A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Nowhere
The lady on Tik Tok who claims the Roman Empire never existed is clearly a fool. Plus, like many such fools she is insufferably belligerent, condescending and arrogant. No one need waste any time considering her peculiar thesis. Well, no one except myself for of course I am curious about how such odd ideas work and how, if necessary, they are to be effectively combated. There is no piece of evidence the believers in Romans can point to that cannot be dismissed as fraudulent or fake or part of a conspiracy by Roman skeptics. This is why arguments about evidence in a piecemeal, point by point fashion play into the Roman skeptic’s hands. Thus, it is useful to consider the real grounds on which we dismiss (deservedly) such a theory as cranky almost without consideration. Considering these will save us a great deal of time we might have wasted wrangling with cranks and fools. The Tik Tok lady in question claims, as various people have in the past it seems, that in the 16th Century Roman antiquity and the Latin language were forged whole cloth by the Spanish Inquisition (for purposes that seem rather fuzzy). What is more, the Inquisition, along with the Victorians it seems, faked all existing Roman monuments. As I said above variations of this conspiracy theory have existed for centuries (J.H. Newman mentions it in one of his books) and I can offer no explanation as to the motives behind it. I note though, that in the case of Tik Tok lady the motive seems to be anti-Catholicism. The prestige of the Roman church seems to follow on the prestige of Rome and its civilization and getting rid of the second undercuts the first. The ambition of this theory is beyond what its author probably realizes even if one confines oneself solely to textual evidence. I boggle at the scale of this purported undertaking. The inquisition would have to have faked ALL of ancient Latin literature plus with ANY Greek, Coptic or Syriac literature that referred to it plus ALL Medieval Latin plus ALL vernacular literature that referred to it or to Roman literature or antiquity in general. They would have to have destroyed ALL previous copies of any text they translated or comprehensively interpolated. Even more implausibly they would have to be so good at creating fake languages that they could convincingly write masterpieces in them both in poetry and philosophy. Plus they would have to fake the 1 million plus words attributed to St Augustine to say nothing of other Latin Patristic authors! One wonders if even the inquisition could have pulled off a fraud on this scale and left NO external clue that it had done so. What is more, if they were capable of pulling off such a feat they would be geniuses of a hitherto unknown order. One would almost think that if people so brilliant and creative ever existed they would merit whatever power or prestige they held. I would be quite proud of being a catholic if the Catholic Church could do something like this!
Alas the idea falls immediately and simply to the ground
if we engage in one short reflection. When we reflect on all the things we have
heard, seen, read or been told about Rome we see that they cohere around the
impression that Rome existed. Take away Rome and the historical and cultural world
as an intelligible object crumbles around us. Thousands of impressions that
cohered before are now floating about random and uncorrelated. If we take away
the Latin language as a historical phenomenon we have the mystery of why a
group of languages that includes French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and
Italian have so many similarities. We have no explanation for why the cultural
boundaries of Europe are what they are or why Germany is such a different place
than France. We have little coherent medieval history for all primary
documentation in Latin is now shown to be far later in time than the events it
documents. We have no Bede and no Notker the Stammerer to tell us about the
Anglo Saxons or Charlemagne. Plus, as I said, if Latin is a forgery and the
Romans fake ALL vernacular documents that refer to them must be suspect too
leaving us basically in the dark about centuries of history. Take away all
history that includes Rome or its influence and we pretty much HAVE no history.
We have no account even of how our arch nemesis the Catholic Church came to be
for almost all the history we have of it is mediated through the Latin tongue. [1]Our
world is now a free floating void of empty factoids with no integral connection
with each other dominated by a mysterious and almost omnipotent institution
which has faked the entirety of its own history and ours to. Taking away the
Romans is, then, epistemically costly in terms of other knowledge and that is
why we dismiss the idea as prima facie absurd. It is as useless and uninteresting
as claiming we live in a simulation.
I think knowers are perfectly within their rights to
consider epistemic cost in evaluating whether they are willing to consider a
certain theory or not. Coherence with existing knowledge is something a theory
should, ideally, offer. A theory that coheres with no current knowledge and
renders what has hitherto been intelligible unintelligible is a theory with
little to commend itself even if its proponent can cherry pick some random bits
of evidence for it. Of course, this theory makes us swallow absurdities much
bigger than any inconsistency the Roman skeptic can find in our documentary
evidence. On this theory things like Renaissance humanism become very puzzling.
How was it that scholars across Europe came to suddenly use a whole new
language that their TEACHERS had never heard of? Might one or two of them not
mentioned a fact so strange? And if the Catholic Church faked all the documents
that refer to its own history why did it invent such scandalous episodes as the
Albigensian crusade? In fact, this theory involves the erasure of whole
regional cultures such as that of southern France. Our sources about the Occitan
world and the dissident Cathar religion are primarily (if not exclusively) from
Latin documents. Without these we would be at sea in trying to understand the
meager fragments of information on the Cathars we have in the vernacular. One
also has to wonder why the 16th century church would fake so much
documentation about a religious foe that had nearly routed it from Southern
France! I could pile up such absurdities endlessly but there is actually no
reason to. The theory that Rome and Latin never existed has too little going
for it to justify tossing out mountains of achieved knowledge. It solves no real
problems and introduces too many of its own. The interesting thing is that we
do not even need to engage explicitly or extensively with the Roman skeptic to
see this. It is a judgment we make implicitly and almost immediately when faced
with her claims and, in fact, the problem is to tease out the grounds of a judgment
we make so implicitly and directly that we barely advert to it. Of course, conspiracy theorists force us to do just this and since they now dominate our
world we had better consider more consciously and directly how exactly we should
deal with them.
[1] Of
course Greek Byzantine texts refer to the Western Latin church but these also
refer to the Roman empire and as such are not available to the Roman skeptic.
Plus, they persistently refer to the Western church as LATIN. Clearly, the
Byzantine Greek texts must be fake too.
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