2.8 Medieval Philosophy
During the Middle Ages, from the 5th to the 15th century, the West gradually abandoned the mystical image of the universe and started to accept the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Ptolemy and Aristotle, with their geocentric cosmological model, where the Earth was at the center and other heavenly bodies rotated around it in a series of concentric spheres. This gradual change in European thinking was accomplished through their contact with the Islamic world, where astronomy had been developed by many Muslim astronomers and philosophers, starting from the preceding Greek philosophy, in addition to their original remarkable contributions that were also based on various theological sources.
Beginning in the 9th century, Europe began to become more prosperous and urban. This urged some European scholars to travel to parts of the Islamic and Byzantine territories in order to learn from their renowned scholars. They had to learn Arabic so that they could read the astronomical works, that had been already translated from Greek into Arabic, along with the original works and commentaries of Muslim astronomers and philosophers. Eventually, those European scholars translated some of these works into Latin, which most of their other fellow scholars could read, unlike Greek or Arabic. In this way, the Europeans gained their first access to the writings of ancient Greeks, along to the original works written in Arabic.
Therefore, by the end of the 11th century, some of Aristotle’s works were translated into Latin, as well as Ptolemy’s Almagest which was translated from its Arabic translation by Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187 AD). The title of this famous work “Almagest” is still the Arabic title.
Along with this flourishing rise in the educational and intellectual level in Europe, universities started to be established, such as the University of Bologna in Italy in 1088, Oxford University in 1096, and Cambridge University in 1209. Consequently, the language of instruction in all European universities was exclusively Latin, and the curriculum consisted mainly of moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, most of which are directly based on traditional Aristotelian thinking.
It was primarily through the work of some Christian scholars, such as St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD), that the ancient Greek views of the universe merged with Christian theology. Aquinas was crucial in making the Aristotelian natural philosophy acceptable to Christians, and he asserted that philosophy and theology were indeed compatible, and that both lead to the truth. He used the metaphor of the “two books”; the first is the Bible, and the other is the “Book of Nature”. In this way he was able to convince many other prominent intellectuals that philosophy could be useful to study theology.