Broomstick wrote:Androsphinx wrote:I think you have it the wrong way round. It wasn't a conclusion, but one stage in the argument that the intellectual climate of Rome found Christianity very attractive due to some of its philosophical underpinnings and implications - specifically its direct identification of God as First Cause, human sin as the cause of evil, the idea of "logos" as some animating or creative spirit and so on - which were big Neoplatonic and Stolic themes at the time.
Right. That's why there's graffiti at Pompeii and Herculaneum portraying Christians as kneeling before a crucified donkey.
That philosophy and intellectual culture was formulated under a pagan society... some highly educated Romans (and others) might have found Christianity intriguing in the same way we might find a new species of bug interesting, but that's hardly the same as a drive to adopt a new religion, particularly one that was being persecuted at the time and also strongly associated with non-Roman barbarians, weird cults (the Jews), the poor, the slaves, and so on. My
gawd, those Christians would accept ANYONE into the club! Egalitarianism was NOT a feature of any society of the ancient world.
The vast majority of Romans didn't engage in philosophical discussions - they were much too busy trying to get by, like most people in most times and places.
Really? There are any number of highly educated people like Clement of Alexandria, Appollonius and Athenagoras and Evodius and Justin Marytr - you know, the leaders, apologists and propagandists of this movement - who had strong philosophical backgrounds.
As I said above, I wasn't arguing that this was the major driving factor at all - I mentioned it as an addendum to a list of other factors. But to try to argue that a large popular movement meant that there was no educated and intellectual element is ridiculous.
Darth Wong wrote:Once again, you have failed to give even a single reason for anyone to consider this book, because you have explained or described absolutely nothing but your usual vague name-dropping. Why should this recommendation of yours be taken any more seriously than Oprah's Book Club, when you have apparently read it yet remain incapable of explaining a single argument from it?
It's six hundred pages long, and traces eight hundred years of development on three continents. What exactly would you like me to quote from it? I recommended it because I found it to be - if not the lightest or best-written book - a very good overview of the period which is now a standard university text, written by a reputable scholar (Fellow of All Souls, last seen at Princeton) and with a large and up-to-date (it was revised in I think 2002) bibliography which would provide plenty of options for further reading. What more would you like me to say? Are you an expert in late-Antiquity, Dark Ages and early Medieval Europe that you can assess the value of the book and its academic worth by a paragraph I transcribe?
Based on what? You have failed to explain even the most cursory elements of this point you're making.
The monotheistic character of Christianity and the advantages that gave it in its ascendency had already been mentioned. I just added that the philosophical climate in the Empire at that time contained a number of movements which found considerably more commonality with Christianity than with polytheism. This is hardly a radical suggestion, and I'm at a loss to see what you find so objectionable with it.
