S.C.Carlson

To put this into perspective, Galen's Christian contemporaries were less preserved: Clement of Alexandria has about 276K surviving words, and Origen has 1029K (less than half of Galen).

Stephen

Malachi151

Bede, the one quote you give by Origin is a joke, it says:

First of all, Origen was, like Clement, raised a "pagan" in an upper class family who had classical training. He was, a rare individual among the Christians, and he, like Clement, saw saw that MOST CHRISTIANS SHUNNED PHILOSOPHY, and here he is talking about the lack of philosphical backing of the religion.

Now, he says to "extract from" Greek philosophy, those things which agree with scripture. That's not an embrace of Greek philsophy, that is an attempt to quote mine what was then highly esteemed knowledge in order to use it as a propaganda tool so that Christians could refer to sources that were more widely known and held in higher esteem in order to support their views.

This isn't an embrace of philosophy at all.

Overall, what we have shown is that in the few places that Christians seem to say anything half decent about Greek philosophy or science, they do so because it either A) happens to agree with a particular view of theirs, or B) because they are trying to use it as propaganda to draw non-Christians into their camp.

Once there were no more non-Christiasn, by the 5th and 6th centirues, these need went away, and the refereces to Greek philosophy did as well.

Malachi151

Galen's works was also A) about 1,000 times more prevalent in the Roman world prior to the rise of Christians to offical power. Glaens works were widely copied and distributed by NON-CHRISTIANS, whereas Clements and Origen's were not, and B) Most of Galen's works were preserved by Arabs, for the 10th time, and C) Galen probably wrote more than these two people in the first place.

S.C.Carlson

The TLG counts are for those works of Galen in Greek, not Arabic. All of them (except for fragmentary papyri) came down to us because they were copied at some point by a Christian in the chain of transmission.

Stephen

S.C.Carlson

We can get lost in the details about the transmission of Galen's works from antiquity, but it is hard to argue that Christians were not interested in medicine when the surviving corpus of Galen and other medical writers is huge.

dongiovanni1976x

I don't have much time here at work to research this in as much detail as I'd like but the first recorded instance of book burning by Christians was in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19:19) After Constantine legalized Christianity there were a great many persecutions against pagans and their literature but not so much directed DIRECTLY at Greek philosophy (especially since the Timaeus was used in support of Christian theology) But in the year 371 CE the emperor Valens confiscated and burned books on liberal arts and law causing many others, in order to avoid suspicion themselves, to burn books in other cities throughout the empire to avoid imperial wrath – Amm. Marc. 29.1.41
Later (448 CE) Theodosius and Valentinian commanded the public burning of unorthodox books "We order to be committed to the fire all the writings…composed against the holy Christian religion, no matter in whose possession the books are found. For all the books that move God to wrath and that harm the soul we do not want to have come even to men's hearing." Cod. Just. 1.1.3, Cod. Theod. 16.5.66
I think it was pretty clear that these are examples of the sword attempting to out muslce the pen in the name of the Christian religion.

Clivedurdle

May we define some terms?

I am becoming less and less clear that the idea of a "Western mind" is helpful. Following Said and Orientalism, and ex marxist theory, it has become a habit of thought to group together 'West, America, Empire, Race, Colonialism" against an equally mythical East.

Tom Holland Persian Fire (or via: amazon.co.uk) brilliantly describes the issues around the Battle of Marathon - about 500 BCE) Darius,(and later Xerxes) against the Athenians and Spartans etc, the classic evil empire from the east against proto democracies. The Hebrew Bible is a description of a very small backwater that somehow only rarely mentions the huge empires around them. Why on eath were they weeping by the rivers of Babylon - then the wealthiest, most educated, most advanced place on the planet? The Greeks called this hubris - it seems a real plague of hubris for xians to go around believing they had a hotline to the creator of the universe. Good things the Greeks also had Nemesis!

Yup the Greeks were an argumentative superstitious lot, looking at entrails, worrying about eclipses and sniffing volcanic fumes at Delphi to get clues about what to do. As is everyone, including modern day xians believing in resurrection, sons of god, and holy communion and sin. Wonderful examples of how human minds attempt to find logic in the clouds and fogs of unreason. The middle of battle was seen as a time when men were thought to be closest to the gods for example - better than sex!

As were the Persians, except they had very strong heirarchical systems - and despite Aristotle calling them Barbarians - excellent science and technology themselves and superb table manners. And they probably invented monotheism...

I strongly recommend Terry Jones Barbarians (or via: amazon.co.uk) for a fascinating discussion of this whole area.

