Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
org. 1960, as Wahrheit und Methode in German

Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one forces me to do so. This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naïve mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it.

355

(Source: books.google.com.tr)

Joel M. Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning
Thomas Dunne Books, Feb. 2010

Rhymes

…something about this process of breaking up a word and looking at its parts resonates deeply with many people. When most people hear that “apologizing is important because it leads to a feeling of unity,” they evaluate the proposition with their head. Does it makes sense? Why? Who is making the claim? What is the evidence? By contrast, many people evaluate “atonement is at-one-ment” with their heart. It’s cool. It’s a neat wordplay. And, surprisingly, even rational thinkers sometimes give the statement more weight because of the wordplay. Similarly, even the most rational people in modern society tend, unknowingly, to believe things that rhyme more than they otherwise would. “A stitch in time saves nine.” It (nearly) rhymes. It must be true. Even people who don’t know what it means think it’s probably accurate. (It means that mending clothing with one stitch before a small rip becomes worse will save more stitches later. Take care of things before they get out of hand.) In the infamous O.J. Simpson trial, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran tried to put a glove on Mr. Simpson’s hand. The glove was too small. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” Cochran told the jury. “Fit.” “Aquit.” It rhymes, so it must be true. The strategy was incredibly effective, even though it mixed rational thought with, in this case, poetry.

25

Etymology

A slightly longer example involves medieval monks who were tasked with copying ancient religious manuscripts. The manuscripts had to be copied by hand because printing had yet to be invented, and the job had to be done by monks because most laypeople were illiterate. So some monks would spend their days copying Greek and Latin manuscripts, preserving the ancient texts by writing them anew. It turns out that due to its architecture, the interior of the typical monastery is an ill-advised place to read and write. There’s not enough light. So the monks put tables just outside their dark buildings and used these tables as copying desks. Because these fixtures were immobile, they were called stationary booths. As the general population in Europe grew more literate, more and more people needed writing supplies: paper or parchment, quill pens, blotters, and so forth. Before specialized stores arose to fill this consumer need, people had two choices: They could make their own supplies, or they could try to buy them. Buying was easier, and the most convenient place to find writing supplies was one of the monks’ stationary booths. By association, then, the supplies themselves came to be called stationary supplies. (The technical name for this sort of expansion of meaning is “metonymy.” It will come up again later.) Only afterward did an arbitrary spelling decision assign the ending “-ary” to the word that means “immobile” and the ending “-ery” to “writing supplies.” Both words actually have the same etymology.

27

Emphasis

This is why airlinese sounds the way it does. Flight attendants tend to emphasize exactly the words that normal speakers do not. For example: “We have arrived at the Atlanta airport… .” Most speakers naturally emphasize “arrived” in that sentence. But the emphasis on “arrived” naturally raises other possibilities in the minds of those who hear the sentence. “Crashed,” for example, is one possibility the airlines would rather passengers not think about. By emphasizing “have,” the flight attendants only raise the possibility of “have not [arrived],” which, by comparison, isn’t so bad.

73

Affect

Let us consider yet another possibility. What if the “cleverness” of having used “ten kilometers” doesn’t come from within the sentence but rather from the culture? For example, suppose we have an American English story about a patriot who, in a demonstration of his love for his country, walks 1,776 miles by foot. How should that be translated into Modern Hebrew? Americans reading the story immediately recognize the figure “1776.” Should the Hebrew translation have a number that, like the English, is immediately recognizable?

Babylonians could multiply small integers. Accordingly, in addition to multiples of ten, “round numbers” in antiquity were products of small numbers. Two times three, three times four, etc. That’s why there were originally six days in a workweek (two times three), twelve hours in a day and twelve hours in a night (three times four), sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour (three times four times five), and so forth. How then should the description of Noah’s ark in Genesis 6: 15 be translated? The Hebrew tells us that the dimensions are “300 amas long by 50 amas wide by 30 amas high.” The KJV version, not surprisingly, keeps the numbers and translates ama as “cubit.” By that translation, however, a matter-of-fact statement about the ark has become esoteric. (The English “cubit” comes from the Latin word cubitus, “elbow,” and one cubit is the length from the king’s elbow to the end of his middle finger. So “cubit”— that is, “elbow”— was just like “foot.”) The U.S. version of the New International Version converts the figures into feet: “The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.” That’s much more useful for an American reader, but what about the figures? Did they have some particular significance that they no longer do?

