On Thu, 27 May 2004 05:44:08 -0700 (PDT), Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
> > Who skinned Hypatia alive with sharpened oyster > > shells, then dragged her > > body behind a cart until she was dead? > > Ah, but its much more complex than just that. This was > before the acceptance of moderation as proposed by > some of the early "Church Doctors" such as Augustine, > in which there was no threat to Christianity by > classical learning. Besides which, in order for this > to support Gary's thesis, this would have to have > taken place at the behest of the church leadership; > rather it seems to have been undertaken by a radical > group that took it into their own hands. Furthermore, > there may have been a bit more of politics involved in > her alienation than just "Pagan" science. The early censorship of the Church is common knowledge - look up censorship in any encyclopedia. This included burning libraries and books. ~~~ Constantine the Great set the pattern of religious censorship that was to be followed for centuries by ordering the burning of all books by the Greek theologian Arius in 333 AD. After the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the established religion of the empire, the Roman government and the church began to persecute both pagans and Christian heretics who deviated from orthodox doctrine or practice. The pope was recognized as the final authority in church doctrine and government, and the secular state used force to compel obedience to his decisions. Books or sermons that were opposed to orthodox faith or morals were prohibited, and their authors were punished. Pope Gelasius issued the first catalog of forbidden books in 496. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761559522/Censorship.html ~~~~ I'll get back to book burnings in a minute. For more on Hypatia: Her contemporary Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates Scholasticus (c.380 - c.450) was a Greek Christian church historian, born at Constantinople.) in his Ecclesiastical History portrays her as a follows: "There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more." The letters written by Synesius (c. 373-c. 414), of Cyrene, Bishop of Ptolomais, to Hypatia, whom he loved and respected as a teacher, grants some insights into the power struggle of the time. In one of them, he complains about dogmatic thinkers: "Their philosophy consists in a very simple formula, that of calling God to witness, as Plato did, whenever they deny anything or whenever they assert anything. A shadow would surpass these men in uttering anything to the point; but their pretensions are extraordinary." In this letter, he also tells Hypatia that "the same men" had accused him for storing copies of "unrevised copies" of books in his library. This indicates that books were rewritten to suit the prevailing Christian dogma, which may also relate to the difficulty of finding accurate contemporary information about Hypatia's life and death. "And [after an alleged Jewish massacre was punished by the Christians and the Jews expelled from the city] a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate -- now this Peter was a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ -- and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her seated on a (lofty) chair; and having made her descend they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her [till they brought her] through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire. And all the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him 'the new Theophilus'; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city." Socrates Scholasticus complements this account by stating that, while she was still alive, Hypatia's flesh was torn off using oyster shells. This is notable, because John of Nikiu also portrays Hypatia as a witch: "And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honored her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom." The punishment of witchcraft had been determined decades earlier by Emperor Constantius, as noted in Soldan's and Heppe's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse [3, p.82]: "Things changed with Constantius, who thoroughly tried to get rid of magic and therefore of paganism. In one of the laws he passed for that reason he complains that there were many magicians who caused storms with the help of demons and who harmed others' lives. The magicians caught in Rome were supposed to be thrown to wild animals, the ones picked up in provinces were to be tortured and, if they persistently denied, the flesh should be torn off their bones with iron hooks." With no iron hooks available, Hypatia's death seems to match the prescribed punishment for witchcraft precisely. She may have been the first famous "witch" as was noted by many church-critical authors. In spite of Cyril's involvement in her murder, he was later declared a saint. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Hypatia%20of%20Alexandria *Saint Cyril* - Carl Sagan wrote about this " The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy--an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options, and were treated as property, Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage. The Alexandria of Hypatia's time--by then long under Roman rule--was a city under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint." http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/2606/hypatia.htm ~~~~ David Van Biema, "The Lost Gospels", Time Magazine , December 22, 2003 . *The Catholic Church is in fact notorious for actively censoring and eagerly destroying almost anything outside of its rather narrow, control-oriented belief system. ~~~ Some author's quotes - Elaine Pagels: "For nearly 2,000 years, Christian tradition has preserved and revered orthodox writings that denounce the Gnostics, while suppressing â and virtually destroying â the Gnostic writings themselves. Now, for the first time, certain texts discovered at Nag Hammadi reveal the other side of the coin: how Gnostics denounced the orthodox. The 'Second Treatise of the Great Seth' polemicizes against orthodox Christianity, contrasting it with the 'true church' of the Gnostics. Speaking for those he calls the sons of light, the author says: 'ââ..we were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant (pagans), but also by those think they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are, like