[FRIAM] now it's personal

[Frank Wimberly]

What was the relationship between the Library of Alexandria and the Muslim
library in Cordoba that preserved many of the Greek writings and the Greek
version of the Bible?  Did the latter get some of the holdings of the
former before the burning?  Or do I have the timing all wrong?

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 9:27 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> While I have always regarded *The Christian Church *with
> disdain/antipathy/disgust and considered them the source of many many evils
> (e.g. Crusades, Inquisition), it was always kind of impersonal.
>
> I just discovered that it was a Christian (nee Roman) Emperor, Theodosius,
> that shut down Eleusis and outlawed the Mysteries; setting the stage for
> the Visigoths to literally destroy the temple complex that an earlier
> Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, had, correctly, recognized as the fount of
> Athenian philosophy and science. You could make a good argument that
> banning the Mysteries is the direct primal cause of our alienation from
> each other as human beings as well as Nature — thus precipitating all our
> current woes, including the climate crisis.
>
> To rub salt in the wounds, the same year Theodosius was wreaking his
> mischief, Bishop Theophilus led a rabid Christian Mob in the sacking and
> burning of the Library of Alexandria and hundreds of satellite libraries
> (all in Pagan temples according to Theophilus), around the city.
>
> That makes it personal and I am pretty pissed that I was not informed of
> this long before now.
>
> davew
>
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