Malachi151

Explaining why something is the case does not change the fact that it is the case. I know full well WHY these things are the case, that's not the point.

Your claims was, "well, even if we lost all the Greek texts, it wouldn't have mattered anyway", to which my reply is: Nonsense.

The world that we live in today is very much a product of the specific ideas and institutions developed by the Greeks and others of the region.

mirage

Roger, thanks, I always learn something interesting from each post of yours.

I agree. I am by no means suggesting environmental or economic determinism in the context of wider culture, but I think that these factors can be underestimated. You tend to need a good meal, some rest and light to read by to think about philosophy a lot.

But that is just what I wish to contest. (I do however, have a lot of sympathy with your later point about the problem of counterfactual history, but then the assertion that classical learning was necessary is exactly an exercise in such counterfactualism.)

Granted, it would not have been a renaissance if there had not been an earlier "flowering". However, given a wealthy, large, relatively pluralistic and stable superculture, with good transport and flourishing trade, including with far flung civilisations like China and India, I just don't see an absolute barrier to a n intellectual "naissance".

And perhaps we overestimate the importance of classical texts precisely because of the history of the region. If you are a medeival Roman, herding your goats in between the vast, almost superhuman ruins of former greatness, then history of past glories is going to hang on your shoulders. This forms an intellectual background of aspiration that would lead scholars to try to recover some of that ancient learning. However, that effort and interest may be little more than an epiphenomenon marking the general conditions necessary for intellectual development: opportunity and curiosity. Of course, since the classical texts were recoverable, they formed the focus of the discussion. But that does not entail that they were necessary for a similar discussion to have taken place at all.

Well, I agree. But how much of that was ideas of Greek philosophers, and how much sheer infrastructure and economic relationships? It is surely a trivial point that the development of an age depends in its detail on what came before. The material it has to work with. I think a stronger point is being made though when Greek ideas, specifically in the form of Monasticly transmitted texts, are necessary for any emergence from the dark ages.

Hmm. Was that a problem specifically with the Roman system, or a more general problem with superstates, particularity ones that didn't really understand economics and in an era with poor transport? A huge state with large provincial self sufficient armies will naturally be unstable. Medieval Europe after Charlemagne was a bunch of pretty damn small states. Much easier to consolidate stable control of.

Indeed. But they also lack witness accounts and describe mass beliefs, which themselves will have been transmitted and developed through many people. And not just any beliefs, but ones claiming resurrection's from the dead and queer things like that from a group of believers who are clearly very emotionally invested in their beliefs. Hardly on a par with a tale of some king getting killed or something. Not htat I hold a rabidly mythicist view or anything. I don't know much about it or consider it important.

No, this is a false dichotomy. All the books may well be interpolated. That by no means entails that we know nothing. It is a far more extraordinary hypothesis that this body of interacting literature, assembled from widely separated surviving fragments, was entirely forged de novo! It just means that we must be cautious about particular points while recognising that the whole gives us a picture not entirely removed from the reality.

I'll toast him at my next banquet!

mirage

Since I did not dispute what was the case, I have no idea why you mention this.

My claim was not that it would have made no difference to the course of history. Just that a rich economic and technological powerhouse culture could have rapidly caught up whenever such a powerhouse were to arise. Since I assume that the ancient Greeks were not superhuman, and that a few geniuses given time and money and communication would have arrived at all the crucial points themselves. You have said nonsense, but you have not given any argument that I can discern.

Again, just a bare assertion. The specific nature of our present is of course influenced by the specific detail of our past. However you still give no reason whatever why an intellectual flowering, perhaps different in detail, could not have taken place without Greek texts transmitted by monks.

Specifically what was so crucial in those texts, and why exactly do you think no one else could have thought of it?

