Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied to the word Christos–‘Messiah’, as was mentioned above, meaning king and redeemer–Jesus Christ, on this analysis, is less a historical personage than a ritual title.

However, the language of Mark (which, like all the gospels, was written in Greek) was in a style inferior to that used by educated writers. The chances are therefore that he was not a sophisticated man, may not have been directly linked with the apostles and, worse, may have been credulous and unreliable. Given that there is a gap of between fifty and eighty years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the later gospels, their accuracy must be called into question. Of the gospels, only one, John, refers to an author: ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’78

They begin with Jesus’ birth. For a start, neither Mark nor John even mentions the Nativity, despite its sensational nature. Matthew locates Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem but says it took place in the later years of King Herod’s reign, while Luke connects the Annunciation with King Herod’s reign and associates the Nativity, in Bethlehem, with a specific event: ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’ This tax was first imposed during the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria, which was the year we understand as 6 AD, after Herod had died. According to this, then, Matthew and Luke have the birth of Jesus ten years apart.83

Details surrounding the virgin birth are even less satisfactory. The uncomfortable truth is that, despite its singular nature, there is no mention of it in either Mark or John, or in any of Paul’s letters. Even in Matthew and Luke, according to Geza Vermes, the Oxford biblical scholar, it is treated ‘merely as a preface to the main story, and as neither of these two, nor the rest of the New Testament, ever allude to it again, it may be safely assumed that it is a secondary accretion.’84 In any case, the word ‘virgin’ was used ‘elastically’ in both Greek and Hebrew. In one sense it was used for people in their first marriage. Greek and Latin inscriptions found in the catacombs in Rome show that the word ‘virgin’ could be applied to either a wife or husband after years of marriage. Thus ‘a virgin husband’ almost certainly meant a married man who had not been married before. Another meaning of the term was applied to women who could not conceive–i.e., had not menstruated. ‘This form of virginity ended with menstruation.’85

Even in those gospels where the virgin birth is mentioned, the inconsistencies multiply. In Matthew the angel visits Joseph to announce the birth, but not Mary. In Luke he visits Mary and not Joseph. In Luke Christ’s divinity is announced to the shepherds, in Matthew by the appearance of a star in the east. In Luke it is the shepherds who make the first adoration, whereas in Matthew it is the Magi. Then there is the episode, mentioned in Matthew, where King Herod, worried about the birth of a ‘new king’, commands that all infants under two and living in Bethlehem should be killed. If such m...

The wondrous virginity of Jesus’ birth also interferes with his genealogy. Jewish messianic tradition, as we have seen, deemed that Jesus should be descended from David, which rules out Mary as the vehicle because she, we are told, came from the tribe of Levi, not of Judah, as did David.87 But, according to the gospels, Jesus is no...

On the other hand, according to a very early version of the New Testament (the Sinaitic palimpsest, dated to200), ‘Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph to whom was espoused Mary the virgin, begat Jesus, who is called the Christ.’89 On this reading, can Jesus be regarded as divine at all? In the same way, in Luke, the twelve-year-old Jesus amazes the learned men in the Temple with his understanding. But when his worried parents come to find him, he rebukes them: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’ The gospel continues: ‘They understood not the saying which ...

The writings of Philo of Alexandria (born about 20 BC, and therefore both contemporaneous with Jesus and earlier than the gospels) shows that ideas of virgin birth were common in the pagan world around the time that Christ lived.94 And of course, Christmas itself eventually settled on the day that many pagan religions celebrated the birth of the sun god, because this was the winter solstice, when the days began to lengthen. Here, again, is J. G. Frazer: ‘The pagans in Syria and Egypt represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on the winter solstice was exhibited to worshippers, who were told: “Behold the virgin has brought forth”.’95

