You make a comparison to some mythological great loss of knowledge in byzantium which is equivalent to something regarding Terrorism.
It’s not your fault: We receive bad history here about Byzantium and Justinian’s actions are portrayed as some kind of slaughter of the ancient Greek knowledge when it was nothing of the kind.
You could probably rightly compare the Latin Church during that time period with terrorism though a little more accurately.
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I have no other real issue with your opinion piece sans this and any conclusions that come from this statement.
But the rest is fine.
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Thank you. It was in Byzantium that the knowledge of the ancient greek philosophers was not merely preserved but actively taught. Plato was less popular than Aristotle and others but he as taught as well.
The University of Constantinople (of which there were several) had as its highest level of learning, Rhetoric, and as Byzantium *was* the continuation of the same people who came up with the Greek secular knowledge, they had no reason to throw it all away.
What they did is incorporate it into what they considered a synergistic relationship between Church and State. Each had their separate duties but they cooperated, secular and religious.
Christianity wasn’t forced, as Constantinople was “cosmopolitan” – worldly and world-wise with trading partners from the globe and they understood that there were different peoples with different beliefs and they respected that in their own way.
But while the Christian East was having their heyday, as did portions of Persia (but not _all_ portions of Persia but some, as they were informed by the Byzantine scholars as well), the Christian West was having a buttload of problems. That’s the history we normally learn about and I learned about, but once you delve into Byzantine history with a positive mindset it must’ve been a pretty amazing period of time. It was 900 years of relative peace (with the last 200 years full of people from the Latin West on one side and the growing fundamentalism sects in Islam on the other side each wanting to topple the walls of Constantinople, which they perceived (incorrectly) as the “City of Gold”.
Sieges from both sides eventually weakened it and it fell by 1483 to Mehmet II, who was from one of the more fundy Islamic groups (as opposed to the intellectual ones from a few centuries prior, who unfortunately had been fading away and long out of power and influence).
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[sorry for the long brain-dump – every time I tell the story I realize something new about it that I forgot]
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Well, it’s a strong set of claims and shoots arrows in a few directions at once.
It’s possible there’s a connection between Augustine thinking and radical terrorism in the name of Islam. I was raised Methodist, which was a non-Calvinist protestant, went through some religious questing (through UU, Quaker and other pit stops along the way, ended up Eastern Orthodox for 5 years, even staying at a monastery for a short bit, and then became Mr. Science in my 30s, and now I’m bringing it together as best I can, catching up on missing knowledge in logic, philosophy and politics – three areas I usually avoided.
But one area I never got ‘into’ that much was Augustine and the Christian west, even though its technically “my background”, as it seems like they had an awfully long dry-spell generally, although late medieval starts getting impressive again.
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I’m not well studied in Ancient Rome, Roman expansion, Augustine, Latin Church, English/French battles, up through about the 1450s or so.
[I have a little knowledge about the development of Scholasticism in the 11th century and up which I tie into today’s University “silo’ thinking but that’s about it].
Then my knowledge gets better again about the West.
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It always felt like “cold stone” to study it. Never had any warmth to it to me. One day I’ll dive in though. I have friends that know every battle ever fought by the celts and I can only listen and try to absorb. I could see how some of it’s interesting.
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