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A Non-Christian Perspective on European Civilization
History is always a matter of perspective. From whose point of view are we looking at the past? The easiest viewpoint to get is, of course, that of the winner, who writes history as he wishes. “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” as Churchill reputedly said.[1]His actual words, pronounced in a speech in the House of Commons, 23 January 1948, were: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.” When it comes to the history of Western European civilization, there are two major perspectives. If I look at it from within the Church, I will see it as fundamentally Christian. I will see the Catholic faith as the soul of our civilization. Our civilization was born with the Church, and therefore must die with it. I will consider the High Middle Ages as a golden age, because it’s the period of the Church’s greatest influence, when all men, except for a few heretics, seemed submissive to the authority of the Pope, who needed only snap his fingers to send the semi-barbarian military class to Jerusalem.
From that perspective, the Renaissance is the beginning of de-Christianization, and therefore a destructive process. Such opinion is quite common among Roman Catholics who read old-fashioned books like Henri Delassus’s La Conjuration antichrétienne (1910):
the whole movement impressed on Christianity by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution is a satanic effort to tear man away from the supernatural order established by God at the beginning and restored by Our Lord Jesus Christ in the midst of time, and to confine man to naturalism.
This viewpoint is shared by French Traditionalists, who follow René Guénon’s brand of anti-modern perennialism, believing that pre-Vatican-II Catholicism was, esoterically, an initiatory mystery cult, and that the past was by definition better than the current Kali Yuga.[2]For a good presentation of that little-known but influential movement, which influences political thinkers like Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin, read Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalim: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, Penguin, 2023. Traditionalists, however, tend to regard ancient paganism even more highly that medieval Christianity, and will not follow Delassus when he claims that the Renaissance was the rebirth of “paganism”, which for him is almost synonymous with satanism (since pagan gods are demons):
Paganism, pushing mankind down the slope to which original sin had led it, told man that he was on earth to enjoy the life and goods that this world offered him. The pagan did not aspire, did not seek anything beyond.
There are grave misunderstandings here. First, paganus originally means “peasant” or country folk; it was used by the Church as an insult against its enemies. No pre-Christian Roman or Renaissance intellectual ever declared himself a pagan. And if by “paganism” we mean “polytheism”, we miss the point. Renaissance men had little time for the ancient gods. What they loved was philosophy, which, in their vocabulary, encompassed all fields of rational investigation, including metaphysics and ethics. Ancient philosophers generally looked down on traditional religion: Socrates was sentenced to death under the charge of disrespect for the city gods. Finally, ancient philosophy has little to do with “naturalism” (in the sense of materialism), still less with atheism. There are no Platonic atheist. It just conveys a vision of God and His Providence (a word that Christians borrowed from the Stoics, like Logos) that is at odds with the foreign Judeo-Christian tradition that took over Europe from the Levant.
The alternative perspective on the Renaissance that I’m going to present here agrees with the Christian perspective on two points. Firstly, the Renaissance was indeed a profound break with the medieval order; it was almost the birth of a new civilization. Secondly, this break was a reconnection with the Greco-Roman heritage; it was a second Greek miracle. Where my perspective differs is in the value I ascribe to this civilizational awakening. I will point out that the greatest achievements of European civilization came from the Renaissance, and that we cannot admire European civilization without marveling at the genius of the Renaissance.
This perspective is not new. When I say, in essence, that European civilization blossomed during the Renaissance by grafting itself on Greco-Roman antiquity, I’m simply echoing the vision of the Renaissance men themselves.
Is this an important topic of discussion? Yes, it is of paramount importance to anyone who is concerned with the future of Western civilization. For in order to form a realistic vision of its possible future, we must first get a clear understanding of its essence, or foundations. If we consider Christianity the soul of the West, then we must either despair or pray for an eschatological miracle. On the other hand, we can perhaps hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel if we recognize that the genius of European civilization is the genius of Greco-Roman (or Hellenistic) civilization, awakened from its medieval slumber by the Renaissance. Anthony Gottlieb, author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, uses an evocative metaphor: “Having pricked its finger on Christian theology, philosophy fell asleep for about a thousand years until awakened by the kiss of Descartes”[3]Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, W.W. Norton & Co, 2016,, p. 359. (although I would argue that Prince Charming came two centuries before Descartes’ Discourse on the Method).
Dechristianization is irreversible, but it does not mean the death of our civilization, because Christianity is neither the first nor the principal root of our civilization. For good or bad, Christianity has nourished our civilization for a time, but did not create it: we are still the heirs of Athens and Rome, far more than of Jerusalem and the Vatican. We are Greco-Romans in a deeper sense than we are Judeo-Christians.
About the Middle Ages
The men of the Renaissance coined the term “middle age” (medium aevum) to describe what they perceived as a long eclipse of Greco-Roman thought and knowledge.[4]Karl Ferdinand Werner, Naissance de la noblesse, Arthème Fayard/Pluriel, 2010, p. 108. Today, this classification is called into question. The period from the 4th to the 8th century is now referred to as “Late Antiquity”; it is characterized by the decadence of Roman institutions and culture, and the conquest of the minds by Christianity, from slaves up to emperors. Not before the end of the 10th century appeared Romanesque art, our oldest surviving vestige of medieval architecture. Romanesque art is simply called l’art roman in French, and rightly so, because it is hardly distinguishable from Roman (romain) art. European chroniclers from the beginning of the 11th century believed they were still living in Romano orbe.[5]Raoul Glaber, Histoires, ed. and trans. Mathieu Arnoux, Brépols, 1996, livre II, § 13-17, pp. 116-125.
From the mid-11th century starts the cultural hegemony of the Roman Church. Or does it? Because the Church had a virtual monopoly on writing, historians, who depend on written material, tend to confuse medieval culture with clerical culture, forgetting that churchmen represented a tiny percentage of the European population. The overwhelming majority of lay people didn’t understand Latin, but they thought, spoke and sang nonetheless, and shared a rich oral culture grounded in pre-Christian lore and ideas (this was the subject of my PhD thesis, condensed into my book La Mort féerique, Gallimard, 2011).
It is a serious but common mistake to attribute the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages to Christianity. Consider the emblematic example of Gothic cathedrals. They are Catholic for sure. But who built them? Bishops were the main fundraisers, but they had nothing to do with the technical and aesthetic prowess of these masterpieces. The designers and builders of cathedrals were highly specialized craftsmen organized into independent guilds. As it happens, some of those men called themselves “free masons”, because they were free to travel throughout Europe and choose their employers. These builders were jealous of their skills and liked to claim secret knowledge dating back to Antiquity. It’s ironic that Freemasonry has become, in the eyes of authors like Henri Delassus, the Church’s archetypal enemy, even declared satanic by Pope Leo XIII (duped by Léo Taxil’s hoax). There is, of course, no identity between the Freemasonry that emerged in the 18th century and the medieval guilds, but the filiation is indisputable.
I don’t want to draw exaggerated conclusions from this fact, nor do I wish to dispute the architectural genius of the Middle Ages. I am simply drawing attention to the logical error of crediting “Christianity” or “the Church” with everything that we see as embodying medieval “Christendom”. The causal link that is commonly postulated between the Catholic Church and European civilization is largely imaginary.
The big question, in the end, is whether Christianity has made Europe great, or whether Europe has, for a time, made Christianity great. To answer that question, you only have to look at what Christianity has produced among non-European peoples (and I count the Byzantines as Greek, therefore European).
It’s noteworthy that the term “Gothic” (gotico) applied to architecture first appeared during the Renaissance, with a pejorative connotation on the part of Italian artists and architects, who saw the flamboyant Gothic of the late Middle Ages as barbaric mannerism, and preferred to return to the Roman standards. They rediscovered these standards in 1414 in the ten volumes of Vitruvius’ De architectura (1st century BC), which was totally unknown in the Middle Ages. Vitruvius’ aesthetic principles, based on geometry, equilibrium, and the imitation of nature, were to influence not only architects, but also artists. We are all familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s reproduction of the “Vitruvian Man”.
The Men of Art
It was a Florentine scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Vitruvius’ work. The city of Florence, the first cradle of the Renaissance, had been an independent Republic since the 11th century, like other Italian cities—including Rome, whose citizens expelled the Pope several times. In the 15th century, under the benevolent rule of the Medici family (Cosimo the Elder and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent), Florence was leading an extraordinary artistic and literary revival. With the founding of a Platonic Academy in 1462, which was to become a major center of intellectual exchange, Florence saw itself as the reincarnation of Athens.
It’s the Florentine Michelangelo who first springs to mind when we think of the breathtaking technical and aesthetic summit reached in the art of sculpture during the Renaissance. It was made possible by the imitation of Greek and Roman models, and by the study of human anatomy, which had been almost impossible under Catholic rule. Nothing comparable to Renaissance sculpture existed in the Middle Ages. Michelangelo’s David, sculpted from a single seventeen-foot high block of marble, raises with special acuteness the question of the relationship (or non-relationship) between Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. From which of these two sources did Michelangelo’s genius spring? Clearly, his David is not Jewish, but Greek. Look closely! The very idea of such full nude human representation is repulsive to the traditional Jew, whose god forbids human images (Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 4:16-17).
If we now look for paintings that best illustrate the European genius, we may think of another Renaissance Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci. And we might reflect on the fact that his world-famous masterpiece is not a portrait of the Virgin, but that of an enigmatic woman in whom some have recognized the goddess Isis, “unveiled”: Mona Lisa as Madonna l’Isa. One of the major contributions of the Renaissance to painting was perspective (invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425), which made it three-dimensional. Italy was not the only hotbed of creativity in painting: the Flemish painters of the same period invented oil-on-canvas painting, and their scenes of daily life soon reached an astonishing level of realism and expressivity.
Let’s move on to music. Apart from Gregorian chant, which is boringly monophonic, little is known of the music played in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, except that the instruments were mainly of Eastern origin. The foundations of Baroque music, which marks the beginning of classical music, date from the Renaissance. The first theories of music appeared in the 15th century, and were of Pythagorean inspiration. It was at this time that the major third was included among the consonant chords, that the meantone temperament was invented to enable the construction of keyboards, and that most of the instruments still in use today were designed. This was the beginning of polyphonic music, the writing of which was codified and began to be printed as early as 1476. All this was invented in princely courts, but gradually found its way into popular music.
Here again, it is difficult to find the slightest contribution of Christianity to these developments. At the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Church advised against polyphony, as it interfered with the understanding of sacred texts. Of course, sacred music became polyphonic too, and we can’t deny that some composers were pious men (Johann Sebastian Bach comes to mind, although he was a post-Renaissance Protestant), but it would be nonsensical to reduce their inspiration and talent to their Christian faith or upbringing. In any case, classical music sprouted from the genius of the Renaissance, and owes almost nothing to the European Middle Ages.
I’m of the opinion that the spiritual and moral uplifting produced by classical music, in all social strata of Europe, was far more powerful than that of the Catholic mass, and that its disappearance from the cultural environment of the younger generations counts for more in the barbarization of our societies than the loss of church attendance and the decline of belief in Christian dogmas. Music is the language of the gods.
In conclusion, the Renaissance can be seen as not mere progress, but an immense qualitative leap in European art, unparalleled in any other civilization.
The same can be said of Renaissance science, which was still called “natural philosophy” back then, and to which I now turn.
Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West (1971)
I can find no better way to introduce this topic than by quoting from Louis Rougier’s splendid book, The Genius of the West (an abridged translation of the French original, Le Génie de l’Occident, 1969). In the first chapters, Rougier writes about “the ‘quantum leap’ of the human spirit achieved by Greece”:
In place of the empirical routine of Eastern thought, the Greeks substituted the science of proof. This science is not satisfied with the evidence of the senses which describes the how of things: it insists upon intellectual evidence which can explain the why. Instead of the practical geometry of the Egyptians we get the axiomatic and deductive geometry of the Pythagoreans; instead of the calculations of the Phoenicians traders, the theory of numbers; in place of the descriptive and numeric astronomy of the Babylonians, the theoretical and explanatory astronomy of Eudoxus, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, which explains the apparently capricious movements of the planets by a geometric combination of simple, circular and uniform movements in an expanded universe. In place of the theogonies of Homer and Hesiod, we find that first the Milesian philosophers and then the Atomists substituted the science of physics, which had as its goal the explanation of all phenomena, celestial as well as terrestrial, by means of purely natural causes. In place of the magical and priestly medicine of the East, Asclepiades and his followers developed a science of healing founded upon clinical observations. For the legendary tales of the bards there were substituted narrative history by Herodotus and interpretive history by Thucydides and Polybius. New words appear which have no equivalents in the ancient Oriental languages: theory, demonstration, logic, and syllogism.[6]Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.
Greek civilization, however, had a “handicap”, Rougier argues. The Greeks loved knowledge for its own sake, but lacked the incentive to apply it in practical ways. This is because they relied on slaves for mechanical labor, which led them to look down on it as unworthy of free citizens.
Prejudice against the mechanical arts became so strong that Archimedes, the inventor of the lever, wedge, pulley, worm screw, and winch, would not—if we may believe Plutarch—leave behind any written treatise on these matters: “regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the charm and subtlety of which are not affected by the claims of necessity.”[7]Ibid., pp. 35-36.
(Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.)
Slavery, Rougier explains, ultimately “brought ruin to the Greek cities, to the Hellenic empire, and finally to Rome, by creating an expansive urban proletariat and by impoverishing the agrarian masses.”[8]Ibid., p. 40.
(Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.) This explains the rise of Christianity, a slave-religion as Nietzsche saw it. Christendom raised the status of the working and merchant classes, which allowed them to organize in guilds and stimulated their creativity, leading to a long series of useful inventions, starting with the water mill and the windmill. With the camshaft, circular motion could be converted into linear motion, and operate mechanical saws or hydraulic hammers. Progress in mining, metallurgy, chemistry, weaving, building, transport, and agriculture, were made of good use.
Taking shape was a technical civilization destined to transform economic and social life and man’s view of the world. This development was greatly aided by the gradual disappearance of slavery and by the establishment of relative security from invasion as great feudal monarchies emerged from the eleventh century on.[9]Ibid., p. 49.
(Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.)
All these improvements were purely empirical, but this empirical approach proved decisive when combined with Greek theory by such geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) or Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who united theoretical science and practical craftsmanship, and transformed knowledge into power.
If Greek science could be rediscovered at all, after a millennium of Christian obscurantism, it is because it had been preserved in the first place during the Hellenistic period, notably in the library of Alexandria founded by Ptolemy I Soter (305-283 BC), which is said to have contained up to 700,000 volumes. It was almost miraculous that a small but significant part of this Greek treasure survived Christianity, to be rediscovered in the Renaissance, as Rougier explains:
The triumph of Christianity in the West as the religion of the state had provoked one of the greatest destructions of books, manuscripts, libraries and works of art ever recorded in history. If a few works survived this holocaust, it was due to some old Romans, high dignitaries of the court of Theodoric. It is not to the West, but to the Orient—Byzantium, Syria, Persia and Arabia—that we owe the survival of Hellenic culture. / Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the works of Archimedes, Apollonius, and others reached the West via Syria, Baghdad, Cordova, Toledo, and Palermo, arousing scientific thought from its long sleep. It was a passage in Archimedes which led Copernicus to the hypothesis of the heliocentric universe; it was Apollonius who led Kepler to substitute an ellipse for a circle in his explanation of the orbits of the planets; and above all, it was Archimedes who taught Leonardo da Vinci, Benedetti and Galileo to use mathematics in their studies of nature. A problem posed by Pappus on the locus of points led Descartes to create analytical geometry. There are many such examples. It is not too great a claim to say that the fate of Western civilization turned on the almost haphazard preservation of a few dozen ancient manuscripts.[10]Ibid., pp. 65-66.
(Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.)
Rougier here perhaps underestimates the relative care with which the Greek Christians, unlike the Latins, treated Greek science, thanks largely to Basil of Caesarea’s letters To Young Men on How They Might Benefit from Greek Literature (around 370). “This little book,” writes Collin Wells in Sailing from Byzantium, “would do much to keep the peace between Athens and Jerusalem in the coming millennium.”[11]Collin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World, Bantam, 2008, p. 48-51. Read also Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: the Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, Cambridge UP, 2007.
Yet only a tiny fraction of the books that had been preserved in Alexandria ultimately made it through the Middle Ages, just enough to rouse a sense of wonder and thirst, which would create a new civilization of books within a single lifetime. When Gutenberg printed his first books in 1454, Marcel Ficino, the future director of the Platonic Academy in Florence, was eleven years old. At that time, there were thousands of handwritten books in Europe, and access to these rarities was relatively difficult. Half a century later, by the time Ficino had translated the whole of Plato, presses were running at 200 to 300 sites in Europe, and there were at least 10 million books in circulation.[12]Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 437. The printing press and the circulation of books accelerated the birth of what came to be known as the “Republic of Letters”, or the “Humanist International”, which brought together the most brilliant minds from Italy, Germany, France, Flanders, Spain and England. It was the humanists of the Renaissance, and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) more than any other, who developed a European consciousness that would have been hard to find in the Middle Ages (below Erasmus in a printed engraving by Albrecht Dürer).
The Rebirth of Greek Science
In the Middle Ages, Medicine had regressed from the time of Claudius Galen of Pergamon (c. 129-201 AD), who had built on the Hippocratic Corpus, systematized anatomical observation, formulated hypotheses on physiological processes—and healed Marcus Aurelius. Because medieval clerics and monks were strongly discouraged from the practice of medicine, and because the dissection of corpses was taboo, less was known about medicine in the 12th century than eight centuries earlier by the Greeks.[13]Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 362. What little learning appeared then came from the Arabs, through whom the Latins discovered parts of Galen’s works, as well as the Persian Avicenna (980-1037), translated into Latin in Toledo between 1150 and 1187.
The same applies to geography. The Greeks (Thales, Herodotus, Aristotle) had yearned to explore and describe the world. Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), director of the Museum of Alexandria, calculated mathematically the earth’s circumference with a precision of 4 percent. Around 150 AD, Claudius Ptolemy composed a compilation of the available geographical data. All this fell into oblivion in the West during the Middle Ages. Cartography became non-existent, or limited to symbolic representations of the world with Jerusalem at its center. Geography was only revived with the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in the early 15th century, and established itself as a discipline in its own right with the Age of Discovery.
In astronomy, no real progress had been made since Ptolemy, whose treatise Almagest was rediscovered by the “Arabs” (mostly Persians in fact) in the 12th century. When Copernicus defended heliocentrism in his treatise De Revolutionibus in 1543, he claimed to be inspired by Pythagoras, while Galileo, a century later, wrote under the patronage of Plato.
The rediscovery of Plato was crucial. As François Jullien explains in L’Invention de l’idéal et le destin de l’Europe (2009), it was under Plato’s patronage that Galileo took
the boldest decision ever, to “superimpose” on the world of common experience a geometric world of idealities, as forms of the intelligible…. This revolution in physics could only be achieved in Europe by breaking with Aristotle, because it required to rise, thanks to mathematics, above the immediate world of quality and perception …, a world made up of changing, contingent and indefinitely varied matter, and therefore also vague and indeterminate, over which mathematical verifications, which are only true in abstracto, could not have a hold.[14]François Jullien, L’Invention de l’idéal, et le destin de l’Europe, Gallimard, 2017, p. 156-157.
Plato deduced his theory of Ideas from pre-Socratic mathematics, because mathematical objects (numbers and geometrical figures) are pure, immaterial, immutable and universal ideas.
Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, disputed the transcendent existence of “ideas” (idea) or “forms” (eidos), which in his view exist only in people’s minds. He freed himself from the cult of mathematics, arguing that “in nature, there are no circles, triangles or straight lines.” At the same time, Aristotle challenged the immortality of the soul, which for him was synonymous with organic life. Medieval scholastic theologians, who discovered Aristotle, first through Averroes from Cordoba in the 12th century, reinjected the immortality of the soul into their Aristotelianism, arguing that, while the soul is naturally perishable, the omnipotent God made is supernaturally immortal for humans.
Aristotle’s empiricism had provided a useful corrective to the rigidity of Platonic idealism, and his logic proved invaluable. But because the scholastic masters put Aristotle’s science at the service of theology, they were scientifically sterile, provoking Petrarch’s sarcasm against “the mad and vociferous sect of the scholastici.” It was the rejection of Aristotle and the rediscovery of Plato that enabled the West to take off scientifically, because the belief in the existence of pure unchangeable ideas is necessary for doing mathematics. British mathematician Roger Penrose imagines that “whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts.”[15]Quoted in Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 178. To do astronomy or physics, you also need to believe that natural laws are real, and not mere subjective concepts.
