In the early days of the University of Paris, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a cloud came up from Spain threatening the very fiber of Christianity. This cloud had a broad dark center of Greek pagan thought. The fleece around its edges was Arabic, for the thinkers and intellectuals who brought this cloud to Western Europe were Moslem Arabs (with names like Averroes and Avicenna). Some of them were even Jewish thinkers - somewhat surprising, since so much of Greek thought was so different from the Bible. The Greeks, for instance, spoke of God as the first cause and the first mover of all things but they never spoke of a God who walked with Adam in the cool of the evening or who called to Moses out of a burning bush.

This cloud of pagan thought rained down reason on the human spirit.…