Manuscripts Of Livy In Romania And Moldova?

I don't know whether Romania and Moldova are good places to look for manuscripts of Livy. (At some point I really need to talk to some pros about how to do this Quixotic thing, searching for the lost books of Livy.) I don't know whether the area is a particularly good place to look for old manuscripts of any kind: much of its history, sadly, is a history of domination and occupation by foreign powers, and it's only since the 19th century that things such as the systematic collection of artifacts such as manuscripts has been allowed to thrive in public institutions belonging to Romania and Moldova themselves.

So why look there? (It's a twofold search, actually: looking for manuscripts which are currently in Romania and Moldova, and for evidence of manuscripts written there which now are somewhere else.) Because the area is unique in having a language based on Latin, but very few historical ties to the Roman Catholic Church. Dacia, the area of present-day Romania and Moldova, was abandoned by the Roman Empire in the 3rd century, and when it was Christianized in the 9th century it became a part of the Orthodox Church. If manuscripts of Livy were made by Romans in Dacia, and/or later by Dacians who had retained the Latin language, and if the lost books were victims of a concerted campaign by Catholics to destroy them beginning in the 6th century, any manuscripts in Dacia-Romania/Moldova would've escaped the reach of that campaign.

It's an absurdly thin thread of a hope, but absurdly thin threads are all I have so far. Of course, if manuscripts of the lost books had already been found in Romania or Moldova, or if Romanian or Moldovan manuscripts had been found elsewhere, the whole world would have heard about it by now. What I'm trying to do now is find out whether there are any manuscripts of the known books which are believed to have been written there. Those could possibly turn out to be clues to the whereabouts of the lost texts.

And, of course, that's true of manuscripts of Livy written anywhere. And, of course, it's true of manuscripts of other ancient writers who read Livy, and of biographical information about those other writers. I badly need to find a list of Livy manuscripts which is somewhere close to comprehensive. A recent and very comprehensive list would be the best, of course, but even a list made in the 19th century which was only halfway-comprehensive back then would be a tremendous help. Also by now I probably should have read every single commentary on Livywhich has ever been published, but, for whatever reason, every single one of those commentaries I've seen is, quite frankly, ridiculously expensive.


It would also be a tremendous help if my reading skills in Romanian and Moldavian were a little better. (For things like reading Romanian and Moldovan library catalogs.) These are Latin-based languages, and so I have a leg up with my knowledge of Latin and French and Spanish and Italian, but because they were cut off from the other languages over 1800 years ago, more than a few differences have crept in, and that means that it's harder for me to read Romanian than, for example, Portugese or Provencal. I am given to understand that the influence of Slavic language in the formation of Romanian and Moldovan has been especially strong, and that in the modification of the original Latin the indiginous Dacian language, Hungarian, Greek and other languages have all played a part. Oh well. High time I started to get serious about learning Hungarian anyway.

Fear And Trembling Have Their Place, But Not Before Imaginary Beings

In the course of discussing Genesis 22, wherein God commands Abraham to make a burnt sacrifice of Isaac, and Abraham is going to obey but at the last second God says Never mind, I was only testing you, you passed the test, we're cool, Søren Kierkegaard, and how, in his book Frygt og Bæven, asserted that God's commandment that Abraham kill Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice, and Abraham's decision to comply, cannot be understood rationally. I disagree. The story itself, like all religious stories, is irrational. But like all religious stories and precepts it can be understood rationally, but only from an atheist point of view. Abraham might never have existed, this story of the human sacrifice which almost was clearly sends the message that God must be obeyed, always and unquestioningly. The tale also seems to point to a time in the ancestry of the people telling it when a transition was made from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. This is subject matter for anthropology, not theology. Kierkegaard was brilliant, except when he was Christian, and vice-versa. Thank goodness in a lot of his writing the voodoo does not interfere with the clarity of thought. If only he could've stopped fearfully trembling before That Which Is Not. The story of Abraham can be understood rationally, but not while sharing Abraham's irrational belief in a big meanie in the sky who runs the universe.

