Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
“And the importance of these centuries of which I have been writing is not to be found in the external order they created or attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man – a change which can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
Dawson' book is a valuable learning vehicles for anyone interested in the development of Western Civilisation. In fact all of his books are worthwhile to read. His main idea – civilisation does not last when it is unmoored from its roots, or in the case of Europe and North America from its Judeo-Christian-Greco-Romano heritage. This book performs two services by providing proof that; 1) the world of the middle ages was complex, innovative in many ways, brutal surely, but not dark and 2) the development of Christianity fused with Roman-Greco ideals and technology was a long process and one that occurred differently in various parts of Europe but which was absolutely essential to the rise of Europe to world domination. Historians have proven for example that the Roman legacy was strong in southern France, but quickly disappeared in 5th century England, leading England or the Angle-Saxon lands on a far different path of theological-Christian-political-economic development. The complexity and richness of the middle ages [500-1500 AD] which directly led to the Renaissance and our modern world should of interest to anyone who wonders how our society was developed, from where, and by whom.
Dawson's works can also be used to juxtapose Christian development with Islam. One needs to keep in mind that the Moslem invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries, which destroyed Mediterranean trade patterns, raw material sourcing [gold, papyrus, fruit, spices] and which resulted in endless slave-taking, military attacks and the wanton destruction of Christian targets and assets around the Mediterranean; was by the 9th century ossified in comparison to the chaotic and but at times dynamic Christian states of west, central and north-west Europe. Islam was very good at squatting and the Moslem empire which was not unified in any real sense throughout the Mediterranean basin, did bring about [as the Mongols were to do in the 13th century] a vast territory under the control of one culture which occasioned for that area an increase in trade, capital formation and thus prosperity.
Trade patterns were thus changed to benefit the Moslems, with Ummayad Cordoba and the Spanish littoral as prime examples. This forcible redirection of Mediterranean flows in the political-economy is however quite a bit different than saying that the Moselms created the wealth by themselves, or were engaged in 'learning' or inventing all emanating from 'their' theology. Moslems were for the first 4 centuries of their existence minorities in the countries they conquered and everything from hospitals to algebra was already in existence in the occupied territories of the Jews, Greeks, Christians, and Romano-Berbers. Mostly everything in that Islamic world from the 8th to 12th centuries emanated from Jews, Greeks, Christians and Moors who were Christian converts to Islam. A fact rarely mentioned by academics.
Some of Dawson's themes include:
Dynamism:
“The other great world cultures realized their own synthesis between religion and life and then maintained their sacred order unchanged for centuries and millennia. But Western civilization has been the great ferment of change in the world, because the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal. Centuries before the achievements of modern science and technology Western man had conceived the idea of a magna instauratio of the sciences which would open new ways for human understanding and change the fortunes of the human race.” p. 17
Orientalist Theology:
“Apart from this single exceptional case [Carolingian Empire], there has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. And even in the Middle Ages the religious unity imposed by the Church never constituted a true theocracy of the Oriental type, since it involved a dualism between the spiritual and the temporal powers, which produced an internal tension in Western society and was a fertile source of criticism and change.” p. 19
Urbanization:
“Nor was the medieval city a repetition of anything that had gone before. It was a new creation, unlike the cities of antiquity or those of modern times and differing also, though in a lesser degree, from the types of city which were to be found in the East at the same period.” p. 161
and
“Henri Pirenne wrote: 'The medieval urban economy is worthy of the Gothic architecture with which it is contemporary. It created in every detail, and one might say ex nihilo, a system of social legislation more complete than that of any other period of history, including our own.' It was this integration of corporate organization, economic function and civic freedom which makes the medieval city, as Troeltsch remarks, the most complete embodiment of the social ideas of the Middle Ages, as we see them in their most highly developed form in the writings of St. Thomas and his contemporaries.” p. 171
War, disorder, the Moslems, the Inquisition:
“The fourteenth century was an age of division and strife, the age of the Great Schism, which saw instead of the Crusades the invasion of Europe by the Turks and the devastation of France by England. And at the same time the intellectual resources of Western society which had been so much strengthened by the extension of the university movement no longer assisted the integration of Christian thought but were used negatively and critically to undo the work of the previous century and undermine the intellectual foundations of which the synthesis of the great thinkers of the previous age had been built.” [sounds like our modern age] p. 198
and
“It marked the reappearance [Catharism in southern France in the 13th c.] of an ancient oriental religion as far or farther removed from Christianity than the religion of Islam. Consequently the Papacy used the same methods as it had employed against the Moslems – the method of the Crusade, and of an appeal to Christian princes to use their power in defence of the faith...and finally by a code of repressive legislation which gave birth to the inquisition.” p. 209
The history of the Middle Ages as Dawson relates in such intricate and scholarly detail, are as diverse as the characters and Christians living in Europe during this epoch. It is a complex history with the tension between Church and State always present. Yet the importance of this period which spawned the Renaissance and our own modern world cannot be cheapened or discounted.
“And the importance of these centuries of which I have been writing is not to be found in the external order they created or attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man – a change which can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
A process which is now in full train.
An insightful look into 10th century Europe. It is my contention that by 900 AD Europe was the richest, best-fed, best-educated and most agriculturally productive geographic entity in the world. It was 'Christendom' which formed the modern world, developed technology and science, and allowed freedom to come to the fore of the political-economy. Free-will, free-association, freedom of speech, free assembly, and the mandate to use rationality only arose in Christendom – no where else.
