S.C.Carlson

I'm not the one claiming that Christians, especially in the middle ages, embraced science. I'm pushing back against your claim that they weren't interested in medicine considering the size of the bulk of medical texts among the surviving Greek works. To devote so much labor and expensive resources (parchment) to preserve millions of words is evidence against your claim.

Stephen

Apikorus

I think that another reason for the transmission of texts might be overlooked here. The Byzantine Christians may have preserved Greek texts because they felt it was their heritage. In college I once took a course in Germanic Heroic Poetry. One detail I recall is that the Lay of Hildebrand, one of the earliest extant works in German, was copied onto the empty pages of parchment in a religious codex by monks at the Fulda monastery. It seems that the monks wanted to preserve this poem as part of their cultural heritage, even though it was probably part of a purely oral tradition, and even though it was distinctly non-Christian.

Malachi151

What we know about Early Christian and middle age medicine is this:

#1) They did believe in spiritual healing, the power of prayer to heal, etc., hardly supporting a view that they rejected supersitition and brought fourth scientific medicine.
#2) They blamed most afflictions on the devil or sin.
#3) They selectively used some classical texts, such as Galen's, as references, but they did not persue futher advances based on the principles of science.
#4) They also rejected many classical texts and parts of texts, including Galen's, because they were seen as atheistic or heretical.
#5) They had laws, taboos, etc., against many of the traditional medical practices of local cultures, i.e. pagan medical practices, including herbal medicines, because they were seens as witchcraft.

So, no I wouldn't call the rise of Christianity a boon to medical science.

Clivedurdle

andrewcriddle

The manuscripts of Lucretius discovered in 1417 date from c 800 CE and hence were presumably copied by Christians.
http://www.tertullian.org/articles/c...appearance.htm

Andrew Criddle

Bede

That's an interesting point. I think it certainly accounts for the survival of Beowulf and the Islandic Sagas. I'm dubious it would help much with scientific writings.

B

dongiovanni1976x

What about if the Greek east felt that their heritage was more akin to one's mental prowess than that of one's physical prowess. Certainly there could be good reason to preserve the wisdom of their ancestors in their traditional language. What makes you "dubious" about this?

Bede

Well, no. Much of Galen’s work was preserved by the Arabs after Christians translated it into Arabic for their Islamic masters. However, the Greek corpus of Galen, all 2.5 million words of it, was preserved in its original language by Christian Byzantines. So, all ten times, you were wrong.

BTW, your insinuation that Christians were responsible for the fire that destroyed Galen’s other works is implausible and not backed up by any evidence. The sources make no mention of the cause of the fire because fires were so very common. Furthermore, you have no evidence of how common Galen’s works were in the ancient world. You are just guessing (and wrongly, if the relative proportions of the Oxyrynchus papyri are anything to go by.)

A part of Virgil and recent papyri finds, we have no classical manuscripts from before about 800AD. Everything we have was copied by Christians at some point. See Reynolds and Wilson “Scribes and Scholars” for the full story.

World class: John Philoponus, Hunayn ibn Ishaq

Important: Boethius, Aetius, Qusta Ibn Luqa, Gerbert of Aurillac, Leo the Mathematician

Other: Paul of Aegina, Alcuin, John Scotus Erugena, Augustinus, Al-Bitriq, Isodore of Seville, Cassiodorus, Yahya Ibn 'Adi, Ibn at-Tayyib

I’m sure we could find some more....

Best wishes

Bede

S.C.Carlson

Medical science before Louis Pasteur was pretty atrocious, but I still disagree with your claim that the Christian scribes were not interested in copying medical texts. They were, and they copied a lot of them.

Stephen

Malachi151

Thanks for proving my point. First of all, the copying of a text a time or two does not imply that the Christian embraced the ideas. I think its pretty easy to show, from the quotes I have already provided, but more can be supplied, that Christians were in opposition to pretty much every idea present in Lucretius' work. Secondly, why wasn't the text maintained?....... Presumably because it was of little interest of because it was heresy.

Secondly:

Now, the question is, where did the Greek works go, and why did some of them not make it. It doesn't have to be the case that every single person who went by the title of Christian hated and despised these works and destroyed them, any more than every person who was a memeber of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had to hate and despise market theory. I'm sure that you can find Soviet writers from the 1970s and 1980s that discuss market theory and had copies of The Wealth of Nations.

However, when you are talking about movements and institutions you are talking about the offical doctrines, the major actions, and popular consent, the status quo, the events that had an impact.

It doesn't have to be the case that every Christian was a book burner, the fact that many books were destroyed by Christians does not mean that all Christians destroyed book, but, trying to blame this all on "the barbarians" is simply a lie and a farce.

Yes, there were a couple of INDIVIDUALS early on who preserved SOME things, but even at this, we are talking about mostly works that agreed with Christian theology, so this excludes what would more rightfully be called scientific oriented works.

As has been said, the copying of books does not demonstrate the EMBRACE of science, reason, and philosophy by Christians.

Someone show me evidence for the claim that:

If this were true then we would see many copies of the works of Epicurus, Democritus, and other materialist philosopher. We would see Christians expanding on atomic theory, not denouncing it. The Christians denounced the theory of gravity held by the Greeks, atomic theory, and because they denied gravity, they concluded that their couldn't be people on the other side of the earth. The denounced material study of nature, instead turning to scripture, and the view that "the Bible is the absolutely true word of God, which can never be questioned, any human derived conclusion that contradicts scripture must be false." That's not an embrace of science, reason and philosophy.

When the institutions DEFINED such things as the concept of atoms heretical, and therefore unallowable for specuation and investigation, that certianly was a "closing of the Western mind", there is no way to deny that.

Going futher:

This is hardly evidence of a Christian embrace of Greek works. We got lucky, we got single copies, this doesn't mean that Christians were busy encorproating these works and ideas into their worldview or that they were "interested in them".

The article mentions the work of Lucretius, but we don't know why this script was copied in the first place. What we do KNOW, however, is that Christian opposed all of the ideas in the work. So regardless of who copied it, how, and why, can we say that the idea of Lucretius in The System of Nature were embraced by "Christians" and kept that branch of thought alive?

Hell no we can't say that, which just further proves the point, just becase we have a text does not mean that the ideas contained in it were embraced by Christians, either as a whole, or even by those who had the work copied.