I just read the history of humans from Ancient Greece to the 18th Century in the online Encyclopedia Britannica. It happened when I asked this question: Did human intelligence peak a few thousand years ago with the ancient Greeks?
And I thought this fantasy. Maybe we are descended from a different branch of human tree - perhaps the Germanic branch rather than the Ancient Greek branch. The Germanics are characterized as 'barbaric' compared to how much is written about the astonishing accomplishments of the Greeks. So many inventions in all areas. We can't but wonder how things fell backwards and so far backwards.
The Encyclopedia Britannica tells me generally that it turns out that overpopulation, starvation, climate catastrophes and so on that caused migrations/wars that resulted in great upheavals of Europe and eventually the weakening of Rome. But more significant, the rise of Christianity spread across the western world to become the governing force. It organized activities around faith and moral behaviour, and demonized all that went before. It cast out a lot of intellectual activities. It was faith vs. reason.
"Christianity appeared on a planet that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal sacrifice. And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions for purges and pugilism."
That comes from Catherine Nixey's book The Darkening Age: the Christian Destruction of the Classical World.
Here's the original view by Edward Gibbon in his classic 18th century book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is quoted in a Guardian article HERE.
A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its “exclusive zeal for the truth of religion”, a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a class of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty.
The Enlightenment view is that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilization’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists).
So there we are with our answer. And an insight into the state of our societies today: the clash of faith vs. reason continues.
One of Niagara-on-the-Lake's heritage homes on John Street. This is the back view during a garden tour. I guess this house's architecture got me thinking about the Greeks.
