People today often judge the value of religious practice from its distance from reason.

Did Christians Destroy Classical Culture and Create the Dark Ages? 2

If then dead books may be committed to the flames, how much more live books, that is to say, men.
Matthieu Ory, Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity for the Realm of France (1544)

The Library of Alexandria
Justinian the Great
The Barbarian Excuse
Preserving Classical Culture
The Role of Monks
Charlemagne
Into Modern Times

Abstract

Once the Empire was administered by Christians, public libraries had their Pagan books progressively replaced by Christian books. Christians closed Pagan temples and academies, destroying or scattering their libraries. Even as early as 235 AD Christians, like Sextus Julius Africanus, were in powerful and influential positions in Rome. By 391 AD, an edict of Theodosius prohibited visiting Pagan temples and even looking at their ruins. In Alexandria, Pagans revolted, led by the philosopher Olympius. They locked themselves inside the temple of the god Serapis—the Serapeion. Christians violently sieged and captured the building, demolished it, burnt its famous library and profaned its images. Christians try to deny that they ravaged the Pagan learning accumulated over the whole of previous history. Since this vandalism started the Dark Ages, it is difficult to prove…

The Library of Alexandria

The library was founded by Alexander’s general Ptolemy Soter (Ptolemy I, 367-282 BC). Under his son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, the library became the centre of Hellenistic culture. Manuscripts were collected from all over the world and the library’s fame drew scholars from far and wide. The main library was in the Brucheium, the privileged quarter, with an overflow in the Serapeum. The number of rolls is uncertain but around half a million. Aulus Gelleus claims there were 700,000, Seneca says 400,000 and John Tzetzes makes it 490,000 in the Brucheium and 42,800 in the Serapeum.

Christians like to make out that Ptolemy VIII burned the city before the birth of Christ thus destroying the library long before Christianity was founded. Needless to say it is nonsense. Whatever burning Ptolemy VIII did cannot have been extensive because Alexandria remained a great, famous and wealthy city, and the library remained a huge attraction to scholars for hundreds more years. The library of Alexandria might well have been less grand than it was in its first century but to pretend it had been destroyed in 88 BC is God’s Truth par excellence. One irresponsible Christian apologist quotes a source saying that, though it never reached its former greatness, the library was reconstituted and survived for several hundred years longer, and then illogically concludes “most of the damage to the library occurred before the birth of Christ!”

Between the birth of Christ and the vandalism of the Christian bishop Theophilus in 391 AD, the library of Alexandria had its tribulations mainly at the hands of Roman Emperors, but the damage was not huge, was made good and the library restored in each case. The mathematician Diophantus made efforts to restore the library in about 270 AD only to find Aurelian invading to put down the inept pretender, Firmius, and doubtless causing substantial damage because the Palace quarter was partly incinerated.

Christians say that the Serapeum library which they admit they did destroy was a small temple library, not the original massive library of Alexandria. It is sophistry. After Aurelian had damaged the Brucheium library, the Serapeum became the main library. That does not imply that only temple books remained, though it does suggest the library was much smaller than it was in its heyday. Evidently the main library building in the Brucheium must have been too badly damaged to serve as a library any more, whence the transfer, but many rolls must have been salvaged and restored. There might still have been hundreds of thousands of rolls, many of them transferred from the Brucheium library, in the Serapeum when it was destroyed by the Christians. But, however many rolls there were, the Serapeum was a valuable Pagan resource. The Christians knew what they were doing and why.

The claim that the library continued to flourish even under Christianity until the Moslem conquest, according to F L Kent, Librarian of the American University of Beirut, and Arundell Esdaile, of the School of Librarianship at the University of London, editing the article on “Libraries” in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “can hardly be supported”. Christians have been keen to blame the destruction of the Serapeum on to the Moslem invaders in 642 AD, when Omar, Caliph of Baghdad, is said to have ordered the books, except for the works of Aristotle, to be used as fuel to heat water for the city's public baths. This story was not recorded until 300 years later. Its author is Bishop Gregory Bar Hebræus, a Christian, who typically wrote about the Moslem invasions without the distraction of historical documentation, but simply with the benefit of his lurid imagination (The Burning of the Library of Alexandria, Preston Chesser, eHistory)!

