Antipope Innocent II

Good summary.

As is often the way when dealing with close-minded fundamentalists. They prefer myths to facts and will fight tooth and nail to cling to them. But this exchange hasn't been entirely pointless. I get the impression some people on the sidelines have learned a few things about the Middle Ages and realised that the popular cliches are rather too simplistic. Most people's conceptions about that period tend to be wildly wrong. You should hear people howl when I explain it was actually a period of technological advancement (!!) or that Medieval people, in fact, bathed and washed regularly (!!!).

Speaking of which:

At that early stage? No, not really. They assumed other people outside the monasteries were doing that, since they always had before.

In the earliest stages of Medieval monasticism they were “supposed” to do little except live separate from the world and pray a lot. At least, that was the ideal. Except living separate from the world was easier said than done and required monastic communities to try to be self-sufficient in most things, including book production. Thus the scriptoria and thus the emphasis in those scriptoria on “stuff like hymnbooks and saint biographies”. As monasteries became more popular, got bigger and more sophisticated they attracted some higher-ranking, better educated monks who liked books other than hymnbooks and saint’s lives and who either brought some of those with them or had copies of them made. This is why, when other collections and libraries got scattered and lost in the chaos of the Fall of the Empire and these collections in monasteries tended to be the main ones that survived, the books that survived were so heavily skewed to the religious and so weirdly diverse in other respects.

As an old lecturer of mine once put it – “Imagine a nuclear holocaust that not only wiped out almost all civilization but also destroyed all libraries and book shops. Yet, for some reason, only preserved the book collections of Church of England vicars. The collected knowledge of the society that arose from the ashes would be very weird – lots of hymn books and sermon collections, some books on gardening, some light novels and nothing about building bridges or nuclear physics.”

I’m just telling you what happened and why. I don’t know why you think I’m “defending” something. I'm sorry if you don't like what I'm telling you.

They did a better job, for a lot of complex reasons. Until the Twelfth Century that is, by which time the Islamic world was starting to go backwards in this regard, the Byzantine world was in decline generally and Medieval Europe was going in leaps and bounds.

Let’s fact it – most Medieval Europeans had a few other things on their plate until after 1200 or so. Getting raided by Vikings one week and Avars the next kind of takes your mind off copying Aristotelian works. Particularly if you can't read Greek to begin with.

I leave value judgments about how past periods of history fall short of modern desires for them to be more like us to those who like to indulge in such things. I just study how the past was, not scold it for not being the way I’d like it to be.

One of the reasons I avoid those value judgments is that they tend to lead people to believe in erroneous myths about the past. Myths like – “the Medieval Church taught the Earth was flat” or “Christianity caused the Dark Ages”. Those myths and neat, simple and easy to understand. But, unfortunately, they are also wrong.

Roger Pearse

A good summary of why monastic collections came into being and contained what they did.

Very much so. People don't seem to understand how awful the Dark Ages were, and must have been to experience. Imagine living in a society where every generation had less than the one before, everything was getting worse, seeing learning vanish, order vanish, and trying desperately to find some way to teach your children, while these simply noticed that the new overlords couldn't read or write or wash and didn't care? It must have been heart-breaking.

Lupus of Ferrieres in letter 1 makes clear how the barons around Charlemagne scoffed at literacy, even while Charlemagne reversed the whole slide into oblivion and began the recovery.

If we complain that people in the past did not follow the values invented seemingly in modern California about 30 years ago (which presumably will be abandoned in the next 30, as every set of period values turns over) but preferred to live by the values of their own period of history, surely we are guilty of the worst sort of anachronism? Just why are the values of our period of 60 years absolute, rather than *their* period of 60 years?

Every era could do the same, of course, which means that it's all rather meaningless.

I notice that some of those who make this demand also say that they believe that there are no absolute right and wrong. But some then go on to make this sort of complaint, which seems to me to implicitly assert that the values of the period of history in which they happen to live are absolute.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

Then why do you keep insisting that the medieval church believed in a flat earth because it was written in scripture?

James Hannam

Hello all and especially the antipope. If we don't already know each other, we should. Do please send me a PM as we have many mutual interests.

