Chapter 9 8. People who seek knowledge

Modern intolerance, like the ancient Gauls, can be divided into three types: intolerance of laziness, intolerance of ignorance, and intolerance of selfishness. The first is perhaps the most common.It can be seen in every country and in every class of society, especially in small villages and ancient towns, and it is not limited to human beings. The old horse of our family lived a stable life in the warm stables in Cowley Town for the past twenty-five years. Lee, who knows its bricks and mortars well enough to know that his daily walks in the comforts of Connecticut will not be frightened by unfamiliar sights.

Our scientific community has so far devoted so much energy to studying the dialects of the long-defunct Polynesian Islands that it has sadly neglected the languages ​​of dogs, cats, horses, and monkeys.But if we understand what a horse called "Dude" said to his former Cowley neighbors, we can hear an outburst of intolerance never seen before.Dude is no longer a pony, he has been stereotyped many years ago, so he finds that the etiquette, habits and customs of Cowley Town are all pleasing to the eye, but the etiquette, habits and customs of Westport are completely wrong, and he still is like this until his death think.

It is this intolerance that makes parents shake their heads and sigh at the follies of their children, that makes people absurdly yearn for "the good old days," that makes savages and civilized alike dress in hideous garments, that fills the world with superfluous waste. life, and makes the man with new ideas the enemy of mankind. Even so, the intolerance is relatively harmless. Sooner or later we all suffer from this intolerance.It has driven millions of people from their homes in past generations, and it is now a major cause of permanent settlements in places that would otherwise remain barren.

The second type of intolerance is more serious. An ignorant man can be extremely dangerous just because he doesn't know anything about things. But it would be even more frightening if he also excused his own intellectual inadequacy.He has erected a fortress of granite in his soul, and he professes himself to be infallible, and he stands at the top of the aggressive fortress, challenging all enemies (that is, those who do not share his prejudices) to ask them what reason they have to live on earth. People with this affliction are harsh and mean.Living in constant fear, they are prone to brutality and enjoy torturing those they hate.It was from this group that the idea of ​​"God's chosen people" first emerged.Moreover, the victims of these hallucinations always imagined that they had some kind of relationship with the invisible God, so as to embolden and embolden their bigotry justification.

They would never say, for example, "We hanged Danny Deaver because he was a threat to our happiness, we hated him, we just liked hanging him." They would never say that of.They got together in solemn conclave, and spent hours, days, or weeks studying in detail the said fate of Danny Deaver.Once the final verdict was pronounced, Danny, a wretch who might have done little more than petty theft, appeared to be the most dreadful man ever to commit a felony against the will of God, Only God's chosen people can understand), to whom the execution of sentence is a sacred duty, and the judge is honored for having the courage to condemn the associates of Satan.

The honest and good-natured man is as susceptible to this deadliest illusion as the brutish and bloodthirsty, and it has become commonplace in history and psychology. Crowds of people watched with great interest the suffering of a thousand poor victims, certainly not murderers, but honest and pious people, who felt themselves doing an honorable and gratifying thing before God. If tolerance is mentioned to them, they also object, seeing it as an unseemly admission of a decline in their moral sense.Maybe they were intolerant themselves, but in that case they were proud and plausible of it, because in the damp cold morning light stood Danny Deaver in his saffron shirt and imp Breeches, step by step, slowly but surely approach the market for executions.Once the public display is over, people return to the comforts of their homes for a feast of bacon and beans.

Doesn't that in itself justify what they thought and did? How else could they be the audience?Why not switch places with the dead? I admit that this idea is flimsy, but it is so common and hard to counter that people simply believe that their thoughts are God's thoughts, and therefore cannot see how they can be wrong. The third remaining type of intolerance is caused by selfishness.In fact it is a manifestation of jealousy, as common as measles. After Jesus came to Jerusalem, he taught people that it was impossible to win the favor of Almighty God by slaughtering a dozen cattle and sheep, so all those who made a living by ceremonial sacrifices slandered him as a dangerous revolutionary. When they got their big stake, they managed to put him to death.

A few years later, St. Paul came to Ephesus, preaching a new doctrine that threatened the jewelers' trade, because the jewelers at that time made a fortune by making and selling figurines of the local goddess Diana, and the goldsmiths' guild was poor for this. One point is to lynch this unwanted trespasser. There has always been an open war between some who make a living from some established cult and others who try to steer people from one temple to another. When we discuss medieval intolerance we must remember that we are dealing with a very complex problem.It is only in extremely rare cases that we encounter a single manifestation of the three different intolerances.In the persecution cases that have come to our attention, three situations often coexist.

An organization that possesses great wealth, controls thousands of miles of land, and rules tens of thousands of serfs, will pour all its anger and energy on the peasants who want to rebuild the unpretentious "heaven on earth", This is very natural. Ending heresy thus becomes an economic imperative, subordinate to the third category—selfish intolerance. But there is another group of people who feel the pressure of an official ban: scientists.The problem is more complicated. In order to understand the evil attitude of the ecclesiastical authorities towards those who reveal the mysteries of nature, we must go back centuries and see what happened in Europe between the first and sixth centuries.

