Key Takeaways:

• The Idea of Selling One’s Soul to the Devil Was Based on Real Life

• Scientific History is Rife with Angelic Visitations, Fever Dreams and Co-Discoveries

• Science Leverages Empiricism but its History Suggests Platonism

The Idea of Selling One’s Soul to the Devil Was Based on Real Life

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a polymath and history’s most influential German writer. He lived from 1749 to 1832, and his magnum opus was a drama called Faust. The story is about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for magical powers, which he then uses to seduce the lovely Margarete. But like all deals with the devil, Faust’s bargain ends in tragedy for everyone involved.

Goethe was inspired by the legend of a Dr. Faust or Faustus that was ubiquitous during the Enlightenment period. This legend lives on today as our modern trope of the mad scientist.

The infernal tale of Faust was inspired by the real-life figure of Johann Georg Faustus, who was an itinerant alchemist during the 1500s. He traveled from town to town convincing people that he could transmute their base metals into gold. But after he died suddenly in an alchemical experiment gone wrong, rumors circulated that the devil had finally come to collect his soul.

The Enlightenment-era legend of Faust was also burnished by the life of Johann Fust, who was a wealthy goldsmith during the 1400s. This Fust used his wealth to bankroll Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, and famously sued him to take control of the apparatus.

The printing press plunged Europe into chaos. Mechanical presses began churning out pamphlets faster than Church authorities could confiscate them. The Church lost its monopoly over the public narrative, and as a direct result the Protestant Reformation engulfed Europe in an orgy of sectarian violence.

The printing press was undeniably a technological marvel. But it wasn’t obvious to the people who lived through the Reformation that unleashing this technology had been a good thing. Liberation from a corrupt Church orthodoxy had come at a terrible price of societal stability. Many who lived and died during that era wondered if the introduction of the printing press had been the work of the devil. These sentiments gave rise to the archetypical story of Faust, who shortsightedly trades near-term power and wealth in exchange for long-term damnation.

Scientific History is Rife with Angelic Visitations, Fever Dreams and Co-Discoveries

The only way to deliver electricity across vast physical distances involves the rapid alternating of voltage and current. Without alternating current, electricity would be lost to resistance as it travels over miles of power lines. After it was pioneered by famed inventor Nikola Tesla, this crucial method of energy delivery transformed society in the 20th century.

Tesla was struck by the epiphany about alternating current during a recitation of Goethe’s Faust, which he memorized in its entirety. This strange incident is typical of the history of science. Time and again, major breakthroughs have arisen from strange visions and angelic visitations. Or they were discovered simultaneously by people who could not have been in contact with each other.

René Descartes invented the Cartesian coordinate system of x and y axes. With his philosophical concept cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), he single-handedly merged Western philosophy with science. And according to his contemporary biographer, Descartes owed it all to an angelic visitation where three divine spirits announced to him, “the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure.”

The German chemist August Kekulé revolutionized the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, plastics, and explosives in 1865 when he discovered the ringed shape of the benzene molecule. The modern world would be unrecognizable without his contribution. Kekulé himself claimed that he discovered the structure of benzene during a reverie where he beheld the ancient magical symbol of a snake eating its own tail called the Ouroboros.

In addition to angelic visitations and magical visions, major discoveries in science also occurred simultaneously. Isaac Newton developed calculus independently from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who unknowingly formalized the same mathematics across the English Channel in Paris.

In 1858, Charles Darwin was astonished to receive a letter from a colleague proposing the same theory of evolution he was currently formulating. Alfred Russel Wallace had come down with malaria in Indonesia. During the sweaty, tortured fever dreams that ensued, the idea of natural-selection-driven evolution came to him all at once.

Later that year, the two scientists published a joint paper together on what was known for years as the “Darwin-Wallace Theory of Natural Selection”. But Wallace couldn’t put his strange experience with malarial fever out of his mind. He developed a keen interest in the occult that embarrassed the bewhiskered and stiffly-cravatted members of the Royal Society. As a result, we hear only about Charles Darwin today.

Science Leverages Empiricism but its History Suggests Platonism

Science presumes that our minds are housed within our bodies, while our bodies navigate a much larger external reality. This way of thinking is called empiricism, and it’s frequently associated with the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

The fundamental idea behind science is that we can empirically measure reality—despite flawed, subjective observations of it—through an emphasis on repeatability. If experimental results can be duplicated by disparate observers, the assumption is that they are measuring something objective.