Wads4

--and not forgetting the "pagan" temples, which were themselves often centres of philosophical discourse. Nothing was done by Christians to help prevent or alleviate the burning of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus,--indeed I believe some such Christians went to watch the show; ( and no I don't have a quotable reference for every single statement). The library of Alexandria was not actively encouraged either,--the temple of Amon at Siwa, Egypt was deliberately starved of funds for maintainance, and allowed to decay, as were others. Pagan priests were murdered or driven out by fanatics. Artistic and valuable Egyptian temple inscriptions were deliberately chiselled out whereever they could be reached,( I have seen them myself) and the erect phallus's of Egyptian fertility gods were likewise "hacked off" (hence the expression for when you are feeling under the weather). The processions of the goddess Isis were banned in Rome and Alexandria after about 394 AD, and the Virgin mary substituted for her; likewise the goddess Diana was given a Mary makeover against the will of her worshippers. The whole story is one of Christian intolerance and fanaticism for the classical culture which they misappropriated.

Bede

Wads4,

If you're an atheist, why do you care if a procession is Diana or the Virgin Mary? The Temple of Artemis was destroyed by (pagan) Goths in 262AD. The ruins were quarried by later inhabitants as happened to almost all abandoned buildings.

I think you'll find the Byzantines were anything but less fanatical than Western Christians. Try reading at least John Julius Norwich's history (or via: amazon.co.uk) before telling us about Byzantine society.

I also suggest you read something like Bartlett's The Making of Europe (or via: amazon.co.uk) before you write off the entire Christian Middle Ages.
Best wishes

Bede

Wads4

Perhaps I have a natural distaste for pushy Christians, and see the worshippers of Diana and Isis as victims. Of course there are no simple black and whites in this subject,--there were "good" Christians and "bad" pagans, and as we approach the subject from different perspectives,--your's basically Platonic and mine basically Epicurean, we can both of us find references which support our respective causes. I doubt if Christian barbarians were much more tolerant than pagan ones,-and anyway it is difficult to distinguish them given that there was such a fervent melting pot of beliefs in those times.
I appreciate your greater scholarship and am attempting to read more relevent material, but the gaps in my education do not invalidate my whole argument. I agree that the temple of Artemis was destroyed by pagan Goths, though they could just as well have been Christian ones, and that thereafter it decayed, but it decay was for the same general reason as the loss of other pagan works,-- it was not re-built because of the takeover of all other belief systems by Christians. It was not merely the loss of a fine building, but the loss of a whole culture; perhaps that was a good thing,-who can say,-it is all relative anyway; the winner won and that's it. Incidentally after Herostratus set fire to the temple in 356 BCE,(over 600 years previously) in order to achieve his 15 minutes of notoriety, it was later restored and re-built after Alexander's death because people still respected the ancient gods-like Artemis, and there were no Christians to deny them their freedom to do so. In the end, what does it all matter? It matters because the foundations of all modern religious and cultural strife were laid down by the clash of beliefs,--which themselves were in the end, arbitrary, artificial, and syncretic,-- and the same war for hearts and minds is still going on. We have to choose which side to be on,-- Rationalism, Evolution and Modernism generally,- which I would have thought would be the choice for intelligent scholars like yourself,--or ancient and obscure superstition which has to be aggressively promulgated by the modern descendents of those who took over the Roman Empire for ideological reasons.

Malachi151

I think that this has been beat to death, but I'll just give my summary of my position on it.

Bede presented this review of "Closing of the Western Mind", in which he stated that basically: "Far from 'closing the Western mind', Christians embraced Greek science, philosophy, and medicine." He also referenced the reviews on Amazon, with the official review stating that the book was wrong because the Christians embraced Greek philosophy, pointing to people like Paul, Clement, etc., as examples.

I refute both Bede's claims and the claims made in the Amazon review by stating that "Christians" certainly did not embrace Greek science, philosophy, and medicine as a whole, and giving specific refutations of the Amazon claims.

Bede then essentially defends his entire claim with the claim that "the evidence that the Christians embraced Greek science, philosophy, and medicine is that we have 'so many' pre-Christian works, which have been copied by the Christians."

There are several problems with this line of argument however.

#1) Ignoring the specifics and details, the one fact does not prove the other.