The very latest Jesus scholarship runs as follows: despite the differences discussed above, the striking similarities that remain in Matthew, Mark and Luke stem from the fact that Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark when they were composing their gospels. More, if you take out Mark from Matthew and Luke, you still have a lot of similar material, ‘including vast sections that are nearly word-for-word.’112 Nineteenth-century German scholars called this Q, for Quelle, or ‘source’. Together with the find, in 1945, at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, of the Gospel of Thomas, which scholars knew about but thought had vanished, this put a fresh light on the New Testament. The two most eye-catching and controversial views that have emerged from these discoveries are, first, Burton Mack’s, that Jesus was ‘a historical footnote’, ‘a marginal personality who, through whatever series of accidents, was turned into a god’, and Paula Fredericksen’s, that ‘Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who expected a cataclysmic intervention of God into history…and was devastatingly wrong. Christianity, then, amounts to a series of attempts to deal with this staggering error, most notably the doctrine of the Second Coming.’113 Both of these give Jesus a much-reduced status but still consider him to have been a historical figure.114

There was, of course, no year 0, and for several reasons. One is that the zero had not yet been invented: that happened in India, probably in the seventh century AD. Another is that many people around the world, then as now, were not Christians, and conceived time in completely different ways. A third reason is that the conventional chronology, used for dating events in the West over several centuries–AD, for Anno Domini, the year of Our Lord, and BC, before Christ–was not introduced until the sixth century.

Easter was introduced in Rome in about the year 160. The first mention of Christmas Day, according to G. J. Whitrow, occurred in the Roman calendar for 354. Previously, 6 January had been celebrated, as the anniversary of Jesus’ baptism, which was believed to have occurred on his thirtieth birthday. The change occurred because infant baptism was replacing adult baptism, as Christianity spread, and this led to a change in belief also. It was now held that Christ’s divinity began at birth, rather than at his baptism.20

Furthermore, while these events were taking place in Jerusalem, between the Crucifixion and the revolt, Paul had become active outside Israel. Paul, a tent-maker from Tarsus, west of Adana in modern Turkey, was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. Unlike Christ he was a city man, who was famously converted, around AD 33, ‘on the road to Damascus’, when he had a vision of Christ (Acts 9:1–9). (He had a chronic ailment, epilepsy being suspected.11) Paul had conceived his own version of Christianity and saw it as his duty to spread these ideas outside Israel in the Graeco-Roman world. His conversion, incidentally, should not be exaggerated: Paul was a Pharisee, and therefore a fervent believer in resurrection: so far as he was concerned, he was converting from one Jewish sect to another.12 There can be little doubt that there were, at the time, rival versions of Christianity. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, for example, Paul says this: ‘For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, who we did not preach, or if ye receive a different spirit, which ye did not receive, or a different gospel, which ye did not accept, ye will do well to bear with him.’ Elsewhere he refers to his rivals as ‘the chiefest apostle’, and to James, Cephas (Peter) and John. Because some of Paul’s ideas threatened the credibility and authority of the Jewish-Christian disciples in Israel he was denounced and, in 59 or thereabouts, arrested and taken to Rome (because he was a Roman citizen...

Paul also provided early Christianity with much of its ‘colouring’ around the edges. He condemned idol worship, sexuality and, implicitly, the practice of philosophy.20 In Rome in the early years, Christians often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride.21

Although the early church was not consistently suppressed (by 211 there were bishops around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Lyons), there were emperors who were very cruel in the number of martyrs they created. Given the apocalyptic view of the early Christians, this only added to their sense of mission and drama (virgins had sixty times the reward of ordinary Christians in heaven, it was affirmed, but martyrs received rewards a hundredfold).36

By the third century, a curious cross-over time had been reached, when ‘the desire for martyrdom was almost out of control’.40 By now Christians deliberately flouted Roman practices–they insulted magistrates and destroyed effigies of the pagan gods, in an attempt to emulate the suffering of Jesus. Persecution was what they sought. ‘For suffering one hour of earthly torture, it was believed, the martyr would gain an eternity of immortal bliss.’41

These were (depending on your point of view) fine sentiments. But in fact the crucial change, from persecuted religion to the official faith of the empire, came about not for any fundamental change in philosophy in Rome but because one emperor, Constantine (306–337), found Christianity more practically useful. In 312, at the battle of the Milvian bridge, outside Rome, Constantine faced the usurper, Maxentius. Constantine was advised by his Christian supporters that if he sought support of their God, he would win. In some accounts he is reported to have had a vision in which he was instructed to have his troops paint a looped cross, , on their shields.42 He agreed, and his victory was decisive. Thereafter, he allowed all faiths in the empire to worship their own gods and, most importantly, removed the legal constraints that had been directed at Christians. From then until his own deathbed conversion, Constantine believed that he was guided by Christ. In frescoes he was depicted with his head surrounded by the nimbus of a saint.