dumb animals.'" Tom Harpur: "To make sure this story stuck, all Pagan opposition was quelled with an unequalled fury. Mystery schools and philosophical academies were closed down, libraries of books were burned, and anathemas were hurled at all who dared to raise objections. Those who risked everything by pointing out that the Christians had taken over all the old Pagan myths, rites, and ceremonies but transformed them by literalizing everything were either banished or killed." Richard Carrier: "All other religions but Judaism were outlawed under pain of death throughout the Mediterranean and Europe by 395 AD." ~~~~ Christianity and Pagan Literature http://www.bede.org.uk/literature.htm Burning down entire libraries - although Gibbons in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire believed the Great Library of Alexandria was burned downed by a Christian mob that is not proven. Noting Christian writers approving of Emperor Jovian burning his father's library makes a better case. There is no dispute that the Roman Empire destroyed books, Diocletian tried to destroy all Christian books, and when the Church became the official religion any books not supporting it's doctrines were banned as seditious. -Even before the Church - the state and its magistrates officially controlled the Roman religion. The protection of the religion from undesirable influences led sometimes to the authorized burning of books. Livy hints, in his account of the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, that several times before 186 B.C. the Roman magistrates had been requested by the senate to collect and burn books of soothsaying. In 181 B.C. occurred a more definite episode. Several annalists told the story, later rehearsed by Varro, Livy, and others, of the finding in a buried chest of some books of Numa, part of which were written in Greek. and dealt with the Pythagorean philosophy. The matters set forth appeared to the Roman senate quite inharmonious with the established religion, and they decreed that the books should be burned by the praetor, Quintus Petilius. Even the most rudimentary historical criticism can perceive that these books were a bold forgery, but fit is clear that someone wrote them, and that they were burned. Thus the first attempt to introduce Greek philosophy into Rome, by means of a subterfuge, was abortive. In 168 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes made a determined effort to crush the Jewish religion. Part of the program, which he and his followers carried out, was seizing and burning all the books of the Jewish law and prophets that they could find in Jerusalem. By the fifth century learning in the Western Empire was rapidly decaying as barbarian hordes swept over the dying Roman civilization. Ammianus Marcellinus had complained in a rather rhetorical way that the libraries of Rome had been shut during his time in the mid forth century. Whatever was left in Rome was destroyed during the sackings of 410AD by the Goths, in 455AD by the Vandals and many times thereafter. In Alexandria too, at the start of the fifth century, Orosius found that pagan temples, while still standing, had been emptied of their book . ~~ How about the Bible: The Book of Acts (19.19) tells us one striking result of the labors of St. Paul in Ephesus. The city had for centuries been a hotbed of magic,20 but now the practitioners of the black art were converted to a higher doctrine, and they manifested their sincerity by burning in a public conflagration their books on magic, to the value of 50,000 drachmas (" pieces of silver"). How many are those books of magic and not books of philosophy or science? ~~~ In the year 303 Diocletian promulgated throughout the Roman world his famous edict commanding the Christian churches to be overthrown and the Scriptures to be burned. Eusebius related how he saw with his own eyes the Holy Scriptures tossed on the fire in the market place Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, heresies and opposition to Christianity *frequently* led to the burning of books. Diocletian, not content with assailing the Christian scrip- tures with fire, ordered burned the Egyptian books on the chemistry of silver and gold. This would keep the Egyptians from luxuriating in wealth, he grimly said, so that, in the future, lack of financial resources would deter them from resisting the Roman might. In the year 371 Antioch was the sufferer, when the emperor Valens took from various private homes there, and burned, large numbers of books on liberal arts and law. His paradoxical pretext was that these law books were unlawful. Discouraged and terrorized people all over the eastern provinces of the Empire, wishing to avoid any possible suspicion, *began to burn their own libraries.* http://www.tertullian.org/articles/forbes_books_for_the_burning.htm (Interesting, the author of that little study ends it there and praises the Church for burning so few books.) ~~~~ Theodosius banned the Olympic games -- which were considered pagan. He prohibited visits to pagan temples and forbade all pagan worship. Ordinary Christians were delighted at this move, and mobs of **Christians joined the anti-pagan program by robbing pagan temples of their treasures and looting temple libraries, causing the disappearance of many writings.** In the repression some of the most splendid buildings of Grecian architecture-- were destroyed. Pagans in the east tried to defend their freedom to worship, and in the west some pagans rallied in an attempt to overthrow Valentinian II. Valentinian II was assassinated. A military commander in the west, being a German and not eligible to be emperor, created an anti-Christian puppet named Eugenius, who announced that the hour of deliverance from Christianity was at hand. In response, Theodosius cracked down harder on pagans in the eastern half of the empire. He made pagan worship punishable by death. In 394, he led an army of Visigoth cavalry and others against the reign of Eugenius, defeating Eugenius' forces at the Frigidus River, in the extreme northeast of Italy, a victory the Church was later to interpret as the work of God triumphing over paganism. With his victory against Eugenius, Theodosius moved against paganism in the western half of the empire as he had in the east, wiping out freedom of worship across the whole of the empire. Then in 395, perhaps because of the strain of his recent military campaign against