A “truth” was now defined and enforced by law
Charles Freeman on a crucial moment in history (from The Closing of the Western Mind):
In January 381 Theodosius issued an imperial decree declaring the doctrine of the Trinity orthodox and expelling Homoeans and Arians from their churches…
This council, together with the imperial edicts which accompanied it, was the moment when the Nicene formula became part of the official state religion (if only for the moment in the Eastern empire). All those Christians who differed from it – Homoeans, Homoiousians, Arians and a host of other minor groups – were declared to be heretics facing not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state. The decision of Constantine to privilege one Christian community over another was consolidated in that a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God. It was unclear on what basis this “truth” rested, certainly not one of exclusively rational argument, so it either had to be presented as “the revelation of God,” as it was by Thomas Aquinas, or accepted that “truth” was as defined by the emperor. [pp 193, 194]
Not what you would call a science-friendly world, then.
I read Freeman’s book last year. Great stuff.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: A “truth” was now defined and enforced by law http://dlvr.it/8PgVL […]
I ordered this on Amazon the other day. Thanks for the tip Ophelia.
“facing not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state”
If a god is omnipotent then surely vengeance can safely be left to him. That human beings who believe in this god feel the need to extract vengeance on behalf of their god is the best proof possible that they don’t really believe (deep down) that their god is omnipotent. And if he is not omnipotent then probably he doesn’t exist.
I propose a new rule of thumb: the stronger the laws of blasphemy the weaker the belief
Jan: it’s not, and never has been, about belief. It’s about control; it’s about who gets to be in charge and get the cushiest job and say who’s in and who’s not….this is one reason for the anti-woman bias in religions – the clerics don’t want the competition because they know deep down that women are NOT inferior…….
Yeah, Theodosius has a lot to answer for. So to speak.
Jan
In fairness to believers; God, as described by parts of the old testament, is a psychotic shit who believes in and gleefully practices collective punishment. Once angered by the trivial acts of a few humans, he might wipe out whole cities.
So while belief in such a being is profoundly non-rational, if someone does believe, then making damned sure that no-one around them pisses off God is actually a pretty sensible course of action.
I haven’t read the book, although now I will check it out. I must say that, taken out of context, I would not include this as an example of “closing the western mind.” The Roman Empire NEVER allowed a free reign of ideas. The fact that Theodosious enshired the Nicean Creed over traditional Roman gods is an example of a shift in consciousness in the Late Roman Empire.
Anybody that’s interested in the topic must read St. Augustine’s The City of God, and if you haven’t read much about that period Peter Brown’s bio is an excellent beginning.
That’s Flavius Constantinus enforcing the family dogma. The father, son, and holy ghost are Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, the three original Flavian emperors.
This is the argument of Joseph Atwill, and I’m convinced he’s correct. His book can be read or downloaded for no charge here:
http://www.esnips.com/doc/b67761f4-ecd2-423a-93a0-0ff2b9eb6149/Joseph-Atwill—Caesars-Messiah—The-Roman-Conspiracy-to-Invent-Jesus
but the holy trinity won’t appear until the forthcoming book due out next year from publisher Ulstein. I read about it on Atwill’s website.
I think an important truth is being overlooked. Please examine Atwill’s thesis.
Flavius Theodosius, I should have said.
Atwill’s thesis founders on the idea that what appears in Josephus’ Jewish War, where sayings and doings are ascribed to Jesus, was actually written by Josephus and was not a later interpolation by pious Christians, which it almost certainly is. And why would we bother to accept a very complicated, arcane historical thesis, instead of simply acknowledging that Christian theology was highly contested in the early centuries as it took shape, and that, eventually, when the church was given a privileged position in the empire by Constantine and his successors (aside from Julian), it took the form that we find in the Nicene Creed, and that that form was ultimately enforced with sanctions according to the decree of Theodosius? Atwill provides a conspiracy theory for the origins of Christianity. It’s a waste of time. We don’t need all this secret lore in order to dismiss Christian beliefs.
A point that should not be forgotten here is that revealed religion depends upon authority, otherwise all you end up with — as you do in any case — is a chaos of interpretations. Once you have suggested that you have a revelation from a god, it is either self-evident (which very few things are), or it is open to interpretation. If the meaning of the revelation depends upon interpretation, then it must be established by authority, or else it will simply be frittered away in a haze of disagreement and contention. Of course, establishing the authority is difficult, for at the beginning there are no recognised authorities. There are simply different interpretations and the parties that hold them. If one of the parties can get hold of political power, it will use it to enforce its own interpretation. That’s what the “orthodox” party did. The “orthodox” would like to claim that it has possession of the true faith, but it could just as easily have turned out the other way. Like many other things in history, much depended upon the “right” person being at the “right” place at the “right” time. It could just as easily have turned out that Arianism happened to be the lucky interpretation, but it didn’t. The real problem is that enforcing religious orthodoxy reaches out into practically every other dimension of life, and thought in general comes to be policed, which is what happened.
And so the western mind came to be closed for hundreds of years. Freeman’s book is a great study of this closing. I think a lot of people misunderstand The Closing of the Western Mind. If you’re looking for decisive evidence for this closing, as though an iron curtain dropped at the gates of Byzantium, and the outcome for all points West was like the result of the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Russians after WW II, you won’t find it. It was more subtle than that, although theologians began, with Augustine, to build a theological rationale for the suppression of heretics, and, eventually, with Aquinas, for their execution. In the end it worked up to the kinds of brutal thought control of the Inquisition and the Counter Reformation, with its Index of Prohibited Books, but it was not always so limiting, and some advances in thought and technology were made during the Dark Ages, so that James Hannam had something on which to hang his exaggerated claims. (It is simply a dream that people closer to the events, who thought of their time as a time of rebirth, did not see the Middle Ages and its restrictions with greater clarity than Christian revisionists writing today. Revisionists forget that it was Christians in the Renaissance who saw the Middle Ages as a time when freedom of thought was limited, and thought itself constricted by distorting limitations.) But the turning point clearly comes where Freeman suggests, with the decree of Theodosius, and ever since then not only has Christianity itself become stultified and stultifying — as is so evident in the antics of the present pope — but the promise of Greek thought had to await another thousand years before being built upon, first by humanists like Erasmus and More, and then by the scientific and philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century.
Classical liberal, what’s your argument? I’m wondering how a situation in which ‘a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God’ could avoid being an example of mind-closing.
“Revisionists forget that it was Christians in the Renaissance who saw the Middle Ages as a time when freedom of thought was limited, and thought itself constricted by distorting limitations.)”
Freedom of thought was flowering in Northern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries (if we could be so overbroad here.) It truly was a Renaissance. It was shattered at the end of the 13th C by, among others, the Condemnation of 1277 is symbolic of this change.
I would argue that the Western Mind expanded greatly from the end of the 11th C (rediscovery of Roman Law, the rise of industry, technology and commerce) to the beginning of the 14th C.
Life, starting in the 14th C, became much more difficult as a result of cooling temperatures and increased rain reducing arable land (a little ice age) and plagues sweeping in from the East. There were virtually no plagues from the 7th C to the 14th C in Western Europe. For the next three and half centuries (1347-1700) there were outbreaks of plague roughly every generation.
With the collapsed economy, famines, plagues came all sort of repression and idiocies that were not much seen before.
Yeah that’s not helpful. For one thing none of it is in the least incompatible with the decree of Theodosius having been a mind-closer. For another thing it’s just a string of generalizations whose relevance is not obvious.
You are in breach of your Privacy Policy by publishing my private details, which I did not provide to you.
I demand that you remove my name from your website.
This without prejudice to further legal proceedings.
Dude, you posted comments here of your own free will. Lots of luck with the “further legal proceedings.”
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I did not provide you with my name, I did not use it on the interactive sections of the website, you obtained it from an informant.
You seem to spend your whole life telling people how to behave, and look what happens in this tiny part of the world where you are in charge.
You disgusting hypocrite. Remove my name from your website immediately.
That’s inaccurate. A reader told me your name (which is another pseudonym, for all I know) after you tried to enlist him in a rebellion against me…whatever that could have meant: everyone deciding to stop visiting B&W, I suppose.
As you see, the rebellion was a bit of a flop.
Privacy Policy
At Butterflies And Wheels, we completely respect your online privacy. We are fully committed to safeguarding your online privacy and personal information while you’re here at the butterfliesandwheels.org website
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
I did not provide you with my name, I do not wish my personal details to be published on your website, and you refuse to remove them. How can you possibly say you respect users’ online privacy in these circumstances?
You used what you call your name (which could be a pseudonym) on the Talking Philosophy blog and on email messages you sent to people who comment here. I reported the fact here because you had spent a week posting increasingly abusive comments as “Kees” and I wanted it known that you were the same as the (also abusive) commenter at TP. I don’t have any of your “personal details” here; I don’t know your personal details.
Since you’re so worked up, perhaps I should link to those old threads, at Talking Philosophy and here, so that readers can remind themselves or find out for the first time what you said. It’s fascinating stuff.
You do know my personal details, they are published on your website here:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/cue-twilight-zone-music/
I did not provide you with my personal details, I do not wish you to publish my details on your website, I wish you to remove my name from your website.