The suspicious reader will notice that the Moslem invasion was 300 years after the Roman empire came under the influence of Christianity, and 150 years after Theodosius I had already ordered Pagan temples to be destroyed. The New Columbia Encyclopedia, making no mention of the Moslems feeding the bath house fires, notes simply that the libraries “suffered especially in 391 AD when Theodosius I had Pagan temples and other structures razed”. A report online by San Jose State University coyly remarks:

In AD 391, riots instigated by fanatical Christians damaged the collection heavily.

The temple of Serapis was made into a Christian Church in 391 AD, doubtless marking the end of the library. Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD, oversaw the end of it. His nephew, Cyril, succeeded him as Patriarch.

Justinian the Great

Christians consider it proof of the virtue of the fifth and sixth century bishops regarding the preservation of classical knowledge that Greek culture could still be an issue in the sixth century. In truth, by then large numbers of classic books had already disappeared forever. The ones spoken of by Christians are those which they declared compatible with Christianity for one reason or another. The intolerance of Christians is illustrated by the plot by Cyril of Alexandria to murder the fashionable and virtuous Neoplatonist philosopher and daughter of the “last member of the Library of Alexandria”, Hypatia. It is the Cyril who succeeded Theophilus. He ordered a gang of monks to murder her by hijacking her carriage, mercilessly killing her then stripping her naked body of its flesh using broken tiles or oyster shells—a monstrous deed even Christians cannot deny.

The final death blows to Pagan culture however came from Justinian the Great, Emperor from 527-565 AD. He is considered great because:

he had two great commanders, Belisarius and the eunuch, Narses, who re-conquered large parts of the Western Empire from the Germans for him
he codified Roman law (but himself ignored the rule of law—blatantly robbing friend and foe alike and encouraging his officials to extortion)
he spent fortunes on building churches to the glory of God
he persecuted Pagans and heretical Christians alike.

While doing all these wonderful things he forgot the proper management of the economy and did far more damage to civilisation than barbarians ever did. The empire was left ruined, its administration corrupt, the countryside abandoned and the cities full of beggars who waited in vast numbers for alms from the state coffers.

When Justinian closed the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens (529 AD), he closed the last of the Pagan schools, the large Neoplatonic school in Alexandria having already gone Christian in 517 AD. It was closed because it was anti-Christian! This school was the last Pagan school in the whole of the Christian Empire—but the “great” Christian Emperor thought it too dangerous to tolerate and closed it.

Christians were happy to retain some classic writers—Homer because Christians saw allegories in his work, Plato and Aristotle for their philosophic value and some poetic and rhetorical works were kept for teaching style. Otherwise Paganism had gone. Chadwick says there was no prohibition on the expression of Pagan thought and no restriction imposed on the diffusion of Pagan literature. Since neither Pagan thought nor Pagan literature could be taught, neither was likely to be a problem. It is like saying people can watch whatever they like on TV, but there will be only one channel—the Christian channel.

The Barbarian Excuse

Christians pretended the destruction of the classical works and libraries of the ancient world was the result of the barbarian invasions, as though the barbarians were ignorant savages. Well, perhaps they were, but they were Christians. The invasions of the Western Empire were by the German nations, the Visigoths and the Vandals.

The Visigoths, who sacked Rome in 410 AD, founded the first German kingdom in the Empire. They were Christians having been converted by Wulfila to the Arian faith half a century earlier
The Vandals migrated through Western Europe to North Africa in 429 AD. There they founded a powerful maritime nation which harassed the shipping in the Mediterranean and in 476 AD they sacked Rome leading to the end of the Empire in the West. Like the Visigoths they were Arian Christians.

Though these tribes had put paid to the Western Empire, invasions continued for several centuries, east and west, but after Justinian the damage had been done—not by the barbarians but by the Christian bishops and their thugs. Nevertheless Christians insist that the barbarian invasions created several conditions which led to the end of culture.

The German invasions and the declining economy destroyed the educational system largely through the decline of the cities. With the loss of the educational system, culture automatically declined too. Christians also claim that the invaders destroyed public records and urban libraries.