Its success was helped by the fact that its growing confidence enabled it to relax a little and absorb pagan practices where this was felt to serve its interests. Besides the adoption of the feast day of Mithras, 25 December, as the date of the Nativity, the very word ‘epiphany’ was a pagan concept, used when gods or goddesses revealed themselves to worshippers, as often as not in dreams.44 The terms ‘vicar’ and ‘diocese’ were taken from the emperor’s administrative reforms. The original ‘Sunday observance’ was conceived as a day of respect not for Jesus but for the sun. In 326 Constantine gave the shrine of Helios Apollo in Nero’s circus to the Christians for the foundation of their new church of St Peter. The shaven heads of Christian priests were taken from the practices of pagan priests in Egypt and when Mary was first honoured as the Mother of God, at Ephesus in 431, the church dedicated to her was constructed on the site of the temple of Diana.45 The incense used at the dedication ceremony was the same as that used to worship Diana.

There was one final reason for the success of Christianity. People thought that religious solidarity would help the declining fortunes of the Roman state. In turn this implied a crucial change in the organisation of society, a change that, as we have already indicated, would shape the Middle Ages. This was the rise of the priesthood.

Without meaning to, Benedict had created an institution that turned out to be perfectly suited to the early Middle Ages. Amid and after the fall of the empire, when the cities declined and the world became less organised and more localised, when schools and other civic functions decayed, monasteries–located far from the cities–remained strong and offered a lead in education, economic, religious and even political matters. The monks often became intercessors with the deity and in consequence monasteries were endowed by royalty and the aristocracy alike. They enjoyed immense riches and abbots became local powers of great influence.

Augustine’s view of history also involved a great and influential pessimism. The fall of Rome, for example, coloured his doctrine of original sin, which would form such a central part of the Western Christian vision. Augustine came to believe that God had condemned humankind to eternal damnation, all because of Adam’s original sin. This ‘inherited sin’ was passed on through what Augustine called concupiscence, the desire to take pleasure in sex rather than in God. This image, of the higher life of devotion, dragged down by ‘the chaos of sensation and lawless passion’ was paralleled by the decadence in Rome and as an idea would prove extremely durable. From Augustine on, Christians viewed humanity as chronically flawed.81

For example, he wanted to make the liturgy more accessible to the faithful and his genius was to involve music. Thus was born Gregorian chant. In the same spirit he invented the notion of purgatory. He was particularly concerned with what should happen when a sinner received absolution from a priest, and had been instructed in a programme of ‘satisfaction’, as it was called, but died before the programme could be completed. To Gregory, it would be grossly unfair to condemn such a person to hell, but at the same time he or she could not go to heaven, since it would be wrong to admit that person alongside those who had completed their programme. His solution was a new, albeit temporary destination–purgatory–where people could complete their satisfactions, endure their punishments, and then, all being well, move on–to heaven. His other ‘user friendly’ idea for the faithful was that of the seven deadly sins. Evil, for Gregory, would always be a mystery for man: God intended it as such, as a test of faith (as it had been for Job). But the seven deadly sins were intended by Gregory to be a guide for the faithful, so that they weren’t always ‘overwhelmed’ by a sense of sin.

The calendar in use at the time Exiguus made his calculations was based on the accession of the emperor Diocletian, which took place in 285. Thus, the year that we call 532 was for Dionysius the year 247. But Exiguus didn’t see why time should start with a pagan emperor and it was during his Easter calculations that the abbot conceived the idea to divide time according to the birth of Christ. And here there befell Exiguus an extraordinary numerological coincidence. Victorius of Aquitaine, as we have seen, had come up with a 532-year cycle. As Exiguus worked back, in the year we call 532, he found that a Victorian cycle had begun in the very year in which he believed that Christ had been born–what we now call 1 BC. In other words, the sun and the moon, at the time he was working, were in exactly the same relation as they had been when Jesus was born. This was too much of a coincidence and, in the words of the Venerable Bede, confirmed for Dennis that 1 BC was indeed the year ‘in which He deigned to become incarnate’. From then on, and thanks to Dennis, dates were given as Anni Domini, ‘years of the Lord’. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that it became customary to designate the preceding era ‘before Christ’.87

