Quote:
Originally Posted by RyJ Maduro
That's a vastly oversimplistic sentiment. The ancient texts of the Greeks were conserved by the monks during the Dark Ages, diligently transcribing the works of the great doctors and philosophers in the abbeys while the outside world plunged into ignorance. The Catholic Church is directly responsible for the preservation of the works of Aristotle and Plato.
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The only reason those works were so diligently preserved is that they were looked upon as authoritative documents. The church read and preserved them and followed them "faithfully" without ever going out and expanding upon the science (biology, astronomy, etc.) that the greeks were responsible for creating. Unlike the Greeks, whose texts they so diligently copied, they were also a population of illiterates because the church was against the classical education that people in the Greek and Roman empires had as part of their lives. Basically, keeping these documents alive was all they did. The population did not benefit from this as the church discouraged literacy and learning by the population and declared all new thoughts and ideas to be herecy, punishable by death.