Jehanne asks some questions that I think deserve an answer. So here goes

Copernicus dedicated the book to the Pope because he was a rich patron. This was standard practice in the 16th century. If I recall, the Greek version of Euclid was dedicated to the Bishop of London, a German treatise on mining to Elizabeth I, a Ptolemy to Henry VIII. De revolutionibus wasn't even the first astronomical treatise dedicated to Paul III. He wasn't expected to read it, just feel flattered by the attention and send a gift to Poland.

Lactantius wasn't a flat earther. Copernicus got this wrong. He did reject the antipodes in language that confused later commentators but that is a separate question. Interestingly, one of the very few corrections that the papal censor made to De rev in the 1610s was to remove the reference to Lactantius. On this point, they had Copernicus bang to rights.

Hard to do if he never read it.

No he couldn't. The Church had no position on heliocentricism until 1605. That meant that Copernicus was most certainly not a heretic.

As he wasn't a flat earther, the question hardly arises in this context.

It was an obscure question of astronomy in a fiendishly mathematical book that about ten people in the whole of Europe were qualified to understand. Papal policy on the point was very sensible - leave the matter well alone.

No. I expect he never read the book. If he had, he would have realised that Copernicus was using the flat earth to make a rhetorical point.

I've laid out the details of how the argument in De rev is structured in an essay here.

My own brief take on the flat earth myth is here.

On the preservation of ancient literature here.

Best wishes

James

(the poster previously known as Bede)

Read Chapter One of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science FREE

WishboneDawn

It frames the way we view them. Were they akin to fundamentalist literalists and completely "backwards" as aa claims?

Or were they more open to natural philosophy and have a different way of viewing scripture? The answer to that holds implication for both the church at the time and the history of philosophy and natural philosophy.

WishboneDawn

My interest is registered!

I just recently started to learn about natural philosophy and the church of the middle ages and it's pretty much stood everything I'd assumed on it's head. I can't wait until there's more then a chapter of your book to read.

Antipope Innocent II

Considering you are (I assume) a Christian and I am an atheist, the fact that we seem to agree on this and related issues should indicate something to the few who are still trying to resist the facts on this thread.

It saddens me that we atheists have fundies as well. We're meant to be the smart ones. :huh:

Antipope Innocent II

That's the reason this subject has fascinated me for so long. Like everyone else I went through High School and learned the myths about the Medieval Church teaching the Earth was flat, Christianity ushering in the Dark Ages, the Church stifling science and technology etc. Then when I began to study Medieval history at university and found the real period bore little relation to the cliches, prejudices and Hollywoodisms that form most people's conception of the Middle Ages, especially in the area of reason, science and technology. It's slightly surreal that the period that gave us the printing press, the mechanical clock and reading glasses - three of the most signficant inventions in history - is still regarded as a stagnant and sterile dark age.

One of the projects I have to get around to doing one of these years is a website on Medieval science, technology and reason called (with deliberate provocation) "Age of Light". Books on these subjects are widely available but are not widely read by non-specialists. And most of the stuff on the Web on these subjects is largely Nineteenth Century crap.

Dreadnought

I had a feeling from the start that this was part of a larger revisionist onslaught as this topic seemed to begin as a prepared trap that angelo atheist walked right into. I'm looking forward to the continuation, but I'm expecting the proponents of this new view on the dark ages to be the ones demonstrating their cases with evidence rather than demanding to be showed wrong.

WishboneDawn

It's not really some wildly new view of the dark ages anymore than textual criticism is a radically new way to view the bible. Misquoting Jesus is eye opening for most lay people out there but Bart Ehrman is writing about stuff that's long been established, is even old hat, in the circles of the textual critics. From what I gather, scholars and historians have known much of this stuff about the Middle Ages for awhile...It's the rest of us who are still operating on high school history classes and hollywood biases that haven't caught up yet.

I got my introduction to this by way of a series of lectures on the history of science from The Teaching Company (Lawrence M. Principe was the lecturer). Not a source that's prone to wild theories or radical flights away from scholarly consensus.

It should be noted that one view doesn't completely exclude the other. The Middle Ages were a miserable time for many. But that doesn't exclude a class of very well educated and well connected people that were doing very exciting stuff in philosophy, theology and natural philosophy. At least that's my impression as a noob on the topic.