Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives

Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives shows that the historical origins of Western science lie in the medieval synthesis of Greek science and philosophy with the faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This synthesis is most evident in medieval medicine where the synergies of Greek philosophy and Greek science are most evident within the monotheistic faith traditions. The first such Western synthesis of medieval medicine took place in the eleventh cenury at the monastery of Monte Cassino when Constantine the African translated, for the first time, Arabic medical manuscripts into Latin. These manuscripts became the core of the first medical curriculum in the West called the Articella. Other translations of Arabic science continued over the next century forming the basis for the medieval scientific curriculum in Astronomy, Chemistry, Surgery and Pharmacology. In the Golden Age of Islamic culture found in the Eastern and Western Caliphates centered in Baghdad and Cordoba, during the ninth and tenth centuries, we find a great flowering of scientic studies and a synthesis occurring of Greek, Syriac and Arabic scientific insights and methods of understanding the rational implications of both faith and science. This harmony of the three pillars of medieval society, faith, philosophy and science, continued well into the medieval era in both the Islamic and Christian worlds and continued to be the case in many areas of science until the Renaissance era in Western Europe. This book was written jointly by Christian and Islamic philosophers; it shows that Christianity and Islam played a key role in bridging the world of Greek philosophy and science with the Western intellectual tradition developed in the medieval universities and laying the foundation for the great scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeetnth centuries.