Local customs
I’m reading Charles Freeman’s AD 381.
This sounded familiar already; it’s only page 2.
Theodosius was not himself a fanatical Christian, and despite the harshness of the language in which his decrees were expressed, he showed some restraint and flexibility in the way he applied them. In a vast and administratively unwieldy empire, any law lost its impact as it filtered down into the provinces, and some may never have been systematically enforced. However, this worked both ways – a law might be ignored, or it might be imposed with brutality by a local enthusiast.
Ahhh yes – that does sound familiar. It sounds exactly like Pakistan. It sounds exactly like a lot of places. There is never any shortage of local enthusiasts.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Local customs http://dlvr.it/B80Rk […]
Isn’t it the truth. Enthusiasts indeed. That is, if I understand the word once meant somebody who’d really opened up a can of piousness and out did the regular believers.
By the way, I’ve already ordered this book. Should arrive before xmas. I’ve just finished ‘The closing of the Western mind’, which I’ll recommend (or loan, sorry Charles) to some relatives who I’m confident would get a kick out it. I didn’t realize, but I had Charles’ book ‘Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome’, a book I’d poured over for years, but haven’t touched probably for a decade. At this rate, I’ll have all of Charles’ books soon….
“Theodosius was not himself a fanatical Christian.”
And I’m sure Adolph was a really nice guy too – it’s those crazy people around him who took his words far too seriously.
Wow – 1600 years on and people still apologize for the scum of the earth.
Enthusiasm is best left to people who run micro-breweries, collect lead soldiers or keep obscure sports alive.
Very well said, Shatterface. People should be passionate and zealous about tracking down bootleg records, breeding orchids or salsa dancing. Passion and zeal are scary in politics, frightening in religion and absolutely terrifying in the combination of the two, theocracy.
“And I’m sure Adolph was a really nice guy too –”
Don’t see where anyone is saying Theodosius was a nice guy. Shoot, he had an empire to run and was concerned about social cohesion. “nice guys”, if there were any, went out with the republic – not that the romans were ever nice to subjugated peoples…..
As for Adolf, I doubt he was much of a nice guy despite what Eva Braun, Traudl Junge and Magda Goebbels obviously thought; but he did have a lot of help from nice guy enthusiasts, many but not all of them “christians”; even some peace-loving muslims signed on in the Bosnian SS “Handschar” division and helped quite enthusiastically.
Heh. Charles really isn’t apologizing for Theodosius, MadSci; that’s a factual statement, not an emotive one.
Brian – same here: I’ve had Charles’s The Greek Achievement in my bookshelves for years.
I hope perhaps Charles Freeman could confirm, but I think religious intolerance more or less began with Christianity. Christians broke Roman law by refusing to respect Roman gods, while the Romans sought to more or less rule provinces while giving partial respects for local deities, and sometimes replacing those local deities with Roman names. Thus, for centuries, Christians were ‘tolerated’ and even prospered within the Roman empire, even though they were outlawed. And the Christians themselves wrote this early history as a history of persecution against Christians. When Christianity finally became the official religion of the Roman empire, some of the most hateful and barbaric laws were introduced, persecuting the Jews.
@ Egbert,
“religious intolerance more or less began with Christianity”, yes, my reading of Freeman’s book ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’ confirms that opinion. Christianity presented a political,not a religious problem, for the Roman state.
There are still many Christians who claim that the Church ‘saved Western Civilization’. Freeman’s work demonstrates that Christianity was indeed inimical to Greco-Roman traditions,in reality, the clergy only preserved the fraction of pagan learning that was compatible with Christian superstition.
A C Grayling’s “Towards the Light” is a very informativel summary of the West’s long painful emergence from the long night of Christianity.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/06/the-perniciously-persistent-myths-of-hypatia-and-the-great-library
Some perspective on the era.
A C Grayling’s “Towards the Light” is a very informativel summary of the West’s long painful emergence from the long night of Christianity.
Oh for gawd’s sakes.
You know, the West’s entire legal systeme emerged in the 6th century at a time when Christianity had triumphed.
The decline in learning and enlightenment only began in the late 7th-early 8th century.
When the Arabs captured Egypt and the Near East the supply of papyrus virtually dried up, and with it the transmission and dissemination of knowledge as well. That’s why so many manuscripts from the eighth, ninth and tenth cenuries are written on recycled paper upon which one can still see snippets of older, earlier scripts
Sixth century Byzantium represents a period of great brilliance and originality in nearly every field of human endevour. The era saw the introduction of “arabic” numerals ( indo-persian decimals, actually), the invention of gegorian chants, and great works of engineering such as Hagia Sophia. The complexe network of aquaducts and sewers built by Justianian, for instance, remained Istanbul’s principle system of waterworks right into the 1960s. Hardly anyone knows that.
What’s more, Italy, Spain, southern France and North Africa ( some two thirds of western Rome), all of which had been lost to the barbarians a century earlier, were recaptured
It has been in the interests of both Islam and western Christianity to suppress and deny that brilliance.