I don't think religious beliefs are defensible. That sounds very harsh, but I don't think we should tiptoe around such issues. Thousands of years' worth of tiptoeing has been more than enough. Kierkegaard is much less irrational then many other theologians who claim that belief is rational and produce reams of the most appalling nonsense to buttress that claim, but not quite as rational as his many atheist fans who decline to accept ancient irrationalities.

Of course, it sometimes benefits people -- real, non-imaginary people -- when their fellow humans fear and tremble before an unreal deity. It distracts them from fear and loathing which would make sense -- fear and loathing of powerful rulers who claim to act in the public interest but do not, for example. (Of course, it's much more admirable to stand up to tyrants than to tremble before them, but it's also heroic, and let's face it, the vast majority of people simply aren't heroes. Maybe that sounds harsh too, but it's plainly true.) It's no coincidence that the worst tyrants appear to be very religious, whether they actually are or merely find it useful to have their subjects distracted by an imaginary tyranny. I don't doubt that many rulers sincerely believe in God, when they're told from infancy that they have been selected by God to rule -- for the good of all, of course. Most of us are susceptible to flattery, and the temptation to believe it grows as the flattery grows more constant and extreme, and what could be more flattering than being told your entire life that God has chosen you to be one of the leaders of His creation?

Sincere or cynical, promotion of religion is very practical for rulers. Most of us don't have such an excuse for holding on to religious belief.

Abraham And Isaac And Religion And Sanity

In HP Religion, James Goodman addresses the Biblical story in which Abraham is commanded by God to make a human sacrifice of his son Isaace, and almost goes through with it, and at the last minute God says, Okay, stop, I was just testing your obedience, we're cool. Goodman reacts with horror to this story -- but not with enough horror. He draws parallels between Abraham's painful situation and tough decisions which must be made in war. He mentions people who have wrestled with this Bible passage (chapter 22 of Genesis), including Kierkegaardand, according to Goodman, Bob Dylan.

"The ritual sacrifice of a child should and would be universally condemned," Goodman states. (Not really going very far out on a limb there.) But he continues: "But[...]"

But nothing. Goodman's trying to have his cake and eat it too. For one thing, as we can see from many of the comments on Goodman's story, prattling on in a quite unbearable manner about how this horror story of Abraham being commanded to tie his son up, slit his throat and burn his body demonstrates God's perfect and infinite love, anything at all will be far from universally condemned, if it's seen as "God's will." For another thing, there is a difference between human sacrifice and war. Sometimes war is waged in an injust way which is indefensible; and sometimes it is a tragic choice which must be made to oppose injustice. For a third thing, Kierkegaard was sometimes brilliant and sometimes Christian, but never both at the same time. And for a forth thing, in "Highway 61 Revisited" Dylan doesn't portray the story of Abraham and Isaac as a deep and awesome mystery, he doesn't "wrestle" with it. He reacts to it with appropriately unambiguous horror and disgust. He portrays god as a cosmic bully and Abraham as a coward who almost instantly knuckles under to a bully in the most despicable way imaginable. In Dylan's song Abraham is just one more scoundrel in a row of jerks who are described about 1 every 15 seconds.

If Sir James Gearge Frazerwas correct, then nearly every single human civilization has passed through a stage of human sacrifice, and that stage was much more recent in the case of Frazer's beloved Romans than he or other Classicists had thought. He reacted with horror to his discovery that polished and urbane Classical Latin poets lived at the same time as priests and priestesses who made ritual sacrifices of people. I can only think of one way to see Genesis 22 in a positive light: as a story of a people leaving human sacrifice in the past, and in fact in a far more remote past than did, among many others, the Romans.

