Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Wordful Wednesday: Lost to the West

I’m certain that without the Internet I wouldn’t get as much reading in.  Or at least I don’t think I’d read on quite as diverse a range of topics as I read now.  I still get recommendations from friends, from bibliographies of other books I read, and from the Cursed Library New Materials RSS Feed (a good thing which prevents me from doing much of my own choosing), but it sure seems like, these days, I get a lot of recommendations from other bookish blogs.

I first saw mention of Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization, by Lars Brownworth, over on superfastreader.com.  And it certainly would’ve been nice to be a super-fast reader, because interesting and gripping as the book was, it wasn’t exactly speedy reading.  And I’m not really sure why not.

I love to read both fiction and non-fiction, and my favorite topics in non-fiction are science and history (and History of Science is a particular favorite).  Both history and science books are awesome because they make me feel smarter and dumber at the same time.  Mostly I feel dumb that I didn’t already know more about the topic.

Everyone learns about the Byzantine Empire in school, right?  I know I certainly did, though I haven’t had a world history class since (wow!) 1987 or so.  Double wow there.  It all goes back to the fact that I did a 3:2 transfer program to get my engineering degree.  Since we future engineers were only going to be experiencing three of the normal four years of George Fox College’s offerings, the powers that be decided we shouldn’t waste time on trivialities like Western Civ and U.S. History or, for that matter, Bible 101.  No, instead, we few, we lucky few, got to take upper-division electives in the humanities and Bible.

(This isn’t really a complaint here.  In Bible, particularly, I loved the classes I took – Writings of John, Life of Christ, and Christian Classics were awesome.  And I got my Bible 101 from LeTourneau University after I transferred.)

So I got to choose either Psychology or Sociology, had to take both Ethics and Intro to Philosophy (both of which helped me discover my love of writing), and the History class I chose was England to 1688.  By the way, I enjoyed the class quite a bit.

(Looking back, I’m really glad I studied Engineering at a liberal arts school.  Because Intro to Music and Survey of Art were really cool classes.  Even if we engineers enjoyed adding an ‘F’, guess where, in Survey of Art.  Psst…it was right before the only ‘a’ in the course title.  Don’t tell my mother.)

You know what I love?  When I completely hijack an otherwise well-intentioned book review to just yammer on about something in my past.  Blogging is awesome.

Anyhow, I knew something about the Byzantines, because I’d had Mrs. Gaffney’s Honors World History way back twenty-three years ago (sob!), and I even read Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium back in college, which wasn’t even fifteen years ago!

All that being said, I knew nothing about the Byzantine Empire  And now I do.  I know that Justinian was a pretty remarkable dude, Belisarius was an amazing military commander, the Comnenis brought things back from the brink, the Fourth Crusade was a tragedy, and being the Byzantine Emperor must’ve been a pretty cool gig, apart from the fact that the severance package usually involved being poisoned, blinded, or strangled with a bowstring.

But more than any dry facts I may have learned in reading this book, I learned to admire the Byzantines and to be thankful for what they did, preserving what became known as the Western Tradition even while being normally thought of as The East.

Because, really, what would’ve become of Western Europe without Constantinople?  In short, it probably would have ceased to exist during the Dark Ages.  At its most vulnerable, it probably would have been attacked by the Bulgars, or the Khans, or the Turks.  But with Constantinople there, a brilliant and wealthy target, all the big guns seemed to aim there.  And most of them were pushed back.

Of course, Byzantine power waxed and waned a fair bit, and some of the Emperors weren’t worth the air they breathed.  But others brought them back from the brink and managed to save the remnants of Greek and Roman culture so they could be passed on later.  And even the final fall of Constantinople did good for the Christian West.  In their exodus from the failing empire, the population carried copies of classical works into the West (which had been Lost to the West).

In short, even though I seemed to struggle to get through it, this is a terrific book and highly worth reading.  And I need to read more histories.  (Heh…but I already started another.)

Next up…no idea really.  I’ve started five books, and I’m pretty sure I know which three I’ll finish first, but can’t make an educated guess as to which will pull me in for a quick finish.