We have the same problem when talking about years. Genesis 5: 8 tells us that Seth lived to be 912 years old. Notice the “12” at the end. That was a round number in antiquity. Whether Seth was really that age or not, readers of ancient Hebrew would see such a number as a round number, while we do not. Genesis 14: 4 talks about “twelve years” of service. Should the translation make it “ten”? An even clearer case for translating round numbers (according to antiquity) into round numbers (according to modernity) comes from Genesis 17: 20. There the second part of Ishmael’s blessing consists of two parallel parts: “twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.” Clearly, having “twelve princes” is poetically akin to becoming a great nation. Any ancient reader of Hebrew— regardless of their view of the literal truth of the story itself— would know the “twelve” here isn’t meant to be taken literally. Twelve was a round number, similar to the “thousand” in “I’ve told you a thousand times.”

76

Allusions

Talking about pregnancy is taboo in some circles, so new words to describe pregnancy keep popping up in the language. Once “with child” was a common expression. Then that became too common, so people started using “pregnant,” Latin for “expecting,” as in “expecting a child.” Then that became too common, and now some people prefer the English “expecting.” In yet another move away from talking about the woman and her womb and so forth, many people use “pregnant” and “expecting” for both members of a couple, so in some dialects it’s not just the woman who’s “pregnant” or “expecting,” it’s the couple.

198

Levav & Nefesh

The most important commandment, according to Jesus in Matthew 22: 37, Mark 12: 30, and Luke 10: 27, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind” (NAB and, essentially, NRSV). Jesus himself (using Greek) is quoting Deuteronomy 6: 5 (which is in Hebrew), and that line is central to both Jews and Christians. Deuteronomy 6: 5 is part of the text that Jews traditionally affix to their doorways, and, as we just saw, Jesus calls this the most important commandment. The combination “heart and soul,” or some variation of it, appears nearly forty times in the Bible, further emphasizing how important these two ideas were in antiquity. But here’s the problem. The Hebrew words for “heart” and “soul,” the words in Deuteronomy 6: 5 that Jesus quotes, are levav and nefesh, respectively. And they are severely mistranslated. In fact, the translations miss the point entirely.

…

[So:] The nefesh was like the hardware of humanity and the levav like the software. It should not surprise us, then, that levav and nefesh were used together to form an expression. And it is precisely that expression that appears in what Jesus calls the most important commandment. We are supposed to love God with everything about us that makes us human. Unlike the usual English translation, which limits the commandment to our “heart,” excluding our thoughts, the Biblical commandment includes emotions and thoughts and more. And again unlike the usual English translation, the Biblical commandment specifically addresses our corporal, physical existence.

89

Casuistic & Apodictic

Technical words help distinguish the Ten Commandments from other laws. Laws that prescribe consequences are call “casuistic.” Those that simply state right from wrong are called “apodictic.” … Why say “Don’t steal” when another part of the Bible already has a punishment for stealing? The answer is that Leviticus 5 is a legal system, while the Ten Commandments are a moral framework. The point is that stealing is wrong. The severity of the offense has nothing to do with getting caught or punished.

Curiously, court records of the time don’t reference the Code of Hammurabi in the way we would expect them to if they were really the law of the land. So the role of the code may not be exactly what it seems. Some scholars think that the Code of Hammurabi, coming as it does before the Ten Commandments, diminishes the importance of the Bible. In their minds, the Ten Commandments are merely a revision, sometimes not even a good one, of something that the Babylonians had long before. But like our modern American laws, the Code of Hammurabi merely prescribes consequences. It lacks the fundamental force of the Ten Commandments. (In technical jargon, all of the laws in the Code of Hammurabi are casuistic, not apodictic like the Ten Commandments.)