There are no personal details, I know no personal details, there is only a name, which you used to post at Talking Philosophy and to email some people who comment here (whose email addresses were available on the site at the time). That’s all. It’s just a name and it could be fake for all anyone knows. You didn’t keep the name private. If you wanted it kept secret, you shouldn’t have used it to email people who comment here. I have published no “personal details” on my website, I have published only a name which you yourself made public.
Now that’s enough. Go away.
Ophelia said: “Classical liberal, what’s your argument? I’m wondering how a situation in which ‘a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God’ could avoid being an example of mind-closing.” I’m not saying I approve of “revealed truths” I don’t; nor am I saying I’m for government repression, I’m not. All I was saying was that I don’t consider Theodosius enshrining the Nicene Creed was an example of the closing of the western mind. (Mind you I haven’t read the book and am taking this out of context. ) The reason is the Roman Empire already had laws prohibiting ideas; there were tons of these laws repressing freedom of speech and declaring some ideas as heretical and punishable by death. There were even laws as ridiculous as not allowing the son of baker become a tailor or a carpenter. The fact that a repressive government changed which ideas and thoughts were acceptable and which were punishable by death is interesting when evaluating the period. However, if we’re looking for examples of when society became more relaxed to ideas and when society became more repressive: this isn’t one of them. IMO
Is “Kees” part of the Bilbo/Tom Johnson/MiltonC/You’re Not Helping/Polly-O/etc… sockpuppet collective, or is he a freelance kook?
Thanks for the clarification, CL. Do you have a citation for “there were tons of these laws repressing freedom of speech and declaring some ideas as heretical and punishable by death”? I thought the Romans punished actions more than ideas, but maybe that’s wrong.
Sorry about the delayed posting!
hyper, freelance I think. There was a time early in the YNH mystification when I thought YNH might be “Kees” but I stopped thinking that when more information about YNH started to emerge.
But he is someone who uses pseudonyms to do serial mystifications, and to try to bully people – me, at least. He has that much in common with good old YNH.
Classical Liberal, the decree of Theodosius can be a turning point even though an extreme closing of the mind did not occur on the precise date of its issue. And, as for freedom of thought in the Empire, it is surely no exaggeration to suggest that there was greater freedom before Theodosius (and even Constantine) than there was afterwards. Certainly, freedom of thought and expression as we know it was not enjoyed by either the Greeks or the Romans, and even then it appertained only to a few. But, certainly, freedom of religion and religious thought was much more in evidence before Constantine than it was in the centuries immediately following his “conversion” (if that’s what it was). Christians were persecuted in the first centuries, to the extent that they were (and most imperial authorities sought to minimise the harm), not because the Christian religion was proscribed, but because Christians were intolerant, and dismissed the gods of the Greeks and Romans as demons, and thus threatened to undermine civic order, which was based on the honour shown to civic and household gods. The fact that there were plagues from the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century does not diminish the flowering of learning, science and speculation during the latter part of that period, even though there had been signs of a mini-renaissance before that. But freedom was not wrested from the dead hand of the church until well on in the 18th century, and even then it was not secure. It is once again threatened in our own day, and the threat comes almost entirely from the forces of religion and its analogues in secular totalitarianisms. Religion, and especially monotheism, is totalitarian by definition, and threatens freedom wherever it has the upper hand.
OK, thanks. It’s amazing how similar some of these people are. Are they being trained somewhere?
Ophelia,
In a previous lifetime I was a doctoral student in medieval and early modern history (now web developer and information architect).
I don’t have sources with me but we do know that Christians were persecuted, not for actions, but for being Christian. There were economic laws made to prevent inflation – price freezing, requiring people to remain in their occupation (and then requiring their children to follow their parents). Failure to follow was punishable by death. Diocletian
I did a quick search and found the following at the Ancient History Sourcebook (a collection of primary sources)
“Tenants also who meditate flight may be bound with chains and reduced to a servile condition …”
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/diocletian-control.html
Few societies would repress ideas if they didn’t find them destabililzing. So if you believed your god was made of green cheese and ate blue gummy bears the Roman authorities wouldn’t care. But if your God was a jealous God, and not only wanted you to worship him but to foresake all others; and not only foresake all others but refuse to work and trade with them; and not only that but compelled you to show these others the errors of their ways — NOW Rome would do something about your green cheese, gummy bear eating diety.
Thanks CL.
Tenants who meditate flight…but the authorities would have to know about the meditation, which implies some sort of action, no?
And the Romans of the early empire did have a pretty low threshold for non-interference, didn’t they? Even the jealous god was ok as long as the jealousy had no practical effects?
Ah well, I’m just asking you to refresh my memory by personally tutoring me now, so I’ll stop. :- )
I’ll read more of Charles’s book instead of nattering.
But, certainly, freedom of religion and religious thought was much more in evidence before Constantine than it was in the centuries immediately following his “conversion” (if that’s what it was).
Diocletian was a SOB in every way. I’m not a Christian apologist but not a hater either. The Roman Empire really took a turn for the worse in the 3rd C: incessant civil wars, rapacious taxation (those wars had to be paid for), currency debasement all at a time of little ice age so plagues increased, (250-700), reduced crop yield and ever more repressive governments.
No, the downturn did not come with the Conversion of Constantine, the Battle of Milvian Bridge or the Council of Nicea. Think of the late Roman Empire as a repressive Stalinist State. Ideas were tolerated if any only if they didn’t upset the authorities.
Christians were persecuted in the first centuries … but because Christians were intolerant
I must disagree. They were destabilizing yes. Intolerant. No. They were no more intollerant than contemporary Jews in Iran, or Coptics in Egypt. They were a small, mostly penniless group, proclaiming strange ideas without any military or financial power to back them up. As an atheist I find it difficult to accept being called intollerant because I refuse to worship another’s God. Likewise I have a hard time to call the early Church intolerant for the same reason.
But freedom was not wrested from the dead hand of the church until well on in the 18th century, and even then it was not secure. It is once again threatened in our own day, and the threat comes almost entirely from the forces of religion and its analogues in secular totalitarianisms.
Freedom is free from the Church – in this country and large portions of the World. IMHO Aside from the Muslim World theocracy is on the run. Now we are probably at odds at what we consider “control of the church” and “secure.” This could become one VERY long, very fun conversation.
Classical Liberal. “Diocletian was a SOB in every way.” Yes, he was, but, by and large, the number of Christians who were martyred was certainly far smaller than the number of heretics who were murdered by the church. Pliny’s letter to Trajan gives a good insight into how imperial officials regarded the persecution. And Trajan responded by saying that Pliny is not to be zealous in searching out Christians, and is not to accept anonymous denunciations. Civic religion in Rome was not quite the same as religions nowadays, which are seen as belief systems that can be held independently of one’s civic responsibilities, though people like the elder Bush apparently did not think so — at least he did not think that a person could be a responsible citizen and an atheist at the same time. In Rome the relationship was even more intimate, since civic ceremonies were religious, and recognised, amongst other divinities, the genius of the emperor. So, refusal to offer incense on the public altar was tantamount to treason. But the ‘worship’ was neither onerous nor represented an act of commitment to particular beliefs. That Christians refused this small offering is a sign of the intolerance that was to come, an intolerance which, in time, outlawed paganism and Judaism, and punished with death those who turned away from belief ex anima in Christian orthodoxy as formulated by the great ecumenical councils and expressed in the creeds. (Regarding freedom in Greece and Rome. The scope of freedom was narrow, it is true, but it was real. Reading Cicero or Seneca or Tacitus should convince anyone of this. The number of people who would be considered free in this sense was also small, but that does not show that there was not the intellectual freedom that there was.)
I’m not altogether sure what you mean by your last comment. If you think that our freedoms are secure, it should only take a glance or two at actions by democratic governments and the media in the West to confirm that our freedoms are under seige. AC Grayling’s Towards the Light is a good introduction to the history of freedom and to the threats under which freedom now stands. Freedom was snatched from the church, and the church and other religions continue to endanger it. Many people died for the sake of freedoms that we enjoy. They are worth fighting for, but there is a troubling blindness to the dangers that threaten them. When democractic leaders can ignore international law, and treaty obligations, and torture without penalty, freedom is already in danger.
Freedom is by no means entirely free from the church, anywhere. (Which country is “this” in your case, CL? In mine it’s the US.) The church interferes with legislation and law every chance it gets. It denies women abortions whenever it has the power to do so, including in cases where the woman will certainly die without an abortion.
Theocracy is certainly much feebler in most developed countries than it is in much of the rest of the world, but it’s not completely powerless. I wish.
The Catholic church is still pretty effective at hiding clergy who have engaged in criminal activities. The Catholic church can still wrangle thousands of dollars out of nominally secular governments. The Catholic church is still amazingly wealthy. The Catholic church still has the perceived moral authority to prevent thousands of people from using birth control, prevent stem cell research, and threaten to criminalize abortion.
I’m fairly certain the fall of the Soviet Union led to a huge increase in the temporal power of Orthodox churches. The CoE seems to be going through a rift in which huge numbers of Anglicans seem to want to drift back towards a more reactionary Catholicism. There’s an authoritarian schism within Catholicism exemplified by Bill Donahue and Mel Gibson.
