• Introduction: how ancient ritualistic society changed to modern exploitative consciousness
• European History
The information presented herein is concise, serving as a framework for facts and figures. For our own purposes however, to actually understand the very mentality behind history makers, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s “Tattva-Viveka” and Suhotra Swami’s books, “The Dimensions of Good and Evil” and “Shadow and Substance”, contain material illuminating the main acts in History – which, stemming from religious belief, in turn influenced major historical transformations in philosophy, morality, science, social reforms, literature, and even religion itself.
In this way, the various ideologies and philosophical convictions in history are described, and compared with Vedic knowledge, according to a time line of events.
INTRODUCTION
Vedic tradition, the original spiritual knowledge and culture, was given by God, to mankind, at the beginning of creation.
The Puranas describe the state of perfect human life in Satya-yuga; everyone being situated in their natural constitutional position of service to God.
“In Satya-yuga there are no inferior human beings, and thus there is no need of secondary religious principles. Everyone directly takes to the unalloyed service of the Lord, fulfilling perfectly all-religious obligations. In Satya-yuga the undivided Veda is expressed by the syllable ‘Om’, and I am the only object of mental activities.” (SB11.17.11)
In Treta-yuga, as virtue declines by 25%, human society is more inclined towards secondary religious principles. Therefore, the process of meditation, the spiritual practice of Satya-yuga, is replaced by Vedic sacrifices – the process of engaging material elements as an offering towards the Supreme.
Srimad Bhagavatam states that in the course of Maharaja Pururava’s meditating on the means to be reunited with his beloved Urvasi, the Treta millennium began, and the principles of the three Vedas, including the process of performing yajna to fulfill fruitive activities, appeared within his heart.
Furthermore, due to an increase of material attachments and the propensity of lording it over material resources, the system of Varnasrama-dharma is introduced in human society to facilitate a peaceful co-existence with nature and fellow beings, under the guidance of Veda.
The great self realized sages and saintly kings, who are perfect human beings, are exemplary leaders of society. They are the natural link between God and greater humanity.
As virtue further declines 25% in the Dvapara-yuga, the process of self-realization is practiced through elaborated deity-worship. Global Vedic civilization remains due to saintly kings setting and following the standards of Vedic teachings.
Virtue further diminishes another 25% in Kali-yuga. The standards of Global Vedic society decline; leaders become polluted and establish their own dynasties around the world not matching the standards of purity.
How ancient ritualistic societies transform to modern exploitative consciousness, is described in a passage from the book “Dimensions of Good and Evil” by Suhotra Swami:
“With the start of Kali-yuga, five thousand years ago, ritual society gradually stagnated. There was a change in human consciousness that resulted from social upheaval in the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and the Mesopotamian Near East. These civilizations, like Vedic India, had long been ritual societies. ‘Ritual’ is a word that comes to us from the Vedic term åta (the real), which points to the higher cosmic and moral order, beyond human comprehension. Through ritual, societies of antiquity participated in the great universal sacrifice the demigods offer to the Supreme.
Around one thousand years BC, a new order emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia. At that time the stronger independent interests of artisans, craftsmen, farmers and traders wore down the older social norms that had been held together by the knowledge and power of priests and kings, who derived their authority from the divine past.
Egypt and the Near East...gave rise to a new society, which sprang into existence out of the ruined shell of the old. The new society brought with it new technology related to new perceptions of the cosmos. It required new ideas, because it was based on trade and, in part, on free labor. While reliance on authority may suit priesthood, it is a poor guide for an enterprising trader or craftsman. Instead, the merchant had to learn by observing the world around him—the winds and tides. And the free craftsmen learned by changing nature, by experimenting with new materials and methods.
Why did the priests and kings of these societies lose their power? In the age of Kali, the two varëas of leadership—the brähmaëas and the kñatriyas—degrade due to the growth of materialism in the hearts of all men. The same increase of materialism raised the two lower orders—the vaiçyas (farmers and merchants) and çüdras (craftsmen, artisans and workers) to exaggerated prominence. Sattvic culture declined, opening the way for the ascendance of sinful mleccha culture. This destabilized society and promoted quarrel.
It is thus evident that the trend toward mechanistic reductionism was historically nourished by the social preponderance of the vaiçya and çüdra mentality and the social instability of post-varëäçrama society.
The first Western attempt to philosophically reduce the world to simplicity began in Ionia. In this area of the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, Greeks established cities that embodied Kali-yuga philosophy and social values.
Ritual society was a sacred tradition revealed to man by demigods and sages. Ritual progress was the fourfold reward of dharma (religiosity), artha (material prosperity), käma (sensual enjoyment) and mokña (liberation from material existence).
The early Ionian reductionist society was based not on godly revelation but on human sensory observation of the physical world (pratyaksa). Progress was calculated in terms of artha and käma. What became of dharma and mokña, which extend the human mind toward goals beyond sense perception? The vaiçya system of values reduced that subject matter to numbers.”
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The section on Ancient Civilizations show how these cultures were originally based on one single tradition, but due to the influence of prominent individuals, and their influence on group consciousness, resulted in religious, philosophical, political and cultural change.
Ancient Civilizations
Vritti:
These ancient societies established themselves in the shadow of the Vedic culture, keeping the heritage to various degrees in the worship of deities. We have to point out that on its own, demigod worship is inferior. Kåñëa Himself says that it is avidhi-pürvakam—“performed with an improper understanding”. Proper understanding is that there is only One Supreme Personality of Godhead, the source of all. The demigods are different representatives of God, created and empowered by Him to perform particular universal functions. But representing God and being God, is not the same thing. The demigods are jéva souls, the servants of the Supreme Lord.
As Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur points out:
“The Supreme Lord is a principle without a second. If there were many Gods, this universe would have never been regulated so systematically. As each different God having their own various desires would conflict with each other and destroy the world. Any sane person will agree that this manifested universe has been created by the will of a single Supreme Personality.”
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Passages from the book “Dimensions of good and evil” (ch.16), author Suhotra Swami:
“At one point, though, something that India rejected took hold in the West: Zoroastrianism. Here we find both the tie that binds the Western religious tradition and the Vedic heritage, as well as the point at which they departed from one another.
Zoroastrianism is an ancient doctrine of dualism propagated in Persia (now called Iran, from the Sanskrit aryan) at some unknown date by the prophet Zarathushtra. As a religious faith Zoroastrianism is almost extinct. But its concept of dualism lives on in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The teaching of Zarathushtra was not unknown in ancient India either. He is named Jarutha in several passages of the Åg Veda. However, these references are not flattering. Åg Veda 7.9.6 indicates that Jarutha was opposed by the sage Vasiñöha.
In the Zoroastrian scripture called Zend Avesta, Vasiñöha is named Vahishtha. He is said to be a person of harmful intellect who opposed Zarathushtra. Çrémad-Bhägavatam 6.18.5-6 states that Vasiñöha was fathered by the demigods Varuëa and Mitra; 9.1.13 confirms that he was a worshiper of Varuëa. Åg Veda, Mandala Seven, has much to say about Vasiñöha’s devotion to Varuëa. Scholars opine that Vasiñöha and Zarathushtra were both priests of Varuëa, who is called Asura-mäyä in the Åg Veda. It appears that a rivalry broke out between the two.
The name Zoroaster is a variant of Zarathushtra; similarly, in the Vedic scriptures Jarutha is also called Jarasabdha. Bhaviñya Puräëa chapters 139-140 present an extensive account of the background of Maga Jarasabdha. The word maga refers to a dynasty of priests of whom Jarasabdha was a progenitor. In ancient Iran, the hereditary priestly caste was called the Magi. Jarasabdha was born in the family line of véra äditya, “the powerful Aditya” (sun-god). The Vedic scriptures list twelve Adityas (sons of Aditi, the mother of the demigods). They are the twelve spokes of the käla-cakra, the wheel of time. Chändogya Upaniñad 3.8.1 proclaims Varuëa as their chief. In successive months of the year each of these twelve takes his turn in piloting the solar chariot across the sky. It would appear that the lineage of Jarasabdha (Jarutha, Zarathushtra) begins from Varuëa, leader of the Vedic solar deities. The sun, like Varuëa, is called Asura (from asün rati, “he who gives life or rejuvenates”); because Varuëa is very powerful, and because he measured out the sky (as does the sun), he is called mäyä—hence the title Asura-mäyä fits both demigods. Varuëa is called Asura also because he commands a host of demonic undersea creatures. (Lord Kåñëa killed one of these asuras named Saìkhäsura; another asura of Varuëa arrested Nanda Mahäräja, Kåñëa’s father, as he bathed in the Yamunä River.) In the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta the name of the worshipable deity of Zarathushtra is Ahura-mazda (Wise Lord), which matches Varuëa’s title Asura-mäyä.
In Bhaviñya Puräëa, Vyäsadeva tells Samba that Jarasabdha’s descendents, the Magas (Magi), follow scriptures that are reversed in sense from the Vedas (ta eva viparitas tu tesam vedah prakirtitaù). Indeed, Zend Avesta presents the “devas” as demons and the “asuras” as good spirits. Vyäsadeva says that the Magas are attached to the performance of fire sacrifices. Even today the small remnant of the Magi—the Parsi community in India—is known as “fire-venerating.” It appears from the Bhaviñya Puräëa that due to an offense committed by his mother, Jarasabdha’s birth was not very respectable. He and his lineage became “black sheep” among the Vedic priesthood. Yet Jarasabdha was always favored by the sun-god, and in return he placed himself fully under the protection of this deity. The Zoroastrian scriptures (Korshed Yasht 4) do indeed prescribe worship of the sun.
It is in this special allegiance to Varuëa as a solar deity that the Vedic root of Zoroastrian dualism can be discerned. As one of the Adityas, Varuëa is a close companion of another Aditya, Mitra. Åg Veda 10.37.1 states that the sun is the eye of Mitra-Varuëa. (The followers of Zarathushtra regarded Mitra—as Mithra—to be one with Ahura-mazda, since Mithra was the light of the Wise Lord.) Mitra-Varuëa together are the all-seeing keepers of dharma. Of the two, mankind has more to fear from Varuëa. A hymn in Atharva-veda 1.14 is addressed to varuëo yamo va (Varuëa or Yama), linking Varuëa to Yamaräja, the judge of the dead and punisher of the sinful. Though Mitra-Varuëa are equals in upholding universal law and order, Taittiréya Saàhitä identifies Mitra with the law of the day and Varuëa with the law of the night. Though at night the eye of the sun is closed, Varuëa, with his thousand eyes or spies, observes the acts men do under cover of darkness. Here, then, emerges a dualism. Mitra (which means friendship), the daytime witness, is kinder than Varuëa (binder), the nighttime witness—mitro hi krüraà varuëam çäntam karoti, says the Taittiréya Saàhitä: “Mitra pacifies the cruel Varuëa.”
It is curious how Zoroastrianism amplified this dualism. In the Vedic version, Asura-mäyä Varuëa, lord of the waters, dwells in the depths of the cosmic Garbhodaka ocean, far below the earth. Yama’s underworld heaven and hell are very near that ocean; in the matter of chastising the sinful, Yama and Varuëa are closely allied. In the Zoroastrian version, Ahura-mazda (Varuëa) is the lord of light who gave his servant Yima an underworld kingdom called Vara, a realm that, while dark to human eyes, is mystically illuminated.
In the Vedic version, Mitra-Varuëa are a pair of demigods who in ancient times served the Supreme Lord as a team by supervising the realms of light and darkness.
In the Zoroastrian version, Varuëa is the supreme lord. Mitra is his light. The mantle of darkness (evil) is worn by an unceasing enemy of Ahura-mazda named Angra Mainyu or Ahriman. It appears that Angra Mainyu is the Vedic Äìgirasa (Båhaspati), spiritual master of the devas and a great foe of Çukräcärya, the spiritual master of the asuras. From Mahäbhärata 1.66.54-55 we learn that Varuëa took the daughter of Çukräcärya, named Varuni, as his first wife.
In the Vedic version, the powers of light and darkness or good and evil are not ultimate. By taking them to be ultimate, and moreover by reversing them (portraying the asuras as good and the devas as evil), Zarathushtra twisted the Supreme Lord’s purpose for the cosmos that is administered on His behalf by such agents as Varuëa, Yama and Båhaspati. Zoroastrianism was a revolutionary departure from Vedic philosophy.
An important movement within Zoroastrianism was Zurvanism, which became the Persian state religion during the fourth century BC. Zurvan in the Avestan language means “time”; scholars note the similarity between the Zurvan deity and the Vedic Käla, who in Vaiñëava philosophy is a reflection of the Supreme Lord as well as His agent of creation, maintenance and destruction. Käla powers the cosmic wheel of time (käla-cakra) upon which the effulgent chariot of Sürya (the sun-god) moves through the heavens, illuminating the universe and marking the passage of hours, days and years.
In “Omens of Millenium”, Harold Bloom, following Cohn’s line of thought, claims on pages 7-8 that Zurvanism was assimilated into Judaism. Thus the Jews came to equate Zurvan with Yahweh. Citing Henry Corbin, Bloom says Zurvanism lives on today in the Iranian Shi’ite form of Islam. Damian Thompson, on page 28 of “The End of Time” (1996), suggests that Zurvanism influenced John of Patmos, author of the New Testament Book of Revelation.
On page 32 of “Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient” (1971), Oxford scholar M.L. West cites testimony by an ancient Greek that the Magi taught that Zurvan (Time) divided the cosmos into realms of light and dark, or good and evil. West, then showing the Vedic parallel, cites the Maitri Upaniñad Chapter Six. Here, God (Brahman) is said to have two forms—one of time, the other timeless. That which existed even before the sun is timeless. Timeless, transcendental Brahman cannot be divided into parts (i.e. light and dark, good and evil), hence He is ever non-dual. But the Brahman that began with the sun—time—is divided into parts. Living entities are born in time, they grow in time, and die in time. This Brahman of time has the sun (Sürya) as its self. One should revere Sürya as being synonymous with time. The correspondence between the Vedic Sürya and the Persian Zurvan is thus quite clear.
1) In ancient times, one Jarutha, Jarasabdha, Zarathushtra or Zoroaster, the founding priest of the Magas or Magi clan, departed from the Vedic tradition. Western historians believe that Judaeo-Christianity and Islam share principles derived from his teaching, called Zoroastrianism, the predominate religion of pre-Islamic Iran.
2) The deviation of Zoroastrianism was that it accepted only the Brahman of time (the sun), leaving aside the timeless Brahman: Kåñëa. The Supreme Lord was identified with the sun-god, specifically the Aditya Varuëa, who is known in the Vedas as Asura-mäyä and in the Zoroastrian scriptures as Ahura-mazda.
3) The Vedas teach that Varuëa is teamed with Mitra to uphold the law of dharma within the realms the sun divides (light and darkness). Here dharma means religious fruitive works that yield artha (wealth) and käma (sense enjoyment) on earth and in heaven. Varuëa is associated with Yama, the judge of the dead. Yama’s abode is the place of reward and punishment for good and evil karma.
4) If, as the Zoroastrians believed, Asura-mäyä Varuëa is all-good, then he is not all-powerful. The fact that he must protect dharma with a watchful eye indicates that evil is capable of opposing his order. (Çrémad-Bhägavatam, Canto Ten, relates that a demon named Bhaumäsura bested Varuëa in combat; thus sometimes evil gets the upper hand).