The barbarian invasion swept every corner of the European continent like a relentless flood.In the muddy sewage, there are still several ancient Roman national organizations standing in a haphazard manner.But the society within the walls is gone, books are swept away by the tide, and art is forgotten in the new quagmire of ignorance.Collections, museums, libraries, and slowly accumulating scientific material were all used to light bonfires by the savages of central Asia. We have some catalogs from tenth century AD libraries.As for the books of ancient Greece (with the exception of Constantinople, which at that time was considered as far from the center of Europe as Melbourne is today) Westerners have very few.This may seem unbelievable, but the book is indeed gone.Scholars have painstakingly familiarized themselves with the thinking of the ancients, but all they have found are translations (and poor translations) of individual passages from the works of Aristotle and Plato.There were no teachers to learn the languages ​​of the ancients, only a few Greek monks who, in the theological quarrels of Byzantium, were forced to abandon their homes and take refuge in France or Italy.

There are many books in Latin, but most of them were written in the fourth and fifth centuries.The few remaining manuscripts of the ancients have been transcribed countless times without care, making them impossible to understand without a lifelong study of ancient literature. As for scientific books, except perhaps some of Euclid's simplest geometrical construction problems, none can be found in any library, and what is more sad, these books are no longer needed. Those who ruled the world at that time viewed science with hostility, and did not encourage independent study in the fields of mathematics, biology, and zoology, let alone medicine and astronomy, which were regarded as low status, not valued, and of no practical use. value. It is very difficult for modern people to understand this situation. People in the twentieth century all believed in progress, albeit from different perspectives.We don't know if we can make the world perfect.But we all feel that we should give it a try, because this is our sacred duty. Yes, progress has become such an unstoppable trend that at times it seems the belief has become the state religion of an entire country. But medieval people did not and could not have such an idea. Greece once dreamed of a wonderful world full of fun, but this dream was just a poor short-lived!Political upheavals ravaged it mercilessly, sweeping through the unfortunate country.The Greek writers of the next few centuries became pessimists. They gazed at the ruins of what was once a paradise, and thought miserably that all human efforts were in vain! Roman writers, on the other hand, drew conclusions from nearly a millennium of uninterrupted history, and found a vigorous upward current in the development of mankind, and Roman philosophers, most notably Epicurus , also enthusiastically educating the younger generation for a happier and better future. Then came Christianity. The center of people's concerns has moved from this world to another.Immediately the people plunged back into a deep, dark hell, where they were hopelessly resigned. People back then were inferior.His nature and proclivities are evil.He indulged in sin, was born in sin, lived in sin, and finally died remorse for sin. But there is a difference between old disappointments and new disappointments. The Greeks believed themselves to be wiser and better educated than others, and had pity on the unfortunate savages.But they never thought that their nation was any different from other nations because they were the chosen people of Zeus. On the contrary, Christianity has never been able to separate itself from its old ancestors.Having adopted the Old Testament as a holy book of their faith, Christians have inherited the incredible mantle of Judaism, believing that their people are "different" from other peoples and that only those who profess belief in an officially established teaching Some hope for salvation, others are doomed. To those who lack the humility of spirit and believe themselves to be unique among thousands of their own kind, the above-mentioned ideas of course do them great immediate good.For many crucial ages this thought made Christians a cohesive, self-contained whole, adrift aloof in an ocean of paganism. To Tertullian, St. Augustine, and others who buried their teachings in written form, what happened in other places connected by this body of water stretching in all directions north, south, east, and west was of no concern to them.Their last hope was to reach a safe shore where they could build the City of God.What the other desperately striving to achieve or accomplish is none of their concern. They thus created for themselves entirely new concepts of the origin of man and the limits of space and time.The secrets unearthed by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans did not interest them at all.They sincerely believed that with the birth of Christ, all that was of value in the past fell to pieces. For example, the question about the earth. Ancient scientists believed that Earth was one of billions of planets. Christians fundamentally reject this view.From their point of view, the little circle on which they live is the center of the universe. Earth is a temporary dwelling specially created for a special group of people.Its ins and outs are very simple, and it is clearly described in the first chapter of "Genesis". The problem is further complicated when it comes to determining how long God's favored people have lived on earth. Large relics, buried cities, extinct monsters, and fossilized plants are everywhere, just around the corner.But these things can be refuted, ignored, denied or claimed to not exist.Once this is done, deciding on a specific date for Genesis will be a piece of cake. In such a universe, everything is at rest, and it begins at a certain time of a certain year and month and ends at a certain time of a certain year and month.The purpose of the earth is only for a unique purpose, and there is no room for exploration by mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and the like, because these people are only concerned with general laws