[John Isbell]

Oh - our other option was the Unitarians. They'd have hosted our service.

John

[Mark McDonnell]

That all sounds wonderful John, and I take your point. Except that atheism isn't a religion.

Well. I'm done here. Boringly rational and no doubt coming across as narrow-minded and potentially offensive as usual. Oh well.

[Kevin Greene]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

Well. I'm done here. Boringly rational and no doubt coming across as narrow-minded and potentially offensive as usual. Oh well.

This may be the most sincere and human thing I have found in this thread.

[Tim ONeill]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

My admitted sheer ignorance of the topic prevents me from having much to contribute to this discussion. And I don't know Mr Juster or Mr ONeill and have done no research on either, nor have I read Nixey's book. But! (ha) I've read this thread with huge interest. Mr ONeill, to be fair to him if you carefully read his first few posts, does seem to have entered the discussion (at post #35) in the spirit of purely academic objective truth-seeking and has encountered much push-back from people questioning his agenda and accusing him of being some kind of hired lackey employed by Mr Juster to defend his article. I think his defence against these accusations has been pretty robust tbh and, yes, his tone may be fairly curt and dismissive but it seems to come from an exasperated desire to stick to a purely evidence-based historical discussion.

This is all very fair and hits the nail right on the head. Many thanks.

Now, as I say, I'm entirely ignorant of the subject and won't pretend otherwise. Maybe Mr ONeill has some conservative agenda and, despite his atheism, he seeks to uphold the reputation of Christianity against some 'leftist' idea that Christianity=bad and Islam alone was responsible for preserving the art and philosophy of the ancient world. I don't know.

Perhaps, given that I entered this discussion to defend the main thrust of Michael Juster's analysis of Nixey's book, some here could be forgiven for thinking I agree with him on other things. I don't. Anyone who actually knows me and my politics (left wing, progressive, democratic socialist) would find the idea I have any kind "conservative agenda" absolutely hilarious. And the idea I am in any way pro-Christian or pro any religion doubly so. The idea that if you are a non-believer you therefore have to line up behind certain ideas about history that put Christianity in the worst possible light, regardless of the evidence or the consensus of scholarship, otherwise your allegiance to atheism is somehow suspect is precisely the kind of mindless groupthink that my blog is working to expose and debunk.

He claims to be interested only in historical objectivity and facts and he certainly seems to provide them more convincingly than anyone else here.

Thanks again. I AM interested in historical objectivity and simply go where the facts and the best scholarship on any given question leads. I have no fear or favour on any issue and refuse to stick to any ideologically driven "correct" party line simply because I am an atheist. So I show no mercy to people who peddle neo-Gibbonian fictions and distortions like Nixey, no matter how much many of my fellow atheists love them. I am similarly merciless to Christian apologists like Rodney Stark, who distorts history to try to argue that the Crusades were actually just defensive wars against Islam and its wicked encroachment on western Christendom. Atheists who twist Biblical texts to support the flawed, fringe idea that no historical Jesus existed at all get the same short shrift from me as fundamentalist Christians who do so to try to get the infancy narratives in gLuke and gMatt to somehow conform to history and not contradict each other. I am completely consistent in what I condemn and debunk - bad history driven by an ideological agenda and bias.

But thanks again for your comments. It's good to see there are at least some rational, reasonable and perceptive cool heads here.

[Tim ONeill]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

My agenda comment about guest blogger O'neill was bad form but his work online defending the Catholic Church from the charge of collaboration with the Nazis, among other business strikes me as strained. I think his ability to clear the Church of collaboration with the Reich because he can find certain individuals working or writing against Nazism is a mistake similar to what he is doing with his argument here. There are always countervoices and individual betrayals/dissents from ideologies but the real work of the certainties are being done in the Under of the group.

