Chapter 7 6. The purity of life

Here is a little math problem that is not extraneous. Wind a rope into a circle, as shown in the figure: The diameters of the circles are of course equal. AB=CD=EF=GH, and so on. But a slight tug on either side of the rope turns the circle into an oval, disrupting the perfect balance and throwing the diameters into chaos. A few line segments, such as AB and EF, were greatly shortened, while others, especially CD, were lengthened. Now apply the math problem to history.For the sake of illustration, we first assume: AB is for politics CD stands for commercial EF is for art GH stands for military figure

I is perfectly balanced, with all lines being the same length and short, with a focus on politics that is roughly equal to business, art, and military. But in Diagram II (which is no longer a circle), commerce is favored, at the expense of politics and the arts being almost completely absent, and the military a little longer. Or make GH (Military) the longest line segment while the others tend to die out. This is the neat key to answering many historical questions. Try this Greek lock. The Greeks were also able to maintain a perfect circle in all walks of life for a short period of time.

But foolish quarrels between different political parties soon got out of hand, and endless civil wars drained the nation's energies.Soldiers are no longer used to defend the country against foreign invasion.They were ordered to fire on people in their country who had voted for another candidate, or wanted to bend the tax code a little bit. Commerce is the most important straight line in such circles, and when it feels its first straitjacket, at last it is completely cornered, and it flees to other parts of the world, where business is more stable. Poverty enters the city through the front door, and art slips out the back door, never to be seen again.Capital fled on the fastest ship within a hundred nautical miles.As intellectual pursuits become an expensive luxury, good schools can't keep up.The best teachers hurried to Rome and Alexandria.

The rest are second-class people who live by tradition and routine. It is all because the political line is out of proportion, the circle of balance is broken, and the other lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., all come to naught. If you apply the circle problem to Rome, you will find that the special line called "political power" keeps growing until it crowds out everything else, and the circle of glory of the republic disappears.All that remains is a thin straight line, which is the shortest distance from success to failure. Take another example.If you include the history of the medieval church into this math, here's what happens.

The earliest Christians struggled to keep the circle of behavior perfect.Maybe they ignore the diameter of science, but since they are not interested in life in this world, they may not be required to care much about medicine, physics or astronomy.They just want to be ready for the Last Judgment Day. This world is only an antechamber to heaven, and useful disciplines certainly have little appeal for them. Other devout followers of Christ, however, managed (albeit imperfectly) to live well, with industry, charity, generosity, and integrity. However, as soon as numerous small associations were united into a large organization, the new worldwide responsibilities and obligations ruthlessly destroyed the perfection of the original spiritual circle.Their beliefs were based on principles of poverty and selflessness, which half-starved carpenters and quarrymen found easy to abide by.But the heir to the Roman throne, the high priest of the Western world, and the wealthiest magnate on the whole of the Continent cannot live as little as the deacon in Pomerania or a Spanish provincial town.

In the terminology of this chapter, the diameters representing "secularity" and "foreign policy" have stretched too far, and the straight lines representing "humility," "poverty," "selflessness," and other basic Christian virtues have become impossibly short. My generation speaks of the ignorance of the Middle Ages with sympathy, knowing that they lived in darkness.Indeed, they lighted candles in churches, rested in the flickering light of the candles, had few books, and were ignorant of many things that are taught in elementary schools and higher mental institutions today.Knowledge and intelligence are two very different things though, and these good free folk were smart enough to build the political and social structures we still use today.

They seem to be helpless in the face of many vicious slanders against the church for a long time, so we should be merciful in our evaluation of them.They are at least full of confidence in their own beliefs, fighting to the end with what they think is wrong, putting personal happiness and comfort aside, and often ending their lives on the guillotine. Other than that we have no way of knowing. Indeed, few people died for their ideas in the first millennium AD.This is not because the church is less averse to heresy than it used to be, but because it has more important things to do with wasting time on relatively harmless dissidents.

First, in many parts of Europe, the god Odin and other pagan gods were still supreme. Secondly, something very bad happened, which almost brought the whole of Europe to its knees. This "bad thing" is that suddenly a new prophet named Muhammad appeared; a group of people followed a new God called "Allah", and they conquered West Asia and North Africa. The literature we read as children, full of tales of "pagan dogs" and the brutality of the Turks, impresses us with the idea that Jesus and Muhammad represent incompatible ideas. In fact, they are of the same race, speak the same dialect of the language family, both regard Abraham as the ancestor, and both trace back to the same ancestral home that stood on the shore of the Persian Gulf a thousand years ago.

The followers of the two masters are close relatives, but they glared and stared at each other. The war between them has been fought for twelve centuries, and it has not yet subsided. It is futile to speculate about "what ifs" now, but there was a time when Mecca, Rome's arch-enemy, came close to accepting Christianity. The Arabs, like all desert dwellers, spend a great deal of their time herding their livestock, and thus have ample time for silent prayer.City dwellers can cultivate their souls in the perennial joys of the country market, while herdsmen, fishermen, and farmers live solitary lives, lacking anything more practical than buzz and excitement.

The Arabs, looking for salvation, had tried several religions, but their clear preference was Judaism.The reason for this is simple, because Arabia is full of Jews.In the tenth century BC, a large number of subjects of King Solomon could not bear the heavy taxes and the ruler's arbitrariness, and fled to Arabia.Five hundred years later, in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar conquered the Jews, and a large number of Jews flocked to the southern desert for the second time. From this Judaism spread.The Jews only pursue the only true God, which coincides with the aspirations and ideals of the Arab tribes.