We are talking about at least a thousand years when we use the term "Greeks". Possibly 2500 years from the earliest stories of Troy to the fall of Constantinople.

There are huge gaps - for example about Islam - why on earth did it start and grow - Bede, did Allah really do it? What effect has the continuous interaction of peoples, ideas, stories, armies had? Gods, including the xian god and jesus, are fascinating stories, equal to the greek gods you comment about how the xians treated them - why should we not treat your god identically to how xians treated Zeus? Remember, the Phoenicians were subject to the Persians, and that technically included Carthage, except an empire that already took three months to get across had a little logistical difficulty going that far into North Africa.

Remember that astronomical machine found in the med at the turn of the century. Maybe Islam, following Alexander's conquest of Babylon, is actually an accretion of Greek and Persian thinking? Remember the Greeks did reach the ends of the world in Asia and India, how many Alexandrias are there and where are they?

Is it not ridiculous to assert "xianity" or whatever did "x"? Is this not salvation thinking - if Jesus is the son of god his religion must have had an effect on history? More hubris?

What if it is all down to disease, brilliant minds, strategies, decisive battles, if someone got killed by smallpox at such and such a time.

The Dutch say, God created the world and we made the Netherlands. Maybe humans have constructed very painfully and slowly whatever order we find. It is not designed in from a first principle of god, only painfully built up from the bottom.

If xianity is to blame for anything, it is for diverting minds to wallow in superstition.

Malachi151

Not really. #1) As I said, the amount of perserved material has everything to do with how many available copies there were to make copies of. Galen's medical work, because of its utility, was one of the most widely copied and distributed pieces of literature in the ancient world. #2) Galen wrote a shit load. So, the fact that there are is a larger volume of work by Galen than someone like Clement, a 2nd century Christian writing in an underground system, whose works weren't of any interest to anyone except a small community for 200 years, is of no suprise, if even if Clement did write a lot, and I have no idea how much he wrote, but I doubt he wrote even half as much as Galen in the first place.

You are the one that brought the issue up.

Secondly, as I have already said 100 times #1) The simple copying of a text does not mean that the text, or all of the text, was used or that its knowledge was accepted. #2) Pretty much everything that was preserved by Christians was preserved because it agreed in some fashion with their theology, as much of Galen's work did, because he was a montheistic that believed in the soul, the same goes for Plato. #3) No matter how many texts were preserved, the principles of science and philosophy were not practiced or taught or embraced. These texts were preserved for a number of reasons, but they became stagnant. They were refereces at best, simply shoved into dark corners mostly, and have only come down to us by chance because someone hid them or they got lost at worst.

You cant say that Christians embraced science and quote guys like Origen as examples because of a few times when he tries to make peace with the 2nd century world that he lived in when he also says stuff like:

The early Christians of the 2nd and 3rd century were highly insecure. They were a minority group, living in a culture that they did not dominate. They were raised when Greek philosophy was a part of the culture, and they had to appeal to Greek philosophy to some degree because it was THE esteemed source of knowledge and understanding. When they began defending their views they had to speak in the language of the people they were conversing with. They treaded lightly on Greek philosphy to an extent while they had to. By the 5th and 6th centuries they no longer had to, and they didn't.

If the Christians were so into science and philosophy, then show me the Christian texts from the 5th-10th centuries that show Christians USING philosophy and science.

You can't claim that the Christian peiriod was a time of desregard of superstition and the flowering of science, that's completely absurd. It doesn't matter how many texts they copied, when you make these principles the basis of your culture, you have closed the door or science and philosophy:

dongiovanni1976x

:thumbs:
:thumbs:

:thumbs:

:notworthy:

Malachi151

Furthermore, you have to demonstrate that whatever works you are talking about were actually continusouly copied and used by Christians. Just becasue we have a text today, even in Greek or Latin, doesn't mean that it was every copied by Christians after their rise or during the Middle Ages.

The classic example of the Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things by Lucertius. This work was lost for over 1,000 years and rediscovered by accident in 1417. It doesn't survive today because "Christians loved Greek philosphy and science". The work was considered heresy when it was found, and yet still managed to get reprinted because people were hungery for new ideas and it was exciting, not because it was compatable with Christianity, indeed it was a hit because it was so different, and the religious authorities cursed it.

In fact, we know that a huge amount of the works that we have in Greek and Latin were lost for over 1,000 years or more, and were only later found during the 15th and 16th centuries, and some of Galen's works are included in this, so getting counts of "number of words we have today" doesn't tell us much of anything. These works were originally written in Greek adn Latin in the first place anyway.