The extraordinary fruitfulness of Platonic idealism, which inspired the Greeks and then the Romans to believe in man’s capacity to access universal truths and values, cannot be overstated. This is the source of Roman Law, which for centuries remained the basis of all European legal systems. The Roman jurist Gaius, author of the Institutes around 161 AD, is credited with the first attempt to found law scientifically, i.e. rationally. What he calls the “law of nations” (ius gentium) is “the law common to the whole human race, established among all men by natural reason and observed in a similar way among all peoples.” Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625), considered the first systematic treatise on international law, is based on Gaius. The rationality of Roman law explains, according to René Robaye, why it “has outlived the society that created it, to become, centuries later, the foundation of the most important family of modern legal systems. … Most universities continue to make it an object of scientific research, for the genius of Rome is first and foremost that of its law, and the influence of Roman institutions remains considerable.”[16]René Robaye, Le Droit Romain, Academia, 2023, pp. 7-10.
We can therefore conclude for science as we did for the arts: Europe’s unique scientific creativity began in the Renaissance, with the reappropriation of ancient Greek science. As the trial of Galileo suffices to illustrate, the Church played a predominantly negative role in this scientific take-off. This could not be otherwise, since scientific progress started with questioning the Church’s authority in matters of truth, and challenging the belief in miracles. As an emblematic example of the clash between science and the Church, it was with rational philological criteria that Nicolas de Cues in 1433, then Lorenzo Valla eight years later, proved that Constantine’s Donation was a forgery—a serious blow to the prestige and hegemonic claims of the popes.
Reformation and Counter-Reformation
To be fair, the Church hierarchy was not unanimously opposed to the intellectual and artistic movement of the Renaissance. There were humanist popes and patrons of the arts of great importance. Nicholas V (1447-55) befriended Cosimo Medici and founded the Vatican Library, which by the time of his death contained over 16,000 volumes. He took under his protection Lorenzo Valla, who had proved that Constantine’s Donation was a forgery.
Pius II (1458-64) was also a man of great erudition and curiosity, who wrote numerous works, including his memoirs, considered a literary masterpiece. His successor Paul II (1464-71), on the other hand, was a reactionary who had the members of the Academia Romana school of Pomponio Leto arrested and tortured.
Julius II (1503-13) who came to the pontificate after a military career, was responsible for Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel, and commissioned Raphael to paint the famous Vatican mural, The School of Athens, depicting the philosophers and scholars of Antiquity (pay attention to the gestures of Plato and Aristotle in the center, symbolizing their diverging orientation).
Julius II was followed by two members of the Medici family, Leo X (1513-21) and Clement VII (1523-34). Like the Borgias before them, all these popes came from wealthy families. Some were Renaissance men by taste and conviction. Like other princes, they financed major cultural and artistic projects to raise the prestige of their city. They may not have been very religious, or dogmatic, or prone to the burning of heretics, but they attest that there was a Renaissance party within the Church itself. And this suggests the possibility of an new Hegelian synthesis between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the rediscovered Greco-Roman heritage, in the spirit of Basil of Caesarea.
The upheaval of the Protestant Reformation brought this process to an end. To a large extent, it was a counter-Renaissance. Despite their similar positions on the abuses of Catholic authority, the Reformers and the Humanists came into violent conflict, with the Luther-Erasmus controversy over free will in the 1520s as breaking point.
The Counter-Reformation, launched by the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, responded to the Reformation with the same fanaticism. It established:
– dogmatic rigidity, with new dogmas such as transubstantiation, and a renewed attachment to Aristotle, which the humanists had rejected in favor of Plato: Thomas Aquinas was proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pius V in 1567;
– reinforced pontifical absolutism, with the Congregation of the Holy Office (a new Inquisition) founded in 1542;
– the cult of secrecy and political intrigue, with the international network of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
While Nicolaus Copernicus died in 1543 without clerical penalty, Galileo, a century later, was forced to officially renounce heliocentrism by the Jesuit Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmin, who also condemned the astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno to the stake in 1600, after seven years of prison and torture. Bruno was an outstanding genius who had gone beyond Copernican heliocentrism and taught that the universe had no center and no circumference.
The history of European science between the Renaissance and the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries is above all the history of its struggle with the Catholic Church, but also with Protestant autorities (Kepler was excommunicated by the Lutheran Church). Ultimately, it was in countries that protected religious pluralism, such as England from 1689, the Netherlands and Prussia—where the French Huguenots found refuge—that science flourished best.
Yes, But What About God?
The conflict between the Christian faith and science during the Renaissance was by no means a conflict between faith and atheism. Atheism was non-existent in the debates of the 15th century. In the following century, humanists like Erasmus and his friend Thomas More were horrified by the religious wars, but considered atheism even worse than religious fanaticism. Scientists believed in God, and this was still the case in the 17th century: Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific genius of his time, was intensely religious.
However, the idea of God held by these men of learning was moving further and further away from Christian doctrine and closer to Greek philosophy: it was a God who governed the world through natural laws rather than miracles, and who communicated with man through reason rather than Revelation. The life of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal is a dramatic illustration of this tension between two ideas of God. Pascal was a genius of great renown. But in 1654, at the age of 31, he had a mystical experience and renounced the “God of the philosophers” in favor of the God of the Gospels. He stopped contributing to science and moved closer to the Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal. He died of a neurological disease at the age of 39.
The notion that the Greeks—or even the Barbarians, for that matter—were incapable of rising above polytheism, and that Europeans needed Jewish monotheism to “know” “God” is one of the greatest lies that has alienated us from our pre-Christian roots. Greek philosophy was, in essence, a quest for the unity of Being, and philosophers had a lot to say about God, whose existence and nature, they believed, could be discussed rationally.
From the logical premise that God is infinite, the Stoics deduced that nothing can exist outside Him. Consequently, God and the Cosmos are one and the same. For this reason, the Stoics are sometimes called “pantheists” (a term coined in 1705). But it is beyond discussion that they were essentially monotheists. In a famous Hymn to Zeus, Stoic philosopher Cleanthes (3rd century BC) called God “Nature’s great Sovereign, ruling all by law,” to whom men must turn their minds in order to live “the noble life, the only true wealth.” Cleanthes prayed that people who do evil by ignorance can be enlightened: “Scatter, O Father, the darkness from their souls.” The Roman Seneca wrote in the 1st century AD, in his Letter to Lucilius 41:
We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol’s ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise? He it is that gives noble and upright counsel.
Stoicism was one of the most precious gift of the Greeks to the Romans. It had the favor of Cicero, and later of emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose reign was, according to Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), “possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”[17]Quoted in Lisa Hill and Eden Blazejak, Stoicism and the Western Political Tradition, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2021. Gibbon includes Marcus Aurelius’s predecessor Antoninus Pius in that assessment.
Stoicism aroused great enthusiasm during the Renaissance. Cicero’s Stoic treatise on Duty (De Officiis) was the first classical text to be printed, in 1465. Erasmus published Seneca’s work in 1515, and in 1584 Justus Lipsius promoted Stoicism in his essay on Constancy, which impressed many thinkers such as Montaigne (1533-92) and gave rise to what is known as Renaissance Neo-Stoicism. It would later influence some major figures of the Enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote to John Adams (April 11, 1823): “Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.”
Notes
[1] His actual words, pronounced in a speech in the House of Commons, 23 January 1948, were: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.”
[2] For a good presentation of that little-known but influential movement, which influences political thinkers like Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin, read Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalim: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, Penguin, 2023.
[3] Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, W.W. Norton & Co, 2016,, p. 359.
[4] Karl Ferdinand Werner, Naissance de la noblesse, Arthème Fayard/Pluriel, 2010, p. 108.
[5] Raoul Glaber, Histoires, ed. and trans. Mathieu Arnoux, Brépols, 1996, livre II, § 13-17, pp. 116-125.
[6] Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West, Nash Publishing, 1971, pp. 2-3.
[7] Ibid., pp. 35-36.
[8] Ibid., p. 40.
[9] Ibid., p. 49.
[10] Ibid., pp. 65-66.
[11] Collin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World, Bantam, 2008, p. 48-51. Read also Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: the Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, Cambridge UP, 2007.
[12] Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 437.
[13] Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 362.
[14] François Jullien, L’Invention de l’idéal, et le destin de l’Europe, Gallimard, 2017, p. 156-157.
[15] Quoted in Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 178.
[16] René Robaye, Le Droit Romain, Academia, 2023, pp. 7-10.
[17] Quoted in Lisa Hill and Eden Blazejak, Stoicism and the Western Political Tradition, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2021. Gibbon includes Marcus Aurelius’s predecessor Antoninus Pius in that assessment.
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I wonder…
The Islamic Golden Age prospered, whilst Europe lived through The Dark Ages.¹
And then, Europe suffered The Black Plague: deaths galore – so, I suppose, the few who survived were waaay smarter (given that IQ is correlated with health)… Henceforth, Europe engulfed the Muslim World in terms of “civilisational achievements”.
…Could be, in part, explained by cats?
Europe killed cats en masse as they were associated with witches, whilst Muslims are fond of cats – due to none other than Muhammad himself.²
Result: Europe gets rodents and their diseases, the Muslim World does not.
1. Of course, I know, there is contention regarding how “grand” The Islamic Golden Age really was.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_cats
Each birth & each death is a revelation (besides every breath in between); and, mr jefferson, how is it going down there (in hell)?
And this suggests the possibility of an new Hegelian synthesis between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the rediscovered Greco-Roman heritage, in the spirit of Basil of Caesarea.
The Indian mystic and philosopher Aurobindo also mentioned the dialectic between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Greco-Roman heritage in his book “The Human Cycle”:
For, eventually, the evolution of Europe was determined less by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by the vigorous return of the ancient Graeco- Roman mentality of the one rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other. The Renascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind, its eager search for first principles and rational laws, its delighted intellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation and individual reasoning, on the other the Roman’s large practicality and his sense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility and the just principles of things. But both these tendencies were pursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious. ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline. It was from these sources that the individualistic age of Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control which all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise first by the materialisation of fixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally by infallible authority or stereotyped convention.
Outstanding article! Thanks, Laurent.
In recent years doubt has been cast on the conventional view that the Black Death was spread by rats. For example:
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/black-death-may-not-have-been-spread-rats-after-all
Hence, cats might be irrelevant.
“Judeo-Christian tradition” ? (!)
Objection, Your Honor: the witness is hallucinating.
The Greek-Roman pantheon failed to civilise Celtic and Germanic barbarians. Christianity succeeded. Just sayin’.
What Guyénot doesn’t tell you is that the Renaissance was the rebirth of Atheist texts, the Kabbala and the Hermetic Tradition! The Kabbala and the Hermetic Tradition are ALL EASTERN!
In the Laws, Guyénot, Plato calls Atheism a “””malady””” to be interdicted. The Atheist was to be arrested and put in a type of reeducation setting/jail. If after five years the Atheist remains incalcitrant, he was to be disposed of silently in the night.
The Renaissance was a COLOR Revolution that began the dissolution–the Orientalizing, the Judaizing of Europe!!!!
Your praise of Lorenzo Valla. Yes, he uncovered a forgery—and PUSHED a forgery “that a republic is any government without a king”–all the Classical republics, Sparta and Rome, were founded UNDER kings. Sparta, a True republic, (Plato says so in the Laws), had kings throughout her life—Lorenzo Valla is wrong. He was a revolutionary pushing a lie.
“To eliminate an ancient way of life” was the job of modern republicanism. The above was the blueprint for the elimination of Western civilization. What the atheist Machiavelli proposes is “Revolution within the Form”–keeping the name but changing the definition underneath it.
So, there, the Renaissance was NOT about Western Civilization at all. Atheists don’t produce civilization. They’re natural nihilists. How do nihilists create civilization????, there, Mr. Nietzsche.
Madame Francis Yates goes into a deeper dive into the influence of the Hermetic tradition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Yates
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964)
The Art of Memory (1966)
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972)
Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (1975)
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)
Lull and Bruno (1982) Collected Essays I
Renaissance and Reform : The Italian Contribution (1983) Collected Essays II
Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance (1984) Collected Essays III
Both the Kabbala and the Hermetic Tradition is Orientalizing. The Masons are founded on BOTH of these ideologies and the Masons led both the American and French Revolutions. The Am/Fr Revolutions, based off the Enlightenment which was based on the Renaissance Color Revolution ENDED Western Civlization. Modern Republicanism ENDED Western Civlization.
As Trad Catholics say, we now live in the anti-civilizational milieu of Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevism.
“The Whole World is Jewish” — thanks to the Atheists!!!!!
Biological factors are underestimated. Thanks for raising it.
Much higher wages arising from labor scarcity in turn are a stimulus to invention and its application to the productive process. Of course ‘invention’ (its quality) is highly correlated with intelligence, which you’ve raised.
Guyénot raves about Plato, but this may be a mistake; Guyénot writes above:
Rejecting this idea, are some interesting thoughts from the rogue intellectual author of Slavland Chronicles (pen names Rolo Slavskiy or Rurik Skywalker), who came to reject his former Christianity as a Jewish vehicle
The Slavlands author points out how, in fact, Judaism / Christianity / Islam, and most of our modern political afflictions down to Leo Strauss, Klaus Schwab etc, all basically adopted key tyrannical social ideas of Plato as the über-source, especially the core idea of rule by an ‘elite’ manipulating and dominating the masses … the Abrahamic religions being major propaganda here, ditto communist ideology, Great Reset etc
The Slavlands guy argues that we are always fighting a kind of propaganda spook state by the elites, in different guises. And however much some of Plato’s ‘idealism’ might sound nice in some vague aspects, ‘ideal form of beauty’ etc, Plato’s actual political talk was of a ruthless, manipulative tyrant state of ‘experts’, which we see continually re-born in new forms – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, communism, Great Reset, transhumanism etc. Leo Strauss’ smug agenda of manipulation over and over again.
Key background here is that, the oldest Bible ‘Old Testament’ is NOT in Hebrew, but rather in Greek, dating from the 200s BCE, allegedly a ‘translation’ of ‘lost Hebrew’, but quite more likely a Jewish fabrication trying to make Jews ‘great’, with fake stories of defeating ancient Egypt etc, stories entirely missing from Egypt’s vast ancient records
So, as Slavland Chronicles sees it, in fabricating the Bible with the Jews’ ‘chosen people’ hoaxes, Jews were merely implementing Plato’s ‘Republic’ scheme of elites generating ideology to control the peasants
https://slavlandchronicles.substack.com/archive
Slavland Chronicles is now most known as the leading English voice arguing that Putin is a sell-out fraud betraying and jailing nationalist Russians, Putin actually a secret partner of Zelensky and the Western oligarchy, not really trying to win the Ukraine war, but helping in a long-slow genocide of non-Jewish white man Slavs … Westerners manipulated by ‘based trad Putin’ propaganda as he Islamifies etc old Russia
The ‘Renaissance’: nothing but Frankish faggotry and mental masturbation. The fruit? Emmanuel “Macron”.
The idea that the Renaissance (a loaded term, to be sure) is a “rebirth” of the “Greco-Roman civilizational outlook” is basically a conceit. “The Renaissance” is fundamentally an outgrowth of the medieval civilization. That they conceived of themselves as fundamentally different from their “gothic” forbears has little to do with the reality of the actual process of development. Boomers in Paris in 1968 might have thought that civilization was changing forever. What really changed? (things did change, but it was no “end of history” sort of development – maybe the beginning of the end of Western Civilization – and the most consequential changed was fundamentally of a religious character.)
The same thing must be said about “the Reformation” and “the Enlightenment” – and these are the reasons that “the Renaissance” – the Reformation was a religious change. But it was not the rediscovery of Christianity after a thousand years of darkness. That is an absurdity, and the all the educated Protestants know it, and I would suggest, they’ve always known it. True Christianity was carried on by the Waldenses, St. Patrick was a Baptist. These are confabulations. The notion that “Our Civilization is based on the Enlightenment” – this is patently absurd. Do the ignorant people who say this actually believe it? Some undoubtedly do. To imagine everything that really matters is technological progress, and the only thing that really matters in civilization, is technological development and the scientific outlook, or even more laughably, utopian schemes to realize a perfect society, to imagine a Star Trek world as the posterity of “the Enlightenment” – these are manifest absurdities. We can see very clearly, in 2025, that technology and civilization are not the same thing. The roots of civilization are not simply technological advances, certainly not in the sense that all these people hyping AI pretend.
What changed with “the Renaissance” was a religious outlook, but the changed religious outlook (obsession with Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance “Humanists” which some people consider to be “the Renaissance) was not the source of patronage of the arts that led to flowering of artistic creativity. This is not to say that the example of the ancients was not emulated. This emulation had never ceased. Perhaps the higher levels of artistic realism were connected to a philosophical interest in the human body, but I do not think it is necessary to perform dissections to draw and sculpt.
If the Renaissance is regarded as the strengthening and popularization of a kind of outlook on the world that is fundamentally “secular” or headed towards a “New Atlantis” – then what does that really have to do with art and architecture and music? Does it actually pertain to science, properly understood?
“The Renaissance represents a change in religious outlook among the worldly and it referred to IN THIS SENSE by the people who regard themselves as SUCCESSORS TO RENAISSANCE MEN. The belief of these individuals, that they are members of long sequences of social revolutionaries “Enlightening mankind” is the motivation for imagining this epoch as a “rebirth of classical civilization.” Of course it was not in any sense a rebirth of classical civilization.
During the Middle Ages, the Greeks and the Romans were the inspiration for the learning and self-conception of European Christendom. However, before the revival of Neo-Platonism, there was actually less slavish imitation and more creativity required to realize that conception of self as the continuation of Rome. The University as the focus of learning in Europe is something that came long before “the Renaissance.”
The ten oldest colleges at Oxford:
Video Link
The Universities went far beyond our image of medieval learning as being the province of monkish chroniclers. I’m certain men in these town, surrounded by these buildings in the Middle Ages, were as awe-struck by them as we are today. This was the flowering of civilization. It was not sort of “gothic” period of darkness. That is not merely a conceit, it is manifestly false.
Professor James Franklin published an article of New South Wales
“The Renaissance Myth”
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/renaissance.html
Infidelity undoubtedly took all forms, and had done so during the Middle Ages and doubtless before in the Darkest of the Dark Ages. So whether they called themselves atheists or something else, there’s no doubt they existed, though few would have given them credit, since it was very difficult in the medieval consciousness to blot out the conceptions of metaphysics and the spiritual world.
Here is St. Thomas Aquinas discussing opinions of witchcraft:
Now if you’re the type of person who speculates that much of the Middle Ages might not have actually happened according to our established chronology, or think that learning was kept in the East and only exported to the West with the Fall of Constantinople, so that the West was always in darkness without that Oriental Light? How is a person supposed to respond to these sorts of chauvinistic superstitions?
I’m certain there were men inimical to the Christian conception of Man and desirous of a “New Civilization” – men seeking Revolution, others developing Utopian schemes for perfecting mankind as thought experiments. Who were martyrs. There was a steady increase of knowledge over time, and the flowering of creativity. This was not because somebody brought some books and ideas over from Constantinople. Not even close.
And all of these men were fundamentally a product of a Christian civilization.
Just as many of the philosophes were taught in Jesuit schools. Even Edward Gibbon had been a Catholic for a time.
It’s these men WHO ARE NOT the products of a Christian civilization who are giving us fits in the world today. Civilization has never subsisted in the dreams of renaissance men, philosophes, or technocrats. And barbarism has ever subsisted in Orientals, Iconoclasts, and Communists.
This sloppy (or rather dishonest) author’s flagrant, brazen “error” about “new dogmas” in the Council of Trent, and making the assertion that transubstantiation was such a “new dogma.” must be corrected.
The Fourth Lateran Council:
And of course, it was not a “new dogma” with that Council either.
So what we see here, is a great example of the way historical falsehoods have been continuously propounded, since the time of the Renaissance, to establish the myth of the Middle Ages representing a fundamental discontinuity with the Classical World as opposed to the Middle Ages being its further development. In this example by this author, the suggestion is made that the Catholic Church of the modern period is more or less a modern development as opposed to an institution whose doctrines had long been well-established.
The “phantom centuries” (some say this author published such an article) are an extreme manifestation of this tendency to blot out the significance of nearly a thousand years of history, crucial to understanding our Western identity. Without the Middle Ages, we have no identity, and this is why the we hear all the time about “Enlightenment” and “Renaissance” from the Jews and their lackeys. Perhaps the film Rollerball, when the computer library cannot find the13th Century, was cognizant of a certain tendency, a very strong tendency among some, to try to delete inconvenient history.
The Dark Ages do present a problem to those who cannot acknowledge the reasons why Classical Greece and Rome fell apart. The Middle Ages a problem to those who won’t accept the Catholic Church’s role in Western identity. Because it signifies that those who reject the decisive role of Catholicism in our civilization have, in a very fundamental way, rejected the foundations of that Civilization. As the British rejected their English heritage when they destroyed the monasteries.
