A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

centred introduction to critical thinking skills. Working with colleagues, now
close friends, from all over the world and from a variety of disciplines, our
debates are models of what intellectual enquiry should be. When I read of
friends copying out and circulating manuscripts to each other across the fourthcentury
world, I feel at home with them for this very reason. The papyrus roll or
parchment codex might have taken longer to arrive than an e-mail, but arrive it
did with a degree of efficiency that was remarkable. It would be many, many
centuries before literate elites would communicate again so easily across the
Mediterranean world (and some would argue we have not yet recovered the
freedom of debate enjoyed then). I hope that the traditions of toleration and free
enquiry survive somewhat better in the twenty-first century than they did in the
fourth.
Charles Freeman