The scariest is the melange of evangelical forms of Christianity and their disproportionate representation in the US armed forces, including positions of authority – base commanders, etc. And evangelical Christianity looks a lot more like Islam than it does like Catholicism (at least to me).
That’s a brief, incomplete sketch of religious threats to freedom for the world’s wealthiest 2 billion. Pretty much everyone else is in an even worse situation.
From what I understand, diseases are usually diagnosed as a result of the symptoms. Could this disagreement result from the fact that Freeman is diagnosing the disease (using a symptom) and you are talking about its cause? I’m just trying to understand what the disagreement stems from; I haven’t read the book and I know little about the history of medieval Europe.
Wow. I can’t respond to all this. There seems to be two points. First:
Eric,
You are so correct, the Classical world had a different concept of religion. You described the paying of homage well. I’m certainly not defending Augustine, nor the “tolerance” of the Early Church. My only point of contention is that I wouldn’t call it intolerant. Let’s see our differences as one of semantics.
The second point: our freedoms are secure seems to have stirred up a hornet’s nest.
Eric, Ophelia and Dan,
Since I’m a new poster here I should introduce myself a little. I love philosophy, love discussing religion but I’m also an atheist – no God, no Devil, no spirits, no cosmic kumbaya, no meta-physical reality. You’re born, you die, what comes in between is it.
I’m also weird. I think the debate over creationism is one of the best things to have happened for High School science. What’s better than this debate to review the scientific method and the rules of evidence.
I also don’t think the religion is NECESSARILY harmful. (I’m using the word necessarily in the academic sense meaning that religion always leads to harm. I told you I’m weird.
You can believe whatever you want about morality (who to have sex with, how often and how) as long as you don’t force me to with your laws. Now this gets tricky. Most people, religious or not, think that if they disagree with something they need to outlaw it. And the more they disagree with an action the greater the punishment: fines, incarceration or death.
Aside from economics there are few things that are Left or Right. Abortion was outlawed in Romania and other Eastern European states but demanded in China; homosexuality was considered a western decadent disease, etc, etc… Neither abortion, nor gay marriage is a left/right, believer/non-believer issue.
So, when we look at politicians – they are people who bring their ideas, their concepts of right and wrong. I don’t think that having a religious person in office is NECESSARILY a bad thing. The fact that someone says homosexuality is wrong and a sin – and tries to PURSUADE me to his point of view – doesn’t make me feel the revival of a religious state. In fact I think the US is going away from theocracy. To me being religious, even being deeply religious, does not equal wanting to live in a theocracy.
This post is getting too long. So I’ll stop.
The real question is not did the Roman Empire have general free speech, but did it restrict empirical inquiry and philosophical speculation concerning the natural world? So the claim that ideas were not tolerated if they upset the state is not very helpful, since the issue is that what upset the state changed, and in a profound way.
Great point, Eric. The situation was pretty much identical in ancient Greece where an individual’s participation in the government was usually organized according to his membership in various cults, mysteries, and other religious groups. From what I understand, there was no clear line between participation in religious life and participation in the city state generally.
This is where folks like Hannam go wrong when they say Socrates’ death sentence shows that Greece didn’t permit free thought. It was not at all surprising that Socrates was put to death. What was surprising was how close he came to being acquitted when he admitted undermining the rationale underlying so much Greek culture — its religion.
Dan,
And evangelical Christianity looks a lot more like Islam than it does like Catholicism (at least to me).
It does to me too. BUT here are big differences:
1. Over 1/2 of the Koran and the Hadith deal with unbelievers: who they are and how they are to treated (at best second class citizen, at worst death).
2. There is a Scriptual split btween church and state in Christianity: “render unto Caeser” but not in Islam.
3. There is a doctrinal split between church and state in Catholicism (Gelaisus’ Two Swords) and numerous different ideas in the Protestant churches.
All in all there I see close to no chance for a rise of a theocracy in the US, if for no other reason than cultural (love of the US Constitution, a general respect the different sects with an almost, innate memory of the religious wars of the 16 and 17th C).
The real question is not did the Roman Empire have general free speech, but did it restrict empirical inquiry and philosophical speculation concerning the natural world?
Now that’s an interesting question. I don’t remember any laws that restricted such inquiry but there were cultural impediments. So many in fact that by the 11th C the medieval world far surpased the Roman world in technology (windmills, water mills, metal production, agriculture). I forget who developed a mechanical crane for unloading cargo from ships. The craneh was discouraged because it put workers out of work (destabilized the economy).
If I remember dissecting the human body was verboten too. Galen, if I remember correctly, had to dissect monkeys and other primates.
@Classical Liberal:
I don’t think we’re too far apart on most issues. Maybe I should qualify my objections to the notion that we live in a brave new age of religious freedom.
The most important qualification is to differentiate between established religion and religious belief. In the west, religious belief is usually at most only very indirectly harmful (but still harmful, see here: http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html). Mostly, it gives succor to bad ideas by making people gullible or more susceptible to confirmation bias than they are naturally. But for the most part I agree with you that religious beliefs are not necessarily harmful.
Established religion is something else again. Individuals answer to their consciences regardless of their private religious beliefs, and I think it’s fairly common for individuals to deviate from the dictates of their religious beliefs when faced with a concrete moral problem. But churches never will, because churches do not have consciences. Like any institution that isn’t directly led by an individual, churches will do whatever they can to maintain conditions conducive to survival of the church — hence papal infallibility, doubt being sinful, church revision of history, etc. This actually is not quite true, it’s a little too teleological. There are no doubt churches that do not do what they need to survive, but then they don’t survive, and it’s only the churches that are best at silencing doubts and promoting group cohesion that make it to the next generation.
I think that the relationship of big religions to human understanding is analogous to the relationship of big corporations on a market economy — they make it weaker by stifling competition. A healthy economy as a quick turnover for corporations. A healthy epistemology has a quick turnover for ideas. Established religions count on being able to tell people what not to think — or to tell them exactly what to think (implicitly telling them not to think anything else). I can only conclude that the establishment of religions is antithetical to free thought and human progress (based partially on some of my other philosophical and ethical commitments).
So while religious belief, at least in the west, is usually only ever indirectly harmful (with a few obvious exceptions; FLDS and JWs come to mind), established by religion is (in my opinion) harmful by its very nature.
I also have trouble with “end of X” narratives. The only people saying that racism is no longer an issue in the US are racists (ignorance is no excuse; if you think racism is over, it’s because you want to think racism is over, not because you actually studied the problem). I bet Stalinists and Maoists thought they had that religion thing licked, but they just ended up with system of social control nearly identical to a state religion. I suspect that there will always be systems of social control trying to specify the ways people act and think (as opposed to a legal system that focuses on restricting behaviors rather than specifying them) and that these will always look and act a whole lot like religions. If it ever looks like we’ve beaten religion, my bet would be that we ended up beating ourselves instead.
Those are all doctrinal differences. I don’t see that the doctrine of a religion has all that much influence over the behavior of adherents. Compare my devout Catholic grandmother to Bill Donahue. Or compare Jerry Falwell to any of my Muslim coworkers. Falwell is much less tolerant of non-believers than any Muslim I’m ever known personally.
You’re kidding yourself about the love for the constitution and the respect for different sects. The people with the loudest love for the constitution love it as a symbol — again, the content of the doctrine has little influence on the behavior of adherents. Look at O’Donnell on the first amendment, for example. She loves that fucking constitution, but she has no idea what’s in it. I have no love for the constitution as a symbol, but I see wisdom in the content. My respect for the constitution provides some minimal safeguard against theocracy (at least I wouldn’t try to impose it). O’Donnell’s love for it in no way provides a safeguard against theocracy — it might undermine some of those safeguards by downplaying the content.
And I don’t know if you noticed, but thousands of nominally moderate Christian went completely insane when someone tried to build a Muslim religious center several blocks away from ground zero while adhering to all laws and municipal codes that were applicable. People think it’s OK to say stuff in public like “I think people are only moral because of God” — which isn’t necessarily a theocratic notion in and of itself, but it’s a little insulting to those of us who are moral without the fairy godmother looking over our shoulders. I don’t see quite as much of this “respect” as you do.
“Atwill’s thesis founders on the idea that what appears in Josephus’ Jewish War, where sayings and doings are ascribed to Jesus, was actually written by Josephus and was not a later interpolation by pious Christians, which it almost certainly is”
Eric: not trying to be overly pedantic but I think the passage to which you refer is taken from “Antiquities of the jews”. I can find no reference to the jesus of the christians in “the jewish war”
BTW let’s call it what it really is – not an “interpolation” but a Forgery.
Dan,
Too many points to cover. :-)
Yes I do believe that there is a respect for the Constitution and other sects. I think we have a varying understanding of “respect” and “tolerance.” The only intolerant sect — my definition of tolerance — I see in the US are those protesting at the funerals of US servicemen because the US Government is too tolerant of gay rights.
