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CONTENTS I. Community as God II. Communality and Individualism III. Greece or Hellas? IV. He Mission of Christianity V. From the Community Against Individualism to the Community Against the Community VI. Who is Right: the Orthodox God or the Catholic God? VII. Cosmos or Earth, Matter or Life? VIII. The Genesis of Orthodoxy IX. The Genesis of Catholicism X. The History of Russia in the Context of the Evolution of the National Spirit and Orthodoxy XI. Russia in the Early Twenty-First Century XII. Russia in the Twenty-First Century (2030-2100) |
THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY
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Cycle I: | (-2085) | spring | (-1893) | summer | (-1701) | autumn | (-1509) | winter | (-1317) |
Cycle II: | (-1317) | spring | (-1125) | summer | (-933) | autumn | (-741) | winter | (-549) |
Cycle III: | (-549) | spring | (-357) | summer | (-165) | autumn | 27 | winter | 219 |
Cycle IV: | 219 | spring | 411 | summer | 603 | autumn | 795 | winter | 987 |
Cycle V: | 987 | spring | 1179 | summer | 1371 | autumn | 1563 | winter | 1755 |
Cycle VI: | 1755 | spring | 1947 | summer | 2139 | autumn | 2331 | winter | 2523 |
Cycle I: | (-491) | spring | (-299) | summer | (-107) | autumn | 85 | winter | 277 | |
Cycle II: | 277 | spring | 469 | summer | 661 | autumn | 853 | winter | 1045 | |
Cycle III: | 1045 | spring | 1237 | summer | 1429 | autumn | 1621 | winter | 1813 | |
Cycle IV: | 1813 | spring | 2005 | summer | 2197 | autumn | 2389 | winter | 2581 |
Christianity arose out of Judaism but the soil itself was not Judean, rather it was Greek. The historical moment facilitated this since it was the time of the start of a “big winter” for the Jewish people (the must unlucky time for national revival), during the latter half of the “big autumn” of the Roman (Italian) people (the time of stormy weather) and at the very start of the “big spring” of the Greek people (the time of the formulation of the new national-religious personality born in the “late winter”). For this reason the God of the Jews, the Old Testament and the Judaic ritual became the raw material for a new anti-Judaic religion, according to the paradox of cultural anti-filialism.
The place in the “major cycle” also explains why, despite the fact that the empire was Roman, the religion of the Empire was Greek and took the Greek language. During the “autumn” of the spirit religions are not created, during the “autumn” philosophies and works of art are created.
Only in the third century did Christianity begin to be translated into Latin and become not only Greek, but Greco-Roman. During the early fourth century, i.e. at the start of the “big Latin spring,” Greek and Latin versions of Christianity arose, the Greek God and the Latin God who, although they did try to get along, diverged from each other with time. This is not a metaphor, but a description of a real and objective phenomenon, as if two men had quarreled. At the same time, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. The Roman state, just as the people matured and grew into Christianity.
Let’s take a look at the “major cycles” of the history of Hellas and Greece (Macedonia), which will help us to understand precisely why the Greeks created Christianity.
Cycle I : | (-1499) | spring | (-1307) | summer | (-1115) | autumn | (-923) | winter | (-731) | ||||||||||
Cycle II: | (-731) | spring | (-539) | summer | (-347) | autumn | (-155) | winter | 37 |
Cycle I (III): | (-11) | spring | 181 | summer | 373 | autumn | 565 | winter | 757 | ||||||||||
Cycle II (IV): | 757 | spring | 949 | summer | 1141 | autumn | 1333 | winter | 1525 | ||||||||||
Cycle III (V): | 1525 | spring | 1717 | summer | 1909 | autumn | 2101 | winter | 2293 |
During the 8th century B.C. there was a rapid development of crafts, trade and cities in Ancient Greece, and the Greeks began their colonization to the north, east and west. During the 7th century this rapid development continued. The 8th century marked the start of a “long spring.”
During the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. the Greeks mastered the basic trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean, especially after the decline of the power of Assyria. At that time there was not only a specialization and division of labor within crafts, but also among towns.
