An Empire of Reason - The Higher Law

American Political History · Jul 4, 2023 · 28m

For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empire that fed Christians to the lions; and the philosophers’ claim that truth is reached by the unaided mind looked to the faithful like the rival of revelation itself. Tertullian had asked it bluntly: what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

This is the story of the braiding — of how the lost works of Aristotle were saved for the West by the scholars of Islam and Israel, came flooding back through the translators of Toledo, and nearly tore the faith…