But Aristotle’s mentor, Plato, had a very different view of reality. He suggested that ideas have an existence all their own. Plato believed that ideas come from a place he dubbed the “Realm of Ideals”, where they wait to shape our illusory physical reality through the lens of human consciousness.

Though science itself is built on an Aristotelian presumption of empiricism, the actual history of science lends much credence to Plato’s alternative view. He supposed that—like a record or CD not currently being played—ideas like calculus or natural selection exist independently of the thinker. Plato might have suggested that these ideas occurred at the same time to different people because their time had come.

The tale of Faust and his infernal contract with the devil is a story about hidden knowledge delivered into our physical reality from an external source. Though science itself embraces Aristotle’s empiricism, its history bears out the Platonic view. All too often, major scientific advances have come not from rigorous hypothesis-testing, but from angelic visitations, magical visions, fever dreams, and co-discoveries too bizarre to be coincidences.

Conclusion

In the Greek myth, Prometheus stole technology from the gods and delivered it to humankind. Similarly, the Faust that haunted the imaginations of the Enlightenment accepts a gift of otherworldly knowledge. Though they run counter to our modern, empirical sensibilities, both myths view technology as something injected into our world from an external realm. These legends mirror the real history of science, where major breakthroughs arrive via fits of madness or from strange coincidences. All this just goes to show that while our modern understanding of reality is an empirical one, the ancient debate between Plato and Aristotle rages on today just as it did in Classical Athens. The case is far from closed!

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Further Materials

The rainbow’s arch of colour, bending brightly,
Is clearly marked, and then dissolved in air,
Around it the cool showers, falling lightly.
There the efforts of mankind they mirror.
Reflect on it, you’ll understand precisely:
We live our life amongst refracted colour.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Part II, 1790, Act I, Scene I

Key Takeaways:

• Plato’s Philosophy Massively Influenced Christianity

• The Renaissance was a Revival of Platonism

• Renaissance Magic Evolved into Science

Plato’s Philosophy Massively Influenced Christianity

Around 375 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato fundamentally altered the course of history with a single idea. He claimed that although the world we experience with our senses seems like bedrock reality, it’s actually just an illusion.

Plato famously compared the material world to a shadow-puppet show flickering across a cave wall. He argued that the observable universe is merely a distortion emanating from a hidden realm—analogous to the handiwork of unseen puppeteers.

When you walk into a restaurant, you compare objects in your visual field to a timeless ideal of a perfect chair floating around inside your mind. Comparison with such an ideal is how we recognize objects in the observable universe. Though the ideal chair doesn’t exist anywhere in the material world, Plato argued that an understanding of that ideal is how we know where to sit down.

Plato’s dualist philosophy became far more popular five centuries after his death than it had ever been during his life. At that time, a horrified Roman populace was watching their society decay around them. Plato’s assertion that the observable universe is flawed and transient perfectly matched their lived experience.

Furthermore, Plato’s hidden realm of eternal perfection gave Romans a reason to hope during one of history’s darkest periods. This realm was adopted by early Christians as their concept of heaven. Though the story of the New Testament is set in Palestine, it was originally written in Greek and heavily influenced by Greek philosophers like Plato. Historian Will Durant noted that St. Augustine “did not cease to be a Platonist when he became a Christian.”

Christianity is but one branch of the Platonic family tree. It competed with other branches like Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism during the chaotic Fall of Rome. When the Roman government violently persecuted early Christians, it established a historical pattern of authoritative opposition to the Platonism that arises during times of economic crisis.

The Renaissance was a Revival of Platonism

Empiricism is the exact opposite of Platonism. It’s the idea that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, and it’s generally associated with Plato’s protégé, Aristotle. The tension between those two philosophies was dramatically captured by the Renaissance master Raphael in his landmark fresco, The School of Athens. At its focal point, Plato and Aristotle walk side-by-side. Plato’s finger points upward to emphasize his hidden, ideal realm. Meanwhile, Aristotle holds out an overturned palm to insist on the primacy of the observable, material realm.

Raphael’s patrons, the Medici of Florence, were obsessed with Plato. They funded expeditions to recover and translate the works of that Greek philosopher, lost to Christendom during the Fall of Rome. The Medici also bankrolled artists like Raphael and Michaelangelo as they strove to represent Platonic ideals through the painstaking refinement of artistic technique.

The Italian Renaissance was nothing less than a revival of Platonism manifested in art and literature. This revival also gave rise to Renaissance magic.

