Kosh

I for one never thought this. As has been pointed out, this is just a strawman, and I think most people realize that a large majority of the ancient world was full of ignorant and superstitous peoples. This is what made it so easy for Christianity to succeed!

Malachi151

Bede, this is the issue.

Was the average Joe on the street in Ancient Greece a scientifically minded rationalist philisopher? No, of course not. First of all, all of the ancient world was pretty divided along class lines, as is pretty much inevitable in any advanced unindustralized soceity. So, obviously when we talk about Greek philosophy we are talking about a level of discourse among some elite group of people, the people who had the time and resources to engange in discussion and speculation, and study, etc.

Among that rung of society, for a matter of some 500-700 years prior to the rise of Christianity, there was a relatively open system of speculation, investigation, and argumentation that was based on principles of logic and rationalism, that respected to some basic degree, the ability of people to persue explanations for how the world worked.

Even those this activity took place primarity among the upper class, this activity was not threatened by the lower classes in any direct way, and the superstitious sentements of the lower classes didn't pose any major roadblocks to the persuit of whatever knowledge or ideas that educated people wanted to persue, so the fact that the averge Joe wasn't a scholar or a rationalist philosopher didn't really matter, because the average Joe also didn't stand in the way of the persuit of knowledge and philosophy and explanations by those who wished to persue those ends.

Now, of course, everything was not all roses, we know of Socrates, etc., but overall, there was a lot of freedom to explore ideas, AND there was a sophistocated framework within which to work, i.e. logic, rationalism, and to a lesser extent empericism.

That environment continued to exist in a very healthy state into the 2nd century CE, it did then decline some in the 3rd century and was then UNDER ATTACK in the 4th and 5th centuries by Christians.

Now, I have provided over a dozen quotes, from at least 6 or 7 different sources, spanning about 400 years, that clearly show:

#1) Opposition to specific positions held by various Greek philosophers, most notibly the materialist philosophers, but not exclusively (note that materialism is really the basis of science so when we talk about intellectual decline this one philosophy plays a significant role)
#2) Opposition to the process of philosophy, i.e. the process of using human reasoning ability to try to figure out how the world works.
#3) The repacement of human reasoning as a tool for understanding the world with the doctrine of faith, and the appeal to revelation and divine prophesy.

Bede

Malachi,

Please provide a reference for the banning and burning of the list of Greek authors we started with. Please provide a page reference to How the Irish Saved Civilisation that mentions any of them.

You have indeed provided dozens of quotes. Some say absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand, a few show that Christians did not accept the materialism of the atomists. The trouble is you rip theological remarks out of context and try to make them stand for something that they don't. This is exactly the mistake Freeman makes. He reads the Church history sources and assumes that doctrinal disputes really were the be all and end all.

Here's Origen saying that philosophy is essential to theology:

Note he is not talking about the use of these subjects in general - that stands to reason. He is saying even theologians have to use pagan philosophy.

Augustine agreed: "If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared." Yes, he prefers Platonism but he doesn't rule and the others. It is a fact that Aristotle's works were also preserved.

Epicureus and the other Hellenistic philosophers were dying out before Christians came on the stage. The first section of the first chapter, written by Jaap Mansfield, of the new Cambridge History of Hellentistic Philosophy is called "Why so much was lost." Luckily it is available as the sample chapter on line here.

Mansfield explains that the Epicureans had early Sotoics were no longer taught from the third century. What we have today are the introductory texts used in schools up until the 6th century. Also, this was the period of the change over from scroll to codex and lots of obsolete material was not carried over.

He does not blame Christians for the losses and indeed mentions many chance survivals of facts in Christian works that criticised Epicurieans that we would not otherwise know.

Read this chapter, Geoff. It is an up-to-date peice of important schoarship and it shows you are completely wrong to blame Christians for the loss of the atomists work.

Best wishes

Bede

lpetrich

I would love for Richard Carrier to weigh in on this one; he has been doing some research on this very subject. He did his master's thesis on Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire, and he is doing his dissertation on Attitudes Toward the Physikos and his Activity in the Roman Empire (100 B.C. to 313 A.D.).

RC is well aware that there was a gulf between elite rationalists and the irrational masses; he started off his master's thesis with these quotes:
The first quote was from Tylor, Edward Burnett, "The Origins of Culture," Primitive Culture v. 1. Harper Brothers, New York, 1958. p. 328

And the second quote is from Seneca, Natural Questions, 7.25.3: nondum sunt anni mille quingenti ex quo Graecia stellis numeros et nomina fecit, multaeque hodie sunt gentes quae facie tantum noverunt caelum, quae nondum sciunt cur luna deficiat, quare obumbretur.

RC continued with
This may be why he chose that subject -- the contrast was very glaring.

Educated Romans would often deplore how their uneducated fellow citizens would make a big noise when a lunar eclipse happened out of hope of stopping the sorcerers who were trying to make it go away. And they often concluded that those who thought that eclipses were fearsome omens did so out of ignorance; Plutarch said that about Athenian General Nicias, who waited several days in Syracuse, Sicily because of a lunar eclipse -- and got disastrously defeated.

