I'm not even Christian...

I'm not even Christian, but no matter what fedoras and pagancucks like Varg say I do think Christianity is what made Western Civilization great after the fall of Roman Empire

Attached: Cathédrale_de_Reims_intérieur.jpg (300x400, 53K)

Other urls found in this thread:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
youtu.be/r4m1ASfgRmg
skidmore.edu/academics/classics/courses/1999spring/cl200/emperor.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Christianity made Western Civilisation but destroyed the Classical Civilisation. It's up to you to decide whether this is something laudable.

Dumb christcuck poster

Attached: flavius-claudius-julius.jpg (800x420, 52K)

Attached: 5eb.jpg (600x750, 26K)

this

Classical Civilisation was trash, the only good things it produced were copied from ancient Egypt.

Rome was doomed form the start and the west would have been plunged into a true dark age if it wasn't for Christianity.

>Roman civilisation lasted for 2000 years
>doomed from the start

ok bud

>Classical Civilisation was trash

Yeah, and the Middle Ages were lovely...

>Christianity is what made Western Civilization great after the fall of Roman Empire
That's a funny way of saying 'got to America before the Turks'

t*rkish pigs were too busy fucking little boys to go explore

Better to live in if you value intellectuality and spirtiuality over boi pusy and some unnecessary comforts.

What little was worth saving from classical civilisation was not only preserved but perfected in christianity.

How much classical literature have you read?

You mean continued, adapted and improved by the Islamic world, and later copied by the backward kingdoms of Europe.

>Better to live in if you value intellectuality and spirtiuality

kek
Literacy rate was higher during the Roman Empire. All medieval intellectuals still read and were strongly influenced by Ancient texts, since nothing better was produced thenceforth.

Not him, but his point isn’t completely off its rocker.

It’s more accurate to say that structural deficiencies which didn’t matter all that much when Rome was just another anonymous Italian City-state became cascading system failures when it was a continent straddling empire. Blaming Christianity for them is victim-blaming: Roman society began unraveling long before Christians became a majority, and after the breakdown of trade routes and the breakdown of the market economy removed the economic incentive for people to read and write, the only people still bothering to do so were Christian clergy, who were the only thing keeping classical civilization from being permanently lost.

Attached: 0B7CDF2D-297A-44BF-B37A-D2E4576BFC72.jpg (770x481, 135K)

St Augustine
Pseudo-Dionysius
St Maximus the Confessor

All prior to Islam

>Blaming Christianity for them is victim-blaming

>Christian clergy, who were the only thing keeping classical civilization from being permanently lost.
>citation needed

Attached: 300px-Maqamat_hariri.jpg (300x305, 36K)

Christians were convenient scapegoats for a long time, with each new persecution more severe and terrible than the last.

Not denying the importance of the Islamic Golden Age, research is uncovering just how much trade and cultural exchange took place between them and the now Christianized west.

Still though, Rome collapsed in the 5th century. The Islamic Golden Age doesn’t start until the 8th century. That’s a fairly significant time gap

>It’s more accurate to say that structural deficiencies which didn’t matter all that much when Rome was just another anonymous Italian City-state became cascading system failures when it was a continent straddling empire
Not really because that ignores the reforms that harmed the Roman Empire like a declining economy, the slide into tyranny and a reliance on foreign mercenaries during the Late Empire as well as completely uncontrollable factors like plague and colder winters. If you try and pin everything that went wrong on the traditions of the Republic than you're going be spending most of your time trying to shove the rest of the evidence under the carpet.

>St Augustine
Weigh the value of his theology against the priceless temples and statues he encouraged Christians to destroy.

>Not really because that ignores the reforms that harmed the Roman Empire
But that strikes to the very heart of my point: it was a huge empire trying to shoehorn a city-state political model into something far too large for its britches. The lack of federalization meant that reform was either applied universally or not at all, and they lacked any mechanism for judging or studying that reform’s success or failure.

Take currency reform, for example: in all of its history coins were never as stable as they were after Constanine’s reforms, but because he didn’t stabilize copper and silver coinage, all it really ended up doing was fucking over the poor and middle classes who depended on copper and silver as a medium of exchange.

>slide into tyranny
Started to happen during the age of Marius and Sulla

>foreign mercenaries
The armies of Flavius Aetius had the same proportion of state soldiers to allied soldiers that the army of Scipio Africanus had. The difference is that after Adrianople (a self inflicted disaster) Romans had no answer to Gothic Germanics who were “out-organizing” them, so they let the Goths keep their own leaders and officers and settled them on fallow land because by that point in history, the state’s only plentiful resource was lease-able land.

