We can’t have it all. We can’t have, not only de Sade, but even Malte’s notebook, in a society of real, living, personal and conscious faith. To prefer Malte from faith, is aesthetism, and when Vasilief and others speak about a supposed Byzantine stagnation, they are guided precisely by this aesthetism. We are absorbed by a world of creating Everything, the very reality which resembles a ghost and a fiction, a toy at the disposal of our Cartesian all-deciding Ego. This makes our thinking on Byzantium unfair.
Cf. A Short History of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy * A History of the Byzantine Empire * Constantinople Home Page
Hermes
George, you have a duty to historical accuracy. Aristotle was not an abberation in Greek culture and Plato was not the mainstream. It was actually the other way around. I know this does not conform to the narrative you try to construct on this site, so as to make Orthodoxy seem like the natural successor to the ancient world, but it is more accurate.
Good site but try and make it better.
E-Blog
Here is (roughly) the line I have in mind: Homer, Hesiod, Presocratics, Tragedy and Comedy, Socrates, Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus, Proclus. If this is not the main Greek line, perhaps you could give me yours and correct me. Besides this, it is very well known that the life of ancient Greeks was formed around the Divine, whether the many Gods of the popular feeling or the One God of the philosophers. Aristotle is the only thinker that developed a science of ‘knowing everything’, from the growing of plants to the formation of clouds, preparing thus the modern western and un-greek notion of philosophy.
John
I am a regular visitor of Ellopos, and I can’t say that historical accuracy is a rare element here. Orthodoxy does not need anyone to ‘construct a narrative’ and make it seem a ‘natural successor to the ancient world’. The Greek people by themselves, who became Christians and remain until now, prove it adequately I think.
Costis
Hermes’ passion is not for historical accuracy, but against Christianity