In this particular case . . .
I thought that you might be one of the few RC’s I knew who had sufficient Vatican related contacts and could check up on the assertion that the Vatican had ended up with the vast bulk of the better items from the Great Library at Alexandria before it was burned.
Given your literary interests, I also thought it would be of interest to you.
Are you well in your body these days?
Yeah. My wanting to be unpinged was NOT AT ALL about you.
I don’t know about the Vatican and Alexandria. I have heard, though, that the west got Aristotle, Euclid, and a lot else from the Muslims. (I THINK that Ptolemy’s astronomical work is called “the Almagest” because of it’s Arabic preservers and transmitters.) There is also a tale of Irish monks sneaking into Muslim Spain and copying Or stealing Euclid’s “Geometry.”
Around the time of Aquinas (1200’s), whose feast is today (curry in the crockpot! YEAH!), there was much intellectual commerce among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) proposed a metaphysical theory which was debated by Christians for quite a while until it was stomped into the earth by Aquinas et al.
But my alleged point is that, unless the Vatican is like Maxwell Smart and the cone of silence, if they had the juicy parts of the Library then MAYBE it wouldn’t have been necessary for the monks to sneak into Spain and maybe Aristotle would have influenced Scholasticism earlier.
So, the short answer is, “Mmmph.”