I don’t see any others promoting violence. Christianity is bi-polar going from the extremes of God the Father (very intolerant) to God the Son (relatively tolerant). As long as we’re in the What Would Jesus Do phase I’m happy. The moment we see the OT God raise his head — then I’ll think we’re in intolerant mode.
Regarding the Mosque at Ground-Zero. I know many atheists and non-religious people who are leary about it. I now think the people behind the mosque are not promoting tolerance, have no love or care about co-existance but are instead promoting Islam, proselytizing, and making a political statement in the Muslim World that there is a mosque at ground zero.
Hi Eric MacDonald, thanks for responding to my post.
While it’s true that Atwill argues that the “Testimonium Flavianum” is authentic rather than an interpolation, that’s one of the least important bits of his thesis. Did you mean that it is founded on this bit, or that it flounders or fails based on this conclusion being wrong? You said “founders” and I don’t understand what you mean exactly there. But anyhow, yes I know and I think Atwill does too that most people accept that passage is an insertion into Josephus but Atwill’s alternative is pretty interesting, if not well supported by any physical evidence (such as an original text dating back to that period). The people who believe it an insertion also don’t have the text to prove it. In any case, the thesis in no way rests upon that conjecture being true.
What is important in the Atwill thesis in my view are the multiple arguments that a lot of Josephus does refer to the canonical gospels in terms of fulfilling the “prophecies” therein. The convincingness of these rests on the richness and detail of the stories in the Jewish War and of the fall of Jerusalem. This is in the chapter “Until All is Fulfilled” if you want to skip to that part.
It’s true that we don’t need an explanation such as Atwill’s to explain the rise of Christianity, but it presents itself and makes it hard to deny through the details of the clever references and jokes in Josephus. Maybe you have read it all and not been convinced, but if you haven’t actually read it I wish you would. I know many people who have read it and found it unconvincing but on the other hand most of the people I expect it to resonate with respond as I expect. It’s the people who weren’t interested in christianity origins previously (like me) but who are maths literate who seem to accept it, while the people who already know a lot about biblical stuff usually don’t. They can’t get over that there’s no evidence that the Pauline literature actually dates from the 50s CE, for example. It’s easy to dismiss us who think it’s obviously true as simply naive I know but I still think it’s simply obviously correct and I think I’m pretty good at seeing how complex things can hang together and how they can’t be accidental. That’s because I’ve slaved away for years building up complicated contraptions and know that every bit has to fall into place just so. That’s what the Flavians did with the Jewish War and the gospels once you see how it works.
If you find yourself convinced by Atwill’s argument that Jesus’ ministry in the Galillee follows the same path as Titus’ military campaign putting down the rebellion, and that each major battle is referenced in a clever way by Jesus (such as Jesus teaching how to be fishers of men at the same place where the Romans speared the rebels in the water like fish) then you have little choise but to believe he is onto something.
I just hadn’t heard the word used that way for a while I guess.
foun·der 1
(foundr)
v. foun·dered, foun·der·ing, foun·ders
v.intr.
1. To sink below the surface of the water: The ship struck a reef and foundered.
2. To cave in; sink: The platform swayed and then foundered.
3. To fail utterly; collapse: a marriage that soon foundered.
4. To stumble, especially to stumble and go lame. Used of horses.
5. To become ill from overeating. Used of livestock.
6. To be afflicted with laminitis. Used of horses.
v.tr.
To cause to founder.
I always recommend those who ask to read my AD 381 before Closing of the Western Mind because it is shorter and more focussed on my main argument ( and then people can go on to the longer and more heavily footnoted Closing if they so want). I make the point there that,when you take the combination of Theodosius’ legislation of 381 and his sweeping laws against all forms of paganism in the 390s, then there is no equivalent in the ancient world since the pharaoh Akhenaten’s campaign against the Egyptian gods in the fourteenth century BC. I have never had this challenged.
The Roman empire was divided into provinces, each with a a governor. If things were settled their staffs were small and legions were only there to defend the boundaries or deal with serious local unrest ( which they did with great brutality, e.g. the Jewish revolt of AD 70). The whole of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, did not have a single legion stationed there. There were empire- wide laws – that of AD 212 where all free subjects of the empire were granted citizenship, for instance – but most cities were virtually -self-governing and the emperors respected their laws. There was widespread tolerance of religions- only last week i was standing in the ruins of the synagogue at Sardis and reading to my study group the decree of the council of Sardis which granted the Jews full rights to practice their religion. In the second century, the emperors did their best not to persecute Christians- if you brought a false claim against a Christian to court, you could be accused yourself , but there were local outbreaks of unrest in which Christians got killed. In the third century, the fears that the empire might collapse if the gods deserted it meant that everyone was expected to sacrifice. Christians naturally refused and it was for this reason they could be arrested ( though many bought a certificate that they had sacrificed from corrupt officials). The major anti- Christian persecution took place at the end of the fourth century. One debate WITHIN Christianity was whether Christians should offer themselves for execution in imitation of Christ or whether it was sinful to encourage anyone to commit the evil of persecution so that one should lay low.(See my A New History of Early Christianity for the details.)
By the fourth century things had got tougher, more troops and higher taxation was needed and there are stories of increasing brutality and more empire-wide laws, although Diocletian’s Edict of Prices of 301 proved unworkable and was soon abandoned. Theodosius, who was a Christian Spanish general appointed to rule the Greek-speaking half of the empire, thought that Christianity should be made the official religion,but only through one version of Christianity, that of the Nicene creed, which had been hotly disputed ever since Constantine had forced it on the bishops in 325. One of the points I elaborate in AD 381 was just how sophisticated theological debate on these issues was before the clampdown of 381.I say somewhere that I think it was actually of higher quality than one finds nowadays!! But all that, together with the tradition of rational thought, faded after AD 381. Augustine consolidated the clampdown in several ways: a) He said that the burden of original sin had virtually extinguished the power of the mind to think rationally b) Secular knowledge was not valuable in its own right but only in so far as it served theology which was elevated to a supreme form of knowledge. More than a thousand years later, Enlightenment thinkers were still trying to get theology off its pedestal as a superior form of knowledge c) The Church had a right to persecute. One must remember that that the most fundamental change in the context in which intellectual life took place was the threat of eternal hellfire- something completely unknown to the Greeks. Augustine argues openly that it is better to burn a few on earth in the hope of avoiding the burning of even more in hell and elaborates a justification for persecution. All this leads to a Closing of the Western Mind.
Technology. This view , put forward by Lynn White, that the Middle Ages was an age of great technological progress when the Roman empire was stagnant in such things, is completely discredited, largely because there is virtually no evidence for rises in agricultural productivity before the eighteenth century. On my tour of Turkey, I took my group to see the remains of the second century AD acqueduct at Aspendos in southern Turkey. The problem was that the water flowed down from the hills and needed to be raised to enter the city’s acropolis. There was an 800 metre depression between the two and an acqueduct of constant height would have been too expensive to build. So they ran the water into a header tank in the hills and then siphoned it down and up again to a receiving tank just above the city from where the water ran into Aspendos. This was practical hydraulic engineering of the highest order – which Christian medieval state would have been able to do that? The bizarre implication, that one finds in writers such as Hannam and Rodney Stark, that if technological change (such as it was) took place within a Christian state somehow it was because they were Christians, is just laughable.
Sorry, for the long blog, but I hope to clear up some of the issues raised here by Classical Liberal and others. CL needs to get reading!
P.S Can I thank Eric MacDonald for his fine overviews which are helping keep up the standard of this blog against its strange collection of adversaries.
Thank you Charles. And may I thank you for your Closing which I bought and read in 2006, and learned so much from. I have since read many criticisms of your book which have not convinced me, but I did not realise that the opposition to it was so organised and so top heavy with Christian apologetics. It’s interesting to hear that there is almost a secret Cabal which sets out to undermine anyone who dares question what is, in their terms, the consensus view, when it is really a resurgence of Christian orthodoxy.
I was amused, and so may Ophelia be, recalling our distant debate with this gentleman, that Nicholas Beale has praised Hannam’s book thus:
And so Christianity becomes the fons et origo of science and modernity! Strange, then, that the church should have been dragged kicking and screaming, all the way, into an acceptance of science, freedom of thought, and democracy. Strange, too, it is fair to say, that there is now a concerted effort to claim, at the same time, both that Christianity is the origin of all these good things, and that Christian control of the culture is an essential part of their continued flourishing. The level of disingenuousness in these conflicting claims is truly staggering. What troubles me is that someone like Thomas Dixon, who stated here, only a short while ago, that he is an unbeliever, should have bought into the Christian revisionist position to such an extent.
I merely add, in a separate note, that Sailor is right. I meant the Jewish Antiquities, not the Jewish War. To Paul Gnuman I merely say this. I am not one for conspiracy theories. John Allegro decided there was evidence enough to show that Christianity was a mushroom cult (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross [if I remember aright]). Atwill thinks he can show that Christianity is in some way the apotheosis of the Flavians. Needless to say, I did not read his stuff with close attention. It’s a waste of time. The ways of the mind are infinitely strange, and you can prove almost anything if you are willing to stretch the elasticity of language to breaking point. There are lots of people who believe, and argue in detail, that the 9/11 terrorists were either Americans or Jews, but in any event certainly not Muslims. Why waste your time on such things? Don’t you have more important things to do?
