 Greetings everybody. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I'm absolutely thrilled to have a wonderful scholar, a dear friend, a great thinker in how to make peace on the planet. Talk about one of my favorite books, not only of his, but of all books. I think it's an absolutely splendid, spectacular book and a great read. And that is Aristotle's Children. The subtitle is How Christians, Muslims and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages. Richard, thank you so much for joining. Richard Rubenstein is a professor emeritus at George Mason University and has led wonderful programs on conflict resolution and peacemaking at the George Mason and globally for many, many years. So it's just an absolute delight to be together with you. Oh, thanks so much, Jeff. I'm very happy to be here. And as you know, I think you're one of my role models and I'm very delighted to be here to be able to talk with you about this book. It's so much fun and thank you so much. You know, I consider myself an Aristotelian. I love and adore Aristotle. I think he gave us so much of Western culture and ideas. I came to Aristotle relatively late in my career because I thought as a young person when I was starting out at school, I just wanted to learn some math and how to pull the levers on the economy. So I loved economics and I had actually walked across the hall at Harvard in my freshman year from a course on political philosophy to a course on mathematical economics and how I got started. So it was only many years later that I came to absolutely love and appreciate Aristotle and ancient Greek wisdom and what it means for all of us. So I want to start asking, what about you? Was Aristotle an early love or how did you come to a whole line of work because you have written beautifully, wonderfully on early Christianity, Aristotle on another wonderful book on the Hebrew prophets of yours. So how did you come to this line of inquiry? Well, I really came to it through, just as you're suggesting, I came to it through being interested in religion and religious and particularly in religious conflict. I was teaching and still connected with an emeritus professor and I was connected with the Jimmy Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University and I become fascinated by the problem of religious conflict in our own society as well as in the world in general. I had, earlier on, I'd written some books on terrorism and I got more and more into thinking about why religion, which is supposed to be a cause of peace, you know. The better side of us. That's right. How come it had become such a bone of contention for so many people around the world? So I wrote a book called When Jesus Became God, which was a book about the Aryan controversy and I wrote that book because I wanted to know why what looked like a hair-splitting theological controversy that should have been worked out by priests or monks, you know, in there and talking with each other ended up being a conflict which burned down cities. It was a conflict over the nature of Jesus' divinity. And so it made me wonder why do religious matters become, how do they become linked with social conflict and how do they become so destructive and so violent? So after I wrote that book... By the way, how immediately relevant in these weeks and months... Yeah, I'm afraid so. I'm afraid so. With the new war in Israel and Palestine, it's terrible, but so much religious underpinning to this. Absolutely. We need to get back to that because what happens in this book in Aristotle's Children is that really what I expected to be another war story turns out in a way to be a kind of peace story. When I started writing the book, I was interested in the fact that... As you know, the works of Aristotle, which had been lost to Western Europe, most of them had been lost to Western Europe for a long, long time after the collapse of the Roman civilization and the so-called Dark Ages. Aristotle's work were rediscovered in Spain when the Christian knights and Christian rulers went into Spain to take Spain back from the Arabs, and the Muslims, who had controlled it for 400 years, they discovered not a backward civilization, but a civilization in many ways more advanced than their own, in which, among other things, the Muslims had translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and not only the works of Aristotle, but of other Greek geniuses, like the Galen, the founder of medicine and Archimedes, the founder of engineering and all of that. Well, Aristotle was one, but for Christians or for people interested in good and evil and how to live and also people who were becoming interested again in nature during the hard years in Europe, the years of foreign invasions and poverty and all of that, there was not a great deal of interest in nature, but interest in nature revived in connection with developments that were transforming Europe, increasing agricultural production, increasing population, creating cities, creating universities, kind of revival of culture in Europe in the 11th and 12th and 13th centuries, which some people call the medieval