5) Scholars who specialize in the history of the Western religious tradition believe “Zarathushtra was the first person to put forward the idea of an absolute principle of evil, whose personification, Angra Manyu or Ahriman, is the first real Devil in world religion. Although the two principles are entirely independent, they clash, and in the fullness of time the good spirit will inevitably prevail over the evil one.”
6) The apocalyptic End of Time envisioned by Judaeo-Christianity and Islam is believed by historians to have been devised by Zoroaster, originally a priest of the traditional religion, [who] spoke of a coming transformation known as ‘the making wonderful,’ in which there would be a universal bodily resurrection. This would be followed by a great assembly, in which all people would be judged. The wicked would be destroyed, while the righteous would become immortal. In the new world, young people are forever fifteen years old, and the mature remain at the age of forty. But this is not a reversion to the original paradise; nothing in the past approaches its perfection. It is the End of Time.”
7) Those who await this End of Time expect to achieve eternal life in a resurrected body of glorified matter on a celestial earth cleansed of all evil. They expect, as human beings, to be “above even the gods, or at least their equal.”
From historian Jeffrey Burton Russell comes one more key element of the Zoroastrian faith that needs to be mentioned: “Indeed, celibacy was regarded as a sin (as was any asceticism), a vice of immoderation, a refusal to use the things of this world for the purposes that the God intended.” Celibacy—which is highly respected in Vedic religious culture—is likewise a sin in Judaism and Islam. It was a discipline important to early Christianity. But reformed Christianity has discarded it entirely, heeding Martin Luther’s admonition that:
“The state of celibacy is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” (Table Talk CCCCXCI)
That Zoroastrianism regarded celibacy and all asceticism as sinful returns us to the premise that launched our survey of the historical foundation of Western religion: “transcending duality has never been an option in Western religion, rooted as it is in an ancient distortion of the Vedic path of fruitive activities (karma-märga).”
THE GREEK CIVILIZATION
Greece was the origin of western civilization that started about 3,000 years ago. The peak of its glory was around 500 BC, which was the golden age for Athens.
“The Greeks are known as Pulindas, and it is mentioned in the Vana-parva of Mahabharata that the non-Vedic race of this part of the world would rule over the world. This Pulinda province was also one of the provinces of Bharata, and the inhabitants were classified amongst the ksatriya kings. But later on, due to their giving up the brahminical culture, they were mentioned as mlecchas.” (S.B 2.4.18 purp.)
“Yayäti: The great emperor of the world and the original forefather of all great nations of the world who belong to the Äryan and Indo-European stock. He is the son of Mahäräja Nabuña, and he became the emperor of the world due to his elder brother's becoming a great and liberated saintly mystic. He ruled over the world for several thousands of years and performed many sacrifices and pious activities recorded in history… He had five sons, two from Devayäné and three from Çarmiñöhä. From his five sons, namely (1) Yadu, (2) Turvasu, (3) Druhyu, (4) Anu and (5) Püru, five famous dynasties, namely (1) the Yadu dynasty, (2) the Yavana (Turk) dynasty, (3) the Bhoja dynasty, (4) the Mleccha dynasty (Greek) and (5) the Paurava dynasty, all emanated to spread all over the world…” (SB 1.12.24 purp.)
“Parasurama, when he saw that all the ksatriyas have become rascals, he wanted to kill them all... Twenty-one times he killed. Some of the ksatriyas, they fled from India, and they came to this side in European countries. Therefore, origin of the Europeans, they are ksatriyas. Turkey, Greece, and other countries also.” (B.G 2.32 lecture. London, Sept.2, 1973)
Philosophy:
Greek philosophy formed the basis of all later philosophical speculation in the Western world.
Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur writes of their level of understanding and realization:
“Followers of ‘selfish material bliss’ conclude that when there is no existence of God, soul, world beyond death and the consequences of one’s activities, then let us voluptuously engage ourselves in the sensual pleasures by being somewhat cautious against the immediate consequences. There is no use in unnecessarily wasting the time in religious activities. This kind of belief has been prevailing in the human society from time immemorial, due to the defects on unholy company and evil activities. Doctrine of this type has been never seen to become society – oriented. According to its origin in different countries, it has been only produced and written by respective persons. Among the innumerable subscribers of this doctrine, Charvaka pandit of India, atheistic Yangchoo of China, atheistic Leucippus of Greece, Sardanaplus of middle Asia and Leucretius of Rome are the prominent persons…
The modern – day advocates of materialistic bliss have compiled their doctrines after a type of unselfish materialsitic bliss, in view to gaining the faith of the masses.
Atheistic doctrine of karma (Karmavada) of India is perhaps the oldest of these. The Mimansakas, who are the advocates of this karmavada have vitiated the meaning of the self-revealed Vedas in favour of their doctrine and have used their erudition in establishing something called ‘Apurva’ in the place of God by using various aphorisms like purva-codana; (BG 18.18; Knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the knower are the three factors that motivate action; the senses, the work and the doer are the three constituents of action)
A Greek scholar named Democritus has established the basis of this doctrine in his country. He says that the ‘matter’ and the ‘void’ are eternal. Union of matter with the void results in creation and the separation of the matter from the void, in destruction. Materials are distinguished from each other due to the differences in quantity. There is no distinction in the class of materials.
Knowledge is nothing but a type of feeling generated by the union of internal and external objects. As per his doctrine, atom is the basis of all matter.
The ‘Vaishesika’ system of philosophy preached by Kanada of our country, accepts the eternal distinction of classification of the atoms and this is in some way different than the atomic theory of Democritus.
According to the ‘Vaishesika’ doctrine soul and the Supreme Soul have been accepted as eternal.
Plato and Aristotle of Greece also have not accepted the Supreme Lord alone as the eternal principle and the only source of the entire universe.
In this way the defects of the philosophy of Kanada are also seen in the doctrines of these scholars…”
Vedic literature and the Jatakas, Jewish chronicles, and the accounts of Greek historians all suggest contact between India and the West. Taxila (present day Pakistan) was a great center of commerce and learning.” Crowds of eager scholars flowed to it for instruction in the three Vedas and in the eighteen branches of knowledge.”
Greek writers refer to the travels of Pythagoras and others, to the East to gain wisdom. According to his biographer Iamblichus, “Pythagoras traveled widely, studying the esoteric teachings of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and even Brahmins.”
Early Greek philosophy, a sort of proto-physics, was born in Ionia around 580 BC from observation of phenomena.
Leucippus was a propounder of the atomic theory of matter, later developed by his pupil Democritus.
Democritus also wrote on ethics, proposing happiness, or “cheerfulness,” as the highest good — a condition to be achieved through moderation, tranquility, and freedom from fear.
Pythagoras (circa 582 – 500 BC) of Croton added the abstract dimension of numbers. Pythagoras taught that reality can be known not through sensory observation, but only through pure reason, which can investigate the abstract mathematical forms that rule the world.
Socrates told about the general universal principles and about one Divinity (but for telling the truth –– which was considered unorthodox –– he was sentenced to death by drinking poison) Socrates defined virtue as knowledge. Eusebius in his biography of Socrates relates an incident recorded in the fourth century BC in which Socrates met a Brahmin in the market place. The Brahmin asked Socrates what he was doing. Socrates replied that he was questioning people in order to understand man. At this, the Brahmin laughed and asked how one could understand man without knowing God.
Plato of Athens, a well-known student of Socrates, elaborated upon the moral dimension of Pythagorean idealism. While there is much in Platonic morality a student of Vedic knowledge can agree with, moral values taught by God had no place in Plato’s system. Plato was reluctant to affix morality to a personal God; rather he insisted it is fixed in an eternal Good beyond the world of matter. His values were discoveries, made through intelligence, dependent upon reason, not revelation.
Plato was sure about the eternality of the individual soul, but less sure about spiritual personality. He believed every soul to be the very form of life itself. As such, the soul belongs to the transcendent realm of eternal pure forms. Souls in the phenomenal world can sustain purity by reasoning, the link to the realm of true forms. The reasoning soul exhibits three virtues: wisdom, courage and temperance. An impure, unreasoning soul is deficient in these three virtues, that deficiency manifesting as the vices of ignorance, cowardice and intemperance.
Aristotle, Plato’s most prominent disciple, brought goodness down to earth by dispensing with his teacher’s idea of a transcendent realm of forms that projects ideal virtue into the phenomenal world. While more or less agreeing with his teacher that the soul is pure form and excellence of character, Aristotle argued that the soul is inseparable from its body. Goodness, likewise, is inseparable from particular good things. When the body vanishes, so does the soul. When a good thing vanishes, so does its goodness. Despite these differences, Plato and Aristotle agreed that matter is moved by the soul.
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EUROPEAN HISTORY
• Predominant Tribes: Greece, Rome & the great migrations
• Early Middle Ages
o The invasion & disintegration of the Roman Empire
o The origins of church power
o The Byzantine Empire
• High & Middle Ages
o Intellectual growth, political developments & cultural unity
o Rise of national awareness
• Early modern times
o Religious wars & the Reformation
o The Age of Absolutism & the Centralized State
o The secular view of the world
• Age of Revolutions
o The French Revolution & the Napoleonic Wars
o Practical politics & “Scientific” Socialism
• The 20th Century
o The World Wars
o The Postwar Era
o The End of the Cold War
o Cooperation & Integration: the development of the European Union
o The Future of Europe
Scientific liberalism & the culture of bland tolerance
Common interest – the highest virtue of the modern age
PREDOMINANT TRIBES
The first major civilization in Europe to mature were the Minoan Greeks from the island of Crete during the 2nd millennium BC; they are classified as Indo – European invaders.
By 1400 BC mainland Greeks, called the Mycenaeans, had conquered the Minoan realms. Mycenaean civilization had commercial contacts with the Middle East as well as Britain (for tin). Mycenaean society was almost totally destroyed after 1200 BC due to widespread fighting amongst themselves. In the Greek Dark Age that followed, the Greeks learned to fashion tools and weapons of iron and the Iron Age began in Greece.
Beginning about 1000 BC, the tribes of the central European culture were expanding along the principal river routes, giving rise to such major groupings as the Celts and the Slavs, as well as Italic-speakers and Illyrians.
• In northern Italy the Villanovan Culture (circa 1000-700 BC) became of major importance.
• The similar Hallstatt Culture (8th century BC to 5th century BC) and the La Tène Culture (circa 450-58 BC) – which owed much to the Hallstatts – were spread with the Celts through much of Western Europe between the 7th and 4th centuries BC.
• The Germanic Peoples began to expand from southern Scandinavia and the Baltic by 500 BC.
SUPREMACY OF GREECE
By 800 BC Greek civilization began to reemerge after the shock of the Dorian invasion, but in a form different from that of the Mycenaean culture. This was, in a considerable degree, due to the Phoenicians, who had been establishing trading posts in the Mediterranean and spreading elements of Middle Eastern civilization westward. From them the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, to which they added full vowels.
In the 8th century BC the Greek city-states began to expand by means of colonization, especially in southern Italy, and by the following century Hellenic (Greek) civilization was reaching maturity.
Greek colonies had then been founded throughout the Mediterranean region, and the growth of trade among these settlements and with other peoples resulted in the spread of Greek culture. Most of these “new” Greek cities, although virtually independent, were bound by a common culture. They were aware of their Hellenic heritage and considered other peoples barbarians.
Most ethnic groups in the western Mediterranean, including the Etruscans, who had supplanted the Villanovans, eagerly adopted an overlay of Greek culture. Most major urban centers in the area, Greek or not, progressed from monarchies to aristocracies to commercial oligarchies (plutocracies – rule by the wealthy). By the 5th century BC, some Greek centers, such as Athens, had developed into democracies.
• Monarchy – system of rule by a monarch or a king.
• Aristocracy – system of rule by aristocrats – people from noble families or the higher classes.
• Oligarchy – a small group of ruling men – consisting of the wealthy, powerful or intellectual.
• Democracy – a government elected by the citizens – based on majority decision making.
Greece came to be threatened by the expanding Persian Empire, founded in the previous century. The Persians soon conquered all of Asia Minor, and in 490 BC they attacked Greece. After the Persians had been decisively repelled (479 BC), democratic Athens emerged as the major power in the Greek world. An Athenian empire was established in the Aegean Sea, hastening the economic and cultural integration of the region, and the 5th century BC became the golden age of classical Greek civilization.
Athenian expansionist policies and old economic and political rivalries, however, caused the suicidal Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), in which much of Greece was devastated, and wars among the Greek cities continued in the following century.
Macedonia, to the north of Greece, had not originally been part of the Greek world. By the 4th century BC, however, its ruling class had become Hellenized.
Under Philip II, Macedonia conquered much of Greece, and his son, Alexander the Great, added the Persian Empire to these realms.
After Alexander’s death, his successors divided the empire, with the result that the centers of gravity during the following period (known as Hellenistic) shifted to such cities as Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria.
Both Macedonia and Greece were ultimately conquered by Rome during the 2nd century BC.
ASCENDANCY OF ROME
Unlike Greece, Italy was fragmented among many ethnic and linguistic groups.
There were several groups of Indo-Europeans who had infiltrated northern Italy late in the 2nd millennium BC and subsequently spread through the peninsula. Villanovans developed in the north while the Etruscans (or at least their ruling class, who had migrated from Asia Minor and settled in central and northern Italy) created a composite civilization consisting of Villanovan and eastern elements. To this was added a thick overlay of Greek civilization, including the alphabet, absorbed from the Greek colonies in southern Italy.
About this time—the traditional date being 753 BC—Rome was founded on the Tiber River. The Romans were a Latin people belonging to the Italic group.
At first a primitive village, Rome was occupied and civilized by the Etruscans. The Romans began a conquest of the surrounding area around the end of the 6th century BC, and by the early 4th century BC they had taken the important Etruscan city of Veii. After a temporary setback caused by invading Gauls (a tribe of Celts from France), the Romans continued to absorb large parts of Italy; by the beginning of the 3rd century BC most of central and northern Italy had become Roman.
Unlike the Greeks, the Romans tied together their domains by roads and granted full or partial citizenship to settlements outside Rome, a policy that eventually led to a more or less uniform language (Latin) and culture.
Further Expansion:
In the so-called Pyrrhic War (280-271 BC) Rome gained control of Greek southern Italy and, by absorbing that area, became partly Hellenized.
The conquest put Rome in direct rivalry with Carthage, an old Phoenician colony in North Africa, for control of the western Mediterranean. Ensuing wars with Carthage – the Punic Wars – gained Rome Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, and North Africa.
By the middle of the 2nd century BC, Carthage was eliminated, and Rome gained control over Macedonia and Greece as well.
The Romans cleared the seas of pirates and spread roads throughout the region, making communications easy and fostering cultural unity. This Romano-Hellenistic cultural amalgam was bilingual, with Latin dominant in the West and Greek in the East.
The Roman Empire:
After a period of civil wars and strife, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire under Emperor Augustus around the beginning of the Christian era (circa 27 BC).
During the following 200 years the level of prosperity in the Mediterranean reached a high point that in many ways was not equaled again for a millennium and a half.
The Roman Empire assimilated many groups of people into its civilization; moreover, in AD 212, nearly every freeborn man within its confines became a Roman citizen. Such a concept of universal citizenship was unique in the ancient world. Beyond the borders of the empire certain elements of Greco-Roman culture also influenced the Celtic and Germanic tribes. So thorough had been the Romanization of the empire that to this day languages of Latin derivation are spoken in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, parts of Switzerland, and Romania.
