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How Technology Drives Religious “Fundamentalism”

Since I’m a book-nerd I probably would put the printing press as one of the top five technologies of the period between 1000 and 2000 A.D. I’ve written before about how I think the printing press drove rapid cultural and social change. But in this post, I want to make explicit something which I’ve long believed: the mass production of very cheap books allowed for the development of “religious fundamentalism” that we see in the modern world.

Martin Luther and his fellow travelers opened up a vast new domain of reading for the lay public by their assertion that reading scripture was essential for any believing Christian and their relationship to their God. This is why Luther and colleagues furiously produced Bibles in the vernacular so that the people could have access to God’s words themselves. This was new, as most people during the Middle Ages were illiterate, and the Church provided Christianity through liturgies. For the literate, the Bible was in Latin in any case, inaccessible to the lay worshipper.

People participated in public Christianity and were guided by their priests. A “personal” relationship with God may have been possible for some mystics, but for most people, the Church was the avenue through which salvation occurred.

The Reformation changed that by opening the door to a radically individualist and demotic Christianity. Protestantism is strongly associated with increased literacy in Europe, just as the density of printing presses is associated with a greater propensity for a region to become Protestant. Though the state Protestant churches attempted to take on a very similar guiding position that the Roman Catholic church explicitly claimed as its role in society, they were subordinate to the nation-state, and Luther and Calvin had opened up an alternative path for lay worshippers in private devotion to the scripture.

This is not limited to Christianity. The Ottomans famously banned printing presses for Muslims for centuries, but the genie could only be kept in the bottle for so long. Korans with the original Arabic on one page and translation on the other are now widely available, as well as books relating to the Hadith. Though Islam is self-consciously a religion of the book, for most of its history most believers were illiterate, and very few had Korans. And even if they had a Koran most Muslims were not Arabic speakers, and the Arabic speakers who were literate may have had difficulty with the archaic Arabic in the Koran. ‘

The words of the Koran are the words of God, therefore they had a magical quality. The meaning was less important than repeating the words of magic, and that was often the purview of the prayer leader, a representative of the ulema. With the exception of some Shia groups, Islam does not have an official clerical class, but operationally the ulema are like rabbis in Judaism, providing advice, guidance, and instruction in affairs of religion.

Just as in Christianity the spread of religious literature to the masses resulted in “reform” movements and changes in behavior and self-identity. In some areas and cases, the power of the traditional ulema was broken. After all, with cheap books, anyone could learn the law of God and master his Word.

The same pattern can be found in other populist reform movements across many religions (e.g., Won Buddhism and Arya Samaj). The “higher religions” tend to have religious scriptures or revelations of various forms, and eventually, these were all put down in the physical form. When the printing press made these sacred books cheap, they spread across much of the population, breaking the information monopoly of religious elites.

With the spread of cheap Bibles and religious pamphlets, along with literacy which allowed many more people to reflect and identify with a particular sect or confession, the strength of an explicit religious identity deepened across the world. One of the facts which I find amazing and interesting is that in the 16th century it was plausible that peasants on the lands of particular rulers were naturally obligated to follow the religion of the ruler, even after the ruler converted to a new religion. Oftentimes this was grudging, as the new Protestant faith often overturned old festivals and the familiar calendar. By the 17th century, this was not feasible. The House of Stuart was overthrown due to its defection from the Protestant religion in England, while in Germany many rulers who changed their religion faced hostility and suspicion from their people. When the rulers of Saxony converted to Catholicism, the people remained Lutheran (in fact, for some time the only Catholic priests in Saxony were those which served the royal household!). Similarly, when the rulers of Prussia embraced Reformed Christianity, their people remained Lutheran.

The religious book transformed the nature of religion, from being guided by religious professionals, to being a coordinated project of elites along with bottom-up enthusiasm from the masses. In the process, it made religion much dumber, as it took on the shape of its guiders, who were a combination of intelligent and stupid. The textual method of Salafists and Protestant Fundamentalists is, to be frank dumb as shit. If you teach dumb people to read Holy Books, it won’t make them smart. Rather, it has turned religion somewhat dumber.

Book-populism can lead to strange directions. Pentecostalism is not very focused on scripture. But it is clearly inspired by democratic populism, which rests on the back of an educated citizenry. It is hard to think that the same religion produced St. Thomas Aquinas and the trussed-up shamans who are Pentecostal preachers, but here we are.

The integration and evolution of religion within civilization has been a matter of scaffolding it with accouterments of functionality and form which made it acceptable and useful to elites and high culture. It is a long march from the fetish idol in the wood, to temples of ancient Egypt, finally to the Sistine Chapel. But the Reformation ended the long march of elite religion, and demotic and populist urges and passions once more came to the fore. The shamans and demons burst out of our deep psyches, that which had been sublimated and suppressed but wrapped now in the lexical garb of higher religion.

Civilization, rational, ingenious, enables the return of the repressed.

102 thoughts on “How Technology Drives Religious “Fundamentalism”

  1. You are correct that the printing press did not have a major effect in China. However, that’s because of the hieroglyphic nature of traditional Chinese Mandarin writing, leading most people to be functionally illiterate

    Koreans were to first to employ metal movable type in 1234 and have had a phonetic alphabet since 1443, but neither had any “major effect.” So I don’t think, in the case of the Chinese and Koreans, it was the nature of the writing system per se, but other social-structural and ideological barriers (probably Confucian-gentry monopoly in literacy – in Korea the mandarinate forbade widespread use of the press) that prevented the dramatic increase in literacy.

  2. that’s because of the hieroglyphic nature of traditional Chinese Mandarin writing, leading most people to be functionally illiterate, because learning how to read, let alone write, was a laborious process that took decades. One of the major innovations of the Chinese Communists was to recognize this issue, that the written language itself was designed to be exclusionary to those not of the elite, and to create Simplified Mandarin. This came very handy in the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and elsewhere, as now everyone was able to read and even write CCP propaganda and slogans.

    This is very wrong. The simplified characters used on the mainland are no lighter in terms of educational burden than the traditional characters they replaced (still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong). The explicit design goal was to make the characters physically easier to write by hand, as measured in stroke count. If there was an increase in literacy, it came from an increase in education, not from the character reform.

  3. Re printing in East Asia, could be wrong but my understanding is that the issue in China was more that metal moveable type has lower advantages over woodblock printing with very large character sets.

    So China goes one way on metal moveable type because of that, and then to some extent, even though Korea *could* go another way (with Hangul), the influence of China as the proper way of doing things is quite strong (the people should write things “properly” in civilized Hanzi, as a mark of civilization and education and anything else ought to be discouraged) so they don’t really.

    Not that woodblock printing is totally terrible as a printing method but maybe not quite as productive.

  4. Not that woodblock printing is totally terrible as a printing method but maybe not quite as productive.

    Well… so what? China clearly engaged in “the mass production of very cheap books”. They did indeed do it with woodblock printing. But when you’re reading the book, it doesn’t really matter whether it was printed off of wood blocks or metal sorts.

    The argument above is specifically that mass production of a single book led to social upheaval. That makes movable type irrelevant — the only advantage of movable type over block printing is that you can scavenge the sorts for reuse in another book once you’ve printed the first one.

  5. Well, I don’t really know what the cost points are. Relatively small differences in cost to do a production run of a new book from metal movable type rather than woodblock could have been large relative to incomes and led to relatively large differences in book production, which mattered. It seems like a precise economic question.

  6. @Matt: The question is also how many variations being produced. Like do you print the same text (like the bible) over and over again, you don’t even need movable metal letters at all. Actually it would be quite expensive to create a standing matter and leave it that way or at least it would be no big improvement.
    The movable letters really pay off if you produce a rather small run and alter it the next time, but in an ideal case you don’t change everything, keep the same format. So the movable letters are ideal and a huge improvement for newspapers and pamphlets primarily, in which the basic form being kept and only the main content being altered.
    Of course, the metal letters persist longer too, but while that is important, its of secondary importance.
    For the bible the principle translation was more important, for the political-social movements pamphlets and newsletters. There is an own scientific line of historical research on the printing production from the reformation to the end of 30-years war, because many more modern propagandistic methods appeared there probably the first time.