Then you are going to have to put in some work to back this analysis of what I've said about the Church and the Nazis up with detailed argument and reference to the evidence. I have not "defended the Catholic Church from the charge of collaboration with the Nazis" by finding "certain individuals working or writing against Nazism". I have done so by noting and detailing a consistent policy of the Vatican from 1922 to 1945 of maintaining a pretence of outward political neutrality while working covertly to thwart the Nazis at every turn and support those trying to overturn or, later, destroy Hitler's regime. And it's not like the Nazis didn't know this or make their displeasure about it perfectly clear. If the Church "collaborated" then it's decidedly odd that the Nazis called them "allies of the Jewish war criminals", forbade citizens of the Reich and occupied countries from listening to the Vatican Radio and imprisoned thousands of their clergy in concentration camps. "Collaborators" also don't tend to be involved with several plots to assassinate their friends' leader or overturn him in a coup.

So if you actually choose to back your statements up for once, rather than hiding behind arch assertions and snide insinuations, I will be ready and waiting with plenty of knowledge of the subject, the source material and the scholarship. You will need to bring your A game, I can assure you.

He seems to have styled himself as a corrective for the new Atheist scene, which he finds littered with bad historical arguments. He is probably right on that and I am sure I would agree withhim on plenty.

Good. And anyone who knows me knows I don't reserve my robust criticisms for New Atheist ideologues who distort history. I am completely even-handed when it comes to biased pseudo history. As I note above, I am every bit as harsh with Christian apologists like Rodney Stark, who tries to argue the Crusades were defensive actions to protect western Europe from aggressive encroachment from Islam. Or the fundamentalist literalists who twist history to try to get the infancy narratives in gLuke and gMatt to harmonise with each other and with historical evidence. My blog focuses on the New Atheist stuff largely because there are plenty of people already who debunk Christian bad history but no other atheists that I know of have turned their attention to the egregious distortions of "our side". And given all the loud honking about "scepticism" and "objectivity" and avoiding "confirmation bias" etc from the New Atheist camp, that's deeply ironic.

I also think if you take a spin around his various haunts on the net you will find him to be a fellow that is almost always abusive and derisive of anyone who disagrees with him.

I give back what I get, and make no bones about it. When I join a discussion or when I encounter someone new within one, I am always civil, if robust in debate. But if someone starts getting personal or snarky with me or starts making insinuations about me or my motives, the gloves come off. So I often say to people in this kind of exchange, if you don't like my tone, check your own.

More than a few academic history folks accuse him of being a bad actor and many find him simply an ass.

No it is not "academic history folks" who do this - it is almost always amateur hobbyists who are clustering together to boost fringe theories and ideological pseudo history. There are groups of Holocaust deniers who really don't like me (they also say I'm really "a Jew"). Then there are the anti-Christian fanatics and the Jesus Mythicists who have the same opinion (they also say I'm really "a Christian"). The academics, on the other hand, tend to hold me in pretty high regard. The late Maurice Casey praised my blog in one of his books, Bart Ehrman, James McGrath and Larry Hurtado have also been kind enough to endorse my stuff. And my Nixey review has been praised by Dame Averil Cameron, Prof Tim Whitmarsh, Sarah Bond and history writer Tom Holland. The interesting thing here is not just that the latter are all leading academics or professional historians, but that they are not of any one ideological background - they include atheists, agnostics, liberal Christians and conservative ones. That should tell you something about who supports and endorses me and who does not.

He does make some fair points and has done alot of work on the subject and others find him very valuable despite his abrasive behaviour. I think he has something upside down in his argument here and is denying what seems obvious to me regarding the way threat of torture and violence work as well as the way identity becomes encrypted and layered under such circumstances.

This is nonsense and is as much a caricature of what I say as your stuff about the Nazis and the Church. I condemn Christian apologists like David Bentley Hart, who maintains that the Christians of the fourth to sixth centuries were innocent little lambs and Christianity triumphed purely because of its inherent wonderfulness, as much as I do Nixey or Charles Freeman, who maintain it was because of violence, censorship and oppression. Both views are wrong, and both are wrong because of their proponents' ideological blinkers.

I do see the destructiveness of certain Christianities as playing a large part in a continuing war on animal-ness, animism, and other ways of seeing/being on the earth.

So do I. Though what that has to do with anything I've said I have no idea.

I am sorry for falling into amusing myself by throwing rocks at the wasp nest of Tim's brittle internet persona.

*Chuckle* Dude, please. My internet persona is about as "brittle" as old rhino hide.

I also think Richard, John, and Walter had good reason to question what they did, when they did and think you may letting Tim off a bit easy on their accounts.

