Peter the Venerable

Peter of Montboissier was born to a woman who was called "Blessed Raingarde" (she was revered as saintly but not formally canonized).

His mother dedicated him to God and handed him to a Cluniac monastery early in his life. By the time he was twenty years old he was the prior of a monastery at Vézelay. He was so good at his job that by the age of thirty he was named abbot general of the Cluniac Order, and embarked on a campaign of reform and stricter discipline.

Peter favored education, and promoted learning in his monasteries. This put him at odds with Bernard of Clairvaux, who preferred the life of a monk to be spent in prayer and manual labor. He charted his own course in other ways: he supported the election of Pope Innocent II against that of Pope Anacletus, even though Anacletus also began as a Cluniac monk, like Peter. Peter also protected Peter Abelard when he was being persecuted for his Trinitarianism (more on that later).

He was prominent in many religious councils, such as Pope Innocent II's Council of Pisa, where he supported Innocent's reforms. He tried to persuade the political figures of Europe that the Crusades should be nonviolent missionary campaigns, not military campaigns intended to subjugate.

His defense of Christianity against other religions was fierce. He wrote treatises against Jews. He called for the Koran to be translated into Latin (which was completed in 1143) so that it could be debated properly, meaning refuted properly. He traveled to Spain (possible Toledo) to meet the translators. Later scholars criticized the translation for its errors.

His responses to the translated texts were two treatises, the the Summa totius heresis Saracenorum ("The Summary of the Entire Heresy of the Saracens") and the Liber contra sectam sive heresim Saracenorum ("The Refutation of the Sect or Heresy of the Saracens"). He essentially labels them heresies so far from Christianity that they are equivalent to paganism.

Peter died on Christmas Day 1156. Peter was thought of as a saint, but was never canonized. As of 2004, the Roman Catholic Church considers him "Blessed."

I now want to turn to his support of Peter Abelard, another French scholar who caused a stir in religious circles. See you tomorrow.

Ending Religious Tolerance

The 10th Abbasid caliph was not intended to rise to that position. Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn Harun was born in 822 to an Abbasid prince and a slave concubine. His father, al-Mu'tasim, was a court official to Ja'far's uncle, his father's brother caliph al-Ma'mun. Both al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim were sons of Harun al-Rashid, who reigned at the start of Islam's Golden Age.

When al-Ma'mun died in 833, he nominated his brother rather than his son to rule. When al-Mu'tasim died, his eldest son (Ja'far's brother al-Wathiq) became caliph. al-Wathiq had a fairly non-dramatic reign except for ongoing battles with the Byzantine Empire. al-Wathiq ended that conflict for several years after agreeing to a prisoner exchange in 845. His death from natural causes in his mid-30s caught the nation by surprise. His son was fairly young, and so for the second time in that dynasty the succession went "sideways" to a brother rather than a son. Ja'far found himself elevated to the caliphate and taking the regnal name al-Mutawwakil ala Allah, "He who relies on God." He was 26 years old. (The illustration is of hid face on a silver dirham.)

His well-educated brother had been a lover of poetry and the arts, enjoying poets, scholars, and musicians. In contrast, al-Mutawwakil cared more for power and grandiosity. His reign was known for ending the religious tolerance of his predecessors. Whereas dhimmi ("protected ones"; a designation given to those of other faiths) had many privileges, he took steps to revoked or disrespect them. In 850 he decreed that all Jews and Christians had to wear garments that distinguished them from the faithful: honey-colored (yellow) hoods and belts. Moreover, their places of worship were destroyed and they were no longer allowed to hold public office.

An ancient sacred cypress of the Zoroastrians was ordered cut down to be used as timber for a new palace. It was 1400 years old, and legend said it had been brought by Zoroaster from heaven.

He even attacked fellow Muslims. There was on ongoing debate over whether the Koran was created or not. That is (to put it simply): was it produced by a man, or was it divine knowledge that was then "un-created" by a man, because it was eternal? There was a sect that rejected the idea that the Koran was the literal word of and co-=eternal with God, and therefore did not exist until Muhammad wrote it. al-Mutawwakil stomped on this heavily, taking hostile steps to anyone promoting the doctrine that the Koran was created by a man.

al-Mutawwakil had named his eldest son, al-Muntasir, as his successor, but over time was showing favor to his second son, al-Mu'tazz. The two sons had support from different political factions, and the elder was unhappy with his father's shifting attention, especially when the younger was given the privilege of leading prayers at the end of Ramadan. Other humiliations followed, and a faction approached the elder son with a plan to assassinate his father. al-Muntasir was not opposed. The plan was carried out in December 861, and al-Muntasir became caliph. al-Mutawwakil had died before lumber from the Zoroastrian cedar arrived to be used.

