From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the
eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the
"Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for
the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great
thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were
pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by
encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia,
and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how
writers--philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as
Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and
Ricci--tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set
its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important
early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians
such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later
thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored
the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired
Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of
scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain
faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists
such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne
developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. A
sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter
in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a
new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the
classical and the modern world.
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