March 28, 2005

Be Careful What You Wish For

IN THE INSANE DARKNESS, SMALL CANDLES GLOW BRIGHTER: Man Gets Birthday Wish, Church Ceases to Exist

"In just a matter of hours, classical works by Homer, Ovid and Vergil disintegrated, Europe was overun by Moors and is now under a theocratic dictatorship, works by Michaelangelo and other artists vanished, the slave trade resurrected, his wife ceased to be, and 2000 years of unsaid prayers went unanswered.

He said he wished the Catholic Church never existed."

Funny and not in the peculiar sense.

[HT: The Anchoress]

Posted by Vanderleun at March 28, 2005 3:25 PM
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Alternative history time!
The role of the Church in preserving and shaping civilisation cannot be understated.
Unless, of course, Gibbon was right about the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
If so, slavery might be back, the Christian artistic tradition gone (replaced by alternative evolution of the Greco-Roman one) and England, and thus the USA, never founded.

But you'd likely have much more classical literature surving, and possibly legions under the Prefect of Arabia Petraea crushing some obscure troublemaker back around 1360 ab urbe condita.

Posted by: John Farren at July 29, 2005 1:59 AM

The Romans were doomed by themselves, not by Christianity. Their own decadence was a greater foe than a hundred legions of Goths or any other army.

Posted by: Final Historian at July 31, 2005 1:31 PM

Final Historian:
Actually, I likely agree more with you than Gibbon. Should have put a big IF in there.
Arguably the Romans biggest handicap was their relative lack of innovation. The late Empire was little changed in technique from the early Republic -consequence of a slavery economy?- and was even relatively unadaptble in political institutions; its response to expansion being retaining the shadow of city-state forms with a reality of military-cum-dynastic despotism.
Big, but fragile socially, politically, economically.

And a major counter-argument to Gibbon's thesis is the survival of the Christian Byzantine Romaoi Empire. Which adapted just enough to hold on for almost a millenium.
There's another "alternative": Justinian completes the reconquest of the West, and rather than Catholicism and competing states and social groups, an Imperial Orthodoxy dominates Europe.
Or what about bigger roles for Arian or Celtic forms of Christianity?
Alternatives that might lead to certainly different, and perhaps worse, worlds than the one we live in.

Posted by: John Farren at August 1, 2005 12:15 PM

Thanks so much for posting the Birthday Wish story on your blog.

God bless,Maureen Martin

Posted by: maureen martin at August 3, 2005 5:38 PM