The church’s worldview erased pre-Christian civilizations from European memory

Evidence

The ancient civilizations of the Old World, in Asia as well as Africa, became legends, preserved most constantly in the obscure and recondite histories of biblical narrative. As knowledge became more and more a monastic preserve, secular reconstructions assumed a certain rarity due to the church’s commitment to the interpretation of history in accord with its perceptions of divine will. Ethnocentrism, legitimated by the authorities of church and ignorance, the two fountains of medieval knowledge, became the basis for world knowledge. Ultimately, with the evolution of Christian ideology into a worldview, it was enough to know that mankind was divisible into two collectivities: the army of Light and the army of Darkness: Whether men wrote of an imperium christianum, a regnum Europae, or later of a societal Christiana, there was the same impulse to separate the known securities of the “inside” from the dark and threatening forces of paganism, heresy, and schism which lay beyond the perimeter. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 448

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the dehumanization of non-European peoples before contact — the framework that primed Europe for colonization; echoes the earlier point in White Noise or colonial historiography that erasure precedes exploitation. — connects to: Suppressing messianism produced a secular national theology that erased the land’s non-Jewish history