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

short, the spread of Christianity involved a process of collaboration between
local rulers, the partisans of local holy men, and ancient spiritual forces.
This is a very different cultural world from that of the Romans. In the
declining years of the empire, it was still possible for a man to enjoy a traditional
education in the classics. Boethius’ famous Consolation of Philosophy (c.524) is
a work by a Christian rooted in the classical world and infused with the
philosophy of Plato. Born c-480, Boethius translated Aristotle’s books on logic
in a form that enabled them to survive in the west while most of Aristotle’s work
vanished for 800 years. He was planning to compile a major work in which the
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was integrated when he was arrested,
imprisoned and executed by Theodoric (514-526), whom he served as an
administrator. Another of Theodoric’s Roman civil servants, Cassiodorus (490-
c.585), spent his last years gathering ancient manuscripts in his estate at
Vivarium in southern Italy, where monks copied them for him. A century later,
Isidore, the Bishop of Seville from 600 to 635, compiled a large etymology of
Latin words: a reconstruction of his sources suggests he had a library of some
200 authors with perhaps 475 separate works. This can be compared with the
third-century Roman library of the poet Serenus Sammonicus with its 62,000
papyrus rolls.
During this period many ancient manuscripts must have decayed and
disappeared. We do not know what happened to the libraries of the scholars
described in earlier chapters. Most of Origen’s thousand works, part of what was
the most celebrated Christian library in the ancient world, at Caesarea in
Palestine, seem to have been discarded when he was declared heretical. It has
been suggested that some of the finest libraries of ancient Rome, those of the
imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill and those in Trajan’s sumptuous forum,
were destroyed during a siege of Rome in 546. There is some evidence that one
or two private libraries were preserved in Rome and Ravenna. Overall, however,
hundreds of thousands of works must have been discarded, allowed to rot, or
consumed by fire.
The disappearance of books went hand in hand with a slump in literacy. It is
true that the Church still expected its clergy to be able to read and write - and
Pope Gregory in particular was determined to maintain standards among his
clergy - but even so there was a dramatic decline in proficiency. In sixth-century
Gaul, the aristocratic Gregory, Bishop of Tours from 573 until his death in 594,
explained that he felt impelled to write his Ecclesiastical History of the Franks
when those around him lamented: ‘Woe to our day, since the pursuit of letters