The 3rd century AD was a time of dissolution, after which Emperor Diocletian reconstituted the empire.
Under Constantine the Great in the 4th century, Constantinople (now Istanbul) replaced Rome as the capital, and Christianity was – in effect, if not officially – made the state religion.
After the Western Roman Empire fell to invading Germanic groups in the 5th century, giving rise to a series of Germanic kingdoms, the church in many ways preserved the Roman heritage.
Vritti:
54.5.1.3.3 On Christianity and its by-products by Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur:
Islam, Judaism and Christianity carry principles of the doctrine of dualism propagated by Zarathustra from Persia. He proclaimed there are two All-powerful God’s; the Creator – Who is Good and his rival the ‘Satan’. The focus of one’s existence is within this world of duality – having no scope for transcendence (Vaikuntha) only heaven or hell within this universe.
Due to this theory Islam, Judaism and Christianity adopted a theory of the ‘Trinity’. At first the Trinity was conceived of as three different God’s; later this idea was reconciled in the understanding that the Trinity were three principles of the One God.
Some people say that if God is All-good and His creation is also all-good, then God, having created this world for the jivas to enjoy, can be blamed seeing all the innumerable inadequacies.
Considering the merits and defects of this moral monotheism, some religionists concluded, that this world is not an abode of unalloyed bliss, but is rather full of sorrow, and all beings are born into sin. According to their doctrine that sin has been inherited by human kind from the first created being. They say that by creating a primordial being, God allowed him to live in a blissful garden along with his consort. God also warned him against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Due to ill counsel of some wretched jiva, the couple ate the forbidden fruit and as a result of it they fell down to this miserable world by losing their merit due to the offence of disobeying God. Because of that offence committed by that primordial-couple, all jivas are born as offenders.
Since that offence was not capable of being eroded away by the jivas themselves, a portion of God (Jesus) was born in the form of a human being, and carrying away the offense of all obedient jives, he accepted death. Those who are obedient to him secure salvation; the disobedient are thrown into eternal Hell.
To believe in this dogmatic religion, some irrelevant events are to be trusted:
• The principle of the jiva soul exists only in between life and death.
• The jiva soul did not exist before birth and will also not come again into the field of activity after death.
• Apart from human beings other creatures do not have a soul.
This faith is an outcome of narrow wisdom.
• The soul is not a transcendental principle. Its creation should be imagined out of matter either due to the succession of events or due to the will of God.
• According to various conditions in which human beings are born, they become liable to carry on their lives either piously or impiously. It cannot be told why the different souls are born in variable conditions.
Because of this it seems that God is injudicious.
• The resultant action of a single birth will be rewarded by either eternal heaven or eternal hell
This opinion is quite unacceptable to he devotees of the All- merciful Lord.
Those who follow this religion will not be able to do selfless service to God.
• In practice they will be striving for worldly development – by means of cultivating action and knowledge – gratifying God by their own sense of dutifulness. That simply by altruistic activities, God will be pleased in return.
But the unalloyed devotion free from the influences of karma and jnana is never manifest to them.
• In the present doctrine of our discussion, and in the other modern ones following this, God is without form as well as He is all pervading.
• Cultivation of Gnosticism is a main feature in them. Thinking that if any form is attributed to God, He will be humbled.
Divinity imagined becomes quite a materialistic idolatry.
Sky is an inert object of the material world, all-pervasiveness and formlessness are also the qualities of sky. The God conceived by these people is also of that kind! This is called as material worship.
• Even the so-called God’s worship of these dogmaticians is quite defective and imperfect. Prayer and adoration only are known as worship. The wordings used for prayer and adoration is also quite worldly.
• Being the slaves of gnosticism they are quite afraid of the worship of transcendental Vigraha of the Lord. Not only that, they anxiously advise other human beings not to imagine any transcendental form of the deity. Their idea being that adoption of an image will become tantamount to inert worship. Due to this wicked idea, they remain quite incapable of experiencing the supra-mundane Transcendental principle in the real form of God.
These people are most self-centered.
• For fear of evil teachings, they do not accept shelter with any preceptor, and even if any preceptor is available, they do not honor him. Since the evil-preceptors misguide the disciples, they discard even the holy-preceptors.
• Some of them say that: as the reality is inherent in the soul, it can be realized by one’s own effort and therefore it is not necessary to take shelter at the feet of a preceptor.
• Again, some other people say that it will suffice to accept the chief-prophet. The prophet himself is the God, the preceptor, and the deliverer. He enters in to us and destroys the root of our sins; there is no need of any other human being as preceptor.
• Among some of them, a certain scriptural book is accepted as God given. Others of them do not accept any scripture for the fear of subscribing to the erroneous views contained in the books.
• Again, though a single God is accepted in this doctrine of our discussion, that God is filled with defective discriminations and this is a draw-back on the part of the jivas who are after devotion to Him.
• Although the God is one, another sinful huge entity has been accepted by them, who is independent of God’s will.
• Again those who have discarded the existence of that sinful entity, being unable to understand the illusive potency of God, have observed the generation of sin due to the weakness of jiva soul.
• Sins are no doubt, incurred due to the weakness of the jivas but, unless the beginning-less sin and virtue are not accepted, the God alone is to be blamed for the creation of weakness among the jiva souls.
• These people accept the God as stainless, only in the course of talks. But, in practice they throw over all the sins at Him.
• In the entity of a living being, these people are quite unable to understand the distinctions of purely sentience spirit, subtle material body and gross material body.
Both the knowledge and science of their religion are defective and illiberal.
In the pride of materialistic scientific developments, their science of transcendental knowledge becomes quite contracted and as a result of which, their religious performances also are insignificant.
• The highest covetable by them is the mundane heavenly planets.
• Since they take the subtle body itself as the soul, they are unable to distinguished between the mind and soul.
Theo-logicians delirious with mixed-reasoning, even after accepting the divinity, are unable to establish the unity of God…
***
These mundane notions are prevailing theological ideas practiced by individuals throughout history.
THE GREAT MIGRATIONS
As civilization was being consolidated in the Mediterranean region, great changes were taking place elsewhere in Europe.
The Bronze and Iron Age cultures (2nd & 1st millennium BC) of the outer regions consisted mainly of pastoral and agricultural communities, much less stable than the Greco-Roman settlements. Migrations from poorer to richer areas were continuous, and the movement of one people or tribe in turn dislocated other peoples, often causing chain reactions.
The prime movers in these changes during the last centuries BC and the first centuries AD were the Germanic tribes.
These peoples had occupied parts of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany at the end of the Bronze Age (before the 1st millennium BC). During the Iron Age they began to migrate southward.
In the 2nd century BC two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and Teutons, reached what is now Provence (southern France), but were eventually repelled by the Romans. The Suevi occupied part of modern Germany.
The Celtic tribes of that region were pushed westward to be conquered many years later by the Romans under Julius Caesar. Roman expansion into Germanic territories was permanently halted in AD 9, when Germanic troops under Arminius (Hermann) smashed the Roman legions at the Teutoburg Forest. Consequently, Rome occupied only a buffer zone east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.
By AD 150 migrations and consequent dislocations of peoples again intensified, threatening the imperial borders. Emperor Marcus Aurelius successfully battled the Marcomanni and Quadi, as well as the non-Germanic Iazyges, and it is indicative of the period that he spent most of his reign fighting invading tribes. By the beginning of the 3rd century AD the Alamanni had penetrated to the northern Roman frontier, and in the east the Goths began their infiltration of the Balkan Peninsula (Southeastern Europe). After their defeat by imperial troops, the Goths were made mercenaries (paid soldiers) of Rome.
During the second half of the 3rd century, Germanic groups, including the Franks, entered the empire. Great efforts were then made to strengthen internal defenses. Under Emperor Aurelian Rome itself was surrounded by a wall, Dacia (Romania) was abandoned, and more and more Germanic mercenaries were recruited to fight for the Romans.
Rome weathered the crisis of the 3rd century only by means of Diocletian’s restructuring of the empire, which was done primarily to deal with the Germanic tribes more efficiently.
After the middle of the 4th century the situation appeared to be under control, but then a new people, the Huns, invaded Europe from Central Asia and caused a new series of chain reactions.
The Goths were pushed into the Balkans, where they defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378.
In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome itself, sending shock waves throughout the empire. Shortly afterward the Vandals penetrated to Roman North Africa and established a kingdom there.
The Huns, under Attila, were finally defeated by a Roman-led Visigoth army in 451, but four years later Rome was sacked again—this time by the Vandals; Britain, Gaul, and Spain were by now occupied by Germanic tribes.
The end for the Western Empire came in 476, when Germanic mercenaries in Italy deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus and made their chief, Odoacer, king of Italy.
EARLY MIDDLE AGES
When Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, he had no designated heir, and when Zeno, the Eastern emperor, was told that there was no immediate reason to appoint a successor, the suggestion seemed reasonable. In law, in theory, and in people’s hearts the empire was indivisible and unconquerable. Many emperors’ reigns had been short, many had ended violently, and the belligerent Germanic peoples had been a fact of Roman political life for more than a century. No one at the time could have known that Romulus Augustulus, who ironically bore the name of Rome’s legendary founder, was to be the last Roman emperor in the West and that an age had come to an end.
The Roman-Germanic Conflict:
At the close of the 4th century the Germanic peoples to the north and east of the Roman Empire had begun to move west and south.
In face of the Germanic migration, Rome, troubled with serious economic dislocation, pursued a policy of pragmatic accommodation. Much land – which the overextended empire could afford to lose – was immediately given up to them, but the emperors were determined to defend vital strategic points, such as the Mediterranean seaports, on which southern Europe was dependent for its lifeblood of African grain.
By the mid-5th century, however, the Germanic groups were in political control of the Western Empire. The Vandals had occupied the agriculturally rich provinces of North Africa since 428. Gaul came under the sway of the Franks in the early 5th century; the Visigoths held Spain by 507; and Italy had become a Gothic kingdom at the invitation of the emperor.
The Germanic tribes wanted land and treasure, but they also wanted to live as Romans. What is conventionally thought of as the barbarization of the Western Empire – should just as firmly be considered the Romanization of the barbarians. The essential conflict between the Romans and the Germans was religious. The Germanic peoples were hated and feared less as enemies of Roman political control but more as bearers of rival versions of Christianity.
• The western Germans were pagans who worshiped a pantheon of sky gods and nature deities. The eastern Germans had already been converted to Christianity by the intense missionary activity of Bishop Ulfilas, a follower of the doctrine of Arianism, which maintained that Christ was fully human and not divine by nature. In AD 380 this doctrine was condemned as heretical.
Heretical: an unorthodox opinion or belief that contradicts established religious teachings, especially one that is officially condemned by religious authorities.
• The Church also encountered the ‘Gnostics”(who envisaged the world as a series of emanations from the highest of several gods. The lowest emanation was an evil god (the demiurge) who created the material world as a prison for the divine sparks that dwell in human bodies. The Gnostics identified this evil creator with the God of the Old Testament, and saw the Adam and Eve story and the ministry of Jesus as attempts to liberate humanity from his dominion, by imparting divine secret wisdom) who were the first to be oppressed by the Christians. They existed throughout the Roman Empire.
• Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople, also introduced theology about the status of Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, called Macedonianism. He was exiled by the Council of Constantinople of AD 381. Followers of his theology were made to suffer and their literature was declared ‘forbidden’ to that extent that it was all burned and their possessor was to face death by law.
This was the first episode in Christian history that introduced a standardized Christian creed (the Nicene Creed), whose wordings introduced a feeling of neglect for all other religions of the world.
The Origins of Church Power:
The religious opposition to the Arian and pagan invaders gave a new meaning to the church and papacy during this period.
Pagan: believing in or relating to an ancient polytheistic or pantheistic religion worshiping many gods
Polytheistic: the belief in or worship of more than one god
Pantheistic: seeing god in the various manifestations of the creation, i.e. a large mountain etc.
Church governance had been organized much like the Roman provincial administration – control was in the hands of independent local bishops.
Three bishops located at Alexandria (North Egypt), Antioch (Turkey), and Rome held positions comparable to those of provincial governors, supervising not only their own cities’ congregations but also those of the neighboring territories. These three were figures of great prestige, and each was granted the honorific title of pope (“father”). The pope at Rome had the additional claim to prestige of being the direct heir of Saint Peter, who was considered the first bishop of Rome.
Initially the papacy grew in influence due to activist Roman popes, but even more important was the compromise, paralysis, and ultimate collapse of the Roman government in the West. As political authority disintegrated, the bishops stood firm for what they saw as the truth and the ancient order, and the only representative of that ancient order in Rome was no longer the emperor or the Senate but the pope, the holder of the chair of Saint Peter.
The Byzantine Empire:
Despite the collapse of the Roman government in the West, a Roman emperor still reigned in the East, and his successors would continue ruling for another thousand years. Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) was now the ruling city of the eastern Roman provinces. The eastern empire became so transformed in its character, that modern historians have labeled it Byzantine rather than Roman.
The tendency throughout Roman history of the empire to become a military autocracy (rule by one person) was decisively broken during the reign of the great 6th century emperor Justinian. The government became entirely professional and civilian, centered on the palace and, most important, on the emperor himself. Roman law was codified into a systematic digest. Finance and tax collection were centralized. Justinian’s religious policy also contributed to centralization.
In an age of intense religious conflict and questioning of doctrine, the Byzantine Roman Empire became the Orthodox empire, and the religion of the emperor became the official state religion. The Coptic Church of Egypt, the Ethiopian Church, the Syrian Church and the Armenian Church held their own views and did not accept the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon; this group of churches separated from the Orthodox Church and became known as the Oriental Orthodox Church.
Council of Chalcedon: The 4th such meeting of senior bishops held in AD 451 to discuss the position of Christ and laws to govern the activities of the Church, the clergy, and the congregation. The Oriental Orthodox Church only accepted the conclusions of the AD 449 Council of Ephesus – the 3rd convention of bishops – rejecting the 4th council.
In the early years of his reign, Justinian embarked on the attempt to reconquer the Arian Christian West. The Vandal kingdom of Africa fell quickly, as did Visigothic Spain and much of Italy. However, under continual pressure from Persia, the empire lost its military hold on Spain, which again reemerged as a Visigothic kingdom, although now entirely Byzantine in culture and political organization. In Italy, the imperial forces had to withdraw to the Adriatic stronghold of Ravenna (the old Roman capital from AD 402-476 on the northeastern seacoast) and the island of Sicily, leaving the rest of the Italian peninsula to the invading German Lombard tribes. While the Balkans were entirely overrun by Avars (Mongolians) and Slavic Peoples.
Justinian’s western conquests gave medieval Europe its characteristic cultural pattern: the Mediterranean coast and Spain being severed from the economically and culturally underdeveloped north were now in effect part of the Middle East, a development consummated in the 7th century, when North Africa, Spain, and parts of southern France fell to Muslim armies.
The Rise of the Franks:
In the north, European history from the 5th through the 9th century was dominated by a group of western German tribes called collectively the Franks.
Unlike the eastern Germans, the Franks were converted from their ancient paganism directly to Catholic Christianity, without an intervening period of Arianism. The conversion began decisively for the Salian Franks after their warrior chief, Clovis, was baptized as a Christian, along with many of his followers, in 496.
Clovis, a descendant of Merovech or Merowig (reigned 448-458) and thus part of the sacrosanct ruling family of the Salian Franks, was the first king of the Merovingian dynasty. Through his many military victories against other peoples and the success of a long series of complex family vendettas characteristic of Frankish culture, he became supreme ruler of all the Franks.