Naturally there is truth in this. The barbarian invasions effectively finished off the Western Empire, but the German invaders were themselves Christians, and the Roman decline had been started long before by the Christian onslaught on the culture prevailing when they took over administration of religion. The economy declined because the effectiveness of the army declined and the economy of the Empire depended in part on conquest. Christians refused to serve and urbane Romans followed suit, leaving the army to uneducated provincials and barbarian federati, who were often good soldiers but obviously lacking the commitment to Rome that had built the Empire. The economy also was damaged by maladministration by Christian administrators when Christianity dominated the Empire. The followers of the poor Galilæan were interested in riches and glorifying God—as they remain to this day.

Papyrus used for the rolls favoured by Romans was fragile and so Latin manuscripts were easily damaged.

Of course this is true, but for hundreds of years before the Christians took power it had never been a problem—manuscripts were always being re-copied in a major industry. Under the Christians it became a problem, not because the manuscripts were fragile but because the Christian bishops would not allow them to be copied and as manuscripts cracked and flaked in use they had to be discarded without being replaced. Yet Christians claim that their monks preserved ancient culture by copying old texts. Why then was the fragile nature of papyri a problem? Surely the worthy Christian monks would have copied the papyri on to vellum or parchment. They did not, precisely because they were trying to expunge Pagan traces except the few which were acceptable.

Literacy in Greek then Latin declined.

This has nothing to do with the barbarian invasions. The disappearance of Greek began exactly when the Christians took over and began to close the Pagan temples and Pagan schools. The link is blatant yet Christian apologists try to blame barbarian invasions. To say that some Christians themselves taught Greek is rather like saying it is fine to kill off wild animals because we have some preserved in zoos! Not surprisingly, the loss of Greek culture was followed by a decline in Latin until only the clergy used it in a bastardised form, the rest of the population being illiterate.

Writing itself was almost lost, being preserved only by the Christian clergy and monks.

Having destroyed all means of learning it is hardly surprising that writing almost disappeared. The Christians were not interested in general learning and practical knowledge but only religious understanding. Having destroyed the Pagan schools they generally did not replace them with anything comparable. Clergymen were taught but the knowledge was sterile—it only enabled them to read the Vulgate and other devotional works. That a little learning survived in a few monasteries is true but, in fact, most scholarship was lost and had to be rediscovered at the Renaissance or relearnt afterwards.

It is pious lying—God’s Truth—forced on to Christians by historical truth that gives us this nonsense. If the real story of Christianity were taught in schools, the Christians would be thought of like Hitler—destroyers of culture to force their own interpretation on the world. The only difference is that Hitler failed. No one denies that barbarian invasions disrupted society, but the barbarians were Christians and they were able to invade because Christianity had already undermined the Empire from within.

Preserving Classical Culture

Their fathers having destroyed ancient culture, Christians today have the gall to claim that it was the Christians who preserved it! These modern Christians are so unprincipled as to quote the Nestorians as an example of how Christians treasured classical learning. Truthfully they banished Nestorius to Egypt as a dangerous heretic. He declared the Virgin Mary was not the mother of God because, although God was the father, she had borne Jesus as a human.

Christians, liberal as they never were had the Nestorian Christians driven from Syria by the Emperor Zeno, the Isaurian, around 485 AD. They fled to Persia and Nestorianism was effectively destroyed in the West. At Nisibis, however, Nestorians built a centre of Greek culture including a library of the classics. They attracted scholars from Greece, including some of the Pagan school of Athens closed by Justinian in 529 AD.

Fortunately, the despised Nestorians were able to preserve some Pagan culture and pass it on to the Moslem Arabs when they conquered the area in building up the mighty Moslem Empire. Many Pagan classics were translated into Arabic whence they eventually were recovered in the West at the Renaissance.

So, yes, Nestorian Christians did help to preserve classical culture but it was through no good intent on the part of orthodox Christians who hated the Nestorians as much as Pagans and sought to destroy them both. To claim credit because their plans did not work out as they expected is typical Christian trickery.

Christians also pretend their own scholars linked the wisdom of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They cite Boethius (d 524 AD) who wrote commentaries on Greek and Latin philosophers. He translated two of Aristotle’s treatises on logic into Latin, and was the resident scholar in the Ostrogoth kingdom.

Note the contradiction. Christians blame the destruction of classic culture on the barbarian invasions not on Christianity, but here they quote the resident scholar of a barbarian kingdom as a protector of classic works. They blame the barbarians for book burning then seek kudos because Christian scholars in the barbarians’ court preserve Pagan texts. Curious that, like the Nestorians, the Arians had been declared as heretical and were persecuted as much as the Pagans.

