30
Nov
2016
Lara-Murphy Show on *The City of God*
Sorry for the hiatus, my travel schedule the last two months has been pretty crazy. Carlos and I have released another episode of our podcast. It’s definitely not your usual fare; we talk about his latest reading, Augustine’s *The City of God*.
It is one of the greats (I read it not so long ago as well).
I would make one corrective comment. Right towards the end, Mr Lara suggests the work was basically unknown until the fall of the Empire in the East (ca. 1453) and that the Church “locked up” knowledge until then.
Neither claim is accurate. To the first, I suspect he is accidentally associating the obscurity of Aristotle who was largely unread in the West until the 1200s, with Augustine, Plato, and knowledge in general. The re-reading of Aristotle lead not to the Renaissance but to the Scholastics.
As regards learning in general, while it is true that the years after the fall of Rome were rough, that was not much due to the Church “locking up” knowledge as it was unrest and war. Even so, even a cursory look at the works of the Middle Ages would show they were neither so “dark” nor unlearned as the Enlightenment thinkers (a name which they gave themselves) say.
Books abound, but for the quickest intro, the Teaching Company course on the Early Middle Ages is an excellent brief summary.