Renaissance. Well, what happened was when the Christians went into Spain and they found all of this stuff, Aristotle's writings on nature, Aristotle's philosophies, Aristotle's ethics, Aristotle's writings on the soul and the rest. It's been called the most revolutionary intellectual discovery in Western history and it probably was. It's an amazing moment and let's take a pause here just for one moment to give listeners a sense of the chronology of all of this just so that they have the background. If I could be very quick in this and please jump in at any moment. Just to say that Aristotle lived in the fourth century, BC in ancient Greece. He was of course the student of Plato who was the student of Socrates and Aristotle's great works were especially between 350 BC and his death in 323 BC, I believe it is, or 324. But in any event, this great, great genius, I would say perhaps the greatest of all geniuses of the Western world, wrote it towards the end of the fourth century BC and together with the Platonic influence and other Greek schools of thought, the Stoics and the Epicureans and others had a profound and lasting influence on Western civilization including not only the Greek era but then the Hellenistic era that followed with Alexander the Great and then the Roman period, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Then very quickly when as Christianity rose and the Western Roman Empire fell, that was a kind of double whammy to Greek thought because Christian theologians were skeptical or radically antagonistic in many cases to pagan philosophy and pagan knowledge and the Roman era which had embodied the Greek intellectual thought had disappeared in the West. And so as you said, Aristotle's texts disappeared from the Western Mediterranean region, survived in the Eastern Roman Empire and much of which was then conquered by the new Muslim rulers and the Muslim rulers were extremely interested in Greek knowledge. They wanted to suck up all the knowledge they could find from ancient Greece and Rome but India and elsewhere and so some of the greatest learning was in the golden age of Islamic philosophy and Islamic thought in Baghdad in other centers of Arab scholarship in ancient Cairo, Faustat in the Medieval times and in Spain under the Caliphates, the Umayyad Caliphates of the Muslim conquerors. Then as you said, a reconquest took place over several centuries in which Spain was returned, one could say, to the Christian rule that had been the case of the Roman period before the conquest by the Arab and Islamic rulers and you pick up the story there. As you say, all of a sudden this unbelievable wisdom in the form of Arabic translations of ancient Greece, it's like discovering the world's greatest library suddenly that they had no idea existed in Western Europe and that's where this incredible story of yours takes off. Yeah, good. Thank you, Jeff. That's a perfectly wonderful summary of the history that leads up to this and you mentioned that Christian thinkers, early Christian thinkers would consider this kind of thing pagan philosophy and they would be suspicious of it and were suspicious of it for lots of reasons. So I knew that before I started doing this research and so really what I expected to find was a kind of old time battle between fundamentalists and modernists or the equivalent. I expected to find the Christian dogmatists resisting Aristotle and the Aristotelians being kind of like, oh, I don't know, intellectually I guess I'm a child of the 60s. So in my book I talk about Peter Abelard who was a great teacher at the University of Paris who was a kind of rock star, almost like a 60s character in some ways. And really I expected to find a great battle between the kind of Christian fundamentalists and the Aristotelian modernists and then I was very surprised to discover that that's not really what happened at all, that at the beginning that's what happened. The Christians go into the great Muslim cities of Andalus, of Spain, which I have to say in some ways, I'm really tempted to recommend another book to people who are listening to this. There's a book by a woman who died recently unfortunately named Maria Rosa Menacal called The Ornament of the World and it's about this Spanish civilization that was really in some ways, you don't want to sentimentalize it and exaggerate things, but it was a magnificent civilization in some ways. You were just in Cordoba, in Sevilla, in Coledo, unbelievable beauty. It is and it was a place where the Arab rulers had learned to tolerate, even more than tolerate, even to encourage a kind of cultural diversity. It wasn't problem free, but especially comparing that with what happened in Europe later on, it was a golden age where Christians and Jews and Muslims and all kinds of ethnic groups as well could live together in peace and discuss things with each other. At any rate, this kind of collaboration made possible the translation of the works of Aristotle from Arabic. They had already been translated into Arabic in other places in the Arab Empire, but now the question was how they were going to get translated into Latin. You had