>plague, cold weather
Merely accelerated Rome’s deflationary spiral.

Why do people assume things wouldn't be better without Christianity? What if we would be more advanced and awesome without it? It's not like things were going badly for the developing western civilization before christcuckoldry reared its head.

Hardly
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century

Western civilization prior to the spread of Christianity was an unending nightmare of civil strife

And western civilization for the next thousand years after Christianity was an unending nightmare of poverty and oppression.

If massive environmental shift, invasion, poorly managed institutions, a military infested with barbarians and an overstretched empire were all Christianity's fault, then I guess God is fucking real you absolute cretin.

Owed mostly to mass migrations triggered by climate change, and also because of public policy put in place during the dominate, like legally tying people to the land.

Once temperatures recovered into the medieval warm period and the last of the migrations died down, Western European living conditions soared

>city-state political model
Your example doesn't support that, it just shows the difficulty of running a large empire. Problems like currency debasement and inflation weren't caused by the economics of the Roman Republic, they're common to all large political entities throughout history. Most Chinese dynasties experienced the exact same problems.

>Started to happen during the age of Marius and Sulla
Yes, but the Romans still saw themselves as equals, there was just more competition to be the first among equals until eventual you have massive amounts of power in the hands of dictators and the Principate. Augustus, Tiberius and Vespasian all had power over the Roman Empire, but they were still ostentatiously accountable to their equals in the Senate. The transition into an a tyrannical "kingship" we call the Dominate was a problem that only came later on later on and is a completely different beast to early Roman tyranny.

>The armies of Flavius Aetius had the same proportion of state soldiers to allied soldiers that the army of Scipio Africanus had.
There's a difference between allies fighting for you and settling barbarians peoples in your land in exchange for the tenuous promises.

>Merely accelerated Rome’s deflationary spiral.
You're massively understating the importance of these factors. The Antonine and Justinian Plagues decimated the Roman Empire and colder winters both encouraged further migrations and made it a lot harder for Rome to defend its borders.

There are aspects of the Roman Republic that were directly involved in the collapse of the Roman Empire such as Marius' reforms leading to troops being more dependent on their generals than the state, meaning that once the Emperor becomes everyone's Imperator he's going to have to hand over a lot of cash to an increasingly entitled military to ensure their loyalty. But saying everything can be traced back to Republican institutions is too simple an answer for a complex question.
textlimit

The fact that you are writing off a total reset of their understanding of reality, allegiance and values as an important variable is hilarious.

My post and the post I replied to have nothing to do with Christianity. Be quiet while mommy and daddy are talking.

>doesn’t show that
Sure it does: the Roman public government pathologically refused to reform itself, necessitating an emperor to rule as a government within a government, and because he had no official legitimacy, any swinging dick could declare himself emperor and march on Rome. By the time of the empire their government was a completely disjointed mess ruled from the shadows.
>Yes, but the Romans still saw themselves as equals
That was in the process of breaking down. By the time of Marius and Sulla Romans were seeing each other as enemies whom you had to stick it too by voting for the right asshole. It suddenly occurred to them that they could vote themselves more money.

And principate emperors were merely humoring the now powerless senate. For every Augustus respecting them, there was a Caligula trolling them.

>difference between
Yes, the principle difference is that “barbarians” were now organizing on a scale that Romans had never seen before, and couldn’t really do anything about.

>plagues
Were horrible, yes, but neither plague was as severe or extreme as the Black Death, the difference being that after the Black Death productivity gains flowed into the bank accounts of now liberated bourgeois, where as in antiquity virtually all of the economic recovery was concentrated in the hands of powerful aristocrats who used that wealth to try and take over their own country.

Not writing off, just understanding the growth that took place despite the geopolitical turmoil.

The medieval universities, for example, all got their start in that period. The theological groundwork for what would eventually become academic science was being laid down. The first ever mandate to educate the masses was passed down by Charlemagne to the Catholic Church, to cite another

in the end all the shit Christianity gets comes from being a Middle Eastern religion derived from Judaism

>Sure it does: the Roman public government pathologically refused to reform itself
And yet we've been talking about the reforms that hurt Rome for the better part an hour.
>By the time of the empire their government was a completely disjointed mess ruled from the shadows.
And by the time of the fall of the Empire it was ruled by blatant autocrats.

>That was in the process of breaking down.
Unless you're an extremely cynical Roman Senator the ascension of Tiberius, yet alone the establishment of the Principate instead of a dictatorship says otherwise.
Also might I remind you what happened to Caligula, Nero and Domitian?

