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Lesson 3.8: Into the Void
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Rome fell—but not before raising Christianity to the throne. In its triumph, the Church buried the pagan schools, silenced the philosophers, and turned the pursuit of wisdom into obedience to doctrine. Philosophy survived, but only as a shadow of itself—abstract, disembodied, and no longer a way of life.
Topics discussed:- The Fragile Foundations of Empire: How climate shifts, pandemics, and migratory upheavals undermined Rome's stability and accelerated its collapse.
- From Creed to Control: How Christianity’s elevation to state religion empowered it to suppress dissent, enforce orthodoxy, and marginalize competing philosophies.
- The Displacement of Pagan Thought: How rich traditions of inquiry—from Epicurean naturalism to Aristotelian empiricism—were dismantled, lost, or rebranded under Church authority.
- The Eclipse of Philosophy as a Way of Life: How the therapeutic, practical dimensions of philosophy were replaced by scholastic abstraction and theological obedience.
- The Rise of Moral Authoritarianism: How Augustine’s doctrines of original sin and divine grace reinforced a system of inherited guilt, curbed intellectual freedom, and redefined virtue as submission.
- Glimmers of Survival and Recovery: How remnants of ancient thought were preserved by monks, transmitted through Islamic scholars, and eventually rediscovered by humanists, paving the way for the Renaissance.
For more, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and Rome's Traditional Fall
00:00:00
Speaker
I should begin this last lesson with an admission of guilt. I have failed. I was supposed to get through the 1200s in this course. We have not made it anywhere even near the 1200s.
00:00:15
Speaker
In this lesson, what we will do is begin by covering the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which is traditionally dated to 476
00:00:26
Speaker
And then we're going to do a whirlwind just, you know, survey of what happens in philosophy for several centuries. And then we're going to close with, ah you know, kind of a slightly longer reflection on some issues in medieval philosophy.
00:00:45
Speaker
This is not an ideal situation for covering any of these figures that we're touching on today. The fall of the Roman Empire on its own should get a whole lesson, but it is what it is. Maybe the time period that this course covers is a little too long to be manageable.
00:01:04
Speaker
In any case, let's start moving into the void here. Let me begin by saying this. There is sort of a traditional tale that is told when we talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
00:01:19
Speaker
You know, it has to do with internal conflict, power struggles, assassinations, corruption. There's plenty of that at all times during the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic.
00:01:32
Speaker
And then there's also external threats, that is, invasions from Germanic tribes. So that story actually is roughly accurate, but I want to tell ah more complete story, slightly more complicated story.
00:01:49
Speaker
And the reason for that is because one of the themes that we really kind of harped on in this course is that Ideas are shaped by what's going on in the social environment.
Climate Change and Rome's Decline
00:02:03
Speaker
So just to give one example, many of the schools of philosophy were shaped by the trauma of being conquered by the Roman Empire.
00:02:14
Speaker
And that goes beyond the schools of philosophy to include also monotheistic religions, right? So that's what we saw in unit three. Well, the same goes for history. It's not simply that, you know, a great man rises and then there's no great man anymore. So the empire collapses.
00:02:32
Speaker
It's a little more complicated than that. So I want to tell you about two things that contributed to the fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire.
00:02:43
Speaker
And those two factors that we'll talk about are climate change. and disease. Two very relevant topics today. So let's begin with climate. And by the way, this all comes from the wonderful book by the historian Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome.
00:03:03
Speaker
But basically, kyle Harper says that the Romans were fortunate to reach their peak during what he calls the Roman climate optimum.
00:03:15
Speaker
This is a warm, wet, and stable period when it comes to climate. And that's what you want for an agrarian empire. Basically, Harper is saying the Romans got lucky.
00:03:28
Speaker
And this climatic luck is what allowed the empire to expand so rapidly. And it was during this period. Roman climate optimum that the empire in fact reached its maximum extent, right? That's how you can tell that one is an enabler of the other. Climate enabled the expansion of Rome.
00:03:51
Speaker
In addition, of course, to the social institutions of Rome and everything we've discussed before, what we are adding now to the analysis is climate. And wouldn't you know it, later on, there's a transitional period when it comes to the climate.
00:04:06
Speaker
And this period is marked by climate instability, including, interesting, a little ice age and reduced solar energy. right so I'll talk about that in a second.
00:04:20
Speaker
But basically, when you plot the decline of the western half of the Roman Empire and you plot the climate, well, lo and behold, when things start to get a little turbulent, climatically speaking, that's when the Roman Empire begins to decline.
00:04:40
Speaker
And we're talking here the middle of the second century to about the seventh century. That's when climate is getting quite unstable. And I did mention something about the Little Ice Age. You can find books on the Little Ice Age. it's Very interesting. There's actually multiple Little Ice Ages. So you have to look for the late antique Little Ice Age.
00:05:02
Speaker
Anyway, so that's that's its whole thing. i won't mention much about that. But this part that was sort of new to me as I was researching for this lesson and this course was this idea of reduced solar energy. So climatologists can measure the amount of energy, the level of energy coming from the sun And during this time period, apparently this level of energy had slipped into its lowest point in several millennia.
00:05:33
Speaker
That is for several thousand years, we had gotten more energy from the sun than people in the early Middle Ages got. So that, you know, i I can't say much more than that. I don't quite, this is not my my wheelhouse, right? But this is climatically speaking, something very interesting is happening during this time period.
00:05:54
Speaker
And of course, it is not good for the project of empire. And so this is where we begin to see a decline. Let's plot this sort of in a timeline here so you can kind of visualize this more easily.
00:06:09
Speaker
The Roman climate optimum occurs between 200 BCE and one hundred and fifty ce So this is a time period when Rome is gaining all its territory, including all the Hellenistic kingdoms that we talked about.
00:06:29
Speaker
And this climate is excellent for a agrarian empire. If you collect taxes in the way that the Romans did, right, they collected crops from their colonies. Well, this is really nice for you. This is a great time period.
00:06:44
Speaker
to be a burgeoning empire and it was for rome but then after a couple of centuries things begin to turn this begins around the middle of ce
00:06:59
Speaker
And during this time period, you get climatic instability, which eventually leads to agricultural instability and then eventually to social instability.
00:07:12
Speaker
So you can easily see how that happens. In the not too distant past, we had some disruptions here in the United States and worldwide because of something called...
00:07:25
Speaker
Supply chains, so supply chains. No one knew what that meant before the COVID-19 pandemic, but now we do. And so you can imagine something like that was happening in the late stages of the Western Roman Empire.
