/lit/ - Literature

>>18366560
Nothing but resent could come from a "man" who looks like that.

>>18366561
SAY THAT TO MY FACE FUCKER AND NOT ONLINE

>>18366624
I'll go piss on your grave some time, you faggot imp.

>>18366560
Read it. It checks out.

>>18366560
Not the only thesis of his book. And so what if it was the case. Rome falling was a good thing.

>>18366560
>Man dislikes thing I like
>Points thing out as a contributing factor to the decline of world’s greatest empire
>There’s no way he’s right because I like that thing

>>18367220
>he defend something
>he must like the thing

im not even a christcuck

>>18366624
He's right you know (Gibbon, that is about the christkeks)

>>18366560
yknow every major exchange of information and affection from commerce and communications technology being hijacked by insane inquisitors means white people do the bare minimum to get by in each other's presense and never play honestly with each other.
Or you know masturbation shame and heaven and hell LARPing magic spell games over shitty boring church sermon music > white people having fun and freedom of thought

NAH I need to borrow more credit!

>>18367451
take your meds, man.

>>18367463
You are a fag.

>>18367476
thats rude, man.

>>18366560
I lost interest after THE CRUELTY, VANITY, AND FOLLY OF ELEGABALUS, since after that everything pales in comparison.

>>18366560
sigh, read Machiavelli

You know, it's kind of a boring thing to say, but isn't the answer to "Why did Rome fall?" that "It was always going to"?

Entropy affects civilizations and empires, too. Everything runs out of energy and strength sooner or later, at least in this world. Rome ran out of resources, it ran out of manpower, it ran out of competent commanders for its armies. It ran out of money, too, thanks to not knowing how inflation works. Eventually it just ran to ground, like every other empire in history.

Even so, Rome, by Gibbon's measure, lasts from 753 BC, when Romulus christens the city, to 1453 AD, when the Ottomans take Constantinople. That's more than 2200 years of some political entity known as "Rome" existing in the world. That's impressive. And Rome's cultural and historical legacy have lasted even longer. Rome got a lot longer than most civilizations and empires get.

>>18368190
This and Christianity survived the fall so I'm not really sure what Rome and Christianity produced that Christianity didn't by itself. In fact the Vandals and Goths were Arian Christians.

>>18368270

The one Question that even Edward Gibbons was too afraid to address in his book :

> Is Christianity weak because Christian Rome fell or is it strong because Arian Christian Goths conquered Rome?

>>18368369
Everyone who ever calls Christianity weak can't sufficiently answer how this supposedly "weak" religion conquered the world and won billions of believers on every continent. It's had even more success than Islam, despite Islam explicitly being a conqueror religion. Clearly there's SOMETHING strong about Christianity, its own success attest to that.

>>18368369
It's because unitarianism destroys the pagan trins.

>>18368419
It takes a certain amount of inner strength to go to pagan sacrificial cultures and make them an alphabet so they can read and write then translate the Bible to their language so they can learn about God then wash and rinse.

I think the problem with Edward saying Christianity is that the reasons he gives for how Christianity caused the fall are shitty.

He says it created military weakness, but Rome was conquered and ended by the Goths who began Christianising by the early 4th century and by the end of the 4th had fully Christenised. In fact, the Goths were more Christian (even if heretic Arians) than the western Roman Empire where a significant number remained pagan like in the city of Rome, especially in comparison to the eastern empire and Constantinople. Now Christianity didn’t seem to have weakened the Goths martial spirit so why would it for the western Roman Empire? Neither did it destroy the resolve of the more Christian eastern Roman Empire to survive no matter what.

He also says it caused the fall because Christians were indifferent to the earthly world, but Christians have always cared about the earthly world. Most Christians were enthusiastic about military conquests because it meant the survival and spread of Christianity in the earthy one (like St. pope Gregory the Great preached). Of course the Roman Empire Christians cared deeply that the empire had fallen to heretics (like the Vandals and Goths), which was one of the main motivations behind Justinian’s reconquests, and in the case of Britain (to pagans), which is why St. Gregory was so determined to send Christian missionaries there first out of all places.

>>18366560
The high IQ take is that Edward Gibbon is wrong and retarded, but that Christianity is still really at fault (although it also managed to provide a stabilizing influence throughout Europe post-West Rome)

bruhs foucualt already went into this shit in history of sexuality, christians were actually sexually liberal art first because fucking all the time is a good way to increase the ranks of the religion, but the romans were already becoming prudish and obsessive about regulating sex, so christians changed up their style to resonate with that. i guess it's sort of like how now the church is starting to slowly embrace lgbt shit cuz that's the way the masses are going. so romans would have become uptight prudes scared to fuck and been overrun by people with higher birthrates with or without christianity.

>>18368491
china collapsed and then reconsolidated as a megastate without any spooky ideology a few times, the fact that europe never reunified under one empire goes to show maybe christianity was harmful in "stablizing europe" since basically it was all out war for centuries and highly unstable

>>18368419
>despite Islam explicitly being a conqueror religion
lmao retard it was Christianity that did mass conversions by the sword not Islam, they didn't give a fuck if the populace converted or not

>>18368527

> europe never reunified under one empire goes to show maybe christianity was harmful

That’s what made Europe great. Qing China and the Ottoman Empire became extremely shitty for a reason.

>>18368527
>since basically it was all out war for centuries a
Wrong. It also depends where you look. It was mainly war wherever Vikings (mainly Normans in the later years, who were "technically" Christian) settled. The Holy Roman Empire was largely peaceful along with many other areas of Europe that weren't exposed to pagans or Muslims.
>without any spooky ideology
I think if you got to understand Taoism and the Heavenly Mandate you'd take that back. China had its own imperial-religious tradition up until the Boxer Rebellion.

That said, it's by no means guarantied that the lack of Christianity would've saved Western Rome. If Mithraism, as well as a solidified Imperial Cult, prevailed as a dominant and dogmatic force (which would've required further political-religious changes) it could've extirpated the Dionysians, Cybelenes, and various other destabilizing cults, and thus the Empire may have survived. The aristocracy itself needed to be majorly reformed or replaced though, or at least put through a new baptism of fire to revitalize it. In comparison to these heroic and imperial cults, Christianity was a hybrid of plebeian cults and native Roman religiosity, and eventually more general European paganism as it tried to make itself more palatable to Europeans. The most obvious evidence of this is the fact that the Pope to this day still holds the title originally held by the Roman god-emperor (and prior to him the high priest of the Roman cult), pontifex maximus.

>>18368565
true, i just don't know about the narrative that christianity was some stabilizing force when there where three different kinds of christianity in europe, and they were all fighting each other

>>18368573
daoism wasn't the ideology of any dynasty that i'm aware of

>>18368590
That's because it's not an ideology, it's a philosophy that is inherent to the Chinese ruling classes (at least back in those times).

>>18368527
And yet there were multiple nations, kingdoms, and states in Europe that became vastly more powerful than China ever was, in the centuries after Rome fell. I mean, fuck, the Spanish Empire, French Empire, and British Empire all make China's mightiest periods look like a joke.

>>18368577
I think it created just enough unity to make them fight together against Turks and moors and other invaders, but never enough to fully unify them. I think the good thing is that Europe had so many countries that if one declined the other can continue to do well. For instance, Spain and Italy declined in 17th century, but Britain and France continued to do very well which meant Europe continued to advance. On the other hand the decline of large unified empires in Asia (Qing China, Ottoman, Mughal India) meant no one else could pick up the mantle.

>>18368573