“Apologetics, Christian or other, is always a risky enterprise,” the late Stanley L. Jaki once wrote. “Once caught in apologetic zeal, one can, especially if one is a historian, easily overshoot the target.” It was a characteristically shrewd insight, and one that might be applied to certain aspects of Jaki’s own remarkable career.
Those rules of argument became increasingly complex. Many, after several centuries, now seem almost banal: it is perhaps a testimony to the effectiveness and importance of the foundations laid down in the twelfth century that stages in argumentative processes which then had to be carefully thought through and elucidated are now taken for granted, with… Continue reading The Middle Ages … and Your Latest Laptop
