With many regards to. (Tart!)
The popular perception of the Dark Ages is wrong. That’s the message of Nancy Marie Brown’s “The Abacus and the Cross” (Basic Books), which tells the story of Gerbert of Aurillac (d. 1003), a monk who rose from humble beginnings to become Pope Sylvester II, and came to personify the union between science and religion that was in evidence a thousand years ago. “In his day, the earth was not [believed to be] flat. People were not terrified that the world would end at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 999. Christians did not believe Muslims and Jews were the devil’s spawn. [And] the Church was not anti-science—just the reverse,” writes Brown.
But in today’s world—in which religion and science are seen as being at odds with one another, it’s a challenge to orient oneself to the idea that the Church was a champion of learning. In the following Failure Interview, Brown introduces us to the so-called “Scientist Pope,” and explains why our beliefs about the Dark Ages are misguided.
photo { Michel Delsol }
