countjulian

First things first: the part about Photius and Justus was just a little tidbit of my knowledge, not Murray's (I really sound that scholarly?). I suppose I should have indicated it better, my bad, I'm sorry, I'll cut myself with the shards of my broken heart, etc. He was referring to Herodotus and Thucydides in particular, although it was clear that the whole broad scope of the Greco-Roman historical position was being referenced, as it was being compared to the Jewish "History" in the OT. And to Laficado: I am sorry for the comment above. In truth, I was making a reference to a joke by Maddox, an internet pundit, here: http://maddox.xmission.com/hatemail.cgi . It's the email right at the center of the page, from the "Why do you give a shit?" guy.
too late i realized that Maddox, though somewhat popular, is still not that well known. It was a bad idea, and I offer my sincerest apologies for it.

Anyway, back to the debate. Polybius and Pliny ,as you said, overlap, they complete each other; rarely do you find two historians covering a significant number of years together in unison, providing two opposing sides of the story. As MacMullen pointed out, one gets a certain feeling of Christian partisanship in the record keep when holding one slim volume of Pagan Zosimus and being confronted with the voluminous output of the ecclesiastical historians. You also forgot to mention that the two biographies of Alexander are separated by a respectable amount of time, centuries, to be exact. Also, as one progresses farther into the Christian era, you find that more and more history gets preserved, because more and more of it was Christian. I put in the point about Justus of Tiberius because it goes along with the others well. Another point might be illustrated from that area and time: don't you think it is a bit odd that we got a rather large history of Israel from around the times of Jesus and shortly thereafter in the birth pangs of Christianity, Jewish War I as I like to call it, but that we got no equivalent historian from Jewish War II: Bar Kochba's Revenge? I do not mean to imply a conspiracy carried out over all of the disparate monasteries in the medieval world, only that what was saved was that which interested the Christian monks, and science usually did not fit the bill. Of course there was no concentrated book-destroying campaign against science after the fall of paganism (though Hypatia's fate carries some interesting implications for the period of forceful Christianization), but science and philosophy, though seen by some Christians such as Augustine (Augustine had some reservations about science, but certainly it would have distressed him to find only an incomplete copy of Timaeus available for Plato lovers in the West for hundreds of years) as a good thing, were seen by others as an evil part of the whole pagan cultural sphere, and one cannot deny that the monks who copied and preserved books brought their own prejudices with them to the copying table (unless they did not happen to read, at which point they would simply pick stuff at random to draw on the vellum-non-erasable coloring sheets).

Edit: Also, you quote scholars whenever you feel you need to in support of yourself; what makes Murray "nuts", the fact that he happens to hold a degree and disagree with you?

Bede

Well obviously!

Two points. First, Christians obviously went to the trouble to preserve what they thought important. Not what you think important. They were not very good at preserving history although Murray's contention that this was based on a strategy to produce an authorised timeline strikes me as absurd. But you are right that when you have to copy every out by hand you do the important stuff first. Pagans did the same, no doubt, and I don't think you'd like the Corpus Hermeticum, Plotinus or other pagan religious writings either. So history and literature are not well preserved.

Second point. What is interesting is that ancient science is VERY well preserved. I ran through some statistics above, but half of all pagan Greek that is extant is technical or medical. There was a massive bias to preserve science and medicine over almost any other kind of literature. This was NOT the doing of the Arabs. It was Christian Byzantium that preserved the original Greek texts and there is relatively little that is lost in Greek but extant in Arabic. To state Christians neglected pagan science is the opposite of the truth - they invested a huge amount of resources to preserve it.

Best wishes

Bede

Clivedurdle

Is this argument more about the relative contributions of Western and Eastern Christianities? My understanding is that the Roman Empire is actually continuous to the fall of Constantinople in 1451(?) (Norman Davies History of Europe).

So, are there significant differences that have evolved between these two christianities, the West far more dogma driven and resistant to science, possibly as a result of the very significant damage in the West, the East continuing as usual? The West of course also caused very significant damage to Byzantium.

In 700 CE approx some even further East xians reached China, and recorded on stone their beliefs, including not believing in original sin!

I also recently saw a comment that early Islam and the Caliphate can be seen as a soft humanising reaction to dogmatic xians and their beliefs in damnation as shown in Revelation. The extremist Islamicists now can be traced back to this fundamentalist Western xian streak! (This weeks New Scientist)

Which causes more problems - wars or beliefs (dogmatic religions)?

Why do some individuals and groups take dogmatic routes and others not?

Lafcadio

1453 the fall of Constantinople, 1461 the fall of Trebizond

NOGO

It is important to understand what one reads.
It is also important to have sufficient background into a subjet in order to get the gist of the matter. That is what Bede lacks.
Bede has to settle for textual analysis which resembles midrash more that anything.