Collins would likely agree with this assessment. Some interesting facts from the 10th century on why and how Christendom saved the world.
in the tenth century probably less than 25 percent of European land was owned by the church and monastic orders and that kings and magnates controlled 40 percent or more. Ordinary people owned about 30 to 35 percent, but the constant insecurity and chaos meant that they were still subservient to the local strongman because they needed his protection.
The Secular state was always more powerful than the Church and incessantly desired its subservience to state power.
Italy seems to have been an irresistibly attractive prize for the Germans. It was not only the warmer climate and brighter light, the economic prosperity and the developed resources, particularly in northern Italy, that attracted them. It was also the influence the emperors could exercise over the papacy, which indirectly gave them even more power over the church in Germany.
and: retaining their educational role, monasteries in the ninth century had become increasingly secularized owing to their social and economic clout. Patrick J. Corish points out, “They became associated with the established major dynasties, and in consequence became centers of secular power.....Monastic armies fought with kings and against kings.
Yet the benefices of monasticism, Church technological developments, public and court schools, medicine, hospitals and even the idea of peace-days in which war was outlawed, all added magnificently to the heritage and expansion of Christendom.
Irish monks who “saved civilization” and learning in the West, a project that continued through the Carolingian period and on into the tenth century. The ability to reform itself was one of monasticism’s great strengths, and one of the great reforms of Western monasticism emanated from the monastery of Cluny in southern Burgundy and spread across Western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Irish monks preserved Latin and Greek learning well before the great days of Muslim al-Andalus, and these same monks, from the seventh century onward, spread that learning and culture across Continental Europe and England via their missionary work.
And what of the poverty of the Moslem-fascist political project in Spain?
In traditional Islam there was no clear separation of what today we would call religion and the state. The key question of who should lead the community was left unanswered. At first the caliphs saw themselves as the successors of Muhammad. They claimed “to be khalifat allāh....vice regents of God. They assumed the protection and endowment of Muslim worship, the organization of mosques and the defence of the pilgrimage. They claimed authority in legal and doctrinal...
Islam, isolated and convinced of its own superiority, felt it had nothing to learn from Christian Europe. We will return to this knowledge transmission when we consider Gerbert of Aurillac. All of this suggests the need for a more nuanced appreciation of al-Andalus. In the end the greatness of Moorish Spain was something of a mixed blessing.
al-Andalus simply wasn’t the kind of tolerant paradise that Lewis imagines, especially for Christians. It was a highly stratified society with a strict demarcation of roles, including for a period the wearing of identifying badges for Jews and Christians. Mozarabic Catholics were cowed, second-class citizens in what had originally been their own country.
Catholics and Jews were constantly reminded of their second-class status. They were dhimmi, “protected ones,” or “people of the book.” Dhimmi were granted a special residential status to live in Muslim-dominated countries in return for paying jizya, a poll and land tax. Generally, there was no outright persecution of Christians until the time of the vicious dictator al-Mansūr (976–1002).
the hadith (sayings ascribed to Muhammad) says, as “the one who fights for the faith of Allah” than of actually gaining territory. Over the course of Abd al-Rahmān’s campaigns against the Christians, he achieved some victories. One Moorish chronicler says that after a battle in July 920 at Valdejunquera, southwest of Pamplona, there were so many heads of the Christian dead to take back to Córdoba to set up around the city walls that the mule trains could not carry them.
And, Al-Andalus was far from an open, tolerant society even for Muslims.
Anyone who has studied the disaster of Moslem Spain – the millions killed and taken as sex chattel; the forcible conversions, the endless raids against Infidels, obscene taxes on non-Moslems, the lies about how large or grand Cordoba was; knows the above to be true. The Reconquista which was effectively over in 1250 except for the statelet of Granada which paid a ransom to survive, is one of the greatest epics in Western history.
At least Collins has the intelligence and factual confidence to impart the truth.
Garwood has written a very interesting book on the Flat Earth phenomenon. Anyone who criticizes the reigning cults of today including: Islam is Peace, Globaloneywarming, Queer genes, Bacteria to Biologist, Cosmic Big Bang, National Socialism, or Keynesianism, is usually branded inter-alia a 'Flat Earther'. The current Flat Earth society president is an evolutionist and globaloneywarming cult member, so perhaps a new ad-hominem and pejorative is necessary.
From the time of Christ right through the Christian infused academy of Ptolemy [2nd century], through medieval science and philosophy from Boethuis to the Venerable Bede [8th century]; and into the development of the scientific method [12th to 14th centuries] which included calculations of a spherical earth, mean speed theorems, gravity and even the elucidation of why there are rainbows; no Christian believed in a flat earth. The only exceptions were the minor Christian writers Lactantius and Cosmo [4th and 6th centuries, and both were quite insane]. Christian theology does not support the idea of a flat earth, in fact the Bible is quite mute on the earth's shape, though in Isiah it is called a sphere.
As Garwood explains:
“..educated medieval people did not believe the earth to be flat, and it was neither Columbus’s intention nor the outcome of his voyage to demonstrate to doubters that it was a globe.”
“Columbus’s contemporaries assumed that it was spherical – indeed, the point was far beyond any sort of dispute – many believed that the stretch of water between Europe and Asia was uncrossable and sailors risked becoming stranded or running out of food. Under these circumstances, what is widely assumed to be his greatest achievement is a chimera: no educated person in fifteenth-century Europe would have imagined that Columbus was bound to sail off the edge of the world.”
Only really clever Darwinists and 'Scientists' state that Christians believed in a flat earth. They were the ones who proved its sphericity [see the voyages of Catholic discovery for more information].