  7. @Obs

    The dogmas of biblical inerrancy and infallibility are late Protestant creations, which did not exist among former Christians and early Protestants and does not exist among non-Protestant Christians to this day. I think your interpretation of Christianity is too Protestant-focused, non-Protestant Christians, who do not have a dogma like sola scriptura in the first place, do not give the weight to the word of the Bible many Protestants give. Protestants have come closer to the Muslim position with their dogmas of the inerrancy and infallibility of their scriptures. But in the case of Islam such dogmas make much more sense since, unlike Christianity, according to the Islamic dogma, scriptures are revealed by God to the prophets through the angel Gabriel (Jibril) word by word and there can be no error or human involvement in their production as they are from God word by word, which has never been the position of Christianity. That is also why Islam has Sharia law and puts a strong emphasis on the Koranic text and being in accordance with the Koranic text in the formation of Sharia law and in all other matters. But that does not mean that the Koranic text is not open to interpretation or should be interpreted fully literally according to Islam, as for instance, traditionally many and maybe most Muslims interpret the six days of creation mentioned in the Koran non-literally.

  8. Another bit of info: the overwhelming majority of Muslims traditionally interpret the physical descriptions of God (Allah) in the Koran non-literally.

  9. @Obs, yes agree with your thoughts on that, though a mild counterexample on pamplets and basic newspapers being common in a woodblock printing culture is Edo Japan is known for its quite a rich print culture of even small run stuff (e.g. shimbun-nishiki-e).

    There is a difficulty between disentangling here the pure effect of movable type from a wider effect of Europe seeming to be much more keen on mechanisation (using metal mechanisms!) and use of animal+water power generally, and this leading to productivity improvements in printing (larger volumes, for cheaper) before even industrialisation, but ultimately to very large print volumes during industrialisation (and the truly massive print cultures of subsequent eras). And of course the cultural effects Twinkie quite rightly brings in too.

  10. Language scholars in China now state openly that adopting simplified characters was a mistake. It conferred no benefit in terms of increased literacy.

  11. I agree with Razib about many kinds Protestant being dumbed down, though I don’t agree as to why.

    As noted above, there wasn’t any sort of societal upheaval that went along with the printing press in the East as there was in the West. Which means that the societal upheaval in the West was caused by the printing press needed more going on than the printing press alone.

    I’d also, there is no correlation between being a ‘book’ religion and not being intellectually very sophisticated. It might seem that way to a modern Westerner since that can be seen as the way it has played out.

    What makes many varieties of Protestantism at least seem so low brow is that said denominations require that the membership of the congregation understand the sect’s ideas, and unless one is going to be highly restrictive as to membership, that means that said sect’s doctrine cannot be very sophisticated.

    Catholicism has no such requirement as to its membership, and one doesn’t need to understand much at all about Catholicism to be a good Catholic, if one isn’t adequately equipped. Some might say at present, it’s not even a requirement for being Pope. Being clever and learned is a fine thing, but it’s more important to be good than clever.

    I’d agree with the other commenters that what happened with regards to religion and society in Europe weren’t “Law of History” type things, but peculiar to Europe.

    Lastly, Razib has been comparing the Reformation to now a bit. I think that is true since I’d say now we are realizing that the nation state isn’t always a given and one can have more than one tribe competing for the reigns of the state. Maybe the nation state, or an arrangement where everyone is in a tribe that transcends the borders of a state, is a prerequisite for democracy and that is a “Law of History”.

    Lastly, per what’s going on now, I’d also think that mass affluence leading to at least an episode of mass decadence might be a “Law of History”.

  12. @John: “Language scholars in China now state openly that adopting simplified characters was a mistake. It conferred no benefit in terms of increased literacy.”

    I wonder why they say a mistake. Are there any negative side effects other than the deviation from the tradition?

  13. Are there any negative side effects other than the deviation from the tradition?

    No. For most purposes, simplified and traditional characters are equivalent. For example, the traditional character 國 has the simplified form 国. There’s nothing more to it than that — it’s written one way in one system, and another way in the other system. This obviously does not ease any memory burdens.

    Some characters were unified. For example, the traditional 後 (“after”) and 后 (“empress”) share the simplified form 后. This does ease memory burdens, but not in a significant way. 候 (“time”), 厚 (“thick”), 鲎 (“a type of crab”), and 豞 (“oink”) are all pronounced identically to 后.

  14. @Obs – Yes. People who only learn to read simplified characters can’t read traditional characters (which means they can’t access any literature before simplified characters came into use). People who learn traditional characters can learn to read simplified characters without much difficulty.

    There is also an aesthetic/artistic dimension: calligraphy.

  15. @Obs – The argument for and against is a lot more complicated than that, but I see that as the most fundamental and important one. Plus simplified characters are just dumb – they come across as crude, inelegant and uncultured. Hong Kong and Taiwan refuse to change to simplified characters, and cite the fact that they both have higher literacy rates than Mainland China despite that.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simplified_Chinese_characters

  16. Catholicism has no such requirement as to its membership, and one doesn’t need to understand much at all about Catholicism to be a good Catholic, if one isn’t adequately equipped. Some might say at present, it’s not even a requirement for being Pope.

    You know the old joke: “Protestants read nothing but the Bible; Catholics read everything but the Bible.”

    In truth, whenever I brought Protestant acquaintances (usually Evangelicals) with little experience with Catholicism to a Catholic Mass, they were always a bit surprised – “You guys have TWO Gospel readings at your service?” I smile and say, “Yes, we read the Bible sometimes. Aristotle is not our God.”

    being clever and learned is a fine thing, but it’s more important to be good than clever.

    The heart and the mind should be one. There is no reason why one can’t be intellectually rigorous (to the best extent of one’s capacity) and be virtuous at the same time.

  17. Catholic Christianiy destroyed a lot of the ancient traditions and knowledge, but at the same time they did, almost from the start, include a lot of classical knowledge and philosophy, with a more intelligent interpretation, in the religous teachings.
    The “back to the book” means basically you strip Christianity of its European and more developed character, pull it back to the sect it originally was, which is even more harmful than the developed version which was useful for a high cultural and national development for various people.
    Lutherans were in this respect not as extreme, since they too build upon a tradition. However, at the start of the movement, there was a threat of it getting out of control against not just the bad, but also the good aspects of the established occidental culture. This would have caused more troubles than just bloodshed on the longer term. I think Luther realised that quite fast, and being raised and educated Catholic, he also knew some good aspects of this societal system as well.

    The more radical sects, most of which being not really tolerated in most of Europe, especially not their missionary work, were much more regressive and aggressive, much more harmful than the more state oriented Lutherans and even some reformed Calvinist sects, not talking about Anglicans. If early Christians would have discarded all non-Christian teachings completely, they either wouldn’t have succeeded or ruined the occident so completely that I don’t even want to think about it. Many people which talk about the complexity of the scriptures and their interpretation just continue a more philosophical approach, which on the one hand was good, on the other makes Christianity more intellectual and developed than it originally was. Because many primitive things in religious writings were, originally, not meant metaphorically or had a higher meaning, they really were that low brow, that’s what they are. It was more intelligent, better educated and more reasonable people, which had, when looking at this and while believing the fundamental teachings, had to make sense out of it and improve the writings to be useful and more logical than they really are!

    People oftentimes speak about “religous tolerance”, yet tolerating some religious diversity is one thing, allowing religious teachings to spread which are harmful, even dangerous to a lot of the stabilised and positive aspects of a given society is another, completely different thing.

