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Category: Destruction of Greco-Roman world

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Celsus Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Free speech / association Porphyry of Tyre

Ancient book burning

Excerpts from Roger Pearse’s review of Joseph Hoffmann’s Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains:
 

The sixteen-book work by the Neoplatonist Porphyry Against the Christians is lost. Constantine ordered that all copies should be destroyed; a century later Theodosius tacitly acknowledged that this had not occurred by issuing a similar edict.

Constantine_burning_Arian_books
Constantine burning Arian books

Porphyry adopted an “idiot-boy” literalism as his tool to debunk. Anything that could be made to sound discreditable, anything that did not fit with the tenor of contemporary prejudice, any statement that could be made to sound contradictory, could be presented as a reason to deride the Christians. However, such a approach is unimpressive to anyone except a believer. Such people could have their faith in anti-Christianism bolstered, and be encouraged to sneer and have gibes ready to throw. But the unconvinced reader would see easily that such statements can be made about anything, however worthy.

Instead, the essential argument is an appeal to the irrational herd-instinct of mankind and its need to conform. Many of Porphyry’s arguments consist simply of assertion that something is shameful or embarrassing, rather than rational discussion. This can only work if the flavour of the times is such that the subject is unfashionable. To look for a modern analogy, modern readers will be aware that “anti-racism” has not acquired the power it has in our society by rational argument. Instead it relies on repeated assertion and intimidation, to create a climate in which only certain ideas can be said. In the ancient world, likewise, certain ideas went without saying. The Christian ethos was not part of this; and indeed, as a novelty, was embarrassing. The idea that the poor might be important was disgusting. Porphyry simply harps on the subconscious need to the reader to conform to what he knows society expects, rather than reasoning objectively what is right.

But once the times changed, the approach worked in reverse. It was Porphyry’s ideas that went against the tenor of the times.

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Ancient Rome Celsus Cicero Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emigration / immigration Porphyry of Tyre Tacitus

The Roman legacy

by Manu Rodríguez (translated from Spanish)



Rome not only opened Europe’s doors to our Greek brothers, but also to the Syrians, and the Phoenicians, and Jews, and the Persians, and to the Egyptians…

It was a flood, a deluge of Eastern cults. Finally, nothing could be saved because we were not anchored onto anything solid. Uprooted, we went astray after a process of self-destruction that had even corroded our very roots, our very fundamentals (courtesy of our Cynic and Skeptic philosophers and Stoics). We navigated adrift, without a North; a wind without North. We laid at the mercy of anyone, of any clever devil. And that’s what happened to us: a clever devil caught us, and we were held captive in his cave for more than a thousand and five hundred years.

In no way did we need any morality or Eastern cult. The European natives (indigenae, born of the interior) had their own gods (indigetes, divinities of the interior), i.e., their own laws, norms, morals. We were doing well: they were the treasures of the families, the ancestral legacy. While these values were maintained nothing bad could happen to us.

It was the contempt for such symbolic significances what marked the beginning of our decline and ruin: the neglect of our being. We should have been stronger. Instead, notice our superficiality in detaching ourselves from the highest value; our folly, our decline, our stupidity, our decadence, our weakness. We disappointed our parents who are in heaven. We were perfidious, unfaithful, disloyal, infidels; unfair.

Anyone who abandons his people, his mother country, is an outcast, a bastard. Those who abandon their Fathers and their legacy, these are the true stateless. They have no country, no parents; they’re only infidels. But that was precisely our behavior. That’s what they did, by force or degree, all of our ancestors: the Romans, Greeks, Germans, Celts, Slavs… All of them disowned the Fathers during the fateful Christianization of Europe. I speak for our ancestors. Upon us falls such guilt, such error, such treachery.

We, the present generations of Europeans, have to repair such perfidy, such disloyalty. We must reclaim the thread with our ancestors, the legacy; give it life again.

♣

Here’s what we missed, what we throw overboard, what was lost of our sight. I speak of the genius of Rome, from her being and her becoming, of a living branch of the Indo-European tree that has not perished. Of her success and failure we must all learn. They succeeded in both keeping their identity, which made them strong, and their ethical significances, moral and civic, so familiar.

The symbolic significances I mention below are taken from the Atlas of World History by Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, page 88. They are slogans that provide strength and firmness, and moral courage. They were the weapons that we could have used then, and failed to do; but we can use them now. There is still time. It is time to recover what makes us strong and asserts us. Let’s see if those significances remain valid. The following is a summary.