a situation in which you had Jewish, Arab and Christian scholars working together to translate these works from Arabic into Castilian and then from Castilian into Latin. Anyway, it's a really wonderful story. One can actually see in Toledo, the place where this large translation factory was underway. Then you have a kind of historical contingency, you have luck. As luck would have it, all of this was happening when Europe had reached a point that new ideas like this were going to spread and spread very rapidly. These books, of course, there was no printing press yet. They had to be copied by monks, but they copied thousands of them and spread them all over Europe. As you said before, the initial reaction on the part of the European Christians was negative. Let's say why. The initial reaction was negative, not only because Aristotle was a Greek, was a pagan, but because of certain things that he believed, but also in some ways even more because of his attitude. The things that he believed that were controversial to Christians were things like the eternity of the universe. Aristotle thought probably with the unit, every effect is the result of a cause, he said. Therefore, if every effect is the result of a cause, you can have an infinite chain of causes and effects. When I say that every effect has a cause that's one of the fundamental doctrines of Aristotelianism, then I'm also pointing at something else. Aristotle was such an interesting guy. He was, in one way, one of the first empirical scientists. He was particularly interested in biology and living in Greece and stuff. He was interested especially in sea life and he was interested in plant life. With incredible powers of observation and also dissection of the animals and plants and embryology is stunning. That's right. The first thing to think about just being an Aristotelian characteristic is this kind of concentration, this kind of focus on the natural world and really wanting to observe, really wanting to see what was going on there. For example, if you're looking at something in the natural world, is that just one thing or is it composed of parts? If so, what are the parts? How do the parts relate to each other? That sort of thing. When I say that there is some resistance to this sort of thing on the part of Christians, what I'm getting at is in Europe for centuries where your main job is to survive and where life is really very tough and you manage to survive and you seek consolation for this really short, brutish etc. life in thinking about the life to come. The old saying, man is born, suffers and dies and so what you're thinking about is how can I live a relatively controlled and a somewhat decent life as long as I've got the life, but how can I die well and go to heaven? That sort of otherworldly cast of thought which really lasted for a long, long time in Europe is challenged by people who say, wait a minute, look at this fish. How can it breathe underwater? For really a long time, I think the attitude in Europe was, who cares? We're worried about how we're going to make it till tomorrow with the Vikings invading and everything else that's going on. So Aristotle's attitude is one of intense interest in the natural world coupled with a feeling that we belong here, that the natural world is our home and that we have some relationship. We're natural too. We have some relationship to nature and this is where Aristotle disagreed with his great teacher Plato because Plato was always talking about how what we see in the world isn't really real. What's really real are the ideas that stand behind all of this, the principles. So Aristotle had a complicated relationship with Plato who was his teacher but his emphasis was always on, no, we belong here, we need to figure out what our relationship with nature is and there's also another implication in this, we can be happy here. Not only is this our home but it's a place where if we handle ourselves reasonably and correctly and with some sensitivity to other people's needs, we can be happy. And just to add for people to take a look at one of the most wondrous works of art, the fresco by Raphael in the Vatican of the School of Athens because of the center of that great picture which is actually the cover of your book I'm just realizing again. Plato pointing upward and Aristotle with his hands forward, Plato saying, it's the ideal world and Aristotle saying, no, we remain down on earth. And interestingly, Plato carrying one of his dialogues, the Timaeus and Aristotle carrying the ethics under his arm. So it's an absolutely wonderful, fantastic picture but the wonderful cover of your book. So it is Aristotle down to earth. And so what happens when this reaches Paris, these new ideas of the practicalities, the happiness, the groundedness of Aristotelian thought? Well, what happens is so interesting because it's an illustration really of the impossibility of legislating ideas or the impossibility of limiting ideas. I think sometimes these days, especially we assume the efficiency of totalitarianism or the possibility of, we're very aware that some people have, a few people have a