Unfortunately, this began a period known as the Anarchy at Samarra, lasting until 870 and almost destroying the Abbasid Caliphate.

Let's turn away from politics and find something good about al-Mutawwakil's reign. How about the Great Mosque of Samarra? I'll bet there are some interesting stories there. I'll check it out and get back to you tomorrow.

Raising Moral Children

Ramon Llull was a 13th century Catalan mystic and theologian whose controversial writings made him many enemies. One of his more interesting metaphors that perhaps was not so controversial was about raising moral children.

His Doctrina pueril ("Instruction for children") was a guide to moral living addressed to his son Domènec (then between eight and 12 years old). It was important for him to write it out not only as an idea to leave to posterity, but also because he had left his wife and family several years earlier (to become a Franciscan) and therefore was not raising Domènec personally.

Among his pieces of advice for raising children properly, he includes 

...not to expose their children to romances, songs or musical instruments that encourage them to be lustful. To preserve their children’s budding intellects and overall bodily health fathers should ensure that spicy food never be served, as it could overheat their humours and damage their developing brains, and nor should rich food, which would lead them into ill health, gluttony and lust later in life. [link]

Llull does not discuss breastfeeding or wet nurses, but he does emphasize the "health benefits and moral properties" of human milk in the raising of children. Solid food should not be introduced to the child's diet too early, lest the child become "mean and stingy." Llull associates the feeding of children with breast milk with charity, generosity, good upbringing, and the development of moral character. His idea that breast milk contributed to the development of morality was picked up by later philosophers, especially in the Iberian peninsula. The illustration comes from a later published copy of Llull's Doctrina and represents the tree of morality, the choices one makes as one grows that could lead to either joy or punishment.

This was not a strictly religious view in that there is no reference in the Bible to breastfeeding, nor in early Jewish writings. In fact, only the Koran among the Abrahamic religions mentioned the topic. Verse 46:15 mentions a bond between the baby and the source of breast milk that last until the child is about two years old. This was an interesting wrinkle on the subject of wet nurses, since in parts of the Iberian Peninsula, wet nurses were commonly Muslim slaves. Tomorrow, let's talk about wet nursing, slavery, and a little about "milk siblings."

John of Damascus

John of Damascus was born into a well-to-do Arab-Christian family in Damascus around 675 CE. His father was an official serving the Umayyad Caliphate. He was a priest, a composer of hymns (some of which are still used in Eastern Orthodox liturgy), and a defender of Christianity. He was interested in law, theology, music, and philosophy.

He lived near the end of patristic development of church dogma, and is considered the last of the Eastern Orthodox Doctors of the Church, being referred sometimes specifically as the Doctor of the Assumption because of his writing on the Assumption of Mary.

He spoke out in contrast to the Eastern tradition of iconoclasm. He wrote three (that we know of) works defending icons:

You see that He forbids image-making on account of idolatry, and that it is impossible to make an image of the immeasurable, uncircumscribed, invisible God. You have not seen the likeness of Him, the Scripture says, and this was St Paul’s testimony as he stood in the midst of the Areopagus: ‘Being, therefore, the offspring of God, we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto gold, or silver, or stone, the graving of art, and device of man.’

These injunctions were given to the Jews on account of their proneness to idolatry. Now we, on the contrary, are no longer in leading strings. Speaking theologically, it is given to us to avoid superstitious error, to be with God in the knowledge of the truth, to worship God alone, to enjoy the fulness of His knowledge. We have passed the stage of infancy, and reached the perfection of manhood. We receive our habit of mind from God, and know what may be imaged and what may not. [link]

The anti-Semitism is not unique. Other works of his show strong hostility to other groups: Against the Jacobites; Against the Nestorians; Dialogue against the Manichees; On the Faith, Against the Nestorians; On the Two Wills of Christ (Against the Monothelites); as well as the straightforward On Right Thinking.

He was also, unsurprisingly, opposed to Islam; one of the first known Christian writers to attack it. In Concerning Heresy he claims Muslims first worshipped Aphrodite, and that Mohammad learned Christianity from an Arian monk instead of true Christianity. Also, he criticizes the claim that Mohammad received the Koran from God in his sleep, because there were no witnesses. Moses received the Torah in front of the Israelites, Jesus was foretold by the Old Testament, but no witnesses exist to support Mohammad's claims, and no prophecies in the Bible foretold Mohammad.