    Like the Amish and Jehovah’s Witnesses might seem harmless, even quirky in a funny way to most reasonable observers, and I too wouldn’t care too much as long as they stick to themselves and don’t cause troubles. However, just imagine any given society would experience a massive spread of this kind of religious teachings, or any other hardcore “Ur-Christian values”, probably just in a time of societal instability and economic poverty. This would cause a partial societal and civilisational breakdown, it would make the given society unable to develop rationally, compete or defend itself. Its suicidal unless we live in a world of complete “peace & harmony”, which is unlikely to happen any time soon and even then the best for humanity would be if it could be “contained” and its spread limited eventually.

    You can’t make an effective state or strong community with people having such strong and one sided ideological leanings and limitations, hard to alter because they being “taken from god himself and superiour to human reasoning”.
    That was a major part of the Roman downfall as well as the Islamic retardation, which was caused by a similar exclusion of traditional and classical knowledge in favour of a more radical “scriptural” and simply radical appraoch, therefore limiting the scope of the intellectual outline and worldview.

    Usually more important than the spiritual aspects of a religion, which are largely irrelevant, since nobody knows for sure what’s “the right belief” anyway and what people dream of is secondary, are the theoretical and practical consequences of any religious teachings for a given society, families and individuals. Like people can believe in a god or not, decisive is what “that god” or better “his prophets” tell them to do and what their priests make out of it. Does this allign well with the human reality or not? Does it improve the competitiveness and potential of “the followers” or not, but not just on the individual, but also on the societal and state level.

    A large part of what was good and useful about occidental Christianity was primarily European and only secondarily Christian. The more extreme and fundamentalist it became, whereever and whenever, the more damaging it was, because the message needed to be tamed and interpretated to be useful. By well-educated, well-meaning, reasonable and intelligent people. Reformation did start primarily because people got more educated, the church did leave its primitive state behind, but exactly at that time it happened it was no well-educated, well-meaning, reasonable and intelligent people in charge of the church, which caused most of the troubles.

  18. @ Onur Dincer

    there can be no error or human involvement in their production as they are from God word by word, which has never been the position of Christianity.

    Of what use would a God be who could not competently communicate his expectations and instructions to his followers?

  19. @Obs

    People oftentimes speak about “religous tolerance”, yet tolerating some religious diversity is one thing, allowing religious teachings to spread which are harmful, even dangerous to a lot of the stabilised and positive aspects of a given society is another, completely different thing.

    I wonder who you have in mind as arbitrator of what is “harmful”?

    Religious freedom is a good thing. Unless they start sacrificing perfectly good virgins, people should be left alone in their religious beliefs.

  20. iffen: “I wonder who you have in mind as arbitrator of what is “harmful”?

    Religious freedom is a good thing. Unless they start sacrificing perfectly good virgins, people should be left alone in their religious beliefs.”

    Harmful is what prevents effective and efficient solutions to important problems for a given individual or population success and well-being which practises this religion or ideology. Even worse if it has a negative effect on mankind as a whole directly or indirectly.

    Like if a religion tells its followers everything is just about doomsday, this world doesn’t matter, there is already a problem. Similarily if it prohibits or even just discourages scientific, rational endeavours and problem solving strategies.

    Concrete examples would be to refuse:
    – to develop or use any kind of more sophisticated technologies
    – to use rational and scientific methods to define, explore and solve problems humans might face, but recur to “the scriptures as the sole source of wisdom and truth”
    – To refuse modern medical treatment, like blood transfusion, organ transplants, stem cell theraphy, genetic therapy etc.
    – To refuse the use of violence and war regardless of the circumstances

    The list could be extended ad infinitum and for many of those points listed, as long as only a handful of people follow this, they only hurt themselves or nobody at all. But if such religions and ideologies spread in a population and culture like a memetic virus, they must be contained or the damage could become serious.
    Again, Rome is probably one of the most striking examples of how far such a damage can go, because even though Rome had a lot of problems and weaknesses, what really broke its neck was Christianity. Early Christians only hurt themselves, but when they got lose, they hurt the whole system.
    The advantages of the more advanced civilisation being reduced drastically by the exreme Christian culture of the time after Constantine. This was eroding the fundaments of the Greek-Roman classical culture, which was barely able to hold things together.
    During high Medieval times, step by step, Christianity got tamed and rationalised, transformed to the occidental culture which could be useful. But the original impact on a antiquity was desastrous.

  21. what really broke its neck was Christianity

    How could we have gotten to universalism without Christianity? How could we have had the Enlightenment without Christianity. How would we have been able to destroy that pernicious anti-virtue, verecundia, without Christianity?

  22. @iffen: You don’t know the path everything would have taken with no such “strong religion” or another, similar rather monotheistic and universalist cult.

    However, you have to look at some of the core teachings of Christianity from a strictly analytical perspective and at the religious practise in the early centuries of its spread and dominance. Any reasonable, unbiased observer can only come to a truly crushing judgment about the impact of Christianity.
    Many of its positive aspects could have been produced in a different way, without the negative ones in the full package. That’s what religion is about, the full package, because unlike in philosophy and ideology, its much harder to be eclectic.

    But I’m not all too much about alternative realities, because things happened like they did, the good things and the bad things, that’s the past.

    However, I’m also speaking about the present and future. By looking back and what happened then and what specific religious morals and phenomenons started and caused, we can be very certain about the fact that religion and ideology does matter and “its not all the same” or “harmless” and “can just be tolerated”.

    Like I said, you can tolerate small sects which are under control and very, very unlikely to spread or gain any momentum, any kind of big influence on society. But if a religion gains momentum and influence, it does matter what they believe, what their moral is, what they deem right or wrong. Because it will change society and culture as a whole.

    Like I said before: The “undefined, open state” is mainly for fairly homogeneous societies in which the freedom you provide does encourage creativity and progress, but doesn’t alter the principle trajector all to much.
    If the differences are more fundamental, religious tolerance might seem to be a nice thing, but its also highly dangerous. And people which don’t even realise this are just naive.
    There might be people which say its worth it, the risk I mean, but some events and trends are just predictable.

    If you allow an ideology or religion to spread, which is against the examples mentioned above, you can just expect society as a whole to move in their direction, away from a more rational and efficient position.

    This is true for ideologies as it is for religions, especially with those which demand a high impact on daily life, which I put largely in the same category.

    To sume it up: Let’s say Christianity had its role to play and even though it ruined a lot, it also created a lot of rather positive things, which might or might not have been created otherwise. But the point is: This was created by civilised and rationalised version of Christianity and could only be used by pushing “core Christian values” back. If going back to the basics once more, it would be like allowing to destroy the bit it created.

    That’s exactly what some sects, which weren’t tolerated in Europe, were trying. To allow them to spread would have meant to allow them to threaten the successful occidental project.
    And looking back in time, to the present and the future, this was right. Because things were growing over the ocean, again some good, some bad, which where, when they swept back, hit Europe as a whole.

  23. By the way, “tamed Cultural Marxism” in a Neoliberal societal framework became the preferred “secularised religion” of the English-American Plutocracy. If you look at the developments in the last decades, this is really like a top-down creation of a cult. This is very obvious by looking at various decisions and statements Oligarchs, their organisations, various institutions, the state and transnational organisations (including and particularly the UN) made.

    This is “the cult” and “moral compass” which they deem fit to be useful for them in a global context and able to supplant (other) religions, national and ethnic identities, more rooted and traditional cultures and values, in a money based & controlled society.

    Most such “top down cults”, especially if having logical holes bigger than a barn door and contradictions with the Oligarchic societal reality absolutely irreconcilable with the egalitarian ideological fundaments. But then again, Christianity had a much tighter and less artificial moral core, yet similar things could be done with it too. But to create a new ideology which is, even in its premises, so hypocritical and erroneous on every level, but succeed with it, would be an almost unbelievable success for modern mass psychology and manipulation.

