason,” “post-truth,” and “fake news,” as well as AI-generated illusion and what French postmodern theorist Jean-Baudrillard called “hyper-reality.” Moreover, our age is witnessing an increase in both right- and left-wing authoritarianism. The Reopening of the Western Mind’s arguments for Western liberalism and science thus seems like the work of a bygone era that ended sometime in the heady days of the twenty-first century when Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis seemed to have failed. It seems that even those living in liberal democracies long for authority of some kind. If, as Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue, we must, even while allowing political discourse and innovation, ultimately turn to an authority, we must then ask: Where is this authority to be found? Perhaps, it is, as MacIntyre suggests, but Freeman rejects, to be found in a gentle but constant authority that has been with us in the West for quite some time.