At the core of all magic lurks the Platonic notion that perceived reality is an illusion, akin to the dreamscapes that our minds simultaneously conjure and experience during sleep. Renaissance magicians sought to alter that reality in the same way a lucid dreamer might seek to alter their dreams.

The Corpus Hermeticum is an ancient text rediscovered by the Medici during the Renaissance. Just like the New Testament, it was informed by Plato’s philosophy and written in Greek during the late Roman Empire.

Unlike the New Testament, it contained empowering passages such as, “If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.” For a thousand years, Europeans obediently accepted the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching that aspiration to godliness was the most abject of heresies.

But the Corpus Hermiticum proved to be an irresistible alternative to the New Testament. As the feudal economic system collapsed and Church authority waned, Europeans became increasingly fascinated by magic. Like Raphael’s brilliant fresco, the popularity of the Corpus Hermeticum reveals that a revival of Platonism was the intellectual force behind the Italian Renaissance.

Renaissance Magic Evolved into Science

Hermeticism went on to become the basis of Renaissance alchemy. Later generations of Medici remained wholly fascinated by this magical art. Where St. Augustine had taught that moral improvement was the gateway to the hidden kingdom of heaven, alchemists believed that a great work, or “magnum opus”, would allow them to transcend the observable universe.

The idea of the magnum opus was not only reflected in the great works of Renaissance artists, but also in the intricate experiments of the alchemists. Their bubbling alembics were supposed to reveal as much about the observer as they were about the material world that Plato took to be an illusion.

But as the European economy stabilized during the transition from Medieval feudalism to modern capitalism, Platonic dualism reverted back to Aristotelian empiricism. Alchemy gave way to chemistry, while astrology developed into astronomy. White lab coats replaced wizard’s robes as science was born of Renaissance magic. Today, scientists rather than priests differentiate heresy from gospel on behalf of the masses.

During the Fall of Rome and during the Renaissance, the decay of existing economic systems made various forms of Platonism an attractive philosophical perspective. Conversely, times of relative economic stability tend to promote the opposite, empirical view of reality.

Christianity began during an economic collapse as a Platonic revolt against Roman authority. But by the time feudalism reached its maturity, Christianity had calcified into an authority similar to the one it had displaced in Rome a thousand years before.

As feudalism collapsed, Platonism once again challenged authority under the guise of the Italian Renaissance. Just as early Christianity gelled into the Medieval Church, Renaissance magic surrendered to the empiricism of modern science.

If this fascinating historical pattern holds, our modern scientific authorities should expect another revival of Platonism once the capitalist economic system reaches its expiration date. From beyond the grave, Plato patiently plots his revenge.

Conclusion

Church opposition to the Platonism of the late Middle Ages was a redux of the political repression of Christians during the late Roman Empire. The screams of heretics in the dungeons of the Inquisition mirrored the throwing of Christians to lions in the Colosseum. In both cases, the powerful responded violently to strains of Platonism threatening their intellectual authority. These episodes reveal that popular assumptions about bedrock reality often reflect the interests of authorities rather than any actual state of the cosmos. That’s why—during times of economic crisis—the philosophy of Plato has emerged from hibernation to undermine established intellectual monopolies. It’s at those moments that people take a long, hard look at their emperor to see if he’s wearing any clothes. That’s when Plato’s notion that reality is an illusion is at its most obvious.

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Further Materials

If then you not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time, and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights, and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.
Corpus Hermeticum 11:20

Key Takeaways:

• The resolution of the Thirty Years’ War curtailed the political power of the Popes, but international banking houses soon sprang up to take their place.

• There was much cross-pollination between founding members of the Bank of England and a secret society called the Freemasons.

• In an astonishing coincidence, a prominent Masonic symbol stands just steps away from the spot where the Thirty Years’ War began.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

During the Middle Ages, popes often wielded significant political power over the crowned heads of Christendom. But the brutal Thirty Years’ War that ravaged Europe between 1619 and 1648 changed all that. The conflict erupted after enraged Protestants stormed Prague Castle and threw the Catholic administrators they found there out of a high window.

After millions died in the resulting military conflict, an exhausted Europe finally established international borders around sovereign nation-states with the Peace at Westphalia. This agreement put an end to the Thirty Years’ War by guaranteeing states like Bohemia—where Prague is located—the right to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism for themselves, without interference from the Vatican. These borders severely curtailed the political influence enjoyed by the popes during the Medieval period.