But of course it is interpreted in quite another way by many practicing Jews and Christians and Muslims. Nauseatingly, they twist the story until it looks (to them) like an illustration of pure perfect cosmic infinite Love. If a head of state demanded that one of his subjects kill his own son to prove his loyalty, no sane person would call it an act of love on the part of the ruler. It would be considered an act of extreme tyranny and grounds to overthrow the ruler. If I were married and my wife demanded that I kill our son to prove my love for her, as long as I could prove she made that demand, not only would I have absolutely no trouble getting a divorce, and custody, and a very strongly-enforced restraining order, but my ex-wife would very likely also spend some time in prison or a hospital for the criminally insane. Not to mention the utter contempt and horror, and criminal prosecution, which that hypothetical subject of a tyrant, or I in that hypothetical marriage, would deserve, if we showed the slightest sign of complying with that despicable request, which Abraham was willing to do. Believers are making ridiculous excuses for their imaginary friend who rules the universe, excuses which they would never make for a real human being. Oh the mental gymnastic believers go through to defend their god.

Imagine if people expended a fraction of that energy to protect other real living breathing human beings.

The Idea That Stories In The Bible Are Metaphors Is A Contemporary Myth

Nota bene (That's Latin. It means "note well."), I'm not saying that I believe that Noah built an ark and saved all those animals, or that Samson killed all of those people with the jawbone of an ass. I'm saying that the authors of the Bible, and ancient Jews and Christians, and also most Jews and Christians and Muslims until pretty recently, believed those things happened. Of course, the fundies still believe it. But there has emerged this other group within these religions which still believes in God, and still believes that the Bible is the most important book in the world, but not only no longer themselves believe things like the stories of Noah actually happened, but also are insisting, not only with straight faces but also with advanced degrees in theology and sometimes, unfortunately, in other fields as well, such as Biblical Studies or even ancient history in general, that those stories were ORIGINALLY WRIITEN AND UNDERSTOOD as metaphors, and that literalism and fundamentalism are aberrations from the main traditions of these religions, when, in plain fact, they are not aberrations but holdovers, continuations of the old beliefs.

Where does this recent belief in the non-literal intent of the Bible authors come from? Like other irrational religious beliefs, it comes from an unwillingness to face certain realities. In this case it's an unwillingness to see the ancient world for what it was, the unwillingness to see the similarities between the Abrahamic religions and other ancient beliefs, and the unwillingness to see how much primitive ancient mentality has been brought into our own time by those religions.

Some people believed that Hercules actually existed before Christianity came into the Graeco-Roman world and stomped all over the local religions of which the tales of Hercules and Zeus and Athena and Hermes were a part. In the case of metaphors and fiction, it's clear to both the authors and the audience that the stories are made up. Not so in the case of myths and religion. The Greeks and Romans, many or most of them, believed that lightning and thunder were giant spears hurled by Zeus (whom the Romans called Jupiter), that when the seas became stormy it was because Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) was agitated, that Aphrodite (the Roman Venus) looked after people in love, and so forth. The Greeks and Roman pagans were much more tolerant when it came to open discussion of religion than were the Christians who wiped their religions out, and so every now and then an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher would express his opinion that all the stories about the gods were nonsense and that no rational person should believe they existed -- but these philosophers were expressing minority opinions, they were going directly against the grain of their society at large. There's no reason to believe that most pre-Christian Romans and Greeks didn't believe in the literal existence of many, many gods and goddesses. The city of Rome in particular was famous as home to a vast number of religions collected from all over the Empire, and many individual Romans each worshiped many different deities. Some of them worshiped Jesus along with many other deities, before Christian authorities made it very plain that to properly practice Christianity meant no longer worshiping deities of any other religions, and, in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, destroyed the many temples of other religions which stood all over the Empire.

