This order’s detestation of the "heathen" books was of the deepest virulence, and the fires of their hatred turned into physical flames first at Antioch, as described in
Acts, and, says Higgins, were repeatedly rekindled by a succession of councils up to the last canon of the Council of Trent against heathen learning. They sequestered many books for their later destruction.
"Here we have the cause, and almost the sole cause, which effected the darkness of the world for many generations." Higgins relates (p. 565) that St. Gregory is said by John of Salisbury to have burnt the imperial library of the Apollo. (
Forsythe’s Travels, p. 134.)
The Victor Tunensis, already mentioned, was, according to Higgins and Lardner, the agent of considerable destruction of Gospels about the sixth century, and probably by order of the Emperor Anastasius at Constantinople.
Some twenty-four volumes of the works of the great Gnostic philosopher Basilides,--extolled so highly by Clement of Alexandria--his splendid
Interpretations Upon the Gospels, were all burned by order of the Church, Eusebius tells us. These works alone might have
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changed the course of Western history into pleasanter channels than those of bigotry and slaughter.
Mead is authority for the reported burning of the manuscripts of French Rabbis by the Inquisition. He says that for one thousand years the Christian authorities hurled all kinds of bulls, anathemas and edicts of confiscation and conflagration against the Talmud. He cites, too, the vandal acts of the fanatical Crusaders, who left smoldering piles of Hebrew scrolls behind them in their path of blood and fire. Official burnings of Hebrew books began at Montpellier in 1233, where a Jew, an Anti-Maimonist, persuaded the Dominicans and Franciscans of the Inquisition, likely unaware of the purely internal conflict between exotericism and esotericism in Jewry, to commit to the flames all the works of Maimonides. In the same year at Paris some twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud were burned, and in 1244 eighteen thousand various works were fed to the flames.
The story of the destruction, not only of books, but of cities, monasteries and temples, of the early pre-Christian Gaelic civilization in Britain, Ireland, Brittany and Gaul, is a sorry narrative of Christian fury. A Christian mob destroyed the city of Bibractis in 389 in Gaul, and Alesia was destroyed before that. Bibractis had a sacred college of the Druids with forty thousand students, giving courses in philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, architecture and esoteric religion. Arles, founded 2000 years before Christ, was sacked in 270 A.D.
A statement in Westrop and Wake’s
Phallism in Ancient Religions charges Cardinal Ximenes with having burned the old Arabic manuscripts. And Draper shows that the same Ximenes "delivered to the flames in the squares of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, among them translations of the classical authors." Wilder states that thirty-six volumes written by Porphyry were destroyed by the Fathers.
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The Dark Ages didn't exist. The era is a myth. But one religion that IS going through a cultural Dark Age is Islam. As historian David Starkey said on Question Time the other week: "What great culture and scientific advancement has come from Islam in the last 500 years?" Nothing whatsoever.
You and I live in this age BL and as your posts usually make great leaps affirming just that. The dark of the Dark Ages refers to lost wisdom of the ages past before this present excuse for an age of enlightenment.
Christian resistance against Jihad timeline
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9W1S89aDDc
istorical highlights of Christianity's armed struggle of survival against Islam, will complete video series up to the 20th century.
This video goes through the century's of major Islamic atrocity's to the Christian world before any Crusade was launched. ( 632 AD - 1061 AD )
The
Encyclopedia speaks (XII, p. 765) of "a revival of learning as soon as the West was capable of it"--after being under Christian tutelage for a thousand years.
At a moment when the conscience of cultured people everywhere is horrified at the savage atrocities of a nation diabolically committed to violence, it might be well to remind those on the side of Christian resentment against "pagan" barbarity, that when the Christian Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides on July 15, 1099, they slew its inhabitants regardless of age or sex, while Saladin committed no act of outrage.
. E. Ellam, in his
Buddhism and Modern Thought (p. 140), puts in brief compass and strong terms the degradation of Europe under Christianity:
"Yet the moral level of Europe was lower than that of any savages of whom we have record. Its barbarities and cruelties, its vices and brutality, would have scandalized even Dahomey and Benin. Cyril of Alexandria has a lurid description of the vices even of his own followers. Augustine says much the same of ‘the faithful’ in Roman Africa. Silvianus, a priest of the fifth century, writes: ‘Besides a very few who avoid evil, what is almost the whole body of Christians but a sink of iniquity? How many in the Church will you find that are not drunkards, or adulterers, or fornicators, or gamblers, or robbers, or murderers,--or all together?’" (Silvianus:
On the Providence of God, III, 9.)
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