154

Ryszard Kapuscinski, from the third chapter titled The Collapse inside The Emperor
Penguin Classics, 2006 (org. in Polish as Cezars, 1978)

Also from this book: The Throne & It’s Coming, It’s Coming

Experience confirms it. A man starved all his life will never rebel. Up north there was no rebellion. No one raised his voice or his hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and immediately he rises in rebellion. The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread. He’s all wrapped up in the thought of food. He loses the remains of his vitality in that thought, and he no longer has either the desire or the will to seek pleasure through the temptation of disobedience. Just think: Who destroyed our Empire? Who reduced it to ruin? Neither those who had too much, nor those who had nothing, but those who had a bit. Yes, one should always beware of those who have a bit, because they are the worst, they are the greediest, it is they who push upward.
113

…in order to limit excessive war expenses, only officers had a right to a funeral, while the bodies of the common soldiers were left to the vultures and hyenas.
122

They [the soldiers who finally ended Haile Selassie’s reign by a coup d’etat] were completely dumbfounded, however, completely unable to understand, when they saw that His Most Singular Majesty wore his military uniform all the time (medals jingling), and carried his marshall’s baton, as if he wanted to show that he still commanded his army, still stood at his head, and still gave the orders. No matter that this army had designs against the Palace. Well, so it had, but under his command it was a faithful, loyal army, which did everything in the Emperor’s name. They rebelled? Yes, but they rebelled loyally!

That’s it, my friend—His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign.
134

Ryszard Kapuscinski, from the first chapter titled The Throne inside The Emperor
Penguin Classics, 2006 (org. in Polish as Cesarz, 1978)

Also from this book: It’s Coming, It’s Coming & The Collapse

Each step was a struggle between shuffling and dignity, between leaning and the vertical line.
6

…in the Palace questions were always asked from top to bottom, and never vice versa. When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.
9

[After his usual morning visit to his leopards, lions and other animals of prey in the palace’s garden, The Emperor…] …approaches a flock of flamingos, but the shy birds scatter when he comes near. The Emperor smiles at the sight of creatures that refuse to obey him.
10

[Every morning while strolling through his gardens The Emperor Haile Selassie listens to reports from his various information agencies who competed against each other. These spying organizations ‘live in fear of not reporting something in time and falling into disgrace, or of a competitor’s reporting it better’] Haile Selassie never commented on or questioned the reports he received, during his morning walks, about the state of conspiracy in the Empire. But he knew what he was doing, as I shall show you. His Highness wanted to receive the reports in a pure state, because if he asked questions or expressed opinions the informant would obligingly adjust his report to meet the Emperor’s expectations. Then the whole system of informing would collapse into subjectivity and fall prey to anyone’s willfulness. The monarch would not know what was going on in the country and the Palace.
11

Haile Selassie was a constitutional Chosen One of God, and he could nor associate himself with any faction (although he used one or another more than others but if any one of the favored coteries went too far in its eagerness, the Emperor would scold or even formally condemn it. This was especially so for the extreme factions that our Emperor used to establish order. The Emperor’s speeches were remarkably kindly, gentle, and comforting to the people, who had never heard his mouth form a harsh or angry word. And yet you cannot rule an Empire with kindness. Someone has to check opposing interests and protect the superior causes Emperor, Palace, and State. That is what the extreme factions, were doing, but because they did not understand the Emperor’s subtle intentions, they slipped into error—specifically the error of overdoing it. Desirous of His Majesty’s approbation, they tried to introduce absolute order, whereas His Supreme Majesty wanted basic order with a margin of disorder on which his monarchical gentleness could exert itself. For this reason, the extremists’ coterie encountered the ruler’s scornful gaze when they tried to cross into that margin.
29

I’ll come right out and say it: the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in favorable light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and everyone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet. No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can be only one sun. Such is the order of nature, and everything else is a heresy. But you can be sure that His Majesty shined by contrast. How imposingly and kindly he shone, so that our people had no doubts about who was the sun and who was the shadow.
33

Mr. Kapuchitsky, do you know what money means in a poor country? Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things. In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire remains a customer. He may purchase more, but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country, money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud of because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.