00:07:42
Speaker
And then climate got even worse. So by the middle of the three hundreds you begin to see drought-driven migrations. That is, there had been droughts in the Eurasian steppes, and those are these grasslands where many nomadic peoples live. And that forced the Huns to migrate from their homeland, and then they displaced the Goths.
00:08:10
Speaker
And it was sort of like a domino effect. you know as One group displaces the other group, which gets pushed up against the borders of Rome. And so now you have these climate refugees that are trying to get into the Roman Empire.
00:08:27
Speaker
And we'll tell that story in a little bit more detail in a second.
Disease and Its Impact on Rome
00:08:32
Speaker
But let me just finish off this timeline. Then, as if things couldn't get any worse, you get the Little Ice Age that comes in the late 5th century.
00:08:43
Speaker
So this is when that solar energy doesn't doesn't quite make it to Earth. And this is obviously not good for crops. So it's really not good for an empire based on crops.
00:08:57
Speaker
So there it is That is a little bit on the role of climate. Let's talk now a bit about disease Now, disease has shaped society since the beginning of humankind before humankind.
00:09:14
Speaker
Disease just, you know, it's this hidden factor, this invisible enemy that we don't think about too much, but it really does have a profound influence on how we structure our societies.
00:09:28
Speaker
So, predictably, disease shaped Roman society. There was basically just a persistent disease burden. That's what you get when you pile so many people together along with their domesticated animals.
00:09:43
Speaker
You just get conditions that allow diseases to proliferate. And so this had an effect on everyone in the Roman Empire. Let me give you some stats here about what it's like to live in an empire where you periodically get sick or where your grandfather was sick with some really bad disease.
00:10:06
Speaker
And so you have to live with those physical consequences. For example, it looks like the average male height was five foot five. That's because being sick, especially early on, developmentally speaking, right, when you're a child and all that,
00:10:23
Speaker
That affects your long-term prospects for health outcomes. And so if you got really sick as a kid, that's probably going to affect how much you can grow.
00:10:34
Speaker
Life expectancy was ah about 30, right? So on average, you could expect to live to 30. Of course, if you're wealthy, that number moves up substantially.
00:10:47
Speaker
But if you just take the average of everyone, that's not that's not very good, right? And let me just tell you about the major plagues that we know about. The Antonine Plague took place during the reign of, I believe, Marcus Aurelius.
00:11:02
Speaker
The Plague of Cyprian hits in 251. The Bubonic Plague hits after the fall of the Roman Empire, but that is still obviously very important. And what I'm giving you here are the start dates. So the Antonine Plague begins in 165, the Plague of Cyprian in 251, but anyone but anyone who is familiar with the aftermath of the COVID pandemic in more recent history, knows that, you know, it doesn't just hit one year and then it's gone. It sort of stays with you, right? It stay it comes in waves and the, you know, disease toll rises and falls.
00:11:40
Speaker
And even today, several years after the COVID pandemic, the people that die from COVID, it's still not zero, right? Some number of people still die every year and from COVID-19.
00:11:54
Speaker
And so even though the plagues would strike on a given year, they they at least began on a given year, they would stick around for years and years to come. And these plagues were substantially deadlier than you know the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:12:09
Speaker
So these were scary times indeed. And even survivors who somehow managed to pull through, they were, again, they were... going to live with negative health outcomes for the rest of their lives.
00:12:23
Speaker
So I guess the punchline here is that the empire was always, always, epidemiologically speaking, fragile. right It was always carrying that disease burden.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so when you consider that stressor, the stressor of disease, on top of the stressor of climate, on top of the Germanic tribespeople and the droughts that they're facing, well, now you can see that What's coming in 476, that's
Events Marking Rome's Fall
00:12:55
Speaker
the straw that broke the camel's back, right? It was just all these factors combined that led to the eventual imperial collapse that we see.
00:13:07
Speaker
Just like the collapse that we began this course with, right? So sort of fitting that we end and begin with a collapse Let's consider now the timeline of imperial collapse.
00:13:23
Speaker
Let's begin with Constantine because that's a figure that you should be familiar with by now. It turns out that the days of Constantine, early 300s, I think he his reign ends in the 330s, that was actually a period of resurgence, right? So things were kind of better. They were improving.
00:13:43
Speaker
ah Who knows if it had to do with his ruthless efficiency or if it was just a climate playing nice. But eventually the climate would stop playing nice.
00:13:55
Speaker
And so what happens beginning in the middle three hundred is that the droughts in the Eurasian steppe start to create climate refugees. We're talking here about the north of the Black Sea area.
00:14:11
Speaker
Think modern-day Ukraine. And what was going on there is that there was sort of a a goth-dominated political order. that's um It's hard to call this an ethnic group. you know there's There's lots of debate here. I want you to just roughly think about the goths as one tribe.
00:14:30
Speaker
And even though it has multiple groups within it, let's just think about it as one tribe for the moment. And they were getting pushed out by the Huns. The homeland of the Huns was just too dry to feed their horses, too dry for anything.
00:14:44
Speaker
And so they started moving into the territory of the Goths. And eventually, of course, the Goths start to make their way out of their former territory because the Huns are...
00:14:55
Speaker
Very scary indeed. And they start to go up to the border of the Roman Empire. Now, these are not regular climate refugees, right? i I don't know what you imagine a climate refugee is like, but this is, you know, this is a ah heavily armed group They have a cavalry. They carry, you know, the ah composite reflex bow that the Scythians used to use.
00:15:20
Speaker
So this is ah very dangerous group of climate refugees. And they're knocking on Rome's door. Now, there is a very complicated story here about the back and forth between the Goths and the Romans.
00:15:37
Speaker
Let me just say this. The Romans tried to mistreat the Goths. The Goths wouldn't take it. And there was some fighting. Eventually, there was a peace deal.
00:15:47
Speaker
And it was actually Theodosius who got called out of retirement that made this deal with the Goths. So here's when things get kind of hairy. Theodosius dies in 395 and the Visigoths declare, you know, this peace treaty, we made that with Theodosius. He's gone.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so one leader named Eliric, he forms a brand new army And now you get decades of war going on in every direction, basically.
00:16:20
Speaker
You had Stilicho on the one hand. he He was basically taking care of the future emperors because they were kids, essentially. They're Theodosius' sons.
00:16:31
Speaker
And so Stilicho is sort of in charge. And so he leads some armed forces com composed of both Western and Eastern soldiers against the Visigoths.
00:16:43
Speaker
meanwhile The Huns, they're invading Asia Minor. Things are getting very ugly in multiple regions. And this just causes more and more instability. You begin to see the empire fragmenting.