Understand the Jew, the Jew does not truly to belong to our Western Civilization. This is why they totally reject our heritage, vaguely speaking about “the Enlightenment” when referring to their system of occult control of freemasonry established Republican (judeo-masonic) governments in the West.
We see so many well-preserved artifacts of the Classical World, so many depictions of what life must have been like, we do not see so many things that make history relatable for the Dark Ages. The Sutton Hoo helmet seems very outlandish to us, even the Lewis Chessmen, although they were 12th Century (around the time of Somerled), seem quaintly medieval. Nevertheless, there are extraordinary artifacts that are relatable.
Video Link
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was the recipient of some of that transmitted culture.
Before Gurdjieff’s father was slain by an Ottoman bullet in 1916, he passed on to his son George a lot of the Hellenistic poetry and prose his elders had taught him. One curious bit he George remembered was the Hymn to Helios by the Emperor Julian (who wrote in Greek) and probably not in general circulation in the early 20th century.
Much of what was lost, burned, or kept hidden by the church might well have been known to bards like Gurdjieff’s father. One reason I’ve always wanted a time machine is to find out how much of our culture was never lost at all, just kept safe by non-scholars who stayed quiet when clerics were around.
Guyenot’s article is based on several facile popular notions, for example, that there is such a thing as a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” He should write for Time magazine.
I thought the conventional view was that it was spread by fleas…. which also afflict cats (& people).
But who said health correlates with intelligence? Odd suggestion.
La Renaissance, tout comme la decouverte des Ameriques, sont la consequence directe de la chute de Constantinople !
The rise of medieval European civilization owes much to Islamic influence, a fact often overshadowed by the exaggerated “Judeo-Christian” narrative. Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) and Sicily served as vital conduits for ancient Greek knowledge, preserved and expanded by scholars like Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, later reintroduced to Europe. Gothic architecture’s defining features — pointed arches, ribbed vaults — trace back to Islamic structures like the Alhambra. Sicily’s Norman rulers embraced Arab-Byzantine styles, while Toledo’s Mudéjar art blended Islamic aesthetics into Christian Spain. The paradox lies in how this legacy was later “re-Christianized” — thinkers like Thomas Aquinas relied on Muslim interpretations of Aristotle yet framed them as purely Christian thought, masking the true, diverse roots of Europe’s intellectual rebirth.
References:
“The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance” by Jim Al-Khalili.
“Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe” by Diana Darke.
“The Norman Kingdom of Sicily” by Donald Matthew.
“Mudéjar Art: Islamic Aesthetics in Christian Art” by Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualís.
“Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works” by Dimitri Gutas.
These resources provide in-depth analyses of the Islamic contributions to Europe’s architectural and intellectual heritage, challenging the traditional Judeo-Christian-centric narrative of European civilization.
Great article, thank you. The “triumph of Christianity” in Rome could be seen as a kind of organic evolution in the demoralized remnant of what was once the world’s great power. The political, military, natural, and economic disasters of the previous century had severely undermined Rome’s old religion, whose deities had apparently abandoned the people they had brought to greatness. The complex pantheon of gods and goddesses inherited from the Etruscans and borrowed from the Greeks was already transitioning toward monotheism, with Jupiter (the literal father-god) and Sol (the original divine son, good shepherd and healer) becoming the major cult figures, along with Hercules, who like the Christian deity was also a man who became a god.
In time Christians would co-opt classical philosophy, adding in watered down elements of Plato and Aristotle (who agreed that some sort of second life followed the real one) in order to give a gloss of intellectual respectability to the cult. They could not do this with the brilliant and popular philosopher Epicurus, for whom the central purpose of life was the pursuit of pleasure, guided by reason, and who rejected both an afterlife and gods interested in human activity. Unable to counter his argument, churchmen reduced him to a Falstaffian caricature of a mindless hedonist and suppressed his works and followers. Yet the wide dissemination of the first rediscovered copy of his great treatise, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), provided the spark that would light the Renaissance. Familiar with the great science of classical Greece, which understood everything was composed of only two things, atoms and void, Epicurus might have been one of the influences that would have put men on the moon in 969, not 1969, had his work not been disappeared for a millennium.
And Thomas Jefferson, who proudly called himself an Epicurean, changed the course of history when he used the alteration of Locke’s austere phrase “life, liberty, and property” to express something far more profound, the pledge of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. It’s hard to picture a bolder slap in the face to traditional, authoritarian Christianity than the powerful promise of happiness in the here and now as the goal of the new polity. State enforcement of prayer, obedience, and self-denial to prepare for the afterlife had heretofore long been the norm in the Old World. And, like it or not, the “Nature’s God” invoked in the Declaration is the noninterventionist god of the rational Deism that was also inspired by the rediscovery of the west’s true cultural heritage.
Guyenot, for all his talent and knowledge, has not moved far enough from an Eurocentric perspective. This is the faith of many of highly intelligent people who have renounced the Abrahamic creed, but didn’t truly see beyond the Mediterranean οἰκουμένη. For this highly regarded region is but the westernmost end of the Silk Road (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691176321/greek-buddha).
About Putin, he is a shabbos goy, just like Trump is and the others (Macron, Starmer). It is fitting that in the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian & Islamic) fold, we end up ruled by the “children of Abraham”. To achieve self-rule, we need to go back to the true Self, which was the highest aim of the spiritual introspection of the Ancient Greek philosophers (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) and their (mostly) Oriental teachers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacharsis).
The one thing I know for certain is that I am not the most powerful thing in the universe. But it seems logical to me that there is one thing that is the most powerful thing in the universe, and I have no problem calling that God. I think trying to understand God and our relationship to Him is perhaps the most important thing we should be doing. What I do have a problem with is the belief that humans are the second most powerful and important thing in the universe, which is what monotheists seem to think with their “man was created in Gods image” belief. That seems enormously conceited to me.
I admire the ancient Greeks and Romans for their mythology which attributed human characteristics to the different planets and sought to tie their interactions in with our earthly endeavors. You may scoff at the idea of astrology now, but it seems more ridiculous to me that people can think that they can live out their lives totally unaffected by the rest of the universe and that the only type of consciousness there is is human consciousness. Back in the days of early civilization when people first had the leisure time to think about these things, and could still see the night sky, (and weren’t oppressed by some enforced state religion designed to control them) it was easy to observe the movements of the planets and recognize cyclical patterns and observe how they affected their lives. How is it that we can believe that we are more than just a collection of molecules and have some sort of inner soul, but nothing else in the universe does?
And if you think the stars and planets are too far away to affect us, keep in mind that relatively speaking, the distance between the stars relative to their mass and size, is roughly equivalent to the distance between molecules that make up solid matter relative to their mass and size. If you squeezed out the empty space between the molecules the entire earth could be compressed to a ball a few yards wide. Yet those molecules certainly do affect each other when spread out so far apart.
We still name the days of the week after the sun, the moon and the five visible planets and the Norse god equivalents of the Greek/Roman gods who represented those planets: Tieuw=Mercury, Woden=Jupiter, Thor=Mars, Freya=Venus and Saturn. Funny how the ancient Vikings so readily adopted the ancient Greek mythology on that. It could also be argued that it was the Vikings adoption of Christianity that led to the renaissance. The dark ages were dark in Europe because for centuries no one could set one stone on top of another without some Viking coming along and knocking it over and running them through with his sword. It was only after King Canute converted them all forcibly to Christianity that some sort of civilization emerged. Of course now that has morphed into some type of suicidal altruism that is destroying itself. Maybe there are some ancient forgotten truths that need to be rediscovered. Or maybe nobody ever really knew what the hell is really going on and no one ever will.
Sir Isaac Newton once replied to a colleague who was scoffing at astrology: “You sir have not studied the matter. I have.”
You will sometimes see Catholics who have a romanticized view of the medieval era when the Catholic church was at the peak of its power. In this era, though, the average life expectancy was in the thirties. It was not until Europe passed through the Renaissance and 18th century Enlightenment that life expectancy started rising. According to the writer Angus Deaton, it first started rising in Great Britain rather than the still Catholic Spain or Italy.
People who dislike the modern era could still live like a medieval peasant if they wanted to but very few of them actually do. They are perfectly willing to take advantage of the modern medicine and modern technology that has enabled people now to live twice as long as most humans of the past did.
Good job.
Hold fast.
Opposing René Guénon’s works because of the opinion of some of his followers who deforms his works to impose a supremacy for catholicism is wild. Also not enough has been said about the influence of eastern civilization in the Renaissance ; Westerners wanted to become the new Greek not because they fed on Classical Greek text but because they sought enlightment from the eastern doctrines just as them. What has obscured the renaissance is that the westerners have constantly obscured the origin of their “discoveries” effectively stealing the advancements of other civilizations and knitting a supremacist standpoint from their vague moral aspirations.
You must be a cat worshipper…
“Europe suffered The Black Plague: deaths galore – so, I suppose, the few who survived were waaay smarter (given that IQ is correlated with health”
Fanciful but false
“Europe killed cats en masse as they were associated with witches, whilst Muslims are fond of cats – due to none other than Muhammad himself.²
Result: Europe gets rodents and their diseases, the Muslim World does not.”
Another silly, cat-obsessed piece of nonsense.
Camus says nothing about the absence of cats in Oran in his novel The Plague
Mio caro, il cristianesimo aveva solo un lavoretto da fare.
Non costruire cattedrali che quello è un hobby per adepti maturi.
Ma salvare le anime.
Come potrai capirlo?
Una volta messo dentro a sé stessi il cristianesimo anzi il Cristo, puoi fare la cattedrale come nulla fosse e senza stancarti.
Non è un prodotto mercantile.
A well-argued and interesting overview, Mr. Guyenot.
A bit tongue-in-cheek, I think it is more fair to conclude that Athens/Rome was the mind of Europe; and Christianity the soul. And that Europe would not have been what it is (was) without them both.
That Aurobindho , just when I was concluding that he was just a sophisticated Hindu supremacist , you come out with this. Thanks for the quote.
Except that the witch-burning craze in Europe followed long after the Black Death. The BD is one of those cataclysms that makes one question the existence of a God who cares about humans.
The towering achievements of the West were not based exclusively on either Greek or Renaissance learning, but in addition on the philosophical resources provided by Christian theology.
That is what I learned from other books, Theology and the Scientific Imagination by Amos Funkenstein.
“While Nicolaus Copernicus died in 1543 without clerical penalty, Galileo, a century later, was forced to officially renounce heliocentrism by the Jesuit Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmin”
How much ignorance, Mr. Guyenot. Bellarmine, also an amateur astronomer and who also taught the heliocentric theory, died in 1621. Galileo’s trial begins in 1633.
Does the past influence the present?
Yes.
Does history matter?
No.
A day or two ago I wrote that a quarter of my male classmates were, by the age of fifteen, full adults, that another half was right behind them, and that I was in the quarter following them, the last quarter.
To which of these boys, if any, did history matter?
To the first quarter?
Hahaha! Their opinion, insofar as it touched on ‘history,’ was that
To whom then did history matter?
To one or or two of the last quarter… maybe.
History matters to very, very few. It is a leisure activity, like the arts.
If history matters to only a few, what does matter?
Well, I can name three things that matter to most, if not all mankind, three things that matter more than history anyway: parenthood, agriculture, the domestication of animals.
Mr. Guyénot’s sprawling, encyclopedic article will give birth to hundreds of comments.
Here are three of mine:
Plato’s ‘ideas,’ ‘eidos’ are BS. They’ve caused nothing but mischief.
Hence wormholes.
I agree. (I named the group that brought about this catastrophe a day or two ago.)
Gibberish.
People move faster and farther in any day than either fleas or rats. People also like to blame something or someone else for their misfortunes, so we have German cockroaches and Dutch Uncles and Dutch Treats.
From the link given by Jim Jatras in his comment #5:
[my bold]
Moving on from Black Death to Art…
Arguably. the biggest and most far-reaching artistic breakthrough during the Renaissance was the development of linear perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi and others. Unfortunately LG rushed by that very important point about perspective with a single sentence, but at least he did give us Raphael’s astonishing fresco The School of Athens from 1509-1511, albeit with its bottom cropped out.
There are so many other factors at play that I find it difficult to assess whether or not Christianity was a positive influence leading to the Renaissance, or a negative one, holding back artistic and scientific development for centuries, but also unwittingly contributing to the spread of Arab and probably Chinese knowledge to Europe as a kind of blow-back from the Crusades.
Of course, all this is total nonsense and shows these people’s absolute ignorance of the nature and way of life of a cat, which needs its fixed territory and has to inspect it regularly. Cats are also animals that need a lot of rest and should not be chauffeured around in a vehicle for hours on end. It can be assumed that this stress caused by selfish, narcissistic owners will cause the animals to die a few years prematurely.
There was no Islamic Golden Age. Read Emmet Scott’s “The Impact of Islam” (2014).
Video Link
For the O.P. claiming that Islam had a period of flowering, it was entirely based on Grecian (Ptolemaic, Seleucid) sources via the Eastern Roman Empire and post-Seleucid Persian sources, so the simple product of invasion and plunder.
I recommend the series of articles at the link below to anyone wanting to truly understand the flow towards the heliocentric model of the solar system. The writing style is irritating at times, but it is quite comprehensive, covering the objections of scholastic philosophers, the shortcomings and incorrectness of early heliocentric theories, and the arduous path to a correct analysis.
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
Orreries based on a geocentric model and the idea of crystalline heavenly spheres were at the same time wrong, very beautiful, and a huge advance in mechanical technology.
Jan 25, 2023 Pope Francis Says Being Gay ‘Isn’t A Crime’ As He Denounces ‘Unjust’ Anti-LGBTQ Laws
Pope Francis in an interview with the Associated Press Wednesday said being gay is not a crime as he criticized laws that criminalize same-sex relationships, in what appears to be the latest attempt by the pope to soften the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality.
Video Link
Genesis 1:27 King James Version
27- So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=KJV
Oh dear, Guyenot has fallen hook, line and sinker, for the Enlightenment myth, perpetuated by Gibbon, of a dark and superstitious Christianity extinguishing the light of Reason which had burned brightly under the Greeks and the Romans. He really should read some of Tim Holland’s books in Classical Antiquity and the utter barbarism of their attitudes to everything.
The fall of Roman civilization was due entirely to the decadence and perversity of the Romans themselves, who regarded the purpose of life as perpetual self-indulgence; usually in a sexual and epicurean way. Children were seen as an expensive and bothersome hindrance, and from at least the first century AD fewer and fewer Romans were willing to have them. This was a problem lamented by numerous of the ancient authors, men such as Tacitus and Pliny. By the mid-second century the population had begun to decline, and by the mid-third century, after the Plague of Cyprian, the Empire’s population crashed, and never recovered afterwards.
Some recovery did happen in the East, where Christianity was strongest. And in fact the Christians were the only demographic group growing, due to their abhorrence of infanticide and abortion. Indeed, they frequently rescued and raised children left to die by the Romans and Greeks.
As a matter of fact, Christianity was seen, by the early fourth century, as having the power to regenerate the Empire, and that’s almost certainly one of the reasons Constantine legalized it. But it grew too slowly in the West to halt this region’s demographic decline.
The Middle Ages, far from being a period of darkness, saw innumerable technical and scientific innovations. By the eleventh or twelfth centuries these included mechanical clocks, spectacles, windmills, the stirrup, mouldboard plows, new metallurgical techniques in steel manufacture, double masted sailing vessels for tacking into the wind, paper- making, silk manufacture, etc. By the fourteenth century we can add gunpowder, printing, the compass, and a host of other things. Vast numbers of agricultural and medical innovations were devised in the monasteries.
Finally, there was no “Dark Age”, as the years between circa 615 and 915 AD never existed at all and were inserted into the calendar for political reasons by the Ottonian Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. Herbert Illig has written extensively on this topic in German, and it has been covered in detail in English by Emmet Scott in “Guide to the Phantom Dark Age” (Algora, 2014)
Yes the subject of the article is extremely important, but the author is working with very dubious sources and what amounts to a regurgitating a historic byline that misses the essence of the Renaissance, Christianity and the genius of Platonists schools against the enslavers of mankind situated around the financial oligarchies. Thus we see no mention of Nicholas of Cusa in the article, but rather the whimper of an advertisement for Stocism.
Thus it should be understood that the population collapse in Europe began in the 1300’s prior to the dramatic onset of the “Black Death” which was accelerated because of the fact that the population was collapsing, and collapsing due to the populations of Europe under subjugation by the financial oligarchy of Venice. The Venetian “rentier class” bankers, the “Black Guellph” situated the conditions for economic collapse similar to the outsourcing of the productive capabilities of the west today sucked dry by equity firms of the Wall Street/City of London axis from hell.
This article goes into considerable depth as regards this situation, one we are in the midst today.
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/954_Gallagher_Venice_rig.html
What is important thus to note is how mankind recovered from this Dark Age through what is the Renaissance, to which knowing the inner workings of that revival of the human spirit is so important. So yes we do see that the Renaissance is situated around the rediscovery of the essence of science, the capacity of man to Plato’s notion of “hypothesizing the higher hypothesis” of transcending the “cave” of sense impressions, of the propaganda of social norms that thought for example that the earth is flat.
Cardinal Cusa brings Christianity and other faiths, into a higher hypothesis, that a catholicism not bound by what is the de-evoluton and subjugation found in fundamentalism (as fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Judiasm are but the projects of the financial oligarchies), but of that which
recognizes a unity of science and humanism, that is not an atheistic project to destroy the higher hypothesis, but that which fosters agape and the agapic manifestations that find science and art affirming something much greater than a stoics going along with the evil.
Thus this article below, “Nicholas Of Cusa and The Council of Florence”, situates Cusa’s forgotten works….where the notion of human rights and of the nation-state is found along with underlying importance of the significance of the Filioque of what proceeds from the father is found in the son, humanity, as humanity is made in god’s image, to which that realization is found in the recognition of the fact that science, the ability to hypothesize the higher hypothesis is universal, as genius is not confined to one race, or of a elite with a race, but could be cultivated through education that was not close ended, but open ended.
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/fid_912_hzl_c_flor.html
And thus these articles is important relative to the issue of education, universal education, based upon such a higher notion that is the essence of renaissance and political organizing as true evangelizing.
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/942_bro_common_life.html
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/953_louis-XI.html
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/educ/hist/2013/1003-northern_renaissance.html
The first error you have made is when you call Catholic Church the Church of Christ Jesus.
According to The Gospel of Christ Jesus His Church are people born of The Holy Spirit and those whose names are written in The Book of Life and not these whose names are written in Catholic Church registry of baptism.
When we look at the people of the Bible , the progressives were Cain’s line generations, they were builders of cities and makers of instruments.
What you call civilization has not much in common with true faith, and has nothing to do with builders of great buildings people call churches because they are not, they are altars for idolators to proclaim false religion.
This world has been cursed and God dwells in heaven, not in the buildings, for it is written Matthew 21:42
“Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?”
and anyone who rejects Christ Jesus is building in vain.
Are there plans to translate to English La Mort féerique.Anthropologie du merveilleux (XIIᵉ-XVᵉ siècle)?
The story of Arthur and the Knights delighted me from childhood.
The tales also influenced Kermit Roosevelt and were a driver in his quest to topple the government of the Persian Mossadeqh.
Indeed! But here is another angle:
Pre-Black Death, Europe was a miserably poor third world hell. This was good for large landholders, but bad for the peasants, and bad for society as a whole.
The Black Death cut the population and – unusually for a plague – kept it down for generations. I am not arguing the bad science fiction that we need to cull the human population – that’s evil and stupid and not needed – but as an object lesson in what happens when populations are kept moderate FOR REASONS OTHER THAN LACK OF FOOD, it is instructive. The standard of living of the average person shot up – significantly higher than modern India etc. (!). There was an investable surplus. Of course, the big estates that depended on abundant subsistence labor tended to fail, but so what.
Amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics. I do not disparage the importance of many aspects of this post but: when we go from an impoverished society where most output is needed just to keep people barely alive, to a prosperous society where there is plenty to go around and invest in new technologies etc., well, that seems pretty critical to me.
If all you have is a mass of chronically malnourished peasants wallowing the mud, well, can anything else be more than a detail?
“And that Europe would not have been what it is (was) without them both.”
I fully agree
Thanks for asking. I’ll think about it.
“the semi-barbarian military class” were the nobility, the rulers, the Elite Elect. First born primogeniture inherited and ran the father’s estate, second born was generally “given to God” (the Church was a softer, lucrative life for many), and other surviving children aspired to be knights, living and dying by the sword, for honor and glory, and chivalry (which was nowhere as useful as portrayed). The Nobles ruled mostly small principalities (pre-Nation states), married other elites often geographically distant, arranged for financial or military advantage, and their wars and skirmishes were generally family affairs, over disputed real estate. The Church supported these warmongers, and occasionally sent them off to massacre infidels (or enemies of the Church, and therefore, of God).
