5 ms·

While the subject matter of the series is very interesting, I feel that it is a trend of nuancing things out of proportion. Yes, the Roman emperorship claim wa

While the subject matter of the series is very interesting, I feel that it is a trend of nuancing things out of proportion. Yes, the Roman emperorship claim was continually picked up, but there were differences (in the West especially) in the organization and reach of these regimes. The Church became more of a parallel branch of power and not a subordinate. Yes, literacy was not lost altogether and people of these periods preserved some books. But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries. There's a whole long story of how the West lost and then gradually recovered Plato and Aristotle, because for the long time they couldn't read Greek, the Ostrogothic king killed the early potential translator to Latin (Boethius) and then there were ages before these foundational texts were regained from Arabic and then Byzantine sources. Lots of philosophical and historical books (such as many parts of Livy's history of Rome itself) were preserved only as summaries, because apparently no one wanted/needed to even read them. Myself, I would distinguish the (okay, gradual) fall of the empire as the political regime and the decline of the civilization. The former, I think, was actually a good thing, since I cannot imagine another road to the modern experience of personal and political freedom (however flawed and maybe fleeting) from the centralized and despotic culture of the late Empire. (I don't have strong convictions about the causes of the latter).

zozbot234 5y ago
> But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.
- stereolambda 5y ago
  I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    What's the stuff that "would have been preserved" by the Classical world but was not preserved by the monasteries, and the existing tradition in general? Religious texts? We actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff, in the form of Classical philosophy. We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.
    - stereolambda 5y ago
      There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_w... Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty. I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?

zozbot234 5y ago

> But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.

stereolambda 5y ago
I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  What's the stuff that "would have been preserved" by the Classical world but was not preserved by the monasteries, and the existing tradition in general? Religious texts? We actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff, in the form of Classical philosophy. We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.
  - stereolambda 5y ago
    There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_w... Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty. I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?