At Clovis’s death, under the customary law of the Salian Franks, the lands under his control were divided among his four sons. They would, in turn, leave their lands to whatever male heirs they had, so that the whole era of Merovingian rule was characterized by alternate periods of fragmentation and consolidation, depending on the numbers and abilities of the sons.
The era came to an end in the 8th century. The last Merovingian kings have won from history the name of rois fainéants (“slothful kings”).
Power was more and more to be found in the office of palace mayor and not in the hands of the king himself, until in 751, King Childeric III and his only son were imprisoned. Their long hair (symbolic among their people of royalty) was shorn, and the Arnulfing palace mayor, Pepin, son of the great warrior Charles Martel, proclaimed himself king of the Franks, the first of the Carolingians to assume the royal title.
The Carolingian coup d’état (seizure of an existing rule by a small group) would never have occurred without the active intervention of the pope.
In a series of letters written in the 740’s between Pepin and the pope, in which Pepin inquired about the propriety of his own state, where all power was not in the hands of the monarch, the pope responded by citing the biblical precedent of David, anointed by the prophet Samuel while King Saul was still alive. The pope, moreover, followed the precedent and anointed Pepin, as he would continue to anoint his descendants, in a ritual of royal consecration.
Charlemagne:
The greatest of the Carolingian kings was Charlemagne, even in his own time a figure of myth and legend. His reign marked the culmination of Frankish development. Under his rule the Franks, by a series of military conquests, became masters of the West and guarantors of papal power in Italy. He defeated the Lombards in Italy, the Frisians in the north, and the Saxons in the east, annexed the duchy of Bavaria, and pushed the Moors out of southern France.
He proceeded to consolidate his power over this vast territory by tying members of the landholding class to one another and to himself by special oaths of loyalty, which at times were rewarded by grants of land from newly conquered territory. This policy called feudalism —the first major example of the growing ties of personal dependence connected with political power—not only gave Charlemagne a ready supply of warriors but also helped make him, as it were, omnipresent in his own territory.
Inseparable from military and political consolidation was the growth of Charlemagne’s sense of Christian mission. He founded monastic houses in border territories, which served as pioneer establishments bringing forests and marshlands under cultivation and Christian control. They also provided centers for missionary and educational activity, as the expansion of Christianity required a trained clergy, a standardized rite, and the production of useful books.
The key was education, and the practical work of founding and staffing monastic and cathedral schools demanded outside help. Charlemagne found that help in Rome and the Lombard lands of Italy, where the ancient educational traditions had never entirely died. However, the major contribution to the Carolingian educational reform was Anglo-Irish, as the great monastic houses of England and Ireland were rich in books and skill, and Charlemagne’s foremost adviser was the English scholar Alcuin.
The King expanded the Christian mission through bloody conquests. One day in AD 782, he killed almost 5,000 Saxons. He spread Roman Christianity across Central Europe. For his aggressive expeditions he was credited and described by the Christians as ‘of a devout religious bent.’
The kingdom of the Franks, as a result, integrated Europe in territory and culture, as it had not been since the Roman Empire. On Christmas day in the year 800, Charlemagne went to mass in Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. As he rose from prayer—so the story goes—the pope placed a crown on his head, adored him, and he was acclaimed as imperator et augustus by the people. Charlemagne was thus crowned emperor not merely of the Franks but of Rome (which came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire). The power of the new state, the organization of the church, and the ancient traditions of Rome had now become indistinguishable.
New Invasions:
The last years of Charlemagne’s reign were marked by political tensions that continued into the reigns of his descendants.
Europe during the later 9th and 10th centuries was a scene of renewed political disintegration and one more series of cataclysmic invasions, this time from the Scandinavian Vikings out of the north and from the west across the Danube plains by the Asian Magyars (a people who originated in the Urals and migrated westward to settle in what is now Hungary in the 9th century AD). Borderlands were withdrawn from cultivation, trade was disrupted, and travel even over short distances became dangerous.
Throughout this period several important tendencies were discernible:
• The government was weak, while the local landholding families were powerful.
• The ascendancy of the Benedictine monastic houses, also great landholders embedded in the network of feudal alliances.
• Finally, the papacy became a secular power in its own right, exercising direct political control of much of central and northern Italy; gradually establishing an elaborate machinery of central authority over the regional churches and monastic houses. Through diplomacy and, above all, by the administration of justice, it also accumulated substantial secular and political power throughout Europe.
HIGH & LATE MIDDLE AGES
By the year AD 1050, Europe was entering a period of great and rapid transformation:
• The long period of Germanic and Asian migrations had ended, and Europe enjoyed the stability of a settled population; a population growth of striking proportions had begun and was to continue.
• Town life, which had never entirely ceased during the previous centuries, experienced remarkable growth and development, thereby shifting the trend of economic self-sufficiency afforded by the medieval farm towards trade and commerce.
• Trade and commerce, particularly in the Mediterranean lands of Italy and southern France and in the Low Countries, increased in quantity, regularity, and extent.
Intellectual Growth & Ferment:
As the European economy grew more complex, every branch of public affairs also became equally intricate — the municipal governance, the administration of justice, the regulation of social and political institutions and trade, and the development of educational institutions necessary to provide the personnel for such administration.
This new complex social life produced an intellectual upheaval unprecedented in European history. Both ecclesiastical (church) and secular laws were systematized, commented upon, and questioned. The ferment, present in all spheres of inquiry, has come to be known as the renaissance of the 12th century.
Rhetoric (public speaking) and logic (reasoning) became objects of inquiry in their own right separate from theology and which led to investigations of the long-dormant classical tradition. Theological doctrine was explored, giving rise to new methods of inquiry. This inquiry had two main goals: to revive the wisdom of the Roman writers, uniting it with Christian literature and learning, and to create new works of art and literature that expressed this same unity.
In the early 13th century the major works of Aristotle were made available in a Latin translation, accompanied by the commentaries of Averroës and other Islamic scholars. The vigor, clarity, and authority of Aristotle’s teachings restored confidence in empirical knowledge (knowledge based on sense perception and personal experience as opposed to theological doctrine) and gave rise to a school of philosophers known as Averroists. Under the leadership of Siger de Brabant, the Averroists asserted that philosophy was independent of revelation (the authority of the scriptures). Averroism threatened the integrity and supremacy of Roman Catholic doctrine and filled orthodox thinkers with alarm. To ignore Aristotle, as interpreted by the Averroists, was impossible; to condemn his teachings was ineffectual; he had to be reckoned with.
The Seeds of Secular Morality:
In AD 1266, the work “Summa Theologiae” of Thomas Aquinas officially wed Catholic theology with Aristotelian philosophy. In it’s time, the “Theory of Everything” was an intellectual monument to both the proto-science of the ancient Greeks and the moral authority of Jesus Christ. Above all, western Europeans began to think of themselves in new ways, a change reflected by innovations in the creative arts.
From Suhotra Swami’s book – ‘The Dimensions of God and Evil’:
“But the Thomist model of reality—“Thomist” was the label given to Aquinas's thought—was pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction.
• Admission that some portions of the Bible are not the literal truth
• The high degree to which the model depended upon the power of human reason
• The physicality of the model: Aristotle proposed that the upper spheres of the universe were made of “pure matter”—an immaculate, unchanging crystalline solid; while rejecting the Platonic position that the real form of the world exists in a higher dimension of consciousness. It followed from Aristotle's physics that the higher spheres—for example, “the eternal pearl” of the moon—could be rendered humanly visible just by discovering a way to get close enough to see them.
• The humanism of the model: within creation, the earth was positioned at the privileged center, and among earthly creatures, the human race had the only role in God’s plan
• The conceit that the model explained all there is to know
Each was a seed of facta—a “truth” made by man, not God. He wrote “To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to condemning the command of God,” thus he opened the door to secular (i.e. non–religious) morality or what Çréla Bhaktivinoda Öhäkura calls kevala-naitika jévana, a life that aims no higher than ‘niti’ (ethics).
Vaiñëava philosophy agrees with the theologians of the Theory of Natural Law that the moral universe is orchestrated according to a body of laws that can be understood by human reason. But because material nature has its origin in the transcendental spiritual nature, Vaiñëava philosophy does not agree that human reason can grasp natural law only from physical sense data. Our reasoning must be trained in the supersensory information revealed in the Vedic scriptures. Then we shall be able to understand for what reasons we are punishable in the moral universe.
The seeds of its self-destruction began fructifying in 1604. That was the year Galileo Galilei established the “fact” that a nova (new star) flared into being in the constellation Serpentarius. This contradicted the Thomist model, which said stars are permanent fixtures of an unchanging heaven where nothing new could happen. In 1609 Galileo looked at the moon through a telescope. He found that the Thomist lunar heaven was not a fact: he could not “make it out” in his eyepiece. Fact was, the moon looked very much like earth. Fact was, the surface of the moon reflected earthlight. To Galileo, that meant that the earth, shining like the other planets, is not special.
Looking elsewhere through his eyepiece, Galileo discovered more facts: Jupiter, is encircled by moons; the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system; countless stars are invisible to the naked eye. By dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, Galileo demonstrated mistakes in Thomist physics.
Now, the Aristotelian “facts” of the Thomist model were tied together by Christian logic. The tremendous weight of new facts discovered by Galileo could not be supported by that logic.”
Galileo being accused that his work was heretical, wrote an open letter on the irrelevance of biblical passages in scientific arguments, holding that interpretation of the Bible should be adapted to increasing knowledge and that no scientific position should ever be made an article of Roman Catholic faith.
Thus Galileo set about assembling a new, non-theistic logic for his facts. Suppressed by the Church, Galileo died before he could complete it. In 1979, Pope John Paul II opened an investigation into the astronomer’s condemnation, calling for its reversal. In October 1992, a papal commission acknowledged the Vatican’s error.
In other spheres such as literature, the love lyric and the courtly romance appeared in the emergent vernacular languages, and a brilliant resurgence of writing in Latin took place. Painting and sculpture devoted new attention to the natural world and made an unprecedented attempt to represent extremes of emotion and experience. Architecture flourished with the construction, along frequently traveled pilgrimage routes, of churches in a style that combined Roman materials and techniques with an entirely new aesthetic.
Far-reaching changes also took place in religious life:
• In the 12th century new religious orders were established, such as the Cistercians, who attempted to purify the traditions of Benedictine monasticism, and the orders of mendicant friars, to adjust the rural monastic ideal to the new urban life. Common to them all was a new sense of individual piety, based not on ritual but rather on emotional identification with the suffering of Christ.
• Similar in spirit was the growth of the cult of the Virgin Mary, a figure relatively unimportant in the Christianity of earlier centuries. Thus, throughout the period, people began to assert their primacy as individuals with significant inner lives.
Political Developments:
At the same time people began to identify themselves as members of larger and more abstract groups of interest than kin and neighborhood. The political events of the period were intimately connected with these new identifications.
One of the major events was the rapid rise to power of the Normans, descendants of Vikings who settled in northern France during the 9th and 10th centuries and became feudal retainers of the king of France.
Feudal – medieval social system: the legal and social system in which vassals held land from lords in exchange for military service.
The Normans burst onto the scene of European history in 1066, when they conquered England under Duke William of Normandy. William secured his conquest by a program of extensive resettlement; the French-speaking Normans became the ruling class of England, tied to William by land grants and feudal obligations. This thorough political feudalization and the imposition of other Norman institutions brought England into the mainstream of continental political and social development.
That the duke of Normandy, a feudal dependent of the king of France, was now also king of England, thus becoming his equal in status and his superior in strength, illustrates the growing complexity of the European world. Political conflict, and with it, the idea of the state as an autonomous institution, was inevitable.
In the Germanic and Italian territories of the Holy Roman Empire, the new activity of the papacy as a real governing body came into conflict with the power of the emperor in a tangle of issues collectively known as the “Investiture Controversy”.
Throughout the early periods of the empire no strict separation had been made in theory or reality between the ecclesiastical and political realms. From the moment of the historic alliance of the Carolingians with the pope, the emperor was considered not solely a secular figure. Similarly, the bishops, princes of the church, were secular powers in their own right, advisers and feudal retainers of kings and emperors. It was thus unquestioned that the secular power should play a part in the selection of bishops and be an active presence in Episcopal (church) coronation or investiture (installation in an office or position).
The solution in England in 1122 was that the church was to have the right to elect bishops, and investiture was to be done by the clergy. Elections were to take place, however, in the presence of the emperor, who also would confer whatever land and revenues were attached to the bishopric by investiture with a scepter, a symbol without spiritual connotations.
Although sometimes resolutions were not so smooth – when Henry II became the king of England in 1154, he wanted the power to govern the churches of England, which created a rift between the Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Becket) and the King of England. But it was resolved in 1170 when the king’s knights came and beheaded the archbishop while he was offering prayers in the cathedral.
As the Princes main concern was more often that bishops and abbots be loyal to them, rather than be morally upright, a struggle broke out when Pope Gregory VII declared the predominance of the church in the choice and consecration of its own officials. Church reformers recognizing that lay investiture was not in accord with the ancient laws of the church, attributed to that practice the low morals of the clergy of their day, especially their indulgence in simony and concubinage.
Lay – not belonging to the clergy
Lay investiture – when the people of a church who are not members of the clergy elect church officials
Simony – buying and selling of spiritual things such as the purchase and sale of church offices. The word is derived from the biblical Simon Magus, who attempted to buy spiritual power from the apostle Peter
Concubine – the cohabitation of a man and woman without sanction of legal marriage
The most important result of the controversy was that it called into question all relations between church and state.
In theology, law, and political theory, the state, as a secular entity, was critically examined, as was the church, not only as the community of Christian worshipers but also as an administrative aristocracy of bishops in the service of the pope.
The church became, by the end of the 12th century, a singularly great European political power alongside the diverse emergent secular states.
Cultural Unity:
A “cultural unity” was developing in Europe, the institutional expression of which was the Christian church. An important expression of Christian cultural unity however, was the growing intolerance toward non-Christian populations within and on the borders of Europe.
This unity was reflected most clearly in the series of military expeditions, called Crusades, for recapturing Christian holy places in the Middle East from Islam. The Crusades were preached by the church hierarchy and drew support from the new monastic orders, for which the “military pilgrimage” represented the road to individual and collective salvation. The idea of a holy war, cut across class lines, attracting the traditional warrior aristocracy as well as peasants and the new classes of artisans and laborers created by the growth of urban society.
Islam, the infidel enemy in faraway Jerusalem, was also the enemy in the Spanish borderlands and in Sicily—and so centuries of commerce, both in goods and ideas, came to an end.
It was also in this period, from the 12th through the 14th century, that intolerance toward the Jews who had settled throughout Europe became widespread and virulent. Punitive decrees restricting Jewish settlement and occupation coincided with mass outrages and riots against the Jewish population, and the seeds of ideological anti-Semitism were sown (the Jew as an uncanny, demonic creature, involved in international conspiracy and guilty of ritualistic murder of Christian children, entered the folklore of European imagination).
In the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 a strategy was adopted to expand Christian teachings and to fight heresy. The council defined anyone as a heretic who did not follow the established beliefs of the Roman Catholic mission. In 1231 a religious court was established called the Inquisition. The Inquisition was first introduced in Germany, France and Italy, and then it was expanded to the Mediterranean region, Spain in 1478 and to England in the 1500’s.