    Cultural Marxism spread in a similar way like a harmful religion, which it basically is, in Americas Oligarchy and institutions. The main difference is the top-down and even more artificial origin and distribution.

  24. @Obs

    Any reasonable, unbiased observer can only come to a truly crushing judgment about the impact of Christianity.

    You can’t make statements like this and expect to be taken seriously. I am as reasonable and unbiased as they come and I don’t accept your conclusion. You can’t just “declare” that a different opinion is biased and unreasonable and expect it to hold water.

  25. @Obs

    You have not just an anti-Christian bias but also a Protestant-oriented bias, which reduce the weight of your conclusions. Otherwise you would not make statements like this:

    The “back to the book” means basically you strip Christianity of its European and more developed character, pull it back to the sect it originally was, which is even more harmful than the developed version which was useful for a high cultural and national development for various people.

    Early Christians, and all non-Protestant Christians in fact, were never as Bible-oriented as the Protestants would be. They did not have dogmas like sola scriptura, biblical inerrancy and biblical infallibility, they did not give the weight to the text of the Bible Protestants would give, they had many sources of authority besides the Bible, and their interpretation of the Bible was too often non-literal. Even the books of the NT are full of non-literal interpretations of the OT. Gnostics, with their extremely non-literal interpretations of the OT and very frequent disregard of the OT, were a phenomenon of the very early centuries of Christianity, and they were just the most extreme versions of a gradient of non-literal interpretations of the OT and its disregard, of which Proto-Orthodox Christians and later Orthodox/Catholic Christians, also took their share in abundance from the beginning. Christianity largely developed and spread among the Hellenistic circles of the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy in its early centuries, early Christianity was far from the Bible- or Jewish-oriented cult you and many Protestants assume it to have been, it was very Hellenistic and philosophically-oriented, this can be seen even in the books of the NT.

  26. @iffen

    Of what use would a God be who could not competently communicate his expectations and instructions to his followers?

    I am not making a value judgement like which religion or denomination is better or whose conception of God or revelation/inspiration is better. Just trying to give an accurate portrayal of them in an unbiased way.

  27. @Onur Dincer

    Yes, thank you. Your comments are informed and helpful. I was merely expressing my opinion that sola scriptura is not the problem for believers that non-believers think that it is. People like Obs look at it and see problems; problems that believers don’t have. They are all contained within the non-believing observer’s view.

  28. @iffen

    You are welcome. Sola scriptura was still a significant departure from the previous practice and it ultimately led to the doctrines like biblical inerrancy and infallibility (I am not saying such doctrines are good or bad). But not all Protestant sects have been equally influenced by such doctrines, I acknowledge that. If we take the ones that have been influenced the most, their departure from pre-Reformation Christianity is higher, for instance, than the departure of many Koranist Muslims (Koranism takes only the Koran as the source of authority and rejects the Hadith or at least does not take them as a source of authority) from the traditional non-Koranist forms of Islam as the non-Koranist forms of Islam are already quite book-oriented due to the traditional word by word revelation doctrine in Islam.

  29. @iffen: So you would have had no problem with the Christian mob destroying academies, cutting philosophers and scientists into pieces, burning books or just discarding them, so that we only get a minor portion of all the ancient knowledge and history to this day, also because of the “Christian revolution”, this destruction horizon?

    Or that they were preaching people should become martyrs, caring only for afterlife, forget about the cities, about the army, about the state?
    Even forgeting about honour, the family, the clan, the father, the brother? Just care for their “eternal soul” which has to do what the book tells them or what their preachers made out of it? Family and children are not important, only praying is? Sexuality is evil, but dying a childless virgin makes you a saint?

    Or that they told people that wisdom is useless and “heaven belongs to the simple-minded”, that education and knowledge is useless, superfluous and there should be no debates, no research, because the bible gives all answers?
    When the people fled the cities from the pressure, the rich no longer carried for the state and public goods, actually nobody did any more?

    This was a cultural meltdown and it was caused by radical Christian preachers and disciples.

    I can only agree and feel with what Galerius said and have to imagine his desperation, how to deal with the new religious sect, which he knew was so dangerous to the well-being and sheer survial of Rome:
    “Amongst our other measures for the advantage of the Empire, we have hitherto endeavored to bring all things into conformity with the ancient laws and public order of the Romans. We have been especially anxious that even the Christians, who have abandoned the religion of their ancestors, should return to reason. For they have fallen, we know not how, into such perversity and folly that, instead of adhering to those ancient institutions which possibly their own forefathers established, they have arbitrarily made laws of their own and collected together various peoples from various quarters. After the publication, on our part, of an order commanding the Christians to return to the observance of the ancient customs, many of them, it is true, submitted in view of the danger, while many others suffered death. Nevertheless, since many of them have continued to persist in their opinions and we see that in the present situation they neither duly adore and venerate the gods nor yet worship the god of the Christians, we, with our wonted clemency, have judged it wise to extend a pardon even to these men and permit them once more to become Christians and reestablish their places of meeting; in such manner, however, that they shall in no way offend against good order. We propose to notify the magistrates in another mandate regarding the course that they should pursue. Wherefore it should be the duty of the Christians, in view of our clemency, to pray to their god for our welfare, for that of the Empire, and for their own, so that the Empire may remain intact in all its parts, and that they themselves may live safely in their habitations.”

    https://pnna.org/pdf/Kleinman_ancient_coin_articles.pdf

    He really tried to come to terms with the Christian believers, to integrate them, make them good Roman citizens and part of the community. The Christian reaction was of course mockery, that they saw the fall of “the pagans” coming and acted even more aggressive than before, with their goal of taking over coming closer. His tolerance allowed them to eliminate everything else, everything they don’t liked.

    The greatest irony of all is that so many pieces of history and knowledge only survived to this day, because Christians wrote the 10.000th time religious copy on erradicated ancient texts (palimpsest), because of the good quality of the pergament, so we could still decipher it, oftentimes by x-rays.
    If you ever get across how many ancients texts only survived to this day because the pergament was re-used or they were quoted by Christian authors, sometimes even for ridicule the original, you get an impression of what was taken away from occidental culture. Rome ruined itself, with extreme Christianity taking over, even before being conquered.

    It had other defects, I already wrote about the demography and dysgenic trends, sure, but Christianity made nothing of this better at all, even on the contrary.

    I won’t say that all Christians were bad or Christianity had no positive effects too, I’m not one of these, don’t get me wrong. I still see quite a lot of positive things in Christianity. However, many of these positive things could have been pushed in another, less harmful form, and the burden coming with it was just huge. And only step by step, in a slow and painful process, a lot of the burden was left behind, but unfortunately not all of it.
    Many modern harmful ideologies are based on the same principles and mental gymnastics Christianity introduced, in which facts don’t matter if you have an idealised view on humans and/or nature.

  30. @Onur: “Early Christians, and all non-Protestant Christians in fact, were never as Bible-oriented as the Protestants would be. They did not have dogmas like sola scriptura, biblical inerrancy and biblical infallibility, they did not give the weight to the text of the Bible Protestants would give, they had many sources of authority besides the Bible, and their interpretation of the Bible was too often non-literal. Even the books of the NT are full of non-literal interpretations of the OT.”

    I agree with you to some extend and actually wrote that myself, that this was what saved Christianity from being a pure devastation, the philosophical influences. However, I also wrote about how this came. It was intelligent, educated people trying to make sense of it.
    That doesn’t change the outcome I described above. It was not necessasrily and always the fault of educated, leading Christian theologists, but what “people on the ground” were doing. Yet what they were doing was because they felt the urge and legitimation to do it, because of Christian preachers.