It didn’t have to happen that way, but it’s also very plausible that it did, and good diagnosing means ruling out all competing explanations before accepting one beyond question. How has it been ruled out that the Flavians didn’t create christianity? I would like to know if it can be done. As I mentioned the Pauline literature predating the first Jewish rebellion I have researched and it cannot be established. There is nothing other than contextual dating, like dating Gone With the Wind to the 1860s based it being set then. But it too (the “authentic” part) is part of the fabrication.
So if it can’t be ruled out and it’s plausible on its face (and I think it is at least as much as that christianity arose innocently, which the Dead Sea Scrolls do not support) then it’s not unreasonable to entertain the evidence. The evidence is there. This is not a crazy conspiracy, it’s merely a state action. The Flavians had means and motivation and they didn’t need or try to keep it a secret. They just had to lie to the slaves they indoctrinated.
But back to the evidence: it’s there and there’s a huge amount of it. Even in the gospels themselves without reference to Josephus there is the puzzle of the empty tomb to solve. It’s a comedic choreography. Such a thing cannot arise by chance. Four disparate authors cannot write four separate dances and have them later turn out to mesh perfectly. That there are specific time cues is itself a clue because one doesn’t need a time cue in a fable.
The empty tomb puzzle cannot alone indicate who wrote the gospels but it can tell the whole thing is a deliberate fraud and that posterity was meant to appreciate it. The Flavians are telling us who though through Josephus. Do you know, Josephus relates, Titus narrowly escapes an ambush at the Garden of Gesthemane, where he is caught without his armour. So he is the mysterious naked man who escapes while Jesus is captured. Josephus then gives us a little sanctimonious lecture about how providence smiles on the righteous while others would be caught. Titus is the true messiah, you see. And this is just one tiny detail, compelling in its own right, but part of a large structure that preserves the order of events. This cannot happen by chance.
Technological advances in the 11th C were real.
Over 5000 water mills recorded in the Domesday book – all in southern England
Hundreds of water mills in Paris area
Adoption of Roman Law to deal with problems which the Germanic law couldn’t: ie a flood breaks the dam of a tanner which sends effluence down river, harming others.
Lynn White’s key works were published in the 1950s and 1960s, obviously research in the ensuing 50 years modified much that he wrote. AND YET the key principles are there, a massive upsurge in technology in the 11th and 12th C which far surpassed anything in the classical world. His works are still be debated, but as Needham said his work is one of the most “stimulating” and, as with the Pirenne thesis (the concept West and Europe started with the Muslim World controlling the mediterranean and splitting Constantinople from the Germanic West) still very relevant.
Many of White’s details were wrong (such as the stirrups) but then so were many of Darwin’s details. These incorrect details do not invalidate the thesis.
Are we to say there wasn’t any technology in the Classical World. No, but the 12th C Renaissance did exist; there was a flowering of the mind seen in technology, commerce, and the arts.
‘A massive upsurge in technology in the 11th and 12th C which far surpassed anything in the classical world.’
Classical Liberal. I assume that you have informed yourself of this debate and seen my comments on Hannam’s thesis ( the end of my response to his response). What you need to show is that technology actually led to any substantial rise in living standards. There is certainly some rise as the base in say, 700, was so very low, but it is hard to find. You also have to deal with the evidence that surplus went to the aristocracy and the Church as experts such as Chris Wickham have demonstrated – and that living standards for the peasantry may actually have dropped as they were ‘caged’ (Wickham’s words). In contrast, Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome has good archaeological evidence for the prosperity of the Roman peasantry and shows how much of the materials,etc, that they expected to have as part of daily life, simply disappeared for centuries. The making of bricks disappeared in Britain for some eight hundred years..
I am happy to take you on one of my tours to the Roman world and show you the evidence of technological achievement well beyond anything known in the medieval world. You only have to walk through the ruins of any of the larger Greek or Roman cities (the ones in Turkey or north Africa are best as they were never built on) and see how they dealt with the problems of living together far more effectively than the medieval city (not least in such basic things as providing clean water and not letting dead bodies inside the walls where they contaminated water sources) . Rome was bringing in more litres of water a head than New York does today. It had baths ( e.g.that of Caracalla) which could provide hot water for 4000 bathers a day. The sophisticated siphoning systems allowed water to be taken up and down great heights. The effective use of concrete led to domes such as that of the Pantheon. I wonder where you got this idea that the classical world was not technologically advanced from as it certainly does not appear in any of the standard books on Roman technology.
Nonsense. Paul. Conspiracy theories just are based on the fact that events, simply by chance, can be shown to fall into all sorts of patterned orders. Without that conspiracy theories couldn’t even get started. With that, it means that you can make up conspiracy theories about practically anything you care to name. I repeat. This clever clever argumentation is a waste of time.
Charles,
A rise in technology does not necessarily mean the rise in everyone’s living standard. And a rise in living standard, even today, is difficult to quantify. Clearly there were tremendous technological changes and tremendous poverty. Example the one of the payments to the chancellor of the exchequer in 12th C England was the candle stubs from the king’s chandeliers.
Nonetheless there were the mechanical mills (ie not human nor animal powered); there were the adoption of Roman laws (Justianian) to handle the complex situations that arose which the existing Germanic laws didn’t address, nor could be adopted to; there was a flowering in arts and literature and education.
Clearly there was something positive about living standards. Population shot up until the little ice age started (1300); towns grew as did long-distance commerce. I’m a great follower of Marc Bloch’s idea that life decayed after the “3-prong” invasions; with Western Europe falling apart after Justinians ill-fated reconquest, the rapacious taxation, the arrival of the Lombards and then in the generations that followed by the 3-prong invasions; and that it wasn’t until the 11th C that Western Europe regained its footing.
As an aside – you mention baths. There were over 300 public baths in 1300 Paris which had a population of roughly 30,000. People weren’t as dirty as commonly imagined as these baths were more than enough for people to bath several times per week. Obviously some baths did not have many customers or were very exclusive. :-)
I suppose part of my response is opposing the Petrarchian concept of Ancient World good, Renaissance good, and what came in between was bad.
Classical Liberal.I can’t see any answers to my points.
What has the revival of Roman law – justinian was,of course, consolidating earlier laws- to do with the progress of the medieval world over the Roman one- as you describe it it was the return of a better system over a less adequate one.
When I was fifteen, e.g. in the summer of 1963, the local museum let me help on an excavation of a Roman villa, just eight miles from where I live now. I found myself in the brick hypocaust trowelling out ash. There must have been a moment when the fires were lit for the last time and the ash never cleared out -probably about 400 AD. If the villa was typical warm air would have circulated under the floors and through pipes in the walls. There would have been hot water too. When were such luxuries available for people of middling wealth in private homes in this part of the world again? Arguably not until the twentieth century. They did not even have bricks again, and then only in grander buildings, until the 12th-13th centuries.
I am a hands-on person- I don;t need to deal with Petrarchian ideas, just the evidence as one can still see it in the Mediterranean. I was lucky to get out to Rome in 1966 and begin working on larger Roman villas and then Greek cities in my vacations from Cambridge so this is the way I see things. Manuscript evidence is inadequate compared to the evidence from archaeology so far as technology is concerned.Petrarch was thinking about literature, he was hardly interested in technological achievement.
Justinian Code was a 6th C consolidation of earlier law codes. In the 11th C these laws were “rediscovered” in the west and became the foundation for new laws. The reason was that commerce and industry had expanded to a point that the Germanic Laws (Salic, Lombard, etc) were no longer even remotely usable or adaptable.
Surely 1000s of mills are an indication of technological and commercial progress over earlier centuries. AND, interestingly enough, there were many times more mills in operation in the southern England and a few miles areound Paris (where we have clear records) than in ALL of the Roman Empire at any time you choose to pick.
Now do mills mean that ALL peasants in ALL places live a better life? No. But credit must be given in that there were technological and commercial advances.
Eric, do you know offhand, what are the conventional interpretations of the meaning of there being a naked man who escapes capture at the Garden, while Jesus is captured? I think I may have read some but they were too easy to forget, because they seemed so inconsequential, and hardly worthy of justifying interrupting a major plot event. I noticed that Mel Gibson didn’t include the naked man in his scene.
If it’s that easy to come up with these parallels as you claim, can you find one approaching the quality of Atwill’s for this scene? From any literature at any time and any place? Maybe you might find one or two. But then consider, Atwill’s explanation is based on an story set at the same location, and is part of a major event alluded to in a central way by Jesus, that is, the coming of the Son of Man. And it’s just one of a sequence of something like eleven links, that are in the same order in Jesus’ ministry and Titus’ military campaign at the same geographic locations,
Classical Liberal. How do you know the figure for all of the mills in the entire Roman empire? By definition they are in rural areas and it would be a matter of chance wether they were discovered or not.
Many of the mills are on streams and represent part of the imposition of feudalism by the landowning classes- you can’t mill your own, you must come to the lord’s mill on the river over which we have rights.