The procedure of the court was simple. Just two witnesses of any kind and class were required to accuse anyone of any rank. The accused was then brought to the interrogation chamber where he was tortured until he confessed. If the person was willing to accept and follow Christianity, he could be given a minor punishment – of pilgrimage, flogging or a fine – or be seriously punished with confiscation of his property, or life long imprisonment. Otherwise, if he did not submit, he was then given to the secular authorities for termination, who would kill him or burn him alive at the stake.
The period of the Inquisition encompassed a rise of both heresy – an expression of the intellectual and social restlessness of the age – and political and military attempts to destroy it, most notably the Crusade in southern France against the heresy of the Albigenses.
• The Albigenses were declared heretics as they did not believe in the sacraments and disregarded the Christian hierarchy of popes and bishops.
• The Waldenses were the members of a Christian group founded in 1173 by Peter Waldo of Lyon (France). He began to preach a message of voluntary poverty and absorption in religious devotion. His preaching attracted many followers who were called ‘the poor men of Lyon’. In the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, they were also declared heretics.
Europe’s cultural unity was thus not free of conflict. On the contrary, it was in a precarious state of equilibrium, and its elements, continuing to develop, inevitably clashed with one another over the next centuries.
The Rise of National Awareness:
The material and intellectual forces released in the 12th century continued to have an impact during the next 200 years.
Throughout Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, local, regional, and national interests challenged the cultural unity of Christendom. The continuing growth of commerce both within Europe and with the East, civic awareness, the extraordinary intellectual and artistic creativity of the Renaissance, and social turmoil were all characteristic of the late Middle Ages. The general struggle for supremacy between church and state became a fixture of European history.
• It manifest – in the absence of any potential unifying power – in the hope for a united Italy, independent from both pope and emperor and free of civic and territorial strife.
o The towns and cities – which were growing in prosperity and population – began to strive for political self-control. The struggle was particularly fierce in Italy, where towns were caught between the conflicting political designs of the Empire and the Papacy.
o There was conflict between the various social classes and interests. One result of which was the intensification of political and social thought, now called “Civil Humanism”, as people attempted to articulate their own positions.
o During this time the Bubonic plaque of the 14th century (1347-1351) killed about 25 million people in Europe.
• It manifest in the ‘Hundred Years War’ from 1337 to 1453 between the king of France and the king of England, his theoretical underling. [At that time, Joan of Arc (1412-1431), believed to be God inspired in conquering the English, accomplished a decisive victory. Later, she conducted another campaign, this time without royal support, where she was captured by Burundian soldiers, who sold her to their English allies. Eventually she was burned at the stake in 1431 as a heretic. Twenty years after her death, the church pronounced her innocent].
• Spurred on by national rivalry and commercial interest in opening new trade routes to the East, the Spanish monarchy sponsored the first voyage of an Italian navigator-merchant Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). The result was unexpected – a new world lay to the west. Horizons were widening, and the material and physical world had become an object of curiosity in its own right.
• In the scientific field, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), replaced Ptolemy’s (AD 100-170) geocentric theory, which held that the sun and the planets revolved about the fixed earth. He postulated the heliocentric theory – the earth and other planets revolve about a stationary sun.
EARLY MODERN TIMES
The Dawn of a New Age:
The century and a half between European contact with America and the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) was an age of transition and intellectual tension. After 1648, religion continued to be important in European history, but the priority was of secular concerns; this transition left unrest and uncertainty in its wake. The peoples of Europe exhibited a profound ambivalence – being no longer medieval, though not yet modern.
Captains such as Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan – insofar as they were inspired by their own personal religious zeal – made possible a vast missionary effort. Motivated by acquisition as well, they contributed to a commercial revolution and the development of capitalism.
As the principal sponsors of the earliest voyages, Portugal and Spain were the first to reap an economic harvest. Although the vast quantity of silver that poured into Spain from the Americas contributed to a “price revolution” (rapid devaluation of money and long-term inflation), it served initially to place extraordinary power in the hands of King Philip II, heir to the Habsburg domains in Western Europe and the Americas, Philip was also the self-appointed defender of the Roman Catholic faith.
He opposed the ambitions of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean not only because the Turks were imperial competitors but also because they were seen as Muslim infidels. Similarly, his campaigns against the Netherlands and England were at once imperial and religious, his enemies in both cases being Protestants.
The Reformation:
The Protestant Reformation that Philip so detested was begun in 1517, when Martin Luther proposed his Ninety-Five Theses for public debate. In search of personal salvation and offended by what he considered the sale of papal indulgences, the Wittenberg professor had arrived at a position that differed little from that for which Jan Hus (John Huss) had been martyred a century before.
Indulgences – (by paying an amount of money or property to the church, a certain amount of his sins will be dismissed and they will not be counted as sins. This was like a ‘license to sin’, and thus, all the wealthy Christians bought the indulgences in bulk to freely indulge in their sinful acts without the fear of God, and that revenue became the main source of multiplying the church property).
Having proclaimed salvation by faith alone, Luther refused to recant even when presented with a bull of excommunication. Despite its religious character, however, Luther’s challenge to the church was entangled with politics. Recognizing the danger of political repercussions, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V placed Luther under imperial ban.
Luther’s break with the church might have remained an isolated event had it not been for the invention of the printing press. Reproduced in large numbers and widely circulated, his writings served as the catalyst for even more radical reform—that of the Anabaptists. In their determination to re-create the atmosphere of primitive Christianity, the Anabaptists were opposed by Roman Catholics and Lutherans alike.
Nor could the Reformation be contained geographically; it entered Switzerland when Huldreich Zwingli championed its cause in Zürich. In Geneva, French-born John Calvin published the first great work of Protestant theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Calvinism proved to be the most politically militant of the Protestant confessions.
Although not merely a response to the Protestant challenge, the Counter Reformation represented an effort by the Roman Catholic Church to reinvigorate the instruments of authority. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) reaffirmed traditional Roman Catholic dogma, denounced ecclesiastical abuses, and established the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books. In the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, the Counter Reformation could boast of an organization as militant and dedicated as that of any Protestant confession.
Religious Wars:
The struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants could not be confined to the spiritual arena.
During the period from 1550 to 1650, protracted religious wars occasioned widespread death and destruction. These religious struggles were, however, inextricably intertwined with political contests that eventually assumed primary importance.
In France, bloody civil strife between Roman Catholics and Huguenots (Protestants) dragged on for 30 years until Henry IV was recognized as king in 1593.
Placing secular power above religious loyalty, the Protestant Henry converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith recognized by the majority of his subjects.
In the Netherlands, Roman Catholic Spain and the Calvinist Dutch provinces fought a long and brutal war (1567-1609) that ended in victory for the Calvinists. Here, religion was closely identified with national aspiration; Dutch leader William of Orange, a Roman Catholic and a Lutheran before becoming a Calvinist, summoned his people above all else to national resistance.
In England, too, the religious struggle was part of a more encompassing effort to ensure national independence from Rome. Under Queen Elizabeth I, reasons of state dictated religious policy; as a result, Protestant administrative autonomy and Roman Catholic ritual were skillfully woven into a fabric of compromise that produced the Church of England. With the aid of treacherous storms (the “Protestant Wind”), Elizabethan England turned back the “Invincible Armada” (the Spanish navy) sent against it by Philip II of Spain in 1588, a victory as much national as it was religious.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) was the last religious and the first modern war. Ignited in Bohemia, where Roman Catholic Habsburgs and Protestant Czechs stood in fierce opposition, the fires of war were fed by Lutheran Denmark and Sweden. Almost from the first, however, the war’s character was ambiguous; although religious passions certainly contributed, the war had by 1635 become a political contest between the Habsburg and Bourbon families, both Roman Catholic, for European political dominance.
Consistent with the transitional and tension-ridden character of the age, it was Cardinal Richelieu, a prince of the church whose interests were secular, who led the French into the fray. At the end of the war France emerged as the greatest power on the European continent and the prototype of the secular, centralized state.
The Age of Absolutism:
In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, absolutism began to take a recognizable form; the secular, centralized state replaced feudal political conceptions and institutions as the instrument of worldly power and influence.
Through the efforts of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, France had emerged as the first great modern power.
In 1661, when Louis XIV (1638-1715) assumed control of the country’s affairs, he understood that new territories could be won only by mobilizing the economic and military resources of the entire nation. The series of wars that he visited upon Europe failed to transform his boldest dreams into realities, but the effort itself would have been impossible without the mercantilist economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the creation of a large standing army. The vast military and civil bureaucracy that was the certain attendant of Louis’s unbridled territorial ambition soon began to take on a life of its own, and although the king may have believed that he was the state, he had in fact become its first servant.
A similar fate overtook the French aristocracy. As feudal diversity fell victim to bureaucratic rationality, aristocrats were obliged to surrender political power to bureaucratic officers called intendants.
Mercantilism – Economic policy, under which governmental control was exercised in accordance with the theory that national strength is increased by a predominance of exports over imports – an idea that exports to foreign countries are preferable over both trade within one’s own country and to imports; that the wealth of a nation depends primarily on the possession of gold and silver.
Efforts were directed toward the elimination of the internal trade barriers that characterized the middle Ages. Industries were encouraged and assisted in their growth because they provided a source of taxes to support the large armies and other trimmings of national government.
Exploitation of colonies was considered a legitimate method of providing the parent countries with precious metals and with the raw materials on which export industries depended.
The use of colonies as supply depots for the home economies, and the exclusion of colonies from trade with other nations produced such reactions as the American Revolution, in which the colonists asserted their desire for freedom to seek economic advantage wherever it could be found.
European industries, which had developed under the mercantile system, became strong enough to operate both without mercantilist protection and in spite of mercantilist limitations. Accordingly, a philosophy of free trade began to take root.
The Centralized State:
Perceiving that power was supreme, other European monarchs were quick to emulate French absolutism.
Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) devoted his energies to transforming Russia into a major military power. As part of his program of Westernization he created a standing army and a navy, encouraged the study of Western technology, and insisted that nobility be defined by service to the state.
Moreover, he took steps to rationalize government administration. These efforts were crowned with success when Russia defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721). Situated in their new capital at Saint Petersburg, Peter and his successors could no longer be left out of Europe’s political equation. Nor could Prussia, where the historical pattern was similar to that of most centralizing states: War and the expansionist impulse dictated the concentration of power, the standardization of administrative procedures, and the creation of a modern standing army.
The price to be paid for failing to centralize power was political decline, as manifested by the histories of Poland and the Ottoman Empire.
The persistence of aristocratic independence so weakened Poland that it was finally devoured at three separate feasts (1772, 1793, 1795) by its neighbors Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
The Turks, once the feared conquerors of southeastern Europe, were unable to prevent their Janissaries and provincial officials from usurping power that had once belonged to the sultan. As a result, the Ottoman Empire was on its way to becoming the “sick man of Europe” before the end of the 18th century.
Out of the wars that ravaged Europe between 1667 and 1721, a state system emerged that by and large survived until 1914.
At the beginning of the period, France stood unchallenged as the greatest military power in Europe; by the second decade of the 18th century, however, England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia were all powers to be reckoned with.
Instead of a French imperium, Europe was organized as an equilibrial group of great powers. Balance of power became the fundamental principle of European diplomacy and an effective counter to any aggression that had for its aim continental hegemony.
Imperium – absolute power
Equilibrial – a state in which opposing forces or influences are balanced
Hegemony – leadership or dominance of one country or social group over others
The Secular View of the World:
Paralleling the secularization of politics was the secularization of thought. The scientific revolution of the 17th century laid the foundation for a worldview that did not depend on Christian assumptions and categories. Cutting themselves loose from theology, philosophers discovered new allies in science and mathematics.
For thinkers such as English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), the destiny of the soul was of less concern than the operation of the natural world. Further, even though Bacon was an empiricist and Descartes a rationalist, both believed that the power of human reason, rightly employed, rendered authority obsolete. Still theistic by nature, at least admitting to the ‘watch-maker’, while others such as empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) analyzed the rationale of divine cause and decided that it is non-existent.
Empiricism – the theory that all knowledge is derived from sensual experience
Rationalism – the theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of knowledge
From Suhotra Swami’s book “Substance and Shadow” Ch.2:
“Here are four of Hume’s arguments in summary:
• All creatures are subject to pain as well as pleasure – but why, if God is benevolent?
• The world is controlled by strict laws – but if God has to resort to rule of law, how can He be perfect?
• Powers and faculties are distributed to the living entities with great frugality. Why, if God is magnanimous?
• Though the different parts of the great machine of nature work together systematically, these parts (for instance, rainfall) are sometimes deficient, sometimes excessive. Thus it seems nature works without higher supervision. Why, if God is infallible?
Hume’s skepticism left ravages upon the European mind.
The response of the rationalists came from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was highly impressed by Hume’s logic. Kant attempted to synthesize skepticism and rationalism into what is known as Critical Philosophy.
In doing this, he fell victim to reflexive criticism. He argued that while reason is transcendental (i.e. it stands outside sense perception), it is meaningful to us only in terms of sense perception. We must rely upon our senses to know whether an idea is reasonable or not. Therefore the design argument is (from the human perspective) unreasonable, because the world we perceive does not appear to have been created by a beneficent and omnipotent God. But if perception proves reason, how does Kant prove from sense perception his contention that reason is transcendental to the senses? On this point, he fell victim to reflexivity. Kant’s conclusion was, for all practical purposes, agnostic: God is confined to the realm of the unprovable, beyond the senses. Therefore discussing God is a waste of the philosopher’s time. Rationalists who philosophize about a reality transcending our experience are in what Kant called transcendental illusion. Thus Kant ended an era of rationalist defense of Christianity.
The irony is that before Kant, rationalism was largely identified with theism and deism. Today, people take rationalism to be a synonym for atheism and scientific skepticism.”
Of the several makers of the modern mind, none was more important or more celebrated than English physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1858-1931), who worked out an all-encompassing mechanical explanation of the universe resting upon the law of universal gravitation. The awe that Newton inspired in the 18th-century philosophies can scarcely be exaggerated.
From Suhotra Swami’s book “Substance and Shadow”:
“Newton reduced reality to the base concerns of vaisyas and sudras, namely numerical value and physical work. His model was cool to the belief (shared by Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) that matter is moved by spirit and it was warm to the belief that mechanical forces move matter.
If matter is moved by spirit, it is then fair to say that matter has a moral dimension. Most religions teach that souls are promoted or degraded according to what they do with matter; they also teach that certain kinds of matter are sanctified by God. When they utilize sanctified matter (holy water, for example), souls are blessed. The blessing emanates not from the molecules of the holy water – these being no different from the molecules of sewer water – but from the holy spirit that moves the foundations of the material world: the three modes of creation, maintenance and destruction. God acts through earth, water, fire, air and ether (sound) to deliver people from sinful life, and to inspire their hearts with loving attraction to Him.
On the other hand, if matter is moved only by mechanical forces, it would be fair to say it has no moral quality whatsoever. Newton allowed a role for God only in the beginning, when He set the mechanism of the cosmos into motion. God faded from the scene after that initial push, and mechanics just carried on. If this is the case, then water is always just water. The only ethics at play in a mechanistic universe are the ethics of physical survival.
Determined to popularize the scientific worldview and to adapt its methods to the task of social and political criticism, the leaders of the “Age of Enlightenment” placed the affairs of this world squarely at the center of their work.