00:16:59
Speaker
And with this comes weakness. And this weakness enabled the Visigoths to sack the city of Rome itself. This is a massive deal. First of all, it is just a part of Roman mythology that God is on their side.
00:17:21
Speaker
And the indicator of that is that they keep winning, right? Why else would we win all the time? It must be that God wants us to.
00:17:33
Speaker
So what does it mean that you now have Germanic tribespeople marauding through your capital city. Well, that is just psychologically unfathomable for many people, especially because no one had in their recent memory anything even remotely close to this.
00:17:55
Speaker
It had not happened in 800 years, right? That the eternal city had been taken like that, occupied in that way. So that happened in 410. But Rome is still there though, still weak, but still there.
00:18:10
Speaker
and so you get more major sacks of cities and conquests of cities. um One that I'll mention is that in 430, the Vandals laid siege to Hippo, which is where Augustine was on his deathbed.
00:18:28
Speaker
So Augustine died of, ah I guess, natural causes. It wasn't that he was killed by vandal or anything, but he was alive during that siege. And the city falls a little bit after Augustine dies. But that's just one factoid that we can add on here. um Finally, in 476, a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer deposes the last Western Roman emperor.
00:18:55
Speaker
That would be the boy emperor, Romulus Augustulus.
Post-Fall Fragmentation and Church's Rise
00:19:00
Speaker
And so that's the date that is traditionally marked as the fall of Rome, or at least the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
00:19:09
Speaker
The Eastern Roman Empire, also called the Byzantine Empire, that would continue for another thousand years. But at least for the Western Roman Empire, that Western imperial court, that is deposed completely.
00:19:25
Speaker
And that would be the end Rome.
00:19:56
Speaker
This is when, in a sense, the church takes over. Now, obviously, the church is not in charge of the region that was formerly the Western Roman Empire.
00:20:10
Speaker
That just kind of breaks up and fragments into you know little regions, little kingdoms. Some cities sure get emptied out, but... Everything just gets smaller in scale. So in what sense does the church take over?
00:20:25
Speaker
Well, this is obviously a philosophy class and philosophical concerns are what predominate here. And so what I'm talking about here is that the church takes over epistemically speaking.
00:20:38
Speaker
So first and foremost, philosophical inquiry of the sort that we saw, let's just say, during the first century of the Roman imperial era or during the Hellenistic age, that is not happening anymore. What what happens here is that in many domains, faith replaces reason.
00:21:04
Speaker
And curiosity becomes, maybe not heresy, maybe that's too strong of a word, but heresy adjacent maybe is a good way to put it. Because during this time period,
00:21:16
Speaker
It is the views of Augustine that sort of get pushed through as dogmas, right? They are accepted as doctrine. And we talked in the last lesson about how Augustine at a certain point just takes doctrines that were pushed through by the ecumenical councils and and just accepts them at face value and just tries to resolve what they are. So at this point, he's not really engaging in an open-ended inquiry.
00:21:48
Speaker
He's just trying to massage together different philosophical and religious doctrines so that they somehow fit into a coherent worldview.
00:21:58
Speaker
So in other words, this is the beginning of using philosophy Not to discover what might be true, what's the most rational thing to believe, but to defend what you already believe.
00:22:15
Speaker
You get that? that's that's ah That's not what was happening in the Hellenistic age. At least that wasn't the norm. That wasn't the point. And now it's starting to be what philosophy is for.
00:22:29
Speaker
If you're using reasoned argument at all, it's to defend Christian doctrine. Another way that the church takes over, epistemically speaking, is in terms of what they do to any dissenters, right? So there is a pretty harsh suppression of dissent.
00:22:50
Speaker
If you are a heretic, the Catholic church will use any state powers, any any sort of political powers that are still around to persecute heretics. Right?
00:23:03
Speaker
So this is very unlike the Greek tradition that we began this course with of, you know, spirited debate, free speculation. Right now, there's more of a top-down enforcement about orthodox beliefs.
00:23:20
Speaker
And anyone who diverges from the accepted doctrine, well, it's not always very pretty for them. Perhaps the most obvious way that the church takes over what good epistemology is during this time period is the way that they are sort of actively dissociating from pagan philosophy.
00:23:43
Speaker
mean, we might even call this a sort of anti-intellectualism because there is so much that Christianity borrowed from pagan thought. I hate to do this to you again, but...
00:23:55
Speaker
Here is a quick laundry list that I just came up with. Plato. From Plato, Christianity got the idea that there is ah divine realm and that this is really the ultimate source of all reality. Everything that we see here on this physical world, that's just temporary and definitely unworthy of our attention.
00:24:19
Speaker
You want to move toward the divine realm. From the cynics, you get this sort of righteous stance against the ways of society. You can kind of see that the monks who would leave the city and go live on their own to be self-sufficient, that just looks a lot like cynicism.
00:24:38
Speaker
And those Christians that stayed in the city and would heckle, you know, the pagans and and sometimes do violence against them. Well, that's got a cynical ring to it, too, right? Remember, Diogenes, the dog, would make sure to tell people when he thought they weren't living according to nature.
00:24:56
Speaker
from aristotle came this style of argument for god's existence along with many other philosophical methods that were used to defend the christian doctrine From the skeptics and the Epicureans, you get all these beliefs by which the Christians could define their views against.
00:25:19
Speaker
Some scholars actually think that the the Christian doctrine on pleasure, how pleasure is ah source of evil in many cases, that actually comes from debating against Epicureanism.
00:25:33
Speaker
right So for Epicureans, the only intrinsic good is pleasure.
Intellectual Migration and Preservation
00:25:39
Speaker
and So how do you distinguish the Christian view from the Epicurean view? You say, well, actually pleasure is a source of evil, right? So this is sort of a weird contribution from Epicureanism.
00:25:52
Speaker
We can say the same thing about skepticism. For skeptics, doubt is a good thing, right? That's actually what you're supposed to try to generate in yourself. so that you can be you know a little bit more emotionally distanced from your beliefs or appearances, as the skeptics would call them.
00:26:11
Speaker
But for Christians, though, doubt is not okay. It's actually faith that's the ideal for Christians. Faith, even in the face of contrary evidence, right? So faith is the principle that that the Christians sort of reified and and magnified in the face of Pyronian skeptics or against Pyronian skeptics.
00:26:34
Speaker
So Epicureanism and Pyronism, they had their own influence on Christianity, even if it was just in terms of Christians finding ways to distinguish themselves from these schools of thought.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I'll give you just one more here from the Stoics. Well, so much came from the Stoics, but the idea that thoughts could be morally evil, ah, that's so Stoic, right? So that comes from Stoicism.
