06-23-2021, 05:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-23-2021, 10:59 AM by RiverNotch.)
will wait for tomorrow (thanks for the feedback!) for a proper response, but i feel especially obligated to answer busker's charge xD
"flowerlike seat of domes" applies as much to Christian architecture, in particular *Eastern* Christian culture, as it does to Muslim architecture. While both styles came at flowery ornaments and layouts independently, as far as I know the domes were something the Muslims borrowed from the Christians.
The Christians, of course, borrowed their domes from the Romans, but not in the sense of trying to appropriate Roman identity. Rome encouraged its subjects to become more Roman, so Jews following principles of Roman architecture would have been the sort of appropriation the originators encouraged. As far as I have read, early churches that were built specifically to be churches were based on Roman tombs, as they were often built in commemoration of martyrs.
This demonstrates, of course, another refutation of one of your points. The decline of Christianity is already being blamed by many Christians on militant atheists, rather than on the various churches' own faults. In other words, for every fanatic, for every thuggish monk in service of Cyril of Alexandria, you had an Origen and an Augustine and a Jerome and a Basil and a Gregory the Theologian and a Gregory of Nyssa, you had a Christian who worked well within Greco-Roman intellectual traditions to further their own values.
Likewise, older (and newer) religions were rarely so monolithic. The Romans didn't even consider themselves to have a religion in the same way the Jews and Christians did until Julian the Apostate, and I would argue that Roman religious traditions, so deeply tied to their institutions of state, were already on their way out by the time of the Gracchi brothers. Later, you have the Muslims, who for all of their iconoclastic tendencies helped preserve whatever knowledge passed their way from already-crumbling Constantinople for sake of the somewhat ungrateful European scholars of the 15th to the 18th centuries.
The Dark Ages were a myth. As Rome struggled to survive in the face of multiple Germanic invasions, mechanical lions roared at the foot of the throne of Constantinople; and as the Latins threw the sophisticated society of Byzantium into disarray, streetlamps illuminated the Muslim city of Cordoba. Christians wiping out pagans, Muslims wiping out Christians, atheists wiping out religion: these are all myths, constructed as such in service of a sociopolitical program that originated from the West. Progress -- or the power it provides -- is far better served when the immediate past is worse than the present, and the distant past is an icon of the future.
And, for the record, I was born in and live in the third world, and there's a very good reason why Christianity -- or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Communism -- has such an appeal to us. Marx put it beautifully in one of his essays on Hegel:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
The Christians, of course, borrowed their domes from the Romans, but not in the sense of trying to appropriate Roman identity. Rome encouraged its subjects to become more Roman, so Jews following principles of Roman architecture would have been the sort of appropriation the originators encouraged. As far as I have read, early churches that were built specifically to be churches were based on Roman tombs, as they were often built in commemoration of martyrs.
This demonstrates, of course, another refutation of one of your points. The decline of Christianity is already being blamed by many Christians on militant atheists, rather than on the various churches' own faults. In other words, for every fanatic, for every thuggish monk in service of Cyril of Alexandria, you had an Origen and an Augustine and a Jerome and a Basil and a Gregory the Theologian and a Gregory of Nyssa, you had a Christian who worked well within Greco-Roman intellectual traditions to further their own values.
Likewise, older (and newer) religions were rarely so monolithic. The Romans didn't even consider themselves to have a religion in the same way the Jews and Christians did until Julian the Apostate, and I would argue that Roman religious traditions, so deeply tied to their institutions of state, were already on their way out by the time of the Gracchi brothers. Later, you have the Muslims, who for all of their iconoclastic tendencies helped preserve whatever knowledge passed their way from already-crumbling Constantinople for sake of the somewhat ungrateful European scholars of the 15th to the 18th centuries.
The Dark Ages were a myth. As Rome struggled to survive in the face of multiple Germanic invasions, mechanical lions roared at the foot of the throne of Constantinople; and as the Latins threw the sophisticated society of Byzantium into disarray, streetlamps illuminated the Muslim city of Cordoba. Christians wiping out pagans, Muslims wiping out Christians, atheists wiping out religion: these are all myths, constructed as such in service of a sociopolitical program that originated from the West. Progress -- or the power it provides -- is far better served when the immediate past is worse than the present, and the distant past is an icon of the future.
And, for the record, I was born in and live in the third world, and there's a very good reason why Christianity -- or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Communism -- has such an appeal to us. Marx put it beautifully in one of his essays on Hegel:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."