I find the respondents’ reactions to date odd; but then again, I wasn’t attracted to Quora because it was a walled garden. I’m grateful that the stuff I write on Quora gets higher ranking in Google than what I’ve written outside Quora, and I’m annoyed that outsiders have to jump through hoops to get to it.

I’m more of an old school internet person, and I agree with those who think walled gardens compromise the integrity and the usefulness of the web. Hyperlinks are the point of it. Hyperlinks in, and hyperlinks out, and the free flow of information in between.

And the biggest annoyance about Quora being a walled garden? I’m not convinced it’ll be around in five years. And archive.org has no reach into it. Everything we do and are is a sand mandala; but walled gardens are that much more perishable. And that much less impactful.

I’ll of course overlap with others, but that’s to be expected, and it’s a Survey Question anyway.

Let me break this down into what motivates me and what triggers me.

Motivations:

• Interacting with clever and/or (usually and) lovely people that I respect.
• Learning about stuff I’m interested in. On occasion, that I didn’t even know I was interested in.
• Adulation.
• Sharing niche stuff I know quite well about.
• Reasoning about stuff I don’t know well at all, but arriving at an intellectually satisfying conclusion, based on Wikipedia and my powers of inference. That is truly one of the highlights for me.
• Writing well-crafted prose. Or hilarious prose. Or touching prose. (Only succumbed to writing verse here once so far.)
• Adulation.
• Feedback. Can I get more feedback, people? Even if it isn’t adulation?
• Don’t mind the adulation either, though.

Triggers:

• An intriguing question on subject matter close to me, that I know all about. Often in a pet topic. You know the ones.
• An even more intriguing question, on subject matter that is not necessarily close to me, but that I know enough about to think through.
• An A2A on something that might not be intriguing at all, but that I can have fun with anyway. That includes an awful lot of survey questions.
• A question well answered by a fellow Quoran, where I have something to add to their answer (and that warrants a bit more than a comment). If my answer is going to be supplemental to theirs, I’ve lately taken to writing “Vote #1 That Quoran”: I’ve got a following by now, and I can get more upvotes than their original answer even if I’m just a clueless outsider.
• A question that has so far been answered by a bunch of people, stupidly. (Is stupidly too harsh? Unreflectively, reflexively, superficially.) It’s good to think “no, you haven’t got it at all”, crack my knuckles, and get to setting the record straight.
• A good discussion in comments, that raises a new question. Sometimes, I might A2A myself as a result.

Yeah, when I was an undergrad, someone did a conceptual art thingy, involving nailing books into the lawn. And students had the kind of anguish that McKayla Kennedy spoke of in her Pinterest answer. And rescued the books; I got a Ulysses out of it.

The books were going to be pulped by the publishers anyway, as surplus; they were released for the conceptual art thingy on the understanding noone would rescue them.

Was that the biggest atrocity?

Nah.

McKayla rightly identifies that a conceptual art thingy is worse than burning a book. Burning a book recognises its power. An art piece?

They don’t care what they’re doing to the poor things, all that matters is how it looks.

There’s worse than that though, McKayla. Even that, at least, is a symbolic acknowledgement of the book; it fetishises it as a symbol.

You know what’s worse?

Whenever I step back in the university library. And I see students, one after the other, on their laptops and on the remaining desktops. Checking Facebook, or eating lunch, or Googling, or studying PDFs.

And not one of the bastards paying any attention to what’s sitting on the shelves.

There’s worse things still than fetishing a book.

There’s being utterly oblivious to them. Within the temple once consecrated to them.

Originally Answered:

What is your first memory?

I remember remembering my earliest memory. I don’t remember it, but I remember remembering it.

I remember remembering being photographed, and thinking how tight my pants were. The photo is with my sister, and I must have been 3 or 4. It’s at my parents’; I should get it some time and scan it in.

Yes, I was chubby.

Cyril of Alexandria.

Patriarch of Alexandria. Doctor of the Church. Founder of Mariology, and formulator of the concept of the Mother of God. Establisher of Miaphysitism, the distinct belief of the Oriental Orthodox Church; yet his formulation was also foundational to the Chalcedonian Christianity of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church.

Even if you don’t hold him directly responsible for the lynching of Hypatia, St Cyril was a street thug in a long line of street thug Patriarchs of Alexandria, with monks as his shock troops—and heretics, Jews, pagans, and any Christian who crossed him as his target. Most of his contemporaries recoiled from him; the church historian of the time, Socrates of Constantinople, does not have much nice to say of him.

A couple of decades ago, his collected works were accidentally deleted at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, on the old Ibycus system before my time; the grad student ran in exclaiming “I’ve deleted Cyril! I’ve deleted Cyril!”

That’s not much of a revenge against Hypatia (especially once the backups were restored). But it’ll have to do.

