4 ms·
The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks on
by davoneus 3y ago
The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks only preserved matter favorable to Christianity.
If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved.
Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago> If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved. this really isnt true.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoAgain, what you are posting is the old stereotype that is being complained about here. Any survey of education in the Eastern Roman Empire will talk about how pagan literature at variance with Christian teaching, was not only copied, it remained the very foundation of the literary canon used for teaching. Christian educators simply found it too useful to censor out of existence. The loss of so much literature in the Western Roman Empire has to be understood in the context of the overall collapse in literacy there, which was due to late-antiquity political factors and not religious ones, and then resource starvation in scriptoria.