this little lemma is entirely missing the bigger point of my post to dilbert, anyway. he tried to make-out like the 'dark ages' were that way because the church held sway and people were living in an era of religious ignorance before 'science'. but that's just an asinine interpretation. the church was actually responsible for preserving and transmitting an organised body of knowledge, the closest thing we had to an incipient 'sciencia', in fact, and medieval theologians were doing plenty of work in logic, developing something like the formal-methodological approach and rigour that we recognised as 'science' after the great humanist-renaissance turn and into the enlightenment.
the dark ages might have been a setback, but the church had a major role to play in western thought and culture's protection and recovery. to recapitulate:
western civilization was profoundly shaped by christianity, and christianity specifically gave many of the distinguishing characteristics to the cast of 'the western mind'. it was a rebellious, enterprising religion, with a profound emphasis on individual doubt and individual faith. it's not hard to see how that led to the modern rationalist-skeptical mindset (descartes is the most obvious connecting bridge, here). radical doubt is a part of christian theology. the protestant work ethic and the early scientific-inquiring mind, as in newton or bacon, are good examples of this. there isn't such a vast gap between christian church fathers rinsed in logic and scholasticism arguing over how many angels would fit on the head of a pin and an early scientist peering down a microscope to delve into the theretofore unseen mysteries of creation: both come out of the same culture and the same worldview, the same will to knowledge, the same method of doubt and proof.
of course, it also came to have a heavy hand in repressing certain forms of knowledge and censoring the ever-increasing store of knowledge that contradicted a by-then set of religious dogmas ... but that's a separate point. from 500AD onwards western culture and knowledge was hanging on by a string in the heads of those 'few irrelevant' theologians.
Oh by the way some even flat out rejected the greek philosophers for theological argument as corrupt and incompatible because they were pagans in conflict with the jews.
yes, that's very true and i've never said otherwise. christianity's relationship with the greek philosophers has always been a fraught one. the church as a worldly institution declared lots of things as apocryphal or blasphemous or whatever. that's a separate discussion in the history of biblical scholarship and theology. but it hardly contradicts my point that the thinking of the ancient greeks was a constant presence and influence throughout the middle ages: you have to know about someone to write tracts declaring them 'blasphemous' or 'null' or whatever. the same process of exclusion happened with the 'gnostic gospels' and the works of pseudo-dionysus, another thinker from the early middle-ages who makes the living link between medieval thought and the greeks very apparent.
there have been several movements in the history of christian philosophy that were later extinguished or stamped out. neoplatonists, gnostics, and so on, which tend to express the more mystical and metaphysical aspects of the christian faith (i.e. by being closer to plato than to the jewish side of things). there has been a push-pull in the religion between these contrary and somewhat opposing systems since the days of peter and paul.
augustine explicitly credits the platonists for leading him to christ, but then damns them for their 'arrogance and pride'. rather neatly summarises the conflicts between hellenistic metaphysics and jewish laws, there. there is plenty of this stuff in the 'roman' christian line from augustine and boethius on, contrary to the way you talk about the schism, the orthodox church, the greek fathers, etc.
Last edited by uziq (2020-11-05 11:41:48)
