Byzantine Logics

Submitted by Mozere (United Kingdom), Feb 4, 2013 at 05:38

Greeks may have invented critical thinking but they gave this up when Constantine made christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire,as E Gibbon says a self interested act of a hypocritical despot.Do the modern Greeks restore critical thinking in Hellas,I do not know.The very word byzantine means a tortuous,labyranthine and scheming way of thinking.The byzantines of constantinople were an arrogant bunch of elites(see Ibn Battudas travels there in 1340s) they reckoned that Attican Greeks were rude peasants,indigenous anatolians,Syrians and Copts as heretical and they endevoured to turn them into Greek speaking Ortodox obedient subjects by violent means,change plus ca change c'est la meme chose,they were ashamed to call themseves as hellenes as they were ashamed of the pagan connotations,instead they called themselves Romans (roumai).

Edward Gibbon,the great Englishman of enlightenment,sent shock waves through Hannoverian England when he blamed the demise of the Roman Empire not on the barbarians at the gates ,not on the decadence,but squarely on christianity,which he claimed,and I concur,led to loss of civic pride,bigotted intolerance,civil apathy,imminent milleniarism,he further goes on to describe how the christians went on to demolishing pagan buildings and libraries,ideas of critical thinking to expunge any vestiges of Greek culture of antiquity,Platos Acedemy was closed down by Justinian.Early christians were no Cof E tea party.

The classical Greek virtues of critical thinking,rhetorics,Aristetolian logic,grammar, natural sciences,Platonic method of questions and answers ,were awakened when the Arabs very quickly overran (as if by invitation) Syria and Egypt because this freed the intellectuals of these lands argueing about such arcane subjects as to the nature of trinity,homoeousus,the no of angels on a pins head,Arianism,nestorianism etc. .Also the Islamic Empire enabled the ancient greek wisdom to be cross fertilised by persian and Indian wisdom.

As the vulgar only needs blind faith this state of affairs slowly came to an end by the 12th century,last nail in the coffin of Islamic free thinking was driven in by Gazzali,the dour ascetic who shut out refinements in life this gave intellectual respectebility to fanaticism.It was at this time when the Turks burst onto scene,when Islamic learning was being ossified and reduced to a series of conformist formalisms.Thus the Turks in Anatolia did not see the fruits of the islamic philosophy's golden age .Consensus among the respectable historians is that critical thinking was conveyed to Europe not through Byzantine roumoi but through the islamic thinkers ,they ,the Europeans,liked also Islamic architecture so much that they turned some of the mosques into churches or palaces.

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