No "Dark Age" in Byzantium?

[timoneill]

Just delurking for a moment to see if anyone here can help me.

In the standard formulation of the "Christianity caused the Dark Ages" myth, the idea is that a retreat from reason to blind faith and superstition caused a "closing of the Western mind" a la Freeman et al. I've read more than enough on the real state of intellectual history in the Middle Ages to know this is nonsense, but I'm curious about what happened in the East.

Unfortunately my knowledge of Byzantine history generally is sketchy (I can't say it's ever interested me much) and tends to be grouped around points where it intersects with Western European history. So my knowledge of Byzantine intellectual history is limited to bits about the Schism with Rome and the various doctrinal disputes of the Fourth to Tenth Centuries. But I know very little about science and philosophy in the Byzantine world.

I've picked up some conflicting messages about the latter - on one hand I realise that academies remained open in Constantinople and Alexandria and that Christian scholars there continued to study Homer and Plato along with the Bible. On the other hand I've read that there was a stagnation in secular learning which, even if it wasn't as pronounced as the near total collapse of such learning for a while in the West, could be said to have represented an Eastern "Dark Age". And that this stagnation was, of course, caused by Christianity.

Now I'm sceptical of that last idea, but don't know enough on the subject to refute it. Can anyone suggest some reading on this?
Thanks in advance,

Tim O'Neill
Medievalist Atheist

[humphreyclarke]

I think the conundrum is not why the east stagnated but rather why the west leapt ahead with the massive translation efforts from Greek and Arabic into Latin in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Byzantium had an intellectual advantage at first, in particular with its greater political stability. I do know that their intellectual culture was more focused on preservation and producing commentaries on ancient texts. There was no wholesale subordination of science and philosophy to theology. Instead compromises were made. In terms of contributions, the most important are John Philoponus's commentaries on Aristotelian physics, Dioscorides's herbal (De Materia Medica) and commentaries on ptolomeic geography and astronomy. For example, Puerbach and Regiomontanus's Epitome of the Almagest, exercised a strong influence on Nicolaus Copernicus. So Byzantium did suffer from a lot of the same problems as the west (invasion, economic decline and social upheaval) but the intellectual culture was sustained and eventually furnished a lot of the resources which would be deployed in the 16th and 17th centuries.

[timoneill]

Mar 14, 2009 18:51:52 GMT humphreyclarke said:

I think the conundrum is not why the east stagnated but rather why the west leapt ahead with the massive translation efforts from Greek and Arabic into Latin in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Is that really a mystery? The West lost a lot of those works so, when it got access to them again and had the stability and educational infrastructure to do so, was stimulated to translate them into Latin and then elaborate on them. The East never lost them in the first place, thus had no such stimulus.

Byzantium had an intellectual advantage at first, in particular with its greater political stability. I do know that their intellectual culture was more focused on preservation and producing commentaries on ancient texts.

Which is pretty much what the Roman tradition had been doing before them.

There was no wholesale subordination of science and philosophy to theology. Instead compromises were made. In terms of contributions, the most important are John Philoponus's commentaries on Aristotelian physics, Dioscorides's herbal (De Materia Medica) and commentaries on ptolomeic geography and astronomy. For example, Puerbach and Regiomontanus's Epitome of the Almagest, exercised a strong influence on Nicolaus Copernicus. So Byzantium did suffer from a lot of the same problems as the west (invasion, economic decline and social upheaval) but the intellectual culture was sustained and eventually furnished a lot of the resources which would be deployed in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Okay. So is there any recommended reading on all this?

[humphreyclarke]

Sure, there is a section in Lindberg's the Beginnings of Western Science, but actually I have just referred back to Grant's 'The Foundations of Science in the Middle Ages' and there is a pretty good overview in there and he essentially asks the same question as you have 'Why did the Byzantine Garden of learning produce few flowers for the history of science and natural philosophy'?. He basically comes up with these answers.

1) War - The fact the empire was constantly at war in defence of an ever shrinking empire may have disrupted intellectual activity. He doesn't think this factor was that important. Others have suggested that, increasingly on the defensive, the Byzantine culture had a tendency to turn inward and focus on religious contemplation and theological questions.