Nonsense. Richard used Sagan's garbled retelling of the Gibbonian fairy tale of Hypatia and so I went into detail about why modern historians who specialise in the relevant period don't accept that hoary myth. Then he tried to make some snide insinuations about me sharing some "biases" with Michael Juster, to which I responded quite civilly. If "John" refers to John Isbell, he tried to defend his claim that it was "Islam, not Christianity" that preserved key Classical texts in the face of clear evidence that it was both, often working together. He failed completely, declared victory and then flounced off in a huff. John Riley tried to make an argument that the death of Hypatia was actually due to "theological differences" between Cyril and Orestes, but couldn't come up with any actual evidence to support this supposition. And I have no idea who "Walter" is.

Finally, I am more than happy for you or anyone else here to drop the insinuations about my motives, the fantasies about imagined "biases" of mine, speculations about my politics and Google stalking me via comments by various online oddities and weird contrarians who don't like me and just engage with what I'm saying about history. But if you do so I strongly recommend that you do your homework carefully, because I only defend positions that I have researched in great detail, so if you don't you will be bringing a butter knife to a gun fight.

[Tim ONeill]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

I think you can recognize quote-mining in O'neill's review just by following the link below and the comment section afterwards but regardless I think the problem with his argument is what he is concluding even supposing he is presenting the evidence fairly.

https://vridar.org/category/book-rev...darkening-age/

This is the third time the fanatics on that weird blog have been cited as some kind of authority and evidence of bad analysis on my part. When this was raised before I challenged you to back this up with specifics. You failed to do so. Try it now. What quotes am I supposed to have "mined" exactly? I think it's time for you to put up or shut up.

[Patrick Murtha]

...And I just realized all this bantering over the Dark Ages was going on! What a whole lot I missed by staying at the top of the forum, and never coming down here to General Talk. Everyone knows that the Dark Ages are called dark because the electric light was not yet invented. (I jest!)

Aaron, there are some real beauties in Medieval poetry. For myself, the Anglo Saxon is song-full--Beowulf, obviously, but there are some other humdingers, the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wife's Lament. (Benjamin Bagby does a marvelous oral presentation of Beowulf in the Anglo Saxon.) Alas, since my degree was gotten, I have had little time to tinker with this language and keep my mind refreshed in it.

But Latin seems to be more your thing. There is a beautiful song "O Tu Qui Servas," very medieval in sound. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZs9umz4JNI) I am trying, in some of my spare time, to work on translating "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii: De Septem Disciplinis." It is a long allegory on the liberal arts, and I fear I will never get past the first several pages. If taken literally, Medieval works tend to appear dry. Their richness is in their use of allegory.

You might also be interested in the Latin poetry of Richard Crashaw. He is a baroque poet.

Of course, I do not know of any Medieval who compares to Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc, in Latin. But that is to be expected, as Latin was not exactly native to the Medieval man.

Sincerely,
PM

[Tim ONeill]

Originally Posted by Patrick Murtha

Of course, I do not know of any Medieval who compares to Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc, in Latin. But that is to be expected, as Latin was not exactly native to the Medieval man.

Latin was absolutely "native" to literate medieval people ("man" and woman). It was a living language that evolved over the medieval period and, as it did so, continued to have a lively poetic tradition.

The reason you don't "know of any Medieval who compares to Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc" is some of the later medieval humanists (e.g. Petrarch) came to idealise the Latin of the earlier Romans and so declare, anachronistically and illogically, that this was somehow the "real" Latin and that anything after about the second century was "debased", "degraded" or "barbarised". So the living Latin of the later Middle Ages was rejected and a rather artificial attempt at reviving the Latin of " Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc" became regarded as the epitome of learning, style and eloquence. Which pretty much killed the living Latin tradition and replaced it with a rather more sterile "Renaissance" imitation.

Personally, I regard the poetry of Chaucer and Dante to be very much the equal of that of "Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc", but - interestingly - they chose not to write their best work in Latin.