lot of power and many people don't have very much power. And sometimes I think we can get pessimistic about that thinking, well, the people with power are going to tell us what to think and how to think. But what happens in Paris is that the church initially, the Bishop of Paris, initially says you're not allowed to read this. Aristotelian stuff is dangerous because not only because of the attitude questions that we just mentioned, but because he's teaching things that are so logical that if there are things that we believe that aren't so logical or that don't seem that probable in a naturalistic sense, reading Aristotle and believing what he, adopting his views on things can undermine some basic Christian beliefs. Like a belief in the resurrection of dead people, for example. Aristotle's view is once you're dead, you're dead. And so how can anybody be resurrected? That might become a question. And all sorts of other beliefs that also might be questionable. So the Bishops say you can't read this stuff and everybody reads it anyway. I mean, that's what happens is people are so interested that the whole culture is kind of coming alive and people want to see, well, what does Aristotle say and then they want to talk about it? And what's interesting, and you mentioned it and just to underscore, this is the moment of the birth of European universities. Bologna has come first at the very end of the 11th century but University of Paris soon after and other universities. So there actually are people reading. There are students, there are student groups that are organized. In fact, these early universities generally were kind of pickup institutions where groups of students would come together and find someone to teach them. So this was like reading clubs in a way. Exactly. We found some really interesting juicy stuff we want to read. We're going to talk about it. Right. So that's exactly what happens and there are students. The universities are, say, the University of Paris is in Paris. Oxford is in Oxford, England. But the students of these universities are from all over Europe too. They come from all over the place and they live in communities, in ethnic communities that are known as nations. And just as you say, they favor some teachers get big crowds. Other teachers don't get big crowds to find something else to do. Well, the interesting thing that happens then is that since two things are happening, one is generally the students want to read and talk about Aristotle. And they're not interested in talking about Aristotle. I'm thinking about the 60s again. We were interested in reading Marx because we wanted to understand what was going on in Vietnam and other places and we thought that would help. But also we wanted to make trouble. Good trouble. Good trouble. It was kind of a rebellious act. That really was not what was going on when the Aristotelians... Let me say this is kind of complicated, but mostly students were not interested in Aristotle because they were out of love with Christianity. They weren't interested even necessarily in reforming Christianity. They were interested in Aristotle, one, because they had become interested in nature and in life and in our potential to understand things. The Great Revolution was a revolution of confidence in our ability to understand, to make sense of things. And so for a long time that had been a whole suspect activity. And that is indeed what's so wonderful about reading Aristotle 2,300 years later. How logical, how systematic, how rational, how balanced, how judicious. It's an amazing thing. One of the things about Aristotle also is that he always starts an analysis of any subject with the best received opinion, a method that he called endoksa, which is what are the knowledgeable people say about this topic. And it's exactly the method till today that we use in a scientific paper where the first section of the paper is what is said about this topic. And so Aristotle started that. It's compelling because you're up to date on this range of issues. And then he goes into, well, here's how to think about this. Yeah, I thought of that too, you know, when I was in law school and we were taught in law school if you're going to write a brief, what you've got to do is not only make your arguments, you make the arguments for the other side. You anticipate what the other side is going to say and answer those arguments. And if you don't do that, you don't have a good brief. Well, Aristotle did that. And that became under Catholic leadership in Europe that became part of the scholastic method. Exactly, Aquinas' method. What are the three objections to this? Exactly, exactly. So what I was going to say was that these students are not just being rebellious when they read Aristotle. They want to understand, but also their faith tells them that God created everything. God created the universe. And whatever the universe contains, we're discovering God. It's a way of discovering God. And there can't really be any fundamental conflict in what science discovers and what God did. Because the last thing that any of them wanted to do was to be involved in a heresy