Another servant of the king of the Ostrogoths was Cassiodorus (d 583 AD). In about 537 AD he founded a monastic order to study and copy Pagan literature which he brought from Africa when necessary. Christians want us to believe that barbarians destroyed books then employed Christians to replace them. The truth is that the Catholic church was barbaric but the Arian barbarians were relatively civilised. The Church destroyed Pagan books but some Arian barbarians tried to preserve them.

The Role of Monks

Individuals such as S Benedict of Nursia (d 543 AD), who founded the Benedictine order, and the Venerable Bede(d 735 AD), had some marginal effects in preserving ancient scholarship but mainly Benedictines were copyists and perpetrated many pious forgeries. Inasmuch as these people preserved anything, it was already just a question of saving from total extinction what the Christians had already practically destroyed. The reason was that the sixth century had already seen the completion of the virtual destruction of classical knowledge. For the next six hundred years Christian scholars like Bede were picking over the ruins, trying to find nuggets of learning. When they did they tried to preserve them and find reasons for using them in teaching. They pleaded that they were necessary for the monks to learn Latin grammar or to learn how to declaim effectively. Thus some books of the Latin poets, Juvenal, Ovid and Horace, orators like Cicero and playwrights like Terence were preserved before the last copies were binned.

All of this puts Christians in an ambiguous position but the demands of faith always seem to overwhelm the demands of honest scholarship, and the crimes of the Christians are always played down and their few heroes and heroines, played up. Sometimes they admit Christian bigots opposed the classics and intellectualism but salve their consciences with the pretence the church actually preserved classical scholarship.

It is not even true that monasteries in general preserved scholarship. Some did—usually remote ones difficult for the church of Rome to control—in the wild north of England and in Ireland. The stage arose when even much of the clergy were illiterate and orders like the Benedictines preserved literacy largely for devotional reasons not through dedication to scholarship. The first Benedictine monastery was at Monte Cassino in Southern Italy, where the works of Tacitus, Seneca and Varro were copied. Christians like to take praise that they preserved Tacitus, the historian who was not flattering to the them, but this is nonsense. Most of the books of Tacitus were not preserved, particularly the ones that would have referred to Jesus! Isn’t that just strange?

Much of the scholarship re-found at the renaissance came from the east, and from the Arabs who had marvellous universities in, for example, Cordova, when Christian Europe was savage. Some monks of the Dark Ages, culture having gone, began to wonder about things and came to be scholastic. But many authors have romanticized the extent to which they preserved anything. Some knowledge was preserved but it was nothing to what the Christians had destroyed, and some inquisitive monks were among the first to rediscover wonderful things in the dusty works left unread in their libraries. But to claim credit for this when centuries earlier Pagan scholars had been made into beggars and their books burnt in the interest of the One True God, is brazen.

Charlemagne

In France and northern Europe, it was Charlemagne not the church who tried to revive learning. He found many of the Frankish clergy illiterate. The monks who copied manuscripts did it purely mechanically, with little understanding of the texts they were copying. Errors in the texts, poor handwriting and a failure to divide the words properly make Merovingian manuscripts hard to understand. So much for the church preserving scholarship. Ignoring all this, Christians demand praise because a few wealthy monasteries had libraries.

Charlemagne—not the church—made every monastery and cathedral in the Carolingian Empire, besides observing the practices of religious life, run a school for anyone able to learn. To teach the teachers, he brought in scholars from England and Italy. This exactly illustrates the sterility spoken of above. Observance of religious practice to save their immortal souls was what was important to Christians—nothing else! That is why the Roman Empire collapsed so spectacularly, splintering into warring principalities in the west and, in the east, consolidating into a corrupt autocracy run by a potentate treated as a God. It took the secular head of one of the largest principalities in the west to force the clergy to start to do something useful. Charlemagne’s reforms made education once again a public matter. Only from this point on can Christians begin to claim with any general truth that the church kept alive learning.

We are in the ninth century, almost 500 years after Constantine. The spark of knowledge had almost been extinguished in Europe as a consequence of Christian bigotry. The stirrings of a renaissance were beginning at the instigation of an eight foot high sword wielding prince—not the ignorant loafers in the Vatican. Yet the Christians want to take credit for keeping alive the scholarship of the ancients which they had destroyed in the first place.

