Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott

Author:Emmet Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780578094182
Publisher: World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press
Published: 2011-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

Boethius has been called by Lorenzo Valla the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastic philosophers. Nonetheless, there is nothing medieval in his thinking: He is entirely a man of classical antiquity, and it is evident that the great transformation which brought Graeco-Roman culture to an end had, in his age, not yet occurred. He was a Christian, and yet, “while accepting the principle of revealed faith, he was not averse to using his own reason to buttress it.”[3] Indeed, his thinking is so pervaded by the rationalism of Greece that his Christianity, notwithstanding the fact that the Church considers him a saint, has long been questioned.[4] Such hypotheses however are unnecessary. Christian civilization of the fifth and sixth centuries was not the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages, and the influence of the ancients, of the “pagan” thinkers of classical antiquity, had not yet been sidelined. It was still perfectly acceptable for a writer to be a Christian and a follower of Plato. In the words of one author, “… while eager and courageous spirits were contending for the Faith … throughout the Empire, men (and some of them Christian men) were writing and speaking as though no thing as Christianity had come into the world. And the age that witnessed the conversion of Constantine and inherited the benefits of that act was an age that in the East listened to the interminable hexameters of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, which contain no conscious reference to Christianity; that laughed over the epigrams of Cyrus; that delighted in many frankly pagan love-stories and saw nothing surprising in the attribution of one of them (the Aethiopica) to the Christian bishop Heliodorus; that in the West applauded the panegyrists when they compared emperor and patron to the hierarchy of gods and heroes.”[5]

The other great mind of the time was Cassiodorus. Cassiodorus was born at Scylletium, near Catanzaro in southern Italy, of a family that was apparently Syrian in origin. He began his career as councilor to his father, the governor of Sicily, and made a name for himself while still very young as learned in the law. During his working life, as quaestor between 507 and 511, as a consul in 514, then as magister officiorum under Theodoric and his successor, Athalaric, Cassiodorus kept copious records concerning public affairs. At the Gothic court, his literary manner, which appears overly stylized and rhetorical to a modern reader, was accounted so remarkable that, whenever he was in Ravenna, significant public documents were often entrusted to him for drafting. Ultimately he was appointed praetorian prefect for Italy, effectively the prime ministership of the Ostrogothic civil government and a high honor to finish any career. His promotion seems to have coincided with Boethius’ execution, though, understandably enough, he makes no mention of this in his writings.[6]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.