Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization by Efthymios Nicolaidis (review)

Recent discussions on the relation between religion and science in various historical contexts have mitigated an earlier view, influenced by Enlightenment anticlericalism, that this encounter was generally inimical. The volume under review offers Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodoxy as an example inviting further reflection on this problem. It also partly redresses the lack of any monograph on Byzantine science (pp. 197–202), generated by a widely shared perception that Byzantium was marginal to developments in world history and that the Byzantine legacy of the entire Orthodox world (Greek, Slavic, or other) is incompatible with and obstructive to modernity. Accordingly, researching the sciences among Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule meant measuring Greek progress toward modernity and eventually explaining what led to the creation of a modern Greek nation-state.

The Byzantine period (fourth to fifteenth century) is covered in approximately 100 pages, whereas another 100 are dedicated to subsequent developments among Greek-speaking orthodox Christians until the end of the twentieth century (geopolitically covering the Ottoman lands, Eastern and Western Europe, and Greece since its independence in 1830). Conceived and completed within four years (p. xii), this volume is admirably succinct. Its author, who acknowledges the difficulties generated by the dearth of existing research on the subject and the complexity of the issues involved, deserves gratitude for producing the only comprehensive reference available to scholars working both within and outside the fields it directly covers.

The volume focuses on the aspects of science where later developments led to the so-called scientific revolution: the constitution of the world as a physical entity and its function in astronomical terms, especially planetary motion. It implicitly assumes that the definition of science and its distinction from “pseudo-science” remained stable throughout the seventeen centuries it covers and was approximately the same as the modern one.

The author repeats ideas found in secondary literature instead of scrutinizing and reformulating them. As a result, the book reproduces earlier interpretations of Byzantine culture abandoned by Byzantinists and occasionally includes factual errors. For example, chapter 2 contrasts the spherical universe of a postulated Alexandrian school, derived from “Hellenic” sources and embraced by highbrow culture, with the flat universe of an Antiochian school based on “Asiatic” sources and propagated by monks and the lower clergy in “popular” texts such as lives of saints. This contrast is no longer tenable, especially since what the author describes as the “popular” and “primitive” angelology of the Antiochian school (p. 31) is, in fact, a key ingredient of a particularly highbrow medieval endeavor: the ninth-century translations of Greek material into Arabic by Hunayn b. Ishaq and his associates, who routinely rendered the ancient gods of the pagan texts as angels. This reflected a philosophical tradition embraced by both pagans and Christians in late antiquity and beyond: the derivation of cosmology from the allegorical interpretation of ancient mythology. The book’s negative assessment of Byzantine culture during iconoclasm (seventh–ninth centuries) ignores its positive reevaluation by recent scholarship. The account of Byzantine-Arab astrological exchanges during this period is muddled and inaccurate regarding the careers of the elusive Stephen (of Alexandria, Athens, and so forth) and Theophilos of Edessa (not a Greek Orthodox astrologer who immigrated from Byzantium to the caliphate, but a Syrian Christian born in Muslim lands and active at the court of caliph al-Mahdi). Two very distinct literary forms, hagiography and the Erotapokriseis (teaching manuals in question-and-answer form) are conflated (p. 54). Psellos is presented as a reader of predominantly “pagan” literature, which presumably led to a subsequent need for Emperor Alexios I to “re-Christianize” Byzantine education; this interpretation disregards Psellos’s extensive engagement with patristic literature and generally distorts the outlook of eleventh-century Byzantine education. The author states that, in the fourteenth century, Theodore Metochites “hoped to purify...