Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives

About the Book

Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives shows that the historical origins of Western science lie in the medieval synthesis of Greek science and philosophy with the faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This synthesis is most evident in medieval medicine where the synergies of Greek philosophy and Greek science are most evident within the monotheistic faith traditions. The first such Western synthesis of medieval medicine took place in the eleventh cenury at the monastery of Monte Cassino when Constantine the African translated, for the first time, Arabic medical manuscripts into Latin. These manuscripts became the core of the first medical curriculum in the West called the Articella. Other translations of Arabic science continued over the next century forming the basis for the medieval scientific curriculum in Astronomy, Chemistry, Surgery and Pharmacology. In the Golden Age of Islamic culture found in the Eastern and Western Caliphates centered in Baghdad and Cordoba, during the ninth and tenth centuries, we find a great flowering of scientic studies and a synthesis occurring of Greek, Syriac and Arabic scientific insights and methods of understanding the rational implications of both faith and science. This harmony of the three pillars of medieval society, faith, philosophy and science, continued well into the medieval era in both the Islamic and Christian worlds and continued to be the case in many areas of science until the Renaissance era in Western Europe. This book was written jointly by Christian and Islamic philosophers; it shows that Christianity and Islam played a key role in bridging the world of Greek philosophy and science with the Western intellectual tradition developed in the medieval universities and laying the foundation for the great scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeetnth centuries.

About the Author

Gerald Grudzen, PhD has earned graduate Theology degrees (M.Div. and M.Th.) from Maryknoll Seminary in New York and completed his PhD in History and Religious Studies from Columbia University with a specialization in Islamic medical philosophy and its impact on the first medical curriculum in the West. Grudzen’s study of this topic will be published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2007 as Medial Theories about the Body and Soul in the Middle Ages: The First Western Medical Curriculum at Monte Cassino. Grudzen also has recently published a study of the social justice thought of Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King in Across the Rim of Chaos.

Grudzen received a Templeton award for the development of a religion and science curriculum drawing from Christian and Islamic Sources in conjunction with Doctor Shamsur Rahman of Southern University in Bangladesh. Grudzen and Rahman also were able to work together on this project at Oxford University under the direction of John Brooke, Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Religion and Science at Oxford University. Grudzen and Rahman then collaborated in the writing of this text, Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judaeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives.

Grudzen teaches Philosophy and Comparative Religion for San Jose City College and the University of Phoenix in Northern California and online graduate courses in the History of Christianity and Religion and Science for Global Ministries University and serves as Dean of the Master of Theology program.

Grudzen and Rahman are co-chairs of a Spirituality Science project focusing on Health and Healing to be convened in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the first week of January, 2008. Representatives from multiple faith traditions are planning to attend from Europe, the USA and Bangladesh along with medical representatives from Turkey and Thailand as well as Bangladesh.