Ancient and Mediaeval Science 31 



aeval science should be as well acquainted with Arabic as possible; 

 Arabic is as necessary for him as Greek for the student of antiquity .^^ 

 Mediaeval science and philosophy were written primarily in four lan- 

 guages, Greek, Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, all of which are important, but 

 none more so ( at least before the thirteenth century ) than Arabic. 



The Latin writers of the West had been weaned from the Greek 

 sources, because Europe was cut in two by a wall separating the Catho- 

 lic world from the Orthodox. The Latins had drifted away from 

 the Greeks since the fifth century, and the separation was already com- 

 plete and unhealable three centuries later. Their distrust of Greek 

 Christianity was superimposed upon their distrust of Greek paganism; 

 their knowledge of Greek almost vanished and thus they lost all points 

 of contact with the main fountain of science. Instead of being able 

 to continue the work of the ancients and to start from where the latter 

 had left, they had to start as it were from the beginning. That would 

 have been too heavy a task for them, even if they had had more aptitude 

 for scientific study than they had. They had to do again the Greek work 

 without the Greek genius. 



It is one of the paradoxes of history that the abyss cloven between 

 the two halves of Christendom was bridged by the Asiatic representa- 

 tives of another faith, speaking an alien language absolutely unrelated 

 to their own. The Latins would not read Greek, the language of the 

 Orthodox church, but they were finally obliged to read Arabic, the 

 language of Islam. This evolution required some time though less than 

 one would imagine. By the end of the eighth century the Mediterra- 

 nean Sea had become a Muslim lake and Carolingian power and culture 

 were withdrawing northward. At that time, we should remember, 

 Arabic science had not yet blossomed. Its golden age lasted some three 

 centuries, from the ninth to the eleventh century, and it was only 

 toward the end of that period ( a little earlier in Spain ) that the Latins 

 became aware of the importance of Arabic science. They were fully 

 aware of course of the material power of Islam, though it took two or 

 three centuries of crusades to convince them of their own military in- 

 feriority. A nun of Gandersheim (in the duchy of Brunswick), Hros- 

 viTHA (X-2) spoke of Cordova as the ornament of the world.^- 



To appreciate Arabic culture in general was one thing, an easy one, 

 unless one was blinded by religious hatred; to appreciate Arabic science 

 was another, far less obvious, far more diflBcult. Even as the early 



^ The comparison is apposite because the duty is of the same order in both 

 cases, and its limitations are similar. We don't expect the historian of science to 

 be able, let us say, to edit a Greek (or Arabic) text from the MSS; that is a task 

 for the philologist and the edition of a single text may engross the latter's energy for 

 years; but the historian should be able to read those texts or to refer to their main 

 technical points, otherwise he could not properly discuss those points. Some his- 

 torians of science have edited scientific texts, e.g., Tannery, Greek ones, Julius 

 RusKA, Henry Ernest Stapleton, Eric John Holmyard, and Carra da Vaux, 

 Arabic ones. 



^''Decus orbis, in her Passio sancti Pelagii (1.12). Karolus Strecker: 

 Hrotsvithae Opera (p. 54, Leipzig 1930). 



