Eyewitness to History: The Monastery

We've become spoiled.

Every day, we have come to expect more and more knowledge, more progress, faster computers, terabytes of storage space.

Human society hasn't always been so enlightened.

The barbarian hordes eventually conquered the last bits of the Roman Empire in the sixth century. At that point, the Dark Ages began.

The expansion of human knowledge virtually came to a standstill. The preservation of ancient texts, including the Holy Bible, became the self-appointed responsibility of residents of monasteries all over Europe.

Today's FamilyFirst pick takes a historical look at how monasteries managed to save priceless knowledge during medieval times.

Life in a monastery required levels of self-discipline that look impossible to achieve, yet many, many men chose such a path and thereby assisted in the preservation of human knowledge from a much more enlightened age, in the hope that another similarly inclined change in culture could take their preserved manuscripts and use them in the furtherance of knowledge.

That's exactly what happened. So if you esteem the Bible, or the Odyssey, or the writings of Pliny the Younger, you might offer a silent acknowledgement to the self-sacrificing monks who kept them preserved.

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/monastery.htm

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