Yes, these are dark, dark times. Autocracy is on the rise around the globe, riding the fury of ignorant mobs to arrive at a new barbarism. Climate breakdown, entailing economic and social collapse now seems very close indeed. It would be very easy indeed to fall into the bleak despair, as the achievements of the educated, built patiently over the centuries, are squandered in a couple of insane decades. But survival is possible. Other intelligent people have witnessed a collapsing world. And realised that the most important thing was to save what they could from the ruin, then pass it on. So that one day learning and reason could rise again
Our examples are four remarkable men who lived roughly between the years 400AD and 600AD as the Roman world, its trading and legal networks, its learning and reason, collapsed around them. Astute readers will note that most of them professed the Christian Faith. We at LSS advocate no faith or all of them, believing such decisions are best reserved to the mind of each individual. What they illustrate is how to accomplish psychological survival in the face of catastrophe. If their faiths helped them, so be it; we think the methods are more enlightening than the beliefs
St Augustine of Hippo 354-430 In the late Roman Empire the daily work of a priest a bit like a social worker today; distributing alms, visiting the sick, binding the links that tied a fraying society. But he wrote books too. Like all his contemporaries, Augustine was horrified by Imperial collapse. But instead of just wailing and gnashing his teeth, he set out to ask why, using the best ideas available to him at the time. In the City of God he claimed that Rome fell because it had not been based on Justice. In a world of profound inequality and judicial corruption it is a lesson not without resonances today. His ideas that, somewhere out there, another City could be built where trade and learning might thrive again, inspired the best of people through the darkest times, Including some on this list
Cassiodorus Old LSS hands will recall our blog of 11th June 2020 on Marcus Cassiodorus c 485-585) From which we will take this single extract
He had realised that the one place where works of learning could be effectively preserved was in the shelter of monasteries. And so he set his monks to work, copying and preserving as many works as they could. It is thanks to him that so much work survived the collapse of ancient civilisation. And that one day this learning, more precious than gold, would be revived..
if you want to know more, go back to the original blog
St Benedict of Nursia 480-547 If you want monasteries to survive , people have to want to stay in them. At a time when monasticism was plagued by weird fanatics, defying the rules of nature and reason in ever more convoluted asceticism, St Benedict set up rules that were feasible, sustainable and went with the observable grain of human nature. The result was that his Benedictine Monasteries began to spread, offering sanctuaries, however imperfect, where the seeds of learning could survive. His work provided one of the foundations for the work of :
Gregory the Great (?-604AD) Gregory subsumed the work of all the above and others, by clearly recognising that the old world was gone, and there was no point regretting it. It was time for new methods and new ways of thinking. Whatever the ups and downs of the Churches ever since it was Gregory who gave that vital push which enabled them to become custodians of knowledge for centuries to come. In that sense, he achieved.
We live in times when are own barbarians seem close to perfecting their own world of lawless violence, squalor and ignorance. But we may have our revenge. The task now is to work out where we went wrong, and from that to pass a legacy to future generations of the Intelligent. You do not have to be a Christian, you can even be an Atheist, and still believe that one day there will be a City, bright and shining, where the educated and the just thrive. And the world of the Barbarians will again be remembered as as epoch of squalid folly, and their leaders are bywords for incompetence and cruelty.
#middle ages #medieval #st augustine #survival #papacy #gregory the great #cassiodorus
Learning, Science and Society 