The vast majority of people– peasants and merchants– did the work, grew the food, traded for necessities, and most importantly, paid the taxes. The Nobility spent much on war, but also on finery and luxury, to show the untermenschen their superiority. Sometimes the peasants and merchants revolted; they had few successes and were slaughtered by the betters (sometimes for sport, sometimes to send a message). It wasn’t until the English brought commoners who could wield bows and arrows that the peasants were welcome on the battlefields; took some time for others to adopt. Frontal assault by heavily armored ‘chivalrous’ knights, “semi-barbarians”, on horseback were the accepted warmongers. Nicely detailed in Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror”. And clearly, our leader Elites are not so different today from those in the 1300s and 1400s. Cannons led to cannonfodder (peasants) at the fronts of armies, and the leaders moved progressively toward the back of armies (for a better view?)
There’s an alternative account of the Renaissance, one not as yet set out at book length, to my knowledge: once Henry the Navigator found the New World a great business opportunity opened up. Slaves. But the Church was down on that. So would-be human traffickers needed an alternate authority. Ta-daa! The ancients. Cultural efflorescence was a side-effect.
Thanks for bringing up Illig. I thought of him right away, reading Mr. Guyénot’s article.
Is Illig right? Doesn’t seem very likely. To me anyway.
But one of my less admirable character traits is that I enjoy, now and then, watching monkey wrenches being thrown into the machinery.
So you are one of those people who thinks that a civilisation that assimilates ideas from outside should be paying a forever tax to the outsiders? If you come up with an idea and then acquire the idea and use it, do I owe you praise and thanks (and money) each time? Seriously, what do you want?
I’m disappointed to see that Guyénot, by far the most interesting contributor here, has backslid to Scaligerian chronology after so beautifully blowing it to smithereens in his excellent Anno Domini. I mean, he even cites Poggio Bracciolini’s “discovery” of Vitruvius without mentioning that he was the Renaissance’s premier forger of fake historical texts.
What if he has it backwards here? He credits Plato with mathematizing science and thereby liberating the Western mind, but where has that led us? To the Jewish deceiver Einstein’s fake e=mc2 formula, which is pure gibberish, as is the fake speed of light, the supposedly exact measure of which (299,792 km/s) just happens to be identical to the latitude of the Great Pyramid in Egypt (29.9792° N). Check it yourself. This isn’t “ancient aliens” encoding heavenly constants in their architecture, this is just Jewish occultists dropping references to their esoteric symbology in their fake science. Waves have no top speed, as Tesla knew. Physics today is pure Platonic/Kabbalistic mathemagic, with obstruse formulae replacing observation and mechanics. Our realm can indeed be partially understood using Greek “reasoning from first principles”, but only on a restricted local level; the price of this Platonic streamlining of science, however, is the terminal Western disease we see all around us, namely the complete disenchantment of life, the loss of the concrete, incarnate, non-theoretical wisdom displayed by the pre-Christian cathedral builders and its replacement with the abstract rationalized knowledge of the Vitruvian architects, whose philosophical/aesthetic impulse leads straight to Le Corbusier and his rational hellscapes. Put even more bluntly: Jews have used the Platonic mindfuck to disguise themselves and their schemes as unquestionable emanations from the inaccessible realm of pure Forms. Read Charles Fort. We know jack shit about this world we live in. The second you start trying to explain things you can’t see by extrapolating from locally observable principles, your mind closes to anything that might contradict those “laws”, and a Jew silently attaches himself to your brain stem.
Don’t forget that these wonderful Greeks as well as their humanist heirs (I think they were actually the same people) all practiced slavery and pederasty. Not only that, half of the conclusions Socrates arrives at “rationally” are just plain wrong — read any dialogue and you’ll find examples.
As for Isaac Newton — no draft of the Principia exists, and I think it’s more likely that he was simply an Intel cutout used to launder/adulterate old knowledge and science. The second law of thermodynamics is bullshit anyway, as the simple existence of life proves.
All these heroes like Plato, Newton, Einstein fall apart upon close inspection.
Still — a very interesting article with some great insights, like everything Guyénot writes.
Like all antique peoples romans lived in a world apparently without hope. As greek before them (or ancient folks of Near East) when romans arrived on their civilization peak discovered the emptiness of this world. That thrust them in debauchery, excess of all sorts because without embodied Hope -Christ, all that was left to them was to suicide with style.
Of course, mr. Guyenot, doesn’t realize that and keep trying with the same classical civilization reheated soup. Profanas simplicitas: he understand classical world less than the most modest monk in the first ten centuries after Christ
“A man should know his limitations.” – Dirty Harry. And this essay stuffing of 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag is a perfect example of it – starting with using the term Judeo-Christian as having some semblance to Christianity is an automatic disqualification in itself – it reveals total ignorance on the subject – been there done that!
Western Civilization was fundamentally possible from 3 sources – Greco-Roman law tradition, Christianity and it took place in White European cultures – and that is history. DaRenaissance as man’s savior is a view of the myopic humanist – https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/search?q=Renaissance&updated-max=2020-12-29T17:43:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=0&by-date=false&m=1 – as many of the authors thoroughly analyze that I have archived in DaLimbraw Library. You can do your own research there as well on this or other topics.
> a reconnection with the Greco-Roman heritage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_maximus
The “Roman” Catholic Church, with its Pope (Papa — never mind “Call no man on Earth ‘father’, for your Father is in Heaven”) was from the very beginning a Roman enterprise. And from a Muslim* perspective, what is called “Christianity” is obviously the religion of Paul the self-appointed apostle and turns the teachings conveyed in the Gospels by the Christ of so-called Christianity on its head! It has always been a syncretic enterprise designed to appeal to the inherently polytheistic mindset of the “Greco-Roman” world.
Jesus is not a “God” in the Gospels, and never claims to be one. He prays to God, as we read in the Gospels. He also teaches his followers to pray to the very same God, via the name of “Father”. Did he ever teach his followers to “Call on me, and pray to me, and worship me”?
*In the Qur-an, Sura ‘The Table’ (5), the actual God informs us that the apostles (“helpers”) of Jesus were those who were present at the famous “last supper”. Saul cum Paul was not present, we note.
Of course Jesus did tell Peter that “You will deny me trice” but alas just like Peter misunderstood His mention of “leaven” to mean literal bread, he also misunderstood “before the cock crows” as a litteral rooster announcing the coming of the next morning!
Of course what Jesus the Messiah of Israel meant was before the announcement of the “Dawn of the Day of the Lord” …
Now let’s count the 3 times Peter (RA) and the Roman Church built on his name but acutally the Church of Saul-cum-Paul “denied” Jesus …
There was no “black death”, what it really was, was the (((usual suspects))) poisoning the wells.
https://odysee.com/@Slammdcrxx:8/The-Black-Death-(Jewish-Well-Poisoners)
I agree with the importance of what today we call the Renaissance, but would call it instead the Naissance, because during this time people like Poggio Bracciolini “rediscovered” not most of the “ancient” works, but all of them. For example, Mr. Guyenot discusses the architect Vitruvius, whose 10 volume work someone, perhaps Bracciolini, “rediscovered,” which bears a remarkable resemblance to the works of the great Renaissance architect Alberti (1404-72), titled The Ten Books on Architecture. An amazing coincidence. Bracciolini “rediscovered” a remarkable number of the “ancient” works, or perhaps, and to my mind more likely, wrote them himself and with the help of others in his employ. As another example, Bracciolini “rediscovered” the works of Tacitus, which two authors in the 19th century decried as 15th century forgeries by Bracciolini — John Wilson Ross, Tacitus and Bracciolini, The Annals Forged in the XVth Century; and P Hochart, De L’Authenticite des Annales and des Histoires de Tacite. Same with Plato, who today scholars date very precisely to between 428 and 347 BC but whose works also miraculously “re-appeared” around the 15th century. No one asks questions like how did “ancient” works survive for a thousand years or more “hidden” in monasteries around Europe according to Bracciolini who “found” them. Today libraries keep older books under lock and key because of their fragility. Same with the “survival” of the Greek and Latin languages. How did that happen if the hoi polloi didn’t speak them?
But wait! Laurent Guyenot is also the First Millennium Revisionist who agrees with you that the Dark Ages are a myth and that those centuries never existed. I was getting confused reading this article but then remembered that as LG he writes according to officially accepted historiography.
Man temporally created God, therefore God is in Man’s image.
So instead of appreciating the fact that everything is a mystery to it’s origins, man creates “the final answer” to the mystery, and as Galileo found out, only certain people can exercise that finality of “truth”
Thump! Thump! Thump!… I hear a bible coming…
Grok cannot be particularly intelligent considering it mentioned “vaccination” and “pasteurization” as human achievements. The former is a misconception based on the existence of “viruses”, i.e. something that does not exist as well as a form of poisoning as people are injected with harmful and often lethal substances. The latter is a completely useless procedure that deprives food of its nutritious value. Why is this called AI unless, of course, this stands for Artificial Idiocy.
Thanks for a great article Dr. Guyénot!
The Roman Catholic Church has committed so many crimes against humanity that I thank God I was raised Protestant. The Catholic Church executed William Tyndale merely for translating the Bible into English so more people could read it. The Vatican’s main desire is power and control.
Catholicism is a mixture of paganism and Christianity. Jesus and his disciples observed the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday. Sunday…
the day of the sun….was chosen by the Catholic Church because it was the pagan day of worship of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. Same with celebrating Christmas on December 25…Jesus was born under the sign of Pisces in February or March, but the pagan Romans celebrated on December 25, a few days after the shortest day of the year with regard to sunlight, as the rebirth or renewal of Sol Invictus.
Jesus himself said by their fruits will you know people. The Catholic Church is rotten to the core with pedophiles and has many doctrines that are contrary to Holy Scripture.
Again, I thank God quite literally that I was raised…and remain…Protestant. God bless you all.
All good points. Your comment is more intelligent than this author’s foolish essay.
Nice to see someone give Peter Waldo and the other Christian originalists some overdue credit.
Before the Christian revival of the 1200s to 1500s, pagan Europe suffered for centuries. The Church of the Roman Empire played a huge role in that suffering and violently fought reform at every step. So did some misguided Protestants.
Too bad so many atheist bigots blame all Christians for what some Vatican and Protestant fanatics did.
I think the author of this article, Mr Guyenot, is coming from a feeling of a wounded mind which is struggling to lay out a foundation of European civilisation where corrupt and corrosive mythological Judaistic and its deformed expression like Christianity could be as far away and detached as much as he could.
I understand his intellectual anxiety and appreciate his endeavours to find out a better explanation, but in doing so, he should not shoot himself in the foot. Open your heart, sir; let fresh air come in and try to give some other perspective a serious consideration, one of which is outlined above for a direction. Do not let race be the principal perspective of looking into things of society; this is what the self-proclaimed chosen ones do, which is wrong, but not letting this lens away is basically an indirect subscription to the same flawed fundamental racial ideology for others.
Otherwise your article was very refreshing to read.
Plato and Newton certainly do not. Einstein is a fake.
We may read Plato’s Republic, it may be to a degree dystopian, but to me, seems to be a good guide. Same goes for St. Augustine’s work, and then for St. or Sir (executed anyway) Thomas More’s Utopia, in Latin, is modelled on Platon’s, I think few people ever read it, I have twice, still have the book, so will read it again soon.
It was very much based on Platonic ideas of ideals, mixed with Christian, any who reads it may work out for themselves whether they want to live in More’s Utopia. I would not, but it is a brilliant Christian-Platonist work of literature.
[Your should-have-been bold.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_IX
The pope who issued a decree that cats were to be killed was not because of an association of witches, it was profit. The peasants were so plentiful that the amount of grain the lord received was too lttle so he decreed cats wre to be killed as to FORCE THE PEASANTS TO EAT THE RATS THEMSELVES.
Europe was engulfed in superstition and all scientific knowledge was extinct. It was the Muslims that kept the spark alive.
Mr Laurent Guyénot shows his biases by rewriting history and giving just a passing reference to the so called Moors.
Seek help before you spiral deeper into delusion.
‘You must be a cat worshipper …’ — ariadna
The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ used by the estimable M. Guyénot is a conflation of two dissimilar things.
One might as well speak of doggish cats or cattish rats.
All three are comically chimerical.
Muhammad was a murderer, thief, rapist and child molester. He was inspired by Satan. Not God. The Quran is demonic filth. Look at India…no Christians or Jews there for Muslims to fight, so they fight Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs. Muslims cannot live in peace with any other religion. That’s proof of its demonic origins.
In other words, ‘A Jewish Perspective on European Civilization’.
Come now, you are entering “…the Son of God is just a ripoff of the Sun god Ra.”, territory.
There is no such thing as ‘Judeo-Christian’, there is only ‘Christianity’. Guyénot, is just repeating Hasbara talking points.
Since World War 2, when the levers of power were taken by a (((hostile foreign mind))), every decade has seen a concerted effort to move us away from Christiantiy; and every decade that we move away from Christianity we fall further into the Jewish abyss. Amazing that Guyénot can’t make the connection.
Anyway, Guyénot is getting a much deserved spanking here by people more erudite and educated than I am (or Guyénot for that matter).
Mr. Guyenot’s majestic review of the Intellectual Trajectory of Man stops just short of the totalizing genius of Jacob Boehme (d. 1624), whose insights outrank the Greeks and Romans, correct the worst defects of Popes and Luthers, and focus usefully on the End Time’s rapid approach:
https://www.academia.edu/74111120/The_Last_Act
Indeed, independent lines of evidence converge on the intuition–felt by one-third of living peoples–that we are in the final countdown to Judgment. Here is the briefest summary that gives the year and day (34 months away):
https://www.academia.edu/128072349/A_Note_on_Absolute_Time
Rene Guenon (d. 1951) is mentioned by Guyenot who, however, fails to notice that Guenon saw intricate the cosmic trajectory towards finality as it began accelerating in early in the 20th c.:
https://www.academia.edu/44692464/The_Antichrist
As a result, the demography of the hereafter can be discussed in outline, giving an estimate of the final population of the City of God, where Umz.Com readers are headed if they fortunately concern themselves with the moral rightness sought by the the best of Mankind all along:
https://www.academia.edu/95448335/A_Note_On_the_Impending_Eternal_Renewal
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Christians worship Jesus as an incarnation of God.
Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet.
Jews killed Jesus.
Ergo…America is Islamo-Christian.
The USA is “Judeo-Christian” like ham sammiches are “kosher.”
The chutzpah! Tribalists have no shame. They’re infamous for lying, cheating, stealing, and killing. The Chosen are notorious for grifting unearned glory, valor, and respect.
Time to shoah them the way…to the woodshed.
Again.
It was about 3rd c. A.D. when the Talmudic Monster saw how the Hebrews had been booted from what is now Palestine by the Romans (for good reason) and decided on a plan of counter-attack. The first thing was to get rid of Christianity–hence the infamous Koran, which they managed to instigate three centuries later in Western Asia. (The Koran mentions Moses by name 115 times and makes him a role model for Arabs.) The jihadists actually got to the gates of Vienna (1683 A.D.) before the Christians stopped them.
Here’s the story of satanic Moses the Sorcerer and his Hebrew followers, whose long-term actions (across many centuries) need now, having founded America to compile wealth with slave labor from Africa, and after achieving victory through nuclear bombings by 1945, have now merely to extirpate the Islamic Revolution (in Tehran) and thus free the Sunnis to kill the Shiites endlessly, while the Christians who have somehow survived Islamic Jihad continue in schism, irrelevance, heresy, and perversion, with a little prodding from Talmudic Mendacity:
https://www.academia.edu/122647432/Moses_the_Sorcerer_Meta_Analysis_
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The argument that 300 years is missing from history is exceedingly persuasive. I read “Guide to the Phantom Dark Age” and I found his evidence for what ought to have been the emergence of a distinctive architecture over that period of time rather than an absolute stasis — evolutionary or devolutionary — as persuasive as the other evidence. 300 years is a long time! …An arc of time between now, 2025 and 1725 for comparison.
By that calculation it is now 1725 AD!
Vaccination was based on the existence of bacteria, which, according to some, do not exist. What do exist are pleomorphs
Video Link
For the benefit of those who missed it or didn’t get it the first time, hiding as it was in my opening sentence
I could have added lice, but they’re even slower than fleas, except when riding on humans.
To put it in plain English for you: The spread of Black Death was faster and farther day to day than either rats, fleas or lice could move, as Jim’s article notes in the selection I quoted. Therefore, rats, fleas and lice cannot be responsible for the spread of Black Death.
Maybe you should read it.
“Everything feeds on everything else.”
“The history of man is the history of crime.”
Overal great article but some points should be made
The Roman Catholic Church had a profound effect on all of Europe. It spread Latin and through Latin half a dozen European languages developed including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese. All our Scientific words are derived from Latin. When the Roman empire collapsed in 444 AD a true dark age set in especially for Great Britain.
The Roman empire violently rejected Judaism and the Jewish community so much so that by 135 AD they were expelled from the Empire by Emperor Hadrian. However the Roman empire adopted Chrisianity and the Church adopted Roman law, customs, language, and its heirachy. One can claim that the Vatican itself is modeled after the Roman heirachical system. The Pontiff comes from the term Pontifus Maximus the high priest of Roman college of Priests in pre Christian Rome.
That means the Roman Jewish wars took on a new chapter when the Jews returned to Europe. They rejected Christ and they fought the Roman Empire. To wage an ideological war against the Roman Catholic Church defined the next 2000 years . There is no such thing as “Judeo/Christian”.
As for the Renaissance the Catholic artist created Christian, Pagan and Judaic imagery. This the first time that Judaism inherited masterpieces as in David but they were the creation of Catholics. When Constantinople fell in 1453 a lot of those skilled workmen fled to Europe. Their role in Florence changed that city. the wealth of Constantinople includes the four bronze horses of the Basilica of San Marcos in Venice brought there by the Crusaders
The reason why the Vatican condemned the Free Masons in their Papal Bulls was because it was set up in 1717 to take down the Church. That was and is its mission. That is why Pope Pius IX called it the Synagogue of Satan and to this day any Catholic found associating with the Free Masons can be excommunicated. The Church takes this seriously.
“Judeo-Christian” is a misnomer and should never have been adopted by Christianity or Catholicism. The term “judeo-Christian is a weapon used by the JEW$ to suborn Christianity.
Judaism is the polar opposite of Christianity.
The present situation in the middle east (the ongoing genocides in Gaza and the West Bank dispossession of Palestinians) is PROOF.
Evangelical Christianity has been so bastardized by the JEW$ that they put JEW$ on a pedestal, absolving them of all criminal behavior and wrongs.
The Catholic Church is no better, absolving the JEW$ of responsibility for the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ as well as adoption of the (false) notion that JEW$ are our “elder brothers”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
JEW$ are the spawn of satan and should be recognized as such.
Guyenot is full of $#it and is attempting to marginalize Christian (Catholic) achievements throughout the ages and to replace true Catholic accomplishments with a secularized version of history.
It is the Catholic Church that built and ran the first hospitals, citing charity as a requirement.
It is the Catholic Church that built magnificent cathedrals and other buildings that are still standing to this day.
It is the Catholic Church that built and ran educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities.
Yes, there were grievous mistakes committed by the Catholic hierarchy, but nobody is perfect.
Guyenot’s hatred of Christianity is on display for all to see.
Scripture, like temporal reality, is a mirror. What you see is who you are. (For others reading this, always keep this in mind and you will get the ‘best reading’ of both life and scripture. And keep OP in mind as a cautionary example.)
The nature of your thoughts, the manner of your expression, is sufficient indication as to your self-diagnosis as “demonic filth”. However it is never too late to seek to liberate yourself from the grip of such demonic forces that speak through you.
As to “Protogonus”, he is a very confused puppy indeed. I have looked at his ‘thesis’ (being quite generous here) of sorcercy of Moses (AS) given his incessant spaming here and elsewhere. That too is quite revealing. There is not even an attempt at a logical and coherent presentation of an idea.
In general, I have always thought that a passionately negating embrace of anything to be a significant sign of misdirected mental and spiritual energies. An intelligent, upright, and clear hearted person obviously avoids things which they find objectionable or patently false. Why even bother?
Muslim India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_period_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
A Golden Age, actually. But what do you know?
(Limit 2 / day on anon so lack of replies to anticipated “demonic” rebuttals should not be read as having been silenced by twisted posters such as OP and the resident pamphleter.)
