Karl: Historical Essays
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History, Christ, and Civilization
by Karl Tyson(Draft)
Note: The historical analysis below intentionally assumes an authorial and critical position of imagined membership in a Christian imperial state that might have existed from around 400 - 500 AD following the conversion of the western and Mediterranean world. This posture allows the essay to explore those historical elements which ultimately defeated and subsumed such an empire. This may seem facetious, and in many ways it is, until one realizes that we are now re-entering an imperial age nevertheless, one decisively shorn of authentic Christian trappings (assuming one discounts the new Evangelical Catholic church that has arisen in the vacuum of the Protestant collapse).
Prologue: Historical Questions about the Germanic Kingdoms
In looking at the Germanic Kingdoms from 100 to 1900 we are especially interested in the early roots of persistent characteristics. In such a long period it is clear that some cultural, political and social structures may change, some earlier ones disappearing and other foreign elements temporarily or permanently adopted. These changes should interest us only tangentially to the main story. The objective is to trace what was peculiar and persistent to the political states established by German-speaking tribal units.
A few questions:
1. Why is it that we see elements of democratic or communalistic political organization in the earliest (warrior bands) and most ethnically Germanic (Iceland's Volkmoot) of these states, and elements of extreme authoritarianism (absolute monarchy) in the later and less ethnically Germanic states?
2. What is the role of the early acceptance of Arianism by the southern Germanic tribes, and Celtic Christianity by the northern Germans, and what was the political calculus of their progression into Roman Catholicism?
3. What is the balance between the technology of warfare and the spirit of warfare that enabled Germanic kingdoms to subdue native populations?
4. Why did Germanic kingdoms in the German heartland (Scandinavia and Northern Germany) tend to remain relatively small, while kingdoms outside the heartland tend to start as, or eventually coalesce into, rather large kingdoms (Italy, Spain, France, England)?
5. What factors influenced the longevity of dynastic kingdoms and the group of lineages that held rulership within them?
6. Can the adoption of feudalism be seen as an elaborate truce between Catholicism and Germanic kingdoms allowing each to gain the most important role, the Church as shepherd of the masses and the Germanic princes as political sovereigns?
7. Why did the Germanic warriors fight and kill each other as readily as they fought outsiders? Did this characteristic inform both their training to the technology of battle and the spirit of warfare they carried into any battle?
Some common traits between Germanism and Mohamedanism:
Tribal ethnic roots in adverse conditions. Beginning in a heresy. Religio-political conquest. Ethnic superiority asserted. Authority entrusted to military subordinates and family members.
History, Christ, and Civilization
The Classical Pagan Greco-Roman Seedbed Civilization (500 BC – 500 AD)
Classical Greco-Roman civilization reached its zenith in the time of our Lord, Jesus Christ. If you take the 500 years before and the 500 years after his advent, you get 1,000 years that represent the growth and eventual triumph of Greco-Roman military, economic, and intellectual effort, throughout the Mediterranean region - the known world in the West at that time, and then its downfall. Where did these Greco-Roman people groups come from? They descended from Indo-European tribes, originally horse riding herdsmen, nomadic plunderers, whose cultural patterns were described by Homer who, in about 800 BC, when the Greeks were just beginning their development, looked back to the prehistoric era of their Mediterranean affairs, around 1000 - 1500 years before Christ. At that time, these people came as invaders from the north. They migrated into the Greek peninsula and Asia Minor. They were equally adaptable to raiding by sea in warships, and raiding on horseback or chariots. Not only the Greeks and Trojans, but the Indo-European Hittites, Hyksos, Philistines, and Sea Peoples were active at the time of Homer's Mycenaean heroes, conquering and establishing dynastic kingdoms. They pressured and influenced the development of the existing Middle Eastern cultures, who were largely more civilized, settled, and urbanized, and spoke non-Indo-European languages: Minoans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Canaanites. In this milieu of the Ancient biblical world, by the way, were the Hebrew tribe, alone faithful as a cohesive group to a single omnipotent deity, flourishing for awhile in the midst of Egyptian pharaohs, Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and hostile Canaanite and Philistine neighbors, developing an exclusive tribal spiritual allegiance to their god Yahweh that would not be shaken through 4,000 years to this day.