AD BC explanation

‘The origin of the word barbaros is early Greek, and it gained three central meanings in the course of classical antiquity which it has retained to the present day: an ethnographical, a political and an ethical definition.’95 For example, Homer used it in the Iliad, referring to the Carians in Asia Minor; he said they ‘spoke barbarically’. He meant he could not understand them, but he did not describe them as ‘mute’, as others in antiquity would dismiss foreigners, nor did he liken their language to ‘the twittering of birds or the barking of dogs’, as many others did, from China to Spain.96 As time passed, however, the Greeks’ view of themselves changed as their successes in philosophy, science, the arts and government began to ripen. They now started to think of themselves as the ‘ideal people’ and their enemies as lesser souls. In 472 BC, during the Persian wars, Aeschylus dismissed the enemy as ‘barbarians’ partly because ‘they spoke like horses’, but mainly because he thought their political traditions were primitive–they were little more than slaves subjugated to an oriental military tyrant, and did not enjoy the freedoms of the Greeks.97 ‘Barbarian’ was no longer a neutral term, but an insult. The meaning changed again during the Hellenistic period, when Greek culture and Roman government existed alongside each other in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, as men began to be judged by their humanity, according to their ethical and social habits, rather than by their milit...

Evolution of thd term barbarian

This brings us back to Christianity. As was mentioned above, in early antiquity religious toleration had been the rule rather than the exception, but that changed with the animosity with which the pagans and Christians regarded one another.11 We should not overlook the change that had come about in men’s attitudes with the arrival of Christianity as a state religion. There was an overwhelming desire to ‘surrender to the new divine powers which bound men inwardly’ and ‘a need for’ suprahuman revelation. As a result, the thinkers of the period were not much interested in (or were discouraged from) unravelling the secrets of the physical world: ‘The supreme task of Christian scholarship was to apprehend and deepen the truths of revelation.’12 Whereas paganism had imposed few restrictions on the intellectuals of Rome, Christianity actively rejected scientific inquiry. The scientific study of the heavens could be neglected, said Ambrose, bishop of Milan (374–397) at the time it was the capital of the western empire, ‘for wherein does it assist our salvation?’ The Romans had been more than comfortable with the notion, first aired in Greece, that the earth was a globe. In his Natural History, Pliny had written ‘that human beings are distributed all around the earth, and stand with their feet pointing towards each other, and that the top of the sky is alike for them all and the earth trodden underfoot at the centre in the same way from any direction.’ Three hundred years later, La...

The whole structure of Christian thinking was at times inimical to pagan/classical traditions. Rhetoric provides one example. Traditionally, of course, rhetoric could not be separated from the individual who composed it. But in the Christian mind, it was God who spoke through his preachers. This is based on Paul, who stressed the power of the spirit–it is the spirit rather than the individual who speaks, which ultimately means that philosophy and independent thinking in general is rejected as a means of finding truth.14 Gregory of Nyssa was one of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers, great orators who were sympathetic to classical philosophy. Even he was moved to say: ‘The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone–to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.’ By the same token, the dialectical method–as epitomised by Aristotle, for example–was also outlawed: there can be no dialogue with God. It was largely as a result of this that, save for two works of logic, Aristotle vanished from the western world, preserved only because his works were hoarded by Arab interpreters. Scholars in Alexandria and Constantinople continued to read Aristotle and Plato but, as was mentioned above, saw their role as custodial rather than to add new ideas. In 529, as we have seen, Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens on the grounds that philosophical speculation had become an aid to her...

