I'm afraid St Benedict may be getting the credit credit for this, in much the same way Elon Musk gets the credit for inventing electric cars. See earlier bits on science, reputation and the career as scientist vis-a-vis packaging. Celtic Christianity being the main example of what was going on outside the Romano Christian world, eventually they too were brought into an obedience line such that a millennium later natioanlism = religion. Which if they had done before the English as Norman interceded they never would have been Catholic. The idea itself is well worth discussing.
also on the process in which the middle tier was stripped out in favour of the imperial cult by way of making the Jesus devotee-ist obey the church, another resource and frame is Jörg Rüpke's On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. In reading this I had to learn about the phrase "appropriation of knowledge" and had a bad time at a dinner party: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/inappropriation
There is an argument that the Irish Celtic Christianity is a major source, as in a safe refugia for a trove of texts and traditions, etc, while barbarians roamed the collapsed Roman west before their various leaders were sold on the idea that Roman Catholicism was a good way to structure kingdoms and empires: because Constantinople. St Benedict comes way later and gets the credit for the work the others have done. He just wrote a manual for an approved improved maybe franchise system. The manual emphasises obedience (I'll get to that later).
Christianity in Ireland originally arrived in an area that was never under direct Roman rule, and was a very local affair, and not an adjunct to Imperial power as an imperial pre-eminent cult with Constantine, and then later the official and only religion with Theodosius choice of Nicene Christianity with a (military) hierarchy. St Augustine arrives in between these two and provides the intellectual basis to swap out the more local (the cults of the polis) for an imperial empire-wide monopoly of product labelled 'The City of God'. Curiously in the west Christianity survives in Ireland where this model had never been imported.
As such the Irish Christianity was more devotional than military. It was thus integrated into celtic bardic traditions. There are arguments Ireland had its own links with those Christianities present in northern Africa or Egypt when pre-Patrick saints are discussed. He was not the first. (Like Elon Patrick gets the credit when he just was a better marketer of product)(Or the evidence for the prior art are 'lost'). (The Buddha might be another example of this, where the best known gets labelled as the first). (We like origin stories as much as we like to give agency to things that have none.)
An example of this investigation are books like , Mary Condren's The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
That tradition in Ireland was lost when the Anglo-Normans arrived and the Catholic Church was imported. The insular ways were lost while they received little acknowledgement for their efforts.
(In recent centuries Catholicism and resistance-lead nationalisms often do well out of each other, Catholicism and Irish nationalism were not always so strongly linked.(Another example % Catholics in East Timor increased after the Indonesia invasion while animism decreased).
In Ireland Catholicism was banned by a Protestant Ascendancy because Catholics must obey the church first and their King second (a position which was more like the original insular Celtic Christianity which gave no thought to Rome) (e.g. Catholics were not allowed to buy land for example, and the Irish Parliament was of course built out of an enfranchisement to land-holders only).(This is the legal ancestry of why MPs for the Commonwealth AUS parliament are not allowed to be dual nationals).
So the idea worth discussing is local world-building. Curiously this can also lead to collapse when we do our own research.
Shaun as Giles - fantastic - worth wading through all the other heavy philosophical pieces!
Yes, it was a bit heavy this week I guess. It's where my head is right now. But note taken.
I've a response to Gaston at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/a-wonderful-straightedge-of-a-book
I'm afraid St Benedict may be getting the credit credit for this, in much the same way Elon Musk gets the credit for inventing electric cars. See earlier bits on science, reputation and the career as scientist vis-a-vis packaging. Celtic Christianity being the main example of what was going on outside the Romano Christian world, eventually they too were brought into an obedience line such that a millennium later natioanlism = religion. Which if they had done before the English as Norman interceded they never would have been Catholic. The idea itself is well worth discussing.
The idea might well be worth discussing, but I'd have to understand it first. I don't follow what you've written :)
also on the process in which the middle tier was stripped out in favour of the imperial cult by way of making the Jesus devotee-ist obey the church, another resource and frame is Jörg Rüpke's On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. In reading this I had to learn about the phrase "appropriation of knowledge" and had a bad time at a dinner party: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/inappropriation
There is an argument that the Irish Celtic Christianity is a major source, as in a safe refugia for a trove of texts and traditions, etc, while barbarians roamed the collapsed Roman west before their various leaders were sold on the idea that Roman Catholicism was a good way to structure kingdoms and empires: because Constantinople. St Benedict comes way later and gets the credit for the work the others have done. He just wrote a manual for an approved improved maybe franchise system. The manual emphasises obedience (I'll get to that later).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization
Christianity in Ireland originally arrived in an area that was never under direct Roman rule, and was a very local affair, and not an adjunct to Imperial power as an imperial pre-eminent cult with Constantine, and then later the official and only religion with Theodosius choice of Nicene Christianity with a (military) hierarchy. St Augustine arrives in between these two and provides the intellectual basis to swap out the more local (the cults of the polis) for an imperial empire-wide monopoly of product labelled 'The City of God'. Curiously in the west Christianity survives in Ireland where this model had never been imported.
As such the Irish Christianity was more devotional than military. It was thus integrated into celtic bardic traditions. There are arguments Ireland had its own links with those Christianities present in northern Africa or Egypt when pre-Patrick saints are discussed. He was not the first. (Like Elon Patrick gets the credit when he just was a better marketer of product)(Or the evidence for the prior art are 'lost'). (The Buddha might be another example of this, where the best known gets labelled as the first). (We like origin stories as much as we like to give agency to things that have none.)
An example of this investigation are books like , Mary Condren's The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
That tradition in Ireland was lost when the Anglo-Normans arrived and the Catholic Church was imported. The insular ways were lost while they received little acknowledgement for their efforts.
(In recent centuries Catholicism and resistance-lead nationalisms often do well out of each other, Catholicism and Irish nationalism were not always so strongly linked.(Another example % Catholics in East Timor increased after the Indonesia invasion while animism decreased).
In Ireland Catholicism was banned by a Protestant Ascendancy because Catholics must obey the church first and their King second (a position which was more like the original insular Celtic Christianity which gave no thought to Rome) (e.g. Catholics were not allowed to buy land for example, and the Irish Parliament was of course built out of an enfranchisement to land-holders only).(This is the legal ancestry of why MPs for the Commonwealth AUS parliament are not allowed to be dual nationals).
So the idea worth discussing is local world-building. Curiously this can also lead to collapse when we do our own research.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/to-build-a-better-world-we-should
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/sister-wendy-on-love-as-an-obedient