Thank you for saying this. There is nothing more ignorant than the “Technology does not matter. Science enslaves us. Modernity is terrible.” crowd typing into a website from their cellphone to complain about the modern world. Everyone over the age of 30 who does that should STFU since they’re already past their life expectancy if it wasn’t for technology, science, and modernity.
I liked the article, in general terms. However I find the music-related parts a bit misleading. What does it mean that “The first theories of music appeared in the 15th century”? Guido d’Arezzo, the inventor of modern staff notation was born in the XI century. Again, “it is difficult to find the slightest contribution of Christianity to these developments” is simply not true. Arezzo was a Benedictine monk. Guillaume de Machaut, the great French early polyphonist was also a church man. Hieronymus de Moravia, XIII century, monk. Franco of Cologne, XIII century, also monk. And literally hundreds more. The early polyphony was a church thing, actually, have you never heard of the Schola Cantorum of the Notre Dame cathedral? Where masters Leonin and his disciple Perotin created primitive organum polyphonies in the XI century? They were church men, and made church music. So, when you say “classical music sprouted from the genius of the Renaissance, and owes almost nothing to the European Middle Ages”, this is not true. Classical music owes everything to the middle ages church music. You mention princely courts, but those came later, and had little to do with these developments.
I don’t believe humans, capable of thinking about it, ever thought the world was flat. One can see the round sun, moon, visible planets, stars, and the curvature of the horizon and deduce that so too the world is round. Why the persistence of this smear, on past humanity, is what I want to know. Some reflexive knee jerk idea, meme, accounts for it?
Just received an akashic vibration from Long Tom of Monticello.
He says his cotton crop is doing “famously well, due to the remarkable Warmth of the Climate”. Furthermore, “…the Harvesting thereof is easily effected, due to the surprising Number of male Negroes in the Vicinity”.
He says that he discussed “…the Revolution in France with the Master of that thermally-blessed Clime”, and both agreed that “the entire Affair had gone well, with dogmatic Priestcraft abolish’d”.
In closing, he recommended Hell to all “Men of sound Mind”, saying that “…the papists had misrepresented it woefully. There is no lack of fascinating dinner conversation.”
Oh you of little faith…
The Protestant adoption of the Schofield Bible translation is a reason for the increase of jewi$h perfidy which is more than a major problem today. This “translation” elevated the JEW$ into the status of gods, something that most evangelicals subscribe to.
Let’s not forget the adoption of usury as well.
Your Protestant declaration that “good works” are of no merit and cannot be used to achieve “salvation” required the elimination of six Catholic books from the Protestant Bible. So much for the “inerrant word of God”.
According to Protestant doctrine, one can be a grievous sinner all of his life, hurting others and on his deathbed profess a belief in Jesus Christ and will automatically be “saved”.
The Protestant belief in the “prosperity gospel” and that failure in business are moral failures are but two more Protestant beliefs that were adopted from judaism. Joel Osteen, anyone?
Observe the Protestant “robber barons” of the 19th century who cared not one wit about the well-being of their employees, amassing great wealth and fortunes on the backs of their workers while constantly pleading poverty by cutting wages while living grand lives themselves. Thankfully, it took a Protestant (Henry Ford) to break the basic capitalistic belief that stockholders were king and employees were expendable.
Catholic doctrine requires employers to pay fair wages.
Declaring the Bible to be the “inerrant word of God” (which Catholics do not subscribe to) is also problematic. The Bible was written, rewritten, translated, and retranslated by MEN, many with their own agendas woven into the translations. Prima noctus, anyone?
That being said, Protestants are good people who should be respected…
That being said, I am glad that I was raised as a Roman Catholic who didn’t need to be “born again”.
P.S.: The Roman Catholic Church is not “off the hook” either. The Vatican II Ecumenical Council was a partially successful coup by JEW$ and Protestants which “Protestantized” the Catholic Church.
Absolving the JEW$ of responsibility for the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ and declaring that JEW$ are our “elder brothers” are but two heresies that have been incorporated into Catholic teachings. Not good…
As always, best regards,
To the dozen commenters here who object to the term “Judeo-Christian”, I get that you don’t like associating Christianity with Judaism. But if you don’t like Judaism, you shouldn’t like Christianity either. Christianity is totally Jewish. 70% of the Christian Bible is the Old Testament which was written entirely by Jews for Jews. The other 30%, the New Testament, was partly written by Jews for Jews, and partly written by Jews for Gentiles. Christianity is the most Jewish religion after Judaism.
And Protestantism is even more Jewish than Catholicism since Protestantism is a return to reading the Jewish gospels and Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism is believing the Jewish texts literally. You don’t get more “Judeo-Christian” than that.
Excellent point.
Europeans + Christianity = Western Civilization which has been responsible for 95% of the scientific, technological, and artistic progress that humans ever made. (See Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment.)
Non-Europeans + Christianity = cannibals living in mud huts (Haiti).
Europeans – Christianity = globohomo, which isn’t good, but is still much better than cannibals living in mud huts.
Who would you rather live among – Christian Africans or Atheist Europeans? No matter how much you may claim to hate the modern world, you have chosen to live in a First World country because the Third World alternative is so much worse.
Europe without Christianity > Christianity without Europe.
Hey, bobby baby-there are more people than just ‘Christians’ and Jews. And among ‘Christians’ and Jews there are many schools of thought. What a cartoonish world you Yanks inhabit.
I was apprised recently that the 1913 Nobel winner for physiology, Richet, discovered the basis for anaphylaxis, (a term he coined), and posited that all parenteral injections of foreign substances caused some degree of anaphylaxis, which makes all ‘vaccines’, particularly those containing numerous ‘adjuvants’, potentially harmful, particularly in those more susceptible for any reason. He must have been the ur-‘antivaxxer’.
And Western ‘civilization’ has also destroyed the planet’s habitability for our species, through capitalism, the apotheosis of greed. Three cheers for the West!!!
Yes agreed about people in the past…though there are plenty of people presently with oodles of videos stating with all sorts of claims that the world is flat….
Black Death epidemic was minor factor in most of Europe. Only France suffered major population decline at that time, but probably by 100 years war, not epidemic.
‘“Judeo-Christian” is a misnomer and should never have been adopted by Christianity or Catholicism.’ — anarchyst
Globally, Christians outnumber Jews by over one hundred to one.
‘Judeo-Christian’ is a semantic example of stolen valor: a false equivalency coined to steal the latter’s prestige.
One might as well speak of ‘Congolese-American rocket science.’ It doesn’t exist, and never will.
At last we encounter someone who knows some actual medieval history. Guyenot’s survey is nothing more than the latest iteration of “I hate the Catholic Church. Nothing good happened until people like me came along.” Guyenot simply puts an intellectual glaze on the same old Protestant-atheist cake. His “facts” aren’t facts. They are what we used to call “lies.” In truth he sounds like an American.
Since 1968, we’ve heard this non-stop braying: “Western Civilization isn’t Christian.”
No, it isn’t new, Year Zeroism isn’t new. BCE and CE (certainly it is new for them to be considered “common parlance” and for open disdain to be expressed when BC and AD are used) aren’t new. It’s true that the people who style themselves “the elite” of society have collectively disdained Christianity for a long time. It’s part of their religion, part of their subservience to the Jews.
And yet the non-stop braying and whining and complaining about discussing the influence of Christianity on the development of of Western Civilization IS rather new. It would have been rather hard to do in non-Communist countries before 1968. To simply pretend that Christianity never mattered.
The refusal to acknowledge the positive significance of the Middle Ages to civilization was a product of of Anti-Catholicism, and that was a cover, for a long time, for the sort of infidelity that intersects with the ideology of revolution and so-called “cultured paganism.” (and incidentally, whether pagan and paisano are variations of the same term is irrelevant to their semantic content and common usage).
There have always been those who have tried to cut out the Christian aspect of our history and development, the way Thomas Jefferson would cut the miracles and hard sayings out of the Gospels.
Incidentally, if you watch that video on the St. Cuthbert Gospel, it was the Jesuits who preserved it from being destroyed by the English Anti-Christians.
We aren’t told of the Jewish role in the sacking of the monasteries in the 16th Century, although I’ve read recently that impoverished nobility were marrying Jewish women in the 16th Century for money. It is hard to imagine the Jews were not involved in the sacking of the monasteries. The English alliance with the Turks and the Barbary Pirates are suggestive of many international connections with Jewry.
The post-68 embargo of Christianity in public discourse is a new thing and it proves that our Civilization IS Christian, or they would have no need to continually harass the Christians with laws to arrest those engaged in silent prayer, laws to force Christians to celebrate homosexual “marriage,” laws to throw men in prison for stating their moral convictions in public, or the teachings of their religion about the Jews in public. Yes, civilization is Civilization is Christian, but barbarism and subhumanity are JEWISH and COMMUNIST.
While I don’t doubt Laurent Guyanot is a real person and is involved in writing these essays, we should be suspicious of ANYTHING on a site like this. Recall Ron Unz continually referring to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration” plan to be applied by the federal government.
There is a recklessness in these essays wherein he doesn’t seem so concerned with contradicting himself or in establishing a coherent narrative, but rather in promoting various theories. All of these theories spread confusion and sow discord, none of them promote resistance to Jewry and the system in which its entrenched.
Denying that Western Civilization is in some fundamental sense a Christian civilization, or developed as such through most of its history, is foremost a Jewish obsession. It may have been a habit with some, but it was seldom if ever a psychological necessity for gentiles to continually try to minimize and deny the role of Christianity IN OUR BEING HERE AS EUROPEAN PEOPLES.
I stand corrected.
Couldn’t have said it better. The term Judeo-Christian is perfectly appropriate, except for Marcionites. (Any Marcionites, around here?).
There are two great disciplines governed by the principle of irreversibility: thermodynamics and history.
I once said in a salon that Plato is the movement of the spirit within eternity. When we think, we are all Platonists. If I try to think the universe, I must move the Bible into the frozen universe of Platonic ideas. That is what meditation means. Plato best intuited the grief of the powerless man in the face of essences.
Nothing can replace Christianity; not even all the ancient pre-Christian culture. I believe that the peak of Europe is not in Athens, but in the Middle Ages, when God walked from house to house. I define the brilliance of historical eras according to the religious genius of the era, not according to political feats.
The ancient dead are not beautiful at all. Only the Christian dead are. However, I found in Homer a dead person of all beauty: Pentensilea, queen of the Amazons, killed by Achilles. And Achilles cries that he killed this beauty of a woman… And then Tertis – the voice of the working people – begins to insult the corpse of Pentensilea. Achilles punches him and kills him – the working people – for being impudent and for insulting their corpse. Here, then, we saw a beauty, although in principle, the ancient dead are not beautiful. It was the Christians who introduced the beautiful mask of the dead.
The Italian Renaissance, where man is placed at the center of the universe, is heretical from the Christian point of view. The autonomization of man’s power is in itself demonic. My opinion is that man is the most significant, in fact, the only one who is man, is homo religiosus.
Old women go to the absolute by praying, and the philosopher by babbling syllogisms.
Petre Tutea (1902 – 1991) – a Romanian economist, essayist, philosopher, jurist, politician and publicist, nationalist militant, member of the Legionary Movement, 13 years imprisoned and hard labor by communists.
I think that he answered to all flights of fancy written about revival of classical world
All forms of European humanism, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the fetishistic to the papal, are based on the belief in man, himself situated in a given spiritual context, in a given material empirical situation, as well as in a given historical context. The whole essence of any type of humanism is man (homo), and encapsulated in the ontology of any type of humanism is none other than humanism (homo hominis). Man represents the highest value, the supreme value. Man is the main criterion, the last criterion. “Man is the measure of all things.” This is in essence, in its core, any type of humanism. Therefore, all forms of humanism are, in the final analysis, idolatrous or polytheistic in origin. The pre-Renaissance, Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods – of Protestant, philosophical, religious, social, scientific, cultural or political origin – all types of European humanism, consciously or unconsciously strive, they fight incessantly to reach one result: to replace faith in the God-man Christ with a faith in man, to replace the Gospel of Christ with a human one, to replace the philosophy of the God-man Christ with a human one, to replace Christocentric culture with a human one. In short, they seek to replace the life after Christ and in Christ with one made according to human patterns.
Has European man transformed Europe into an idol factory? Almost all the products of civilization have become idols. Therefore, the era in which we live is first of all an era of idolatry. No other continent is so invaded by idols as contemporary Europe. Nowhere is man more enslaved to things and nowhere does he work so hard for them as in Europe. In reality, it is idolatry in its most serious form, because the worship is directed to the earth. Tell me, does not man worship the earth when he selfishly loves his body made of dust and insists on the idea that he is body and only body? Does he not worship the earth when he proclaims the ideology of class struggle, of the nation and of humanity?
Europe therefore suffers not from atheism, but from polytheism. We cannot complain about the lack of gods, but about their inflation. Because he lost the true God, man wanted to quench his thirst for Godhood by creating idols. He created idols from science and its theories, from technology, from discoveries, from religion and its representatives, from politics and its parties, from fashion and its mannequins…
Saint Justin Popović ( 1894 – 1979) Serbian Orthodox theologian, archimandrite of the Ćelije Monastery, Dostoyevsky scholar, writer, anti-communist
“that Europeans needed Jewish monotheism to “know” “God” is one of the greatest lies that has alienated us from our pre-Christian roots”
Great article but Europe roots are not only Greek or Roman, what about the Celts whose inventions and technologies were copied by Romans after exterminating them in what was the biggest genocide of the time (in Gauls notably).
While the Renaissance was certainly a rebirth of a world which had been experiencing decline (exactly like our today) due to various factors, Europe can’t be restricted to only Greek-Roman heritage or Christianity. Slavic, Vikings, Germanic, Celtic people made Europe as much as Greeks and Romans did.
I disagree with the characterization of Christianity as being Judaic by one commentator. If the source of the new testament is indeed a book written by Jews to serve their interests, the words and deeds of Jesus which was written by non-Jews since it was written long after and by Christians, not even former Jews but actual Christians.
If Christianity was just another form of Judaism, the Jews wouldn’t have Jesus tortured and killed like they did and they wouldn’t go after the White Christian Man nowadays like they do, to destroy him.
Europe is the sum of a long history that didn’t start with the Greeks. It’s not because older civilizations didn’t leave writing evidences that they didn’t transmit what was used by those coming after them, as in the case of the Celts for example whose lore in medicine have been lost and technological prowess are now known. many Roman achievements like carts, roads, swords and machines were in fact common to the Celtic tribes who populated Europe from the Danube to the British isles.
Preposterous!
Not only is this is a false dilemma to a t. But we also have to be honest when looking at christianity. The open-borders, pro lgbt, proto liberal (don’t judge!) cult is at the center of the hostile dissolution of the west. And why would you invoke the Third World so vividly (“cannibals living in mud huts”), when it’s welcomed into the churches, fed and housed.
Christianity IS Globohomo.
Europe only has a chance if it doubles down on the “Renaissance” (for a lack of a better word, as I’m really ambivalent about its historicity) and its real roots.
Not too much different from Abraham.
The speed of light matching the latitude of the Great Pyramid is news to me, so of course I looked it up:
The speed of light is (claimed to be) 299,792,458 m/s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
The pyramid is located at 29°58’45”, or 28+(58/60)+(45/3600)=29.979166666666664
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
So at least the first 5 digits match, with the rest of the fraction being very, very close. Of course, many online are claiming it is totally a coincidence but anyone who dabbles with statistics knows how improbable such coincidences actually are. Less than 1 in 100,000 and it just happens to match one of the most major landmarks? Personally I don’t buy in such funny coincidences.
I need some time to mull over this, but you probably convinced me. Do you happen to know of other such numbers?
Catholics and Christians of all types are welcome within the faith. This does not negate the need or desire for Christians to establish their own racially or culturally separate communities. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christians who desire to do so.
Many people have the mistaken assumption that Christianity demands that racial or cultural boundaries be abolished. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Yes, there are Christian sects that preach (and desire) “multiculturalism and diversity”, much of this attitude being driven by outside (jewish) interests, in order to destabilize Christian and other cultural and societal preferences.
THAT is the jewish way–reserving social and cultural exclusivity for themselves while spreading their “multiculturalism and diversity” poison demanding that “the rest of us (gentiles)” give up social and cultural exclusivity.
All one has to do is see what jews did to Catholicism with the imposition of their “mandates” on the Vatican II Ecumenical Council. It is when jews got their “get out of jail free” card, being “forgiven” for the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, despite their hatred of Jesus Christ and Christianity that exists to this very day.
Let’s not forget the “slide” towards “anything goes” when it comes to sexual matters. The promotion of homosexuality by jewish interests has led to other sordid perverted practices being legitimized. From homosexuality and LGBTQXYZ perversions imposed on civil societies and on vulnerable children to pedophilia which is about to be “normalized”, even the Catholic Church is not immune from such sinful practices and heresy.
Normalizing what was once considered “mental illness” at the behest of jewish interests has only one solution…
The “Austrian painter” had the right idea–expulsion…
The “problem” remains…expulsion to where?
I saw your twitter profile.
Check this out !
The war between Serbia and Albania is not a war between Islam and Christianity.
That’s Russian propaganda and many are falling for it. (As was i for many years)
Kosovo has radicals but they are actually Turks descendants from a Soufi Sect that was kicked out of the Ottoman Empire. Head’s why they attacked Christian Churches.
30 Years ago Albania used to be 80 % Muslim. Now that % has dropped towards 50 %.
Christianity is booming and flourishing in Albania like never before.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t61FVRtbRQY
Islamo-Christian is just as ridiculous as Judeo-Christian. If you haven’t read the Qur’an maybe it’s time and when you’re finished bone up of Talmudic laws. Jews and Muslims are two slices from the same loaf. And demoting Jesus to a prophet isn’t reverence its blasphemy.
He also succeeded in the field of art history. There was no Byzantine art with its expression. There was no proto-Renaissance, based mainly on the Byzantine tradition and the young art of Northern Europe. There were no artists like Giotto, Martini, Memmi, Cavallini, who brought to art something that no one had ever dreamed of before. And no social functions of art…
Bam, and here you have Brunelleschi, Michelangelo and Leonardo. And ancient Greeks all around.
Tbh Christ himself probably started the de-Christianisation process when he said that his kingdom is not of this world.
Socrates was falsely tried on atheism. He defended himself against atheism. Weak attempt to tie him and Plato to your silliness.
As or more silly is your use of “Judeo-Christian”. Informed people, whether Christian or not, know the “judeo” is a late add on by jews and mainline Protestants.
Just these two unserious things make your whole argument questionable. Greco-Roman culture is of course our civilizational lynchpin. Christianity absorbed and added to it. For better or worse is arguable. Probably some of both. Christianity is a broad subject and about many things with many perspectives at this point. It’s certainly dead as a cultural force.
Personally I practice aspects of both in my inner life. Both dead traditions popularly speaking. But both alive in the souls of many. Sans the “judeo”.
I don’t know what’s more strange…
1) Christians denying Jewish influence on their religion. Their apostles Jewish, Bible written by Jews, their God is a Jew. It may not have been Rabbinic or Talmudic but its still Jewish. The Old Testament very Jewish or Hebrew. The New Testament also Jewish but in a different way.
I realize particularly some “anti-semite” Christians like to downplay the Jew part because their Churchian religion taught them to be occasionally (at best) anti-Jewish, its part of their tradition.
And Id argue none of these traditions are original.
Then they start panicking, trying to downplay the Old Testament, or pointing fingers at some of the more Judaized Protestants. ALL OF Christianity has Jewish imprint on it. Point fingers all out want at the other Christian sects it doesnt change a thing.
or
2)To the pagan, Grec0-Roman, and the kind: what makes you so confident these pre Christian beliefs were NOT influenced by Jews or Hebrews?
Millions of Jews lived in the Roman territory and surely a big part even Greece before them. They werent all wearing funny clothing, making them stick out, some of them would be hiding or “assimilated”.
Then you have the Protestants arguing Catholicism is pagan. I would argue all of Christianity has pagan ideas. Essentially Christianity combined the Jewish and Pagan ideas. Some Christian groups focused on pagan ideas than others, other more on Jewish ideas.
All these groups were not exactly pure. Neither the Orthodox, Catholic or Protestants. There were other Christian and gnostic groups also extinct, wiped out, or tiny and silent.
No one is gonna read this but basically:
Some young aristos saw the paganus doing stupid stuff and said, “I’m better than you, oh gosh, AHH, I’m so awesome… oh why can’t you be like me,” proceeded to fluff is adonis-hair, did a hair-wave and smugly walked away.
A lone eremitáno saw the paganus doing stupid stuff and said, “Over on my PILLAR we don’t need money, I am a PILLAR MAN why do you need to fight and die over money? We all get along just fine!”
