Thomas Cahill

Thomas Cahill (1940 – 18 Oktober 2022) adalah seorang cendekiawan dan penulis Amerika. Dia terkenal dengan seri The Hinges of History, sebuah seri prospektif tujuh jilid di mana penulis menceritakan momen-momen penting dalam peradaban Barat.

Kutipan

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

• Apakah Sigmund Freud benar atau tidak ketika dia bergumam dengan jengkel bahwa orang Irlandia adalah satu-satunya orang yang tidak dapat ditolong oleh psikoanalisis, tidak ada keraguan tentang satu hal: orang Irlandia tidak akan pernah berubah.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Patrick... memahami bahwa, meskipun Kekristenan tidak terkait erat dengan kebiasaan Romawi, Kekristenan tidak dapat bertahan tanpa literasi Romawi.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Irlandia memiliki keunikan dalam sejarah agama karena menjadi satu-satunya negara tempat agama Kristen diperkenalkan tanpa pertumpahan darah.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Orang Irlandia pada akhir abad kelima dan awal abad keenam segera menemukan sebuah solusi... Kemartiran Hijau, yang menentang Kemartiran Merah yang konvensional dengan darah. Para Martir Hijau... mengasingkan diri ke hutan, atau ke puncak gunung, atau ke pulau terpencil... di sana untuk mempelajari kitab suci dan bersekutu dengan Tuhan.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Kemurahan hati orang Irlandia tidak hanya diperuntukkan bagi berbagai orang tetapi juga berbagai ide. ... Mereka membawa ke perpustakaan mereka segala sesuatu yang bisa mereka dapatkan. ... Tidak bagi mereka keraguan Santo Jerome... mereka mulai melahap semua literatur kafir Yunani dan Latin kuno yang datang kepada mereka.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Sementara di tempat lain di Eropa, tidak ada orang terpelajar yang akan tertangkap basah berbicara dalam bahasa daerah, orang Irlandia berpikir bahwa semua vernacular adalah permainan - dan terlalu menyenangkan untuk tidak menggunakan bahasa tersebut. Mereka masih terlalu kekanak-kanakan dan suka bermain untuk menemukan nilai dalam keangkuhan.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Halaman-halaman sebagian besar buku terbuat dari perkamen belang-belang, yaitu kulit domba kering, yang tersedia secara universal - dan tidak ada yang lebih berlimpah daripada di Irlandia, yang padang rumputnya yang hijau cerah masih menjadi tuan rumah bagi ledakan domba-domba putih yang baru lahir pada bulan April. Vellum, atau kulit anak sapi, yang berwarna lebih putih seragam ketika dikeringkan, digunakan lebih hemat untuk teks-teks yang paling terhormat.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Karena tidak memiliki banyak kota, Irlandia tidak melihat pentingnya uskup, dan lambat laun posisi uskup digantikan oleh kepala biara dan - dalam sebuah perkembangan yang akan membuat orang Romawi yang memiliki harga diri menjadi dingin - kepala biara.

• Para kepala biara... memiliki kuasa untuk menyembuhkan, ... hampir pasti mendengar pengakuan dosa, mungkin ditahbiskan sebagai pendeta, dan bahkan mungkin pernah merayakan Misa.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Orang Irlandia ... mengembangkan sebuah bentuk pengakuan dosa yang secara eksklusif bersifat pribadi dan tidak ada padanannya di benua ini. Dalam gereja kuno, pengakuan dosa-dosa seseorang - dan penebusan dosa berikutnya ... selalu bersifat publik. ... Seseorang tidak selalu memilih "imam" dari kalangan profesional yang telah ditahbiskan: tindakan pengakuan dosa terlalu pribadi dan terlalu penting untuk pembatasan seperti itu. Orang mencari seorang "anmchara", seorang sahabat jiwa, seseorang yang dapat dipercaya sepanjang hidup.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Satu abad setelah kematian Patrick... hanya ada sedikit orang Romawi yang tersisa di Eropa barat. [Pada pertengahan abad keenam, seluruh struktur halus organisasi politik Romawi dan komunikasi Romawi telah lenyap. Sebagai gantinya tumbuh kerajaan-kerajaan kecil yang kokoh pada Abad Pertengahan, orang-orang Gothic yang buta huruf memerintah orang-orang Gotik yang buta huruf, kafir, atau kadang-kadang Arian - yaitu, mengikuti bentuk kekristenan yang direndahkan dan berpikiran sederhana di mana Yesus diberi status yang mirip dengan Muhammad dalam Islam.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Tidak pernah tertarik dengan bangunan yang mengesankan, para biarawan Irlandia lebih suka menghabiskan waktu mereka untuk belajar, berdoa, bertani - dan, tentu saja, menyalin. ... sebuah gubuk kecil untuk setiap biarawan... sebuah ruang makan dan dapur; sebuah skriptorium dan perpustakaan; sebuah bengkel, tempat pembakaran, penggilingan, dan beberapa lumbung; sebuah gereja yang sederhana - dan mereka berbisnis.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Perilaku sombong ini telah membingungkan para sejarawan, membuat mereka bertanya-tanya apakah Kolumbanus sedikit kurang waras. Tapi saya pikir kita bisa mengaitkan sikap ini dengan ke-Irlandia-annya.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Sastra Latin hampir pasti akan hilang tanpa bahasa Irlandia, dan Eropa yang buta huruf tidak akan bisa mengembangkan literatur nasionalnya yang hebat tanpa contoh bahasa Irlandia, literatur vernakular pertama yang dituliskan.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Lebih dari separuh tafsiran Alkitab antara tahun 650 dan 850 ditulis oleh orang Irlandia.
  • Ch. VI What Was Found