2) A stagnant intellectual culture. This he sees as the most important. Byzantine scholarship was of an uncritical nature, whereby most scholars who commented on ancient texts were convinced the ancients were always right and therefore believed they could add little or nothing. In 'Science and Religion) Grant quotes a statement by Theodore Metochites, a 14th century student of classical thought who declares in 'Historical and Philosophical Miscellanies:

'The great men of the past have said everything so perfectly that they have left nothing for us to say.'

There also appears to have been a lot of self congratulatory scholarship and flattery with little desire to actually solve problems in natural philosophy. He quotes one author as saying that sometimes scholars borrowed books from each other, but rarely did they actually collaborate. Instead we find a lot of elaborate correspondence between them where they congratulate each other on their expertise. He also suggests the handmaiden formula may have been counter-productive and cites the example of John Italus in 1082 who was declared a heretic because he came to love Hellenic learning too much and whose errors were read out in church on the first Sunday of lent. Actually I have looked at this example myself and it seems was condemned because he supported the Emperor's (Alexius I) critics in the church. He was accused of believing in things like the migration of souls and using inflammatory neo-platonist language but this seems to have been secondary.

3) Lack of institutional backing - Church and state were often the same thing in Byzantium and neither of them institutionalised natural philosophy and science. The theologians were either hostile or indifferent. Unlike the west, natural philosophy never became a regular subject of study in the schools. In contrast to the east, the west was able, through the papal revolutions, to exclude secular authorities from ecclesiastical matters. This created a more positive environment for secular affairs in which reasoned discourse could be carried on and helped avoid the pitfalls of Caeseropapism.

Having said that, as Grant points out, the Byzantine significance lies in the preservation and transmission of the Greek scientific tradition, for this they deserve to be called 'the worlds librarians' in the middle ages. There is also the lamentable fact that much Byzantine literature on science and natural philosophy has not been published and is mostly unread. And lets not forget they invented the hospital!.

My take is that it is the intellectual culture is the key here. We don't have some 'dark age' of learning here because the ancient texts are being preserved, in fact having a good working knowledge of them was imperative for rising to a good position in the empire. What we do have, arguably, is a stagnant intellectual culture; one which isn't quite confident enough to go beyond commentaries. In many ways, as you point out, its a continuation of the Roman tradition. There appears to be a pervasive feeling of self satisfaction with the writings of the ancient Greeks and little desire to go beyond them.

That's my non-expert opinion anyway, I'd be interested to hear what James thinks as i know he was looking it this a while back (someone asked the question in a blog comment)

[timoneill]

Thanks for the detailed response Humphrey. I have read Grant's Foundations, but it was a while ago so I had forgotten he'd covered this there. I'll dig out my copy and re-read that section. If you can think of any other reading that covers this subject, please let me know.
Cheers,

Tim O'Neill

[humphreyclarke]

No problem Tim. Hope it was of help.

[bjorn]

"Scholars of Byzantium" by N.G. Wilson is not too bad.

[James Hannam]

Tim,

It's staggerly hard to get hold of, but the best book I've found on the subject is

Byzantine Humanism: The First Phase (1986) by Paul Lemerle. It was originally in French, if I recall.

By the way, I really like the new blog and have linked it to my reader. Thanks for the offer of a review.

Best wishes

James

[James Hannam]

By the way, Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational sees the entire Byzantine period as simply the continuation of the fall from rationalist grace that afflicted Greece continuously from 200BC onwards. In other words, the Byzantine Empire's problem was not that it was Christian but that it inherited the Hellenistic mindset. Dodds sees even the revival of Greek science in the second century AD as an aberation that does no more than interrupt the long decline to 1453.

Best wishes

James

[timoneill]

Mar 30, 2009 12:18:41 GMT James Hannam said:

By the way, Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational sees the entire Byzantine period as simply the continuation of the fall from rationalist grace that afflicted Greece continuously from 200BC onwards. In other words, the Byzantine Empire's problem was not that it was Christian but that it inherited the Hellenistic mindset. Dodds sees even the revival of Greek science in the second century AD as an aberation that does no more than interrupt the long decline to 1453.