The cumulative effect of the following:

• Patriarchy, and its concern to control fertility and access to fertile women as tribal commodities.
• The concern of archaic Judaism to associate fertility with religious identity (circumcision).
• The dismissal of bodily desire as more base than spiritual pursuits, to be regulated (already present in both Judaism and several strands of Greek philosophy).
• The emergence of asceticism in some branches of Judaism.
• The presence of some ascetic preoccupations, and concerns over temptation, in the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
• The severe discomfort with sexuality and the physical world in general of Paul.
• The rejection of libertine sexuality associated with paganism (already in place in the injunction to Gentile Christians to abstain from fornication and blood sacrifices, if they weren’t going to get circumcised).
• The continued discomfort with sexuality and preoccupation with abstinence of most Church Fathers.
• The asceticism of both the Eastern Desert Fathers, and of Jerome who joined them.
• The more intellectual yet even more pessimistic outlook on humanity of Augustine.

I refer you to What is the etymology of “Laconia”? My answer there covers both Laconia and Lacedaemon. Tl;Dr: we’re not sure.

Such a highly specialised hypothetical, my good Dr Aziz Dida, deserves the soundest of empirical enquiry.

Mercifully, we have for Europe an extremely sound and fairly reliable criterion to answer this question.

Eurovision Song Contest: A map of the countries most voted by others

Yes, there’s some static caused by large ethnic minorities. Whatevs.

This is my magnificent rendering of Europe loosely based on this. Grey for countries that didn’t really fit. Enjoy the Eurovision Union.

My answer is more a gut-feel from Modern Greek practice, but I suspect it applies to antiquity as well. Dimitris Almyrantis perceptively identifies the (or at least an) underlying reason: avoidance of retribution. Cernowain Greenman identifies the surface reason: code of honour.

The modern Greek code of honour (How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) also prominently features hospitality. The rationale that I intuit for it there is: it’s all about positive Face. If you can dispense largesse, you will be looked on as a valued member of the community: to be honourable consists of doing right by your fellow human, which means not only giving back (reciprocity), but also giving (generosity).

In that light, honour requires that you be hospitable, just as honour requires that you be diligent and responsible. (The reproach for a slack civil servant or a cheating tradesperson is that they are afilotimos, dishonourable.) You do good for others, not because you expect it in return, but because society as a whole benefits from it.

That’s consistent with Dimitris’ answer, which it ultimately derives from, and it’s a modern elaboration of Cernowain’s.

Amazon.co.uk: Charles Freeman: 9780300170832: Books

One of the few negative reviews on Amazon, by someone offended by Freeman’s secularism, says:

If you are looking for a secular or fundamentalist liberal account of the Early Church, which presupposes that there is very little which needs to be understood about the person of Jesus, and his followers’ convictions about him, then you could do no better than buy this book.

Yup. And that makes it a great read for me.

I’ve read a fair bit on both Historical Jesus and the Early Church, but this account still foregrounded for me a lot, and I appreciated it for that. That includes:

• The incoherence of Paul’s theology
• The lack of curiosity Paul had about the actual Jesus the Nazarene (something Nikos Kazantzakis lampooned towards the end of The Last Temptation of Christ)
• The massive contradictions between the three or four strands of the New Testament (Hebrews vs Romans in particular)
• The lack of a well-defined orthodox Christian theology for centuries
• The long-running prominence of Subordinationism in Christian theology prior to Nicene Christianity. (The conventional narrative is of course that the Trinity was there all along to be uncovered; the account of the homoousion as a stumbled-on catchword, which was never really thought through, was a welcome corrective.)
• The extent to which the first four Ecumenical councils were the products of imperial intervention
• The Da Vinci Code narrative of Christianity being this unsullied chalice before the Empire got hold of it was one I long found puzzling, with my orthodox (Orthodox) Christian instruction in the Ecumenical Councils. This was the first time I got it.
• The fact that Leo I could claim much of the credit for the Chalcedonian creed—at a time when the West was otherwise a laggard in theology
• The closing down of inquiry in the face of orthodoxy
• How much Jerome and Augustine have to answer for, in their ascetic and pessimistic view of humanity

The most sensational bit of the book is the very early speculation on what happened to the body of Jesus. It’s still an unsettling notion for me—unsettling because it is plausible. But that is a bit of speculation, and it should not distract readers from the rest of the book.

I found myself thinking this would be a particularly interesting read for Muslims. They would get their kicks, I suspect, from the fact that a lot of their polemics against Christianity were live issues in third- and fourth-century Christendom.

One review I’ve found sneered that Freeman is a generalist not a theological historian, and that this work does not break new ground. That does not compel me: there’s a hell of a lot of room in the world for cogently argued summaries of modern scholarship.