The preservation ( disciplina potestas) of the domestic or household order is made by the father (both parents we would say today without objection), by the authority (sapientia), the maturity of judgment (consilium) and integrity (probitas). The circumspection (diligentia), the rigor (severitas), and self-control (continentia, and temperantia) define the solemn character (gravitas) of their actions, acquired by the industriousness (industria) and tenacity (constantia). The offspring are educated in adult models (mos maiorum). Humility (modestia) and worship (reverentia) are the virtues that should govern the relationship of the younger generation with the older. Young people are also demanded obedience (obsequium), respect (verecundia) and purity (pudicitia, integritas morum).

As for the training of citizens this is what it says: Valor (virtus), independence of judgment and action (libertas), glory, devotion (pietas), fidelity or reliability (fides) and propriety in public life (dignitas) constitute the ideal virtues of a Roman citizen; something that he must put in the service of the community (res publica) in order to contribute to a greater power and greatness of his people (maiestas populi romani). The common good is the highest law (salus populi suprema lex).


I also recommend the reading of the treatise De officiis (On Duties) of Cicero.

Each of these Latin terms has a wider semantic field that expresses the translation (that I copied from the original). The auctoritas had a sense of moral standing, as when we say “so and so is an authority in a particular science or branch of knowledge.” The sapientia is both the wisdom, knowledge as intelligence, sanity. Pietas is the devotion we owe to the manes or Parents, the elder (mos maiorum) and to the res publica, the mother country. Sacrae patria deserere and deserere patriam were Roman expressions that designated desertion of the Fathers and the adoption of a foreign religion. Gloria is precisely fame, good reputation, be renown; reaching general and public honors after a cursus honorum full of merit, in the service of my people, for the greater glory of my people.

These values can be reclaimed today with dignity and without any demerit.

I remind my fellow citizens this past story because presently Europe (and the Magna Europe) runs a similar risk to that loss in the ancient world. This time it will be much worse because it is foreign people and foreign to our being what will dominate us. That was a purely ideological domination; this will also be a demographic domination. We will be clearly disadvantaged on earth and in heaven.

♣

The decline was soon shown in Greece (since the Alexandrian period) and Rome (since the Carthaginian wars): corruption, despotism, injustice, immorality, treachery—in all areas of life. Polybius and Cicero warned in Rome, and Columella and Sallust, Tacitus, Persius and Juvenal. Everyone noticed it and pleaded: “Go back to the sources, Roman: return to the Fathers, purify and recover the aura, the prestige (auctoritas), the majesty.” All in vain. The echo of that failure still resonates today.

No, it was not the alien cults, nor the Jews or the Christians… It was us, our indifference and our nihilism, the cause of our destruction. There laid our weakness. We were not up to par. We failed to respond adequately to the Christian apologists, for example. There was no Demosthenes, no Cicero in the first Christian centuries. We watched them destroy our foundations. The philosophical schools provided arguments to the Christian propagandists (criticism of our gods, traditions and customs, our values). We weakened the security and confidence in ourselves, in our science, knowledge and powers. The future lords of Europe had little to add.

Doesn’t this story sound familiar to you, European? Behold our times. Haven’t we for more than two centuries been destroying ourselves? Which result we get from our current nihilism, our skepticism, our relativism, our political, moral and cultural indifference; our profound boredom? We repeat that history. We make the same mistakes. Again, we will be defeated.

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Ancient Rome Art Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Zeus

The fall of Rome

“But the advances made by Jewish theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and the robber.”

—Theodor Mommsen, in Provinces of the
Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian


1.

Constantine the Great, also Saint Constantine (Emperor from 306 to 337 C.E.) has been described as a monster even for the standards of the ancient world. Catholic historian Paul Johnson wrote about him: “Constantine had no respect for human life, and as emperor he executed his eldest son, his own second wife, his favorite sister’s husband.”

The Roman Emperor inaugurated the Christianization of public life. He sanctioned with death penalty, instead of the traditional exile, those who published anonymous libels. His dispositions for death penalty were extremely severe, and I would like to know if it is true what I have read in a book: that under Constantine tortures such as pouring molten lead into the mouths of some women who had violated certain laws accompanied death penalty.

In 330 Constantine condemned the Neoplatonic School. Sopater of Apamea, a distinguished Neoplatonist philosopher was one of many who were put to death by Constantine.

Under Constantine’s reign pagans were referred to as “foolish,” “people without morals,” and their religion “a hotbed of discord,” “a fatal error,” “empire of darkness,” and “madness that has ruined whole nations.” However, while Julian said that Constantine was a “destroyer of ancient and venerable constitutions,” throughout the centuries Constantine has been much praised by Christian apologists.