Eventually driven back from early inroads in the southern Mediterranean and Middle East, as those earlier civilizations solidified and expanded their own power base, the Greco-Roman peoples established strong bases in Greece and Italy by about 800 BC. The Greeks expanded first, using an unprecedented military superiority to conquer the entire eastern ancient world under Alexander by about 300 BC, and spreading their intellectual achievements throughout this new Hellenistic world. The Romans followed soon after, expanding rapidly from 400 - 100 BC while usurping and inheriting Greek conquests, and overlaying a different Latin military, organizational, and legal world on what was becoming the Greco-Roman world. In this early period of expansion, the Greeks and Romans met resistance from several potent people groups. The great adversary of Greece was Persia, a powerful eastern empire conquered for a time by Alexander, but eventually lost and never fully reconquered by the Romans. The Persians were a constant danger, a well-organized and rival civilization on the eastern front. The Romans, having absorbed all the local Italian tribes and kingdoms, met resistance from two peoples, the Carthaginians, based in North Africa, who had built a powerful trading empire throughout the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians were descended from Phoenicians, and practiced a religion very similar to that of the Canaanites. In the north, both the Greeks and Romans had to fight constantly with a widespread and warlike people called the Celts, who inhabited much of Western Europe. Eventually Rome completely conquered Carthage, and then completely defeated the Celts and took all their land in Europe, with the exception of a few northwest fringe areas where Celtic people live to this day, in Scotland and Ireland.
Pagan Civilization and the Jewish Influence (0 AD – 500 AD)
At the time of Jesus, an extraordinarily advanced civilization was in place, where an educated citizen, such as the Jewish expatriate Saul of Tarsus, might have spoken his native tongue (one of several dozens of conquered groups), Greek, and Latin. He would have had access to written and taught knowledge about Greek art, literature, philosophy and science, Babylonian astronomy, Egyptian geometry, and Roman civil engineering, governance, and jurisprudence. He would have lived in comfortable, sanitary, well-ventilated and temperature controlled housing, with a wealth of civic institutions for sport, entertainment, and recreation nearby in almost any of the hundreds of Imperial cities, such as Ephesus. He would have participated in a complex and relatively efficient money economy, where a range of goods and services from staples to luxuries were readily available, often transported thousands of miles to reach the local store shelves. Jesus the Savior, the reputed Messiah of Jewish tradition, appeared and walked on Earth at the highpoint of this ancient pagan civilization.
The religion of the Greco-Roman world was a sophisticated version of the primitive Indo-European religion, consisting of ritualized interaction with a pantheon of miraculous, human-featured, invincible gods, often much like divine personifications of themselves at their most exalted - warrior-kings and enchanters. In fact the continuum between Man and God was traversable - gods could procreate with humans and give birth to heroes, or demi-gods, of half race. These religious ideas were at least compatible, if not derived from the same root of the family, with the ancient belief by Babylonians and Egyptians that their own gods determined their fates. There is today an analogous religion in India that descends from the same or a very close version of Indo-European gods, called Hinduism. We call these religious beliefs pagan, a pejorative that comes from the Latin for "country dweller" - meaning a rude bumpkin who still clung to the old gods even after the Christian religion was well established in most urban areas throughout the aging Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion around 400. However, it should be remembered that the vast majority of people living throughout the ancient world were paganic. They upheld and transmitted the worship of many different gods, with different styles, beliefs, and esoteric knowledge, but they all saw in each other's belief the same fundamental principles we think of as pagan: reverence and supplication, often by sacrifice, to one of many human-like spiritual potentates that they believed inhabited certain sacred places on Earth and interacted with its inhabitants. In addition, they frequently believed in spiritual powers indwelling natural objects such as trees, springs, and mountains. They believed in various methods to determine the will of the gods, which meant their future fate, by signs and oracles.
The tiny, almost inconsiderable sect of the Jews, with a belief in one supreme, exclusive, and jealous God that had been upheld by the Hebrew race alone for centuries, was an oddity to most people of Jesus' time. The only religion that could be remotely compared with it was the Persian religion, called Zoroastrian after an early founder, which insisted like the Jews that the pagan gods were either imaginary or non-existent, or else the earthly expression of demonic personages. This connection between Judaism and Persia has historical and biblical components, first in the role of Persian intervention to essentially free the Jews from the Babylonians, enabling them to live and work freely both in Persia/Babylon and in Jerusalem at the rebuilding of the city in the time of Nehemiah. The Jewish scholars learned much from the Persians, apparently introducing a well-defined theory of a bodily resurrection after death from this influence, even though it was a controversial belief among Jews up to the time of Jesus. The legend of the three Magi is related to the Persian religion, whose priests were know as Magi, that is, magicians, and were especially versed in astronomy/astrology, and therefore suited to discover and investigate the star foretelling Christ's coming.