But some thought that perhaps the masses could be educated:
.

Going beyond that to his dissertation, RC plans to discuss the physikos, the closest counterpart to a scientist in the Greco-Roman world; he plans to discuss what physikoi studied, who would become physikoi, and attitudes toward physikoi among various philosophical schools and other groups.

I remember a radio broadcast in which RC presented some preliminary conclusions; RC said that while the Epicureans started with some preconceived ideas, they seem to have had remarkably correct ones (he expanded on that in detail in Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed), the Stoics thought it important to study nature in order to obey it, the Platonists were a mixed bag with their non-empirical approach, though they did value mathematics as a key to reality, the Aristotelians were perhaps the closest to a modern scientific outlook, and that the Cynics were more-or-less philosophical hippies. He also noted that many people were eclectics, picking and choosing from philosophical schools, and that some people thought it important to learn about different philosophical schools.

He also noted that early Xians disdained the philosophical schools around them; the early theologian Justin Martyr liked Xianity because it didn't require that he study any science, and Lactantius ridiculed the idea of antipodes. From RC's prospectus:
Bede's Xianity-as-superscientific-religion apologetics seem rather hollow; if Xianity is the most scientific religion there is, then even the earliest Xians ought to have been willing to learn from pagan scientists and build on their work.

RC suspects that Xianity does not have the bulk of the blame for ending ancient science; he suspect that the Roman Empire's 3rd-century crisis was an important factor -- civil wars, political conspiracies, you name it. All this strife distracted from learning scientific and artistic skills; RC noted that Constantine stole some of Hadrian's sculptures for one of his structures because he did not have the sculptors on hand that Hadrian had had. And RC noted that Neoplatonism was very popular because it was rather escapist -- and Xianity had much in common with Neoplatonism there.

And yes, Xians back then fought bitterly over differences in doctrine that sometimes bordered on the absurd, like whether the Father and the Son have the same essence (homoousia) or similar essences (homoiousia), or whether the Virgin Mary ought to be called the Mother of Christ or the Mother of God. Pagans back then found that an annoying feature of Xians; it was unprecedented in pagan religion. Nobody ever fought wars over what love affairs Zeus had had, for instance.

Finally, the theologians' anti-atomist arguments that Malachi151 quotes are not much different from the god-or-chance dichotomy that one still gets from many Xian apologists.

Bede

Thanks Ipetrich. The above is highly plausible IMHO. I am looking forward to what RC publishes some books or articles on this matter, but know from experience just how long it takes.

Best wishes

Bede

Malachi151

<edit> I have provided 10 times more source material here than you, who, in fact, only provided one link to show that we do have works of Hero, which of course, doens't even explain where they came from or who maintained them, only that we have them.

These works by Hero are mostly mathematical and practical, so its not too suprising. Yet, it still doesn't tell us where they came from, etc.

At any rate, you are the one making claims, you provide the support for your claims.

Your claims is:

I think that I have provided more than enough material to show that Christians were NOT interested in Greek philosophy and science and medicine, and they didn't copy the vast majority of Greek pre-Christian works.

You haven't even provided evidence of what works they DID maintain, and even at that, copying a book is not the same thing as accepting its views or applying its principles.

I don't have a list of specifically which exact works were banned, destroyed, left to rot, no one does. What we do know, however, from both Christian sources and non-Christian, is that the Christians did shut down many schools, destroy many schools and "pagan" (meaning anything non-Christian) temples (temples also containd many libraries and documents), and wrote tons of works in opposition to the various schools of Greek thought, specific conclusions of Greek thought, and against the process of philosophy in general. They did not apply the principles of philosophy, logic, rationalism, empericism, etc. on their own either, except perhaps in discussing doctrinal matters, like is Jesus God or the Son of God, etc. They made holding views that were consitent with many schools of Greek thought heretical and punishable by anything from ostracism to taking of property to death.

We do know that almost nothing of Epicuris survives, except where he is quoted by others in anti-Epicurean works. We do know that NOTHING AT ALL of Democtritus survives except where he is quoted in anti-Democritan works. We also know that these works existed at the time of the Christians rise to power because they quoted the hell out of them and wrote in opposition to them extensively.

We also know, for example, that the works of Galen that were used by the Christians were highly edited and stripped down to essentially what were the most useless parts that were wrong, because they left out all of the parts that were "materialistic" and showed the body in a materialist way, and of course they didn't persue his processes or methods of investigation, I.E. SCIENCE.

If the Christians, as you say, were such lovers of science, and such abolishers of superstition, then were is the post-Christian technological and scientific expolsion of the 5th-10th centuries? Instead of an explosion in scientific and philosophical advance we see a massive decline, which you and other apologists can only explain by saying "the barbarians, the barbarians!"

