Let me gather some threads here and make a too long cloak. This started when Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> objected to the term Dark Ages which I had used as a jovial afterthought. He also objected to my dates, the first dates I used being "Dark Ages" and later "the fall of the Roman Empire" and the "Renaissance." No matter that he does not believe in any of those terms I used them and so must be using them as he with a degree in history defines: AD 476 and AD 1500. The fact that i disagree with these dates is immaterial.
I then agreed with him that the Dark Ages seems a misnomer, no Darker than previous times, and agreed with him that the intellectual Renaissance, which he doesn't believe in but he suggested a date anyway, really had it roots in the 12th Century. My agreements and agreeableness seem to bring forth longer disagreements from him. We had a digression into book burning which occurred earlier than this period, which he implied he didn't believe happened and wanted citations but then seemed to say "Oh, those books which the State or Church needed to burn." Maybe I should use his real words "Of course such works would be suppressed." Saturday he seems to write that a period of nearly four hundred years is too short a time for a "lively literary and scholarly environment" to develop under Islam in Spain but the two - three hundred years of Catholicism must have been the roots of it. ??? Perhaps I am misinterpreting something there. I'd better quote that: Gary: > 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. Damon >I am not minimizing these centers. However, again >look at your dates. Spain >did not fall until 711, and by the late 5th C or so was >fully converted to >Catholicism. Sicily not until more than a century later. >For there to be a >lively literary and scholarly environment there must >have been something >there to begin with. I would say this argument is not only contradictory but also suggests that it is too soon for most of the universities in America to be centers of new knowledge and learning. (I would like to agree with him here but just can't even if we start redefining 'new knowledge and learning.') I will point out that the Archbishop of Toledo after the reconquest supported translating the Arabic works, my nod to the church. I also note Toledo and Cordova were under the control of Rome only by their recognition of Visigoth (Arian until 589) control. Let me add a quote here: "From Spain came the philosophy and natural science of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators in the form which was to transform European thought in the thirteenth century. The Spanish translators made most of the current versions of Galen and Hippocrates and of the Arab physicians like Avicenna. Out of Spain came the new Euclid, the new algebra, and treatises on perspective and optics. Spain was the home of astronomical tables and astronomical observation.... (Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 289)" I had noted much earlier in this thread the 40,000 manuscripts in Rome. In the great library of Cordova alone, there were some 600,000 manuscripts. "Paper, a material still unknown to the west, was everywhere. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries." (James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed) - recommended if popular account of science moments and changes in knowledge. To continue then, now that I had earlier agreed with him about there not being a Dark Ages, Damon writes "that Europe was too busy trying to survive to develop a lively literary or scholarly movement during this period (specifically the so-called Dark Ages)." ??? So a lack of literature and scholarship only creates a "so-called Dark Ages", perhaps I should agree with him again and see how he responds. Maybe I should just let Damon argue with himself. Expanding on the Augustine debate he writes "In the fourth century controversy had raged over the Church's policy towards classical learning, but with time MODERATE VIEW proposed by ST AUGUSTINE [emphasis mine] prevailed that 'pagan' learning should be tolerated as long as it was kept subordinate to scripture and put to good Christian use... <and more interesting stuff>" which is somewhat different than what I wrote "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." So I believe he is arguing here that because Augustine believes that not all "pagan learning" should be destroyed but only that which the Church finds unable to tolerate or use the Church is promoting learning during this time. ??? Doesn't that support that the church was burning the books before then and with Augustine improved that and they just started destroying some? Lists of proscribed books started around this time as I noted earlier in the thread. I'll answer a minor point raised - I was redefining a Renaissance to agree with Damon about the 12th century rise in scholarship. Damon is free with the term Renaissance, citing several of them, for one who doesn't believe in them but stresses the continuity of, what he doesn't define, I'll call 'whatever'. My use of Totalitarian. Gary: > 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. Damon has objected more than once that the Church was engaged in a struggle to survive and so "I disagree that it could summarily repress knowledge." Does Damon not think an authoritarian hierarchical institution "struggling to survive" as he puts it, I could explore this further here but let it go, might be less tolerant, not more, of any ideas it disagreed with? I agree before he objects that "suppressed other knowledge" needs definition and could be overstated: that should be suppressed histories, philosophies, ideas and literature that the Church opposed. The fact that Damon acknowledges it was attempting imposing "universal liturgy and ecclesiastical laws on its clergy" indicates he acknowledges it was suppressing liturgy and laws it disagreed with. Richard Baker chimed in against my characterizing the Roman Empire as totalitarian in that "under Diocletian and his successors the Roman Empire became increasingly hard to govern despite (or perhaps because of!) the vast increase in bureaucracy. " OK, it is not a Republic or a Democracy, would Richard prefer despotic or tyrannical if he objects to totalitarian? I think some of the features of a totalitarian government are the large bureaucracy and increasing difficulty in governing. There were no checks on Imperial power and the Church was established and became the only state religion under the Imperial system. I do not argue that the centralized state did not become weaker, just that the Church started as a branch of a despotic/tyrannical/totalitarian/Imperial government and it remained when the rest of the state broke up. That their was an influx of invaders and weakening of Imperial power is a given. Richard also noted the strange way Damon stresses continuity and then starts tossing around collapses, and I would add Renaissances. At last this thread is now discussing history books. C. Warren Hollister is expected from Damon. "Warren proposed simply doing away with medieval history, suggesting a new periodization of Western civilization: classical antiquity to A.D. 200; late antiquity, 200-1050; preindustrial Europe, 1050-1800; modern Europe, 1800-c. 2000; and finally the postmodern, postindustrial world." Marc Bloch also takes the continuity of structures view and can be considered a founder. I don't know about Richard William Southern who I hear argued that the eleven and twelve hundreds was perhaps the greatest age of humanism. Still I do like, in yet another point of agreement with Damon, "Haskin's _The Rennaisance of the 12th Century_ is good too" Continuing to be agreeable I will second Damon's "history is an interpretive and analytical art." Damon interprets and analyzes Western History as "the church served to preserve the cultural and intellectual traditions through incorporation into spiritual learning" and the transition to 'whatever', after 1500, was "rather evolutionary stretching back several centuries." I interpret it as the Catholic Church suppressed histories, philosophies, and ideas it was opposed to. This repression is opposed to and slows new cultural and intellectual ideas. That more rapid scientific advancement began when the Church did not have a monopoly on the "truth." I agree that this was evolutionary stretching back several centuries or more. I had agreed with Damon about the Dark Ages being a misnomer, if he now says the "so-called Dark Ages" means "no lively literary or scholarly movement" I might have to agree with him again if I wasn't wary of his contradictions. Gary Denton -- Agreeable Maru #1 on Google for liberal news
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