Somebody’s shifu was passing by and tried to explain platonic epistemology by way of platonic epistemological socratic pedagogy… but the peganus threw Plotinus’ book at him. The guy had a disappointed look on his face that the paganus hadn’t even read Meno yet claimed to see Mt. Olympus.
Subsequently the Goths murdered everyone.
Today, the paganus is addicted to pornography of Goth girls even though the Goth craze ended like before I was born probably. You are the paganus. I am not. I am better than you. Yes Plotinus was wrong about everything.
Oh yeah I forgot my point. Basically Christian shifu monks and nuns who lived on pillars with adonis hair (they probably had super-hairspray minus the spray) invented hypercomplex arithmetic and artificial intelligence 750 years ago, but because your ancestors (monks and nuns are celibate) didn’t realize it you think Christian bad.
Lots of lovely erudition here, but I was stopped in my tracks at the outset when the author spoke of “the present Kali Yuga.” Kali Yuga ended in 1899. That was also the year that Christ entered the sphere of the Moon, before the advent of His entering the Earth’s etheric sphere in 1933 – a fact that makes totally moot all of this equivocation about Christianity.
The jews have awarded themselves another “Peace Prize” Reachel Weiss, a West Bank squatter has been awarded Nobel peace Prize for squatting and making the IOF kill people whose property she wanted.
Yeah me. We believe Jesus descended to earth as a man as opposed to being born to and raised by a nice Jewish couple with whom the creator of the universe had decided to learn carpentry. He does however heal the sick, teaches us how to pray and attempts to persuade the Jews to end their murderous cult to no avail. Marcion’s 144A.D. bible is 72 pages with one gospel not the four Rashomon-like Judaized gospels of the Roman bible. A perfect example would be Matthew chapter 1 verse 1 “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”, he also refers to Jesus as the “King of Israel” and so the brainwashing begins. Emperor Constantine’s 325A.D. council of Nicaea’s Roman bible from which all other bibles are derived (except Marcion’s) made Christians subservient to both Romans and Jews, nowadays exclusively to the Jews. Judaism and Christianity are diametrically opposed and were never meant to be in the same book, it would appear that Satan has had the last laugh.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html
I have a theory about that. Islam imposed a uniform and semi-rational legal system on vast swaths of territory, much of it formerly occupied by Christians (and I suppose Persian Zoroastrians.) In the Islamic world, it was usually the Christians and Jews doing the intellectual heavy lifting. Over the centuries, this creative wellspring of dhimmis dwindled, replaced by hidebound, intellectually lazy Muslims.
I’ve been enjoying the controversy of the Schofield Bible on Twatter. This issue and the 9/11 Dancing Israelis have the Jews in a panic and it’s deny, deny, deny. And also call their opponents “retarded.”
It was Alfred the Great who converted the Vikings to Christianity.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html
The Renaissance did a lot of clamping down. The Middle Ages was a halcyon day of freedom in comparison. The philosophers and their re-discoveries kind of blurs the historical picture. In real life, the real screwed the screws down real tight, and we’re still trying to un-screw them.
Not a word about Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello or Botticelli in an article purportedly addressing The Florentine Renaissance? (and illustrated by a painting by Botticelli)… 🙁
I’ll stick with Gombrich
A perspective? With a religious spin? Where is the need for that? To whom? The blind, the erring, the woke? Things are only what they are, and inalienably so. Always.
If you need to put a spin on something, better do it with a breathtaking panache, Joel Osteen style. This divagation looks to me like a bunch of hand-scribbled notes taken in the library while studying a barrel-load of books with pictures.
Christianity presumes to know the image of God.
Suffice it to say that I am laughing at you.
John 3:16 says nothing about works being necessary for salvation. QED.
In defense of ignorance and sloth, does anyone know the destination of more
knowledge, imagination and creativity?
From Wikipedia:
“The orbital speed of Earth averages about 29.78 km/s (107,200 km/h; 66,600 mph), which is fast enough to travel a distance equal to Earth’s diameter, about 12,742 km (7,918 mi), in seven minutes, and the distance from Earth to the Moon, 384,400 km (238,900 mi), in about 3.5 hours.”
That 666 number is another occult reference. I always learned that the Earth’s axial tilt was 23.4°, which is gives us another 666 (90°-23.4°), but it’s now listed as 23.44°, so 666 no more.
More generally, the Neoplatonic project involved rationalizing folk paganism (and ethics, and politics, and economics) by transforming the various phenomenologically observed gods, spirits, etc., into geometrically arrayed abstract concepts represented by the planets. This is where we get the Holy Tetractys, the Tree of Life, the organization of the planet-gods into “seven heavens” with all kinds of as above-so below ramifications for us here on Earth, etc. I suspect that this is all just a made-up jerkoff by social engineers whose goal was to create a hierarchical society on Earth with them on top. Their heirs stick these code numbers into their fake science/history like trophies commemorating their conquest of the rational mind via their clever pseudo-rational ersatz.
Can’t seem to find the original on stonetoss.com oddly enough.
That series was a great smackdown of the potted history that the atheist crowd use to contrast the “scientific” Galileo against the benighted “ignoramuses” of the Catholic Church. Educated people such as Arthur Koestler and Edward Teller had long known that the heliocentric model at the time pf Galileo did not have the observational evidence for it, and in point of fact the elliptical orbits of Kepler came to be accepted only after Newton, long after Galileo, proposed his dynamical theory of gravity.
“This does not negate the need or desire for Christians to establish their own racially or culturally separate communities. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christians who desire to do so.”
But evidently, empirically, christians never did care, do care and will care for specific peoples, borders, “culture” (defined as anything else but christianity) and pretty much everything else – save for one tribe.
It’s not like we have a bit of evidence to help us here. Let me make it as plain as it gets:
Christian racial tolerance and bio-political apathy is the best established historical fact of all times.
Given that our history has been shaped by christianity – which really means christian scribes – we have two millenia of data on this issue. We can sample arguments raised by the most erudite scholars across the centuries, kingly speeches, politics, wars, lofty policies and facts on the ground – there is nothing in history which comes remotely close. Shutting down young commies with “real comunism just hasn’t been tried, right?” does not hold a candle compared to what we know about the core tenets of judeo-christianity.
Defending the church by bemoaning alleged bad sheep is highly ironic because evidently you are the black sheep.
The only question worth asking is: Why? Why is it so easy to dupe White christians again and again?
For instance, why did the super christian, obscenely powerful US super empire of the 50s & 60s let “their” (quotation marks because it’s no more) country go to demographical and political hell?
If we look at the Maga phenomenon, we find all the answers we need.
Christianity is not the answer for a new Nationalism, it is the problem, always has been. But here’s some good news: belief is not the problem.
“Ultimately, it was in countries that protected religious pluralism, such as England from 1689, the Netherlands and Prussia—where the French Huguenots found refuge—that science flourished best”.
Totally false. British violent persecution of Catholics went on throughout the 19 century: only in 1829 Catholics were allowed to sit in Parliament.
Sounds like a classic boomer take.
In European civilisation it seems like you find two tendencies:
1) There is submission to an inherited and unchanging collective social order, which owes its form to higher powers located in another world and a legendary foundation in a time outside our own. The living in this one are ruled by these powers.
2) There is individual and subjective revolt against what is inherited, and a desire by the living to autonomously recreate both their social order and nature around them.
It looks like the second tendency was already to some limited extent at work in antiquity in the Hellenistic, Persian and Roman empires, even though the first was very dominant. Christianity ended up as an enduring compromise in Europe:
God in the other world established how the social order should be and lent his omnipotent power and glory to how it was expressed in this world. At the same time, God allowed individuals some direct access to him and spoke to them in their conscience, and allowed that the visible order was not actually the ideal image of its real prototype in heaven, so their was some scope for autonomous modification of it.
Over time the Christian compromise evolved more and more in the direction of the second tendency, until it became dominant.
Now this article seems to be arguing for the self-conscious recreation of a social order of type 1) on the basis of individual reason and individual aesthetic sense/sensibility, probably by some kind of democratic Rousseauian means?
I guess it will just produce some sort of hybrid form destined to sterility because of the contradiction involved in it, has happened before.
anonymous [371] said
Complex has been thinking that himself, thanks for the share.
DustyBuddy wrote-
Earth’s tilt varies between 22.1° and 24.5° over a cycle that lasts 41,000 years.
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-tropic-of-cancers-location-on-earth-move-over-time
Posted the link to inform people.
Before I read that series, I hadn’t even known that it was possible to prove the rotation of the Earth by dropping things and precisely measuring where they fall.
So, the idea that the Earth is a stable frame of reference for objects above it is just a widely held delusion. The rotation does cause an inertial difference, it just isn’t noticeable on a small scale. However, it is measurable on quite a small scale. Wow!
If your thesis is true, then explain why “is globohomo” only being embraced in the historically Christian west. The non-Christian world wants nothing to do with it. Although correlation isn’t causation, the possibility that Christianity has played a causative role in the bringing about of “globohomo” deserves to be entertained.
The way I see it, Christianity is a gateway to some very bad civilisational outcomes such as Marxism and Noahide religion.
The Christians tell us that we are all sinners existing in a state of contention with a supreme being, and that free will accounts for our sinfulness, but that excludes the possibility that some population groups may be sinful by nature. I will never believe for a single second that this sort of thinking is compatible with race realism, or even scientific realism for that matter.
And then there is the matter of Christianity’s Jewishness. *Some* Christians (and only some) tell us that Christianity is counter-Semitic. but the central figure in Christian religion claims to be fulfilling Jewish prophecies and doesn’t renounce his Judaism (or Yahweh). The situation is very confused, to say the least, and nowadays we can observe Jews ruthlessly exploiting Christianity’s Jewish connection, and Christianity is gradually morphing into pure Noahide religion.
All of these numbers are just arbitrary. Why are there 360 degrees in a circle? What happens to all your magic numbers if you use radians instead?
Psalm 73;. 22 Arise, O God, judge thy own cause: remember thy reproaches with which the foolish man hath reproached thee all the day.
This man who judges and hates God thinks that he is divine which gives him a right to routinely attack Him and His word-which is what The Bible is.
Not a few here think he is brilliant but his wealth of knowledge has purchased him eternity in hell unless he repents
God is infinite Mercy
God is infinite Justice
God is soverign Liberty
This poor soul, solidly on the path to perdition, doesn’t need our praise;he needs our prayers
Here’s a delightful late-Renaissance composition by Monteverdi:
Andalusian cadence. Structurally not dissimilar to early 1990s Gothic-Doom experiments.
Early 1990s gothic-doom experiment by the mercurial Pyogenesis:
forgetmenot wrote:
I suppose, the few who survived were waaay smarter (given that IQ is correlated with health)…
a comment supported by such low IQ people like Stephen Hawking
Can anyone write short synopsis of what is the meaning of this article :). There must be some ideology to it, I just got tired of trying to decode it. To be honest, I did not make it through the whole thing. The article might be better if it was prefaced with some hypothesis as an introduction.
It’s hard to believe that God is good when he condemns people to eternal torment purely for not believing something. You pray for me, and I’ll pray for God because I think he may be going to hell.
Problem with Globohomo is that, at least where I am in Europe, Globohomo means a mix of feminism, LGBTQI+ and Islam. Possibly with some tribal indigenous stuff from Australia and North America in it as well.
It’s only embraced explicitly in the West because Muslims and other non-Europeans don’t need to, they are default part of it. (Unless maybe Chinese and Norks, possibly some Indians).
It is unimportant for much of the world due to it being culturally specific. It’s based on the Master-Slave dialectic (this might be a highly processed version of Christianity or maybe not) and, apparently, the marginalised seeking vindication.
Today the ‘conservatives’, looters and parasites, identify the assets within the government built Public Domain. Assets are down-graded in the MSM press as the pretext serving the justification for its sale to the private sector for efficiency and thrift of the public’s funds. The takeovers always demand the government bail out the investors.
This is essentially the ploy that launched the ‘Reformation’. Read the ‘History of the Reformation in England and Ireland’, by William Cobbett. The Protestant Reformation was a looting operation. Most of Europe’s ‘Royalty’ is based on that loot; land, farms, vineyards, wineries, abbots, convents, residential building, gold, silver, paintings, literature, schools, universities, etc. Martin Luther was accused by a friend, “You work for the princes.” Those who did not share in the looting operation went off to create their own protestant church. I reference E.Michael Jones, author.
The Elitist Liberal Protestants, are British in orientation, are of the belief that wealthy people are God’s chosen, comfortable with usury and speculation in their local, national, and global system of economy. The British Imperial system.
The author’s ignorance of the origins and the history of European civilization is appalling. The Roman Catholic church is NOT the primordial Christian church in Europe. It is merely a heretical sect that the schismatic Frankish ruler Charlemagne in the 9th century AD severed from the Holy Apostolic Ecumenical Church (also known as the Ortodox Church). For a successful split, it was necessary for the Germanic “emperors” to commit a genocide of the population of Italian peninsula that had the ancient Roman roots, that remained loyal to the Holy Apostolic Church and to the emperor of Rome whose seat was in Constantinople.
There was no need to graft the European civilization on the antiquity because it persisted uninterrupted for millennia, in spite of the setback in Europe’s westernmost part after its fall into “filioque” heresy. The Greco-Roman philosophy, science and technology were never forgotten or abandoned in the Roman empire (a.k.a. Byzantium), and were thoroughly studied in the universities and academies of Constantinople and other capitals in the east. This knowledge reappeared in the west brought by the Roman intellectuals who fled their ruined city of Constantinople after its barbaric sack by crusaders in 1204,. They set the groundwork for Renaissance in Italy. Two and a half centuries later, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, a new wave of highly enlightened refugees gave rise to the “high Renaissance” in the west.
I thought that the reason the cat was revered in ancient Egypt was because cats protected stored grain supplies from rodents.
I noticed that there is no mention in the article of the developments in banking that took place in Florence—and the financing of wars, as the feudal system disintegrated.
Still, interesting article.
Re music, do note . . . that Hayden, Mozart, etc. drew very heavily on the folk music and dances of central Europe, especially Moravia, for both the development of the sonata form (started out as suites of dances) and for actual melodies and harmonies to elaborate into “high culture” compositions.
Otherwise I agree with Guyenot’s comments about Western “classical” (also the Romantics, obviously) music’s reaching deeply and mysteriously into the human soul and brain via the ears.
AFAIK no other culture has achieved this.
Yes, it is “Black Death” and not “Black Plague”. Oof, my bad!
Also, I’ve now done more research:
Very possible that cats weren’t exactly “killed en masse“.
BTW, worst of all:
My text, it seems, is anachronistic – Black Death: 1346-1353; whilst, The Witch Trials: 1400-1775, more-or-less.
That was my point, arbitrary numbers are just that.
Some maintain that 360 approximates the days in a year, but is simpler to divide.
Still arbitrary.
Take a trip to the Romanesque and Medieval galleries at the National Art Museum of Catalonia to get some interesting insights on cross-pollination within Iberia and among all the regions bordering the Med. throughout the centuries.
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain also led to interesting alliances between Converso and Dutch banking families.
Extensive genealogies of these alliances/marriages are available online, even at Wikipedia.
The Protestant Reformation was necessary because many of the things the Catholic Church teaches are contrary to scripture…why is why the Vatican fought against Bibles in languages more people could read, like English.
It is not the ”situation” that is confused. You are confused at best. Or a downright lying hasbaratchik masquerading as anti-Jews to confuse us (like not a few fans of Guyenot – and he himself).
Richet is required reading. His Nobel prize lecture has enough basic elements to clue one in.
Another one is Arthus.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1913/richet/lecture/
Richet also found that ingestion can cause anaphylaxis priming.
Jus’ like niggas watchin’ Soul Train an’ sheet in the 70s. Niggas be watchin’ TV an’ shit Willis. Whypeepo think they can jus’ teach Arnold an’ shit.
Didn’t The Renaissanse lead us into The Devils mouth?
Protestants don’t know what they did wrong, it’s really an unforgivable crime against humanity. It’s like you never heard of Joan of Arc, the 8 year, 20-30 or 40 year war, the 100 years war, religious wars plagued Europe for centuries because it was profitable. Who benefited? and on and on. If you read just a portion of Cobbett’s work you’d know why the British were so poor and ghastly. When the nobility looted the Church the standard of living of the peasants and laborers, farmers, and trades people all suffered. The Protestant Reformation was an warfare offensive conducted against Catholic founded Western Civilization and the population. Radical Population Reduction was ordered by an Episcopal reverend Thomas Malthus. It set civilization back a thousand years we still feel its effects today. As for Catholic teachings, so much straw, and its detractors, so much rubbish.” The 1605 Gunpowder Plot was the PsyOp of its’ day blaming Catholics. There are saints and miracles in the Catholic Church. None in the Protestant Church. Can’t even claim George Washington as he came from a Catholic family that escaped persecution in England. 400 years and the British still can’t get rid of the Catholics. Don’t point to this and that; there’s no value. The bottom line is Jesus is our savior and the Catholic Mass provides us with his presence in the Eucharist.
What and where would the United States be if not for the Catholic Church that could create civil societies, and its health and educational system, Jesuit Universities. America’s Industrial Revolution and two World Wars needed/depended on Catholic educated workers; from ditch diggers, mechanics, managers, to corporate presidents, as well as aviators, soldiers, and sailors. This success was just too much for the WASP oligarchy and it had to be destroyed. I reference ‘Slaughter of the Cities’, E.Michael Jones. In the post WWII era, every Catholic head of state was set up for assassination. de Gaulle, Adenauer, Aldo Muro, Diem, Patrice Lumumba, the Kennedys. Senator Javits screamed ‘it’s not fair!’ to Catholic middle class in America and demanded JFK get behind ‘immigration reform’ to tighten European immigration and increase immigration for the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Act. The 2nd Civil War, was already underway as the Civil Rights Movement, that fostered the expulsion of Catholics from the big cities where they enjoyed both political and economic power. That war has never let up.
Catholic paranoia-a novel psychosis! Probably not. Malthus was correct-in the end the human population will outrun food supply, but before that the pollution from eight billion plus humans will destroy the planet’s habitability for our species. Catholic pro-natalism is an odd concoction.
And out his fundament!
AFAIK you’re a fuckwit. Those other untermenschen don’t have souls like yours, do they? Pure Talmudic dogma.
They still are. They still are disgustingly degraded people, from the lowest to the highest class.
Their colonials achieved a significantly higher level of development, though the Left is dragging down their colonies one-by-one.
We can’t understand Leftist Revolutionism without understanding that the British have been the sponsors of it. After the war, when things are very unpleasant, Churchill might be quoted as saying “we killed the wrong pig” but the effect of Britain’s foreign policy was to deliver half of Europe to the Communists. And the same was true in America. Communists may not run America and Britain and yet they seem to operate within them with impunity. You could almost say Britain and America are their home base.
It was Thomas Paine who most likely wrote the text of the Declaration of Independence.
https://jamesperloff.com/tag/thomas-paine/
And the Declaration was influenced by Algernon Sidney who in turn was influenced by the Jesuit Suarez.
Thomas Jefferson was the mulatto breeding hedonistic originator of Democratic Party Machine politics. More of a forerunner of Tweed and Clinton than anything else.
Palestrina was a close associate of St. Philip Neri.
If our music originated in the classical world, show us the classical music of the Greeks?
Oh wait, you mean they read some Greek tracts and developed their musical taste from that?
Not over centuries in the choirs of churches and monasteries?
What are we to make of these people who’ve never heard Gregorian chant at a mass, making their arrogant pronouncements on the history of Western music? (in which the British have played a distinctly MINOR role)
Tallis and Byrd were Catholics, Elgar was raised in a Catholic family, Handel was German, the musicians in Holst’s ancestry (he’s a relatively minor composer, but famous nonetheless) were from his father’s side and his father was not English. That accounts for a significant percentage of the “famous” English composers.
This is from the wikipedia about the medieval composer John Dunstaple (1390-1453)
The musical output of medieval England was prodigious, yet almost all music manuscripts were destroyed during the English Reformation, particularly as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536–1540.[14] As a result, most of Dunstaple’s work has had to be recovered from continental sources (predominantly those from northern Italy and the southern Alps).
Could this be the explanation for the meager account the English have given of themselves in the history of Western music?
Or was it an attitude? After all, the Duke of Wellington burned his violin because his career choice was despised and his suit rejected because of it. Lord Chesterfield told his son to never be seen playing an instrument. Good advice with respect to social advantage, and yet hardly conducive, as a general cultural attitude, towards the development of music.
I saw the most ridiculous remark in Hammerton’s “The Peoples of all Nations” comparing the Japanese with the Chinese, asserting that the relation of Chinese art to Japanese is that the Chinese art was superior but that the general taste of the Japanese was superior to the Chinese general taste – and the assertion was made it was the same with British music and Continental music, that the British were of the first rank in composing music but the musical taste of the public was inferior to that of the public on the continent. We can see this patronizing enthusiasm for Orientalism has always been played up as a way of casting shade on the heritage of Europe.