In the most famous compendium of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), French philosophers Denis Diderot (the editor), Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and others challenged the religious worldview and championed a scientific humanism based on natural law.
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The Latin Christian doctrine of guilt has had the most powerful influence on modern civilization. (Each of the three mainstream Western religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—is grounded in the belief of Adam’s original sin and subsequent fall.)
The following is a synopsis of social dynamics, influenced by this doctrine.
In the early Roman Catholic Church, the most influential exposition of the Christian doctrine of guilt came from Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430). He argued that Adam’s fall robbed mankind of free will. Thus every man born is a servant of the Devil in the form of lust. Having lost our power of choice, we are no better than beasts, as proven by lust’s inescapable control over the human organs. Only when one attains sainthood by the grace of Christ can one be free of lust, free of the Devil, free of Adam’s guilt, and free to serve God. For the vast majority of ordinary Christians not blessed by saintliness, life was a constant threat of demonic temptation. The only hope was desperate, unflagging loyalty to the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.
Augustine’s influence was such that for more than a thousand years until the time of the Reformation, good Christians stood guard against their own sensory experiences as being “of the world, the flesh and the devil.” A Christian was supposed to control bodily urges by prayer, fasting and self-denial. These measures were in the main poorly executed. For example, total abstinence from meat and alcohol was never encouraged by the Church; rather, indulgence was the norm. Meat and alcohol are heavily tamasic. A diet that permits the entry of such things into the mouth gives force to the tamasic urges of lust, anger and greed in the body.
And so, in the thirteenth century, Church authorities recorded that many Christians were throwing off the Augustinian burden of guilt and giving in totally to forbidden sense pleasures. To discipline his flock, Pope Gregory IX launched the tyrannical Inquisition. The next century saw the rise of the Flagellants who whipped themselves bloody in the streets, frenzied as they were by a sinfulness that clung to them no matter what redemptive measures they took. In the fifteenth century, many thousands of Europeans came to the conclusion that the road to salvation shown by the Church was too narrow, steep and strewn by stumbling blocks. These hopeless souls, seeing themselves too sinful to be saved, took to witchcraft and Satanism—partly to defy Church authority, and partly because these “alternative religions” encouraged carnal pleasures unburdened by guilt.
The Reformers of the sixteenth century (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others) were revolted by—and so revolted against—the Church’s powerful institutionalized hierarchy. They argued it had no support in the pages of the Bible. They cried out for freedom in the Word of God from priest-enforced guilt, superstition and resignation. Thoughtful Europeans, hoping Christianity would now be rid of the harsher consequences of the Augustinian doctrine of Adam's original sin, were soon dismayed to discover that the shedding of the Catholic snakeskin revealed a Protestant snake beneath. The Protestants seemed just as unrelenting as the Catholics in laying down “guilt trips” upon the populace: witch-hunts, heresy trials and public burning of supposed enemies of Christ.
In disgust, some intellectuals sought freedom from guilt in a different direction, one that led away from the Bible. And so modern philosophy was born. In the seventeenth century philosophers allied themselves with science. The hope of science was to make reality controllable by reducing it to physics and mathematics.”
The Philosopher-Kings:
During the second half of the 18th century, the Enlightenment joined hands with absolutism. Inspired by the philosophers, absolute monarchs, such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine the Great of Russia, modeled themselves on the ideal of the philosopher-king, attempting with varying degrees of success to enlist power in the service of the common good.
Despite their sincerity, they only succeeded in making absolutism more absolute. The advancement of uniform codes of law and bureaucratic regulations created an aristocratic resurgence, but aristocrats owed their new lease on life to their willingness to serve the state. In an effort to improve the welfare of their subjects, the enlightened absolutists simply advanced the centralized state power more deeply into daily existence.
THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
Toward the end of the 18th century, the concentration of power in the hands of the monarch began to be challenged. European reaction to absolutism was enhanced by the success of the American Revolution (1775-1783), with its resultant republic, and by the rise of the English bourgeoisie due to the Industrial Revolution.
This reaction first crystallized in France in 1789 and spread throughout the continent in the following century.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The French Revolution (1789-1799) comprised a series of events that transformed the political, social, and ideological atmosphere of modern Europe.
These events were set in motion when the aristocracy, refusing to be taxed, made it necessary for King Louis XVI to revive the moribund Estates-General in the spring of 1789. Few suspected that this decision would unleash elemental and irresistible forces of discontent. Although they had different ends in view, aristocrats, bourgeois, sans-culottes (the urban poor), and peasants were united in their determination to alter the conditions of their existence. Accompanying this assertion of self-interest was a body of abstract ideas that gave direction to revolutionary energies.
In particular, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty (defending the popular will against divine right) inspired the more articulate leaders of the third estate (the common people). When the National Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789, it intended to serve notice to the rest of Europe that it had discovered universally valid principles of government.
The Reign of Terror:
The constitutional monarchy that had evolved by 1791 was as unsatisfactory to the king as it was to the increasingly powerful and vocal faction called Jacobins. In the Legislative Assembly (1791-1792), they and the Girondins, another faction, agitated for a republic at the same time as they engineered a declaration of war against Austria (April 1792).
When French forces suffered initial reversals, revolutionary temperatures rose even higher, and in September the newly formed National Convention promptly proclaimed France a republic. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed, and during the ensuing year and a half, the country was ruled by dictators, whose dreams of moral perfection and hatred of hypocrisy inspired a reign of terror that made the guillotine the symbol of political messianism.
The moral fury of the Committee of Public Safety recognized no territorial boundary, and its members prosecuted the escalating war against a coalition of European powers. In part, their success can be attributed to the national conscription that was instituted in August 1793; it demonstrated the awesome military potential of a nation in arms.
Eventually, however, fear invaded the committee itself; in July 1794 Maximilien Robes Pierre, its own leading member, was arrested and executed. During the reaction that followed, the French quickly forgot the “republic of virtue” and welcomed vice almost as a symbol of liberty.
Napoleon’s Rise to Power:
The much-maligned government of the subsequent Directory (1795-1799) attempted to assimilate the least controversial elements of the revolutionary heritage and to deliver the coup de grace to messianism.
Determined to open careers to talent, it made possible the rapid rise to power of General Napoleon Bonaparte. With the connivance of two directors, Napoleon staged a coup d’état – the sudden overthrow of a government and seizure of political power by the military – in November 1799. He ruled as a dictator, and in 1804 crowned himself emperor.
A student of the Enlightenment who came of age during the Revolution, Napoleon was the last of the enlightened absolutists. As part of his program to establish universal reason, he promulgated the Code Napoleon, a uniform system of law, and brought education under national control. As between the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality, he preferred the latter in the knowledge that only a strong central authority could promote it.
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
In foreign affairs, Napoleon renewed Louis XIV’s expansionism with a firm belief in judiciously selected principles of the Enlightenment. He abolished ancient privileges and imposed equality before the law in the territories—and these included most of continental Europe—that he had added to the French Empire by force of arms. In his passion for centralized control, he sacrificed historical complexities to the requirements of administrative convenience, the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine being a case in point.
What Napoleon failed to appreciate was the extent to which larger administrative units and egalitarian reform promoted national consciousness. Just as his success was based upon French national enthusiasm, so his fall was hastened by the development of national consciousness in other European peoples. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) differed from those of Louis XIV in that they were not merely between states, but between nation-states. After a series of disasters, above all the campaign in Russia, Napoleon was defeated; the Hundred Days (1815) that followed his escape from Elba constituted a desperate and hopeless final gamble. With leaders of the Revolution, Napoleon had increased the power of the centralized state and added an explosive mixture of nationalism.
Liberalism, Nationalism & Socialism:
After Napoleon’s defeat, the victorious allies assembled in Vienna, bent upon restoring the old order. Trumpeting the principle of legitimacy, Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich recalled the Bourbons to France, secured Habsburg hegemony in the German and Italian-speaking areas of central Europe, and forged a general agreement—Concert of Europe—to police the continent. His masterful performance, however, could only be a holding action. French revolutionary ideas conspired with the specter of industrialization and a rapidly growing population to subvert any effort to turn back the clock.
The Romantics:
Even more ominous, the romantic imagination had been excited by the stirring drama of revolution and war. Rejecting rational calculation and classical restraint, romantics invented an idealized Napoleon and lent to liberalism, socialism, and nationalism an emotive fervor.
As heirs of the Enlightenment and representatives of the bourgeoisie, the liberals campaigned for a constitutional government, secular education, and a market economy that would liberate the productive forces of capitalism.
Their appeal, although real, was limited to a relatively small segment of the population and was soon eclipsed by that of rival ideologies.
In part, this was because of their indifference to the increasingly volatile “social question,” to which utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen offered provocative, if fanciful, answers.
More important, liberalism failed to generate the kind of fanatical enthusiasm that attended the rise of national consciousness. Set in motion by the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the seminal writings of German historian Johann Gottfried von Herder, romantic nationalism outstripped every competing ideology, particularly in the lands that lay east of the Rhine.
Christianity began to lose its hold on individual lives, while national consciousness took on a messianic character.
From Suhotra Swami’s book “Dimensions of Good and Evil” Ch.20:
“And with this new emphasis on the emotional self came a whole new way of defining morality.
The idyllic imagination shies away from a rigorous definition of goodness. It expects virtue to flow from freedom rather than the discipline of character. Thus the idyllic imagination is sentimental, not perfectional. This sentimental formulation of morality acquired its ideological voice in the writings of the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who sparked an eighteenth-century revolution in European thought known as Romanticism.
Rousseau believed that human beings are at heart innocent. They naturally love justice and harmony. The urban structure of civilization—which encourages competition and the ownership of private property—corrupted us. Rousseau marked the path away from citified ruination by his maxim “To thine own self be true.” This translates well into such modern pearls of wisdom as “Do your own thing,” “Hang loose,” “Get in touch with your inner child,” “What feels right is right,” “If it feels good, do it” and “Get back to nature.”
Rousseau paid lip service to the virtues of compassion, friendliness and loving kindness, but his own character was undisciplined and shockingly deficient in truthfulness, purity and honesty. Other philosophers of his time, who were sympathetic at first to his message, soon soured as they came to know the dark side of Rousseau's personality. Hume and Voltaire dismissed Rousseau as a monster. Diderot called him “deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice.” A woman with whom Rousseau was intimate summed him up as “an interesting madman.”
Considering rationalism and romanticism:
Apparently they are opposites at war with one another. But in the end, the rhetoric of their conflict is a grand illusion. Rationalism and romanticism are factually partners. As functions of the lower modes, they are united by a common theme: disdain for the authorized tradition of goodness. This disdain is itself a Western tradition.
It is a legacy of the ascendancy in Kali-yuga of materialistic vaiçya and çüdra values over the sacred knowledge of ancient priests and kings.
In Vedic culture, the natural virtues of the soul—justice, mercy, friendliness, loving kindness, truthfulness, honesty and pure character—are made tangible in society by a set practice of virtuous duties. Just as a person's musical virtuosity is built and polished by regular practice with a musical instrument, similarly there are regular moral practices that build and polish virtuous character. These practices constitute varëäçrama-dharma, the sattvic social order. When varëäçrama-dharma is observed for the satisfaction of Lord Kåñëa, it yields spiritual perfection.
In comparison, passionate and ignorant Western culture does not know what is to be done and what is not to be done to cultivate spiritual perfection. That is because the focus of Western culture is the body, not the soul.
The bodily identity is the playing field of duality. Duality means the opposite pairs of perception and conception—pleasure versus pain.”
REVOLUTIONS AND “SCIENTIFIC” SOCIALISM
Between 1815 and 1848, Europe was shaken three times by revolutionary eruptions. In 1848 the flames of revolt swept across almost all of Europe, sparing only England and Russia. When the ashes had finally cooled, however, it was clear that romantic revolution had burned itself out. France had proclaimed the Second Republic, but the majority of uprisings had failed, and apocalyptic dreams had not become realities. The restoration experiment, however, was at an end.
Railroads, industrialization, and a burgeoning urban population were altering Europe’s landscape at the same time that materialistic thinking began to challenge the romantic primacy of poetry and philosophy.
“Science” was becoming the guarantor of inexorable progress.
In 1851 London’s Great Exhibition paid homage to the century’s technological achievements. Charles Darwin, despite his vision of a savage nature, promised the “survival of the fittest.” Charles Darwin devised his theory of evolution upon Newtonian foundations.
Karl Marx and German revolutionist Friedrich Engels scoffed at utopianism and worked out a “scientific” socialism that was self-certifying.
From Suhotra Swami’s book “Dimensions of Good and Evil”:
“The religious idea of ‘Apocalypse’ – the final battle where good wins over evil; exerted powerful influence upon religious, political and cultural trends in the West.
Karl Marx divided history into four stages of society divided by periods of social upheaval. The first stage, “primitive communism,” corresponds to the Garden of Eden. The second, “private ownership,” corresponds to the “Fall”. The third, “capitalism and imperialism,” corresponds to the Last Days. In this stage, “the proletariat” (the working class) assumes the role of the Chosen People, the Jews; or in the Christian version, the faithful saved by the Blood of the Lamb, Jesus. The fourth and final stage of society according to Karl Marx is “the socialist revolution,” which corresponds to the Last Battle (or as per the Christian notion of the end of the world-era, the Second Coming). Marx predicted the final stage would be established by “a dictatorship of the proletariat”; gradually, the dictatorial aspect of the working-class state would wither away into Edenic “true communism.” In this formulation of two steps to perfection, Marx paralleled the Book of Revelations. It foresees the Apocalypse in two steps. The first is the return of Christ and his saints, who will rule the earth for one thousand years. The second step is the final defeat of the Antichrist. When all possibility of evil is at last vanquished, a permanent, infallible Eden—a New Order of Heaven and Earth—will be made manifest by God.”
PRACTICAL POLITICS
In politics, the torch was passed to adherents of realpolitik (German for “practical politics”). Thus, the liberal, but pragmatic, Count Camillo di Cavour succeeded where Mazzini had failed; he unified Italy by combining skillful diplomacy with the employment of regular armies.
Rejecting the uncompromising defiance of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian statesman Ferenc Deák negotiated home rule for Hungary within the context of the Habsburg monarchy.
In France, Napoleon III forged a modernizing dictatorship that coordinated industrialization, welfare programs, and social discipline.
Moreover, in the most important event of the third quarter of the century, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany.
Convinced that the great questions of his time could only be decided by “blood and iron,” he used wars against Denmark, Austria, and France to establish the new German nation-state as Europe’s leading power. Nevertheless, even the legendary chancellor, a Prussian patriot indifferent to ideology, was compelled to make concessions to the socialists and the nationalists. His ultimate failure to isolate diplomacy from national passion helped pave the road to World War I (1914-1918).
THE 20TH CENTURY
For most Europeans, the years from 1871 to 1914 constituted La Belle Epoque (“the beautiful times”). Science had made life more comfortable and secure, representative government had achieved wide acceptance in principle, and continued progress was confidently expected.
Proud of their accomplishments and convinced that history had assigned them a civilizing mission, Europe’s powers laid colonial claim to vast territories in Africa and Asia.
Some believed, however, that Europe was dancing on a volcano. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) cautioned against a superficial optimism and dismissed the liberal conception of rational humanity, while artists such as Dutch Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), and Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), explored the darker regions of the human heart.
From Suhotra Swami’s book “Dimensions of Good and Evil” Ch.17:
Moral dimensions of Nietzsche and Freud:
“The mindset of Western civilization is firm in the faith that the value of life is only what we make of it.