The clan aristocracy was being pushed out by traders and craftsmen (the “bourgeoisie”), and a balance of influential powers arose in society. As a result of this, the Greek primitive community did not just survive in certain of its elements, but transformed into a civil community, into the demos. In its development in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. the Hellenic trade-aristocratic-demos system was forced to undergo a period of tyranny, i.e. of the sole power of the rulers of the demos of city-states who managed to limit the power of both the hereditary aristocracy and the trading “bourgeoisie.”
The tyrant Policrates on the island of Samos liquidated old hereditary philuses (tribal communities) by replacing them with territorial districts, created a large navy and brought an aqueduct to the city. Around 523 B.C. Policrates originated common Greek festivals in honor of the god Apollo at his temple on the island of Delos.
In Sycion the tyrant Clisthenes renamed the old Aryan philuses into “pig sties,” “piglet sties” and “donkey stalls” and rejected the old gods on which the authorities of the old Aryan aristocracy relied.
In Corinth the tyrant Periander (627-585 B.C.) replaced the aristocrat courts with territorial district courts, issued a law against idleness, the hereditary philuses were eliminated and instead eight territorial philuses were created. A law was passed to keep people from owning too many slaves.
In Megara during the latter half of the 7th century B.C. the tyrant Theagenes, who took over the demos, broke up the herds belonging to the aristocrats. He considered that he was making the first step toward returning the communal pastures to the farmers.
What is significant is that similar processes occurred in many city-states very distant from each other autonomously and without any centralized political impetus or control (i.e. not only in Greece, but also in the colonies).
This development resulted in more stable forms of social mechanisms than tyranny being instituted in the city-states in the 6th century B.C. (by the start of the “summer”). A democratic form based on far-reaching and flexible social balance of rich and poor, farmers and traders, military men and civilians, and even slaves and freemen was established in some city-states. This form of democracy relied on the special regulatory role of the demos not only as a political institution (assembly), but of the living community as well. Athens was best at this and it was in this city that the demos appeared as an I-community directly managing people’s affairs. It was this Athenian phenomenon that has made the word “democracy” so attractive to this day.
In the oligarchic city-states (the second stable type of society in Ancient Greece), a more narrow and strict form of societal balance came about: political equilibrium. In Sparta, for example, the following types of equilibrium were created: not one but two rulers, the rulers and the council of elders, the council of elders and the public assembly of Spartan warriors, not to mention the five Ephoroi who had the right to control and judge all and were elected from among the Spartan population for a term of one year. In place of the lively and dynamic Athenian civil society, Sparta was ruled by a less lively and dynamic Law based on separation of powers. The basis of society was not balance between groups of producers, but the rule of the military community.
Athenian society was free and balanced, and the community was open, and ruled by maintaining this balance. Spartan society was regulated and took the form of a hierarchy with the unchallenged rule of the military community.
Both these excellent forms were not yet a manifestation of unified national spirit of the ancient Greeks, but a manifestation of the quasi-national spirit in which the Hellenes is understood and is perceived not actually a unified super-community, but as a fraternity, a commonwealth of smaller communities or, more precisely, communities of city-states.
Pantheism is a reflection of this transitional state from the local community in which people are united by direct contact and common, visually perceived events, in which physical contacts are supreme and the senses play the main role, to a community based on transcendental unity, i.e. belief based on dogma and ritual, as well as on linguistic unity.
The culture of Ancient Greece is notable for the fact that it managed over the course of centuries to preserve the delicate balance between local communities and created a great mythology, the spiritual formula of this balance. Only under conditions of constant conflict between local communities could the individual come to know himself, and individualism was able to develop. Otherwise it would have been nipped in the bud and swallowed up by the community.
Is it possible to talk of a single formula of the nation for the Ancient Greeks of the eighth through first centuries B.C.? This was also a nation formula, but not of a nation as a community, rather of a nation as a fraternity of communities. We could put it another way: it was the formula of the quasi-nation whose symbol was the mighty phantom of Ananke, the goddess of fate.
