Fermat

The real issue with Ha-Joon Chang’s FT op-ed last week isn’t his economics—it’s the cartoonish caricature of Catholic theology in the Middle Ages, straight out of an outdated high school textbook or a bad History Channel doc. The 12th and 13th centuries were among the most creative and intellectually rich in Western thought, including philosophy and theology. Just to name a few great Catholic theologians of the time: Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Albertus Magnus, Anthony of Padua, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Duns Scotus. These thinkers have shaped the Western perspective on reason, language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, the mind, mysticism, and politics to this day. Reading Aquinas—by far the deepest and most influential of them all—is breathtaking. His Latin wasn’t elegant, but his mind was. If he were alive today, he’d publish two Econometricas a year. And yes, his theology triumphed because it was better argued, despite strong resistance from entrenched interests at the University of Paris. Dismissing all this as “backward” is just absolute ignorance, pure and simple. A gentle but very well-written introduction to all this is The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. Read also, for a fantastic, easy narrative, Medieval Philosophy: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, Volume 4, by Peter Adamson.