I am sorry but I don;t see any evidence for this massive surge in technology,
Charles — excellent question. *I* don’t. You raise a great point. It’s been a while since I studied this (early 1990s to be more exact) :-)
There was a consensus in the articles I read. I don’t remember which author. Somewhere in my basement I have boxes of printouts. As far as chance, there are an awful lot of records, discovering them is less an archeological exercise than one of looking through legal and financial records.
Nonetheless you may very well be right.
Classical Liberal. I am not surprised you have difficulty digging out the evidence, whether it is in a box of old print outs, on the ground or in documents. The best medieval historians don’t see themselves in some sort of competition over whether their period was better than anyone else’s. They are more concerned with understanding it on its own terms. The competitive approach has got entangled up with a certain sort of Catholic historian (and Hannam is instantly recognisable as such) even though why a Christian mind should be better at creating technology than any other kind of mind has always escaped me. My favourite example is Rodney Stark’s assertion in his ludicrous The Victory of Reason that without Jesus Christ we would not be reading books today. No, I did not understand the reasoning either.
Well, I know there was a lot of animosity between Catholic and Protestant historians in the 19th C and early 20th C: with the Protestants saying that everything that came before the Reformation (and by extension the Italian Renaisance) was an unenlightened age filled with nothing but superstitious, dirty, flea-bitten, plague-ridden fools.
But we’re not debating that we’re debating two issues: one was there a huge increase in technology, industry, law and commerce in the 11th and 12th C as compared to the 6-10th C. I think there is no doubt about that. (See above comments.)
The second point is: did the technology in 12thC revolution surpass that in Ancient World? Everything I read said that. Unfortunately I can’t access these journals on line; don’t have the time to go a university; and won’t find my copies of these articles any time soon.
You made a good point regarding that many mills in the Ancient World might not have been recorded. But we all know that the Roman Governors were always looking for these mills for their tax records. I don’t think many would have been missed by the contemporary authorities. The only question – which I can’t answer – is what have been missed / not included in the estimate by historians.
Classical liberal. It is nothing to do with nineteenth century historians, as you say. That is a canard that is put about and is totally irrelevant because the only thing that matters is the evidence that exists, which is in many cases difficult to interpret. Yet, we have a lot more of it thanks to sophisticated archaeological analysis. There is a consensus that there was a massive collapse in economic life after the fall of the Roman empire and some recovery ,possibly from 800, Martin McCormick argues that it was the pull of the more successful Arab economies that set it off. As you are unable to provide any evidence to suggest that there was a massive technological surge in the twelfth century , the argument cannot go much further but in my original critique of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers , I acknowledged the evidence for Italy and you will find a lot of this in Philip Jones’ The Italian City-State.
Again you produce, for whatever reason, no evidence to put your case that the twelfth century was more advanced than the Roman empire so until you do the argument can simply go no further. In many ways, it clearly was not more advanced and I have provided some examples earlier in the discussion. Many more if you want them.
Classical Liberal. Since you have problems getting hold of sources, why not start with something that is universally respected such as Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome. It is important as it relies heavily on the archaeological evidence. There are so many cases of sophisticated uses of technology in the ancient world that have no parallel in Christian Europe for many centuries- I gave some examples of hydraulic engineering above. I think too much weight is placed on the mills numbers. We don;t know how many were actually in use and how much each ground so one cannot extrapolate from their to say how much productivity (i.e calories of food per head of population) is increasing. As i have said many reflect landowners trying to gain greater control over the peasantry. The biggest difference between the ancient and medieval economies, at least in Europe outside Italy and a few other centres, is that the Roman empire sustained a high level of city life and a Mediterranean wide trade. The evidence is notoriously difficult to evaluate but there is some correlating evidence to suggest that Roman standards of living were not reached again until 1600 – and then the Wars of Religion completely devastated many areas of Europe anyway. If you read books on eighteenth century Europe like Tim Blanning’s superb The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, especially his Chapter One on Communications and Chapter Four on Agriculture and the Rural World, you will see how undeveloped agriculture was even in the eighteenth century.The vast majority of medieval historians have no axe to grind and just try and explain it as it was. A minority, and they are instantly recognisable by their style and approach, get entangled with a Catholic agenda of “If the Church is in control there must be progress’. In my forthcoming book on medieval relic cults, I just avoid these arguments altogether but obviously deal with the many periods of economic disruption (they affected what kinds of saints became popular) which meant that in many parts of Europe there were never the centuries of relative peace enjoyed on a wide scale under the Roman empire. Everyone accepts that the experience of living in Europe in the Middle Ages varied dramatically from one region to another.
I find myself agreeing more with Classical Liberal on this issue. Charles makes some good points but I don’t think it can be denied that there were a series of interlocked technological innovations in Medieval Europe which transformed it from a backward Neolithic society to a civilization leading the world in science and technology by 1500.
When I had this discussion on another thread I found it useful to refer to Angus Maddison’s ‘The World Economy – A Millennial Perspective’ and ‘Contours of the World Economy’ to make a comparison with the Roman Empire in terms of GDP, Life expectancy and Population. These are of course estimates but currently the most respected. He gives life expectancy in the England of 1301-1425 as 24.3, which is actually the same as that of Roman Egypt from 33AD-258AD. By 1541-56 it was 33.7. The Western European population in AD1 was approximately 25 million, by 1000AD, only slightly higher at 26 million having recovered from it’s nadir; in 1500 it had got as high as 57 million – this despite repeated attacks of plague. In terms of GDP his table Comparative Levels of GDP per Capita: China and Western Europe 400-1998AD shows that Western Europe overtook China in 1300. West European income was at a nadir around the year 1000. It’s level was significantly lower than it had been in the first century..there was a turning point in the eleventh century when the economic ascension of Western Europe began. The number he gives for per capita income of Roman Europe is 593 in 14AD which then collapsed to 431 in 1000AD. By 1500 it had leapt back up to 753. Levels of total GDP for western Europe in AD1 were 14.4 bn – this fell to 10.9 bn in 1000AD – then leapt to 44.2 bn by 1500.
George Holmes in Europe, Hierarchy and Revolt remarks that ‘in 1300 Western Europe was probably already by far the richest part of the world if wealth were measured by head of the population. Most of the wealth was concentrated in a band running along the continent from south-east England to northern Italy including northern France, the Netherlands and the Rhineland’ so we have to be conscious of regional variations.
As to the question of whether Medieval Europe was more advanced, I think it’s certainly a mixed picture – one thinks of water supply, concrete (lost until the 1670s) and road construction. However there was something akin to a technological surge in response to European problems. Waterwheels appear to have been used to a much greater extent than in the Roman empire and were used to drive a variety of other machines including sawmills, flour mills and hammermills. There is the domesday figure of course but this is likely an undercount according to John Langdon in Mills in the Medieval Economy. He estimates the number of mills in 1300 in England to be 15,000.
Charles says there was no rise in agricultural production until the eighteenth century. That’s a more complex issue. Using England as an indication productivity – the yield to seed ratio – rose from 3.7 in 1200 to 7 by the 16th century. That is actually lower than some of the yields given in Roman sources but these refer to Mediterranean farmers with light warm soils that enhance germination. Furthermore while productivity was low the area under cultivation increased rapidly. In the early Middle Ages previous technologies were refined to produce the heavy wheeled plough, the breast harnessing of horses, horseshoes, the replacement of the sickle by the scythe, the improvement of the harrow and the development of the three field system. Overall crop yields increased by 2 and a half times from 1200 to 1800. This was what drove the rapid population rise
Lastly by 1400 the total mass of scientific knowledge was much greater than it had been at the end of the Roman empire; an institutional home had been created for natural philosophy; scholasticism had created a disputative inquisitive kind of intellectual culture; important questions had been formulated and progress had been made towards answering them. This allowed natural philosophy to develop in ways which had not been feasible before.
There is no detailed argument in the main post, but the thesis is that the idea that heresy should be punishable (rather than argued against or defended by reason, evidence or logic) is fundamentally unscientific. Yes?
But how does a view on the Trinity engage with science at all? After all, the only reason for disagreeing with the supernatural doctrine of the Trinity is if you believe in some other supernatural doctrine (such as, there are really three Gods). What has this to do with science? Were any of the creeds about essentially scientific matters? (Nicene creed does say that God created heaven and earth, but as Hannam argues, this could easily be interpreted in a way consistent with natural philosophy).
I have been looking for my Bryan Ward-Perkins. As I remember it he provides a good picture of what the peasant farmer in the Roman empire actually had and what skills and material were lost when the trade routes broke down, and how long they took to reappear. In England it was a very long time indeed.
I have always argued, perhaps too enthusiastically as it is a field I do a lot of work in, for a progressive medieval Italy and,of course, the relatively high standards of living there have to be balanced against those elsewhere.So European averages have to be taken with caution.
Everyone agrees that it is virtually impossible to make many firm judgements about productivity etc and it is not necessarily the case that higher population means higher standards of living. There is the argument ,of course, that standards of living rose as a result of the population slump in the Black Death.
Everyone agrees that there were massive differences between different parts of Europe and some areas suffered dreadfully from social breakdown.
