204 DESTINY DISRUPTED
serving as a vehicle for discussion and thought.^3 Nonetheless, their rever-
ence for books as artifacts meant that some churches and monasteries kept
books tucked away in basements and back rooms.
Then, in the twelfth century, Christian scholars visiting Muslim An-
dalusia stumbled across Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek
texts by thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato. Most of these works were gen-
erated in Toledo, where a bustling translation industry had developed.
From Toledo, the books filtered into western Europe proper, finding their
way at last into church and monastery libraries.
The Arabic works found in Andalusia included a great deal of com-
mentary by Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna to the Euro-
peans) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Their writings focused on reconciling
Greek philosophy with Muslim revelations. Christians took no interest in
that achievement, so they stripped away whatever Muslims had added to
Aristotle and the others and set to work exploring how Greek philosophy
could be reconciled with Christian revelations. Out of this struggle carne
the epic "scholastic" philosophies of thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus, and others. The Muslim connection to the ancient Greek
works was erased from European cultural memory.
European scholars began gravitating to monasteries that had libraries be-
cause the books were there. Then, would-be students began gravitating to
monasteries with libraries because the scholars were there. While pursuing
their studies, penniless scholars eked out a living teaching classes. Learning
communities formed around the monasteries and these ripened into Eu-
rope's first universities. One of the earliest emerged around Notre Dame
cathedral in Paris. Another very early learning community became the Uni-
versity of Naples. Then a university developed at Oxford, England. When a
fight broke out among the scholars there, the dissident group migrated to
Cambridge in a huff and started a learning community of its own.
The scholars in these proto universities carne to realize that most would-
be students didn't know enough to even begin studying, so they developed
a set of standard courses designed to get students ready to begin, courses in
rhetoric, grammar, logic, and arithmetic, for example, that were designed
to teach students merely how to read, write, and think. Students who suc-
cessfully completed this basic course were called baccalaureates, Latin for
"beginners"; now they could begin to learn some actual subject such as the-