The Reopening of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman

The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
By Charles Freeman
Knopf 2023

For the many readers of Charles Freeman’s 2003 The Closing of the American Mind, the book was not only soberingly grim, the remorseless portrait of darkness encroaching on civilization, but also obviously begged for a sequel. Anybody watching the lights go out all over the Western world would have been all the more eager for the Enlightenment. 

Freeman’s new book, The Reopening of the Western Mind (substantially published as The Awakening the UK in 2020), almost gets us there. The apparently-requisite endless subtitle of the US edition is “The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment,” and this is just what readers get: a chapter-by-chapter march through the rise of Christianity as the religion of the West, about which Freeman can be gently sardonic. “Local Christianities were made more vibrant by their celebration of local saints,” he writes. “Holy men and women were always troubling to those around them and so it helped when they were safely dead.”

We get the spread of Christianity, the rise of humanism, the beginnings of systematic science, the flourishing of the printing press, and all the other landmarks that will be familiar to anybody who’s ever taken a 101 class in Western history. The book very much feels like a fleshed-out version of the notes for such a class: at every point, the consensus is nudged by never challenged, the exposition is brightened with many vivid character-sketches (about that prince of humanists, Erasmus, for instance, we’re told that he “marks a culmination of the intellectual currents … a distrust of scholasticism, a profound knowledge of both Latin, and by now, Greek, classics, and frustration with the corruption of the church hierarchy and the superstitions of the masses”), and the main points our laid out so clearly that ‘freshmen’ history-readers will feel welcome. Freeman writes that the book is “rooted in personal experience,” and it would be amazing if at least few of those roots didn’t find soil in a succession of classrooms.

And it’s a great thumping ornate thing, in the print-and-paper version from Knopf: heavy in the hand (as it bloody well should be at the whopping price of $50) and burstingly full of color plates. Lavish care has been taken to make the volume as pleasing to the eye as the contents are pleasing to the innate sense of optimism about the so-called arc of history. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.