I like Steven Epstein’s An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe,1000-1500 Cambridge,UP, 2009 and use it as my main source for this period because it is such a careful survey of the evidence. Good chapter on Technology and Consumerism which argues nowhere that there was a massive increase in the use of technology. On mills’: ‘MIlls were ancient technology, the Romans knew nearly everything about them’. He makes the point about landowners exploiting them and preventing by legislation peasants from using their own and notes some improvements but does not quantify how this might have translated into actual rise in productivity – something that would have been impossible to quantify as only a few areas had the right conditions for the most effective use of watermills.
Now I must get ready for my lecture – on medieval relic cults. I have been told that the top man in Anglo-Saxon studies from Cambridge will be in the audience so I had better get myself organised!
The book you need to consult is Terry S. Reynolds Stronger than a Hundred Men: The History of the Vertical Waterwheel. Though I doubt you’ll find much there to feed your prejudices. Reynolds notes evidence, for example, that the Roman mill complex at Barbegal actually consisted of a run of undershot waterwheels, not the more advanced and efficient overshot variety. And there’s not much in his chapter on Medieval waterpower – “Diffusion and Diversification: The Waterwheel in the Medieval Period C500-C1500” – to give you joy either. It’s full of stuff about how waterpower spread throughout Europe, transforming the economy and leading to far greater mechanisation of process generally. Clearly Reynolds is in the thrall of the Templeton Foundation and the Vatican. Or something.
>>Everyone agrees that there were massive differences between different parts of Europe and some areas suffered dreadfully from social breakdown.
During the Dark Ages (i..e the early middle ages) yes? That sounds reasonable (although I can’t judge, my area of competence is the history of ideas). But what has this to do with the post we are commenting on? The post implies that the punishment of heresy is unscientific or ‘science unfriendly’. Surely (as I suggested above) it is heretic-unfriendly. Heresy is essentially a theological issue. What has heresy to do with science?
MacDonald: “It was more subtle than that, although theologians began, with Augustine, to build a theological rationale for the suppression of heretics, and, eventually, with Aquinas, for their execution. In the end it worked up to the kinds of brutal thought control of the Inquisition and the Counter Reformation, with its Index of Prohibited Books, but it was not always so limiting, and some advances in thought and technology were made during the Dark Ages”
So you are saying that what happened in 381 did not immediately bring about the closing of the Western mind? That it was a slow process beginning with Augustine, and reached an apogee with Aquinas? Or culminated even later with the Inquisition? How does that agree with what we know of intellectual history during the period from the fifth century to the middle of the fourteenth?
I’m struggling with what this thread is about. It begins with the declaration of the doctrine of the Trinity in 381, via some musings about watermills and agricultural productivity. What’s going on?
At least it was better than the other comment thread with all that stuff about torture, Cartesian dualism and wanking.
I developed these comments above (about the problem of Aristotle) into a whole post here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/11/problem-of-aristotle.html Why did Greek science (or at least the Greek science that has come down to us) not develop much beyond Aristotle? And how is it that when the medieval West got hold of Aristotle (they didn’t really properly digest him until the middle of the 13th century) they developed beyond him so quickly? And how does this question engage even remotely with Constantine or Theodesius?
As this blog started with a quotation from one of my books, I am happy to bring it bak on track.
In AD 381, for the first time in the history of the Roman empire, the emperor Theodosius declared that there was a truth enforcable by law, notably a Trinity based on the Nicene creed. Anyone who denied this was declared a heretic . After the legislation was in place he called a council to Constantinople which endorsed his view although the records of it are very skimpy. In the 390s Theodosius then moved on to paganism and closed down all temples and pagan festivals. The archaeological , and documentary, evidence for this is building up year by year and i have seen a lot of it in my travels in Asia Minor.No one has ever challenged my claim that the combination of the two sets of laws represents the most sweeping imposition of a single view point since the decrees of the Pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt in the fourteenth century BC. These laws were at first only imposed in the eastern empire but were soon in force throughout the Roman empire.
I go on to show how Augustine developed a number of key themes . a) Original sin has dimmed the capacity of human beings to think rationally. b) The default position is that because of the inherited sin of Adam we are all going to hell and only the grace of God can save us. c)Articles of faith cannot be discussed as they are a revelation from God and are supported by the authority of the Church d) Theology is a privileged subject and all secular learning must be subordinated to it ( I was amazed when reading on the Enlightenment that this view was still being defended in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) e) Persecution is justified because it is better to burn a few on earth to save more suffering eternal burning in hell.
It is important to note that,in the west, all these laws and theological views were in place BEFORE the empire collapsed. Augustines’ work remained influential and one can recognise the emergence of the same pattern in the eleventh century Europe. Galileo and Bruno would have recognised that the Church was still acting within the parameters set up by Augustine so many centuries before.
I hope this brings the discussion back on track. My books The Closing of the Western Mind and AD 381 describe all this in detail. It is no surprise that a certain Tim ‘Neill and a certain James Hannam don’t like them!
@Charles: OK that’s clear. In answer to my question about the connection between Constantine/Theodosius and what happened after, you are saying that the key is Augustine – who we can all agree is with Boethius the most significant late Roman influence on later Christian thinking. This could be in two ways (a) directly through his intellectual influence on later thinkers such as Aquinas but particularly the Franciscans in the thirteenth and fourteenth century (b) indirectly by Augustine’s whole influence upon the later church, its rules and laws and worldview etc.
Does that reflect your overall view, Charles?
On your book, it is already on the Christmas list. I was looking http://ocham.blogspot.com/search/label/longeway at Longeway’s book (on Ockham’s supposed anticipation of ‘Western empiricism’), I am halfway through Hannam’s book at the moment. Yours will be next. Although I confess I find interminable early discussions of Christian doctrine tedious, indeed I regard the whole of the early medieval period (i.e. post-Augustine/Boethius, pre-Abelard) as a bit of an intellectual desert. If your book is mostly about those areas I might give it a miss on the grounds that I will probably agree with you.
On Hannam, my test of a book is to look at the areas I know very well and compare these to my own judgments. My area of competence is the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. So far Hannam has got those bits reasonably well, although he has a tendency to rely on secondary sources, but that’s understandable. He misunderstands Ockham’s nominalism (in my view) but this doesn’t impact his overall case. Also he makes a few interesting points that I had missed.
Peter. Thanks for yours. If you read my full critique of Hannam’s book, with which you may or may not agree, you will see I think it really falls apart after the fourteenth century when the arguments simply don’t make any coherent sense. However, that is for you to decide.
Augustine covered medieval theology like a blanket. Everyone had his main works in their monastery libraries. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was widely read but it hardly mentions Christianity. It is hard to know how vital Boethius work on logic was. I leave it open to others because my previous books essentially end at 600 and I would n’t read them if you want a study of the intellectual life of the later period. When I finished The Closing of the Western Mind, I felt that the conclusion was a bit too bleak and so I added a chapter on Thomas Aquinas and the Restoration of Reason. I felt that Aquinas turns his back on the Augustinian idea that human beings’ capacity to reason was fundamentally damaged by original sin by arguing that they did have that capacity and so I hoped to end on a slightly more hopeful note. Funnily enough one Catholic critic, a prominent theologian, complained that I differentiated too much between Aquinas and Augustine. I think he wanted to make the point that Catholicism was seamless but I still stick to my guns. The impact of Aristotle was the major difference between Augustine and Aquinas.
I have been working a lot on the medieval period for my new book on medieval relic cults. It arose from The Closing of the Western Mind in that I link the collapse of rational thought in the late fourth/early fifth centuries with the rise in the belief in the miraculous. I follow the scholars who have traced this especially in the mind of Augustine. As a young man, with a traditional classical education, he decries the miraculous, as an older man he becomes quite enthusiastic about miracles. Once again Augustine set a tone and there is hardly a single voice in the Middle Ages that argues for a more rational approach to natural phenomena that rules out the constant intervention of God. “God is free to do what he wills’ and so long as He can you can hardly have defined natural laws. They always risk being subverted by miraculous intervention. This is why i would argue that, when you add in the threat of excommunication for heresy and eternal hell fire, intellectual life was so much more limited in the Middle Ages than it had been in the Greek world. This was the real world of medieval Europe and the natural philosophers don’t don’t need a place in my book at all as, other than a few tentative attempts to sort out the difference between supernatural and natural events, they don’t really come into the picture. I think Hannam vastly overestimates their significance and I don’t see any evidence in his book or elsewhere that they provided the foundations of modern science, which Hannam never define anyway. it seems to be just Galileo. Again for you to decide when you have read the book.
I really must get back to work on my desk and duck out of these discussions but I hope you enjoy my books. Holy Bones, Holy Dust, How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe, will be out in April ,2011, Yale University Press.
>>Augustine covered medieval theology like a blanket. Everyone had his main works in their monastery libraries.
