Political uber-blog Daily Kos talks about the Library of Alexandria for its “Science Friday” feature. In the post, regular contributor DarkSyde (inspired by the novel “Remembering Hypatia”) wonders what our present could have been if a Christian mob hadn’t burned the library shortly after the murder of Hypatia.

“One has to wonder just where the human race would be today, if that flame had not been snuffed out. Would our planet now be a poisoned nuclear wasteland in which gangs of semi-feral children chase rats in the shadows of dilapidated glass and metal towers on the outskirts of Bartertown? Or would disease be a factum of history stored in the memory of immortal human/AI hybrids plying a sea of stars, our first interstellar ships unloading genetically engineered people onto the distant shores of new worlds? For better or for worse, and in part because of the destruction of places like the Great Library of Alexandria, the end of that story lays in our future, not in our past.”

The “ghost” hiding in this story is one of religious tolerance and the shifting from a “pagan” empire to a Christian one under Constantine. The order of tolerance for all faiths under his Edict of Milan soon evolved into favored status for Christians, repressions of Jewish and pagan religious expression, and finally the outlawing of all non-Christian faiths under Flavius Theodosius in 392. This edict from Theodosius lead to the eventual destruction of the library.

In the end power corrupts. No faith pagan or otherwise can avoid atrocity when married to the needs of empire. While some like to speculate on how much “better” or “worse” our present would be if the Roman Empire had not turned Christian in the end I prefer the option of the Deist freethinkers who founded our nation. The separation of Church and State.

Tags: Paganism