Aristotle's Children

Aristotle's Children is a history of Western civilization from about 600 BC to 1300 AD. Why that range? Because the focus of the book is how Aristotle's ideas were lost, then rediscovered at different times by Jews, Muslims, and finally Christians, and how his ideas caused big changes in those societies.

I don't know about you, but I sometimes have a hard time reading "general" histories---ones that wander through the timeline trying to highlight any event that might be important to someone. I enjoy histories that pick one or two themes and focus on them over several centuries. That's why I enjoyed this one. You got to see how Aristotle's ideas influenced Greek science, were imposed on Jews, were adopted by Muslims and then rejected because of some ways they conflicted with religion, and then were (literally) rediscovered in the form of some unearthed scrolls in Spain in the 1100s. Whereas Muslim civilization ultimately decided they weren't worth the threat to certain doctrines, Christian civilization hung onto them---for better or worse. They led to huge advancements in science (in fact, his ideas pretty much define the scientific method now) but they've also led to atheism and anti-religious sentiment.

The author often pointed out which Greek ideas agreed with traditional Christianity, and which ones didn't. One fun task was to keep a similar mental chart of which ones agreed with the Restored Gospel and which one didn't it ended up being a three-way Venn diagram. For example, I learned about the Cathars (a heretical group in France in the 1100s), the Cathar heretics reasoned their way into a different interpretation of the Fall of Adam, and some of their criticisms of the Catholic interpretation are spot on. They ended up a little closer to Restoration doctrines in some ways, but then they'd go awry in their reasoning---for example, deciding that all sex and birth are bad. It was fascinating to watch group after group correctly reject some false ideas, but then never quite get all the right ideas in one set of beliefs. It was a terrific study in the limits of reason and the need for revelation.

I do wish the book had spent more time talking about Jewish and Muslim history---it really only touches it lightly in one of the early chapter. However, this is a great survey of about 1500 years of human history, especially for understanding some of the roots of modern Western civilization. I was introduced to several personalities I'd never heard of before (like Peter Abelard) and some I previously knew very little about (like Thomas Aquinas). I found Boethius in particular to be a really admirable person, worth mentioning as a role model when teaching history.