What the Greco-Roman world did know about the Jewish belief and practice of religion, besides a prejudice leading to the universal distaste for its foreign strangeness, was the curious morality embodied by the Law of Moses. It was curious to most pagans because they had nothing similar except civil laws, made to regulate basic interactions within the community, the city-state, and then finally the Empire, which were heeded under coercion, not by generous conviction. Their civil laws did not overlap much with Mosaic law, particularly in terms of moral and ethical commands based on divine instructions from a supreme God that were followed consistently by a minority group, generation after generation, wherever they might live. Because Jews specialized in trade, they lived in most cities and their practices could be observed. The pagans easily saw the moral superiority of the Jews' personal lives. Jews tended to be monogamous and faithful in marriage, and chaste without. Their families were well-behaved and harmonious. They were hardly ever criminal in their dealings inside or outside their clan, constrained as they were by a host of religious laws prohibiting theft and murder, and promoting hospitality and charity. None of these characteristics pertained especially to any other group among the pagans. In their religious tradition, the pagan gods acted like willful humans, with all their wayward passion, violence, and deceit, and without restraint. The pagans followed suit.
The Greco-Roman world was little concerned about events in Palestine during the period of Jesus and his followers. The minor military threat posed by the rebellious Jews in the province of Palestine was just a nuisance really, and the advent of the Messiah was, to pagan administrators, no more than a side note to a troubled occupation. The Jews of Palestine were always a restive people, hating and rejecting the foreign, and especially the pagan, nature of Roman rule. Several rebellions, spanning the period between the time of Jesus to the end of the first few generations of Christians around 130, were crushed by Roman legions, and the Jews were finally scattered away from their ancestral Promised Land centered on Jerusalem. The Romans did spend considerable effort in wars against Persia, a close neighbor to Palestine. But the real menace to the Greco-Roman world was from the north. There remained an unconquered primitive Indo-European group of tribes in northern Europe that was never fully assimilated into Greco-Roman civilization, and clung persistently to pagan ideals of warlike conquest and violent, rapacious behavior. The Celts of the north had been conquered and rapidly assimilated by the Romans, but the Germans resisted successfully, and remained independent, unpredictable, and threatening to the Greco-Roman world.
Collapse of the Christian Empire (400 AD – 700 AD)
The decline of Greco-Roman civilization over the 500 years that followed the coming of Christ led to the Middle Ages of Europe, a period that would be dominated by the Germans and their rough rule by the sword. But by that time, around 500, believers in Christ had thoroughly Christianized the Roman Empire. Indeed Christianity was now, ominously, it's officially supported religion. Virtually the entire known, civilized, Mediterranean world was universally (the original meaning of catholic) Christian at that time. These Christian lands may be divided into four distinct regions: The Greco-Roman heartland in Italy and Greece, the East-Roman lands that were once the heart of Hellenistic civilization, including Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, the Punic-Roman North Africa and coastal Spain, and Celto-Roman France, Spain, and Britain. To the north were the pagan Germans. To the far west were a few Celts, also still pagan. To the southeast were the Zoroastrian Persians. Beyond them, and to the south, were pagans in India, Arabia and animists in sub-Saharan Africa. What happened to the Christian empire known to St. Augustine? Under ideal conditions, such an advanced civilization should have been able to resist external pressures, consolidate the true religion of Christ based on his unadulterated teaching, and proceed to rapidly win the religious adherence and organize the governance of the rest of the world on a basis combining Christian charity and zeal, with Greco-Roman insight and efficiency. Instead, disaster came.
Three reasons can be given for the collapse of the Christian Empire of 500 AD. The first was the degradation of the Church by its becoming an official political body, the Church patriarchs acting in concert with the Emperor. This politicization led to the corruption of the Church, which devastated its natural strength by reducing the prestige and integrity of the church leadership in the sight of the overwhelming majority of honest Christian citizens of the empire. The second was the conquest and destructive impact of hordes of pagan and semi-Christian Germans who invaded in massive waves. The third was the sudden appearance in Arabia of a Judeo-Christian heretical sect, founded by Mohammed, and adopted by the primitive Arabian tribes, who spread their new religion by conquest from about 650. These factors led to a complete collapse in the unified, basically stable and Christianized civilization that existed in about 500 throughout the Mediterranean world. The Germans conquered the Celto-Roman area decisively, as well as the Punic-Roman world, and took half the Greco-Roman heartland by occupying Italy. All this happened just before the Mohammedans burst forth and rapidly conquered the Eastern-Roman world, and took the Punic-Roman parts of Africa and then much of Spain away from the Germans. A small Greco-Roman remnant empire remained based in Constantinople, the Byzantine realm, and lasted another 800 years, but virtually all the Greco-Roman region was lost to barbarians, pagans, or heretics, in the period between 500 and 700.