Would it be correct to say that in America today Christianity is not a major contributor to the lack of acceptance of evolutionary theory? Yes it would, and several studies have shown the correlation between Christian belief and lack of acceptance of evolution, YET, there are even Christian schools that teach evolution, and you can go to Catholic and Protestant high schools and find biology textbooks that cover the theory.

So, the one does not prove the other. The fact that some Christians accept evolutionary theory, the fact that even Christian private schools cover the material in official terms, does not negate the fact that the religion nevertheless hinders the acceptance of the theory for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there is a broad base of popular Christian figures who preach against the theory based on Christian/Biblical principles.

The same can easily be applied to the situation in the Roman Empire in regard to Greek science, philosophy, and medicine after the rise of Christianity. The copying of said books by people who were Christians (which itself is a question we will get to) does not prove that the rise of Christianity didn't hinder the acceptance of the ideas contained within said books, and this is still even being too generous to this argument, as the following points will show.

#2) The Christians didn't have any useful literature of their own, so unless they planned on completely starting over intellectually, i.e. starting from scratch with math, engineering, medicine, history, etc., they had to make some use of the existing literature and knowledge, and since these Christians were Greeks and Romans, this literature was not foreign to them, in fact it was closer to them than the Jewish literature was, so of course they were going to preserve some it, especially the practical stuff that didn't raise theological questions.

#3) Just because we have a work today does not mean that it was continuously preserved or used by Christians, or that it was preserved by Christians at all. Many works were preserved by non-Christian Arabs. Many works initially copied by early Christian sects, which were later declared heretical, many works were abandoned and forgotten for as much as 1,000 years, and many works have made it to us in present day due to the existence of only one or two copies.

#4) The famous, and silly, popular claim of the Christians, that more copies of the Bible were made than all of the other ancient works combined also shows the relative values placed on these works as well.

#5) Most of the Greek literature that was copied was literature that didn't conflict with Christian ideology. By far the most well preserved philosophical works are those of Plato, as Christians were practically Neo-Platonists. Christianity and Plato are pretty reconcilable. Aristotle was treated more skeptically by the Christians than Plato, and his works were largely disregarded for a long period in Christian history, though they were preserved in Arab regions and made a later resurgence due to the still largely reconcilable nature of Aristotle and Christianity. Nevertheless, there was also opposition to Aristotelian philosophy and Aristotelian schools were shut down by Christian authorities on several occasions, in some cases the schools were completely demolished, and the books were not preserved, or at least not by the Christian authorities, though some made their way into non-Christian regions or to other non-Catholic regions.

Works like Metamorphosis were preserved, again, because it seemed to confirm the Christian worldview, and was highly reconcilable with the Genesis account.

The works of Galen were, first of all, very widely published in the Roman Empire, so they were many original sources, making it easy to preserve and many parts of Galen's works were reconcilable with Christianity because he was a monotheist who believed in the soul, BUT, even at this, his works were not continuous preserved and used by Christians, having a gap of some 500-600 years when his works were essentially unknown, and not all of his works were preserved, and not all of his works were used, as we will get to.

#6) Major schools of Greek thought are completely unrepresented in the preserved works, name the materialist / atomist schools of thought. 95% of what we know about the materialists comes from the preservation of their ideas in anti-materialist works, including those of Christians and pre-Christian figures such as Aristotle.

Seeing as how the materialists/atomists are the ones most closely aligned with science, I think that this speaks well against the notion that the Christians preserved science. (Though Christians will argue that Aristotle trumps the materialists, I refute this as well)

#7) This may be the most important point of all. Christians, from top to bottom, though to varying degrees, universally condemned many of the Greek ideas in science, philosophy, and medicine. Atomism was condemned. Gravity was condemned. "Evolutionary concepts" were condemned. Anything, philosophically or practically, which used non-teleological methods to explain phenomena was condemned, and THIS IS THE BASIS OF SCIENCE! They condemned the fundamental core of scientific thought.

