The Monastery of Gregoriou, GreeceMonasteries as saviors of western civilization. Presumably we will have just as much dust-up about my embracing the Spanish Inquisition with this post as we did about my "embracing fascist Zionism."
The Monastery of Gregoriou, Greece
12 comments:
Just wait for the fur to fly when someone raises the epic "Ginger vs. Mary Ann" issue....which naturally raises "Wilma vs. Betty" and thence, the apocalyptic "Alice vs. Trixie" controversy.
And for those of you keeping score at home, put me down for "all three Andrews Sisters simultaneously"....
End times indeed...
So what do Greek Orthodox have to do with western monasticism?
The Orthodox are the original Christians and were behaving themselves long before the abuses of the Catholics - which led to their separation from the Orthodox.
In modern times, the ecumanists have pretty much taken over the new calendar Orthodox - but they are still no comparison to the age of indulgences.
You know you're gettin' old when you still have impure thoughts about the Andrews sisters. Or even if you know who the Andrews sisters are.
Which begs the question....in 30 or 40 years, whose songs will be reminders of the coming unpleasantness?
"So what do Greek Orthodox have to do with western monasticism?"
Oh, for Ghu's sake. I was looking for a picture of a militarily-defensible monastery late at night. So sue me. At least I didn't pick a Buddhist one.
4:32, the roman catholics are also the original christians; saints Peter and Paul having relocated themselves to Rome. (you anti catholic biggot) Simon Bar Jonah, (whom CHRIST himself renamed PETER) was the first POPE of the roman catholic church, and none of your hatred of us can change that. the great scism can be mutually blamed on the roman and orthodox churches, in the time following the Constantinian Change.
You can expect more of these disagreements as things go forward. I'd advise getting used to them.
I'm Catholic. My brother is Russian Orthodox. My mother is Lutheran. I have close friends who are fundamentalists and close friends who are agnostics. We disagree on about 10%, which is a whole lot less than the 99% we disagree with our Muslim/Communist administration. I would suggest that we shut up and smile about the 10% we disagree with each other and keep careful watch over our real enemies.
History teaches that politics and religion are two thing that ultimately are only decided by force of arms. Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean.
Sigh...
Re the OP, the contribution of the Celtic monks (who were even more strictly ascetic than the Benedictines if you can imagine that) to preserving the written works of ancient Greece and Rome is well accepted by historians if not widely known in general.
Great article. It's a 'keeper'.
My only complaint (you knew I had to have one, didn't you?) is that an article about scholarly pursuits deserves to be proof-read, edited, and error-corrected prior to publication. There are enough grammatical and syntactical errors there to make me flinch before recommending it onward.
That's one of the many reasons I'm a friend of the local Trappist monastery.
I see parabarbarian is conversant in the Warhammer 40k theme...
But hey, after all...
NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
...Nobody will expect the three percent, either, methinks.
You'll get no argument from me about this article. But somehow, I doubt your ancient Celtic or my Gothic ancestors would agree that preserving Greco-Roman sivilization (Mark Twain's spelling) was all that good an idea. But duhhh. Greco-Romans preserved the history, didn't they?
Considering the sivilized house of cards we've built on that basis, I gotta ask whether our ancient ancestors mightn't have had a case. Read the history of the mound builders in your AO. Houses of cards have been built on this continent before. They collapse with a clatter.
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