Nietzsche ethics were: “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
Translated into practical life, this ethic turns out to mean that modern man accepts no definite right or wrong above and beyond the needs of the body. Since the fulfillment of bodily needs is the only value he is confident of, modern man concludes that the public good can be best served by an industry of sense gratification.
About the moral universe, Nietzsche said, “There is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: fear therefore, nothing any more!”
Sigmund Freud was electrified by the revolutionary opposition to religion that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche unleashed. He latched on to the idea of human will as blind and primitive, and the idea of Judaeo-Christian morality as poison. From this background he brought forth a “science” he called psychoanalysis, probably the most successful modern attack ever on the traditional Western conception of the moral universe. Freud believed that God, guilt and the whole of theology were but a product of a hidden realm of the mind (or brain) he called the unconscious. The unconscious was a kind of psychic dungeon where a person locked up his or her natural longings. The longings, tortured by powerful mental constructs like “The Father” (God), cried out from the unconscious; these anguished cries appeared in the conscious mind as dreams, fantasies, sudden bursts of intense emotion as well as all forms of morality, religious belief and behavior. These creations of the mind did not constitute a report on the real situation of the outside world. The mind, a product of matter, made reports on the condition of the brain and body, pretty much the way blood pressure reports the condition of the cardiovascular system. Freud’s conclusion was that nobody is morally responsible for anything he thinks, says or does. There are no answers for questions of meaning and value. “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life,” wrote Freud, “he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.””
From Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s Tattva-Viveka:
“A certain doctrine of extinction similar to the Buddhism and Jainism has been found preached in the continent of Europe. This doctrine is called ‘Pessimism’.
The doctrine of extinction is divided in two classes viz., 1) materialistic extinction pertaining to a single life, 2) materialistic extinction pertaining to multitudes of births.
The Buddhism and Jainism belong to the second category.
Schopenhauer and Hartman are the materialistic extinctionalists of the first group. As per the view of Schopenhauer (1788-1860), one will attain extinction by practicing desirelessness for existence, fasting, self-willing abnegation and humbleness, accepting of physical burdens, purity etc. As per Hartman (1842-1906), there is no need of observing any penance because extinction normally follows after death. A person named Har Benson has said that human suffering is eternal and therefore extinction of the self is an impossibility…
The materialistic extinctionalists of modern Europe had preached this doctrine due to their enmity towards the religion of Christianity. This can be understood from the relevant history.”
Such forebodings began to seem less eccentric in the light of contemporary challenges to the liberal consensus. A new and virulent strain of anti-Semitism infected the political life of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France; in the home of the revolution, the Dreyfus affair threatened to bring down the Third Republic.
Dreyfus affair – “Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. The Dreyfus case exposed anti-Semitism in the army and generated extraordinary political and social controversy, polarizing liberal, intellectual, and governmental elements against the Roman Catholic Church, the army, and the conservative political establishment. The case influenced the election of a more liberal oriented French government in 1899, and helped bring about the decline of the French military’s power and prestige and the separation of church and state.”
National rivalries were exacerbated by imperial competition, and the nationality problem in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy intensified as a result of the government’s Magyarization policies and the example German and Italian unifications set for the Slavic peoples.
As the industrial working class grew in number and organized strength, Marxist social-democratic parties pressured European governments to equalize conditions as well as opportunities.
In the midst of an increasingly unsettled atmosphere, Emperor William II of Germany dismissed Bismarck in 1890. For two decades the Iron Chancellor had served as Europe’s “honest broker”, juggling with great dexterity a bewildering array of alliances and alignments and thereby maintaining the peace. None of his successors possessed the skill needed to preserve Bismarck’s system, and when the incompetent emperor jettisoned realpolitik (practical politics) in favor of Weltpolitik (imperial politics), England, France, and Russia formed the Triple Entente.
THE WORLD WARS
The German danger, coupled with Russian-Austrian rivalry in the Balkans, created a diplomatic configuration that presented difficulties far too great for the mediocre men who headed the European foreign offices on the eve of 1914.
When Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, he ignited a diplomatic powder keg.
World War I (1914-1918):
The enthusiasm with which the European peoples greeted the outbreak of hostilities during World War I quickly turned to horror as casualty lists lengthened and limited aims became irrelevant. What had been projected, as a brief war between states, became a four-year struggle. When the guns finally did fall silent in the last weeks of 1918, the German, Austrian, and Russian empires had collapsed, and the greater part of a generation of young men lay dead (10 million killed, 20 million wounded).
Clash was between two coalitions of European countries:
• The Allied Powers – the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Russian Empire. Later joined by Italy, Japan and the U.S.
• The Central powers – Germany and Austria-Hungary, joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.
A portent of things to come was that the principal figure at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) was United States president Woodrow Wilson who was determined to make the world “safe for democracy”. As he was issuing a clarion (urgent) call for a democratic Europe, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who had seized power in the Russian Revolution of 1917, was summoning the European proletariat (working) class to war and offering to supply the ideological keys to a Communist state.
Turning a deaf ear to both prophets of a world transformed, France and England insisted upon a punitive peace (intended as punishment), and Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey were obliged to sign treaties that had nothing to do with messianic dreams (inspired by a hope for a leader or savior).
“When Marshal Foch of France learned of the Versailles Treaty’s contents, he reportedly complained, “This is not peace. It is an armistice (truce) for twenty years.”
The Interwar Period:
In the wake of the catastrophic war and an influenza epidemic that claimed 20 million lives worldwide, many Europeans believed, with German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), that they were witnessing the decline of the West.
The Treaty of Versailles, with its war-guilt clause, had wounded German national pride, and Italians were convinced that they had been denied their rightful share of the postwar spoils.
Exploiting national discontent and fear of communism, Benito Mussolini established a Fascist dictatorship in 1922. Although his political doctrine was vague and contradictory, he recognized that in an age of mass politics, a blend of nationalism and socialism possessed the greatest revolutionary potential.
In Germany, inflation and depression provided Adolf Hitler with an opportunity to combine the same two revolutionary ideologies.
As Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin established national communism, he erected a governmental apparatus that was unrivaled in its pervasiveness.
World War II (1939-1945):
In the face of the growing belligerence of these totalitarian states and the confirmed isolationism of the United States, the European democracies found themselves on the defensive.
Under the leadership of Neville Chamberlain, England and France adopted a policy of appeasement, which was finally abandoned only after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
As World War II began, the stunning victories of the German armies persuaded almost everyone but Winston Churchill that Hitler’s “new order” was Europe’s destiny. But after 1941, when Hitler ordered an attack on the USSR and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the USSR and the United States joined a stubborn England in a concerted effort to compel Germany to surrender unconditionally. The tide turned in 1942 and 1943, and after the Normandy (Normandie) invasion in June 1944, Germany and its remaining allies succumbed in the wake of bitter fighting on two fronts. In the spring of 1945, Hitler committed suicide and a ravaged Germany surrendered to the Allied powers.
THE POSTWAR ERA
In the final days of war, advancing units of the United States and Soviet armies met near the German town of Torgau. This dramatic encounter symbolized the decline of European power and the division of the continent into United States and Soviet spheres of influence. Before long, the tension and suspicion engendered by the geographical proximity of the world’s two superpowers took the form of the “Cold War”, a test of resolve that was particularly nerve-racking at the dawn of the atomic age.
Alarmed by the ruthless imposition of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and by the vulnerability of a Western Europe that lay in economic ruin, U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall proposed a far-reaching program of aid designed to speed European recovery. The Marshall Plan made possible a miraculous economic recovery in the West. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 to promote mutual defense and collective security was the primary Western alliance during the Cold War.
Resistance to Soviet & U.S. Influence:
Almost from the first, the Soviet leaders learned that the fierce national pride that animates the peoples of Eastern Europe could not easily be suppressed. Soviet military force, along with troops from other countries of the Warsaw Pact – the military alliance adopted in Eastern Europe as a counter to NATO –crushed any rebellions, but voices of resistance and reform continued to be heard.
More welcome than the Soviets, the Americans had addressed Europeans as partners in an Atlantic alliance. Some, however, perceived dangers in America’s embrace. Chief among these Europeans was General Charles de Gaulle, who became president of France in 1958. He refused to concede a permanent presence in Western Europe to the United States.
De Gaulle had a vision of a Europe extending from the Atlantic to the Urals and advocated a loose federation of independent states. The first step in that direction had been taken in 1951, when France, West Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) agreed to establish the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).
This was followed in 1957 by the formation of the European Economic Community, or EEC (Common Market).
The End of the Cold War:
From the 1960s to the 1980s, strict conformity to the Communist system in the USSR discouraged economic innovation and punished dissent. Consequently, the economy stagnated. As the Cold War progressed, however, it gradually became clear to the Soviet leadership that they could not win a full-scale war with the United States, primarily because their defense costs were already straining the inefficient Soviet economy.
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. Gorbachev wanted to secure Western aid to modernize the Soviet economy. To achieve this end, he reduced defense spending, worked to ease international tensions, made the government less repressive and more responsive to popular concerns, and he urged the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe to do the same. In 1989 Gorbachev made it clear that Eastern European governments could not expect Soviet military aid to suppress domestic unrest.
The Collapse of the USSR:
In 1989 nationalist and democratic protests in Eastern Europe escalated rapidly into revolutions that swept Communists from power.
Gorbachev’s ambition to modernize the Soviet economy under the continued supremacy of the Communist Party failed. Popular opposition to Communist rule grew, as did nationalist agitation in the Soviet republics against the domination of Russia. When the three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) seceded in 1991, it was the beginning of the end of the USSR. By the end of 1991, 15 independent states had replaced the USSR. Russia, the largest of these independent states, persuaded all but the three Baltic nations to form a loose intergovernmental association – the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The two major organizations of Soviet control over Eastern Europe, the military Warsaw Pact and the economic Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), were dissolved in 1991.
The new governments of the successor states, including that of Russia, introduced a form of liberal democracy and accepted the need to establish free-market economies.
THE GROWTH OF COOPERATION & INTEGRATION
Links between West and East continued to develop. Western Europe welcomed the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe and the former USSR and promised economic assistance to many Eastern countries.
NATO established a Partnership for Peace agreement with all Eastern countries, including Russia, in which these nations could share information, conduct joint military exercises, and participate in peacekeeping operations with NATO forces.
In addition to growing relations with NATO, many Eastern countries also had economic and trade agreements with the former EEC (European Economic Community), which by this time had become first, the European Community (EC) and then in 1993, the European Union (EU).
Economic & Monetary Union:
In 1979 the EEC agreed to establish an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), in which the economies and currencies of the member states would be integrated.
The 1987 Single European Act (SEA) committed the EC to establish a single market in which all trade barriers and customs frontiers would be eliminated and to adopt common policies in areas ranging from employment and taxation to health and the environment.
The Treaty on European Union (also called the Maastricht Treaty) set 1999 as the deadline for monetary union and the adoption of a single currency, set strict monetary criteria that members had to meet, called for cooperation on foreign and security policies, and transformed the EC into the European Union (EU).
Many EU supporters saw the establishment of a single currency as essential if the EU was to be a major international player and as an important step toward political union.
The new currency, called the euro, was introduced in 1999 for accounting purposes and electronic money transfers. Euro-denominated coins and banknotes entered circulation in 2002 and replaced the currencies of countries participating in the monetary union.
THE FUTURE OF EUROPE
The most powerful force in modern European history has been nationalism, which has been at the same time both unifying and divisive.
The horrors of world war have revealed the potentially disastrous results of nationalism and demonstrated the need for cooperation and integration to maintain peace.
After 1945, with the beginning of the Cold War, Europe lived in a state of tension being the likely battleground of any direct conflict between the world’s two superpowers; having been divided into two armed camps – the USSR’s military intervention in Eastern Europe, and the American involvement in Western Europe.
However, the Cold War era also provided a form of stability and peace. The battle lines in Europe were so clearly drawn that both sides knew that the slightest trespass could result in total war. However, stability did not necessarily equal prosperity, as Communist suppression froze Eastern Europe politically and economically. By contrast, the American protective umbrella allowed the Western European nations to prosper economically and to develop closer cooperation and integration.
With the fall of Communism after 1989, bodies such as NATO and the EU have become the focus of integration and cooperation in achieving economic and political security in a Europe now consisting of some 40 states. National differences in policies and priorities will remain, but cooperation will continue because without it no European country can guarantee its own security or economic prosperity.
***
Up to now this article has not given any historical account of religion or philosophy for the 20th century. The theme having concentrated on politics, war economics and institutionalized tolerance. A passage from Suhotra Swami’s book “Dimensions of Good and Evil” (Ch. 19) is now presented to fill this void.
“Scientific liberalism – a fusion of rationalism and romanticism that, having overcome Marxism-Leninism in the former Soviet bloc countries now overshadows the whole world.
Scientific liberalism is a term coined by British journalist Bryan Appleyard. He defines it as the “enforced neutrality” of modern culture, which tells us “we must remove ourselves from values in order to understand them.”
The liberal or romantic aspect of scientific liberalism works on our sentiments so that we not only think but also feel it is best to live our lives disconnected from eternal, transcendent virtues and values. In the excerpts that follow, Appleyard lays out for our inspection the emotional appeal—and the consequent moral danger—of the liberal-scientific project.
“Because [scientific liberalism] offers no truth, no guiding light and no path, it can tell the individual nothing about his place or purpose in the world. In practice this is seen as liberalism’s great, shining virtue, for it is the one way of avoiding what the liberal sees as the horrors of the past.
“Liberal history says that societies that did tell the individual who he was, what he was for and precisely how he should behave have almost invariably been cruel and destructive. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were the great recent European examples...People suffered and died for their national, religious, or moral differences...Liberalism, institutionalized tolerance, would seem to be the only way of constructing a stable society that would sustain rather than oppress such a healthy plurality. This is the key defense of liberalism’s refusal to be spiritually committed...But, sound as that defense is, it does not end the debate...For, as I have said, science is not neutral, it invades any private certainties we may establish as a defense against the bland noncommittal world of liberalism. It saps our energy...Tolerance becomes apathy because tolerance in itself does not logically represent a positive virtue or goal. So a tolerant society can easily decline into a society that cares nothing for its own sustenance and continuity. The fact that democracies constantly seem to have a crisis in their schools is important—it is a symptom of crucial uncertainty about what there is to teach, about whether there is anything to teach.
“At the heart of this spiritual problem lies the lack of a sense of self. Just as scientific liberalism holds back from the moral or the transcendent, so it also holds back from providing the individual with an awareness of his place in the world. On the maps provided by science we find everything except ourselves.”
“Decadence arises”, concludes Appleyard, “from the obvious failure of liberalism to transmit any value other than bland tolerance.”
In 1998, a group of British and American researchers profiled the cult of bland tolerance in a provocative book entitled “Faking It—The Sentimentalization of Modern Society”.