The British have always had a delusional sense of self-importance, and unfortunately, it has not diminished with the fall of their Empire.
The real meaning of the word pagan is not what it supposedly came from Latin – peasants or country folks. Latin was not a spoken language (except in one Apennine province) but a church language and took many words from the older language in which environment it was created.
The word pagan (or more precisely – pogan) itself comes from the old Serbian language and the best translation into English is – shit, excrement, muck. It was used to name some Serbian tribes in the valley of the Neretva River (Pogania), which flows into the Adriatic Sea. The wiki link shows where that province was, although the reference is full of many untruths and nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narentines
Interestingly, it is in the immediate vicinity, near Dubrovnik, where Saint Paul performed the first baptisms in the caves of Trebisnica river, while hiding there from Nero. Very few people know that the first Christian diocese in the world was founded in Dalmatia, in the capital of the Roman Empire, Sirmium, and that both Saint Paul and Saint Peter spent a long time there before going to Rome.
Perhaps the first use of the term ‘Gothic’ was also offensive because it also referred to Serbian tribes and not the falsification that they were Germans, which not even the most hardened panzers would claim.
Of course, Michelangelo’s David does not resemble Judeans, but neither does it resemble Greeks. He looks like the indigenous gods that the future Greeks encountered upon their arrival in the Balkans. Someone has already asked how come all the Greek gods are blonde. David actually looks like Alexander the Great, who was not Greek.
Otherwise, another good text by Laurent, which opens unknown pages of ancient history. I hope that one day he will also pay attention to the forgeries of the so-called ancient Greece (‘Byzantium is not Greece’) and not only of ancient Rome.
We should also not forget that Catholicism arose as a sect of apostates from the mother church that took over the mafia methods of conquering territories and subjugating peoples, and for a long time was a notorious manufactory, a poison house of the Borgias.
If we skim only some names from the text, we can see that they are mentioned – Homer, Thales, Thucydides, Ptolemy I Soter, Copernicus, Herodotus (half), Orpheus, Constantine, Luther, who were Serbs. Could this also be evidence that the mainstream history we know is selective and largely falsified?
Thank you, yes, the Monarchy’s rejection of Christ and satanic/scientific oppression, that feels good to most, has actually made the people of the British Isles crazy. Look what’s happening to Ireland, what they traded, for a slightly higher standard of living. That Enoch Burke case is scary in that the ‘authorities’ can lock up anybody for anything. I can’t describe what’s going on in England, it’s appears one provocative edict after another will, very soon, cause a ‘revolutionary’ reaction. And who’s in charge of this revolutionary moment? It’s a dicey situation. Good luck.
Your ‘British’ persona is amusing until you take yourself seriously and expect others to do the same. Increasing the brain power and labor force, through the Catholic mission system, has always served the perpetuation of humanity, always increased the human population’s standard of living. Malthus, who in his reductionist bent, could not conceive of 8 billion people on planet Earth, was obviously wrong.
No miracles for Protestants? Rubbish. I’m Protestant and personally experienced a miracle a couple of years ago while praying in a Protestant church.
Look up the many evils committed by the Catholic Church. The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 is typical…thousands of French Protestants (Hugenots) murdered for no reason other than not being Catholic.
If you want to bend a knee to a foreign dictator, that is your choice. I only bend mine to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
As always mainstrewam history is written by the winners.
The ONLY TRUE PARADOX of such a preposterous Serbian tale is how such a millenia old superior civilisation has stagnated or even backwarded linguistically in contrast with the “newer” Hellenic (but based at least partially on common Pelasgian, Carian, etc ancestors) that leaped forward in less than two millenia and then once again (when combined with Orthodoxy) did even more of the same.
King Edward died on January 5, 1066. One year and one day after his death, on January 6, 1067, the Roman Catholic William the Conqueror was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey.
Then began a terrible campaign of pillage and bloodshed by the Conqueror against the English people, which culminated in the pseudo-council of Winchester in 1070, when papal legates deposed the Orthodox Archbishop Stigand, who had refused to crown William, and placed the Roman Catholic Lanfranc in his place.
On October 15, 1072, the last English Orthodox bishop, Ethelric of Durham, after anathematizing the Pope, died in prison at Westminster, and the grace of the priesthood left the English land, in accordance with King Edward’s prophecy.
Yes, the sex-mutilation “trans” mania is proof that the collapse of Christianity in Western Europe has meant the desolation of civilization. The absence of all standards, even of basic sanity. As Copin-Albancelli said: “all moral forces having ceased to exist, all material forces will have been shattered by that same cause. Sheep do not resist the sheep-dog trained to drive them and possessing strong jaws”
Of course the Jews are behind it. This character claims to be against the conspiracy of the Jews, but I only really see anti-Zionist content.
This line about Christianity being Jewish might as well come from the Jews themselves: “your religion comes from us” – And then if you start quoting the Gospels and the Church Fathers, they’ll recoil or say you don’t know the context or say it was added later. It is transparent.
Nietzsche would say Christianity was Jewish, with the idea of pushing the odium of the Jews on the Christians, while at the same time wishing death on the all the antisemites. What was the motive for this? Was it not to seek the approval of Jews, with the hope of fame, even the hope of posthumous fame? To seek the approval of Jews but to blacken Christianity. That was the goal. In this case, the goal seems to be to chase “antisemites” away from Christianity and to chase Christians away from “antisemitism.” That is crucial to the Jews, without a political right-wing that collaborationist with the Jews and a Left-wing that is wholly inimical to Christian Civilization and the Western heritage they cannot achieve their political goals through appeals to the masses.
This author purports to be a strong anti-Zionist and anti-judaic, and yet what is accomplished with these silly Anti-Christian rants? He is trying to establish credibility for himself with non-Christians? Highly doubtful. He wants to spread “the truth” about the Catholic religion? Recall that Jack Chick was funded by the Jew Avro Manhattan. Is the motive related to his apparent Moonie University degree? He derogates the Mass but does he not understand the role of liturgical music in the development of Western music? Can someone claim to have any conception of the development of Western music and not understand that even the written staff that the notes are written on originates with the liturgical music? What a stupid remark he made about the Mass, as if musical diversion can supplant the spiritual or “psychological” function of prayer and worship? As if Western music did not develop to accompany prayer and contemplation? The insane and stupid music of the 20th Century (obviously it’s not all stupid, but it’s a general trend) are symptomatic of a collapse of the emotional depth expressed with solemnity – not always with solemnity, and yet, without the emotional depth of solemnity, the light and airy has nothing to float over, the emotional intensity has no sincere gravity. Some Chinese hussy Yuja Wang exposes skin at the keyboard and this is celebrated, today.
And for our author here, posing as an Anti-Zionist anti-judaic conspiracist, it is obvious he responds to posts on this board with anti-Christian and anti-Catholic rants as if he is employed for that purpose, and his anti-Zionism could be the conspiracism of a Leftist. Where is his conspiracism from the Rightist point of view? The only appropriate point of view for a conspiracist, since the Jews are behind the Left.
The Notre Dame de Paris cathedral fire was a good litmus test.
Those who were indifferent to it have no loyalty to Western Civilization or white people, at all, either that or they have a pathological failure to appreciate monumental architecture.
Those who recognize the probability of intentional arson by people who hate the Catholic religion and Christianity (and at the very least a state-sponsored cover-up of the perpetrators – the media NEVER acknowledging even the possibility of an intentional fire) are actually conspiracy minded and awake to what is going on in the world, as opposed to being asleep.
Didn’t the Freemasons usurp the identity of operative masons with the notion that they were responsible for the Order in Stone – themselves and the Pythagoreans, it had nothing to do with the expression of Christian belief of the people?
We know what they did during the French Revolution to the Churches. And for whom? Who ended up with the assignats? Who controls France today. THE JEWS.
But it was the Catholic Church that is to blame, and our civilization and genius has nothing to do with the Catholic religion! No, it was the rebirth of the Greco-Roman civilization! This is childish but it is also a brazen lie and a dangerous lie, one that has been propounded for generation after generation. By those who have established this Jewish system in the Western world.
God is the reason you exist and the reason you have had any happiness on earth
Your time on earth is a blink of the eye compared to eternity but you have no gratitude for the numerous times and myriad ways you have been blessed
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/never-failing-present-boethius-on-gods-eternity/
You’ve a debt that can never be paid but you could at least be a little thankful or spend eternity suffering along with Satan and comparing notes with him about how God is not greater than either of you and how God failed both of you and how He is unjust
You and your stupid posts fill me with a desire to see all Serbs rounded up into camps and exterminated. Perhaps it could be said you’re doing God’s work, because “God” it is well known, is a Serbian word. Like all other words in English and all other languages it originated in Serbian.
The dirty stinking Serbs and the negroes (“negro” comes from the Serbian “negro” which means “negro”) should fight it out for the “We Wuz Kangs” Trophy. “Kangs” is of course the ancient Serbian term for “super-kewl”. Don King and Martin Luther King both had Serbian ancestry.
Is it ignorance or is it paid hackwork, or a collaborative effort with characters possibly of the same milieu as Bronze Age Kike Faggot?
It’s certainly not motivated by a desire to inform. It seems more like some sort of reactive bull-horn type of blast right at the top of the page to redirect readers (who may have started to question the judeo-masonic education/propaganda system view) back towards an absurd “Black Legend” view of European Christendom and its history.
The Anti-Christians (given a platform by Jews, like Jack Chick was given a platform by Avro Manhattan) are true fanatics in the way they almost never give their hobby horses a rest, and it’s hard to see how someone can ride such a hobby horse without seeing the incongruity of blasting Europe’s Christian heritage with crude and sophomoric propaganda while claiming to be an Anti-Zionist with an abhorrence of the Jewish religion.
This is certainly not the general dogma of every Christian sect. Natural Reason establishing the existence of God is Catholic doctrine.
This is proof of either 1) Jefferson’s senility 2) Jefferson’s dilettante’s ignorance. 3) Jefferson writing something with the intention of deceiving future generations into believing a falsehood regarding Christian doctrine.
As for Revelation existing, if God is a Spirit, would He be incapable of revealing himself to man? How could that be logical, that he would create Man with purpose and intent, yet take no active interest in Man, wholly abandoning him to Nature? If God is a spirit with mind and intention, a powerful Creator of the world, then how would it not show an inclination to atheism (or at least to reduce God to a kind of impersonal, almost mechanistic being) to scoff at all accounts of Divine Revelation?
Of course, this is taking his words at face value, and without context it is difficult to say what he is actually trying to communicate. Jefferson and Adams were more likely writing for “posterity” than trying to persuade each other of anything, at all.
Of course, it is highly doubtful that Thomas Jefferson wrote the main body of the Declaration of Independence. The word “hath” is supposed to be hard to find in his writings, yet it would not be odd to see something pretentious like that written by a Quaker’s son, a fanatic like Thomas Paine. Jefferson was also a hate-filled fanatic, but not a ludicrous enthusiast like Paine, I’ll credit him with that.
écrasez l’infâme, eh, Laurent?
Gee Ogimos, If you want a good sermon, go to a protestant church; no one can give a righteous sermon like a protestant. All that history is written by the victors, isn’t it? What did the British Monarchy do to Ireland for hundreds of years? What are they doing now? Never heard of Cromwell? I mentioned William Cobbett’s history book, then there is “America’s Buried History of White Slavery” by Larry Romanoff. What do you have to say for that history? No matter, recognize the fact that the Protestant Reformation has been a colossal failure; you only have to look at the state of the unorderly, dangerous, liberal societies of the British Isles and America.
I have no doubt the catholic church was very corrupt back in those days.
But Evangelical Protestantism is Judaism for gentiles and has a heretical bible.
Iconography (which the Jews and the Muslims hate) is a big part of true christianity.
All the ancient early churches had ICONS like many ICONS. (Ethiopia, Turkey, Armenia, The holy land)
Also believers don’t pray to these ICONS. They are not gods. They are just pictures in remembrance of saints or people who did good things in life.
Here’s a video of an 1800 years old Church in Africa filled with pictures and ICONS.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BQr8x8v87D8
I’m not very religious more like an identity christian but most Evangelicals have no clue what christianity in the beginning of the faith was about. The word Jew didn’t exist 200 years ago. Another zionist invention, just like the Jehova’s witnesses and the Scofield Bible. What’s next ? Goat sacrifice ? A red heffa maybe or tricking god by killing some chickens. The Chosen ones are insane and Shitrahel is the biggest mental health institution on this planet
Faux. La Renaissance a commencé en Italie dès le XIVe siècle alors que la chute de Constantinople date de 1453.
You could be right that the church of Constantinople was the original church. I find it a very interesting hypothesis and there’s evidence for it all over. Example all the orthodox churches in Italy.
I had an interesting hours long talk with an Moldavian in an Irish Pub in Dublin 15 years ago who explained me that the crusades were not not about conquering lands from the Muslims but had as secret goal to destroy the Orthodox faith in the middle East to financially weaken Constantinople. The catholics in Rome back then simply didn’t saw the Arab Muslims as their greatest threat. And he claimed that it was the European white Hebrews aka Jews who also lobbied for that as they back then already had fantasies about Jerusalem. Most people don’t know this but the Arab Muslims NEVER conquered Catholic lands. Spain when it fell to the Arabs was NOT catholic but the Goth rulers applied to some form or Orthodoxy/arianism NOT to Rome so Spain was NOT a catholic country then. Sicily was NOT catholic when it was invaded but orthodox. The French who were devout Roman Catholics kicked the Muslims back to Spain with an enormous victory at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Nowadays the world looks upon French, Germans and Belgian as woke pacifists pussies who eat cheese and drink wine but back then they had the reputation of being the most feared and brutal warriors on the planet together with the English. So the Pope launched a crusades with the mission to go to Palestina and kill all the brown infidel muslims perfectly knowing that 99 % of the French, Germans, Belgians and English caucasian catholic warriors (who never saw a brown person before) would slaughter many Eastern Orthodox Christians and that this would cause the Eastern Orthodox to rebel against the catholics invaders. As i already highlighted the French, Belgians and English back then weren’t that sophisticated. Without books and the internet in a world without migrants, no foreigners would you see the difference between an Arab Muslim and an Arab Christian? Syria The Holy Land Turkey even Egypt, Algeria were then at least 80 % christian orthodox if not more although the rulers were Muslim. The crusaders were great fighters but extremely low educated poor very white europeans, and the christians of the East had very different customs so they killed or mistreated many of them(no doubt assuming they were muslim). Heads why the Egyptian Orthodox Church choose Muslims rule over the Christian Crusader states(bad choice in the end, i have no doubt they regret it). Then there’s the fact that Rusland a great power was Orthodox and there were orthodox Churches all over Poland Czech Republic, Slovakia, Eastern Europe in those days. Constantinople before the crusades had several Mosques outside it gates and they made a lot of money via trade with the Muslim rulers in the far east. The Crusades blocked this trade and weakened Constantinople several times. The vicious attacks on Muslim looking people was no doubt a trigger for many Eastern Orthodox Arab Christians to convert to Islam. The 3 or fourth crusade destroyed Constantinople, robbed it of all its gold and glory and paved the way for the Turkish invasion. The Ottomans conquered many Catholic lands but the Arab Muslims NEVER did. When they tried to invade catholic France with a huge army the French totally kicked their asses in Tours in 732 and they never tried again. Spain became Catholic via the reconquista but at its origin it was Orthodox and loyal to Constantinople.
Maybe you are the fuckwit.
Clearly you know nothing about the subject of music.
“The British have always had a delusional sense of self-importance, and unfortunately, it has not diminished with the fall of their Empire. ”
It could be because they are islanders.
Like the Japanese.
Most islanders feel superior to mainlanders.
I do believe, that is I read that a particular Crusade did indeed sack Constantinople; copied and paste thusly;
‘Constantinople was sacked in 1204 by a crusade, specifically the Fourth Crusade, led by Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, and the Venetians.’
The Venetians were unscrupulous bankers, usurers, and interlopers, controlling vast spy networks, controlling organs of smugglers, hating both the Church and the nation-state. This maritime power eventually moved to the Netherlands and on to London.
Read; ‘Venice’s War Against Western Civilization’, Webster Tarpley.
Is that why the Code of Justinian puts the Bishop of Rome at the head of the Church?
The Visigothic Kingdom was officially Catholic from 587. That’s an amusing designation “Orthodoxy/arianism” that you’ve come up with.
Italy was under Byzantine rule, but you need to understand that the Greeks did not really feel threatened by Rome or the Pope during the Dark Ages, the Great Schism had not happened yet, and the Greeks recognized the Pope as the head of the Church. To disagree with this, you would really need to believe in an alternative chronology or have a crazy idea that more or less all the records are forged.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13535a.htm
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm
And you believe this based on what?
The Crusades occurred because after the Battle of Manzikert the Byzantine Empire was a spent force. Had the Crusades not occurred it’s final collapse might have occurred sooner.
The Crusades were waged against Turks
In this link there’s a map captioned: “The Seljuk Empire at its Greatest Extent.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Seljuk_wars
You can see in this article that the early Crusades had a large role in helping to restore the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire. At the time of the First Crusade even Nicaea was under the control of the Turks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire_under_the_Komnenos_dynasty
You need to understand that when you’re dealing with pseudo-historians, characters like HG Wells and the typical flippant Anglo or Greek bigot, you’re dealing with people who have little knowledge and often no genuine interest in the truth.
The Latins who had helped to restore the Byzantine Empire and who were living in its capital were massacred in 1182.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Latins#:~:text=The%20Massacre%20of%20the%20Latins,the%20city%20in%20April%201182.
The fate of Constantinople in 1204 was the result of the Anti-Latin faction in the city deciding to overthrow the pro-Crusader Emperor while the Crusading armies were under its walls.
You are laboring under delusions foisted on you by hundreds of years of British and Anti-Catholic propaganda.
The characters today who want to trample on the legacy of Christendom are rather late to the party, but they are performing an obligatory function and ritual in our Jew dominated society.
Unbiased history of the Catholic Church inevitably leads to the awareness of the development of the judeo-masonic power in contemporary society. To keep the people in ignorance of who rules them, especially the evangelical Protestants in America, there is a constant refrain of the horrors of the Crusades, even to our day. When Rev. Hagee goes to the well for the Jews, he laments the Crusades. Laurent Guyenot is either a fool or he is writing propaganda for money. One thing is for sure, the effect of writings such as his is to
1) Discourage and drown those who adhere to the traditional anti-conspiracy narrative, a consistent, common sense view of the judeo-masonic power that was well-established by the early to mid 20th Century, going back to the well and riding the hobby horse of Anti-Catholicism to attempt to confuse evangelical Protestants about the Jewish power in recent centuries and in our day.
2) By identifying as a very strong Anti-Zionist and Anti-Christian and promoting crackpot theories, to push Christians away from Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism.
An effort at cognitive Infiltration.
Barefoot, look at your twin brother, the Albanian goat-botherer in #176. I understand the frustration of you who can’t find a single mistake in my comments that goes so far as to say that all Serbs should be rounded up into camps and exterminated.
However, between the lines you confirm that the Pelasgians and the Carians (Herodotus’ father) were not Greeks. They couldn’t have been because they gave them that name much later and it’s obvious that you don’t like using it either, so instead of that Serbian word you use another Serbian word – Hellenic.
When did the (future) Greeks come to Europe? That’s important so that we can assess the correctness of some of Laurent’s views.
Churlz the Insufferable ( French: The Charlemagne) was selected and groomed by the Vatican to destroy the Lombards mercilessly attacking the Vatican at the time. He was recommended by the Venetian bankers, as the most trusted surety for the loans they extended to Vatican for that purpose. An impulsive knuckle-head he was known in Venice however as the Useful Idiot. The Lombards were indeed expunged, and from there Churlz was pushed to also expunge the Saxons, and then to brutally subvert the entire Europe into Vatican’s inalienable colony, by infecting Europe with Ourdemocracy (Latin for “religion”): the “Departments of Education” (the “universities”) producing an army of loyal officers (the “Lawyers”), mandatory extermination for the stubborn (the “rules based order”), Jesus vaccine for the intelectually impaired ( the “pagans”), and, of course, the holy taxes, to pay back their Venetian loans.
Charlemagne was eventually whacked by the JFK syndrome, when he found out that he was mercilessly exploited, and refused to pay the holy taxes.
Pathetic hogwash. Neither Christianity, nor Jewity are religions. They are nom de plume of a unique biological genotype, each. Same as Ab-El and Ka-In, repectively. Meaning, that you either have that specific “it”, or you do not. You can’t have both, else an acute case of schizophrenia develops when the hormones hit.