and the eternity and infinity of time and space. Indeed, many scientists protest that they are godly sons of God at heart.True Christians, however, think more clearly that a man who sincerely advocates the love and devotion of his faith will not know so much, and will not have so many books. A book is enough. This book is the Bible, and every word, every comma, every colon, and every exclamation point in it was written by inspired men. If the Greeks in the time of Pericles had known that there was such a so-called holy book in the world, which included blunt and incomprehensible national histories, love poems with mixed feelings, and illusory stories described by half-mad and half-crazy prophets. Dreams and relentless diatribes about someone who for some reason pissed off many tribal gods in Asia would not interest them. But the savages of the third century fell in love with "writing," which seemed to them one of the great mysteries of civilization, when this particular book was declared perfect and perfect by a council of the Church in which they believed. When the classics with a small gap are recommended to them, they accept it wholeheartedly and with trepidation, as all human beings already know or hope to know.Whoever denies the Kingdom of Heaven, and who goes beyond the limits established by Moses and Isaiah, will be condemned and persecuted by them. After all, those who are willing to die for principles are limited. However, some people's thirst for knowledge cannot be suppressed, and the energy that has been accumulated for a long time must have a place to vent.As a result, the paradoxical conflict between knowledge and repression gave rise to another weak and dull intellectual seed, which came to be called the "Scholastic." This goes back to the middle of the eighth century.Bertha, wife of King Pepin the Younger of the Franks, bore a son who was more justly called the benefactor and saint of the French nation than good King Louis, for the common people had to pay about eight hundred thousand for his release. A ransom of Turkish gold, in gratitude to the people for their loyalty, King Louis had granted them the right to establish their own court. The boy was christened Carolus, and his name can be seen at the end of many ancient charters.He was a little clumsy about signing, but he was always sloppy with spelling.He learned Frankish and Latin when he was a child, but his fingers suffered from rheumatism from fighting the Russians and Moors on the battlefield, and he couldn't control them. Finally, he had to give up the idea of ​​writing and invited the The best writer acts as secretary and signs for him. The battle-hardened veteran prides himself on wearing the "city costume" (the tunic worn by Roman nobility) only twice in fifty years, but he truly understands the value of learning and has turned a royal palace into a private institution. University, to teach his children and the children of other officials. The new emperor of the West was surrounded by many celebrities of the time, and he himself enjoyed spending his spare time with them.He worshiped academic democracy so much that he even gave up etiquette, and like Brother David, he actively participated in various seminars and allowed the lowest-ranked scholars to debate with him. But when we consider the issues of interest to them in the discussion, we naturally think of the topics chosen by the debate team at any rural high school in Tennessee. These people are at least naive.If this was true in 800, it was no exception in 1400.This cannot be blamed on medieval scholars, it should be said that their minds are as sharp as their descendants in the twentieth century.Their situation is similar to that of modern scientists and physicians, but although they enjoy full freedom of investigation and research, their actions and opinions cannot violate the first edition of "Encyclopedia Britannica" in 1768. The reason is simple, chemistry was still a little-known subject at that time, and surgery was often compared with butchery. It turns out (and I'm somewhat confusing my metaphors) that the medieval scientist, despite all his intellect and ability, experimented very narrowly, like putting a Rolls-Royce on the chassis of an old car. The modern engine of a modern engine, once you step on the gas pedal, there will be a series of failures.By the time he was able to safely maneuver and drive this weird new thing in accordance with the regulations and traffic rules, it had become ridiculous, and even with all his efforts, he couldn't reach his destination. Of course, top performers are extremely anxious about the schedule they have to follow. They tried every means to escape the endless surveillance of the church hawks.They wrote voluminous books proving the opposite of what they admitted to be true, in order to hint at their innermost thoughts. They do all sorts of deceptive things: they put on outlandish costumes, hang crocodiles from the roof, fill the shelves with bottles of monsters, and burn smelly herbs in the stove to scare the neighbors out of the front door. Run, and thus gain a reputation as harmless psychos, free to talk nonsense as they please, and not very responsible for their own thoughts.Gradually they developed a whole set of scientific camouflage, and even today it is difficult for us to judge their real intentions. Centuries later, Protestants were as intolerant of science and literature as the medieval church, but I won't say much here. The great reformers could speak and curse as much as they wanted, but they were never able to turn intimidation into concrete action of resistance. The Church of Rome, on the other hand, not only possesses deadly power to dissent, but uses it when the time is right. To those who like to think abstractly of the theoretical value of tolerance and tyranny, the above distinction is of little importance. Yet for those poor souls who had to choose—whether to renounce their faith in public or to be whipped in public—the difference raised a very real question. Sometimes they lack the courage to say what they think is true, and are willing to waste time on crosswords of the names of the beasts in Apocalypse, and we don't have to ask them too hard. I am sure that if I went back six hundred years, I would not dare to write the current book.