Ancient writings saved by early Christians?

[cj.23]

Yes Sagan was completely wrong in that clip from Cosmos, I saw it too, and recently spent some time explaining why it was cobblers over on Dawkins.net. History was not Sagan's strong suit, and his researchers clearly did not check! Whenever it is watched by friends I also have to explain what Neo-Platonism was, and why most atheists today would be less than enthusiastic about Hypatia's beliefs, and the point that her death was universally mourned in all the sources we have about it - all Christian chronicles. She was killed by a mob, to the great distress of all the Church chroniclers, who praise her intelligence, virtue and dignity. She was also incidentally very elderly, which makes her cruel death all the more horrific I think.

I see the multiple burning of the Library is already clarified - yes, and I'm getting really bored with correcting this. Can't someone edit re-runs of Cosmos to get rid of it, or issue a correction at the end?

Incidentally I would not trust The Dark Side of Christian History on anything. Review to follow, and maybe Skepticwiki article on what is wrong with this book in terms of factual content.

cj x

 

[triadboy]

Incidentally I would not trust The Dark Side of Christian History on anything. Review to follow, and maybe Skepticwiki article on what is wrong with this book in terms of factual content.

My nipples are exploding in anticipation.

 

[blutoski]

Why not? to an extent they needed it. The bible meant they needed to know how to read and the management of a large relgious establishment would ensure practical aplication of such.

But Archimedes was an important part of the philospophy of the time and the science. When the Venerable Bede wrote that the like a playground ball that wasn't from careful measurements of the sun but from Archimedes.

For theology you need philosophy. For building on a reasonable scale geometry comes in handy.

Then you have the more dirrectly practical aplications such as an Archimedian screw.

Aditionaly everyone else was worse. At least the monks would know that a book could be something other than fuel for a fire and would be able to read them. The same could not be said of wider society.

Yes, by every measure, the late antiquity period - basically up to 480ish - could be described as Christianity-based-on-Roman/Greek philosophy. Every educated Roman would have had to learn his Plato and Pliny, and needed to explain virtue ethics backwards and forwads. After the collapse of Western Roman governance, this ended quite abruptly, and the Church was all that remained of civilization in Europe, preserving these ideals as best they could. The Eastern Roman tradition could arguably have been preserving these up to the 11th century. People quibble about this.

The fundamental conflict that skeptics refer to between church and science didn't materialize until the period of the Reformation. The ramifications of the Thirty Years War included a retrenchment of religious dogmatism, and the regard for religious dispute as political/military threat. This was not just a Catholic thing.

Even among scientists, the first challenge was to explain why you're rejecting Ptolemy, rather than why you're defying the Church. Arguably, the Church's obsession with preserving these old texts was itself a roadblock for scientific progress.

Most of the destruction was conducted by the pagan conquerors of Rome, which would include pretty much everybody but the Goths, who were Christianized and seemed to be what I refer to as "soft sackers" of Roman cities, basically stealing gold and jewels, rather than destroying things. The other major players were Visigoths and Vandals in Gaul, Hispania, Africa, and Italia in particular, who more or less raped, killed, and burned anything that was Rome, replacing it with despotic regimes that had no time for book learnin'.

Surprisingly, another force for preserving these texts was the Moslem Arabic (Moorish) conquerors who swept through North Africa, right up to Spain. When the Christian forces liberated Toledo from Moorish control in around 1085, they found a huge collection of Roman and Greek works, which is why the Spanish Alfonso dynasty is often considered the crucible of modern astronomy.

 

[ceo_esq]

History was not Sagan's strong suit ...

I have to agree with you here.