Religion is a matter of an exclusively personal choice, like meat-and-potatoes, versus vegan. Or starvation for the Protestants, and the Atheists.
Mazel Tov
There is a large body of pretty mainstream research which finds all kind of “odd things” about intelligence, social class and health among other things.
Take a look at Ed Dutton’s Substack/YouTube videos (not just his YouTube site where he parsimoniously cuts them short, while begging for money (in typically English fashion). Dutton does original research in Sociobiology but is mainly a populariser.
Wonderful.
Raised by hippies, my favorite books were a Time-Life series on mythology, with the Greek and Roman volumes being the faves. Whereas reading the OT for the first time in 2016-2017 as an adult I discovered an abomination whose implications took about five years to really sink in. Guyenot and Atzmon have been invaluable guides on the path towards the neo-Marcionite, post-Episcopalian spirituality I now follow, substituting Greco-Roman and Nordic Myth for the OT, with Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Bach increasingly replacing Byrd and the Tallis Scholars during my little Sunday morning services on the kitchen island with Cash the Havana Brown as my witness and brother in Christ bringing presence. ✝️
Eternally grateful for the work of this author, bringing light and truth into the late imperial and Judeo-Christian darkness all around us. Plus comment #1 about the cats! ☮️🎯🙌
All correct. In his time, the ancestors of the Panzers crossed the Rhine and entered present-day Germany, taking it from the natives (Saxons) and committing genocide against them. They even established the Limes Sorabicus (‘Serbian border’) with the intention of pushing the natives of Germany and Europe even further east.
I would bet that I’ve forgotten more about music than you’ll ever know. Let’s check your taste. Favourite composer, period, work, artist, violinist, pianist, choral work, for starters. Off the top of your head, mind you. NO going to Grok for answers.
Ah, yes, the fallacy of unchangeability. We have eight billion now, only a few million dying of starvation per year, and that must, naturally, it being Catholic dogma, go on for ever and ever, amen. Pity.
Unfortunably, the laws of ecology allow for no perpetuation of unsustainable situations, such as that in which we exist. Of course, for some bizarre reason, ‘sustainability’ is a swear word and anathema for all good Rightists. The only other state possible is unsustainability, there being no ‘middle ground’ save ‘slowly unsustainable’ or ‘rapidly’. And that is mass death, but I guess that’s just more soldiers for your Heavenly Host. Malthus was correct, but he just got the time-line wrong. The debacle has already commenced.
LOL.
The Catholic sect split from Christianity in 1054 and organized itself as a mafia organization that has remained to this day.
The Serbian tribe of the Vandals practiced Arianism in their kingdom in what is now Tunisia after crossing Gibraltar from Spain. They ruled the Mediterranean until the Serbian emperor Justinian (who issued the Justinian Code – i.e. Roman law) sent his Serbian general Belisarius, who defeated the Vandals and annexed their kingdom to the Roman Empire.
It was a Serbian civil war, just as Justinian’s unsuccessful attempt to prevent the formation of an independent Serbian state in the Balkans in the 13-year war was also a civil war.
PS: For dummies – Trojan battle was also a Serbian civil war.
Actually, the first sack of Constantinople took place two and a half centuries before, in 1204. It was perpetrated by crusaders who pretended to be going to the Holy Land. The trooth is that they were hired by the Venetian merchants and bankers to destroy the Second Rome and thus provide Venice a monopoly in the Mediterreanian trade. Many educated Romans fled Constantinople for Italian cities, bringing the knowledge and the skills hitherto unknown there. Not surprisingly, in the following dekades first Italian universities were established, the style of painting and sculpture changed (did somebody mention the horses of st. Mark’s stolen from Constantinople?), and the industries of silk and glass were established in Florence and Venice. The resulting boost of the level of civilizational in the peninsula was nicknamed “the Renaisaince”, although the term “the pillage of wealth and knowledge” would be more appropriate.
The secret goal of the crusades was to take hold of Jerusalem and Mount Tabor for the expected end of the world, which was to be about 5000 year in Jewish calendar, 1240 in Christian calendar. After the end of the world did not come, external help to Outremer was cut off which meant end to the Christian rule there, Jerusalem being lost already in 1244.
Today the crusaders were replaced by the zionists, which means we are due for another end of the world event. Will it come? More likely than in 1240! Remember: every failed end of the world brings us closer to the real end of the world!
And all the tumult around Palestine is a strong argument for the existence of God, isn’t it?
I absolutely agree that the role of Arabs/Muslims in “preserving” the great written works of ancient Greeks/Romans, supposedly forgotten by Europeans during the “Dark” Ages, is overrated.
Interesting play on words/letters that the English words “pagan” came from the Serbian word “pogan”. Did the English word “God” originate from the Serbian word “gad”, which is not very complimentary? But then you should look at the origin of many of these Serbian words that you bring up as maybe they originated from some other languages.
Unfortunately, clicking on the bold letters in the essay links back to the essay itself rather than the depiction of the Vitruvian Man (L’uomo vitruviano) drawing. A high resolution image that provides essential details is available at Wikipedia. Since a miniature version of this drawing is embossed on every Italian one-euro-coin it is worth understanding its significance in a broader context. In comments at this web site I have referred to the Vitruvian Man drawing twice, most recently at the end of last year (December 28, 2024 at 9:30 am GMT):
I shall now expand upon this subtle yet basic observation. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing hints at a daring transition from a strictly Greek artistic conception of the male body, especially with it modestly diminutive phallus, toward a distinctly phallocentric frame of reference. It should be noted that realistic (rather than exaggerated) depictions of an erect human phallus, though uncommon, were no longer taboo. However, male sculptures highlighting this feature were impractical because the shaft sculpted in a state of arousal could easily be broken off. The famous Neptune fountain in the center square in Bologna by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna cleverly circumvented this potential predicament by allowing the horizontal boner of the Roman god of the sea, Neptune, who stands at the top, to be seen only from below at a specific rear angle, as an optical illusion. An image from this viewpoint is embedded in a comment within a parallel thread at this site:
https://www.unz.com/article/grok-3-agrees-that-white-european-men-are-responsible-for-almost-all-the-greatest-human-accomplishments/#comment-7033500
Furthermore, in the context of an outstretched male body, in the form of the letter X within a circle, the navel was perceived to be as its center. Both of these points are highlighted in the following drawing, by the Renaissance painter and architect Cesar Cesariano, who in 1530 published an illustrated edition (1300 copies) of Vitruvius’ aesthetic principles:
Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing incorporates this aspect but then “squares the circle” by showing that the ideal male body, while standing with legs together and hands stretched out horizontally, as in the letter T, thereby forms a perfect square, in which the base of the phallus is at its center, hence the descriptive terms centerpiece and phallocentrism. Unlike in Cesariano’s drawing, the erect phallus points forward slightly above a horizontal level, as was also later the case in Neptune’s fountain in Bologna.
Just as the body proportions depicted by da Vinci – with knee height one quarter from the bottom and nipples of the chest one quarter from the top – represent the ideal configuration, so must then also its centerpiece, representing the fountain of life, have the ideal length. Though this cannot be seen from a frontal view, it can be inferred that it must be sufficiently long, and correspondingly heavy, so that pointing skyward might be impractical due to the effects of gravitational leverage. It is axiomatic that the putatively perfect length of the elevated male centerpiece pointing straight forward is expressed as an ideal ratio relative to its owner’s body height, which will be assigned the number 1.
Imitating nature inevitably brings us to the Italian mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa (circa 1170 – 1250), also known as Fibonacci, who introduced mathematical concepts previously known in India and Euclidian geometry from Greece in a book, Liber Abaci, in the year 1202. The Fibonacci sequence is evident in natural (optimized) growth patterns, for instance the arrangement of tree branches, leaves, or seeds. The ratio of two sequential Fibonacci numbers, as n goes to infinity, equals the Golden Ratio, φ (phi), which was regarded by ancient Greeks as a measure of beauty and completeness in art and architecture.
Wikipedia – Fibonacci sequence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence
Using the Pythagorean theorem pertaining to the diagonal length of a rectangle with a 2:1 ratio (two squares side-by-side), phi equals half the square root of five plus one half.
φ = (1/2) + (1/2)√5 = 1.6180 (rounded)
In the context of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man depiction, the ideal phallus length is easily obtained by taking a drawing compass, with the center (needle) at half the height of the left vertical of the square and the end (pen) at the bottom right corner of the square, then drawing an arc to bisect with the horizontal median line that goes through the center of the square (tangency of centerpiece and pubic bone), and finally subtracting the length of one side of the square. Expressing this result more simply in numbers, relative to body height:
Ideal Penile Length = φ – (Body Height + Penile Height) = φ – 1.5 = 0.1180 = 11.80%
This value can be empirically corroborated by utilizing contemporary statistical data. Since most men do not attain this naturally perfect referential standard of length, to be defined as 1 or 100%, they must express their own measured value as a percent of this ideal, for instance when advertising themselves in online dating applications. If they want to claim to be a “Renaissance Man” then their personal visual virility number better be very close to 100%. Of course, in accordance with ubiquitous practice, as shown in da Vinci’s drawing and all sculptures and paintings from the Renaissance, this necessarily requires having intact foreskin, while “Renaissance Women” will have a smooth pubic mound with no hair.
Synthesizing two pretentious phrases attributed to notable Jewish extremists, Yitzhak – Gruenbaum – Shamir (“One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland“) and Rabbi Yaacov Perrin speaking at the funeral of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein (Even one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail) one could correspondingly make the following bold claim to epitomize the natural phallocentric centerpiece as an integral aesthetic element of artistic Renaissance genius and style:
“One intact adult foreskin is worth more than all the mutilated dicks in Judea.”
Only half correct
Italian Rome is the Second Rome
See the articles by First Millenium Revisionist
Thanks Mike!
According to this idiotic genius, the Serbs are the infallible race and their language is the primordial one.
You shot the wrong poster.
Check and repost.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’m only a few pages into it, but what I’ve read is very good.
The First Millennium Revisionist is no other than Mr. Guyenot. He gets everything wrong.
Maybe you should write a rebuttal if you think you know it better.
I did it several times, like a significant number of readers who definitely ‘know it better‘ than Mr. Guyenot’s ‘‘Marcionite’‘ fictional history of the Church.
In reference to The First Millennium Revisionism trash, the outstanding historian of the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in early medieval canon law and the phenomenon of medieval forgery, Eric Knibbs has completely demolished the premises of Fomenko-Heinsonism fraud appropriated by Mr. Guyenot.
Huh, Anna(cath)alena Nazi girl and Big Mike in a duet?
Nazi girl is frustrated because she doesn’t have a chance to find a single mistake in my comments.
So the question is about pagans.
That’s definitely not an English, German, or French word. Could be Latin, Greek or Serbian.
Laurent says – Latin. And it means something like peasants, country people? That might have been an insult in the 20th century (already in this century, after Covid, it’s no longer offensive to live in the countryside and do agriculture) but certainly not 1000-15000 years ago when almost everyone was rural.
So, someone please explain the Latin origin of that word if they can (Latin is a young, artificial, church and non-spoken language) or prove that the (very offensive) version in #168 is not true.
If a courageous scholar debunks the mainstream theory, then you will see many Eric Knibbs’s shrieking that this is merely “revisionist” and “false” and “denial”.
It is exactly the same with Holocaust revisionism.
So the shrieking of many Eric Knibbs’s is expected.
You are an idiot.
Yes, biology dictates much, but has been largely banned from public discourse. It’s complications are too hard to manage, or some such.
But it’s reality marches on.
They used to hunt apatosauruses, don’t you know.
Nazi trio? Wow! Shouldn’t you be chasing dingoes around the outback so they don’t fart too much and create ozone holes over Uluru? Uncle (Santa) Claus won’t be impressed. By the way, when did the Chinese come to what is now China and where did they come from? Don’t imitate the Greeks and Panzers who have no idea about it themselves.
I’m sure it will come as a surprise to you but Christian or not in the land of the Renaissance those who live north of the Alps are to this day considered barbarians and continuously prove this whenever they visit Italia. A limited exception can be made for the French.
I’m sure this will come as an enormous surprise to you but … to this very day (2025) the people whose ancestors created the Renaissance consider Europeans who live north of the Alps Barbarians. (A exception with reservations is made for some French.)
They prove their nature everytime they invade Italia, at times to make war and at times to play the tourist.
Christianity did not civilise the Barbarians, it simply gave them new ways to visit the world with death and destruction … The Crusades as an example among hundreds.
First, we need to explain the true meaning of the term barbarian, which is different from the modern interpretation.
“Music is the language of the gods.”
How true! Only Islam, of all great religions be it mono or poly deitistic, abhors the idea of music, in essence arts themselves, to its own detriment. How ungodly is that belief… repulsive no doubt.
In the 700s when Charlemagne drove the Muslim invaders our of France Venice didn’t have bankers. It was still a small not important city and metro area. Charlemagne died a natural death
I knew I shouldn’t have opened any Gueynot thread. Even it has a Catholic art illustration
Italy has far worse problems today with the African and Muslim barbarian invasion than it ever had with European tourists.
So Guyenot didn’t make up the idea that the Gregorian calendar was created some unknown time between 400 and 600 instead of 1582? They even plagiarise their lies Just like Joe Sobran plagiarized his fantasy that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays from other liars.
The Protestant Reformation was indeed a counter-Renaissance. But it was foreshadowed in the career of Savonarola in Florence. His bonfires of the vanities destroyed unforgivable amounts of great art. He destroyed the wonderful mix of paganism and Christianity that had developed during the 15th century. He was thankfully hanged and burned by the Church in 1498, but the fatal virus had been released.
Therefore in my opinion, the art of the period 1450 to 1500 is the high point of Renaissance art. After this, the arts get technically more advanced, but a certain gloom is spreading over them. This includes even Michelangelo and Raphael (the Pre-Raphaelites were right!). The wings of the arts were clipped by Christianity, and especially Protestantism.
The greatness of Greece was not its supposed rationality, even though it can be handy of technical development, but its valuation of greatness, heroism and beauty.
‘Humanism’ is the result of a rape of the pagan Goddess by marauding Christians..
I’ve never noticed a German Scandinavian British appearance person lurking around tourist areas and the big downtown train stations and bus terminals robbing begging and threatening
Just Africans Arabs Gypsies blacks and browns.
I expect you to do the same with farting dingoes.
https://au.yahoo.com/news/confronting-photo-of-roadside-fence-highlights-cunning-invasive-killer-035843991.html
Galileo spent his last years in peace, but Antoine Lavoisier died by guillotine, executed by the the progressive Frog government in 1794. The spirited, thuggish atheists dismissed his scientific achievements as grounds for clemency, since that kind of scientist was of no use to the farsighted Revolution.
You misread. It is certainly NOT “possible to prove the rotation of the Earth by dropping things and precisely measuring where they fall”. That was merely an intellectual argument – which cannot be shown to apply to reality. Everything in that situation is in the same frame of reference – rotation of Earth or no rotation of Earth – doesn’t matter.
The Birth of Venus.
Who was Venus, the goddess of love and femininity? A replica of the Greek Aphrodite.
Who was Aphrodite? A replica of a much older, original goddess from European indigenous (Serbian) mythology – Priya.
Priya was taken from Europe by Aryans to India and is still a popular female name there (Priyanka Chopra). The Nordic variant of Priya is Freya.
Priya(telj) is a Serbian word that is still in use and denotes (special) friends, e.g. the parents of the groom and the bride address each other in this way.
The image at the top of this essay shows her in Florence. Tens of thousands of years ago she was fat, but now she is slender, fashionably dressed, yet distinctly Italian. This notion was highlighted in a tourism campaign two years ago, under the new Meloni regime, but of course some self-proclaimed leftists were critical – probably jealous.
Here are four of the more popular images of the contemporary Venus, on a bicycle in Rome, eating a pizza at Lake Como, taking a selfie in Venice, and so on:
Here she is sitting on famous tile steps at a town in Sicily, in seductive mode, prepared to flash her inner thighs if the right man might approach her with compliments:
Reclining on a boat off the coast of the luxurious island of Capri near Naples, she shows off her long legs:
For context, as Italians know, Venus also engages in self-indulgence and likes to masturbate, as shown in the following famous paintings, the first from around 1510, reclining before an Italian landscape while sleeping:
Wikipedia Image – Click on Icon
Venus of Urbino, painted by Titian in 1534, reclining in an Renaissance palace:
Wikipedia Image – Click on Icon
The lying Vénus was a popular theme, for which the following sculpture was formed in the early 19th century, on display in Montpellier:
Wikipedia Image – Click on Icon
The Greek version arose from the sea near the western town of Paphos (Πάφος) on the island of Cyprus; here is a sculpture:
Found near Vienna, the figurine Venus of Willendorf is said to be roughly 30 thousand years old, obviously predating the Serbian Vinca culture by many thousands of years:
Wikipedia Image – Click on Icon
From the goddess Priya the male equivalent Priapos was derived in Greek mythology. He is depicted with an oversized centerpiece.
You are so naive. The Venus of Willendorf is just a marketing name and she is a figurine of the natives of Europe. Vinča was just the peak of European ancient civilization and Serbian genes have been in Europe since the beginning, 36,000 years old. Couldn’t WW be the work of proto-Germans? At the peak of the Ice Age (about 20,000 years ago), almost all Europeans lived in Vincha.
Greek instant mythology? Created in just a hundred or so years after the arrival of the Greeks in Europe. or was it taken over by the natives? Tell us when they came to Europe and where they brought the Olympic mythology from. Take a look at the figurines from Vinča, there are thousands of them. There is (maybe) the root of your civilization, culture, mythology and language.
More priapism from our favourite priapism.
It is not known how many Europeans were living during that time, so your claim could be an exaggeration. Many remaining artifacts have yet to be discovered and new insights gained, but it is understood that there were “cultures” throughout Europe during the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. For instance, the Gravettian culture, of which the Venus figurines were an artistic manifestation, also existed in Iberia, as did the Magdalenian culture and the later Gravettian culture during the ice age, at which period this southwestern European region was a refuge location from the encroaching ice. The Wikipedia article linked to below highlights some figurines in the picture gallery, including the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, found in the Moravian Basin, not so far from where the Venus of Willendorf was found.
Gravettian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravettian
Still, Lepenski Vir and Vincha were the earliest urban settlements in Europe that have been discovered so far.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9761025/haunting-faces-rocks-ancient-europeans-8000-years-ago/
Culture in the modern sense dates back to the end of the Ice Age (10-12K BC). This does not mean that the beginning of human life dates back to that time. There is nothing special (e.g. genetics) related to the Lepenski Vyr and Vinca, it is just that their microclimate around the Danube was favorable for the survival of the human species, while the rest of Europe was ice-bound.
True, it is not that simple, there is something deeper there, but I will save that for more advanced classes. I hope you will progress to that level. Until then, enjoy a beautiful Serbian waltz from the source of European civilization, culture, language and mythology (which may also be yours):
The primary remnants of that culture – pottery, figurines, jewelry – are now in museums, but there are no major structures that I am aware of at that site from its early period. However, in contrast to that location, the remains of the Megalithic Temples of Malta, dating back roughly as far back as 3600 BCE, which I have visited, mainly on the western side of the main island, are certainly more impressive. They predate the settlement of Knossos on the northern side of Crete, which I have also visited many years ago. Obviously, Malta and Crete are islands that were spared the effects of the ice age and are considered to be European too. In Mnajdra there is evidence of astronomical awareness, similarly to Stonehenge, which was erected later. Incidentally, Maltese is the only Semitic language in Europe.
Wikipedia – Mnajdra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnajdra
All megaliths are the work of ‘I2’ genetics, which almost half of Serbs have. The Vinča culture, which stretched to Crete. Stonehenge was also the work of ‘I2’ genetics. What does the word Druids mean?
According to Wikipedia, the etymology derives from Gaulish Celts during the Roman period. I find it peculiar – a fantastical overreach – that you are pretending that European culture at its core is somehow essentially Serbian even though this language was nor codified until the 19th century, words in that language were borrowed from other cultures, and the Serbian Empire itself, centuries before that, was an amalgam of different dialects spoken by various ethnic groups, including Macedonians. When alluding to Serbian genes, whatever that may mean, at this point they must have been significantly diluted by Asiatic and African admixture after nearly half a millennium of Ottoman rule. If you want to reach further back in time, more than two thousand years, it would make more sense to simply refer to Illyria or Dardania.
Your lack of knowledge is close to catastrophic. Druids are older than the arrival of the Yamnaya nomads (and Celts) from the Russian steppes to Europe. You clearly have no idea about languages. Macedonians? Lol. Illyrians and Dardanians? Much better. Then you know that Constantine, Diocletian, Justinian and a few dozen others were Serbs.