00:27:02
Speaker
So there you go. All these ways that Christianity borrowed from pagan thought. But of course, the church doesn't turn around and say, thank you. It instead is incredibly hostile to the philosophical traditions that it borrowed from.
00:27:16
Speaker
And eventually, one Christian emperor, closes down the philosophical schools. And this led to something that we call a brain drain.
00:27:27
Speaker
Brain drains are actually a thing in history. Maybe the easiest example I can give you of what a brain drain is, is from Nazi Germany, right? So Nazi Germany begins to have very hostile policies against the Jews in the nineteen thirty s Well, in the universities of Germany, there were very many prominent Jewish intellectuals and some of them got forced out of their jobs.
00:27:57
Speaker
Some of them just up and left. They knew it was going to happen eventually, so they decided to leave. And so what you get is many brilliant physicists and chemists and other kinds of scientists and philosophers and what have you.
00:28:12
Speaker
They leave Germany and they go to other countries. Oh, and by the way, eventually they help those countries defeat Germany in World War II.
00:28:24
Speaker
And so that's one example of a brain drain. We do get a brain drain in the ancient world as well. And we already know the first two ingredients of it, right? So first of all, if you were a pagan or a heretic in the West, you were going to be persecuted, right?
00:28:43
Speaker
That's understood now at this point, I think. In the East, they were still a little more philosophical. There was still that tradition of debate. Remember, the Eastern half of the Roman Empire is basically...
00:28:57
Speaker
the old Hellenistic kingdoms, which is basically just a bunch of regions that had been influenced by Greek thought. And so for that reason, it's not hard to imagine that there's a whole tradition of reasoned argumentation still going strong.
00:29:12
Speaker
And you can actually see this Because there's all these doctrinal battles going on during this time period between, in particular, Alexandria and Antioch. And they would use you know Greek styles of argumentation for that.
00:29:27
Speaker
Well, as the church begins to take power, epistemically speaking...
Shift in Moral Philosophy
00:29:33
Speaker
there was a push against this Greek style of reasoning, this philosophical argumentation.
00:29:40
Speaker
And in fact, in 529, the emperor Justinian shuts down Plato's academy, right? So now it is getting a little bit more forceful.
00:29:53
Speaker
If you are an independent thinker or a pagan or a heretic, you're starting to really feel the heat here. And so what you get eventually is an intellectual migration or exodus.
00:30:07
Speaker
People just leave the Roman Empire, both the fallen Western Empire, right? They they leave those areas. Or the Eastern Empire that's still standing, but it's getting more authoritarian, epistemically speaking.
00:30:25
Speaker
And they go, well, first they go to Persia, the Persian Empire, always there, always in the background during Rome's history. And then a little bit after that time period, some intellectuals go to Arabia Beginning in the 600s, that's when you get to see the first Muslim empires, right? The first Islamic empires.
00:30:48
Speaker
And because the Islamic empires grew so fast, they sort of needed just, you know, mathematicians and cartographers and just intellectuals in general to help them run the business of empire.
00:31:01
Speaker
And so that's where many intellectuals went. If you stayed in the West, for example, and still wanted to do philosophy, well, by that time period, philosophy had become just more dogmatic. The point of philosophy, to reiterate, was to be in service to theology.
00:31:22
Speaker
You use philosophical argumentation to defend Christian doctrine. And for that, you don't really need all the schools of philosophy and you don't even need all the types of philosophy.
00:31:33
Speaker
What the ancients called natural philosophy, which today we would call something like science, you don't need that anymore. Right. If you're just defending Christian doctrine, it's not as necessary. And so this is where you begin to see many philosophical traditions start to disappear and eventually be forgotten in the West.
00:31:55
Speaker
Let's talk about what this destruction of pagan thought means. i mean, let's get down to brass tacks here. Like what, what did it look like? Well, first of all, texts would disappear, right?
00:32:09
Speaker
Schools were closed, as we already mentioned, libraries were closed, and important texts were either burned or just not copied anymore.
00:32:21
Speaker
And so i have here some figures about what percentage of ancient literature actually survives has made it to us and let me give you the one figure first so about 90 of everything that was written it is estimated during the ancient period it's gone 90 of it gone if you look at just those things written in latin then it's actually 99% that's gone.
00:32:54
Speaker
Only 1% of Latin literature from the ancient world survived. And so that is an astounding figure, right?
00:33:07
Speaker
So that's one way that the destruction of pagan philosophy happened in terms of texts. And as you know, texts were very important by that time period in philosophy.
Intellectual Constraint in the Dark Ages
00:33:20
Speaker
but also some schools were literally targeted. So if you had any atomistic leanings, right, if you liked Democritus or if you were an Epicurean, well, then Christians deliberately targeted you and your writings.
00:33:38
Speaker
And that's because if you recall, the Epicureans, They wanted to explain and understand the natural world so that they aren't afraid of it. right The reason why you understand, for example, how storms happen is that you don't think that it's a God up in the sky being mad at you.
00:33:57
Speaker
You just say, okay, it's a product of natural forces and they happen from time to time. And I don't have to freak out thinking that some God is mad at me. And so this obviously is not cool with a lot of Christian scholars, in particular Augustine. You know, of course, he thought that we need to be scared, that we need some sort of shock and awe to behave well.
00:34:23
Speaker
And so he didn't like any of these naturalistic explanations. And so for that reason, any kind of atomistic philosophy was targeted for destruction.
00:34:35
Speaker
In addition to Epicureanism and Adamism in general, the empiricist aspect of Aristotle was also targeted.
00:34:47
Speaker
Augustine very famously thought that if God wants you to know something, then well God will let you know it, right? God will help you to know it. And if you start prying too much, if you get too curious, that might lead eventually to sin or heresy.
00:35:04
Speaker
And so for that reason, Augustine says, you don't need to go study the natural world. That that doesn't matter, right? Don't worry about it. So these things happen. And as this is all taking place, you get some of those beliefs that the ancient schools of philosophy fought against, right?
00:35:22
Speaker
coming back. right So belief in supernatural explanations, that's something that philosophers had been arguing against since the days of Thales of Miletus.
00:35:35
Speaker
And now they begin to come back. There was widespread belief in demons, in witches. And by this point, you can see that all those things that philosophers had been arguing for, right?
00:35:49
Speaker
Pushing away irrational fears and superstitions. That's all that's how going by the wayside. Superstition is the norm to a certain degree at this point.