    So here like with later Christian sects, I wouldn’t lump them all together, like I wouldn’t lump believers of most other religions, especially those with a broader spectrum of beliefs, together. Yet we can still come to the conclusion that some of these destructive tendencies came directly from the scripture, like in other religions too, and they wouldn’t have come up at all without the religion. Since, like in Islam ideologies similar to modern Salafism, came up over and over again, its an intrinsic problem. And the more the religion dominates society, the less the leading Christians cared for other sources of knowledge and wisdom, but just discarded and even banned it. That was the cultural evolution, it just got worse.

  31. @Obs

    Since you keep making value judgements in your posts, this time I will break my rule and make some value judgements myself.

    I share your anti-iconoclastic viewpoint. When a religion or sect turns iconoclastic, that is, becomes destructive towards the civilization it is settled in, people, whether from that religious group or not, should oppose to that iconoclasm. But this opposition should try not to be directed at the religious group in question or their core religious principles, but at the very acts of iconoclasm and the motivations behind them. As for the past atrocities of the religious groups, we should try our best not to generalize or attribute them to the religious group as a whole or to their core principles. I think criticism of religious groups or their core principles should not be so liberal in fashion (do not get me wrong, I am not saying such criticism should be forbidden), otherwise criticism will not get the result it aims to get and will only bring more tension and clash. But if your aim is exactly to increase the tension rather than decreasing it and finding a middle ground, you can criticize however you wish, if it serves your purpose (not saying that it is your purpose, just making a general statement).

  32. Speaking of Galerius, I think he is among the last people to advocate for a person with anti-iconoclastic convictions. He was the mastermind behind the “Diocletianic” persecution of Christians and his main motive behind that persecution was his bigotry in his paganism. His bigotry only served to make Christians more resolute in their stance and probably played a major role in the Constantinian and later rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

  33. @Onur: I would agree with you and do so to some degree, but even if I’m tolerant towards other people’s religious ideas and feelings, you come to a point where I have to dissent from what you wrote:

    “But if your aim is exactly to increase the tension rather than decreasing it and finding a middle ground”

    Now what is the “middle ground” with people which want to change humans, society, “the world” according to their belief system, but their belief system is not just in one respect, but in many wrong. Either you like where they would pull society, or not.

    So what is the compromise, the “middle ground” with such people? I could bring forward examples from Europe or elsehwere, when people tried to compromise, while still being strong, the result was, usually, that they were later overwhelmed by the fanatics, and these had no mercy with them.

    Its not I think conflict is good at all, even on the contrary, but here (early/pure) Christians are wrong once more: Its not always better to prevent conflict, if its inevitable anyway. Better resolve the situation when you can, in your favour, rather than waiting for your grandchildren being raped when the tides are even worse.

    “Speaking of Galerius, I think he is among the last people to advocate for a person with anti-iconoclastic convictions. He was the mastermind behind the “Diocletianic” persecution of Christians and his main motive behind that persecution was his bigotry in his paganism. His bigotry only served to make Christians more resolute in their stance and probably played a major role in the Constantinian and later rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire”

    The translation I linked to is not optimal, especially the last sentences are not as clear as in the original or better translations. In fact, in his edict, he is almost BEGGING the ROMAN Christians to COME TO SENSES and not ruining what their forefathers built, to jeopardise their heritage, the safety of themselves, their families and the whole Empire for nothing, for a simple belief!

    Almost none of the Roman rulers “hated” the Christians initially, it was just their refusal to come to acceptable terms (“middle ground” in your words, the other side has to comply mininum as much!) which led to conflict and persecution. The Emperors and their magistrates got complaints, the Christian caused troubles, they already became aggressive and impudent. Any reasonable administration had to react to this. Its not like they persecuted them for “their belief”, actually not, at least most of the time or initially, but their actions.

    Yet they always left a door open for the Christians, to come back, to come to senses, to believe what they wanted but remain good Roman citizens. BUT IT DIDN’T WORK.

    I give you an example how Rome went down the drain, finally, inevitably, when its young elite turned Christian. They were educated by the “pagan”, or better classical standards of their time. Isn’t it remarkable that in most of these religious groups some of the best and most philosophical comments being written in the first generations?
    That’s because the first generations being still not raised in this religion, but turn to it later in life! So the education is still present, so is the debate. In later generations, when the totalitarian religion had infiltrated all spheres of society, there is no general education, there is no debate any more!

    And what did this young elite, which should have become officers, magistrates, senators, philosophers and estate owners do, when turning to Christianity? They made it even more radical, with nice words, but still! And they left their other duties and occupations, largely, behind. They simply didn’t care!
    Many of which founded no families, but became priests, monks and especially bishops of course, they only worked for Christianity, not the Roman state. They were still using all advantages of the Roman world, like when a pious, fanatical hermit was fasting in Syria with a special mixture of herbs, they ordered it too and it was delivered to them, in a reasonable time, at a price of a cow or more.
    Doesn’t matter.
    But they lived in dirt, without a woman, fasting, praying, making people stronger believers and forgetting about the state, about the Roman people, about the future, “because the end is near” anyway.

    Many of these elite families, of which so many died in ancient Rome, and these were lucky to survive up to this point, went extinct at this time. So did the ancient Roman culture, the spirit of the people. It was supplanted by something weak and otherworldly oriented.
    Yes, Rome was decadent and degenerated, it needed a renewal, but many aspects of Christianity was just not the best recipe to do it, simple as that. And every reasonable person did know this, even at that time. Many wrote about it, about the early Christians, unfortunately, a lot of these writings were destroyed, but they saw the dangers, the illusion, the fanatism and the irrationality. Its not like it was coming out of nothing. Rome was actually much too tolerant, so that they could be overtaken, and to blame the Romans for anything but that is ridiculous. The numbers of Christian victims of persecuation are fairly low, and most of these convicts did more than just being “humble and silent believers”, they demanded “the rule of god”.

    So again, I ask you, if dealing with such people, where is “the middle ground” if they want Iconoclams, but much more than that, a “theocratic society”, a rule in which their laws and morals define what’s good or bad, which wants to cleanse the world from everything “infidel”.

    You might say there are reasonable people, in the religion, and not all teachings, from that religion, are as extreme. But
    – once you give them their ways, they can decide the future, and they might either trick you, or the more extreme party might just get the upper hand. If you give a religion with extreme convictions the power, you shouldn’t wonder if they use it, against everyone else.
    – if the core teacings of a religion itself are, intrinsically causing such eruptions of destructrion and ignorance, and they must be contained, by other people or more reasonable religious leaders, to not get out of hand, what value has the religion as a whole?

    If its like a vulcan, which you have to carefully watch for the next destructive eruption. I don’t want my people live at the vulcan, or having to carefully listen to him all the time. If religious tolerance opens up such a path, this is no freedom, this is the absolute opposite, because then only the religious fanatics define what is allowed and what not. As a rule, the “tolerance talk” being only used as long as they are not in power themselves. Not afterwards. History proves this times and times again. So one is better advised to look FIRST what’s good about a religion, what’s really advantageous and reasonable in its teachings, and what’s not. And if the “not” part is big and dangerous, well, I see a hard time for the middle ground. The only way would be if the religious group itself would cleanse it from the more radical and destructive teachings altogether, but if its touching its core beliefs, how’s that possible?

  34. @Obs

    Everybody knows that the D & F happened because state subsidies were withdrawn from the Vestal Virgins. Of course, the Christians demanded this, so I guess in a sense you are right to blame the Christians for the D & F.

    I already said that it was unsettling to me to learn that there was so much destruction by iconoclasts during the Reformation. Would it help if I made a more emotional and outraged statement?

    I make value judgments all the time and I think that it was a good thing to end the blood sport of killing humans during the games and circuses. I also think that the universalism introduced by the early Christians was a good thing.

    You are jumbling the end of the Roman Empire in the West, the Reformation and modern religious heterogeneity. It is similar to your grab-bag bugaboo cultural Marxism in which you place all the ideas and trends that arouse your objections. Your nonsense idea that Christian Fundamentalists are on the verge of taking power and destroying civilization is just that, nonsense.

