Methodological Traps, Pitfalls, and Fallacies in the Study of Intellectual Silence

This article is a response to four responses to my book Europe, Byzantium, and the “Intellectual Silence” of Rus’. That book in turn responded to the question posed by Francis Thompson, “Where was the Russian Peter Abelard?” It began with two premises − that theology was “the crown jewel of disciplined thought” in both the Eastern and Western Churches during the medieval period and that medieval Christian theology represented an amalgamation of prior Christian thought with Neoplatonism. The literature of early Rus’ was little more than what would have been contained in a large Byzantine monastic library, because those in charge of educating the newly baptized pagan Rus’ on the basic principles of Christianity felt compelled to provide them only necessary information to save their souls. But why did the package not include the seven liberal arts (including dialectic), which were the basis of the Western Church curriculum?

Afterword

By 2015, Latter-day Saints were beginning to consolidate a more resilient cultural memory of Smith’s vision based on unabashed selection, relation, and repetition of Smith’s accounts in church curriculum. Curriculum a generation earlier had avoided any potential first vision controversies. Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith had been banned, not his interpretation of Smith’s accounts was the curriculum, having been officially selected, related, and repeated via media that was much more likely than a lecture or a textbook to modulate memory formation in young Latter-day Saints. The consolidation of their shared memory will take time. So will the recursion process by which elements are added or subtracted and new memories form. Within a generation, relatively few saints will remember any of the earlier versions of their shared knowledge. This book will preserve those memories.