Can you imagine, for instance, a crowd gathering in Holland to look at a rich Dutchman? Or in Sweden, or in Australia? But in our land—yes. In our land, if a prince or count appears, the people run to see him. They will run to see a millionaire, and afterward they will go around and say, “I saw a millionaire”. Money transforms your own country into an exotic land. Everything will start to astonish you—the way people live, the things they worry about, and you will say, “No, that’s impossible”. Because you will already belong to a different civilization. And you must know this law of culture: two civilizations cannot really know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but the signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you? You are already a man of your own civilization, and you will defend it and fight for it. You will water your own hedge. You are exactly the kind of gardener that the Emperor needs. You don’t want to lose your feathers, and the Emperor needs people who have a lot to lose.
45

Next, he [the Emperor] writes that he forbade the custom that a man who had been accused of murder—and this was only an accusation by the common people, because there were no courts—would have to be publicly executed by disembowelment, with the execution performed by the closest member of his family, so that, for example, a son would execute his father and a mother her son. … Next, he abolished by decree a method that we call lebasha, for the discovery of thieves. Medicine men would give a secret herb to small boys, who, dizzy, stupefied, and directed by supernatural forces, would go into a house and point out the thief. The one who had been pointed out, in accordance with tradition, had his hands and legs cut off. Just try to imagine, my friend, life in a country where, even though you are completely innocent of crime, you can at any moment have your hands and legs cut off.
51

Standing on a platform, His Highness would hear the case as it was presented by counsel, and then pronounce his verdict. This was according to a procedure established three thousand years ago by the Israelite King Solomon, of whom His Most Exalted Majesty was a direct descendant—as established by the constitutional law. *
55 

* From the Wikipedia article on the Rastafari Movement:

The Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Most of its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia (ruled 1930–1974), as God incarnate, the Second Advent, or the reincarnation of Jesus.

Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol.3 

Writers used to cite it as a paradox that Ismâ’îl, ruler of ‘Persia’, wrote his verse in Turkic, while his rival, Selîm, ruler of ‘Turkey’, wrote his verse in Persian. The paradox springs only from a misuse of the term ‘Persia’ for the Safavî empire, which included Persians, Turks, and Arabs equally, and the term ‘Turkey’ for the Ottoman empire, an even more unfortunate misnomer. In itself there is nothing paradoxical in the leader of a tribal grouping writing in the popular tongue, Turkic, while the head of an established state writes in the cultivated tongue, Persian.

from Chapter 1: The Safavî Empire

(Source: languagehat.com)

John O. Hunwick, Eve Troutt Powell, The African diaspora in the Mediterranean lands of Islam

Making of a eunuch in the Ottoman Empire:

Details of the operation

The operator seizes the penis, the scrotal sacs and the testicles and ties them together tightly with a thin but tough cord. Then, with a single razor stroke, he cuts off everything below the ligature. The huge wound is then covered with ashes to stop the bleeding, then boiling oil is poured on and finally, if the first two methods have proved ineffective, it is cauterised with a red-hot iron. This having been done, a crude probe of metal, usually of lead, is inserted in the urethra right up to the bladder to facilitate the flow of urine. This probe is held in place by a harness of the most primitive type which remains in place until healing is complete. 

When all these measures have been taken, the patient is immersed to the waist in the muddy silt of the Nile and left there for five or six days to help the formation of scar tissue. The Nile—that supreme god—ought to heal all ills. These details are horrible, but true. Therefore, I have no fear of exposing them in all their hideousness and fearfulness.

The general appearance of eunuchs after the operation. 

This is the appearance most generally presented by the genitals, or rather their place, after the operation: a huge broad scar of very irregular shape, with raised edges, the scar tissue being of a lighter colour than the surrounding skin, full of folds and wrinkles. There is a purulent discharge, mixed for a long time—often several months—with a great deal of matter tinged with blood. There is almost continuous pain in the perineum, sharp and stabbing at first, later dull. Then come loss of appetite, nostalgia, strange dreams, terrible nightmares; the brain becomes empty, ideas flee, thought is wiped out. The eunuch turns into a brute. The man has disappeared. 