  35. Yes. People who only learn to read simplified characters can’t read traditional characters (which means they can’t access any literature before simplified characters came into use). People who learn traditional characters can learn to read simplified characters without much difficulty.

    Did you notice that these are not parallel claims?

    1. People who learn to read simplified characters can’t read traditional characters.

    This is a reasonable enough claim on its own, though as in any language, context is often enough to tell you what a word is even though you don’t recognize the spelling.

    2. People who learn traditional characters can learn to read simplified characters without much difficulty.

    This is completely correct. But you seem to want to imply

    3. People who learn simplified characters can’t easily learn to read traditional characters.

    This is untrue. Learning to read traditional characters after you’ve learned to read simplified ones is essentially the same project as going in the other direction. It’s easy in both directions.

  36. @iffen: What do you mean with “D & F”? Don’t know that.

    The state and elite withdrew financing and support from many institutions and traditions. People just didn’t care any more, with many devout Christians giving money just to the church, to “save their souls”, while others retreated to their country residence and tried to flee from the insanity and disintegration of the cities. This was a culture dying and Christians played a major role in this game.

    I don’t mix things up arbitrarily, but rather I want to point to obvious parallels of great importance.

    “You are jumbling the end of the Roman Empire in the West, the Reformation and modern religious heterogeneity. It is similar to your grab-bag bugaboo cultural Marxism in which you place all the ideas and trends that arouse your objections.”

    Some of their premises are just the same, and Cultural Marxism exploits Christian weaknesses and tendencies, still present even in the secularised “Western” culture. The Occident needed almost 1.500 years to come back from the first takeover of a radical egalitarian-fanatic religious movement and at times it wasn’t for certain they would at all.

    “Your nonsense idea that Christian Fundamentalists are on the verge of taking power and destroying civilization is just that, nonsense.”

    Where did you read that? First of, I said Lutherans became the Christian culture which was the pinnacle of occidental Christianity, before the 1950’s. So I don’t say they were worse, even on the contrary.

    Also, Christian Fundamentalism had its chance, they destroyed Rome, they hurt Europe, they did weaken the USA. Now they will just wane.

    The Western future belongs to Islamism, Cultural Marxism, the rule of the Oligarchy, which might want to play out both as long as it serves them, or a different upcoming ideology.
    Christians were good competitors with their fanatism, even on a low level, as long as there were no other similarly enough players around. But Christianity which did overcome its primitive state, left Fundamentalism behind, were able to erect more efficient and effective communities and states. That’s their achievement.

    In the North Christianity was adopted by the elites, because it makes people unfree, but disciplined, subordinate to the rule of priests and the king, on the long run the state. The rebellions against Christian rule mainly came from commoners and tribals, which wanted to stay free. Christianity did make the free man a slave, in some respects, dependent from the spiritual and ritual authority of the priests, the rule of the god given king and order. This was bad, very bad, I don’t like it at all.
    But it was useful to break up the tribal structures, the clans, the honour system which might have hampered the state and society.

    So Christianity was awful, in its practise, but good for discipining people, so when the nonsense retreated, and reason came back again, we had a reasonable and socially disciplined bourgeois society in the occident, the fundament of progress. Obviously, this makes people weak on the low level, because they need a functioning state and religion, since they being stripped from their more basal order.

    So in group competition, Christian cultures can be superiour, but on the low level, they are not at all, because Christianity actually destroyed the basics, with Liberalism and Marxism just finishing off the rest.

    That’s why in the direct competition on a low level, Islam practically always wins and Christianity always loses. If Islam would have existed in Antiquity, Christianity would have never made it, because on the same low level, Islam is easier to grasp, more logical and consequential, simply more competitive and brutal.

    So take out a state and higher order which interferes, Islam wins. Go for state competition, a more rational approach wins. In both cases, Christian Fundamentalists have no assets, but can only be led by others to success.
    The only advantage they have, is that they live in one of the most powerful countries and states of the world. But that this country and state is so powerful and rich, is and never was their merit.

  37. @Obs

    Please do not generalize (you have an annoying tendency of generalization and exaggeration without backing your claims) the decline of civilization in the territories of the Western Roman Empire largely resulting from the 5th century and subsequent barbarian invasions to all the Roman world and do not exaggerate and generalize the Christian-induced destruction. The Eastern Roman Empire continued intact during the 5th century (by now largely Christian) with no real decline in its civilization. It went fairly well for most of the 6th century too, only to succumb to a partial decline (did not affect the Levant and Egypt much) late during that century with the Justinian plague and economic collapse and then experienced the Slavic and Arab invasions in the first half of the next century (not to mention the ultimately repulsed Sassanid invasion), losing most of its territories as a result (I am not even mentioning the Lombard invasion in its restored Italian territories). But the biggest blows came with the late 11th century Turkic invasion and the early 13th century crusader Sack of Constantinople, from the consequences of the latter it would never had a chance to recover itself, even after taking back Constantinople. With so many invasions from multiple sides, sometimes at the very same times, the Byzantine Empire did not have the opportunity to preserve its civilization intact for centuries, some periodic declines were inevitable, but still it had continuity with its ancient past sufficient to initiate periods of cultural restoration in more peaceful times. Philosophy (including Platonism and Aristotelianism too), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, medicine, law, rhetoric, Greek and Latin grammar, music and fine arts all continued to be taught in its schools and their books were read in its libraries throughout the the existence of the empire.

    Byzantine society on the whole was an educated one. Primary education was widely available, sometimes even at village level and uniquely in that era for both sexes. Female participation in culture was high. Scholarship was fostered not only in Constantinople but also in institutions operated in such major cities as Antioch and Alexandria.[4]

    The original school was founded in 425 by Emperor Theodosius II with 31 chairs for law, philosophy, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, rhetoric and other subjects, 15 to Latin and 16 to Greek. The university existed until the 15th century.[5]

    The main content of higher education for most students was rhetoric, philosophy and law with the aim of producing competent, learned personnel to staff the bureaucratic postings of state and church. In this sense the university was the secular equivalent of the Theological Schools. The university maintained an active philosophical tradition of Platonism and Aristotelianism, with the former being the longest unbroken Platonic school, running for close to two millennia until the 15th century.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_university

  38. @Michael – In my experience, easy is not the word I would use to describe it, but I’m not going to get into a pissing match about it. I’m no linguistic scholar, so I’ll just defer to your opinion and direct Obs to the Wikipedia piece I referenced about the pros and cons.

    Do you think that the adoption of simplified characters was a mistake? Or think that it doesn’t matter? (If you think going both ways is easy, which does not accord with what a lot of Chinese people tell me, then logically you would think it really doesn’t matter, no?)

  39. @Onur: Obviously the downfall of Western Rome had many reasons, not just one, there were diseases & pandemics, negative demographics, migration patterns, dysgenic trends especially for the backone of the state, the old Roman upper and middle class, the warrior class as a whole, decadence, cultural degeneration and bad morals, civil war and unrest, climatic fluctuation, economic failures, especially in the money system, with the transition to a practical gold standard, foreign invasions, stronger, more sophisticated enemies, bad military reforms and so on. But looking at one single most important factor, I would still say Christianity and if one thing is for sure, IT DID NOT HELP AT ALL. The idea that Christianity was in any way useful and helpful for keeping up the Empire, the state and its cohesion, is simply wrong.

    The ancient world was not the same in the West and East, originally, the Western parts were actually more Liberal and at the same time well organised, while the economic strength and population density was more concentrated in the East. This was a imbalance from the start, when Rome conquered the East and being reflected by the Eastern shift in the population recognisable in Imperial times.
    There were various rather orgiastic, irrational and more harmful cults introduced from the East, with which the old Romans struggled.
    Christianity was just the hardest pill to swallow and the Western part suffocated from it.