called the double truth, where you would say, well, science says this, but religion says that, and they're opposite, that's true. No, they said that's right. And St. Thomas Aquinas' primary method and article of faith in a way was that there can't be any fundamental conflict between the religion as he understood it and science as he understood it. Right, and we hear that actually from Pope Francis today. Faith and reason? Of course, how could there be any conflict? So the image that we have in much of our discussion that there's this pitched battle between science and religion or between faith and reason for these receivers of Aristotle, these students and these great scholars that you talk about, was, no, science is revealing God's work and God's plan. It's the same. It's another way to read the book, the divine book. Exactly. And of course, let me give two illustrations of this, kind of two sides of this. One is, sometimes I think if I could go to any school, be in any classroom at any time, where would I might like to be? I went to Harvard like Jeff did, which is a wonderful place to study. But I think if I could study any place, one place I'd like to be in Peter Abelard's class. That was pretty wild. That's one. So I'll give you an illustration of what Abelard did. This was Christians using Aristotle to challenge certain Christian doctrines, but not the fundamentals of faith. And when I say challenge, I mean challenge and restate. Reform, if you like. Intellectually reform. Christian doctrines. So one of Abelard's famous lectures is where he asks the question, he always starts with a question, and he asks the question, did the Jews sin in killing Christ? He takes the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, which lay a lot of blame on the Jews. Not the Jews generally, by the way, but Jewish leadership. And he says, well, that was, of course, that was deicide. That's sinful. And that, as you know, became one of the basis for anti-Semitism in Europe for centuries and centuries was the charge of deicide that the Jews had killed Christ. So Abelard says, it all depends what you think sin is. And the question is, the question that he asked to make a long story short is if you don't think he's God, if you don't think he's the Son of God, can you be guilty of deicide? And the answer is no, not if sin is a matter of intention. If the primary factor in making a sin-sin is that you do something knowing it's wrong, which, by the way, was St. Augustine's definition of sin. Sin, Augustine does a chapter in his Confessions where he talks about eating the pears on a pear tree, knowing he wasn't supposed to take those pears from the tree. And then it's not, you know, it starts out kind of a joke and then it becomes not a joke at all because he says, I want to do what I know I shouldn't. And that's the problem. And Abelard takes the same definition and he says if the Jews sincerely believe that Jesus was just a guy and not divine, they can't be guilty of deicide. Well, to some people may seem today like common sense. It was semi-revolutionary in Paris. He didn't get immediately into trouble over that. He got into trouble over trying to explain the trinity in rationalistic terms. But it was a spectacular class and when the class was over all of the commentators say the students went out in the streets and continued the discussion. And the point was, let's talk about it. There's nothing we can't talk about. But I think actually if I could go back to Paris and be around in those centuries, I would want to be, I think I would want to be in the 1240s or 1250s at the University of Paris when St. Thomas was debating with St. Bonaventure. Tell us about that briefly. Well, that's where, you know, this is where Thomas believed that human reason was divinely given to us. Just let me pause for one moment to explain. Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the great saints of the Catholic Church till today, was a brilliant young Dominican scholar who became a student of Albert Magnus, who was one of the giants in the reception of Aristotle. Albert the Great, Albert Magnus, and his student was Thomas Aquinas, who arguably is the most important Christian philosopher, perhaps in history I would say, and certainly in the church today, the foundation of the Catholic Church's modern social teachings. And I wanted just to read one phrase from your book where the students mock the appearance of Thomas Aquinas. He's a big, lumbering guy, and they call him like a dumb ox. And Albert Magnus is said to have turned firmly on the students to have rounded on them saying, you call him a dumb ox. I tell you, this dumb ox shall bellow so loud that his bellowings will fill the world. It's incredible because he did fill the world. So back to your classroom with Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, he's so... Anyway, it would have been something to hear him lecture. Thomas believed deeply that that reason was God's greatest gift to us. A belief, by the way, which at the end of his life he also questioned. Anyway, I'll get to that in a second. In the classroom and in debates with