Incontinence, especially during the night during sleep, is almost always one of the inevitable results of castration. From the accursed day henceforth the wretched eunuch always has with him, at home or on his person, a probe which he uses to project his urine to a distance. Sixty percent die during the operation or as a result of it. Those who survive receive assiduous attention and usually attain to more or less complete healing towards the end of the third month after the operation. From then on they are merchandise having a value and are soon sent off to Cairo to become the property of beys and pashas, or towards Alexandria from where they are sent on to Syria and Turkey. A young eunuch is then sold for about 25 purses, the value of a purse being 80 francs.

Also: Jane Hathaway: Eunuchs in Islamic Civilization

(Source: books.google.com)

Şinasi Gündüz, Problems on the Muslim Understanding of the Mandaeans

Every Mandaean [According to Gündüz, the same people as the Sâbians mentioned in the Qur’an as one of the “people of the book” —F.] has two personal names, one is the worldly name and other is the religious (malwaşa) name. The former which is usually an Islamic name is his laqâb, but the malwaşa name is the real name. The Mandaeans use their worldly names in daily life while they use their malwaşa names during all religious occasions and ceremonies. The reason of carrying an Islamic name in a Muslim environment and using this in a mixed society is presumably connected with the rule of secrecy.

(Source: dinlertarihi.com)

Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 

In the 1890s some of Germany’s leading physicists were obsessively pursuing a problem that had long vexed them: what was the relationship between the temperature, the range of colours, and the intensity of light emitted by a hot iron poker? It seemed a trivial problem compared to the mystery of X-rays and radioactivity that had physicists rushing to their laboratories and reaching for their notebooks. But for a nation forged only in 1871, the quest for the solution to the hot iron poker, or what became known as ‘the blackbody problem’, was intimately bound up with the need to give the German lighting industry a competitive edge against its British and American competitors. But try as they might, Germany’s finest physicists could not solve it. In 1896 they thought they had, only to find within a few short years that new experimental data proved that they had not. It was Max Planck who solved the blackbody problem, at a cost. The price was the quantum.

…

Driven largely by the abolition of internal tariffs after unification and French war compensation, by the outbreak of the First World War Germany’s industrial output and economic power would be second only to the United States. By then it was producing over two-thirds of continental Europe’s steel, half its coal, and was generating more electricity than Britain, France and Italy combined. Even the recession and anxiety that affected Europe after the stock market crash of 1873 only slowed the pace of German development for a few years.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies
Yale University Press, 2009

In any event, Copernicus was heir to a long mathematical tradition and—if he cared to make use of it—a tradition of physical theory that had opened the way to new models of the cosmos. And Copernicus’s contribution, to be honest, must be reckoned rather small, in terms at least of scientific progress. Indeed, his treatise was not a work of science, in the modern sense, at all: it proposed nothing that might be tested, it did not prove its case either in terms of observation or theory, and it made few conspicuous advances upon Ptolemy’s calculations. It is true that Copernicus was perhaps the first theorist since Aristarchus of Samos (c. 110–c. 130 b.c.) who had dared so openly to place the sun at the center of the “universe,” but his reasoning was more suppositious than empirical. He also devised a model that dealt somewhat more economically than the Ptolemaic with certain ancient questions, such as why Mercury and Venus remain always near the sun. This very problem had already prompted various reflective souls over the centuries to depart in their cosmological reflections from strict geocentrism: in the fourth century b.c. Heracleides Ponticus apparently claimed that Mercury and Venus revolve not directly around the earth but rather around the sun; the fifth-century encyclopedist Martianus Capella concurred (not on his own authority: he was not a scientist); and, in the ninth century, John Scotus Eriugena seems to have added Mars and Jupiter to the list of planets circling the sun. After Copernicus, in fact, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) devised a system in which all the planets above revolve around the sun, while only the sun revolves directly around the earth; and by the time of Galileo’s trial, many of the greatest astronomers of the time (who were mostly to be found among the Jesuits) had come to conclude that the superterrestrial planets move in heliocentric orbits and had tended to adopt Tycho’s model (though they were willing to consider the Copernican, as an unproven hypothesis). 