Eugenius, Theodosius died, at the age of fifty, believing that the empire had been unified by his wisdom and had become secure under the guidance of God. http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch24.htm#s1 ~~~~ The Nag Hammaddi Library was a collection of works protected from being destroyed by being wrapped, placed in jars, hidden and buried by monks in Egypt around 400 AD. http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlintro.html ~~~~ Enough about book burnings. Some further thought on the 'Dark Ages' The leading Christians downplayed the value of science because it emphasized the physical world over the spiritual world - Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian ("Divine revelation, not reason, is the source of all truth.") and Tatian. Later Augustine, while not explicitly anti-science, maintained that the worldly city could never be the central concern of a Christian. The state must employ repression and punishment to restrain people, who were inherently sinful, from destroying each other and the few good men and women that God had elected to save from hell. ~~~ Book - The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason -2003 A modern argument for the "Dark Ages." Authors words: My thesis is that Christianity was heavily politicized by the late Roman empire, certainly to the extent that it would have been unrecognizable to Jesus. Note the linking of the church to the empire's success in war, opulent church building and an ever narrowing definition of what beliefs one had to hold to be saved. (Hand in hand with this went an elaboration of the horrors of hell, a radical and unhappy development which can only have discouraged freedom of thought.) My core argument is that one result of the combination of the forces of authority (the empire) and faith (the church) was a stifling of a sophisticated tradition of intellectual thought which had stretched back over nearly a thousand years and which relied strongly on the use of the reasoning mind. I did not depend on Gibbon. I do not agree with him that intellectual thought in the early Christian centuries was dead and I believe that the well established hierarchy of the church strengthened not undermined the empire. After all it was the church which survived the collapse of the western empire. Of course, Gibbon writes so eloquently that I could not resist quoting from him at times but my argument is developed independently of him and draws on both primary sources and recent scholarship. On the relationship between Christianity and philosophy I argue that there were two major strands of Greek philosophy , those of Plato and Aristotle. The early church did not reject Greek philosophy but drew heavily on Platonism to the exclusion of Aristotle. In the thirteenth century Christianity was reinvigorated by the adoption of Aristotelianism , notably by Thomas Aquinas. It seems clear that Christianity needed injections of pagan philosophy to maintain its vitality and a new era in Christian intellectual life was now possible. I don't explore it in this book. Even so, when one compares the rich and broad intellectual achievements of the 'pagan' Greek centuries with those of the Middle Ages, it is hard to make a comparison in favor of the latter. Where are the great names? (The critic who mentioned the ninth century philosopher Erigena should also have mentioned that he was condemned as a heretic.) When one reads the great works of second and third century AD thinkers such as Plutarch, Galen, Ptolemy and Plotinus, which are remarkable for their range and depth, one cannot but feel that much has been lost in the west by the fifth century. Something dramatic happened in the fourth century. In 313 Constantine brought the traditional policy of Roman toleration for different religious beliefs to its culmination by offering Christians (who had condemned the pagan gods as demons) a privileged place within the empire alongside other religions. By 381 the Christian emperor Theodosius when enforcing the Nicene creed condemns other Christians as 'foolish madmen.. We decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious names of heretics . . .they will suffer in the first place the chastisement of divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment which our authority , in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decided to inflict'. If this is not a 'closing of the western mind' it is difficult to know what is. It goes hand in hand with a mass of texts which condemn rational thought and the violent suppression of Jewish and pagan sacred places. There is no precedent for such a powerful imposition of a religious ideology in the Greco-Roman world. The evidence of suppression is so overwhelming that the onus must be on those who argue otherwise to refute it. Some readers have related my book to the present day- I leave it to them to do so if they wish -it is important to understand ANY age in which perspectives seem to narrow and religion and politics become intertwined as they certainly did in the fourth century. After all American Christianity was founded by those attempting to escape just such political straitjackets. Christianity has never been monolithic or static. In fact, as my book makes clear, one of my heroes is Gregory the Great who, I believe, brought back spirituality, moderation and compassion into the Christian tradition after the extremes of the fourth century. It is the sheer variety of Christianities which make the religion such an absorbing area of study. I hope Amazon readers will continue to engage with my arguments whether they agree with them or not. Keep the western mind open and good reading! Charles Freeman. N.B. Amazon insists I award my book some stars! I have chosen ''four' because since I wrote it I have come across a lot of new material which I think could improve its argument further. http://tinyurl.com/2dzzx ~~~~ Personally, I have become convinced that the term Dark Ages is wrong because I feel it might be simple romanticism of some earlier time (usually classical Greek) and I see nothing enlightened about most, if not all, ages before it. This does not mean I see anything praiseworthy about the "Dark Ages." I consider ideas from later times more worthy of emulating and only a few religious teachers from earlier times worth remembering. Gary Denton #1 on Google for liberal news
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