You ignore the mountians of evidence that Christians were hostile towards "worldly knowledge", that they shut down schools, and that they destroyed books and let books which contradicted Christian theology rot.

Plato complements Christain theology, so brining up stuff about Plato doesn't advance your argument any. And again, copying Plato is still different from putting the philosophical process to work. By all accounts the Christians copied Plato, but they didn't embrace the idea of open philosophical debate or deriving knowledge from either reasoning or empericism. As was shown in the book "How the Irish Saved Civilization", the Irish monks copied many works, some of which they couldn't even read, they just mimmicked the letters on the page, not even knowing what they said. Others that could read them often put inflamatory remarks in the margins, showing that they were coping works that they didn't even agree with. Yet others who questions and introsepection in the margins, like "hmmm that's an interesting idea, I never thought of that". At any rate, many monks developed a simple book fetish, but they weren't reading the books or using the books to inform their worldview, they were simply copying them.

Presenting one quote from Clement of Alexandria, a 2nd century theologian, doesn't cut it, that doesn't represent all of Christianity. That was one person, who was classically trained, who personally valued Greek thought. It is, again, like trying to quote one guy that says that the Christian Bible is compatable with the theory of evolution and then saying, "See Christianity helps to advance the theory of evolution". And even at that, Clement still railed against any philosophy that didn't agree with Christian theology, so he wasn't really embracing philosphy, AND, to top it all off, WHY was Clement writing in the first place?

HE WAS WRITING IN OPPOSITION TO THE MAJORITY VIEW THAT THE CHRISTIANS SHOULD SHUN GREEK PHILOSOPHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, yeah, we had one semi-voice in the wilderness, who argued, AGAINST THE MAJORITY AS IS SHOWN IN HIS STATEMENT, that Christians should embrace SOME Greek philosophy, but in the end, guess what? They didn't!

S.C.Carlson

As for medicine, the on-line TLG database has over 2.5 million words from Galen's corpus alone. That's a huge amount of text to be copying if they weren't interested in it.

How do we know this?

Stephen

Bede

Com' on Geoff. I provided a complete chapter of the latest scholarship to show you are wrong. Also AFAIK, no insular manuscripts (that's Irish or Scots Irish) are on Greek science.

In your first post you said that Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen or Simplicius were burnt and banned. You gave no source for this info. Now you admit you haven't a clue what was burnt or banned but you have spiritual knowledge that it was lots and lots of stuff.

Burning libraries? Not a single good source for this. The Alexandria library was not destroyed by Christians - it had disappeared centuries earlier. The Serapion library also disappeared before the temple was trashed. (refs) Any more examples? If you read my work you'll find some more stories debunked that you didn't even know about. Christians destroyed heresy and perhaps pagan religious works. Pagans did the same. The first emperor, Augustus, housed the Sibylline Oracles in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill in Rome, after he had destroyed two thousand other prophetic volumes in order to ensure that only the official versions existed. Christians did not destroy indiscriminately or target science.

Closing schools? I'm surprised you know so little you can't even give me the standard example of Justinian in 529. He did close down the pagan neo-Platonist school but pagan leaders did the same thing. In fact, the Romans had closed the schools in Athens before when they first invaded the city in the second century BC. Likewise, the Pharaoh Ptolemy VII Psychon had expelled all the scholars from Alexandria in 170BC prompting many to travel to Greece in search of a living. Constantius II founded a new school and library in Constantinople with salaries paid out of the imperial treasury and the syllabus based on the pagan classics.

Best wishes

Bede

PS: refs for all this if you pm me, but I can't be bothered to code my footnotes.

Bede

Actually I quoted Origen and Augustine, but Clement agreed. So that's three of the most influential of church fathers says pagan philosophy is OK.

Best wishes

Bede

Malachi151

In regard specifically to Galen, the History Channel had a special on this that discussed how Galen's reputation fell into disrepute during the Enlightenemnt and 19th century because so much of the medical tradition associated with Galen was based on Christian misreadings and selective uses of his texts. They went on to say that a lot of what was normally left out of the texts books based on Galen that were used to teach students in the Middle Ages was really the most important and accurate stuff, which we have only started investigating and learning about in the past 50 years or so, which dramtically changes the view of Galen.

In addition, we have this info:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/g/galen.htm

The cause of the fire is unknown.

We also have:

http://campus.udayton.edu/~hume/Galen/galen.htm

So, again, we see that things that were preserved by Christians was only because they found agreement with their theology, and yet, even with the preservation, once it progressed past a simple alignment with Christian theology into using methods or ideas to explore other concepts, nope, it was shut down.

So, again, just because we have a text today does not mean that #1) it was preserved by Christians, most were preserved by Arabs, and #2) that the texts were fully embraced or that their use followed the principles of science or philosophy, and pretty much everything that the Christians preserved they did so because it agreed with their theology, and of course we know that their theology was essentially a product of Greek thought, so that some of this would be compatable is a given, Christianity is the merger of Greek and Jewish thought.