The central thesis is that modern society is a colossal fraud rendered tolerable by an ethos of creepy niceness that, like perfume, masks the rot. A “sentimental fascism” controls public opinion by “a hammerlock on all the caring cliches.” People have become “empathy-junkies” who wallow in a great hot tub of self-indulgent emotions even as they listlessly hand their lives over to:
“Fake schools that spoil rather than teach children; fake religions in which a new commandment, “feel good”, has replaced traditional moral codes; a fake social policy based on the evasion of personal responsibility; a fake political system that takes taxes from the people and gives back gestures and poses; fake counselors and therapists who pretend all pain can be hugged away… a fake news media that manipulates its audience through emotional blackmail by promoting feeling over thinking, fake love that is really just a form of politics; faked feelings, whereby virtues like compassion, friendship and kindliness are imitated at opportune moments and then spat out like mouthwash; fake justice that decides guilt and innocence not by deep feelings about the violation of moral principles, but by how people today feel about moral principles. In other words, there's no justice—there’s just us”
Modern societies face rising crime rates, falling standards in schools, family collapse and widespread confusion about morals and manners. Despite our enormous economic success, something has gone wrong. Two diagnoses are common. One blames bad ideas, theories and policies. The other blames interests and structures and the way society is organized. But really the source of the problem is neither of these. It is something much more basic than organization, funding or precise policies; more fundamental even than ideologies and philosophies. Sentimentality is a feeling, or rather a distortion of a feeling, deep in the psyche of western civilization.
The Greek word psyche means “soul”. There are indeed feelings deep within the soul: feelings for justice, mercy, friendliness, loving kindness, truth, honesty and pure character.
These are the natural virtues of the soul.
In a society based on the principles of goodness, these feelings link us to the moral universe. The virtues resonate sympathetically with the divine law that marks out the fate of the soul. They are feelings of spiritual value.
Unfortunately, the program of scientific liberalism is to bury the soul under the bodily conception. It waters the virtues down into mere body-based sentiments that are contrary to spiritual values. The combination of soulless rationalism and sentimental romanticism is ugly and dangerous. It simultaneously degrades man and desensitizes him to his degradation...indeed, through perverted sensitivities, he comes to relish the taste of his own dissolution.
Why is the West embracing an ethic of fakery? The Christian program for social virtue was pressed on people with the great weight of Augustine’s doctrine of guilt. Therefore people rebelled against it. In time, innumerable secular philosophers took up the question of how society might be perfected. One of the most influential ideas to emerge is called the “social contract theory”.
The social contract theory conceived of a society held together not by Christian virtue but by common interest. This theory elevated common interest to the status of the most important human virtue—as if by common interest alone, a New Order would prevail on earth. Opposed to this virtue is the beastly “war of all against all” (untamed selfishness).
The French sociologist Denis Dudos offers an unsettling insight into the way leading nations of the West, especially the United States, hope to achieve victory for the “virtue” of common interest over the vice of beastly selfishness. The “new cosmology” of science is the inspiration for planners who…imagine how the laws of man’s animal nature (“homo homini lupus” [“man, the wolf to man”]) could be used toward a productive end by channeling their energy into a conventional institution...As a sublimated animal force, the conventional will thus become the instrument for making man artificial and for rebuilding him as peaceful.
Dudos is saying that the goal of today's social contract project is to engage science and technology in manufacturing a class of fake human beings. “Fake”, means, people who are social automatons, who cooperate as smoothly and precisely as do ants or bees. This sort of future is standard fare in science fiction.
For people who are not happy with the prospect of being rebuilt as robots, there is a Mickey Mouse version of the social contract project that redraws people as characters in a grand cartoon of life.
Dudos argues persuasively that the effort to get human beasts to live and work together within an artificial, hi-tech environment simply cooks up paranoia and aggression to the boiling point. Instead of remaking man as a gentle robot or cartoon character, the social contract project remakes him as a werewolf—an apparently civilized man or woman who may at any time abruptly change into a monster and commit the most vile crimes. The artifice of civility gives the werewolf a disguise to move about undetected. Since everybody is potentially a werewolf, who can be trusted?
Anywhere, at any time, a creature displaying the instincts of a beast may suddenly appear. To make matters worse, innocent children will be lured to follow it, for the beast may take the form of a neighbor or a trusted friend. And if you suspect your neighbor is a beast, then he must also suspect you...So people act as if they are being observed, and at the same time they keep an eye on what is going on around them. Because of their mutual presumptions of guilt about each other, people create a sort of diffuse totalitarianism, mutual surveillance, and a general state of anxiety...The system works well, and therefore represents the general interests. Peddlers of real or fictional televised terror become rich and maintain the climate of insecurity…There are so many crazy people, drug addicts, and derelicts around...We forget the causes of these chains of events.
Western hope for the triumph of good over evil is unrealized and unrealizable. It began as a religious faith. It has atheistic variants like Communism. All are doomed to failure because the hope that drives them seeks its fulfillment in the bodily conception. True, the hope itself is originally spiritual: it represents the yearning of the soul’s virtues for freedom from the darkness of ignorance and vice. But it is a hope that has been long misled by wrong teachings. There is a sense of urgency in the world today that the human race is in trouble and needs guidance—but not from the Western religious tradition, nor Western philosophy, nor Western science, nor Western political ideologies. These failed us. Where do we turn now?
Western imagination periodically comes to a point of intense frustration with the “reality-brackets” imposed by Western civilization. These brackets are basically the mode of passion. Mania is valued as a state of mind free from these brackets. But there are two ways the mind gets out of passion: “up” (toward goodness) and “down” (toward ignorance). The problem is that the Western imagination is not clear about the difference between the two. “Good” just means “getting out.” The point is just to reach a state of mind that is “other” than conventional reality. Whether a mind goes “out” upwardly or downwardly is of much less importance: “Whatever turns you on, man.”
With the rise of reductionism, this moral distinction was cast aside. Even before reductionism the distinction was at best blurred, since standard Christian doctrine maintained a unity between soul and body, and standard Christian conduct included meat-eating and intoxication. But reductionism utterly denied the objective existence of vice and virtue. The only reality was matter…
In such a worldview as this, what passes for virtue is the common interest—which simply means group animalism: eating, sleeping, sex and self-defense in a herd instead of on one’s own against all others. Common interest comprises the reality-brackets of post-Christian Western society.
The aim of material society is to generate rasa artificially. But as that is impossible, this aim is the root of all evil. The thirst for rasa drives the nondevotees into sinfulness, which threatens the very existence of society. Thus the government, trying to protect society, is forced to impose more and more restrictions on the citizens. This only encourages their criminality. Thus modern civilization is caught in a downward spiral into deeper and deeper levels of hellishness.
The ramifications of the law, its complications, its apparently motiveless interference with private lives have lead to its widespread evasion; and the more it is avoided the less it is respected. This is nowhere so evident as it is in large cities where the violation of certain laws and many moral conventions is an accepted part of everyday life, where the man that violates them can point to a thousand others who do so too, where the anonymity and perhaps the loneliness and frustration of existence are emphasized by the impersonality of large business organizations and factories and by the restless competition for a place in the sun. All these things tend to condition men to accept crime not as an evil but as a means of getting what they want quickly and as an escape from routine and boredom. The family, the church, the club, and other traditional forms of social control are associated with the tired and aimless regularity of older, pitiable or contemptible lives and so lose their hold on their unruly members who look to more exciting means of satisfying a need for stimulation. Drink and drugs and speed and sex are exciting and so is crime and in cities the opportunities for crime are extensive...
This, as good a description of hell as one can find anywhere, happens to be a description of “the free world” of urban capitalism.
Çrémad-Bhägavatam 7.9.43 calls the taste that impels people to live in such a hell mäyä-sukha, which literally means “illusory happiness” (drink and drugs and speed and sex); Çréla Prabhupäda once translated mäyä-sukha as “humbug civilization.” In the midst of this hell, Lord Kåñëa has kindly descended in the form of His holy name, which puts out the fire of material desire and directly reveals the taste for which we are always anxious. The chanting of the holy names—Hare Kåñëa, Hare Kåñëa, Kåñëa Kåñëa, Hare Hare/Hare Räma, Hare Räma, Räma Räma, Hare Hare—is the proven method for bringing forth the incandescent virtues of the spirit self, thus reversing the downward spiral into which millions of unfortunates are being sucked at every moment.
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Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura – Essay on four categories of materialists:
• Immoral materialists: those who have no ethics and no faith in God.
• Non-theistic moralists: those with ethics but no faith in God.
• Theistic moralists: those with ethics based on faith in God, but who give more importance to morality than they do to God.
• Pretenders: those who engage in immoral behavior while posing as theists.
Immoral materialists:
Those who follow no ethical system are the lowest of human beings. They are the primitive peoples and the hedonistic modern man. Indeed, such human beings are on the same level as animals. Bhaktivinoda describes the attitude of the hedonists: “They consider that this variegated universe is simply a chance combination of atoms and molecules with no creator. Any belief in God or the soul is simply blind faith and gross superstition. As we only live once, a person should try to enjoy as much as possible.”
Non-theistic moralists:
Being more intelligent, the moralist can easily defeat the immoral materialist. He says: “Oh brother, I respect what you say but I cannot accept your self-motivated actions. They are not at all good. You are seeking out happiness in life, but without morals how can there be happiness? Do not think that your life is everything! Consider society as well. Rules, which can increase the happiness of the human being in society, are advisable. That is called morality. Gaining happiness through morality makes man superior to animals. It is necessary for man to accept individual suffering where it will give happiness to society. That is called selfless morality, and it is the only path for man. You must cultivate all the positive sentiments such as love, friendship and compassion in order to increase the over-all happiness of society; by doing this, violence, hatred and other evil tendencies will not be able to contaminate the heart. Universal love is universal happiness. Take up ways of increasing this happiness.”
Positivists such as Compte and Mill, Socialists such as Herbert Spencer, as well as lay Buddhists and Atheists firmly believe this philosophy.
Theism:
Bhaktivinoda describes the thinking of the theist as follows:
“If consciousness arises by some special process through a combination of atoms, there should be some evidence of this somewhere in the universe. There should be some example of this in human history. Man is produced from the womb of a mother. Nowhere is any other process observed. In spite of the growth of material science, nothing otherwise has yet been observed. Someone may argue that man has arisen by a chance combination of matter, and later man has adopted this particular process of birth from the womb. However, the succeeding events should be similar to the first event. Even now we should observe at least a few conscious entities arising by chance combination of matter. Therefore, it can only be logically concluded that the first mother and father must have arisen from the supreme consciousness.”
Bhaktivinoda points out many ways in which belief in God contributes to moral conduct:
• Even is someone has a strong sense of moral values, still the senses are often so strong that even great moralists are defeated. If the opportunity arises to enjoy immorally in secret, belief in God will act as a preventative measure. God can see what man cannot. One who thinks like that will be unable to secretly perform acts contrary to morality.
• Everyone will accept that faith in God produces a greater tendency to perform pious acts than morality alone.
• If God exists, then by faith in Him so much is gained. If He does not exist, believing in Him is harmless. On the other hand, if God does exist, to not have faith in Him is harmful.
• By belief in God, the tendency toward righteousness grows quickly in the mind.
• By faith in God, compassion and tolerance become stronger.
• By belief in God, one is more eager to perform selfless action.
• By belief in God, acceptance of afterlife arises, and man cannot be disappointed by any event in life.
Of those who give more importance to Morality:
Bhaktivinoda states that among the theists, most are materialistic. He describes a group called the theistic moralists who worship God with some degree of faith, but who give more importance to their conception of morality than they do to God. Some of them believe there is no harm in imagining a God, worshiping him with faith, and then abandoning that worship when good conduct is achieved. Others believe that by performing worship of the Lord and acting ethically, the Lord will be pleased and will grant one’s material desires.
Either subtly or grossly, the worship of the theistic moralists is selfishly motivated. Although they consider themselves worshipers of God, they are not much interested in God’s form, personality, activities, or desires, but instead are interested only in what they can gain through worshiping Him.
Bhaktivinoda compares the relationship between the theistic moralists and God to the temporary meeting of travelers at an inn. When morning comes and the travelers leave for their separate destinations, the relationship is forgotten. Theistic moralists worship the Lord not out of devotion but simply because they think it to be the proper thing to do, which will result in their happiness.
Being motivated in this way, materialistic theistic moralists are still in the realm of selfishness. Although they conceive of their ethical behavior as being harmless to others, because they are not on the platform of spiritual vision they are unable to maintain impartial dealings and will inevitably fall prey to exploiting others.
In describing different types of activities aimed at human welfare, Bhaktivinoda has stated in his Sajjana Toshani magazine: “Showing kindness to the soul is the best welfare work of all. By such kindness one attempts to save a person from all worldly sufferings by giving him devotion to Lord Kåñëa.”
Because the theistic moralists are not functioning on the spiritual platform, their ethical systems will never be able to alleviate all the worldly sufferings of the living entities; hence they are unable to completely serve society. They will always fall prey to narrow biases based on bodily, social, or religious differences. In actuality, their relationship with others is much like their relationship with God: as superficial as travelers meeting at an inn.
Although there is some partial social benefit from the ethics of the theistic moralists, because there is no spiritual bliss in the mechanical worship they perform there is every chance that they will either give up their theism or else adopt the ways of the cheating pretender.
Pretenders:
The next class, are those who engage in immoral behavior while posing as theists. Bhaktivinoda has described them as pretenders. He says:
“Although the pretenders do not accept the eternal nature of devotion, they wear the dress and markings of a believer. They have their own motives, which any honest person would decry. Cheating everyone, they pave the way for a world of sin. Undiscerning people, allured by their external appearance, take up the same path and end up rejecting God. They may have beautiful tilaka, devotional dress, chant the name of Kåñëa, appear detached from the world, and give attractive speeches, but secretly they harbor desire for wealth and women. Many such persons exist.”
Bhaktivinoda has compared such pretenders to the cat and the crane. Once some mice came and said, “Have you heard the news? The cat has become a saint. He is now wearing tilaka and neck beads. He is chanting and has become a vegetarian.” Thinking in this way, the mice gave up their fear of the cat. But when the mice started to come nearby, the cat gave up his pretense and pounced on them.
Similarly, the crane stands motionless on one foot for hours at a time, and thus looks like a great yogi. His real motivation, though, is to catch fish. As soon as a fish comes near, he abandons his saintly demeanor and gobbles it up.
Bhaktivinoda has said, “There is no worse association in the world than such pretenders. It is better to associate with immoral atheists than to associate with them. … Only if one gives up the association of crooked hypocrites can he honestly engage in devotional service. Honest worship is the only way to attain Kåñëa’s mercy.”
By presenting themselves as saintly and having concern for others, the pretenders sometimes gain positions of trust and responsibility even in spiritually minded societies. But because their real motivation is to exploit others to satisfy their own subtle or gross pleasures, they are the worst enemies of society.
The Devotees:
Devotees who are situated on the platform of pure love of God see their beloved Lord everywhere and see everything, moving and non-moving, in connection with God. From such a platform, to offer respect to all living entities regardless of material bodily designations is quite natural and genuine, and thus on this platform alone can one be free from the propensity to exploit others.
The Bhägavata Puräëa explains that even though one may follow religious ethics for some time, without genuine devotion to the Lord the subtle desires in the heart, which are the roots of immoral tendencies, are not destroyed and will rise again. Only pure devotion can remove all immoral tendencies. This is described in the Bhägavata: “Only a rare person who has adopted complete, unalloyed devotional service to the Supreme Lord Väsudeva, Kåñëa, can uproot the weeds of sinful actions with no possibility that they will revive. He can do this simply by discharging devotional service, just as the sun can immediately dissipate fog by its rays.” (S.B 6.1.15)
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In Conclusion:
According to Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, the best ethical system is that which is based on the awareness that all others are part of the Supreme Lord and meant to give pleasure to Him alone. Any system that gives prominence to the fulfillment of one’s own selfish desires will ultimately be exploitative and thus harmful to the progress of society.
