For the next several days, or however long it takes to exhaust the subject, I’m going to be posting some rather lengthy excerpts from the book I’ve been reading (as noted at the end of each post). The book in its entirety is, as noted by the author, more an essay than a typical book, which makes it difficult to just post small snippets, rather it is necessary to getting a whole thought across to include a larger portion of what he writes. It is worth the extra time and effort. Slovenly scholarship is a sin, perhaps, but bad scholars might almost be forgiven for believing what they have always been told: that Christianity rejected classical civilization, even sought to destroy it root and branch, and thus inaugurated the Dark Ages. In truth, there is no intelligible sense in which the rise of Christianity can be held responsible for the decline of late Roman culture, some supposed triumph of dogma over reason, or the retardation of science. In fact, the last flowering of classical literary culture, in the fourth and early fifth centuries, was for the most part the work of the church fathers: they provided the period with its greatest rhetoricians, its most sophisticated metaphysicians, and its most innovative stylists. Few pagan writers of the period could match the ravishing power of John Chrysostom’s Greek , or the serenely flowing classical grandeur of Gregory Nazianzen’s, or the unprecedented fluidity, suppleness, and immediacy of Augustine’s Latin, or the elegance and precision of Jerome’s or Ambrose’s. No pagan writer graced posterity with anything as new, rich, humane, or psychologically subtle as the intense lyric interiority of Augustine’s Confessions, or as searchingly honest and movingly human as Nazianzen’s autobiographical poetry. 7 Moreover, with the collapse of the empire of the West— which was induced by centuries of internal wasting and external pressure: of plague, warfare, and demographic decline— it was the church’s monasteries alone that saved classical civilization from the total eclipse it would otherwise have suffered. And, in the East, it was a Christian civilization that united the intellectual cultures of the Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian worlds, and that preserved Hellenic wisdom in academies and libraries in Greece, Syria, and Asia Minor. And, to be perfectly honest, despite the calamities that ravaged Roman civilization, many of the greatest intellectual, aesthetic , and spiritual achievements of the Hellenistic world were taken up into Christian metaphysics, theology, ethics, and art, and were occasionally even somewhat improved in the process. Hart, David Bentley (2009-04-21). Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:14:58 +0000
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