An Archive of poems I have written |
An engagement with Greek Philosophy as if it were a single person In a world of naughty gods Witchcraft, amulets, and potions The philosopher finds himself at odds With mainstream notions He sits on his big chair thinks on what he has seen Sees a world where It is not as it seems There must be a perfect pattern Underneath the chaotic changing Moons and planets that turn In perfect circles earth-orbiting We need to categorize all there is In geometric forms that bring All reality into what is Our answer for everything And when we have found the truths Even God must obey our rules Let no detail spoken by youths Overthrow our system and its tools So let us talk and then talk some more Build perfect cities of the mind Philosopher kings shall recite our lore To soldiers, slaves, and the blind Do not bother me with details Like my perfect cures do not work My theories have been weighed on scales Of pure reason not guesswork The 1277-Condemnation ▼ Arguably the Greek mindset that had crippled scientific observation by limiting what it could see to Aristotelian categories and had fossilized theology into Platonic forms broke when on March 7, 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, with the support of the pope, forbade the teaching of 219 philosophical and theological theses of such nonsense that presumed to tell God what He could or could not do. However by the time of the Black Death just a century later this mindset had still not been purged in the responses to the plague. Galen and Hippocrates still trumped actual observations and free thought about what might be happening. Stephen Meyer in his brilliant book "The Return of the God Hypothesis" shows amongst a great many other things how the final liberation from the Greco-Roman mindset of the first Christian millennia and the recovery of the doctrine of creation in the Reformation helped reopen the eyes of the Western European world and allow the birth of modern science. |