his fellow monks and his fellows and with the students, Thomas was passionately involved in trying to reconcile what we would now call science and religion. Remembering that Aristotle didn't make that distinction at all, that when Aristotle talked about the world, his philosophy included much of what we would call now biology and psychology, but also it included ethics and included philosophy. He was not a specialist, right? This is before the kind of separation of these disciplines, which has proved to us in some ways very advantageous and in other ways a curse. But of course Aristotle had to invent these disciplines first, which is amazing to me because almost everything you wrote was the first great text on a particular subject. That's true. So Thomas was an Aristotelian, and what that meant for him was that if you could, you would look at nature and you would try to understand nature, and there was no problem as far as he was concerned with believing that nature operated according to certain chains of cause and effect that were totally natural, but that you could trace the origins of all of this back to God, that God had put into effect a system in which causes produced effects in an explicable way, in a rational way. And rational to Thomas didn't just mean something that was going on in our minds, it meant something that was going on in the universe. So when he was affirming that there was a divine source for all of this, he was also affirming that the universe was in some ways intelligent and intelligible. So this produced a few problems. One problem was, how could you explain Christ? How could you explain God becoming man and dying for the sins of humankind? How could you explain that things were created out of nothing, creation next nihilo? A couple of items like this. And his answer was there are a few things you can't explain rationally. There are some things which have to be accepted on faith, as Thomas said, but very few. The existence of God himself, Thomas thought, could be proved rationally. According to a kind of Aristotelian idea that there had to be a first mover, a prime mover. Exactly. And then when it came to other things like, was the universe eternal or was the universe, was there a big bang? Was the universe created somehow out of nothing? Thomas got himself into some trouble with people. I mean, he was considered erratically. He became the thinker of the church, the St. Thomas. But before that, he was considered dangerous. Yes, exactly. And one of the things that made him dangerous was, he said, well, you can't really prove logically that the universe was created. Whether the universe is eternal or not is something that you can't really prove one way or the other. One of the things, Richard, that as I was reading it, first the debates and then the fights over whether you could teach Aquinas or not, whether he would lecture what writings were allowed. And then most importantly, who would be hired next? A Dominican or a Franciscan. What overwhelmed me in reading your text was that this is like curing in on a... A faculty meeting. Pure faculty meeting from the year 1280. And it's exactly the same as the faculty meetings that we have until today. That's true. It's true. It's just a wonderful gossip also. And they're fighting with each other and fighting over tenure positions. And who's going to come next? And it's exactly what you expect and want of a university. So anyway, what happens is you have a period of time in which science and religion have kind of learned to live together. And when I say... And you might ask, for one thing, it doesn't last forever. Thomas himself at the end of his life decides not to write anymore because he has a religious experience. There are some accounts of that experience. Some are fairly strange. I mean, interesting accounts. People were claimed to have seen St. Thomas kind of floating in the air and so on. But anyway, he had... He said he had discovered things that he couldn't talk about. And he eventually retired to Sicily. He'd come from Sicily at the time when that was the cultural center of the world, Sicily. Kingdom of the two Sicilies came from around Naples. But it was called the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. He retired there and he eventually died. Just to mention, by the way, for the listeners, this is the 750th anniversary exactly in 2024 on March 7, he died on his way, actually, to what was going to be an attempt to bridge the schism that had developed in the church between the Western Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. And he died in a monastery, Fasanova, on March 12, 74. So we're at the 750th anniversary, exactly now, just a very poignant moment in a poignant time. But please, back to you. Well, no, that's interesting. Thank you for that. You reminded me of that. Thank you. So the other thing that happens is that the Aristotelian movement has produced various great characters like Peter Avalard and Thomas. But it doesn't stop there. It then produces people you might call left Thomas or maybe anti-Thomas, post-modern Thomas, in which, in particular, two figures who