Yet, for all the distinction Copernicus may deserve for having ventured a purely heliocentric description of the heavens, one should appreciate why his theory would not have been particularly compelling to all of his contemporaries. For one thing, the physical arguments he made were no great improvement upon those of the scholastics and so did no more than suggest that terrestrial movement is a conceptual possibility; and, for another thing, his mathematical model was wrong. Copernicus did manage to purge his system of equants, which his professors at the University of Krakow had taught him to disdain, but he still assumed, in good classical fashion, that heavenly revolutions must be circular (else they would not be “perfect”) and that the planets were fixed within separate spheres. Thus, in the end, he too was forced to resort to a system of epicycles—nearly fifty, in fact, including nine for the earth—with little appreciable advantage in predictive power over Ptolemy’s system. Tycho’s later model, it is arguable, is preferable as science, inasmuch as it better reconciles theory with the evidence. Tycho undertook (as Copernicus did not) minute investigations of the heavens, including an observation of a comet moving above the moon, where there were supposed to be only changeless planetary spheres. Moreover, one of the oldest objections to the idea of a moving earth was the absence of any observable alteration in the position of stars relative to one another (that is, “parallax” motion). Copernicus guessed that the distance between earth and the “sphere of the fixed stars” was far greater than was commonly assumed, but Tycho’s model offered a seemingly more plausible explanation. None of which detracts from Copernicus’s real achievements, such as they were, any more than it diminishes the far greater achievements of Galileo (1564–1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727); but it does mean, certainly, that Copernicus was not some isolated visionary gazing back through the centuries, across a vast chasm of Christian darkness, to the pale flickering flame of a forgotten Hellenistic wisdom.

p. 61-62 

Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination
University Of Chicago Press, 1988

That is the key word. The habit of citing authorities, of scholarly annotation, was not invented by historians but came from theological controversy and juridical practice, where Scripture, the Pandects, or trial proceedings were cited. In the Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas does not refer to passages from Aristotle; he takes responsibility for reinterpreting them and regards them as the very truth, which is anonymous. On the other hand, he cites Scripture, which is Revelation and not the truth of anonymous reason. In his admirable commentary on the Theodosian Code in 1695, Godefroy gives his references. This legal historian, as we would call him, considered himself a jurist, not a historian. In short, scholarly annotation has a litigious and polemicel origin. Proofs were flaunted about before they were shared with other members of the “scientific community”. The main reason for this shift is the rise of the university, with its increasingly exclusive monopoly on intellectual activity. Social and economic causes are at work. Landholders, such as Montaigne or Montesquieu, who were men of leisure, no longer exist. And it is no longer honorable to live as the dependent of a lord instead of working.

Now, at the university the historian no longer writes for the common reader, as journalists or “writers” do, but instead writes for other historians, his colleagues. This was not the case for ancient historians. Thus the latter have an apparently lax attitude toward scientific rigor that we find shocking or surprising. In the eighth of the ten books that make up his great work [“Description of Greece” —F.], Pausanias finally writes, “When I began to write my history, I was inclined to count these legends [Greek mythology —F.] as foolishness; but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them, which is this: in the days of old, those Greeks who were considered wise spoke their sayings not straight out but in riddles, and so the legends about Cronos I conjectured to be one sort of Greek wisdom”. This tardy confession show in retrospect that Pausanias did not believe a word of the innumerable unlikely legends that he had calmly put forth in the preceeding six hundred pages. 

p. 11

J. Hammer, Fatih Sultan Mehmet: İstanbul’un Alınışı (Hammer tarihinden derleme)
Rado Yayınları, 1981

Türkler, tam saldırmaya hazırlandıkları sırada birdenbire İtalyanlarla Macarlardan oluşan bir ordunun Konstantiniye’nin imdadına gelmekte olduğuna dair bir haber dolaşmağa başladı. Bu haber —ki kuşatmayı kaldırmak için bin türlü vesileye başvuran Halil Paşa’nın uydurması olduğundan şüphe yoktur— askerin manevi gücüne fena halde tesir etmekten geri kalmadı. Türkler tam iki gün surlar altında ciddi bir hücuma geçmeye cesaret edemeyerek oldukları yerde kaldılar. Fakat üçüncü günün akşamına doğru Konstantiniye üzerinde kuzey tarafından ışıklar saçan bir göktaşı görünmesiyle bunu Hristiyanları tehdit etmekte olan Allah’ın gazâbına alâmet sayarak rahatladılar.

s.77