To recap the outline of the story to this point, we have reviewed that in the period between 500 BC and 500 AD there developed an amazing pagan civilization, the Greco-Roman, that included within it the germ of the knowledge and understanding of the One God, carried particularly by the Hebrew people and religion. God himself intervened to interact with humanity at this point in history, causing the birth of his son Jesus Christ to restate the terms of salvation by which human beings can be reconciled with God. This message, although rejected by most Jews, was received by the Greco-Roman pagans themselves, when it was witnessed to them by the martyrs and saints of the early church in times of great persecution and rapid growth. Just at the point when it seemed the truth of Christ's message would carry an advanced, believing empire to a benevolent world dominion, three counter-factors intervened: the False or Corrupted Church, the German pagan tribes, and the Mohammedan heretics. All three of these factors have continued to this day in diverting the clear path of the united church in overcoming the world of darkness, and it seems to be an obvious conclusion that they were meant to do so by the rulers of spiritual darkness, and they are still doing so today.
The Germanic Supremacy (0 AD – Today)
First the Germans. Last of the northern barbarians to be civilized and christianized, strongly influenced by their primitive experience in a cold and harsh environment, these tribal groups moved in successive waves from a relatively small area located in Scandinavia and southeast of Denmark, and went on to completely overrun Europe between 100, when the earliest great German migrations began, and about 1100, when the last of the great Viking/Norman and Teutonic incursions occurred. Indeed, the crusades can be seen as a German invasion of Asia in the 1100s and 1200s. During this vast time of about 1,000 years, German tribal leaders established innumerable European kingdoms. The Ostrogoths in Italy, the Visigoths in France and Spain, the Vandals in North Africa, the Franks in France, the Lombards in Italy, the Burgundians in eastern France, the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons in England, the Danes and Norse in the British Isles, Iceland, and Greenland, the Northmen in Russia, the Normans in France, England, and Sicily, the Teutonic Knights in Poland and Lithuania, the Saxons in east Germany, the Austrians and Bavarians in south-central Europe. In each case the German leaders assumed the position of feudal nobility, with the warrior king and his henchmen becoming lords over whatever local population they had just conquered. It can be said that the entire hereditary nobility of Europe, in power up until 1800 - 1900, descend directly from the leaders of these warlike clans, small in absolute numbers but extremely powerful by virtue of their fighting skill and aggressiveness.
To extend this trend in time and space, the prowess of the northern and western European powers in world conquest has been astonishing. Starting about 1300, Germanic states began expanding into the east, although at first encountering great resistance from the Ottoman Turks. Eventually the system of German European rulership was extended throughout the Slavic states of Eastern Europe. By 1500 the sea routes to Africa, India, the Orient, and the Americas had been discovered. Within 100 years South America was ruthlessly occupied and subdued, and colonies were planted along the coast of North America. 200 years later the entire continent was under the control of European Americans. Africa was at first merely exploited, but then rapidly conquered and used as European colonies in the 1800s. The large, populous regions of India and China were either conquered or subdued by Europeans by the late 1800s. By the beginning of the 1900s the entire world had been subjugated by Europeans, and it can be argued that the European conquerors descended, literally and/or spiritually, directly from the semi-pagan German tribal leadership that established the complex fabric of feudal Europe between about 500 and 1000. The pattern of conquest, overlordship, oppression, and exploitation that follows all these conquests has a defining signature. When we look today at our "powers that be" in terms of economic, military, and social activities, and wonder that they seem somewhat shy of representing a Christian people in any time and at any place, we are seeing an anti-Christian urge to power and violence that was so historically energetic that it took down the Christian Empire of 500, and continued on to this day in the same vein.