John was also a promoter of perichoresis, the idea that the members of the Trinity are constantly "going around" each other, endlessly interacting and being intertwined. This sounds obvious (maybe) to anyone raised in a Christian environment, but pre-Nicene Councils, focus on the Trinity was often on distinguishing between the three to explain why three were needed. Perichoresis ties their being/existence closer together.

John of Damascus died 4 December 749. He is considered a saint in the Catholic Church, as well as Eastern and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, the Anglican Communion, and Lutheranism. His feast day is 4 December and 27 March. He is there patron of pharmacists, theology students, and icon painters!

As mentioned above, John's writings helped define the dogma of the early Church. Next I want to go a little deeper into his unofficial title "Doctor of the Assumption."

The Laffer Curve

That is an odd headline (and topic) for a blog on the Middle Ages, but let's push on and see where we wind up. The Laffer Curve (named for Arthur Laffer, illustrates a "a supposed relationship between economic activity and the rate of taxation which suggests that there is an optimum tax rate which maximizes tax revenue." [New Oxford American Dictionary] Arthur Laffer acknowledged that Ibn Khaldun essentially defined what we now call the Laffer Curve in his best-known book, Al-Muqaddimah ("Introduction").

We know quite a bit about Ibn Khaldun (27 May 1332 - 17 March 1406) because he wrote an autobiography. Born to a wealthy Arabic family, he was able to trace his ancestry back to the time of Mohammed. He had a classical Islamic education, memorized the Koran, and studied law and Arab linguistics. He also learned mathematics, logic, and philosophy. While in his teenage years, both parents died in the first big wave of the Black Death.

He started his political career at the age of 20 in Tunisia, producing fine calligraphy on official documents, but shortly after moved to Fez as a writer of royal proclamations. There he fell out with the sultan while scheming to advance himself and went to jail for 22 months. After getting out, he was not getting the attention he felt he deserved in terms of jobs, and decided to move to Granada. The Sultan of Granada gave him a diplomatic mission to King Pedro the Cruel of Castile, which Ibn Khaldun carried out successfully. Eventually getting involved in too much political intrigue, he left for Ifriqiya, where the current sultan had been Khaldun's cellmate! The sultan made Khaldun his prime minister. In 1366, that sultan died, and Khaldun allied himself with a different sultan, who was defeated a few years later, upon which Khaldun decided a monastic life was best. He continued to get involved in politics, however, always finding ways to anger someone.

Regarding his works, Al-Muqaddimah was the first part of a seven-volume work that included a world history up to his time. The socio-economic-geographical approach to describing empires is considered by 19th and 20th century scholars as the first ever writing in the social sciences. Khaldun explains that there is a group solidarity that enables small groups to grow in power, and yet become their own worst enemy and eventually fall from power and be overcome by another tightly knit group. He had similarly ahead-of-his-time ideas about economics.

I will leave the discussion of Ibn Khaldun (for now at least) with one more thing: his apt description of government as "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself."

A large part of his historical work involves the Berbers, and I will talk about them in the next post.

Averroes

(Note: Most of this is from the previous post "The Commentator" on 11 December 2012)

Averroes (1126-1198) was born in Córdoba into a family of distinguished jurists and scholars at a time when Islamic culture was flourishing in Spain. He probably would have spent his life as a judge if not for his mentor and friend, the physician Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl, who told him that he should write commentaries on the works of Aristotle. The problem seen by ibn Tufayl was that Aristotle was too obscure either because of the ambiguity of his own writing or the shortcomings of his translators.

Averroes, whose real name was ʾAbū al-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd, embraced the task so thoroughly that, to the West, he became known as "The Commentator." His scholarship was embraced across cultures: Jacob Anatoli translated Averroes' Commentaries into Hebrew. Anatoli's colleague and friend Michael Scot translated some directly into Latin.

He analyzed and promoted most of Aristotle (and Plato's Republic) to the known world, as well as writing dozens of books of his own. So far as we know, he did not have access to original texts—there is no evidence that he knew Greek—and so his commentaries are based on Arabic translations of Aristotle.

He was a rationalist, he asserted that philosophy and religion were not in conflict because they taught about the same things. Common people needed religion and faith to understand what the intellectual could understand through reason and logic. He felt proper understanding of the Koran required analytical thinking.

Unfortunately for him, his rationalist views often got him into trouble when they came up against Islamic theology (which he had studied extensively). He was, in fact, banished by a caliph to whom he had been the personal physician, because some side remarks in Averroes' writing (such as "that Venus is one of the gods") struck the caliph as blasphemous. Fortunately, Averroes was allowed to return home prior to his death.

We've looked at a few different philosophers. Next I want to talk about a particular medieval school of philosophy: scholasticism.

The Iberian Melting Pot

A few days back, Ladino was mentioned in the first post about the Toledo School of Translators. I described it parenthetically as Judaeo-Spanish and left it at that. After 1492, when Jews were expelled from Castile and Aragon, it spread throughout the known world. It is still spoken today by Sephardic minorities, recognized as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in 2017 was formally recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy. Ladino is just one part of a larger topic to me, the blending of two cultures, which prompts me to address Mozarabic culture.

"Mozarab" is likely from the Arabic musta 'rib, which is most easily translated as "to make oneself similar to Arab." Medieval writers used the term "Mozarabic" to refer to Christians living in the Iberian Peninsula which had been steeped in Arabic and Islamic culture. The earliest example we have is from 1026CE, in a land dispute between monks of San Ciprian de Valdesalce and three muzaraves de rex tiraceros (royal silk workers). By 1085 Mozarab was more common, being used to mean Christians who lived under Muslim rule, adopting their customs and language.

The point is that Arabs, Jews, Christians, and Mozarabs were able to coexist on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. The multilingualism among many individuals that resulted from this coexistence made the location ideal for scholars from all over to come to learn from sources in other languages. The Archbishop establishing the Toledo School of Translators was an original idea, but not a surprising one, considering the resources at hand.

It would be unfair, however, to neglect telling you that some Christian scholars traveled to Iberia to learn to read the Koran well enough to be able to write polemics against it. In turn, as Roman law became increasingly irrelevant in Iberia, the non-Muslims had to deal with Sharia law. But that's a topic for next time.

An Arabian Polymath

Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm—let's just call him Ibn Hazm—was a prime example of how medieval scholars could be very "contemporary." To be honest, some of his "modern" thinking resulted from his literal interpretation of the Koran, but the results were very interesting for his time.

Ibn Hazm (November 7, 994 – August 15, 1064) was born into a family with powerful political connections, and from an early age he had more access to education and insights into politics than most. His close exposure to politicians gave him a healthy skepticism about the inherent (un)goodness of human beings. As a result, he turned to God as the only reliable source of morality.

Another outcome of his experience with politics was his respect for language. His analysis of language led him to the conclusion that Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac had all sprung from a common source and changed over time as their peoples separated from each other. Contrary to the opinion of his peers, he saw no reason to consider Arabic to be superior to other languages.

This and other ideas of his caused him to be considered wise, yet controversial. He was famous in the Muslim world for finding no reason that women should be prohibited from prophethood, because the Koran did not forbid it.

The Koran also convinced him that the earth was round. In a passage in which it is stated that "He makes the Night overlap the Day, and the Day overlap the Night" the word for "overlap" derived from the word for "ball." Experimentation with models led him to conclude that the Earth was indeed a globe, and that at any moment of the day the Sun would be vertical to some point on the Earth.

He experimented with echoes in the Mosque at Cordoba to prove that sound travels at a certain speed. Also, he linked lightning and thunder, explaining the delay between the two by using his ideas about the speed of sound. He stated, but could not prove or explain in detail, that lightning caused the thunder.

His bold and controversial statements made him enemies of other scholars, but at a public burning of some of his works (we believe he produced 400 works, of which only 10% survives), he declared that the destruction of the materials did not destroy the ideas inside them.

Nicholas of Cusa: Ecumenist

After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks, Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) wrote De pace fidei (On the Peace of Faith), in which he envisioned a conference in Heaven of representatives of all religions, including Islam and Hussites (the followers of Jan Hus were one of the first Christian Protestant movements, over a century before Luther).

The imaginary conference concluded that it was possible to have a single unified religion, even if it manifests in many different versions with separate practices. After all, the Roman Catholic Church had co-existed with the Eastern Church for centuries; the Eastern Church may not have recognized the authority of the Pope over the East, but the East and West did consider themselves two parts of the same faith.

Nicholas clearly prefers and exalts Christianity, but is willing to find accord with others. He had written Cribratio Alchorani (Sifting the Koran), which acknowledges that Islam and Judaism still possess seeds of the truth. Let me be clear: Nicholas doesn't treat Islam or Judaism as equals with Christianity—in 1451 he had used his authority as a bishop to require Jews in Arnhem to wear badges, and he had imposed other restrictions on Jews that were later lifted by Pope Nicholas V. The fact, however, that a well-known Catholic prelate and respected theologian could write on and publish such tolerant ideas was remarkable for the time.