I write about in the book, and I won't bother, we won't talk in detail about them now, but Don Skotis and William of Ockham are brilliant Aristotelians who kind of start to turn in some ways Aristotle's own methods against him. So I have to say that two things are happening at the end of the 13th century, around the time Thomas dies. You have Christian philosophers, like the ones I just mentioned, especially Ockham, who start saying things like, look, you can't say that God is, God is causing all of the things that happen on earth, all of this natural law which Thomas is believed so deeply in, both in terms of human law and justice and also in terms of scientific law, he believed in law was natural and law was from God. And William of Ockham and others are saying, but wait a minute, God can do anything he likes. And the absolute power of God and the sovereignty of God means that all of this could change anytime. And that everything is provisional. Yes, the natural laws are natural laws, but you can't, if they're laws of God, then they're always going to be the same. And also you know them in a very absolute kind of way. But we're here to tell you, Ockham says, I'm here to tell you that all of these things are provisional, they've changed before, they can change again. And he started when you read Ockham, you start to, you feel like you're reading someone more modern in some ways than Thomas because, and this is kind of opening the door to scientific relativism. And doubt everywhere. Skepticism. And David Hume centuries later saying, just because the sun rises in the east every day, can you be sure that it will the next day? Exactly, exactly. So, but the other thing which is a mindblower is that while all of this philosophical and religious talk is going on in the University of Paris, you know what's happening to the University of Paris? The faculty is inventing physics. And people like John Buridan, Aresmi and others are, they are doing experiments and theorizing about things like motion. In which they're questioning Aristotle and they're doing it in a way which Aristotle himself would have approved of. They're saying, wait a minute, Aristotle says things are, if you toss something in the air, it continues to move through the air for at least for a while because the air behind it is displaced and stuff. And there's, you look for a natural, you know, for something in the air, an ether or something which is pushing the object which allows the object to continue going. So you have these, the scientists, the University of, the theologians, they're all theologians at the University of Paris saying, no, but wait a minute, we've done various experiments and we're not finding any evidence that air is being displaced or any kind of objects that are moved. In fact, you can spin a top and you can see there's no displacement of air there. And so let's be scientific like Aristotle was. And let's realize if you, once you throw a thing into the air, it's going to continue to move for a while because you threw it. And we're going to call that impetus. And we're going to not only can we say that's what's happening, but we can measure it. We can multiply the volume of what's being thrown by the speed at which it's being thrown. And this is happening 300 years before Galileo. So before Galileo gets into his big fight with the church over whether the sun is at the center of the universe or the earth is at the center of the universe, you have guys at the University of Paris saying, you know, the earth might be, the earth might be at the center of the universe because there's no way you can prove because whatever you think about motion depends on where you are, where you're doing the observation. That insight then gets proved if you like by Galileo, but the reason I'm mentioning this is because we're so often we think about science versus religion or science versus the church. Galileo fights this heroic fight and actually he's forced to recant after a while. And so we kind of think of the reason and faith as always being an opposition. But these principles of physics were discovered at the University of Paris when it was under Catholic control and where everybody was in the church. And we could, by the way, jump forward and remember that modern genetics was invented by a monk by Gregor Mendel and there are countless examples of exactly that. The interplay of religion and scientific advancement is very complex and often deeply synergistic. I'm sorry that I would love to continue for hours with you, but we're coming close to the end of the time. I wanted to jump several centuries to the present and just on two points. This advancement, as you say, turning Aristotle on its head, introducing skepticism, led to a kind of antagonism to Aristotle as an enemy of science for some centuries, which is one of the weirdest and most unfair judgments because Aristotle would have been the first to love these new observations. I'm absolutely sure. I just wanted your quick take on that. And then second, I want to come back to Thomas Aquinas and our current world. But first, just on this quick turn against Aristotle