They also condemned the idea of unbiased observation and seeking knowledge without an objective. Under the Christians, philosophy was only useful as a tool to arrive at pre-conceived scriptural notions, and thus it wasn't a real use of philosophy at all, only an attempt at using the weight of greater minds to backup their own doubts and convictions, just like Christians today appeal to academic authority instead of the actual argument, the Christian then, when lacking their own arguments or their own proofs, would appeal to the authority of a Plato, or an Aristotle (when this was acceptable), to say "See, Aristotle also says that things in nature are designed for a purpose by a creator", and they knew that Aristotle held more weight than they did, just as people today will say "See, this guy with a PhD believes in God, so there!"

Even those rare examples of people like Clement (2nd century classically raised Christian convert) and Origen (2nd century classically raised Christian convert) who embraced some Greek philosophy and who made use of some argumentative methods of Greek philosophy, still condemned most of the most important Greek ideas and only approved of philosophy as long as it agreed with scripture. Philosophy and logic could not be used as unbiased tools, they could only be used to support scripture.

Other Christians who dabbled in Greek philosophy, such as John Philoponus of the 5th century, were condemned as heretics and their works were tossed in the dust bin, forgotten for hundreds of years until they were later re-discovered.

#8) The introduction and/or elevation of many superstitions by the Christians. Despite the preservation of some of Galen's works on the one hand (which again was not continuous) the Christians also emphasized faith healing, the idea that the devil or sin caused afflictions, a divine origin of dreams, belief that immaterial forces controlled the world and guided events, etc. These beliefs were many times more widely held and believed and PROMOTED by Christians than any of the beliefs of "pagan" science or medicine, though, of course some elements of the medical texts in question also held some of these beliefs.

#9) Lastly, though we have to credit "some Christians" with the preservation of the works that they did indeed preserve, we also have to credit the Christians for the works that were NOT preserved! Every unpreserved work may not be directly the fault of the Christians, but indirectly and directly they still account for the most significant reason of lack of preservation of works.

When you consider that the least preserved works are also the works that least agree with Christian scripture and doctrines, it is obvious that selective pressure has been applied.

The whole claim that "we have the Christians to thank for the preservation" takes the default assumption that without the rise of Christianity these works wouldn't have been preserved at all, which is a clearly baseless assumption. I certianly contend that more works would have been preserved without the rise of Christianity, not less.

So, I think that all of this pretty well refutes the claim that "far from contributing to the 'closing of the Western mind' the Christians upheld the virtues of Greek science, philosophy, and medicine."

Bede

But in return you get the even greater masterpieces of the Romanesque and Gothic. I found it ironic you were attacking the tithes that built Chartres while defending the Greeks who put even greater relative resources into their temples. But this is a matter of taste. The greatest archectural style in the world is the classical Islamic that built the Dome of Rock, the Al-Asqa Mosque in Damascus and the Mezquita in Cordoba. However, I have no desire at all to live under medieval Islam and any Spaniard who compares their country to what it would be under Islam (like Morocco, if they were lucky) can agree!

I have to say you have this seriously wrong. We are threatened by an ancient and aggressive belief system that rejects all that is important in our society - but it isn't called Christianity. You live in a Christian society and history shows that much of what you like about it is a result of this fact. If Christianity was as regressive as you assume you would live in a country that was like Saudi Arabia.

Christians are on your side. We believe in free speech, democracy, separation of church and state and above all, reason. The way that infidels aim their fire at Christianity is, frankly, daft especially when there is a real threat. Don't put all your religions in one basket and don't be paranoid about Christianity which will do you no harm at all.

Note the Pope's speech last week. Try and actually read it. It is an impassioned defence of the need for reason, even in religion. He believes that faith without reason leads to violence. Obviously Moslems didn't like this much and set about proving it true in the only way they know how.

I think that people who believe that Christianity is against modern society need to read the history of how Christianity gave us modern society. They then need to sit down and think hard about who their real enemies are. If they are still convinced that Christianity is a threat, then reason will have lost another little battle.