Constantine was the first Roman Emperor who ordered the destruction of the intellectual work of Porphyry, the best mind of his age, whose work I briefly discussed in a recent entry. During his campaign of looting of the sculptures and shrines, Constantine did not even respect the famous tripods for the pythia of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The historian Kornemann notes that this was “a larceny of works of art never seen in Greece before.”

After Constantine’s death, his sons Constans and Constantius shared the empire of their father for some time, and only aggravated the all-out, state-sponsored assault on the Hellenic culture.

Under Constans the first destructions, not only loots, of the temples themselves were perpetrated, albeit sporadically. Under Constantius, who appears well described in Gore Vidal’s novel, the most fanatic Christians attacked the altars and temples. The deacon Cyril of Heliopolis, for example, became famous with his actions. The Arethusa in Syria, the priest Marco demolished an ancient shrine. At Caesarea in Cappadocia, the Christian community razed a temple of Zeus, the patron of the city, and another of Apollo.

Under the reigns of both Constantius and Constans, Firmicus Maternus preached the looting: “Out of all pagan temples ornaments! The mint and the crucible with the metal of the idolatrous statues, melt them in the heat of the flames!” In one of his pamphlets Firmicus incited extermination of the pagan cults, including those of Dionysus-Bacchus and Aphrodite.

But most of the temples of the classical world were still upright. The Christian agitator declaimed: “Take away without fear the ornaments of the temples! Melt the figures of gods and coin your money! The Lord has called to the task of annihilate all temples!” Always invoking the god of the Jews, this Sicilian lawyer from upper nobility claimed being an heir of biblical hecatombs as no Christian had done before.

In a subsequent post we shall see what happened to our civilization after this war of cultural extermination inspired by the cult that repudiated the Greco-Roman Gods, and adored instead the zealous, “no other gods before me” god of the Jews.

(Source: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, Vol. I, 1986, by Karlheinz Deschner)

2.

“In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.”

—Edward Gibbon

All Roman emperors after Julian would be Christians. Theodosius “the Great” and the subsequent emperors only completed the destruction of the Greco-Roman spirit that had started with Constantine and his sons. Not only the magnificent temples of worship of antiquity were destroyed almost everywhere, irreplaceable buildings of artistic value that transmitted like nothing else the soul of Hellenic culture, but even until the tenth century the fanatical worshipers of the god of the Jews continued smashing the statues that depicted the divinity of Man like no other art before.

But the most tremendous destruction occurred in the field of education. From the time of St. Paul at Ephesus, church censorship was devoted to the burning of books. After Julian the flourishing book trade disappeared in antiquity, whilst the activity of the monasteries was purely receptive. In the universities the hypertrophy of Aristotelianism aborted any possibility of independent research. In the Middle Ages what I call “real history” was completely unknown, and the sciences were drowned.

With this knowledge I venture to answer a question that has perplexed historians since the Enlightenment: What caused the fall of Rome?

German professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of two hundred theories on why Rome fell. Everything has been postulated—from lead poisoning and environmental degradation to Toynbee and many others’ diverse economic explanations—except the most obvious explanation. The simple truth is that the spirit of an alien, Semitic god undermined the soul of Classical Antiquity. After all, Gibbon himself assigned a major portion of the responsibility for the loss of civic virtue in Rome, and the ensuing decay of the Roman Empire, to the influence of Christianity. I would go further and claim that those unfamiliar with this work, which remains a literary landmark, lack the framework to understand why the Jew-god worshipers and their secular offspring are responsible for the ongoing Fall of the West. (Yes: I am blaming the Christians and the secular Christians who tolerate the Jews far more than I blame the Jews themselves.)

It is true that Rome’s eastern half survived almost a thousand years, until the Muslim conquests. But it was already a thoroughly petrogenic culture under the Medusan spell of Christian dogma. In fact, with its mongrelized citizens the population looked very different from the Latin Rome of the Republic.

3.

“The Skin of our Teeth” was the very first chapter of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation. About the loss of historical consciousness, in the first chapter of Civilisation, Clark said:

Civilized man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.

For over five hundred years this achievement was rare in Western Europe. It is a shock to realise that during all this time practically no lay person, from kings and emperors downwards, could read or write.

St. Gregory, who looks so intensely devoted to scholarship on a tenth century ivory, is credited with having destroyed many volumes of classical literature, even whole libraries, lest they seduced men’s minds away from the study of holy writ. And in this he was certainly not alone. What with prejudice and destruction, it’s surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth.

(Page 17 of the printed, Harper & Row book.)