Sunday, December 19, 2010

Summa Conscientia

The early fifth century saw the accelerating fragmentation of the Roman Empire.  The Goths sacked the Eternal City itself in 410 A.D., by which time it was obvious that the end of the Civilized world was nigh.  It's arguable that Martianus Capella, a proconsul in the Roman province of Carthage, saved western civilization.  He caused the Roman educational curriculum to be condensed into nine volumes.  Everything that a Roman governmental official needed to know was captured there, and was preserved in Medieval monasteries by generations of monks.

Rhetoric, grammar, argument, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy were quite simply saved from extinction, at least in the West.  It was, you could say, the ultimate collection of knowledge.  A Summa Conscientia.

Kevin Baker has just channeled Martianus, producing a Summa Conscientia for the RKBA community.  It deserves generations of monks to lovingly copy and preserve it, or at least the entire gunblogger community to see that a New Dark Ages can never extinguish its light.

Go now, and bookmark.  This is the curriculum that must be studied, and learned, and preserved, and propagated.  Unlike the fifth century, we have the Goths on the run, but we must ever remember Euripides: All is change; all yields its place and goes.  The Goths may yet turn and press the fight.


The battle is joined, the game afoot.  Go, read, and read again.  Credo.

2 comments:

Kevin said...

Damn. Just, damn. Thank you.

Kevin said...

Interesting. More than two years later, I'm getting multiple hits from this post. Thanks again!