Scholasticism vs. Humanism
00:36:01
Speaker
To give you just kind of one really, i think, a good example is that we know today that natural disasters are the product of some natural factor, right?
00:36:12
Speaker
Some natural cause. For example, plagues, those are caused by viruses. Well, the ancients at least would treat plagues as a medical phenomenon, right? They they believed that plagues were something to be studied and and you know Galen, the physician named Galen, he would document things so he can try to figure out why this was happening. And he even recognized that there's more deaths in this time of the year.
00:36:39
Speaker
And so that was something to be investigated. But once the church takes over, Plagues are actually reframed as divine warnings, right? And so if you are, if your city gets hit by a plague, it's because you're not behaving right. All of you need more faith and need to be doing more good works.
00:37:02
Speaker
I think that's a really good example of this shift and and what's happening in the minds of people during this era. To just give you one more example, literacy, which was always really, you know, a minority of people that were literate, but now it's an extra small minority, right? Basically, it gets restricted to the clergy.
00:37:23
Speaker
And this is how Europe goes into its intellectual dark age, right? You know, most people can't read. Most people believe in superstitions. People don't think it's important to study the natural world.
00:37:36
Speaker
Books are being burned. That's pretty dark, right? And so the label that I like to put on all this is epistemic narrowing. Truth just becomes what the church says.
00:37:50
Speaker
And everything becomes just intellectually speaking. narrower and more authoritarian
00:37:59
Speaker
And this brings us to sort of the main emphasis of this course, this idea of ethics, ancient ethics. This time period, this transition into an era of epistemic narrowing after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, this is when ancient ethics dies. And we get a transition toward modern morality.
00:38:25
Speaker
So let's talk about this for a second. Because this this is, the in a way, the point of the course right here. I want to show you that there was a classical approach to morality, which we've we've been calling ethics.
00:38:42
Speaker
And that around this time period, we get a new way of talking about morality.
Renaissance and Rediscovery
00:38:48
Speaker
And that's sort of the era that we're still in today. We still think about morality close to the way that someone like Augustine thought of morality. So let's juxtapose these, right? Let's call the ancient way of doing morality ethics or eudaimonistic ethics, if you want to call it that, eudaimonia.
00:39:09
Speaker
And the modern way of thinking about morality, we'll call it Christian morality, right? Or sometimes I like to think about it as obedience morality. So when it comes to the morality of happiness, right, and ethics of eudaimonia,
00:39:25
Speaker
Your focus is on human flourishing, right? And developing all those virtues or character traits that might take you to flourishing. And to do this, you need to have a naturalistic approach.
00:39:39
Speaker
We know that Aristotle believed that you can only be successful, personally successful and happy within your social system. In other words, You need to study your society to learn how to be successful within it.
00:39:56
Speaker
That means, in other words, you have to do a lot of intellectual labor, a lot of practice doing the right thing, a lot of working on your practical reasoning, right? Try to make good decisions all the time. And eventually,
00:40:10
Speaker
you will become the sort of person that naturally does the right things. That's Aristotle. And the key point that I'm trying to make here is that you need to study the world.
00:40:22
Speaker
Stoicism, same thing. Ultimately, what you want to do as a Stoic is align your thoughts with nature. And what they had to do to do that is essentially develop all these psychological techniques and methods for making sure that you can assess your thoughts, make sure they're actually true.
00:40:46
Speaker
And sometimes you get sticky thoughts that you know are irrational, but you can't quite get rid of them. So you also need techniques for challenging and talking back to those sticky thoughts.
00:40:58
Speaker
And so what the Stoics were doing were also studying natural phenomena. They were studying the human mind. They were basically early researchers in talk therapy and their philosophy in general can be seen as a therapeutic philosophy.
00:41:16
Speaker
So you got Aristotle studying psychology, sociology, and political science. You got the Stoics studying physics, which is basically theology to them, and moral psychology.
00:41:28
Speaker
The Epicureans, same thing. They wanted to extinguish irrational fears and desires, and they did that through knowledge of the world. Again, they would talk about the true causes of you know storms,
00:41:43
Speaker
to get people to not be superstitious about them, to not believe that a storm is a message from God. And so all of these schools of philosophy that I listed here, they saw a science as pivotal to the study of learning how to live well, to the study of ethics, of morality, right? So that is the ethicists who focused on eudaimonia, right?
00:42:10
Speaker
Notice how different this is from Christian morality, a morality of obedience. You don't have to sit there and learn how the world works.
00:42:21
Speaker
You don't have to do any sociology, no political science, no physics, no cosmology, none of that. Just obey the church. And if you obey the church, will you be happy?
00:42:33
Speaker
Maybe. But the real happiness is in the next life. So this notion of eudaimonia is completely out the window. Or another way of putting it is that eudaimonia gets pushed to the next life.
00:42:48
Speaker
And so you don't get to thrive in this one. Flourishing, not in the cards for you, at least not necessarily. You don't flourish until the next life. What should you study?
00:43:01
Speaker
Scripture. That's all you need to study. Scripture has everything you need to know. And if you want to defend some ethical maxim, why you should do something, you go to Scripture.
00:43:14
Speaker
You say, well, here's why you should do this. It says so right here in the Bible. Another sort of really jarring difference between Christian morality and classical ethics is that, at least according to Augustine, curiosity is bad.
00:43:31
Speaker
And that's very unlike what someone like Aristotle would say about humans, that we are naturally eager to learn. And that's a good thing, right? So the main difference maybe that we can say between Christian morality and classical ethics is that Christian morality focuses on rules, right? This is okay. This is not okay. Here's what's right. Here's what's wrong.
00:43:53
Speaker
Just follow it. Whereas classical ethics... The goal is on living the good life. And what the good life is might be different for each person.
00:44:08
Speaker
and So each of us has to investigate and explore and work hard at thriving on our own. And this requires a lot of study of nature and humanity and our social structures and all that, right? So these are very big differences between these approaches to morality.
00:44:31
Speaker
If you are familiar with moral philosophy, you can actually recognize in Augustine something like divine command theory.
00:44:42
Speaker
What does that mean? It means that an act is right if and only if it is prescribed by God and an action is wrong if God tells you not to do it.
00:44:53
Speaker
So the very meaning of moral, according to a divine command theorist, comes from God's commands, right? It is a supernatural rule imposed on you by a supernatural being.
00:45:11
Speaker
Now, divine command theory is not terribly popular today, but it did lead to a view that is very popular today. It's called deontological moral reasoning or sometimes just deontology.
00:45:26
Speaker
And this is a rule-based morality. Basically, here are some things that you're supposed to never do. And here are some things that you should do and just do those things. And that's what morality is.
00:45:39
Speaker
A name that is very familiar to those who know about deontology is Immanuel Kant. He is a Prussian thinker from the 1700s.
00:45:54
Speaker
And when you juxtapose Kantian morality... deontological morality with the morality of the ancient ethicists that we covered in this course, you can really see that morality has become so much narrower today.
00:46:14
Speaker
Today, morality is about coming up with a list of things you're allowed to do and a list of things you're not allowed to do and a way for figuring those out. But it used to be the case that Morality was about happiness, figuring out how to be happy, how to live your life without emotional disturbance, how to rid yourself of irrational desires and fears.
00:46:43
Speaker
It was about day in and day out being your best. In every domain possible, right? It had intellectual requirements.
00:46:57
Speaker
People like Aristotle thought that it included personal success. It was a way of life, in other words. And during this time period, during the dark ages, is when we lose this approach to ethics. And I think we lose something very important in Western thought.
00:47:50
Speaker
I'm looking here at all the history we won't get to cover in this class that I originally did intend to The Viking raids, crusades, the Inquisition. man.
00:48:02
Speaker
Also, it's supposed to cover how certain philosophical ideas made it into modern science. For example, this is an obvious one. Skepticism did make it into the scientific method.
00:48:15
Speaker
That's sort of, you know, where you recognize it from, maybe. The belief that mathematics can explain everything, that comes from Pythagoras and Plato. And that's sort of, you know, in our minds still. Empiricism in general comes from Aristotle, this emphasis on, you know, sensory investigation of the universe. We want to see things. We want to test things.
00:48:43
Speaker
And of course, the laws of nature that came from the Stoics. I was going to do a deep dive into all of these, but there you go. a superficial gloss is all we can do.
00:48:54
Speaker
What I do want to spend some time on now is this notion of the dark ages. Historians as of late have been moving away from using this term, and I think it's probably for good reason. The term is a little misleading.
00:49:13
Speaker
It is true that Rome fell and things were different, but not for everyone, right? If you're just like a regular joe really,
00:49:26
Speaker
What it is for you is that life became more localized, not necessarily worse. It's not the case that your quality of life went down. In some cases, for some people, their health outcomes actually improved when the Roman Empire falls. But generally speaking, your life just became, you know, constrained to your particular region.
00:49:53
Speaker
And that's it. There was also an economic shift, right? So during the imperial era, the wealthy, they were usually tied somehow to the taxation system. That is how you became a part of the elite.
00:50:09
Speaker
You're part of that system that benefits from all the taxation and all the colonies and all the territories. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, um the way to be wealthy was by owning a lot of land. And that eventually led to feudalism. I won't get into what feudalism is here because that would take me forever.
00:50:29
Speaker
But, you know, so that is an important economic shift, but it was very gradual and very slow. We don't get to full-blown feudalism for a couple of centuries. So um that's another change, but not as dark maybe as the term dark ages imply.
00:50:48
Speaker
One other way that the term dark ages is a little misleading is that sometimes, and maybe even I'm guilty of this, it seems like the church just controls everyone's mind.
00:51:02
Speaker
And that's not the case. And i hope I didn't make it seem that way. And if I did, well, here's me correcting that. There were a lot of heresies and they were around for ever, right? There's, you know, in a way they're still around today, right? Because a Catholic might think that a Protestant is a heretic.
00:51:22
Speaker
The point is that in many regions, the church had no way to enforce thoughts as harshly as they probably would have wanted to.
00:51:34
Speaker
And so it's not like the church controlled everyone's mind. In fact, there wasn't even a parish structure that would enable them to do that sort of thing until the 1100s, right? So it was, you know, kind of spotty, hit or miss insofar as the the church could enforce its views on people.
00:51:55
Speaker
What I do want to stress, though, is that there was an intellectual constraint. If there was any darkness, It was in the intellectual climate because as I said before, if you're a local person, right? Irregular Joe.
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, you don't, nothing much changes, but you were never literate, right? Well, now even fewer people are literate. And now even fewer people are permitted to you know develop techniques and argumentation and philosophical training.
00:52:27
Speaker
And if you are allowed to develop those skills, it's always going to be in the service of the church. You are defending church doctrine. That is what reasoning is for.
00:52:40
Speaker
And so that is where the darkness comes in. Again, not necessarily ah decline in quality of life, sometimes actually an improvement in quality of life, but definitely an intellectual kind of darkness.
00:53:00
Speaker
Maybe the best example of this sort of darkness is the tradition of scholasticism. Now, this is... ah medieval intellectual movement.
00:53:12
Speaker
And the idea is to sort of reconcile classical philosophy with Christian theology. But really, you know,
00:53:24
Speaker
Theology being theology, that was always a given, right? The Christian doctrine, that was assumed to be true. And the philosophy was just in the service of establishing why it's true.
00:53:38
Speaker
So one person in this tradition is named Peter Abelard. By the way, Peter Abelard has such an interesting biography, which I won't get into here. but it involves a love affair with a nun.
00:53:51
Speaker
That's all I'll say. His dates are 1079 to 1142. So what Abelard really does is he finds places in church doctrine where they need to apply some sort of resolution to it. There is, in other words, contradictory statements that And Abelard says he and his fellow monks, they need to figure this out. they need to They need to solve these issues.
00:54:21
Speaker
So he's basically compiling and organizing all these church teachings that are in tension with each other and figuring out how to fix them.
00:54:32
Speaker
Right. So very much treating theology as being in need of systematic argumentation and looking for a logical resolution to these apparent contradictions.
00:54:44
Speaker
But always, i should stress, always assuming that there is a solution and here are some problems we can work on so that we can show that Christian doctrine is perfectly consistent, right? So that is Peter Abelard.
00:54:58
Speaker
I hope you can tell that this is not the kind of philosophy that was going on during, again, the Hellenistic age, right? So very, very different. Maybe the next best example I can give you of what the scholastic tradition was like is this debate over what's called the problem of universals.
00:55:20
Speaker
Now, here's the funny thing. I'm deliberately trying to bore you here. Now, if you think I'm boring in general, you know, this is supposed to be extra boring, I guess. So bear with me here.
00:55:32
Speaker
But here was an issue that people during this time period were dealing with. They were asking themselves, do universals exist? Okay, so what are universals?
00:55:45
Speaker
Think about the category of horses, horse human beings. The question is, is there something thing like horseness, something that all horses have in common?
00:55:57
Speaker
Or is there such a thing as humanity, right? That shared human essence of all humans. like is Is that a thing? Does that thing exist? Right. And if so, what is it?
00:56:10
Speaker
Well, of course, Christians adopted the views of Plato. And according to Plato, yes, universals do exist. They're actually forms, right? And so what is the nature of a universal? They are abstract objects. They are not physical, not spatial temporal.
00:56:29
Speaker
They live in the divine realm, right? Some other dimension. And so that's sort of the mainline view. There's other views though. Let's jump to the polar opposite. There is a view called nominalism.
00:56:42
Speaker
They say, no, universals don't exist. You want to know why you think they exist? Because you see one horse, then you see another, and then you say to yourself, they must have something in common, hoarseness.
00:56:56
Speaker
And so you invent that cute little linguistic label, hoarseness, but it doesn't really mean anything. Universals are just fictions, right? They're convenient ways of talking, but they're not really there. They're not really a thing.
00:57:12
Speaker
That's another viewpoint. Sure. Then there's conceptualism, which is sort of, I guess, a middle point. Yes, universals do exist, but they are ideas, right? They are mental mental constructs and they are thus dependent on human minds. Without human minds, they would not exist.
00:57:35
Speaker
Is this problem interesting? Maybe to some people. From my experience, most of my students think this problem is super weird and totally not interesting.
00:57:48
Speaker
But this is what the scholastic tradition was wrestling with. Problems like this one. And the reason, once I tell you, you might even see it as very asinine, at least I do.
00:58:00
Speaker
But the reason why some people were seeking to defend Platonism, which by the way, they called realism. They don't want to associate themselves too much with pagan thought, right? So they called it realism.
00:58:13
Speaker
Well, the reason why they defended realism or Platonism is because they wanted to be in line with Christian doctrine. Remember, there is a concept of original sin and this original sin ah applies to everyone in the category of humanity.
00:58:31
Speaker
So in order for this doctrine to work, you actually need there to be a real category of humanity to which original sin applies. Does that make sense?
00:58:44
Speaker
You actually need this thing called humanity to be real. so that you can have something to pin original sin on. So that's why some people were defending realism.
00:58:56
Speaker
The whole thing sounds very trivial and speculative to me. And many people have written that this kind of thing was not worth people's time. ah had one teacher who called this a waste of a life.
00:59:11
Speaker
So there are some strong words. But the punchline that I'm trying to get to here is that if you wanna know what's dark about the dark ages, it's the intellectual climate.
00:59:25
Speaker
I can list off a whole host of other things that showed that the intellectual climate in this era was not good. We talked earlier about Peter Abelard.
00:59:36
Speaker
The amount of texts of books that he had available to him were nothing compared to what was available in the Muslim world. He would have been better off in some Islamic empire somewhere.
00:59:50
Speaker
Speaking of the Islamic empires, many pivotal, super essential texts only survived as Arabic translations, right? So some of the most important stuff that we have today only survived because there was a copy of it in Arabic.
01:00:07
Speaker
More things that we got from the Islamic world, ideas for things like academic societies, universities, those had to be relearned from the Islamic world.
01:00:19
Speaker
Speaking of relearning, democracy had to be revived through ancient texts because there were almost no Christian societies that had any democratic processes within them.
01:00:32
Speaker
There was actually a couple of radical sects of Christianity and that did, but they were violently suppressed. And I mean, they were just killed. So democracy in general had to be rediscovered from ancient texts.
01:00:50
Speaker
And I'll give you just one more piece of evidence for the darkness, intellectually speaking, of this age. In 1213, that's when we finally get the doctrine of transubstantiation.
01:01:05
Speaker
What is that? That means that the bread and wine of the Eucharist during Mass... is literally the body and blood of Jesus.
01:01:18
Speaker
So some scholars see this as yet another assertion of faith over empiricism. i mean, you can check to see if wine is blood.
01:01:30
Speaker
And it seems to be the case that it's not, but it had to be accepted as an article of faith. So there you go. There is some real intellectual darkness for you.
01:02:12
Speaker
Let's close off this lesson and this course with some comments on Thomas Aquinas, as well as what happens after Aquinas.
01:02:25
Speaker
So Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican friar. He died in 1274. We're not exactly sure as to when he was born, but a good estimate is probably 1225.
01:02:39
Speaker
And he is very famous because he, in an honest and open way, attempted to integrate Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity.
01:02:50
Speaker
Not with one being subservient to the other, but really just thought, yes, if you take the philosophical route, you will come to the same conclusion as if you take the route of faith, right? Of Christian doctrine.
01:03:05
Speaker
And so he didn't make Aristotle fit Christianity. He thought if you really just investigate things philosophically in an open way, you will come to the same conclusion as the Christians.
01:03:19
Speaker
His view, by the way, is known as Thomism, although some people call it Aristotelian Thomism because there's such a strong similarity to Aristotle's thought.
01:03:31
Speaker
And it stood against, obviously, scholasticism. In scholasticism, philosophy is in the service of theology. It also stood against a view called the doctrine of two truths,
01:03:45
Speaker
That basically says that philosophy and theology might arrive at two different truths and that's okay. Maybe each of them is valid in their own way. Aquinas says no to both of those things.
01:03:58
Speaker
If you go down the path of philosophy and you go down the path of theology, you will arrive at the same destination. Now, the reason why it's very good of us to finish with Aquinas is because A, this is sort of a time when reason is being rekindled.
01:04:21
Speaker
Here you see Aquinas giving philosophy a real shot, just saying, let's see where this takes us. But at the same time, people weren't ready for it.
01:04:34
Speaker
His work was deemed too controversial. around the time of his death. And he was actually excommunicated from the church a few years after he died. Now, eventually, he does get canonized as a saint, but not immediately, right? People weren't ready for it yet.
01:04:56
Speaker
And so you can see here that that he is a good sort of end point for our discussion of the Dark Ages. It wasn't time yet.
01:05:08
Speaker
The reopening of the Western mind had to be a gradual process because they had been and their dark ages for centuries. So that's maybe the only way that it could have gone.
01:05:23
Speaker
What happens after Aquinas? Well, quite a few things. For one, there was a man named William of Ockham that we won't get to cover in this class, but I'll make sure he gets a special place in my Philosophy 101 course.
01:05:41
Speaker
Let's move into the history of Western Europe after Aquinas. So again, Aquinas dies in 1274 and in the next century, we're going to see some major, major events in both the history of Europe and also the history of the church.
01:06:04
Speaker
And these are in general bad events. In fact, this is called the crisis of the late middle ages. The first thing that happens is known as the great famine that begins in 1315. And basically you had some really bad rainfall. It wasn't a drought. It was the opposite too much rainfall and it destroys the crops.
