"Proclus was obliged to defend his "pagan" religion, and especially the belief in political equity, against the communal mob violence, systematic book burning, and state repression targeted especially against his school by the new ruler-priests. It is in this context that Proclus turns to mathematics, for he regarded mathematics, and reason generally, as a key instrument in persuading those who violently advocated faith and inequity. It is not incidental that most theorems in the book are about equality (later reinterpreted as "congruence"). Read in the manner explained by Proclus, the Elements is a text which refutes point by subtle point all the key elements in the changed Christian doctrine of the 4th c. CE (reason vs faith, immanence vs transcendence, equity vs inequity, learning as reminiscence, hence past lives vs creation in the recent past, reincarnation vs resurrection, eternal truths hence an eternal cosmos vs apocalypse, images as aids to learning vs charges of idolatry)."
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Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16th C. CE C. K. Raju Pearson Education India, 2007
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Euclid%E2%80%99s_Elements
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Euclid’s Elements
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