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There is no need to apologise especially when something happens outside of your control. It remains a thought provoking read.
Not thought of a book ?
Not thought of a book ?
Maybe that was the case when you were compiling this thread?"I had a nagging anxiety I was being watched though."
Sit back, relax, forget about the past and go for it.Evening gentlemen - thank you again for your positive comments - they mean a lot to me. After having time to calm down and get over my hissy fit - I have reconsidered and will finish the project. I remain though gutted at losing all of last night's work - 7 hours worth. It's not just a matter of re-typing it because of the way I put the narrative together. I use my original notes taken in Madrid for inspiration - form a rough idea of what I want to say - then research the outline - to make sure I spell names and place names correctly - also dates are checked if I'm going to cite them - ditto book titles and the like. Then I start writing - it comes together as I type - to some degree it's spontaneous - so impossible to replicate but then again you won't realise - your never got to read it. Thanks again - I shall return. Yours - I.
That's great news Iain. Thank you.Evening gentlemen - thank you again for your positive comments - they mean a lot to me. After having time to calm down and get over my hissy fit - I have reconsidered and will finish the project. I remain though gutted at losing all of last night's work - 7 hours worth. It's not just a matter of re-typing it because of the way I put the narrative together. I use my original notes taken in Madrid for inspiration - form a rough idea of what I want to say - then research the outline - to make sure I spell names and place names correctly - also dates are checked if I'm going to cite them - ditto book titles and the like. Then I start writing - it comes together as I type - to some degree it's spontaneous - so impossible to replicate but then again you won't realise - your never got to read it. Thanks again - I shall return. Yours - I.
Back by popular demand! Well done I.Evening gentlemen - thank you again for your positive comments - they mean a lot to me. After having time to calm down and get over my hissy fit - I have reconsidered and will finish the project. I remain though gutted at losing all of last night's work - 7 hours worth. It's not just a matter of re-typing it because of the way I put the narrative together. I use my original notes taken in Madrid for inspiration - form a rough idea of what I want to say - then research the outline - to make sure I spell names and place names correctly - also dates are checked if I'm going to cite them - ditto book titles and the like. Then I start writing - it comes together as I type - to some degree it's spontaneous - so impossible to replicate but then again you won't realise - your never got to read it. Thanks again - I shall return. Yours - I.
@Digimonkey Iain - I've just worked my way through the posts. Simply brilliant! Thank you for taking the time to do this - it is very much appreciated and fascinating stuff.Evening gentlemen - thank you again for your positive comments - they mean a lot to me. After having time to calm down and get over my hissy fit - I have reconsidered and will finish the project. I remain though gutted at losing all of last night's work - 7 hours worth. It's not just a matter of re-typing it because of the way I put the narrative together. I use my original notes taken in Madrid for inspiration - form a rough idea of what I want to say - then research the outline - to make sure I spell names and place names correctly - also dates are checked if I'm going to cite them - ditto book titles and the like. Then I start writing - it comes together as I type - to some degree it's spontaneous - so impossible to replicate but then again you won't realise - your never got to read it. Thanks again - I shall return. Yours - I.
@Digimonkey Iain - I've just worked my way through the posts. Simply brilliant! Thank you for taking the time to do this - it is very much appreciated and fascinating stuff.
Looking forward to it.Thanks Tom - I'm grateful for your comments. I need to return to the project. The pictures are done - I just need to turn out the words. I will try really hard this weekend - yours - I.
Outstanding work Iain. Thought provoking, challenging, and entertaining. A real treat mate, many thanks.Psycho-geography in Madrid - part the fourth -
View attachment 35015
They are definitely watching me now -
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This is beginning to creep me out a bit.
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Echoes of Christological debate and schism in the 5th C. church -
To recap what you didn't get to read the last time, the t'interweb having eaten the greater part of my words - it looked at the journey from the original Greek idea of Hades - definitely a place below - but pretty much free from ideas of punishment or penalty. It was just where the souls of the dead went. This latterly shifts as Greek culture becomes stressed - eventually to be invaded by Rome - with notions of judgement being introduced. It really took the spread and eventual dominance of Christianity in western Europe to solidify the concepts of below - bad and above - good. Reaching its - beautifully expressed - logical conclusion in Dante's ‘Divine Comedy,' with its highly elaborated version of Hades. When you translate the Greek word into Latin you get inferno or infernum - hence the name Dante used. A much scarier place - I think you'd agree. Lets move on -
It's not really correct - in my opinion - to refer to Christianity in the singular - it has always been Christianities - plural - at no point was there ever a single interpretation of the core beliefs. In origin an off-shoot of Second Temple Judaism - the differing positions adopted continued to multiply and multiply and - by the calling of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon in 451 - were astonishingly varied and diverse. The Eastern Emperor Marcian - much like Constantine at Nicea in 315 - had become heartily sick of it and demanded that the main groups get together and come up with a definitive statement of orthodoxy. All the divisive bickering wasn't helpful if you were trying to run an empire. The main theological sticking point at the time was how to define the nature of Christ - was he a blend of the human and divine - two separate natures united in the incarnate Logos or of a unitary indivisible form composed of them both? The former won out - dyophysitism more correctly - and the latter - monophysitism - was ruled heretical. A position still held by the vast majority of Christians today. Did it help unity in the church? - of course not - it was never going to. At this point the Oriental Orthodox churches - Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, Eritrean and Indian - went their own way and this rift has never been healed. The Oriental Orthodox confessors would deny the description monophysite - preferring to be labelled miaphysite - but there's no need to further complicate the issue. Why is this relevant? It made me wonder whether the above - the divine - and the below - must always be separate from each other or are there times and places they blend to become one? Who knows?
One of the other main decisions made at Chalcedon was to grant the See of Constantinople equality with the See of Rome - this must have struck the Greek Patriarch as a bit rich - and really only under-lining the obvious. At this point in history Constantinople was a place of great beauty, staggering wealth, intellectual and artistic achievement. The Eastern Empire controlled vast swathes of territory - times were good. The Western Empire - on the other hand - was moribund - it had shrunk back to pretty much only the Italian peninsula - the rot really started to set in when the Vandals took Carthage in North Africa - cutting off the bulk of the grain supply for the mainland - add to that wave after wave of barbarians crashing into their territory. The Pope - Leo I - had very limited temporal authority and about to have greater earthly issues with the arrival of Attila the Hun the next year at the gates of Rome - by this point totally unable to defend itself. Church tradition holds that Leo - with Sts Peter and Paul at either hand - went out to parly with Attila and turned him back. More likely - although sadly more prosaically - it was likely to have been a combination of bribery, an outbreak of plague in his army and the famine then raging in Italy. Add to that Marcian - from the other end of the Mediterranean - was laying waste to his supply lines and Atilla's homelands on the Hungarian steppe. Either way he retreated never to return. It's interesting that we still use terms like vandal and hun as pejoratives - the shock of their appearance out of nowhere all those years ago still resonates in our everyday speech. Goth has had an interesting journey linguistically - first a term of abuse, then an architectural style, next a genre of literature to finally pitch up as a description for moody teenagers. The barbarians had the last laugh though - the final Western Roman Emperor died in 476 and they got to take over what was left.
Thanks for reading - yours - I.
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