My deepest apologies for the misapprehension. I searched databases and the one David Kaiser historian I found was the MIT one, so I assumed. It is also a matter of prolific production of papers -- and my bad that I seldom look into popular books.
My apologies as well for the nitpicking. I am a nitpicker, it is one of my major traits, and at this peculiar time the concentration on details allows me to evade the state of deep anguish that I experience.
I hope that despite the nitpicking, I managed to get through my appreciation for your article.
As for the Byzantine Empire... it depends on what you mean by keeping the ancient intellectual tradition alive. Christianity had put its lens over everything very heavily and there was no corner of that which could be lifted. This prevented the rational tradition from progressing AS IF it were a homogeneous flow from the scholarly tenets of classical antiquity. But while in the territories of the Western Roman Empire the classical texts disappeared from the cultural discourse, mostly except from references used to bolster religious positions, and they were preserved, when this happened, in the scriptoria of monasteries by being copied by amanuenses who more often than not did the work as mindless labour and were ignorant of the language they copied (especially when this was Greek) -- in the Byzantine Empire, where people spoke Greek despite Latin remained the official language until Heraclius, and where most of the great libraries of Constantinople were never destroyed (that is, until the sack by the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the 13th Century), things were different. Most classic texts that had been lost for centuries and their commentaries came back west from the Eastern Empire (partly also because of the exodus caused by that ignoble act of war), which is widely held to be one of the first causes of the Early Renaissance until another exodus from the East, after the Fall of Constantinople, fully started what we call Renaissance in the 15th Century.
In fewer words, classical culture was retrieved in the West from the Byzantines and from the Arab scholars that had translated Greek philosophical and scientific works (the reason that allows Dante to put Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo together with Vergil, among the great wise men who had not known Christ and so could not be damned).
On the Byzantine preservation of Greek and Roman classical culture (albeit enveloped by Christianity) this article expounds more than I ever could as I am not specifically a Byzantinist: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272
My whole point is, I guess, that there never was a complete disappearance of classical culture from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance, and that it was not due to a different set of ideas taking over. The hiatus in the west was caused by overwhelming material factors: the collapse of the entire administrative structure of the Empire under the pressure of a new religion on many points incompatible with it, added to the the influx of great masses of war-waging populations with vastly different culture from the Greco-Roman one, who yet were rapidly subsumed under Christianity. This cultural, economic and social earthquake almost obliterated classical antiquity in the West. Not so much in the East, from where it came back several centuries later.
And if we consider that the Enlightenment is born not as ideas exclusively descended from classical culture, but from classical culture mediated through Christianity and the ancient Germanic ethos both, together with the demands of the new state of things engendered by the Industrial Revolution -- then we see the inevitable continuity rather than the dividing chasm.
To say: I strongly agree on the need to support the Enlightenment at a time when its principles are being attacked from within and without. But I do not believe that the comparison with the cultural upheaval that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire is warranted -- not until a similar socio-cultural-economic cataclysm happens, including war, devastation, famine and drastic regime changes.
In the first 40 years of last century the West found itself very close to that edge, with Fascism and Communism threatening the existence of the Enlightenment begotten world from within and without. We may find ourselves today in a similar though different plight. But I do not believe it is time yet to sound the death toll.
My deepest apologies for the misapprehension. I searched databases and the one David Kaiser historian I found was the MIT one, so I assumed. It is also a matter of prolific production of papers -- and my bad that I seldom look into popular books.
My apologies as well for the nitpicking. I am a nitpicker, it is one of my major traits, and at this peculiar time the concentration on details allows me to evade the state of deep anguish that I experience.
I hope that despite the nitpicking, I managed to get through my appreciation for your article.
As for the Byzantine Empire... it depends on what you mean by keeping the ancient intellectual tradition alive. Christianity had put its lens over everything very heavily and there was no corner of that which could be lifted. This prevented the rational tradition from progressing AS IF it were a homogeneous flow from the scholarly tenets of classical antiquity. But while in the territories of the Western Roman Empire the classical texts disappeared from the cultural discourse, mostly except from references used to bolster religious positions, and they were preserved, when this happened, in the scriptoria of monasteries by being copied by amanuenses who more often than not did the work as mindless labour and were ignorant of the language they copied (especially when this was Greek) -- in the Byzantine Empire, where people spoke Greek despite Latin remained the official language until Heraclius, and where most of the great libraries of Constantinople were never destroyed (that is, until the sack by the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the 13th Century), things were different. Most classic texts that had been lost for centuries and their commentaries came back west from the Eastern Empire (partly also because of the exodus caused by that ignoble act of war), which is widely held to be one of the first causes of the Early Renaissance until another exodus from the East, after the Fall of Constantinople, fully started what we call Renaissance in the 15th Century.
In fewer words, classical culture was retrieved in the West from the Byzantines and from the Arab scholars that had translated Greek philosophical and scientific works (the reason that allows Dante to put Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo together with Vergil, among the great wise men who had not known Christ and so could not be damned).
On the Byzantine preservation of Greek and Roman classical culture (albeit enveloped by Christianity) this article expounds more than I ever could as I am not specifically a Byzantinist: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272
My whole point is, I guess, that there never was a complete disappearance of classical culture from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance, and that it was not due to a different set of ideas taking over. The hiatus in the west was caused by overwhelming material factors: the collapse of the entire administrative structure of the Empire under the pressure of a new religion on many points incompatible with it, added to the the influx of great masses of war-waging populations with vastly different culture from the Greco-Roman one, who yet were rapidly subsumed under Christianity. This cultural, economic and social earthquake almost obliterated classical antiquity in the West. Not so much in the East, from where it came back several centuries later.
And if we consider that the Enlightenment is born not as ideas exclusively descended from classical culture, but from classical culture mediated through Christianity and the ancient Germanic ethos both, together with the demands of the new state of things engendered by the Industrial Revolution -- then we see the inevitable continuity rather than the dividing chasm.
To say: I strongly agree on the need to support the Enlightenment at a time when its principles are being attacked from within and without. But I do not believe that the comparison with the cultural upheaval that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire is warranted -- not until a similar socio-cultural-economic cataclysm happens, including war, devastation, famine and drastic regime changes.
In the first 40 years of last century the West found itself very close to that edge, with Fascism and Communism threatening the existence of the Enlightenment begotten world from within and without. We may find ourselves today in a similar though different plight. But I do not believe it is time yet to sound the death toll.
Thanks very much--that all makes sense.