But nature abhors a vacuum. Just 46 years after the Peace of Westphalia, the Bank of England arose to fill the power vacuum left at the apex of European geopolitics by the deposed popes.

In 1694, bankers from London and Edinburgh pooled their resources and loaned a considerable sum to King William III, who desperately needed funds for another war against the French. These bankers then proceeded to sell off the rights to the future tax revenues the King had promised them as repayment.

The resulting promissory notes soon began circulating as Europe’s first national paper currency. Once these paper notes became widely accepted as a primary form of payment, the bankers found themselves wielding a power that exceeded the popes’ wildest dreams: the power to print money.

Over the ensuing centuries, similar central banks sprang up in nearly every country in the world. By 1930, coordination between these central banks was formalized in Switzerland with the establishment of the Bank for International Settlements, which serves as a central bank for central bankers.

The politician Barry Goldwater once remarked, “Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders…It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.” Like the popes during the Middle Ages, international banking houses have evolved into a transnational authority that holds considerable power over our nominal heads of state.

The Rise of Freemasonry

The Bank of England was established by a small, interconnected group of wealthy merchants and bankers centered primarily around Lombard Street in London. These individuals were shareholders, directors, and major clients of the bank.

In 1717, just 23 years after the establishment of the Bank of England, a secret society called the Freemasons publicly announced the opening of their Premier Grand Lodge in London. This group met in taverns located near Lombard Street.

It must be stressed that not every banker was a Freemason, and not every Mason was a banker. But there was significant overlap between the Freemasons and the founding members of the Bank of England. Discussions, decisions, and influence within both spheres were informally linked through shared membership.

The co-emergence of Freemasonry with the Bank of England is no coincidence. Both institutions flourished in a new era of political stability, created by the 1648 Peace at Westphalia that concluded the Thirty Years War. Both were championed by the rising commercial and professional classes of the day. They were two different manifestations of the same historical forces that shaped our modern political paradigm.

New Order of the Ages

Secret societies have always used secret symbols intelligible only to their members. The Freemasons were no exception. In their rituals, Masons utilize ancient Egyptian occult symbology like the unfinished pyramid and the Eye of Provenance, which is a modern adaptation of the old Eye of Horus.

Latin mottos are another calling card of the Freemasons, as these were part of the Enlightenment sensibility that dominated European culture during the 1700s. In the latter part of that century, many of the men now recognized as America’s “Founding Fathers” belonged to Masonic lodges.

Influenced by the secret society many of them belonged to, the Founding Fathers adopted the unfinished pyramid and the Eye of Provenance as the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. These symbols were accompanied by the twin Latin phrases Annuit cœptis and Novus ordo seclorum, which translate respectively to “God favors us” and “a new order of the ages”. Both phrases were lifted straight from the Roman poet Virgil.

Today, these same symbols and phrases can be found on the back of any US one dollar bill. All US paper money is labeled “Federal Reserve Note” because the Fed—rather than the US Treasury—issues the currency and backs its value. Pioneered by London and Edinburgh bankers in 1694, the modern central banking system today wields tremendous political power. That is particularly true in the case of the US dollar, which remains the world’s reserve currency.

An amusing symbological coincidence can be found at the site of the Defenestration of Prague, where Protestants agitators once hurled Catholic administrators out of a window. Just steps away from the place where the Thirty Years’ War began, there is a large stone pyramid with a copper capstone. This structure is eerily reminiscent of the unfinished pyramid and the Eye of Providence that adorns the back of every US one-dollar bill.

A more fitting symbol could scarcely be imagined for the historical process that unwound the political might of the Popes—and saw it replaced by powerful international banking houses. That such a symbol stands mere feet from the spot where those historical forces were unleashed is an astonishing coincidence of symbology.

Conclusion

One of the chief complaints of the Protestant Reformation was the infamous Sale of Indulgences, wherein the Roman Catholic Church amassed vast wealth by charging its flock for sin remission. The root of the Church’s power during the Middle Ages was the widespread belief that it was in exclusive contact with God. But the political shift from the Medieval period to the modern age involved the displacement of that transnational authority and the rise of another to replace it. Where the Church once monetized a spiritual monopoly, central banks today instead leverage a monopoly over the issuance of currency to dominate international geopolitics.

