Episode Details

For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empire that fed Christians to the lions; and the philosophers’ claim that truth is reached by the unaided mind looked to the faithful like the rival of revelation itself. Tertullian had asked it bluntly: what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

This is the story of the braiding — of how the lost works of Aristotle were saved for the West by the scholars of Islam and Israel, came flooding back through the translators of Toledo, and nearly tore the faith apart, until the largest mind of the Middle Ages set out to prove they belonged to Christ. A silent friar his classmates mocked as the Dumb Ox, Thomas Aquinas wedded reason and revelation into one vision and drew from it the idea that would one day shake thrones: that there is a law above every king, and an unjust law is no law at all. Seven centuries later it would echo from Jefferson’s pen and a Birmingham jail. Three pillars become one temple — resting on a single claim that must now be put on trial.