The Mohammedan Block (600 AD – Today)
Next the Mohammedans. It can be said of the Muslims that they are more Jewish than Jews, more Christian than Christians. They outdo Jews in their monotheism, and put Christians to shame in the areas of charity and chastity. Much of the moral and spiritual content of Islam was imported from the other two foundational religions. In the largest sense, it is a heretical branch of the Judeo-Christian religious rootstock, one strongly characterized by what Christians call legalism. The Christian concept of Grace, and the personal closeness and approachability of God through Christ is absent in Islam, in exchange the believer gets rules from a distant supreme God, Allah. But the Mohammedan religion is strong, simple, and frequently lends itself better to religious idealism than its competitors. Islam conquered and assimilated half of the Christian Empire of 500, mostly by the sword, but also by authentic persuasion. It had assistance in converting and retaining ex-Christians by the inexplicably complex theology taught by the Corrupted Church of the time. The Muslims actually presented their heretical notions as simpler and purer than Christian teachings.
The early Mohammedans were victorious in battle in part because they were, like the barbarian Germans far in the north, adapted to a harsh climate and a hard life frequently involving violence. But by all accounts the Muslims won battles simply because they were convinced that dying in battle was a certain path to heaven. Since the only way to get to heaven for a Muslim is to work one's way to heaven - by obeying the rules of Mohammed - this was an attractive shortcut. It should also be noted that for the early period of Muslim supremacy in the near east, from 700 to 1300, their civilization was actually more advanced technically and intellectually than was the Christian remnant of the Roman Empire. This led to much more efficient governance and organization, and enabled well planned and controlled military operations to succeed against the stronger armor of western knights. During the 1800s and 1900s, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European nations succeeded, after over 1,000 years, in taking control of nearly all the Middle East. Turkey retained its heartland in Asia Minor, but lost Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt to western control. Persia, now called Iran, was effectively controlled by Europeans. Now, all these countries have emerged as modern states, most of which can be controlled by European influences, but there is a vast underground desire among the people for a pan-Islamic state that would restore what is, in their eyes, the rightful glory of Islam, and we see the same contest of western knights in heavy armor battling well organized light fighters today. The ancient heretical sect of Mohammed, which overran half of Christianity or more, which claims the heartland of the Jewish seed religion as its own, and has been the nemesis of Christian powers for 1500 years, continues to obstruct the progress and impact of Christ's message.
The False Church (300 AD – Today)
Finally the Corrupted Church. What was the nature of the church before it was corrupted? First it was independent, with each church being subject to a bishop (shepherd) and deacons (elders) chosen by assent of the congregants. Such choices, often made under serious persecution, generally assured a truly holy and self-sacrificing candidate interested foremost in the spiritual well-being of the local population. The bishops conferred with one another to promote the unity of the faithful. There was an apostolic orthodoxy that was carefully husbanded as the received faith and practice of the saints from the time of the apostles through the persecutions. What happened to corrupt the church? First it became a powerful force in society and eventually in politics. Then it was annexed to the secular government of the empire, and in the west was drawn under the power of a religious government of the Pope in Rome. Perhaps more importantly, the clergy became separated from the congregation, and developed an agenda of its own, often selfish, secretive, and unchristian. Finally, the simple faith and sacraments enjoined by Christ and the early church leaders became ritualized and made into spectacles not much different than those previously invoked in pagan temples.
The greed and sinfulness of church leaders would eventually lead to the protestant reformation. Unfortunately the reformation did not do away with all sinful church leaders or corrupted Christian organizations or denominations allied with secular governments. When the worldly power of governance and law and military might sweep into the church, the spiritual power of love and charity and righteousness sweep out. A corrupted church remains as a hollow shell without a trace of true Christianity except artifacts, like a macabre museum of past souls.
Conclusion
These three historic challenges for the church affect us today, and forming strategies and approaches to counter the forces of darkness may help us see more clearly the path we must choose. But in the end it is exactly the path Christ described for us. The solution to the exercise of unbridled pagan power is to demonstrate the alternative spiritual power of the Holy Spirit. But what do we do? We do nothing, because we are afraid of the powerful and arrogant leaders who have, like Germanic feudal overlords, put themselves on top of us to pen and plunder us. The solution to legalistic heresy such as we find, in an extreme form, in Mohammedans, is to communicate the essential gospel of Grace and Love without backing down. But what do we do? We fight and kill them, reinforcing their fear and hatred for the Christians who attack them, and in the process we ourselves become more legalistic, and more fearful of them, and of ourselves, of who we are beginning to look like. The solution to the Corrupt Church is to demand reform from our leaders, as Jesus did of the corrupt temple moneychangers. But what do we do? We give up on the church and slink away, avoiding a problem we feel unable to rectify. The Church should renounce participation in power politics and authoritarian rule, from self-interested leadership and empty display. These were warning signs of the degradation of the church in 500. They are also today.
