On Sat, 29 May 2004 01:08:31 -0400, Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Your response was: > > Believing it is impossible for the Church to retard learning between > > 500-1000 because it barely survived is silly. It was destroying > > libraries and books before that time. > >Cite please. Specifically how the church was burning libraries and books. >This is contrary to anything I've heard. I posted some citations on burning books and libraries before that time which is what you asked.. > > This is all fine Gary, but again look at your dates and again look at the > transition within Christianity. The role of Christians post Augustine, FREX, > was as *preservers* of this legacy. A lot has been made about Muslims and > preservation of knowledge, but where did this come from? The answer, of > course, is from works preserved by Christians in the Eastern Empire. If > there really was a concerted effort to destroy this legacy, would we have > access to it at all? I see no change after Augustine, it was not until around the time of Aquinas that there was a change in attitudes toward ancient knowledge. While some Greek knowledge was preserved in the Eastern Empire you are minimizing the importance of Toledo and Sicily when they fell from Muslim hands. These both took place just before 1100 and most of Aristotle's work in biology. the Arab knowledge of alchemy, as well as much else arrived in Europe from these conquests. "So just what proportion of ancient literature has been lost? This is difficult to answer but we can get a rough estimate from the size of ancient libraries. Archaeology suggests that the biggest contained 20,000 or so scrolls and the Great Library of Alexandria itself is most reliably said to have contained 40,000. On the other hand, all the extant pagan classical works would not fill much more than a thousand scrolls so we have been left with about 5% of what might be found (barring repeat copies) in Rome." > > Furthermore, in sections of your post, you cite information such as the > suppression of Arianism and Gnosticism. You post this without external > reference to what was going on in Christianity at the time. Of course such > works would be supressed since it was the belief of the mainstream that this > was perilous and grossly incorrect. It was the belief of the official state religion of a totalitarian regime that information it disapproved of should be suppressed. If by mainstream you mean majority, until the successful campaigns of Justinian (died 565) Arianism, not Catholicism was the majority religion of Europe. > > So again, by posting this you create an unequal and only half-story, and > minimize the efforts of later generations to preserve that information. I am reminded of "Alas, Babylon" which mimicked this preservation by having the Church canonization of a Jew and the manuscript illumination of his grocery shopping list by barely literate monks who had no clue to the works they were saving after a nuclear war. I acknowledge that the Irish monks on the remote outskirts of the Empire had a program to preserve manuscripts but the major recent book on the subject is overrated and does not even mention sources besides the Irish monks, i.e. Jews, Muslims, the Eastern Empire. The point you are trying to make is that there was no Dark Ages, there was no Renaissance, was no Enlightenment, and that the Church preserved and spread knowledge and contributed to scientific advancement? I do not blame the Church for the Fall of Rome but as a totalitarian creation that survived the fall of Rome it preserved knowledge it wanted, suppressed other knowledge, and let non-spiritual knowledge it was not interested in lapse. Gary "wanting to have illuminated shopping lists" #1 on Google for liberal news
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