• Beowulf bergulat dengan para raksasa adalah tipe Kristus yang bergulat dengan Iblis.
  • Ch. VII The End of the World

• Selama satu setengah abad - dari pertengahan abad kelima hingga akhir abad keenam - tidak ada... tidak ada komunikasi formal antara Roma dan orang-orang Kristen di Inggris, dan juga tidak ada komunikasi formal antara Roma dan Irlandia...
  • Ch. VII The End of the World

• Lebih dari satu miliar orang di dunia saat ini bertahan hidup dengan kurang dari $ 370 per tahun, sementara orang Amerika, yang merupakan lima persen dari populasi dunia, membeli lima puluh persen kokain.
  • Ch. VII The End of the World

• Jika kita diselamatkan, bukan oleh orang Romawi, melainkan oleh orang-orang kudus.
  • Ch. VII The End of the World

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

• Manusia tidak pernah tahu lebih dari sebagian, seperti "melalui kaca yang gelap"; dan semua pengetahuan datang kepada kita dalam beberapa bagian.
  • Pendahuluan

• Seperti ikan yang tidak tahu bahwa mereka berenang di air, kita jarang menyadari atmosfer zaman yang kita lalui, betapa aneh dan uniknya zaman itu. Tetapi ketika kita mendekati zaman lain, keasingannya menonjol di hadapan kita, seolah-olah itu adalah kualitasnya yang paling jelas...
  • Pendahuluan

• Bagi saya, tugas utama sejarawan adalah menghidupkan orang yang sudah mati.
  • Pendahuluan

• Hanya ketika kita melangkah mundur, kita dapat melihat bahwa kita telah merakit kembali sesuatu yang dapat bertahan di tengah angin.
  • Pendahuluan

• Dunia Yunani akan terus mengalami revolusi budaya yang hampir konstan sejak zaman Homeros hingga hari ketika Romawi membuat Yunani bertekuk lutut pada abad kedua SM... lintasan terpanjang dari perkembangan yang berubah-ubah dalam masyarakat mana pun yang dikenal dalam sejarah.
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Meskipun puisi-puisi Homer dan para penerusnya dibukukan, tidak akan ada publik pembacaan bahasa Yunani hingga kita mencapai abad ke-5 S.M... Sebagai gantinya, terdapat publik pendengar yang membentuk penonton yang responsif di festival-festival dan kontes-kontes.
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Dour, Hesiod yang cemas menulis tentang rutinitas sehari-hari dalam bertani dan dampak musim terhadap kehidupan pedesaan, tetapi juga berbicara dalam bukunya yang berjudulWorks and Days tentang nilai dari kompetisi festival yang mempertandingkan "tembikar melawan tembikar, tukang kayu melawan tukang kayu... penyair melawan penyair.
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Tanpa musik, bagi orang Yunani kuno, sama saja dengan mati... Yunani kuno adalah budaya lagu
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Sayangnya, banyak puisi pasca Homerik - yang disebut puisi lirik karena biasanya dinyanyikan dengan kecapi - hilang dalam pergolakan di abad-abad berikutnya, terutama dalam perampasan dan pembusukan yang terjadi setelah serbuan barbar ke dunia Yunani-Romawi pada abad ke-5 Masehi.
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Simposia ini mungkin telah menjadi, sebanyak apa pun, kesempatan untuk melepaskan kecemasan terpendam dari masyarakat yang selalu berperang "ayah dari semua, raja dari semua," "selalu ada secara alami," seperti yang diungkapkan oleh para filsuf Yunani.
  • Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

• Solon' adalah semacam Franklin Roosevelt dari Athena. Dia adalah seorang pembaharu aristokrat yang memahami secara naluriah bahwa monopoli aristokrasi atas kekuasaan harus dilonggarkan dan beberapa kekuasaan diberikan kepada ordo-ordo yang lebih rendah jika perdamaian sosial ingin ditopang.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• The Greeks never thought to unite all Greek speakers in one political union. Because each Greek gloried in his singular excellence—and each Greek clan gloried similarly—it was hard enough to unite a city. Each city or polis—from which come our words politics, politician, metropolis—thought itself unrivaled in some essential quality and reveled in its reputation.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. ...Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. … [A] machine, called the mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers).
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• ...the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• This hamartia (tragic flaw, the same word that early Christians will use for "sin," especially for original sin, the sin we are born with, the sin beyond any human being's control) is not incidental to Oedipus but is, rather, essential to his admirable character. He is strong, courageous, self-possessed, taking charge and striding boldly where others fear to go—the very qualities that foretell his undoing.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature. ...that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life.
  • Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

• The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• Pericles' words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history... Lincoln at Gettysburg... Churchill's... repeated promise to the British people... of "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." And no wonder, for both orator's knew their Thucydides and knew this speech [Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War]. ...the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential address of John F. Kennedy. ...When he told of the sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches. ...In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgement that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. ...the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained?
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. ...basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms. Christ, Ekklēsia (Church), Baptism, Eucharist, Agapē (Lovingkindness)—all of Christianity's central words were Greek words. Christian patterns of thought... could indeed be traced to their origins in the coastal Levant, but they often shone with a Greek patina.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands raised in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to their influences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God... by imitating God's justice and mercy.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• As... Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• The idea of physical resurrection struck them [the Greeks] as ghoulish. ...Matter is the very principle of unintelligibity [or lack of intelligence]. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little of no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvation in one's body could have any meaning.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

• Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.
  • Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian