THE REOPENING OF THE WESTERN MIND

A complicated perspective on the impact of classical texts on European thought, politics, and culture.

Two decades after the publication of his divisive book, The Closing of the Western Mind, classical historian Freeman traces Europe’s path out of the so-called “dark ages” through the Enlightenment, a process of “reopening” the author attributes to the rediscovery and proliferation of ancient Greek and Roman texts. Appealing to his “personal experience…nosing my way around the Mediterranean and writing and lecturing about it,” the author constructs a version of European history driven by the tensions between rigid, regressive Christian authority and progressive intellectuals who embraced the pagan philosophies of classical antiquity. Writing in accessible yet long-winded prose, Freeman takes a broad approach to this 1,200-year period of massive cultural change. He loosely organizes the narrative around synopses of major texts, cultural developments, and lives of particular intellectual figures, illuminated by dozens of full-color examples of maps, art, and architecture that offer further context to the author’s arguments. This vast scope makes a convincing case for Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and many other classical thinkers’ wide-ranging cultural impact on medieval and early-modern Europe, but it lacks depth and focus outside of the author’s preoccupation with the city-states of northern Italy and his frequent criticism of the Catholic Church. Echoing the claims of his previous work, Freeman characterizes early Christianity as a brutal eradicator of the empirical rationality of Greece and Rome, deriding any attempt to “find a coherent doctrine of Christian belief” as “impossible” even as he details the church’s preservation of ancient texts and subsequent integration of their philosophies into Christian theology and law. The author has an ax to grind, and he does so at the cost of undermining his valid criticism and solid historical research.

A knowledgeable historian delivers a book that is ambitious in scale but shallow in execution.