    You say the Eastern part did well, in my opinion not at all. The whole truly Roman way of life collapsed, almost completely, the philosophy, the virtues, the military efficiency of the old core Greek & Roman world being drastically reduced. The Byzantine Empire largely lived from its economic position and survived based on the fortresses and technical advancements of the past from which it profited.

    In the end, it just survived by causing a deflation for the rest of Europe, strangling the occidental economy for centuries with its control over the West : East trade and the gold standard they introduced, the solidus.
    This was another very negative trend in Rome, the shift from its original cheap metal currency, first to silver, in the end primarily gold. That the Frankish Empire and kingdoms continued to depend on the Byzantine coin was a grave mistake which caused a lot of the downturn, as did the fact that the Western sphere lost its coinage even in late West Roman times.

    Yet what kind of education are you looking at in the Byzantine empire? What were their political and economic priorities, how did they spend and distribute resources? Level for level, Christianity had a negative impact on all these elements. I could now list all events and trends in this respect, but this would make my post truly and article and I’m too long already…
    Quite early on, the Byzantine Empire lived from its image and from the money it gained, much less so from an internal strength of the people and system as such. Comparing old Rome, in its early days, even with the early Eastern Roman Empire, this is absolutely clear.

  40. @Obs

    (you have an annoying tendency of generalization and exaggeration without backing your claims)

    And you are firmly set in the idea that religion and individuals are here to serve the state. In the West, those ideas have been in decline for several hundred years and died a violent death in the last century. Religion is for the benefit of the individual and his community, just like a government.

    @Onur

    the decline of civilization in the territories of the Western Roman Empire largely resulting from the 5th century and subsequent barbarian invasions

    They just didn’t have the human capital to keep it going, even though some tried their best.

  41. @iffen: Religion/ideology and the state are tools for a purpose which is achieving the most for the greatest numbers of individuals and working for the greater whole, the protection and advancement of the community.

    Both a state or religion/ideology can fail on that. And “serving the individual” makes no sense, because in many cases the important question is which individual in which way? What about other individuals and the group?
    What about individuals believing in a sect which destroys their family, lineage, population and culture, by shifting their values and behaviour on a destructive direction?

    In the end an extreme ideology of individual rights and diversity can end up in a more vicious totalitarian ideology than a more classic strong state & nation ideology.
    Because the ideologists can use their “holy individual & diversity” as an excuse for introducing all kind of brainwashing, control and punishment, because their imagined “ideal state of diversity” is a logical fallacy which must be kept alive by force.

    Similarly, like many religious movements first state that everything will fall into place once people are just believing. So the failure of their own idiocy is always “the lack of faith”. So they have to introduce more and more suppression, punishment and brainwashing to “make it happen”.

    The state didn’t fail, only ideologies did. The primacy of the state for higher level development is no ideology, but just a fact.
    What is the business and purpose of the state, thats ideology.

  42. @Obs

    It took centuries for the Eastern Roman Empire to transform from the ancient system of government and economy to the medieval one and it neither accompanied the Christianization nor closely followed it, that transformation largely happened centuries after the Christianization of the bulk of the Roman Empire, so we cannot find a cause and effect relationship there so easily. I do not know what you mean by “Roman way of life,” you are talking about the Romans as if they are a homogeneous people, we are dealing with an empire that once stretched from what is now Scotland to the sands of the Sahara and the middle parts of the Nile and from the Atlantic to the borders of Persia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Even the urban culture was quite varied within the empire, and we cannot expect the change of religion would bring a sudden change in culture and historical record does not show such a sudden change either. The ancient to medieval transformation in the Eastern Roman Empire was largely caused by the effects of the Justinian plague and the accompanying economic collapse and the subsequent losses of Egypt, the Levant and bulk of the Balkans (Italy by that time did not have its previous importance, wealth and power, so the loss of most parts of it after Justinian I was of lesser importance for the Eastern Roman Empire). Also, like I already pointed out, there was never a cultural downfall or collapse in the Eastern Roman Empire, there were periods of cultural declines and upswings, which were highly influenced by politics and especially external politics (boundary changes and so on). The Eastern Roman Empire was one of the most civilized and educated (not only in religion but also in all sorts of secular fields) places in the world throughout its existence.

    You are correct in pointing out that the downfall of the Western Roman Empire had many causes. But I did not say anything to the contrary. I just pointed to the most important cause, which is the barbarian invasions during the 5th century (mostly by Germanic peoples). Only people who deny the demographically massive scale of the Germanic migrations like these left-wing historians of the Vienna and Toronto schools of history can deny their fatal impact on the Western Roman Empire.

  43. the most important cause, which is the barbarian invasions during the 5th century (mostly by Germanic peoples)

    @Onur

    What! The Aryans caused civilization to collapse? Do the WNs know about this?

    Correct me if I am mistaken, wasn’t there also a demographic problem with “homegrown” Romans in that the replacement of the educated and cultured fraction was not keeping up? Although Germanics and others were being assimilated, it was not happening quick enough and in large enough numbers to make up the deficit.

  44. @Onur: The Roman Empire was much more diverse than what kept it together, which was first and foremost the Latins, followed by Italics.

    What the Germanics were taking over was to a large degree just an empty hull.

    If you want to know what Christianity did just look at how they demolished the urban Roman and Greek civilisation.

    What many people still don’t realise is that the early Christians, especially in the first centuries from tolerance to takeover were much worse than later, even most medieval, occidental Christians in their fanatism and for many of their radical groups sheer stupidity and brutality.

    Just compare what being “a monk” meant in 5th century Syria or Egypt, versus 13th century France.
    The first had almost no societal and economic value, but acted extremely destructive and suppressive, whereas high medieval monasteries, with all their defects, became educational and economic centers.

    Early Roman Christianity was an almost completely destructive force which ruined a higher culture. The laws and decrees of Justinian are also clear in this respect.

    Just look at what happened with the Archimedes palimpsest and the Athenean academy, with libraries, public and private, throughout the Empire.

    In some places the incoming Germanics or Slavs actually stopped the dogmatic suppression by the fanatic Christians, which had to convince the newcomers of their ways, resulting, sometimes, in compromises which paid off in the long term, even though the invasion itself ruined a lot.

    The occident began to develop its own, somewhat more rationalised way of working with the Christian ways. Rome was in a deadlock.

  45. For Obs and others:

    Now men are naturally inclined to judge by comparison and by analogy; yet these are methods which easily lead to error. Should they by any chance be accompanied by inattention and hastiness, they can lead the watcher astray, far from the object of his enquiry. Thus many men, reading or hearing the chronicles of the past, and forgetting the great changes, nay revolutions, in conditions and institutions that have taken place since those times, draw analogies between the events of the past and those that take place around them, judging the past by what they know of the present.

    –Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena, Trans. Charles Issawi. 2nd ed. (Princeton: 198). p. 31

    Thanks to The Scholar’s Stage

  46. I won’t object to the quotation, since he was obviously right. But so that you know what I meant above, concrete, I give you some hints:
    When the Germanic warlords took over, the church men were in the subdominant position and could just offer their service. So many of “the terrorists” of the West during imperial times became menials of the more powerful class of warriors. This had good and bad consequences. On the long run the good prevailed, because they led to the Western dualism, which was the only way out of the insanity.

    Why? In the Eastern Roman Empire or Sunni Islam, the leaders could bend rules or make exceptional decisions, in Europe, every nonsensical and unpleasant consequence of Christian dogmas was more than once attacked by the worldly powers, the sovereigns, and defended by the church, which led, on the long term, that the people with the help of the worldly rulers could overturn the religious fanatism.

    At the same time the “service of the church” had to be more efficient and effective, had to be useful for the people and state, had to make itself of general value and act economically reasonable. Again contrary to Orthodoxy, but even more Oriental Christians and Islam. The latter had no way out of the religious deadlock, the occident created one, through its dualism. And the dualism was born when Germanic rulers took over, but accepted the Roman church as a valuable institution.