Anyone who has read Muhammad's writings knows that Medinit borrowed a lot of words of wisdom from the Old Testament. The descendants of Ishmael (buried with his mother Hykah in the Holy of Holies in the Jewish shrine in central Arabia) were not hostile to the ideas of the young reformers of Nazareth.Instead, Jesus said there is one God, the Father of all, and they eagerly believed it.They were unwilling to accept the so-called miracles that the followers of the Nazarene carpenter harped on.As for the resurrection, they simply don't believe it.Still, they leaned toward the new faith and were willing to give it a place. However, Muhammad suffered a lot at the hands of a group of fanatical Christians.The gang lacked judgment and accused him of being a liar and a false prophet before he could even open his mouth.This, together with the rapidly spreading belief that Christians were idolaters who believed in three rather than one God, finally caused the desert dwellers to turn their noses up at Christianity.They proclaim their love for the camel drivers of Medina, Because he only talked about one God, instead of bringing up three gods to confuse the public. Sometimes they merged into one God, and sometimes they were divided into three. It all depended on the situation at the time and the presiding priest's eyes. In this way, there are two religions in the Western world, both claiming to believe in the only true God, and both dismissing other gods as liars. These conflicts of opinion could easily lead to war. In 632 Muhammad died. In less than twelve years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt were successively conquered, and Damascus became the capital of the Great Arabian Empire. By the end of 656, the coastal countries of North Africa all regarded Allah as the leader of the kingdom of heaven. Less than a century after Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean became a lake for Muslims, and all communication between Europe and Asia was cut off. , until the end of the seventeenth century, the European continent was under siege. In such an environment, it was impossible for the church to spread its teachings to the East.All it can hope to do is preserve what has been achieved.It selected Germany, the Balkan countries, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Bohemia, and Hungary as fertile grounds for in-depth spiritual development, and it was generally successful.Occasionally, there are rebellious Christians like Charlemagne, who have a good heart, but are not civilized enough, and use violent means to slaughter the subjects who love their own God and reject foreign gods.However, Christian missionaries were mostly popular because they were honest and upright, and their preaching was simple and clear, easy to understand, and brought order, tidiness and kindness to a world full of bloodshed, fighting and highway robbery. There are frequent good news ahead, but disasters are happening within the church empire. (Using the mathematical concept at the beginning of this chapter) The secular line continues to lengthen, and finally the spiritual factors of the church become completely dependent on political and economic thought; although the growing power of Rome has a decisive influence on the development of the next twelve centuries, But there were signs of disintegration, and the wise men of the people and clergy saw it. Protestants in the north now regard the church as a house, which is empty six days out of seven, and people go to hear sermons and sing hymns every Sunday.We know there are bishops in some churches, and occasionally the bishops meet in town, and we are surrounded by a group of good-looking old gentlemen with their collars turned back.We learn from the papers that they have declared for dancing, or against divorce.Later, when they returned home, the life around them was still so peaceful and happy, without any worries. We now seldom associate this church (even if it is with us) with our life and death and all social activities. Government is of course completely different, it can take our money and kill us if it feels it needs to.The government is our owner, our master, but what is commonly called the "church" is a good and reliable friend, and it doesn't matter if we quarrel with it. But in the Middle Ages, things were very different.The church at that time was a very active organization that could be seen and felt, breathing and existing, and determined the fate of people in various ways that the government could never dream of.The first popes to accept lands from generous crown princes, and to abandon the age-old ideal of poverty, probably did not foresee the end to which this policy would lead.At first, it seemed benign and reasonable for a little mortal gift to be given to the descendants of Saint Peter by a loyal follower of Christ.But come to think of it, from John Grosse to Trebizond, from Carthage to Uprasa, there is a complex system of supervision and management, with thousands of secretaries, priests and scribes, plus There are hundreds of big and small leaders in various departments all over the world. They all need housing, clothing, and food.Then there was the cost of the courier across the continent, the travel of the diplomatic envoy to London one day and Novgrad the next, and the expense necessary to keep the papal courier in the best attire with the secular crown prince. Looking back at what the church stands for, and thinking about what would have happened if the environment had been better, this development is indeed a great regret.Rome soon became a huge state within a state, but the religious color was only left in fragments, and the Pope seemed to be the dictator of the world. Compared with him, the rule of ancient emperors seemed magnanimous. The Church's success was unstoppable, but at a certain point, obstacles arose that checked its ambitions for world domination. Once again, the true spirit of the Lord caused an uproar among the people, which is like a thorn in the side of any religious organization. Pagan believers have become commonplace. Wherever there is mono-faith rule that may cause opposition, there are dissenters.The strife, born on the same day as the Church, kept Europe, Africa, and West Asia hostile to each other for centuries. However, the bloody struggles between the Sabilees, Monofi, Manica, and Nestorians are not worth mentioning in this book.Generally speaking, all sects are rat-bellied, and the followers of Ares and the followers of Athena are both tyrannical and tyrannical, and they are the same breed. Moreover, these disputes have always revolved around very small fragments of theology, which are now gradually forgotten.I don't want to snatch these things from the grave again and waste time and energy starting a theological battle in this book.I write this to tell future generations about the ideal of intellectual freedom that our ancestors fought for at the cost of their lives, and to warn them not to follow the arrogant dogmatic attitude and arbitrariness that have led to two thousand years of painful disasters. But in the thirteenth century, the situation changed dramatically. Pagans were no longer just dissenting opponents, dogged by the mistranslation of individual words in the Book of Revelation or the misspelling of a letter of St. John. He grows up as a warrior, upholding the ideals for which a carpenter in a village in Nazareth died during the reign of Aurelius, and he poses as if he were the only true Christian.