What is the nature of this formula? This formula encompassed the value of the civil (broad or military) community and the value of societal balance (broad, i.e. socio-political or narrowly political, and also for all forms of mandatory religious-societal balance). The totally balanced world of Ancient Greece created ideal conditions for the development of all forms of material and spiritual life in order that human energy wouldn’t be lost in the seams of the poorly joined decentralized social organism, and were almost completely aimed at domestic development and foreign expansion. In such a system individualism hardly contradicted and did not undermine the authority of the community. And the community, in turn, did not attempt to use force to subjugate the individual. The third value in the Hellenic formula was the value of the individual like Odysseus, i.e. the lone traveler driven by the dream of returning to his homeland, but who is fated to return home only after spiritually mastering the world surrounding Ancient Greece, only after understanding (!) that world.
The greatest heyday of Ancient Greece came after the victory over Persia in the Greco-Persian wars of 499-479 (“medium summer of a long summer”), during the period of the so-called “golden half-century” in 479-431 B.C. (“medium autumn of a long summer”). This was the time of Pericles and Socrates. This time made Athens an eternal symbol of cultural flourishing for all Western peoples.
During the period of the “medium winter of the long summer” Ancient Greece was ruined by the wars between Athens and Sparta (431-404 B.C.), in which Sparta won the Pyrrhic War. This didn’t put an end to the struggle. Democratic rule was exchanged for oligarchic regimes and vice versa, at different points in time Sparta was dominant, then Athens, then Thebes, until finally Macedonia became dominant in Greece. That happened in 346-336 B.C.
The Macedonians, although not considered Hellenes, were not quite foreign barbarians in the eyes of the Greeks. It is the Macedonians I will hereafter refer to as Greeks, and not just the Hellenes. Until the fourth century, the Macedonians developed independently from the Hellenes. Their “long cycle” was 48 years ahead of that of the Hellenes. Their formula was different, including values characteristic of smaller nations such as military democracy and a sovereign ruler taking his power from this military democracy. The third value, as for the Hellenes, was the value of Odysseus.
The successful campaigns of Alexander the Great and the creation of Hellenistic states determined the dominance of the Macedonian “formula for success” in subsequent centuries: autocracy, military democracy (military community), individual freedom which, like Odysseus, on its long path to Hellas remade the world.
Hellenic culture, which was oriented toward total balance, as an older culture, adapted itself and adapted the young Macedonian culture to itself. Macedonia became the avant-garde of Hellas, primarily the military avant-garde, and together they represented a unique cultural alloy by the dawn of the new era. The Greek spirit, blended from the Hellenic and the Macedonian spirits, with an admixture of various eastern “additives,” continued the Macedonian “long cycle” that became the overall Greek cycle.
It happened this way because the Hellenic national spirit was a quasi-national spirit that consisted of several dozen city-spirits of communities in conflict with each other in the struggle between democracy and oligarchy. Against this backdrop the Macedonians turned out to be the strongest and most numerous people.
There is another possible explanation (in my opinion, a more convincing one). Even before the invasion of the Aryans in the twelfth and eleventh centuries the Hellenes had a developed culture. Later the old Hellenic (Achaeistic) spirit became rooted in certain city-states. This included the Athenians and other city-states that favored democracy. In others the Aryan spirit, which was relatively new on Greek soil, became established. This included Sparta and other city-states tending toward oligarchy and monarchy. Apparently, it was Macedonia that inherited the Aryan spirit. This spirit, in the end, won out and became the single Greek spirit at the end of the pre-Christian era.
The Greeks arrived at this cultural mix after the period of Hellenism that developed Greek culture not deeply, but broadly. First the Macedonian (Aryan), then the Hellenic (Achaeistic) spirits went through a “late autumn.”
Roman rule came during a “winter” period. So the Romans actively adopted Greek culture, at the same time relating to it as to something over-ripe, something weak. But at the dawn of the new era, the Greeks overturned the entire system of the Roman world and the Roman worldview from within. And this reversal created world religion in the form of Christianity (Orthodoxy).
The further development of the Greek spirit was inseparable from Orthodoxy, and it was Orthodoxy that became the I of the unified Greek nation, the persona that once and for all blended the communities of the Hellenic city-states and the Greek realm.