Thanks James. I didn't realise Dodds' book extended that far. I've had it on my Amazon wish list for a while, but I think I may have to read it before I write a review of Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind for my blog. At first glance, Freeman seems to have an idealised view of ancient rationality and I gather Dodds' work is an excellent antidote to that kind of romanticism.

The University of Sydney library has a copy of Dodds, so I might simply spend a couple of afternoons reading it there.

[James Hannam]

It's only the last chapter that gets us past Plato and the stuff about the Byzantine Empire is a bit of a throw away remark. Still, worth reading if only because it is all so commonplace now. I've got a blog post on it to put up today or tomorrow.

Best wishes

James

[humphreyclarke]

RE ancient rationality. I dug out a quote from Livy (Titus Livius) that said:

'‘Relieved of their religious scruples, men were troubled again by the report that at Frusino there had been born a child as large as a four year old, and not so much a wonder for size as because..it was uncertain whether male or female. In fact that soothsayers summoned from Etruria said it was a terrible and loathsome portent; it must be removed from Roman territory, far from contact with the earth and drowned in the sea. They put it alive into a chest, carried it out to sea and threw it overboard. The pontiffs likewise decreed that thrice nine maidens should sing a hymm as they marched through the city’.

[wraggy]

Tim O'Neill said...


"The fact that the Eastern Empire didn't collapse and that learning chugged along there quite happily for centuries to come kills the "Christianity caused the fall of Rome/collapse of learning" argument dead. The people who like to make this argument are usually vaguely aware that learning in the west was revived largely thanks to works preserved in the Islamic world. But when I ask them where the Muslims got their Aristotle they are usually stumped ..."


With reference to "Christianity killed learning", I am interested in what actually happened in the the east of the empire in contrast to the west.

What did this learning that continued to chug along consist of?

Was it just commentary and preservation of texts, or were there some advances in learning?

Can we compare/contrast the achievements of the east and west, or even the pre-Christian Greco-Roman era with the Christian empire and learn anything about this question?

Has any historian actually tackled this question? (Recommended reading)

It just seems to be a bit of a contentious issue. One only needs to look at the heat that Tim O' Neill's Agora review generated. I have often thought that it may make a good thesis topic for a student of history.

Edit: James Hannam said that he was going to blog a comment on this subject some time ago (see above Re: No "Dark Age" in Byzantium? Reply #10). James, do you intend to cover this subject in the current blog series "Was Christianity Responsible for modern Science"?

[jonkon]

A proper response to wraggy would fill a book, much less be appropriate for a thread like this. For starters, I would check out De Lacy O'Leary's How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs. I would also check out the histories of the Arab people by Bernard Lewis and Philip K. Hitti.

The central culprit is the evil Cyril of Hypatia infamy. A revival of the cult of Isis under Cyril, in the guise of the veneration of the Virgin Mary, was opposed by Nestor, the Bishop of Antioch. Cyril bribed his way into the Emperor's harem, where he gained access to and support of the Emperor's sister. In reaction the Emperor's wife supported Nestor. The situation was resolved when the wife was caught in an affair with the Master of the Offices. The fundamentalist Christian followers of Nestor were forced to flee to Persia, where they formed the core of scientific achievement under Arab control. Nestorians held to a Biblical interpretation which required preservation of Greek philosophical texts to provide the cultural context for proper understanding of Biblical texts.

The religious views of Cyril were spread to the West as a result of the Byzantine Iconoclast controversy. This inhibited scientific development, until a fundamentalist revival started by Anslem in 1066 (see Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages), because a realistic view of space and time, essential for scientific study, was deemed unimportant under the prevailing Iconic style of religious artwork inspired by Egyptian funeral decorations.

[timoneill]

Sept 5, 2010 19:18:43 GMT jonkon said:

The religious views of Cyril were spread to the West as a result of the Byzantine Iconoclast controversy. This inhibited scientific development, until a fundamentalist revival started by Anslem in 1066

Ummm really? Evidence of "scientific development" being "inhibited" by religion in the west please.