Medicine provides other examples of the Christian closing of the western mind. The Greeks had not been especially successful in finding cures for illnesses but they had introduced the method of observation of symptoms, and the idea that illness was a natural process. In the second century AD, in Rome, the great physician Galen had argued that a supreme god had created the body ‘with a purpose to which all its parts tended’.16 This fitted Christian thinking so completely that, around 500, Galen’s writings were collected into sixteen volumes and served as canonical medical texts for a thousand years. It marked the abandonment of the scientific approach in favour of magic and miracles. Sacred springs and shrines were now invoked as cures, the plague was understood as ‘sent by God’ as a punishment, with medieval paintings in Italy still showing pestilence as being delivered from God through arrows, as had originally been the case with Apollo, more than a thousand years before in Homer’s world. Hippocrates had described epilepsy as a natural illness; as late as the fourteenth century, John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended that the malady could be cured by the reading o...

From the outside, then, there is a sizeable overlap between Islam and Judaism and Christianity, not to mention ancient pagan practices. One idea that differs from these other faiths is jihad, the holy war, espoused by certain small sects as the controversial sixth pillar. The Qur’an does specify that one of the duties of Islam is to keep pushing back the geographical boundaries that separate the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, from the dar al-harb, ‘the war territory’, but the extent to which this is to be achieved by war, and how ‘war’ is to be understood, is far from clear.

To begin with, the institution was not hereditary (strangely, the Qur’an gave no guidance on the succession). The first four caliphs, not related, are labelled by modern Muslims as the Rashidun, ‘the rightly guided ones’, and, despite the fact that all but the first were assassinated, their period in office is usually regarded as a golden age. However, the fourth caliph, Ali, was Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin and, in offering himself for election as caliph, he was reverting to a pre-Islamic tradition. Given the history of assassinations, many of the faithful believed that a relative of the Prophet might offer leadership closer to the original. Ali’s followers became a party known as Ali, shi’atu, Ali, which in time was collapsed into Shi’a.25 Later, the Shi’a would become extremely influential–but not just yet, for Ali too was assassinated. In the Islamic civil war that ensued, the victor was Mu’awiya, the governor of a province in Syria and a member of the Meccan clan of Umayya. This brought about the next phase in Islamic development, because for nearly a century the succession of the caliphate was in the hands of the Umayyad dynasty. In subsequent orthodox history this period is relegated in importance. Before the Umayyads came the ‘rightly guided ones’ and after them, as we shall see, Islamic leadership was in the hands of the ‘divinely approved’ caliphs.26 This reflects a major division that had opened up in Islam. The Shi’a took the view that the caliphate belonge...

Shia vs Sunni Muslims origin

Hadith means ‘tradition’, but it also has a more specific meaning. It was an act or saying attributed either to Muhammad himself or to one of his immediate circle. Regarded as second in importance only to the Qur’an, hadith provided the basis for much Islamic theology and fiqh, non-canon law.28 In the Qur’an Allah speaks, in the hadith Muhammad speaks. In hadith only the meaning is inspired; in the Qur’an both meaning and the word are inspired.29

The Qur’an is to Muslims what Jesus (and not the Bible) is to Christians: it is the way God manifests himself to believers.

Then, at the beginning of the ninth century, the Islamic world was fortunate in having an open-minded caliph, al-Ma‘mun, who was sympathetic to a semi-secret sect, the Mu‘tazilites, who were rationalists obsessed with reconciling the text of the Qur’an and the criteria of human reason. Al-Ma‘mun, it is said, had a dream–possibly the most important and fortunate dream in history–in which Aristotle appeared. It is as a result of this dream that the caliph decided to send envoys as far afield as Constantinople in search of as many Greek manuscripts as they could find, and to establish in Baghdad a centre devoted to translation.

They introduced the rosary, probably taken over from the Hindus (and passed to Christians during the Crusades),

Rosary origin

Greek learning was preserved, and added to, and by a roundabout route–across north Africa and up through Spain, rather than directly through Byzantium and the Balkans–reached western Europe. The long-term effects of that transmission will emerge over the remaining chapters of this book, but two points are worth making here. The first is that Europe’s initial encounter with the Greeks, Aristotle in particular, but Plato and other authors also, was via Arab ‘re-elaborations’ rather than through direct transmission. For example, the logic, physics and metaphysics of Aristotle were studied either in translations from Arabic translations of the Greek originals, or in the works of Ibn Sina. This meant that, for a time at least, Greek philosophy was overlaid with the Islamic concern of trying to reconcile the Qur’an with rationalism, in particular Ibn Sina’s view that passages which did not agree with reason were to be understood allegorically. This had a profound influence on people like Thomas Aquinas and on interpretations of the Bible.