Get this.
Copernicus tore apart the Ptolemaic system and recontructed the solar system from scratch.
To give some idea of what that means consider that from earth a planet like mars has several movements. The most prominent is the 24 hour rotation from east to west much like the sun and everything else that you can see in the sky.
Now once you take that out you have to figure out what the other movements are like. You have to figure out for example that when mars changes direction and starts to back track it due to the earth moving around the sun and not real martian motion.
After that you conclude that mars moves from west to east (from a solar perspective) and not from east to west as Ptolemy had it.
Since the sun had no other movement that the 24 hour rotation then it must be fixed etc etc.

After ALL that brilliant work Bede wants us to believe that he most important thing that Copernicus did was to keep circular motion.
Why?
Because he says so in his PR.

Now don't get me wrong, Copernicus set out to keep circular motion and he did. He had to fudge some numbers and ended up with something far less than perfect. But all this is trivial compared with his accomplishments.

Copernicus made the earth just another celestial body. This is what most people could not accept. The duality "heaven and earth" was shattered. The earth was no longer the center of the universe.

BUT do not expect Copernicus to bring attention these details by having him claim them as part of his greatest accomplishments.

Similarly do not expect somebody like Bede, who has an ax to grid, to factor in any of this in his analysis.

Bede

FWIW, I majored in Physics and so I do know rather more about both the maths and the geometry than you seem to think. You are assuming that Copernicus thought like you, but I think he thought like a sixteenth century cleric, which is what he was.

He rejected the Ptolemaic system as unworthy of the God he worshipped and set out to find a system that obeyed the rules that Aristotelian tradition said a 'perfect' system would obey. He failed, because it was impossible to follow those rules, but he did succeed in producing something that Kepler could build on (and clearly confused the hell out of you.)

That concludes our discussion of Copernicus. You are welcome to the last word.

Best wishes

Bede

andrewcriddle

I've ben rereading the Bossy book.

Bossy does believe that Bruno went back to Paris from Germany to write a final Fagot letter, (the letter Bossy lists as text 17 which contains various pieces of intelligence plus wild military schemes eg for invading Italy.)

However text 17 does not claim to be by Fagot and has major differences (plus some similarities) with all the other Fagot letters. IMHO Bossy is probably wrong to claim that Fagot wrote text 17 hence it is largely irrelevant to whether or not Fagot is really Bruno.

Andrew Criddle

countjulian

My, this thread seems to be dying! 1, 2, 3, zap. 1, 2, 3, zap. Well, I must admit that this was due in part to my absence over the last couple of days, attending to some fairly important matters. I hope my absence was not confused with a retreat.

Well, to start us of again, let's take a look at some more interesting numbers. The earliest remaining copies of the New Testament are from around 200 A.D. to A.D. 400 and there are about 5,500+ of them, not counting medieval copies. For the Old Testament our earliest copies come from about 125 B.C. (the Qumran scrolls) and our later Septuagint and Masoretic based manuscripts come from about the same time as the Christian Testament writings, and there are about 1,000+ of them. Now how many copies, medieval and antique, are there left of Frontinus on the Water Supply of Rome, a valuable piece of literature detailing Rome's aqueduct system that could have been of immense help to people in the West and East suffering from undrinkable water? 1. One stinking copy, left lying around in Monte Casino, unread and unheard of, until Poggio Brachionalli had the good sense to find and restore it in the 15th century. I guess they really did "preserve what they thought important."

While you are right to say that the warehouses of Byzantium did preserve much ancient literature, what you did not realize is that this was not for the most part copied material; it was merely stuff lying around that was mostly forgotten and un-catalogued (such as the refutation of Porphyry that provides so much of our material on his polemic to us, preserved from the fires merely by accident), much like the monasteries and abbeys of medieval Europe. Well, at least you have admitted that it was not the monks of the West that saved Western civilization. Another interesting case Vitruvius' On Architecture, which was handed down to us from a single copy that our heroic Poggio found lying around in an old Swiss monastery. If only he had waited a few more years, perhaps we could have "preserved" another copy of Augustine's Meditations on the Psalms. The amount of preserved ancient manuscripts of the Bible does give us yet another truth, that much of the literature of antiquity, if undisturbed, could have easily made it to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries and beyond. It remains up to Christians to explain why such copious amounts of Biblical literature comes down to us today, yet so much of what was mentioned in Antiquity by authors that survived did not; surely, just one manuscript of one of Posidinous' essays shouldn't be too much to ask?