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Further Materials

It was only with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 that one can speak of genuine paper money, since its banknotes were in no sense bonds. They were rooted, like all the others, in the king’s war debts. This can’t be emphasized enough. The fact that money was no longer a debt owed to the king, but a debt owed by the king, made it very different than what it had been before. In many ways, it had become a mirror image of older forms of money. The reader will recall that the Bank of England was created when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants—mostly already creditors to the crown—offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France. In doing so, they also convinced him to allow them in return to form a corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes—which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the king now owed them. This was the first independent national central bank, and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks; the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011, page 339

Key Takeaways:

• The Thirty Years War began as the culmination of the Protestant Reformation, but exploded into a broader power struggle.

• The Peace at Westphalia concluded the Thirty Years War by demolishing the Medieval political hierarchy and replacing it with our modern one.

• A living ebook called The Network State provides us with a glimpse of what a post-Westphalian political paradigm might look like.

The Horrors of the Thirty Years War

Prior to the 20th century, the most brutal conflict fought on European soil was the Thirty Years’ War. It began as the final culmination of the Protestant Reformation. But what started as a religious dispute between Catholic and Protestant factions within Germany’s Holy Roman Empire soon sucked in other European powers like Sweden and France.

Theological disagreements took a backseat as a broader struggle for political power exploded, engulfing virtually all of Europe. Though France was Catholic, it entered the war on the side of German Protestants to get one over on their Habsburg rivals from Vienna and Madrid.

During the decades of chaos that ensued, between 4 and 8 million people met untimely deaths. Europe had never seen violence on such a scale, and wouldn’t again until the first World War. Entire towns were wiped off the map for the crime of loyalty to the wrong faction. By 1648, Europe was exhausted, shattered, heartbroken, and desperate for peace.

Despite the exhaustion, hard feelings still abounded. The grudge between Catholics and Protestants ran so deep that Protestant envoys declined to negotiate in Catholic-dominated cities. Meanwhile, Catholics refused to sit at the same negotiating table as “heretical” Protestants.

To get around this diplomatic impasse, representatives of the Holy Roman Empire met with delegates from France in the Catholic city of Münster. At the same time, 35 miles to the north, Osnabrück was chosen as the site for negotiations between the Holy Roman Empire and Protestant Sweden, because that city was evenly split between Catholics and Protestants.

The Deposition of the Popes

Both Münster and Osnabrück are located in a region of northwestern Germany called Westphalia. The twin treaties that stemmed the bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War are known as the “Peace at Westphalia.” It created our modern political paradigm by establishing international borders.

The Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch was right there in the room when the Münster treaty was signed. Later that same year, he recreated the scene on canvas. His painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and it serves as a portal into that pivotal moment in history.

Our familiar system of sovereign countries and international borders is an inheritance from the bitter struggle of the Protestant Reformation. “Westphalian sovereignty” is the principle in modern international law where nation-states enjoy exclusive sovereignty over their own territory. It is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that “nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

The Popes had been the kingmakers in Europe after the surprise coronation of Charlemagne by the Pope on Christmas Day in the year 800. But in 1648, the Peace at Westphalia formally subordinated the Roman Catholic Church beneath the heads of newly-created nation-states.

After 800 years of dominance over European politics, the Popes found themselves deposed. The Peace at Westphalia created modern nation-states by guaranteeing sovereign nations the right to break with the Catholic Church without interference from Rome. It effectively ended the centuries-old Medieval political hierarchy, and gave birth to our modern political paradigm.

The End of the Modern Era

Because the Westphalian system is the only one in living memory, we take it to be ubiquitous. The Civilization series of video games, for example, awkwardly transposes this system of international borders onto the dawning of the Agricultural Revolution.

But the Westphalian system is far from ubiquitous. It’s peculiar to our modern era, and to the capitalist system of production and distribution that emerged to replace the feudal economic system of Europe.

Renowned tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan wrote a living ebook called The Network State, where he argued that in a dawning digital age, physical location is losing its meaning and relevance. He predicts that new types of political entities will arise from online spaces instead of physical ones.

These new entities could replace Westphalian nation-states. Srinivasan sees a future in which humans organize themselves not according to the geography where they happen to be born, but according to personal political philosophies. We could, in other words, pay taxes and exercise political rights as digital nations instead of physical ones.

In Srinivasan’s vision, the international borders that are the hallmark of our modern Westphalian political system would become irrelevant as citizens of digital polities are distributed across the globe.

As a thought experiment, his vision provides us with an example of what a post-Westphalian system might look like. It enables us to stretch our imaginations into the future, beyond a geopolitical paradigm that has only existed since 1648.