If you are going to use arguments then you really need to go to my website (The Logic Museum), which is an expanding collection of primary sources in medieval logic and philosophy. ‘Everyone had his main works in their monastery libraries’ is a much weaker argument that ‘all the great writers cited Augustine’. The purpose of the website is to provide a well-indexed collection of all the main sources, in parallel Latin-English so that those unfamiliar with Latin can still read the English, but have the Latin close by so that they can see the actual words the medieval writers used. There is a site searcher here
http://www.logicmuseum.com/latinsearcher.htm
which includes all the major internet sites (e.g. Bonaventura, Ockham, Suarez) on medieval/Latin philosophy and theology. If you search on the word ‘Augustine’ (or ‘Augustinus’) on mine, you get a sense of how frequently he is cited. And if you go to individual files such as this
http://logicmuseum.com/authors/aquinas/summa/Summa-IIa-71-74.htm
and use ctrl-F you see that in just these 4 questions, Aquinas cites Augustine 43 times. And the best way to understand the influence of someone like Augustine is to read the original literature – in English translations or, better, in the original Latin (which is generally easy and nowhere as difficult as classical Latin).
>>Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was widely read but it hardly mentions Christianity. It is hard to know how vital Boethius work on logic was.
!!! Astonishment. Consolation of Philosophy was merely a popular work. Boethius was vital both for his original commentaries on Aristotelian logic, and for his translations, without which the Latin West would not have known Aristotle’s work at all. I have begun work on a page for the Ars Vetus (old Logic derived from Boethius) http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/arsvetus/arsvetus.htm but you can see from the links that there is much material to be added.
As for his influence, all the important writers wrote commentaries either on Aristotle’s logic, or on Boethius’ commentaries (i.e. commentaries on commentaries). I have a page of the more important of them here http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/perihermaneias.htm , including Abelard. Unfortunately only in Latin, but there is a parallel of Aquinas’ commentary on the way. Boethius also wrote an important logico-theological work ‘On the Trinity’ which is in parallel here http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/boethius/boethiusdetrinitate.htm together with Aquinas’ unfinished commentary here http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/aquinas/superboethium-index.htm .
>>The impact of Aristotle was the major difference between Augustine and Aquinas.
The impact of Aristotle was the major difference not just between Augustine and Aquinas, but between Augustine and everything that was happening from 1200 onwards (and particularly 1250 and onwards)!!!!
I am completing a translation of and commentary on an important work by Duns Scotus probably written in the early 1290s. Number of times Augustine mentioned: none. Number of times God mentioned: once. Number of times Averroes mentioned: 13. Number of times Plato mentioned: 18 (usually disparingly). Number of times Boethius mentioned: 143. Number of times Aristotle mentioned: 252. That speaks for itself.
Thanks for the extra material. I am clearly more interested in the wider trends in society than you are. I just find these texts so marginal to any form of actual life. I like things that actually relate to people’s lives which is why I have chosen relic cults. But I stick to my overall view that Augustine provided the parameters within which much of spiritual life was defined. There is also evidence that the study of logic in Italy began independently of Boethius with the analysis of legal texts. ButI must opt out here as I have too much other work on.
P.S. In my Relics book, I give many instances where Augustine’s works actually helped define the way people approached miracles and relics throughout the Middle Ages. (Even in the early sixteenth century Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgement in the cathedral in Orvieto draws on Augustine’s description of the physical bodies in heaven from his The City of God.) I think most educated clerics had read The City of God which is,of course, much more readable than scholastic Latin texts which is why it had such influence in daily spiritual life. So it is not so much a question of how far scholastic authors cited Augustine as tracing the influence of Augustine on religious life. I am not going to get waylaid on that one now but it pervades the examples in my book which is why I talked of the ‘blanket’.
Having come from a line of classical scholars, and having been at one of those schools where one did more Latin and Greek classes than all the others put together, I warm to your approach. I am so rusty I would never call myself a classical scholar ( I used my forebears classical dictionaries when I get stuck!) but i was pleased to find I could still understand William Wey’s account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1458 which had never been translated from the original Latin,until just a few months ago, Much recommended. But scholastic Latin – way beyond me- glad to see someone keeping up the old standards. Best wishes, Charles.
Good luck with the relics book, and best wishes,
Peter
Thanks, Peter. Good luck with your researches.
Peter. The reason why I made the point about Boethius, leaving it entirely open for discussion about his importance without taking sides is that, to take one example, from James Franklin’s The Science of Conjecture, an author/ book I have found very helpful. ‘ From the purely historical point of view, the works of Boethius assume an importance quite out of proportion to their intrinsic merits’. ( p. 119). He notes ,p.122, that it was Abelard who had to clarify issues that Boethius had left unclear ( and I have no problems with Abelard). So there is at least some debate on how important Boethius was as a thinker in his own right. ( In fact, although I can’t remember the sources, it seemed standard practice some years ago ( the mid- 1990s when I first did work on him) to warn about overestimating Boethius’ importance as an independent thinker,I assume that Franklin is drawing on this tradition.) This is why I wrote that ‘It is hard to know how vital Boethius’ work on logic was’, reflecting these concerns. It is not an issue that comes up in my book, which, so far as the literature of the period goes, deals more with what we know, from surviving manuscript examples, people were actually reading: with Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy, for instance. ( I am not sure why you were astonished that I made this point- I was simply saying what people outside the academy were reading, along, for instance, with de Voragine’s Golden Legend and Innocent III’s On the Contempt of the Worlds. This is the world my book deals with: there are only a few areas ( on the nature of resurrected flesh, for instance on which Carol Walker Bynum is the authority) where scholastic thought and daily religious belief interact. The relic (s) of the holy foreskin offered many theological challenges!
And I really am trying to move on! I have now found Franklin’s point about the revival of logic. Franklin is important, to me at least, as he stresses the importance of the use of logic in daily life, such as the law courts. Franklin stresses the importance of the rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest. He goes on (pp.14-5) ‘ It would be too much to attribute the dramatic change in mentality to a single chance event, for the first readers of the rediscovered Digest already possessed ways of thinking that were (just) sufficient for them to make sense of the text. The essential idea that one applies reasoning to texts to understand them (in drawing deductions from one’s own and one’s opponents’ views of the text, in trying to reconcile apparent contradictions, in considering emendations of passages that seem against reason had been developed by the school of commentators on Lombard law in Pavia by about 1050. The laws they discuss are primitive, but the issues they take up and their reasoning are not.[Example given] . . On such matters of evidence, the Lombard commentators already show the characteristic medieval tendency to generalize much more than the Roman lawyers and to enquire into abstract principles’. He goes on to argue that this led into the University of Bologna, originally a secular institution,of course, without a Faculty of Theology until 1364.
I know I am getting a bad name for thinking that it is Italy not Paris where you actually get intellectual developments having an impact on everyday life in the Middle Ages,but it is a point I will continue to argue! The tragedy is that it did not last. Hugh Trevor- Roper’s essay ‘ Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’ may be dated (c. 1961) but it still an excellent introduction to the issue of why Italy was at the forefront in the Europe of the fifteenth century but stagnant by 1600 ( and not just economic changes but intellectual ones related to the reassertion of Church authority in the Counter-Reformation – see the accompanying blog discussion on Galileo’s myths!)
1. Well Franklin knows what he is talking about (I haven’t looked at that particular book though). And he indeed says “the works of Boethius assume an importance quite out of proportion to their intrinsic merits” They are certainly important to 12th and 13th century thought (even if their importance was overestimated). The point about Boethius is that he is not an original thinker. His main contributions were the translations of the ‘old logic’ i.e. the first half of Aristotle’s Organon. This was the only way that the Latin West knew about logic at all. He also wrote important commentaries on the logical works, which are also historically important, because they explained what would otherwise have been very difficult works.
>>It is not an issue that comes up in my book, which, so far as the literature of the period goes, deals more with what we know, from surviving manuscript examples, people were actually reading: with Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy, for instance.
It all depends what you mean by the ‘people’ who were doing the reading. As I’ve said, you can’t study the history of thought, without studying the thoughts themselves, i.e. by reading the primary sources. You can’t study the impact of Wittgenstein by reading what the Daily Mail says (if anything) about Wittgenstein. You have to read Wittgenstein, and you have to read books written by people (e.g. Ray Monk, Anthony Kenny, GEach &c) who understand Wittgenstein. The Daily Mail will not help you here!
>>I know I am getting a bad name for thinking that it is Italy not Paris where you actually get intellectual developments having an impact on everyday life in the Middle Ages,but it is a point I will continue to argue!
Same point again. The history of thought is mostly about the thinkers. Their impact on ordinary life is also important and interesting, but it is a different matter. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it was Paris where things were happening.
Let’s settle on a difference of emphasis.My interest is on how the history of thought impacts on the way life is lived.So in my Relics books I look at how what Augustine actually wrote, say in The City of God, is reflected in what people were told to be believe by the Church leaders. This is well documented both in sermons, popular tracts and practices as they are recorded. One of many instances. You will know of Augustine berating Innocentia for not publicising the miracle of her apparently cured breast cancer. This may well be the source for the annual proclamations of miracles each year at major shrines. (Wittgenstein has never been translated into the popular consciousness in the same way.) You are interested in the immediate impact of thinkers on other thinkers. Both are legitimate areas of study. Within your own ,Paris may be more important as the question of direct impact on the surrounding culture does not seem to be an issue. With mine, it is very different and the links between society and thinking in the Italian universities seem to be much stronger and in different areas such as medicine and law (not major areas of study in Paris).
I think it’s clear we agree about our differences.