Best wishes

Bede

andrewcriddle

I have no wish to defend Theophilus, who I agree was a dubious character, but the murder of Hypatia ocurred c 415 roughly 2 years after Theophilus had died and been succeeded by Cyril.

(Cyril may also have been a dubiously politically compromised figure, but that is another matter.)

Andrew Criddle

lpetrich

(St. Augustine and the roundness of the Earth...)
For the benefit of those of us who do not speak Latin, I will give newadvent.org's translation:

The City of God, Book 16, Chapter 9: Whether We Are to Believe in the Antipodes
And to use Johann Kaspar's typography,

For Scripture ... gives no false information

Augustine also states in Book 18, Chapter 40, About the Most Mendacious Vanity of the Egyptians, in Which They Ascribe to Their Science an Antiquity of a Hundred Thousand Years, that the first man, Adam, lived less than 6000 years ago; he had written that book at around 400 CE. Thus, Augustine had been a young-earther.

And in Book 18, Chapter 37, That Prophetic Records Are Found Which Are More Ancient Than Any Fountain of the Gentile Philosophy Augustine states that the oldest parts of the Bible are older than all pagan literature.

However, they were willing to get into bitter fights over questions like homoousia vs. homoiousia, and theologians felt bitterly wronged that the barbarians had been converted to the Arian sect of Xianity, which taught that Jesus Christ was subordinate to God the Father rather than coequal as God the Son.

And another thing I recall from that Richard Carrier radio interview. In the Roman Empire, Vitruvius had written various treatises that contained tables of calculated numbers. But Vitruvius's medieval copiers hpelessly mangled those numbers, even if they got the text OK.

That's beside the point. The priests of Artemis/Diana did not try to outlaw the veneration of Mary, while the priests of Mary tried to outlaw the worship of Artemis/Diana.

If we are to believe Acts, Paul got off the hook in Ephesus after pissing off the silversmiths there by denying Artemis. I wounder what Paul would have thought about his successors giving those silversmiths' successors a chance to continue what Paul had objected to them doing.

And if anything, the early Xians abused the pagans' half-tolerance of them.

Bede, you are so spectacularly wrong that I almost don't know where to begin.

Xianity is only a small part of our society, which has become considerably secular. Simply compare our society to Saudi Arabia or Iran or some other Islamic nation. President Ahmadinejad makes President Bush look like an absolute amateur in the game of sacred-book-thumping.

Bede, don't make me laugh. You have to put the No True Scotsman fallacy into overdrive to make a claim like that.

And Bede, I fully expect that Xian apologists will someday claim that metaphysical naturalism was first stated in the Bible and that it was stupid pagans who believed in Universe-controlling anthropomorphic superbeings. Which is from their track record in taking credit for what their predecessors had opposed.

Bede, that is demonstrably false, unless you wish to run the No True Scotsman fallacy in overdrive. Look in the Secular Lifestyle of IIDB to what happens when people reveal that they are atheists.

And look at fundie theocrats here in the US, however much you might want to apply the No True Scotsman fallacy to them, Bede. They may not be much of the population, but they more than make up for it in zeal. And they are helped by non-fundies' unwillingness to condemn something that parades under the name of Xianity.

I don't quite get that from his speech; it seemed more book-thumping than serious reasoning.

A rewrite of history that would make Stalin proud.

I wouldn't say that very liberal forms are any real threat, but the more hard-boiled fundie forms certainly are -- they are much like those Muslims that you are so worked up about.

I will close with what I think is an interesting vignette:

According to some medieval bestiaries, lion cubs are either asleep or dead for three days after they are born, and then their father comes along and revives them by roaring at them. That was an allegory for Jesus Christ's rising from the dead after three days in his tomb.

But according to modern lion research, when a male lion drives another male from a pride, he often kills that pride's cubs. And the favorite theory on why a male lion does that is because he will get the females in heat, so that they can have more cubs for him, thus perpetuating that tendency.

Note the dramatic contrast in approaches toward studying lion behavior.

There is some video of an infanticidal male lion caught in flagrante delicto at http://lionresearch.org