An associated reason was the arrival, and passing, of the millennium, the year AD 1000 in the chronology of the time. While there were those who, around 1000, still expected an apocalyptic change in the order of life on earth, as the eleventh century progressed, and nothing happened, a belief in the resurrection of the body could not be sustained for ever. As a result, mystical thought increased and there was a rise in so-called Jerusalem literature, mainly in the form of new hymns. This involved a change in the meaning of Jerusalem. The city was no longer expected to descend from heaven, to form paradise on earth–instead the aim was to reach the New Jerusalem in heaven. This was a major shift because it implied that not everyone would be saved, only those who earned it. In turn, this promoted the idea of individual salvation.54 These new ideas were reflected in an important change in the representation of the crucifix in art. In the early Middle Ages, there was a fairly standard iconography, in which the triumphant Christ is nailed to the cross, watched by Mary and John. The figure of Christ is alive and upright, feet side-by-side on a support. His eyes are open, his arms straight, he shows no sign of suffering. His face is often beardless and young. It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the church’s history, years in which death was all around and threatening to most people, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted. ‘The crucifix was ...

Changes in christian thought at the first millennium

Which is how it came about that Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in central France in 1095. There he delivered a highly emotional and rhetorical speech to the assembled knights, appealing both to their piety and to their more earthly interests. He dwelt at length on the sufferings which Christians were experiencing at the hands of the Turks, and the threat of Muslim invasion that hung over both Byzantium and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.* Using a famous biblical phrase, Urban described Palestine as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and, in promising papal protection for the property and family of any crusader, he introduced an idea that was to have far-reaching consequences. He said that, as keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he vouchsafed the crusaders ‘plenary indulgence’ for their sins.49 The origin of this idea may well have lain in the Islamic assurance that any warrior who died fighting for the faith was guaranteed a place in heaven. But the Christian idea of indulgence was soon expanded and abused, so much so that it was one of the practices attacked by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and, eventually, by the Council of Trent. By the twelfth century the Catholic Church had extended the institution of indulgence not just to crusaders but to those who supported them financially, and it is this which seems to have done the damage. By the fourteenth century, the papacy allowed the sale of indulgences even without a crusading pretext t...

Torture techniques included the ordeal of water, when a funnel or a soaking length of silk would be forced down someone’s throat. Five litres was considered ‘ordinary’ and that amount of water could burst blood vessels. In the ordeal of fire the prisoners were manacled before a fire, fat or grease was spread over their feet, and that part of them cooked until a confession was obtained. The strappado consisted of a pulley in the ceiling by means of which the prisoners were hung six feet off the ground, with weights attached to their feet. If they didn’t confess, they were pulled higher, then dropped, then pulled up short before they hit the ground. The weights on their feet were enough to dislocate their joints, causing unbearable pain.77 Torture captures the eye but in a feudal society the signs of infamy, and the ostracism they brought could be just as bad (for example, the marriage prospects of someone’s offspring were blighted).78

Aquinas’ great contribution was his attempt to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity, though as we shall see throughout the rest of this book, his Aristotelianisation of Christianity was more influential than his Christianisation of Aristotle.

In addition, silent reading promoted solitary reflection that helped in an insidious way to free individuals from the more traditional forms of thinking, and from the collective control of thinking, helping to fuel subversion, heresy, originality and individuality.

Silent reading due to increased availablity of books

Once again, we shouldn’t make more of these schools than is there, but nor should we overlook the fact that this was the first time any civilisation had routinely and systematically trained its children, or adolescents, in good business practice. The explosion of imagination, for which the Renaissance is chiefly known, was not based only on commercial prosperity, but numeracy and business skills were regarded as an integral element in the education of Italian children in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their contribution ought not to be overlooked or minimised.