And to judge by your comment, both have done a sterling job.
Byzantine society was educated by the standards of its time, with high levels of literacy, compared to the rest of the world. Significantly it possessed a secular education system that was a continuation of the academies of classical antiquity. Primary education was widely available, even at village level and uniquely in that society for both sexes. It was in this context that the secular University of Constantinople can be understood. Further it was not unique in the empire as for many centuries, before the Muslim conquest, similar institutions operated in such major provinces as Antioch and Alexandria.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_university
So many people let their prejudices get in the road of facts.
To postulate some sort of fundamental and irreconcilable animosity between Christianity and learning is utterly preposterous and flies in the face of all historical fact.
“All historical fact”…garnered from 1. First Things and 2. Wikipedia.
I’m underwhelmed.
Look, “Byzantine” is now considered an insult, but Christian Byzantium, first in the sixth and then later in the ninth and tenth centuries, was absolutely brilliant.
Google ‘Paris Psalter’ or ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ and you’ll see works of thoroughly ‘renaissance’ art…
that date from the ninth century.
For years and years both western Christendom and the Islamic world ( particularly The Ottomans) have worked in tandem ( each for their own particular reasons) to deny Byzantium’s brilliant ( often unparalelled) intellectual, artisitic and scientific achievements? When Constnatinople fell to the crusaders in 1204, almost all of the ‘renaissance’ art was declared blasphemous and subsequently destroyed. Ditto for most of the scientific manuscripts. This delegitimastion intensified in the mid 19th century when, during the crimean war, both the French and British took up the Ottoman gauntlet against czarist Russia. Turkey’s kemalisation after WWI and its entry into NATO after WWII consolidated that process of delegitimisation.
And you know, sacrificing a goat to god will never get ya the recipe for Greek Fire. That recipe is so complexe, its invention could never have been acidental and its inventors, two Syrian monks, must have had a knowledge of chemistry that would not again be equalled until the late 18th-early 19th century.
The Byzantines also knew how to build batteries and they could electo-plate cheap metal objects with veneers of gold. Eleinor of Aquitaine bought two pocket watches ( 100s of years before they had been ‘invented’) while visiting Byzance in the mid 1100s, so that both she and her husband, King John II, could sychonise their love trysts far away from prying eyes.
Just a brief example of this brilliance. Did you know that Hagia Sophia’s dome is topped by kiln-fired bricks that when broken open have a consistent hexagonal structure like a beesnest, an effect that requires an extremely advanced knowledge of ceramics ( and chemistry), and one that makes these bricks the ceramic equivalent of big blocks of sponge toffee? During eathquakes the building displays utterly astounding structural harmonics; it ‘plays’ a tune of balance and counterbalance, one that sees arches bouncing off butresses in such a way that the edifice remains standing. To be fair, the dome DID collapse once early on, but it was rebuilt and has never collapsed since. The dome of Istanbul’s blue mosque, a smaller ‘safer’ structure, has collapsed four times, even though it’s a thousand years younger.
Our prejudices preclude any possibility of a society, much less an entire civilisation, that could be both rational and Christian.
Greek Fire spooked both the Arabs and The Vatican.
I DO hope it doesn’t spook you.
Sauder, calm down. Write more slowly and carefully: your comment is full of typos. It’s also agitated.
Nobody is dissing Byzantium. Take a deep breath.
(And you do realize that technology is not a synonym for “rational,” right?)
I’m rushed because I have to keep stiring the stew.
No, technology ISN,T a synonym for rational, but technology must have, as one of the necesary conditions for its developement, an ambiance conducive to rational thought.
The Byzantines were quite rational.
The lighthouse in Alexandria [edit – OT]
Hey I don’t care why you’re rushed! If you don’t have time to type carefully and correct mistakes, then don’t comment.
And don’t dump irrelevant information about Byzantine technology, either.
Sauder:
??? Her husbands were Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, Neither of them was called John. When she was in the East, she was married to Louis.
On Theodosius, Peter Brown writes in The Body & Society: Men, Women & Sexuality in Early Christianity, p. 383:
I recommend Brown, and also Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, on the development of Christian ideas about sexuality.
Egbert:
It’s also in the Old Testament/Jewish scriptures (Judaism was not orginally monotheistic, but retconned its scriptures after the Hezekiah era, when the wife of Yahweh, Asherah, was written out of the script). Monotheisms naturally tend to intolerance. Whereas polytheisms get along with other people through syncretism (e.g. the Graeco-Roman traditions adopted Egyptian, Middle-Eastern and Celtic gods by identifying them with their own gods on the basis of their job specs), monotheisms say: we are right, everyone else is wrong/wicked. They project the autocracy of earthly rulers on to a cosmic scale, with ‘jealous’ mono-gods – absolute monarchs with magic powers – who take the dudgeon if ‘their’ people so much as look in the direction of any other deity.