by early modern science, which I always found a little sad, a little peculiar. Maybe you can understand from a polemics point of view, but it never seemed fair to me to Aristotle himself. Well, you know, and it wasn't. I mean, in the first place, where it was fair was that some people who were... who called themselves Aristotelians had become dogmatists. And they were so interested in protecting Aristotle or preserving some of the things that some of his principles that they were willing to do that even though all the evidence was that the principles were wrong. Aristotle had said that the heavenly bodies were all perfect spheres and even conscious. And they even had consciousness. And Galileo turned his telescope, his brand new telescope, on the moon and saw pock marks on the moon and saw other things. And said, well, this is not the kind of heavenly body that Aristotle was talking about, there it is, it's on the telescope. So some Aristotelians, people calling themselves Aristotelians, said there must be something wrong with your telescope because Aristotle can't lie. So they had become anti, in a way, anti-Aristotelians. I mean, they had done what we, you know, we so often see in philosophy and political philosophy and especially people becoming dogmatic proponents of some doctrine which has just been proved to be wrong. And that gave Aristotle a bad name but there was something more important than that going on and that is that Aristotle, Aristotle's association with the church but also his association with an attempt to harmonize science and ethics had fallen out of favor with a new generation of renaissance thinkers who call themselves realists. Well, they either call themselves realists or they call, or Protestants. And the realists said, there's nothing but power. Politics is power. Don't bother us with ethics. You know, so... Thomas Hobbes. So Thomas Hobbes says, if you're talking about moral law, Thomas Hobbes says, that's a metaphor. There's only one law. That's the law of the state. And if you're talking about moral law or any other kind of law, all you're doing is poetry but has nothing to do with the real world. So that vicious doctrine, we're still laboring under that vicious doctrine. I mean, some of my best friends are realists. I mean, I know a couple of really good realists. But goodness, that was a disaster. That Hobbesian separation of ethics and politics was a disaster. So that was one. Then you have Martin Luther was a whole other story. Then you have Martin Luther saying, I hate Aristotle. And because you're saved by faith alone. And we don't need all this. Let the people who want to do reason stuff go off in their corner and do it. But we're into his particular brand of Protestantism, which, by the way, many Protestants have grown away from. But that's a whole other story. So Aristotle had a bad reputation, both from the part of the realists and on the part of the Lutherans. Let us come quickly to the present. Thank you for the generosity of your time and all of these wonderful insights. Aquinas after falling out for some time and Aristotle after having fallen out for some time was brought back to the very center of the church in the end of the 19th century by Pope Leo XIII, who started what is now 135 years of encyclicals called modern Catholic social teachings, starting with the Rerum Navarum in 1891 and based very much on Aquinas and with a lot of Aristotle mixed in. And I want to say that what I find extremely exciting and gratifying about that body of knowledge and philosophy is that it brings ethics back into the core of our discussion and the idea that human reason actually can find a way to peace as well. That reason can be something to help better lives on earth. And I want to say we've come to the end of the time but you have played a magnificent role and play a magnificent role in that idea. So not only are you a wonderful historian, Richard, but you're a great moralist in the best sense of saying we can do better and we can resolve conflicts. We can deal with each other. We can have good academic battles, no doubt, but they don't have to turn violent. They can be creative battles. I want to end by paying tribute to all of your work and leadership and conflict resolution. Let's look for another chance to talk about some of that because many, many things to discuss and many things to learn. But we've had more than our normal hour on the book club. I'm sure everybody is listening with wrap, the attention and gratitude to you. We've been discussing Aristotle's children by Professor Richard Rubenstein and it's a fabulous book, but you could feel from this discussion it gives you, it's like swimming in the 2,300 years of Western thought and it's an absolute joy. So let me thank you so much, Richard, for being with us today and I'm sure that people all over the world are going to be grabbing their copies of this book and many others of yours with the absolute delight and a huge benefit. Thank you so much, Chef. I really enjoy being here and talking with you. I always enjoy talking with you. Thanks a million. We'll be together again soon. Thank you.