Friday, May 19, 2017

Clean Up Post

Another sleepless night.   I sort of patched the post from yesterday morning.   I won't go into how it happened but several sentences got erased during one of my editing sessions that made it very confusing due to the two Scotuses from both sides of the 10th century figuring into my argument.

In relationship to the stupid accusation that I was supportive of the intellectual basis of the Inquisition, if I'd looked at the article on the older John Scotus Eriugena in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I'd have found out something I didn't know about his work in relation to the Inquisition.

Interest in Eriugena was revived by Thomas Gale's first printed edition of 1687. However, soon afterwards, Thomas Gale's first printed edition, the Periphyseon, was listed in the first edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and remained on it, until the Index itself was abolished in the 1960's.

So, not only did one of the theologian-philosophers I cited kind of sum up the classical period, help start the Scholastic movement as well as help invent universities, his work influenced the heretics against who the Inquisition was created to oppose (see footnote in yesterday's corrected post).   And his major work was on the infamous Index. Which was gotten rid of more than half a century ago and isn't really relevant to anything going on today.

Britatheists don't much care about real history or modern life, they prefer their ideological, polemical comic book version of those.  Reality isn't congenial to their wished up version of reality.  They've got more in common with the late Jack Chick than they'd ever admit.

Time for my next pill, which will knock me out for a while.  I'll try to post something when I wake up.  Probably about whatever next bomb shell that drops from the Trump treason while I'm asleep, I seem to wake up to a new one at least once a day.

Update: I forgot,  John Scotus Eriugena is also famous for this quote,

Authority is a source of knowledge, but our own reason remains the norm by which all authority must be judged.

Which could probably stand as the seed that eventually turned into science.  If I'd remembered that yesterday it might have figured in my argument about not only the need for people to take science on the basis of authority but the sense of entitlement that guys like Jerry Coyne get so pissy about when people don't just accept what they say on their authority.   Ah, well.  Maybe when pollen season is over.

3 comments:

  1. Always good to see something on John Scottus Eriugena.

    You might be interested in a post I did on him on March 14, 2014. After some personal recollections it occurred to me that his alleged "pantheism" could be chalked up to a change in the meaning of the term "nature," from an older universal concept, embracing God, to a concept limited to creation alone.

    You might also be interested in a short talk Pope Benedict gave on him, here:

    https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20090610.html

    in which he seems to be making much the same point that you are.

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  2. Thank you, I will listen to that. It's good to have you comment.

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    1. Or, rather, read it. I saw the "aud" and thought it meant it was a recording.

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