There's no RATIONAL reason to believe that the tales of the supernatural in any ancient religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, began as anything other than stories which were believed to be literally true. An irrational reason to believe that they began as fiction and metaphor, with everyone understanding that's what they were, is to deny the distance between the literal belief in them on the one hand and modern knowledge of how the world works on the other, and to insist that the Bible and the Koran are full of "timeless wisdom," and do not merely reflect the worldview of people who believed -- really, literally believed -- that what happened to them was the result of the actions of a huge supernatural Being, and that angels, actual winged angels, watched over us, and that after we died we would be judged and sent to a paradise to live in joy forever or to a pit to be tortured forever, a pit run by an evil angel who'd been expelled from the paradise, and so forth. It's as clear as can be that the founders of these religions and the authors of these holy texts literally, unmetaphorically believed all of that, just as the Graeco-Roman pagans literally believed that their gods lived on Mount Olympus and frequently came down in disguise from the mountain to take part in human affairs. One thing which these ancient books actually can tell us is how far we've come in our understanding since the time when they were written.

That is, of course, some of us. Clearly, others can't get through a single day without making things up. Luckily for very many of them, today just as thousands of years ago, religion offers them jobs.

Over And Over I Hear Atheists Saying They Wouldn't Have Any Problems With Christianity "As Long As The Christians Kept It To Themselves"

When did Christians ever keep it to themselves?

I would go so far as to say that a Christian who keeps his or her religious views to him- or herself is barely a Christian anymore. We all know that some Bible passages contradict others to the point that some selection is necessary, but no passage seems to have been anywhere nearly as consistently and tenaciously followed as the last 3 verses of Matthew. I'm talking about Matthew 28:18-20:

18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Amen, indeed! Hallelujah, good night and pass the ammo! Of course, because of the necessary selection which I just mentioned, what they teach will vary wildy, but the missionary spirit has been remarkably consistent for the last 1950 years or so.

But yeah, sure, that's the past! To paraphrase Sam Kinison, just because you lied to me the last 9 times, why would would anyone expect ya to lie to me 10 FUCKING TIMES IN A ROW?! YAAARGGHH!! Why would anyone expect things to go on as they have in the past for thousands of years without a pause? "Okay, Mr Tiger, we're going to put you into this enclosure with all these lambs and calves and little baby ducks and piglets -- as long as you promise not to hurt any of them! You promise? Okay then! What could possibly go wrong?"

Where Did The Old Testament Ban On Images Come From?

That question only occurred to me today. The Israelites were surrounded by cultures which made many images. If you look at the other cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first millenium BC and earlier, the 2nd Commandment looks very unusual indeed.

Could it have anything to do with the Hebrew alphabet, and the contrast between it and hieroglyphs? Just as we don't know for sure when the 10 commandments originated, and whether they originated in oral or written form, and to what extent they may have been modified before taking the form with which we are familiar, we also have no definite idea at all about how old the Hebrew alphabet is, and what exactly the relationship was between various alphabets, Hebrew, Phoenician, Greek, and others, while they were forming. It's clear that those 3 alphabets and others, including the one we're using now, are closely related. It's clear to us now. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it was clear to the Hebrews when the 2nd Commandment was being formed -- whenever that was: 1000 BC, or earlier, or 600 BC, or later. One thing we do know is that hieroglyphs and cuneiform and alphabets were used side by side in the ancient middle East for a very long time. It seems entirely conceivable to me that, to the Hebrews, when they were making their 10 Commandments, their alphabet was the only one they had ever heard of. Perhaps they associated that alphabet with what was domestic, familiar, comforting and good, and hieroglyphs with everything which was foreign, unknown, foreboding, frightening and evil.

Could it be that the ban on graven images began as a rejection of hieroglyphs? Further, is it possible that the Israelite God with His omnipotent power and unpronouncable name and unfathomable ways came from the abstract nature of the Hebrew script, which contrasted with the much more concrete and comprehensible nature not only of the pictures of the pictures of of the deities of the polytheists all around, but also with the pictoral nature of their writing?

Or was it the other way around, did an awesome and unapproachable Supreme Being, whose appearance and name were unknown, give rise to the abstract system of alphabetic writing? Chicken or the egg?