Yet another interesting case is the Greek atomists; the only complete piece that comes down to us today is a poem more valued by Christians for its style than its substance, yet the work of the author's opponents, the Stoics, comes down to us today from 4 of the most exemplary members of their school, which garnered much respect from the Christians for its emphasis on God and virtue. Indeed, of all the philosophy attacked by the Christians, Epicureanism suffered the worst; the Christians hated Epicurus with a passion, and when one hears of the burning of the Library of Antioch or the closing down of other libraries mentioned by authors of the time, it is no wonder that so little of Epicureanism survived. The only reason the letters of Epicurus survived is because Diogenes Laertius happened to be a fan of Epicurus and included in his work, valued for its summations of more Christian-friendly philosophy, 3 of Epicurus' letters. It is a petty more did not survive; in his letter to Pythocles, Epicurus says that rainbows occur from light shining through water left in the air after rain and that earthquakes are the results of the earth's plates rubbing and colliding with each other. Atomism would have been a formidable remedy to the horrible Galenic doctrine of the four bodily humours, based of course on the Platonic/Empedocles doctrine of the four elements, since in its denial of the four elements could have opened up inquiry into the complex causes of diseases. Epicurus was a prolific writer, writing well over 100 books; surely the survival of just one treatise of his would not have been too much to ask?

Three more of your comments warrant mentioning. The first is your assertion that the professional and slave scriptors working in Greco-Roman scriptoriums had axes to grind and only preserved what they wanted to, in the manner of the later Christian monks. This is absurd; they were professionals and slaves who copied whatever they had put in front of them. You also mentioned the Greco-Roman religious writings, which I do indeed like. Plotinous in particular is a fascinating case. As MacMullen points out, he was one of the many of the influential pagans of the pre-late antique period who actually denied miracles, saying that the only things that happen in this world are expressions of natural law. It was a sentiment I wish more of the Christians, who believed in resurrections, faith healings, post mortem appearances, and demon possession. I rather like the Iliad and the Odyssey and Jason and the Argonaughts is a favorite of mine, so yes, again I am rather glad they survived. And as for the Greek Technical works, most of these were lost in Byzantine warehouses and unavailable for us in Christian Europe for a long time, being casualties of the system of text preservation that replaced the Greco-Roman one, and what you also forgot to mention was that no one could read Greek in the West at all for a long period of time, and it was not until well after the 11th century that Latin translations of these texts started to become available.

My last point is, if the Christians preserved pagan science for so long, why did they wait over 700 years to do something with it? Where were the centuries of Christian science and exploration when the Universities started being founded? Surely people were not shell shocked from the fall of the Roman Empire for that long

Roger Pearse

I think you've put your finger on something here. The collapse of Roman society in the West did not happen in the East, where there was a gradual decline. The greatest scientific writers of the 7th century, therefore, are in the Syriac-speaking world, just after the Islamic occupation, who have access to Greek science and are translating it into Syriac (two centuries later the Syriac Christians translated it into Arabic, and so we get the Islamic science). I'm thinking of people like Severus Sebokht here, about whom you will at the moment find little on the web (but if a project I am working on comes to fruition, I hope to have his work on the Astrolabe online sometime).

It is useless to complain that the barbarians in the West were barbarian, true though it is. We can see the decline in the letter 3 of Licinian of Cartagena. He was an educated Greek from the East who was appointed bishop of that area after Justinian's reconquest. A priest in his diocese had preached that a letter of Christ had fallen from the sky onto the altar of his church. Licinian lashes his gullibility and superstitiousness.

The people who wrote that inscription in Xian belonged to the Church of the East, and spoke Syriac. They were based in Persia, and their efforts mean that even today Mongolian is written in Syriac script.

But coming back to your query: the Eastern empire was riven with theological dissention. This was because it was an absolute despotism where no political dissent was permitted. But some religious dissent was, and this was not so very different from the arguments about Greek philosophy that had gone on in classical times. They were resolved by calling councils -- not so different from agora democracy -- and anathemising each other (not so different from ostracism). In short Greek politics continued in another guise.

These factors had some unusual consequences, from our point of view. Firstly it was necessary to understand Aristotlean dialectic in order to take part. Secondly, to do so it was necessary to have access to the works of philosophers. Since a large part of the empire did not speak Greek, this meant that they arranged for translations. In this way the entire works of Aristotle were translated into Syriac, not just once but twice (by different parties). When we remember that science was in some ways a subset of philosophy, we see at once how the infighting led to a perceptible increase in the general knowledge of science in the East.

The West had to drain the final dregs of the collapse, hitting bottom around 750AD, before things could start to improve.

I don't think that 'dogmatism' is different on either side. The lack of the endless infighting was probably more beneficial in the West to enquiry. But the omnipresent risk of starvation or sudden death in the West may have hindered it somewhat.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Buridan

Not quite sure what you mean here? Bruno was advocating a position he held for mostly religious reasons, based on his strong Hermetic views.

My conclusion is simple: After having had numerous opportunities, you have not in any way shown that Bruno was a strong supporter of science (as methodical approach). You have not even shown that he had any interest in - or understood - the geometry of Copernicus.