Jonah H., commenting to this post:
I wrote my dissertation on The Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes. It’s an obscure manuscript, a cosmology by a former merchant to India who was now a monk.
Anyway, aside from procuring me a worthless Ph.D. the read did provide a few interesting insights.
In the middle of it he makes an offhand comment that the Roman Empire, which was by then Christianized, would never fall. That God would allow Barbarians to chastise it from time to time but it would always stand. And he was speaking of the whole empire, not just the empire in the east that would later become the misnamed Byzantine Empire.
What’s fascinating to me is that the end of the Roman [Empire] is usually dated to either 410, the siege of Alaric, or to 476, the death of Romulus Augustulus.
Cosmas wrote this around 550.
In the midst of the collapse of the Roman Empire, no one really thought it would ever end. No one thought at the time that later historians would put the end of their civilization more than a hundred years before their day.
So my question is this.
Have we already passed the siege of Alaric, that point in our history all future historians will agree was the decisive turning point in our collapse, and we don’t know it?
The election of JFK and the New Frontier was the start. The Great Society sealed our fate. FDR laid the ground work but there was still hope ’til ’61. When the government took away the danger of being stupid and lazy all was lost.