>Yes, the principle difference is that “barbarians” were now organizing on a scale that Romans had never seen before, and couldn’t really do anything about.
There's a even more at play here than what you've correctly stated: a failure to properly integrate them (the early Empire's greatest success was making an Empire that was okay with being Roman), the drop in temperatures and resulting sheer number of them. Either way you can't really blame the Republic here.

> in antiquity virtually all of the economic recovery was concentrated in the hands of powerful aristocrats
Interesting point, do you have any sources? Either way, just because another plague was arguably worse (the Plague of Justinian killed 1/4 of the Eastern Roman Empire) it doesn't mean that these plagues were less important in their own time.

Considering how you've dropped a lot of your points I think that you've already realised that insisting that everything and anything can be blamed on the Republic is wrong but I've enjoyed discussing such a divisive topic in a civilised manner. Cheers user.

>reforms
Reform policy was schizophrenic. Reform which was desperately needed went ignored, while misguided reform policy was implemented in a sloppy fashion and without any kind of oversight.
> ruled by blatant autocrats.
The Dominate was simply an admission of political reality and kept the empire going for another 2 centuries before finally crumbling.
>Tiberius
Chosen because there was literally no one else in Augustus’s family even remotely qualified to hold office, he was Augustus’s last choice
>need I remind you
Need I remind you of Pertinax? These senators murdering emperors didn’t really affect any positive change, they never lead to Republican reforms, they were the result of the emperor trying to play off his office as being unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
>failure to properly integrate them
Because by that time in history Roman citizenship was a cruel joke, a tax obligation with none of the say in governance, which has its roots in the unrest that lead to the social war.
>sources
Not while I’m on my phone
>dropped points
I’ve got 2,000 characters to work with, so I focus on broad strokes and avoid getting bogged down in details

>Cheers user.
Cheers, until next time

Tell me when Oxford was founded, dumbass
youtu.be/r4m1ASfgRmg

they're indistinguishable from each other western civilization is christianity and christianity is western civilization

although more precisely roman catholicism

protestantism was the beginning of the end

>there are """""""""""""people""""""""""""" in 2018 who still fall for the "dark ages" meme

Attached: 1459608258601.jpg (766x960, 80K)

>Game of Thrones thumbnail
real academic on our hands here

So... Why it didn't work out for Ethiopians or Armenians? Who were Christians before Western World?

>There are aspects of the Roman Republic that were directly involved in the collapse of the Roman Empire such as Marius' reforms leading to troops being more dependent on their generals than the state

This was rectified very quickly in the Roman Empire. I personally don't think Marius came to haunt the empire 400 years later.

Augustus' aerarium militare set up a permanent state treasury for Roman armies. Private armies like that of Pompey and Caesar weren't really around during the Empire.

How did the emperor have no official legitimacy? See: this tablet investing Vespasian power by decree of the Senate. skidmore.edu/academics/classics/courses/1999spring/cl200/emperor.html

Attached: Lex_De_Imperio_Vespasiani_-_Palazzo_Nuovo_-_Musei_Capitolini_-_Rome_2016.jpg (640x897, 205K)

I think you guys might or mightn't be right, except that you're fetishizing the Republic way too hard. It was an honest to god clusterfuck with no proper bureaucracy. It wasn't some noble paragon of virtue from which the Empire strayed, causing its fall. The Western Empire survived 500 years, you need to make an argument that doesn't rest on Marius' reforms. And no, they weren't just ignorant people who tried to maintain institutions that didn't work anymore. They weren't any more self-interested or covetous than politicians elsewhere. The problem is that you're looking at it teleologically (god knows if I'm using that word correctly). You think that the Empire was inherently doomed to failure and think of the entire institution in those terms. But it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AGAIN to note that it lasted 500 damn years, and that was just the Western Roman Empire.

You try to answer how Rome fell. It's the prime historical obsession of the West. In the process you forget to ask how it survived so long. You miss how flexible and resilient the Roman Empire must've been to shine so brightly for so long. Not many candles can attest to that!
In the case of the Armenians I can tell you that their national church has kept them from destruction for incredibly long. What ethnicity in the West is older than the Armenian one? They were one of the great contributors to early theology, and Armenians played a massive role in the Byzantine Empire as generals, administrators, and even emperors.

The Empire wouldn't have fallen if your lousy religion did not come about.

I think early Christianity was important in giving Western civilization a common identity to rally around after the fall of Rome. Politically, western Europe remained divided, but having that common faith to unite them is what helped to make western Europe its own distinct region rather than a mere section of some empire or another.

>fall of Roman Empire

What the fuck are you talking about? Christianity literally saved Rome from collapse and allowed it to last for another thousand years.