    Concerning the mindset of early Roman Christians, you just have to analyse their punishments and laws. They were gruesom, they were cruel, it was disgusting. The list of what they prohibited, the even longer list of what was declared “sinful” and “Unchristian”, even things of great value, even – for every reasonable individual – true virtues, like scientific curiousity, rationality, a logical mindset, the love for beauty and health, for family and the world, but so many things, were declared “unworthy” or being even criminalised.

    The rise of punishments, influenced by “Eastern customs” which led to death and mutilations even for Roman citizens, even for – again for every reasonable individual – petty crimes, spoke for itself. Roman was more “Barbarised” by Christianity than by the tribal conquest. Just compare the Byzantine customs, their cruelty, with that of the Franks. The Franks were humane in comparison and while old Rome was harsh too, very much so, at least their own citizens had some rights and some protections for their physical inviolability.

    This changed the more Eastern shifted the character of the Empire became and it got much worse, at once, in a short period of time, with the introducton of Christianity. The intellectual downgrading of a whole civilisation by Christianity was just enormous and tragic.
    The only true way back to a higher level cultural development, not just on the short, but the long run, not just for a short period of time, because of one more or less “enlightened” emperor, was to leave the religious dogmas as such behind. You see that in many religions, especially in the strictly monotheistic mosaic ones: They need to be completely reformed and the fanatics shunned, otherwise you can’t come back to a society which being creative and flexible in its problem solving.

    And the best way out of it was the split of worldly powers and spiritual powers, like it happened after the conquest. Because like explained above, the rulers couldn’t just bend the rules all the time, even such absolutely idiotical and harmful rules like very strict and enduring marriage with just one woman – which was already a Greek & Roman tradition I know – but without the option of divorce, EVEN IF THE WOMEN IS INFERTIlE!

    I meant that’s absurd, that’s as stupid as celibacy, you declare, by law, a male’s lineage, probably even a king’s lineage, dead, because the church didn’t accept “illegitimate” children and didn’t allow the king to marry an additional or new wife. The Byzantine emperors could, at times, just accuse his wife of adultery and execute her or send her into a monastery or simply speak a ban. Not pretty, but a solution for the sovereign. The rules of church stay intact for the masses, the emperor “just does his thing”. It creates a more corrupted and hypocritical framework.

    In the West, in the dualistic system, it wasn’t that easy. The sovereign had to use theological arguments, even try to get spiritual support, for his simple and logical decision to get a new wife for fathering a heir.
    And so it happened in the West, that the originally much stricter and less corrupted Catholic church, which was however a papal institution of its own, created a reservoir for resistance exactly because of their strictness and power even over the mightiest European monarchs.
    This was, even early on, the way out of the madness ancient Christianity created in the Roman Empire!
    Its almost absurd, but I guess Roman emperors would just have perpetuated the Christian religious cycles like it happened in many other Christian communities, but especically Sunni Islam. There is no easy way out of the religious bigotry, but the occidental path, which needed many centuries, was still the best way out of the mental derangement early Christian fanatics created.
    Sovereigns which too, not just the common people, not just “reformers, philosophers and scientists”, had a problem with the rule of and suppression by the Catholic church.
    Its just a shame it didn’t happen earlier, because in high medieval times, for many reasons, the Investiture Conflict already showed where it was going, yet Henry IV lost or it was, at best, just a standoff.

    The problem AND strength of the Germans always was that they usually don’t do things by halves. Either they believe something is just and right, or not. Many other people tend to react earlier, with less patience, but less consequential.
    Luther is therefore the prototypical German, because like Nietzsche said about him, correspondingly, he was “the German fool which took Christianity still seriously after the Renaissance”. He really saw the hypocrisy and corruption in Italy, while many Germans were still naive sheeps for the Catholic church, and just couldn’t live on like that any more.
    There is a lot of deep truth in this quote, because there could have been other ways out of the Christian deadlock indeed, probably born out of the spirit of the Renaissance directly, without the religious terror and wars. But probably this way was the more consequential one again, not living in hypocrisy, but challenging the fundaments.

    Anyway, the occidental path out of the Christian fanatics madness, created in the Roman empire of the 4th-5th century, which lived on in the Byzantine state for much longer, was changed, changed its trajectory, exactly because of the Germanic conquest and the split between the “Germanic aristocracy”, which also brought back a lot of useful ideas and virtues, which were largely annihilated by that time in “Christian Rome”, and the “Roman church”. The Lutheran reform was just part of this century long parallel evolution, and tried to bring “the religion” and “the people”, with their worldly rulers, back in one concept.

    This was right, because at that time Christianity already did most of the work it had to do, concerning social disciplination, and became more reasonable again, during the Renaissance. It was a completely different situation in early Christian Rome, where the Christian movement was absolutely out of control.

    Movements like the Circumcellions, the Skopzen, the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses are extremes, I know, but they being born out of the Christian fallacies, they represent the tendencies this religion had, from the start, and which were tamed, over time, and better so in the West, because of the split and dualism. Once such religious frenzy has taken a society over, the most important thing to consider is, how you can get out of it. The Western dualism was the best chance and its one of the many reasons why the occident flourished, on the long run, while others did not.
    Western, more rational and economic, Christianity contributed too, which is an irony, considering what they did to old Rome. Yet a true progress could only be made by leaving the religoius constrictions behind.

  47. @iffen

    Correct me if I am mistaken, wasn’t there also a demographic problem with “homegrown” Romans in that the replacement of the educated and cultured fraction was not keeping up? Although Germanics and others were being assimilated, it was not happening quick enough and in large enough numbers to make up the deficit.

    Even if it is true, it does not lessen the destructive impact of the Germanic invasions on the Western Roman Empire and civilization in the former Western Roman lands in general, to the contrary, it makes it even bigger. It was much worse than the modern third world migrations to the Western world in terms of impact on civilization since the invading Germanics came with their armies aimed to destroy, loot and enslave.

  48. @Obs

    You are still looking at the past through your Occident-centric prism. Much of what you say about ancient or medieval Christianity does not even apply to ancient, medieval or present Eastern Christianity and especially to the official Christianity of the Roman/Byzantine Empire (Orthodoxy). Eastern Christianity (which includes Orthodoxy and the Oriental forms of Christianity) has never stipulated priests and deacons to be unmarried, and divorce and remarriage after divorce are traditionally allowed in Orthodoxy. Also, in Eastern Christianity patriarchs have never had the authority to appoint or depose rulers as popes of Western Christianity later would have, it was Byzantine emperors who appointed or deposed patriarchs (after the fall of Constantinople Ottoman sultans would do that), set the boundaries of patriarchal territorial jurisdiction and presided over ecumenical councils (Russian tzars would follow the Byzantine example on all these with some even more pro-secular ruler modifications), patriarchs have never appointed or deposed rulers and have never had their own country and armies, very unlike the situation in Western Christianity in the centuries prior to the Reformatation in the West.

    Finally, like I said before, there was never a disruption in civilization in the Byzantine Empire, Greek philosophy was so integral to the formation and way of thinking of educated Christians in the East (including rulers and clerics, among others) that no one seriously considered abandoning it, and, as you know, Greek philosophy included what we today call science or sciences too. The Archimedes text on the Archimedes palimpsest was written during the Byzantine times by Byzantine writers, attesting to the promotion of science and philosophy in the Byzantine Empire. The Christian religious texts on that palimpsest were written much later by a group of poorly-educated monks in a Jerusalem contested between the Muslims and the crusaders sometime after the palimpsest had been escaped from the crusader-sacked Constantinople to Jerusalem. As for the Athenian academy, it is the only philosophical school known to have been defunded by the Byzantine Empire, the other philosophical schools and centers of learning continued to be funded by the Byzantine Empire for centuries.

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