The Florentines, like the Greeks before them, believed in achievement and saw life as a race. It was no longer the case, as Thomas Aquinas had argued, that everyone ‘had a fixed station in life’.34

Erasmus had lived, or tried to live, the ideal life of a humanist, as someone who believed in the life of the mind, that virtue could be based on humanity, that tolerance was as virtuous as fanatical certitude, that thoughtful men could become good men and that those who were familiar with the works of all ages could live more happily and, yes, more justly, in their own time.

In 1492, there were around 75 million Indians living in the Americas. Figures for what is now the continental United States vary. The D’Arcy McNickle figure is 6 million but Douglas Ubelaker, of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Handbook of North American Indians, says the most accurate estimate is 1,890,000 at an average density of eleven people per 100 square kilometres.57 Whichever figure it was, the spread of the Indians was not what it became. The Plains Indians, for example, had as yet no horses–because these were introduced by Europeans. ‘Far from being the stereotype of war-bonneted warriors, they were essentially farmers who planted gardens along the Plains rivers and hunted game on foot.’58

Indian American info

The Books of Chilam Balam viewed the invasion as a battle of calendars, or chronologies. The Spanish had brought with them their own brand of time–rather crude to the Mayan way of thinking–and tried to impose it on the indigenous people. So for the Mayans this was the chief battle of ideas, the way the rival religious systems were conceived–as a contest over time.113

Other ideas or inventions missing from pre-Columbian societies were coined money, ethical monotheism, the idea of the experiment and, in general, writing.

We have already seen that what surpluses were produced were as often as not dissipated in elaborate rituals for the dead and this difference in economic development, together with the lack of ethical monotheism and the absence of experimentation, are perhaps the three most important ways in which the Old World and the New differed.

The essence of Calvinism was that morality was enforced and enforced strictly, while Protestant doctrine was developed at the University of Geneva, which Calvin founded.32 And he set up two main arms of government, the Ministry and the Consistory. The main aim of the Ministry was to produce what might be called an ‘army’ of preachers who had to follow a particular programme and way of life and set an example. It was the job of the Consistory to govern morals. It comprised a court of eighteen–six ministers and twelve elders–and had the power of excommunication. It was this court, which met every Thursday, that was responsible for the dictatorship of terror in Geneva, what Daniel Boorstin calls the reign of biblical morality. It was in Geneva that a certain way of life–one that would become very familiar–was instigated: getting up early, hard work, being always concerned to set a good example (for example reading only uplifting literature). Thrift and abstinence were all-important virtues. As one historian put it, ‘This was an attempt to create a new man…the church was not simply an institution for the worship of God, but an agency for the making of men fit to worship Him.’33 The regime gave its name to the ‘Puritan’ movement.34

Calvanism as a beginning to Puritanism

And the council insisted that Purgatory, in reality a sixth-century ‘revelation’, really existed. In turn this helped maintain the doctrine of indulgences, though the council did outlaw any commerce in them.68

Protestantism also revived the communal aspects of penance (the stool of repentance became familiar) and the so-called ‘theatre of forgiveness’, which sounds to us today like a great intrusion but had much to do with the discipline of capitalism that Weber made so much of. Protestantism kept illegitimacy rates low, and Thomas Cranmer’s new wedding service was the first to affirm that marriage could be enjoyable ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other’.79 The Reformed churches paid fresh attention to the idea of women’s equality before God and established divorce as part of normal marriage law. Protestantism changed the ancient Catholic attitudes to medicine and created a desire for worship, not as solitary figures, or in a massive Europe-wide church, but in small groups, which eventually became Methodists, Quakers and so on. These different sects were one way by which tolerance grew…and doubt. An accidental revolution indeed.

The Aristotelian view of the world was thrown out, to be replaced by the Newtonian view. (Newton, complained his contemporaries, some of them anyway, had destroyed the romance of the rainbow and killed the need for angels.)

As we have seen, Democritus had proposed that matter consisted of atoms two thousand years before Newton. His ideas had been elaborated on and introduced into western Europe by Pierre Gassendi, a Provençal priest. Newton had built on this but despite all the innovations he had made, his view of the universe and the atoms within it did not include the concept of change or evolution. As much as he had improved our understanding of the solar system, the idea that it might have a history was beyond him.