[Allen Tice]

Originally Posted by Tim ONeill

... some of the later medieval humanists (e.g. Petrarch) came to idealise the Latin of the earlier Romans and so declare, anachronistically and illogically, that this was somehow the "real" Latin and that anything after about the second century was "debased", "degraded" or "barbarised". So the living Latin of the later Middle Ages was rejected and a rather artificial attempt at reviving the Latin of " Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc" became regarded as the epitome of learning, style and eloquence. Which pretty much killed the living Latin tradition and replaced it with a rather more sterile "Renaissance" imitation.

'Twas ('tis?) ever thus. The Athenian Greek of roughly Xenophon's day was supposed to be the best and "archaizing" writers imitated it for well over a thousand years. Of course, West European medieval literacy itself was diminished. Even in classical Rome, literary "literacy" was pretty much restricted to those who were wealthy enough to pay for tutors for their children. So the crowd got its literature by oral means: plays; mime skits; funny, provocative, memorable short poems (maybe very raunchy) about public figures; songs, maybe bawdy, maybe sweet. Greek Byzantium provided medieval schools because central governments persisted. Literacy in the emerging languages of Europe was limited to what was oral and memorable enough to be written, but not extremely much was written down until after 900. I like whatever I find there, and, hey, in Latin, there's the manuscript that holds the texts selected for Carl Orff's Carmina Burana: O, O, O, totus ardeo, O, O, O... ("I'm hot, hot, hot with l'amour, hot!").

[Patrick Murtha]

Tim, Tim, Tim...I was trying not to re-open this lengthy bantering. Rather, I was trying to answer Aaron, whose question opened this thread.

I am never surprised about the plethora of misconceptions we moderns have about the Medievals. Speaking very generally, much of what we think can be dispelled by reading primary sources rather than secondary. As time has gone on, I realized that things were not as we often think. Part of the problem is that we speak in generalizations about an era that lasted between 500 to 1,000 years (depending on when consider to be the start and end the Dark Ages)! Think of the changes in customs, traditions, language, etc, that have happened to us in only a couple hundred years.

But let me reiterate that, generally, Latin was not native to the Medieval man. He did not grow up speaking or understanding Latin. If he attended a good school, he got enough Latin to put to shame modern the PhD in Classical Languages. But again, it was not the native language for the Medieval. The evidence lies in a multitude of complaints by writers of all sorts throughout the many hundreds of years that we call Medieval, that some scholars and even members of the clergy were ignorant of Latin. And if the scholar and clergy are ignorant of Latin, how is the commoner not? This complaint is not simply the complaint of the Renaissance, of Erasmus, of Boccaccio, of Petrarch, and of Thomas More.

A further proof also lies in your statement about Dante and Chaucer, both writers wrote profoundly in their native tongues as well as in Latin. They also wrote in the vernacular so that their work did reach the common man. It is a common misconception that writers only wrote in Latin during the Medieval times, but that is quite false. It was a matter of purpose and audience--a common audience required language in the vernacular; a scholarly or work intended to cross borders and boundaries required a universal language--Latin. Vernacular poetry was very common as well, thus we have "La Chanson de Roland" or "El Cantar de mio Cid" and a host of others. And if Latin was native, why would kings, such as Charlemagne and Alfred, require the Latin works to be translated into the native tongue so that more people may receive a good education?

Also, studying the schools and the education of that multi-century era reveals that much of the Latin writing we know today, was known then. Cicero was studied in the monastic schools as was Scripture; Virgil and Horace were studied in the monastic schools as was the psalms and patristic poetry. The Medievals often modeled their education in language on Quintillian, using Cicero as their model for prose.

It is true that there were brilliant men writing in Latin, with great art. I will stand against anyone who says that the Dark Ages were intellectually dark. However, I will also not pretend that the general Latin style was just as "golden" as that of the classical period. I will not say that the Medieval writings are deficient in Latin, but they are a different and plainer style.

To compare the Medieval Latin with Classical Latin can be similar to comparing the English poetry of Shakespeare, Crashaw with the poetry of Robert Frost, Sidney Lanier--different times, different styles, different customs, and different preferences. This does not make one necessarily better or worse, it merely makes them different. Is modern English prose more brilliant than Newman's? Absolutely not! Newman's prose is like the sun, while contemporary prose is like the moon. Yet, they both still shed light. Our current custom is moonlight.

Sincerely,
PM