01:06:30
Speaker
food prices skyrocket and millions starve as a result. too Next, there is a conflict between England and France over what else? Territory.
01:06:43
Speaker
And this turns into over a century of intermittent fighting. And for that reason, this is dubbed the Hundred Years' War. This is not good for the population once more.
01:06:58
Speaker
The economies of both kingdoms were devastated. And of course, that is never good for the people on the front lines, right? The regular people. Next, you have a very interesting period in the history of the church. It's known as the Great Schism.
01:07:14
Speaker
And that is when there was actually two competing popes. And one was in Rome. and another was in Avignon, and each of them claimed that they were the true Pope, they had divine authority, and they wouldn't relent, right? So this was a very awkward, and there was actually a third Pope at a certain point.
01:07:35
Speaker
Let's not get into that. This does not look good, right? This undermines church authority. And for all these reasons, you get food scarcity and lots of war and the church doesn't know what it's doing, you start to get some peasant rebellions.
01:07:53
Speaker
So I have ah a list of quite a few rebellions here, but basically... many people were fed up with feudalism they were dissatisfied because they didn't own any land they had to work on someone else's land they had to give the lord a bunch of the crops that they harvested and so there's only so much of that you can take before you you know you get a rebellion right the pitchforks have to come out at some point
01:08:24
Speaker
Of course, this is the era of knights, and that means that those that were trained in combat were few and far in between, and typically they worked for the rich guy that owns all the land.
01:08:37
Speaker
And so most of these peasant rebellions were brutally suppressed. It was not a pretty thing. And so this is all bad news, as you can see. and I haven't even gotten to the worst thing about the 1300s.
01:08:54
Speaker
That would be ah Black Death.
01:08:59
Speaker
Now, I know you've heard of this one. I'll just give you a few tidbits here. the death toll was shocking.
01:09:10
Speaker
Half. half of the population was wiped out in some regions. If you were in areas where there was food scarcity, as I mentioned earlier, there was a lot of that going around, the mortality rate could be as high as 80%, meaning that out of the people that got this disease, 80% of them died.
01:09:35
Speaker
If you compare that with something like COVID, where I think the the mortality rate was like 2%, something like that, Well, 80% is substantially higher than 2%, you can tell that this is a much scarier disease Of course, because there was so much death going on, there was not enough labor to harvest all the grains.
01:10:01
Speaker
And so the landowners, the lords, they actually had to compete for peasants, right? In other words, peasants had some bargaining power.
01:10:12
Speaker
They said, how much are you paying today? Well, over there, they're paying this much. Can you match that? Can you do better than that? And so now this began to weaken this rigid feudal hierarchy that had been in place for a few centuries.
01:10:29
Speaker
So not only was feudalism coming to be undermined, but even the institution of the church was starting to lose its status.
01:10:42
Speaker
And I think you can easily see why. i mean, if everyone is dying, And the church says they can protect you. And the Lord says they can protect you. And people still die. Well, then people started realizing, oh, the church can't protect me.
01:11:00
Speaker
Oh, the church doesn't really know what this is. They say it's because we aren't worshiping God enough or something. But that's not it. People that worship God died just as frequently as people that didn't worship God. It seemed to be the case that this plague didn't really you know pick only the bad ones to kill. And the lords, they couldn't do anything about it either.
01:11:25
Speaker
So people just didn't trust their institutions anymore. And eventually, people had to find something else to believe in.
01:11:38
Speaker
It is during this time period that you get the rise of something called humanism. Now, humanism is not new. In fact, we talked about some of the first humanists in Western history in this course, some 1500 years prior to the time period we're talking about right now.
01:11:59
Speaker
I'm talking in particular ah about the sophists. And so now that people were challenging traditional authority figures New intellectual movements began to spring up and once again, people began to have faith in human reason.
01:12:18
Speaker
Divine revelation hadn't been cutting it for them anymore and these religious institutions we weren't really doing the trick either. So people wanted to shape the sort of societies that in the past had led to some sort of knowledge, right?
01:12:36
Speaker
And so what they wanted to do was revive ancient ways of thinking. And this brings us, perhaps surprisingly, to a bunch of dusty scrolls in ancient monasteries.
01:12:55
Speaker
I've only briefly talked about this, but the monastic tradition, right? That tradition that was in a sense begun by Anthony the Great and Pachomius and the other desert fathers, they, in a way, through their regimented reading practices, they actually helped bring about this new era of humanism and eventually of something called the Renaissance.
01:13:27
Speaker
How did this happen? Well, This has something to do with something called sacred reading. What is sacred reading? There's actually quite a few techniques that could be labeled sacred reading.
01:13:41
Speaker
Let's just focus on this one. What you're supposed to do if you're a monk and you have been tasked with sacred reading is read the text, usually scripture, in a very submissive way, right? You want to approach the text such that you have no preconceived notions and you are not challenging it in any way.
01:14:06
Speaker
you are fully just accepting whatever is being read and you also by the way have full attentional autonomy during that reading and the general idea here is that if you're reading scripture You need to, you know, be focused on it and accept it fully. And if you aren't focused on it or aren't accepting it fully, well, that's a sign of maybe demonic temptation, right?
01:14:35
Speaker
So that is sacred reading, or at least one kind of sacred reading. And because this was a regular practice in monasteries,
01:14:47
Speaker
Monks had to have books and they also had to have books to practice on, right? Maybe non-scriptural books, right? Maybe even books on philosophy.
01:15:00
Speaker
And so because they needed texts to do the sacred reading on, monks actually preserved a great deal of texts.
01:15:12
Speaker
They learned all the things that they had to learn to be able to do this, how to make the paper, how to make the ink, all these different conventions for what ended up being, you know, the mechanics of writing, right?
01:15:29
Speaker
Question marks and periods, I think, were invented during this time period. And so these monks in their isolated monasteries actually kept alive many texts from the ancient world and so after the black death had ravaged western europe and the humanist movement came to be some humanists realized it would be a good idea to go to some of these monasteries and find some of these classical works on philosophy if they exist.
01:16:09
Speaker
So they went on a sort of philosophical treasure hunt. And lo and behold, they found something. Some of the dusty scrolls that they recovered had works of philosophy on them.
01:16:25
Speaker
Now, again, this is a very, very small fraction of the total amount of texts that were produced in the ancient world. But still, it's something, right?
01:16:37
Speaker
And these writings had been sitting there for centuries,
01:16:45
Speaker
waiting to be reborn.