In fact the paucity of this tradition of preservation is proved by the Christian tendency to list individual cases of Christians preserving classical texts. They are able to give these individual instances precisely because they are so rare. If there were massive exchanges of learning and literature—and that was what was needed after the bishops had destroyed classical schools—then these pitiful exchanges of individual books would have been unnecessary.

The enormity of the loss of knowledge in the west is shown by the facts that most of the surviving texts of Latin authors were preserved by the Carolingians because of Charlemagnes’s edict, and three quarters of the surviving Greek classics were preserved in the east. Note we can only speak of surviving classics. Many more never survived. The retrieval of Greek classics from the Arabs and Byzantium began only in this millennium and reached its zenith just as the Byzantine Empire collapsed to the Turks.

When they could not destroy the books, the Christians suppressed the information by declaring it heretical or blasphemous. A few examples will show it, and hint at what has been lost by Christian bigotry. Thales and Anaximander thought stars were suns with planets at immense distances from us. Lucretius implied the uniform acceleration of falling bodies—not rediscovered until Galileo did it—and that space was infinite and with an infinite number of worlds in it. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake as a heretic for saying the same sort of thing. Sextus Empiricus says Democritus had his atomic theory from Moscus the Phœnician. But in Moscus’s idea, the atoms were not utterly indivisible, and so was closer to modern atomic theory—under some conditions they could divide. Pythagoras is thought to have known the inverse square law of attraction. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton all acknowledged the debt they oweed to the discoveries and conjectures of the pre-Christian philosophers and scientists. They were able to express this debt because the Dark Ages shutters were being prized open after a thousand years of darkness.

Into Modern Times

Spanish Inquisition: Folio Society book by revisionist Henry Kamen

Even into the late Middle Ages, the Christians did not cease to destroy anything that they considered alien. They lit pyres of Jewish books after the pope had anathematized the Talmud because it portrayed Jesus as a common criminal. Around 1500 the Spanish Inquisition burned huge numbers of Jewish and Arabic books. Because these events are documented with some pride by the Christian chroniclers of the time, there is no way the Christian apologists can deny them. Nevertheless, it does not suggest to them that perhaps it was simply the continuation of Christian tradition. Christians in Roman times felt just the same way about Pagans as they felt about the Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages. They taught false doctrine—doctrine not approved by the church as the representative of the One True God—and so their works should be destroyed as the work of the Devil.

Nor did this attitude cease with the Renaissance and the gradual rediscovery of learning, and the discovery of the New World. The Church found itself new targets to abuse. Bishop Diego de Landa (Relacion de la cosas de Yucatan) wrote in 1565 AD:

We found, in the possession of the Mayas, a large number of books written in these letters of theirs and, as they contained nothing in which there was not some superstition and devil’s lies, we burnt them all, at which they felt wondrous sorrow and were aggrieved.

The sweet enlightened Christian bishop could not understand why a conquered people should be aggrieved when their cultural heritage was consigned to the flames. It is symbolic of the sheer barbarity of the Church even into modern times. Shakespeare wrote his great works shortly after this. Would we be aggrieved if some monster of a bully had obliged us to burn Shakespeare and the King James bible, written soon after that. All that remains of these Mayan treasures is the Troana and the Cortesian codices in the National Museaum of Spain in Madrid, another codex in Dresden and a fourth in Paris. No other Mayan books survived the Christian holocaust.

As a footnote to the rest—the first Christian missionaries to arrive on Easter Island in the Pacific ocean, just like their predecessors in Africa and South America, set about destroying the old culture they found there. About 600 large stone heads, up to 40 feet high, looked out over the sea. At their bases were wooden boards covered in hieroglyphics. A few were sent to the Vatican, and most of the rest were incinerated in situ. The heads they could not destroy or they would have done. The population was exterminated, carried into slavery or blasted by western diseases. 4000 lived there when it was discovered in 1722—100 in 1887.

To any objective person, it is Christianity which is the work of the Devil.

Reference—Edward Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, London, 1952

Page Tags: Church Fathers, Bookburning, Classical Culture, Dark Ages, Barbarians, Books, Christian, Christianity, Christians, Church, Edict, Emperor Theodosius, Empire, God, Libraries, Library, Orders, Pagan, Pagans, Destroyed Temples

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.