alt Hacker NewsIt's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
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I find that view to be reductive and correspond to simplistic stereotypes of the European Middle Ages (e.g., calling them the "Dark Ages"). It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views, then blames the fact that their values are different then ours all on their religious beliefs (which, too, were varied).
This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal, theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many classical texts were only preserved because of those monks copying them down.
Recycling expensive media is a thing that was going on before the common era. Egyptian mummies were for instance wrapped in recycled papyrus. Look at the BBC wiping tapes, which when something is expensive to buy, economics can be the driver in erasing versus buying additional new media material. Even Neanderthals would recycle their expensive stone tools using the cores-on-flakes method to make smaller tools out of the old broken ones.
The so-called "Dark Ages" were not solely engendered by Christianity, and even the arguably negative characteristics of Christianity in late antiquity were ultimately shaped by prevalent outside factors and not inherent to the religion itself. It literally took many centuries for Roman civilization to collapse, and the root cause was that (like many ancient societies) it was basically predicated on plunder and conquest, so the whole arrangement began to collapse like a slow-motion trainwreck when they could not effectively plunder anymore.
There might have been some hope that it could gradually transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
In case you're wondering why you're being downvoted: the history is much more nuanced. While the Archimedes Palimpsest is a genuine and tragic example of lost text, the broader claim that Christianity engendered a period of scientific erasure is considered outdated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis).
For example, monasteries were the primary centers of literacy and education in Europe during the early middle ages, and they acted as the primary bridge for the survival of Greco-Roman intellectual heritage in the West. Not always intentionally, but they were the only sanctuary for books during those times.
Besides, this is not how history works. Civilizations come and go and times of transition always take a toll. An eye-opening recent book on these questions I can recommend is Tom Holland's "Doninion: The Making of the Modern World".
It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
Suggested reading: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" [0]
Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
People are already correcting you, but I find it hard to read this much into the case of this particular text. We'd need to know the full context to what exactly happened, but they might have chosen to sacrifice the catalog for many reasons, not just because of an anti-scientific bend. Maybe it was one of many copies that they held, yet the other ones didn't survive.
We also need to consider that these sorts of texts did survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.
even stuff like the maya codices, priests just burned up almost every bit of text and historical text that the culture kept so were just missing SO much on them
Except this wasn't "scraped off to make yet another Bible".
St John Climacus' writings are some of the most interesting in the history of Christianity. Probably the most mystical of all Christian writings and give an amazing insight into the history of Christian monasticism. Also still held in high regard for sure in the Orthodox Churches.
Flagged for hate speech.
What could the "West" have accomplished? Perhaps in a religious zeal we only would have burned ourselves up long ago. A knowledge of math and science does not innately impart some higher wisdom.
As it is we have cabals of bankers and technocrats applying every mathematical and scientific advancement in attempting to construct their own version of global authoritarian priest classes. For now it stands they are only being held back by the other things learned from other humanist disciplines...
I was thinking exactly this. Having just toured Rome, the Christian history is considerably easier to access than the older Roman history, even for prominent sites like the Forum, Palatine Hill, the Colosseum. The quality of the Christian work was also far inferior to the older layers underneath.
Darkly amusing is the Vatican. Reading about piety, service, generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn’t be more striking.
This is not a very historically informed comment. This didn’t take place during the “dark ages,” for one, but in a Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct. It’s a shame that some of these discoveries were overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture because paper was so expensive.
The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.