Religious Images And The 2nd Commandment

I love a lot of religious images, I love them a lot. Byzantine mosaics, stained glass -- fugettaboutit. I'm sometimes almost tempted to say that the whole religious fooferah was worth it for the art, and music. Actually I'm not, that was an attempt at a joke. My actual attitude is that what happened happened, and that a lot of the art which has happened was made for religious institutions because they were running the entire society at the time, and the choice for artists was sell religious art or not sell anything. Can we really even say that the work of, for example, Fra Filippo Lippi really is religious art, from Filippo's point of view? He didn't become a monk because he was filled with the Holy Spirit, but because as a baby he was abandoned at the door of a monastery, and he didn't behave at all the way a monk was supposed to, having a stupendous number of love affairs, many of them with nuns, and his paintings have religious themes because the Church was who was paying for paintings. I don't think you can tell by Fillipo's paintings that he was less than pious, and I don't think you have to be a believer to fully appreciate any painting on any subject.

In fact, as we know, religious belief can and often does interfere with all sorts of enjoyment, and in the case of visual art there is the 2nd Commandment. Someone said that the Roman Catholic Church simply eradicated that Commandment from all texts "for many centuries." I really don't think they struck that passage for any length of time, even though Pope Gregory II immediately denounced iconoclasm as soon as the Byzantine Emperor Leo III proclaimed it. If they struck or suppressed the 2nd commandment at any time, it seems to me that this would have been the time, in the 8th or 9th century. But I don't know of a single manuscript of the Vulgate, Catholicism's official version of the Bible from the early Midlle Ages until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, in which Exodus 20:4 is missing or altered from "non facies tibi sculptile neque omnem similitudinem quae est in caelo desuper et quae in terra deorsum nec eorum quae sunt in aquis sub terra," If anyone knows of such an altered manuscript I'd be sincerely very interested in hearing about it. Likewise if you know of a Breviary or piece of stained glass or something else which contains an altered version of the 10 Commandments.

I don't want to ask the person who asserted that this change was made "for many centuries" where he got that. Experience has taught me that people making such claims tend not to tell you where they got their info, and they do tend to get very unpleasant instead and accuse you of being an undercover Catholic spy, and I'm really over it. (Maybe I need to come up with a less unpleasant way of asking than "Where on Earth did you get that?!") But if anyone does happen to come across something which looks like a source for a "the Catholic Church struck the 2nd Commandment from the text of the Bible for" many centuries, or for a shorter period of time, I'd very much appreciate being told about it. Primitive superstitions fascinate me, whether held by religious people thousands of years ago or by atheists today. (Oh yes I did.)

Now of course, the RCC greatly decreased literacy rates among laypeople during the Middle Ages, which was probably much more effective in dealing with inconvenient Bible passages than altering them would have been.

And of course there was the very famous period of iconoclasm in the Orthodox East, although it didn't last as long as some people seem to think. Government-approved iconoclasm in the Orthodox territories actually only lasted a few decades, staring some time between 726 and 730 and ending in 787, and then being reinstated in 814 and lasting until 842 until it disappeared forever -- at least as far as Eastern Orthodoxy is concerned, and thank Euphemism, because, as I said, mosaics. There were sporadic, minor, localized tendencies before and after that to follow the 2nd Commandment, but that's been true of Christian groups in all regions and eras. Calvinists churches come to mind. By now, almost 5 centuries after Calvin, they represent a rather wide range of practices, but some of them to this day are very very free of images.

I wonder whether it's more than a coincidence that a little over a dozen years after the first period of official iconoclasm ended in the East that the Pope crowned the first Western Emperor, the first ruler of what eventually would be called the Holy Roman Empire. Could the Catholics have looked on aghast at iconoclasm, and thought, Okay, these guys are getting fanatical and crazy and it's time to break away from them? Just a thought. Maybe the timing is no more than a coincidence. Maybe Byzantine iconoclasm was just a symptom of a greater, broader social or political tendency. This is a job for a new Steven Runciman! and I'm not him, and I don't see any new Steven Runcimans anywhere, which is a real shame.

What is not a shame is that most of even the most pious Christians have just pretty much ignored the 2nd Commandment, along with many more of even the most pious Jews and Muslims than many people realize.