Conclusion

During the Middle Ages, kings were frequently crowned by popes who endorsed a feudal economic system divided into peasants and lords. But the Protestant Reformation changed all that after it exploded into the Thirty Years War. The treaties that ended that bitter conflict established modern nation-states defined by international borders. Each state was granted sovereignty, which meant the right to choose between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. That system became the stage on which the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism played out. But as capitalism reaches the end of its lifecycle, we should be asking ourselves what a successor to the Westphalian system might look like as we once again prepare to enter into a new chapter of history.

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Further Materials

But though the Reformation had been saved, it suffered, along with Catholicism, from a skepticism encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemics, the brutality of the war, and the cruelties of belief. During the holocaust thousands of “witches” were put to death. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practiced wholesale fratricide. They discovered the political and economic motives that hid under religious formulas, and they suspected their rulers of having no real faith but the lust for power—though Ferdinand II had repeatedly risked his power for the sake of his faith. Even in this darkest of modern ages an increasing number of men turned to science and philosophy for answers less incarnadined than those which the faiths had so violently sought to enforce. Galileo was dramatizing the Copernican revolution, Descartes was questioning all tradition and authority, Bruno was crying out to Europe from his agonies at the stake. The Peace of Westphalia ended the reign of theology over the European mind, and left the road obstructed but passable for the tentatives of reason.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, 1961, page 571

Key Takeaways:

• World War I began with the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire by a Serbian nationalist terrorist organization

• 300 years earlier, the Thirty Years War began with the Defenestration of Prague, another act of rebellion by Slavic malcontents against a Germanic Empire.

• WW1 surpassed the Thirty Years War as the worst tragedy in European history up until that time.

1914: Trouble in the Balkans

On a sunny June morning in 1914, Gavrilo Princip stepped out of a cafe and onto the cobblestoned streets of Sarajevo. The 19-year-old was a political extremist who had arrived in Bosnia with nefarious intent; he planned to assassinate the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire had been formally dissolved after its defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was its successor state. It was ruled from Vienna by the same Habsburg family.

In 1908, the Habsburgs infuriated the Kingdom of Serbia by annexing the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like Serbia, these territories were ethnically Slavic. Gavrilo Princip was backed by the Black Hand terrorist network, who sought to avenge the annexation by gunning down Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the streets of Bosnia’s capital.

But Princip’s planned ambush had been foiled when the Archduke altered the route of his motorcade after an earlier disturbance. Thinking he had failed in his mission, a dejected Princip ducked into a nearby cafe.

When he remerged from the cafe, Princip was stunned to find the Archduke’s motorcade stalled out front. It had taken a wrong turn, a minor mistake that had enormous historical consequences. Princip quickly produced a .380 caliber pistol, stepped up to the open-top car, and fired two fatal shots at point-blank range. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, died bloody deaths within minutes—and the world was never the same again.

The assassination of the Archduke caused a chain reaction. One-by-one, the nations of Europe declared war on each other according to a tangled web of political alliances. By August, World War I had begun. By the time it was over 4 years later, the Great War proved to be the worst disaster ever to stain the pages of history up until that moment.

1618: Trouble in Bohemia

The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not survive World War I. A rebellious act of violence by a Slavic dissident turned out to be the beginning of the end for that Germanic Empire. In this respect, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke mirrored exactly the events that transpired in Prague some 300 years before.

In 1618, the Holy Roman Empire was going through a succession crisis. The outgoing emperor had been tolerant of Protestantism, but the incoming emperor Ferdinand II was loyal to the Pope, and he made no secret of his intention to crack down on Protestants. A bitter civil war was brewing. The northern half of the Holy Roman Empire–where Prague is located—wanted to adopt Protestantism, while the southern factions remained loyal to the Pope and Catholicism.

The German word “fenster” means “window”. It’s the root of the English word “defenestration”, which means throwing somebody out of a window. Over the centuries, defenestrations became something of a tradition in the city of Prague.

The spark that ignited the Thirty Years’ War came when enraged Protestants marched into Prague Castle, seized two Catholic governors, and threw them out of a second-story window. A clerk who got swept up in the frenzy was defenestrated along with them.

Amazingly, all three men survived the fall, with only a broken leg among them. They tumbled fifty feet into a pile of horse manure. In the aftermath, printing presses saturated Europe with propaganda pamphlets. Catholic propaganda represented the cushioning feces as God’s salvation, while Protestant sources represented the same as the only treatment fit for Catholics.

The Thirty Years’ War

Jokes soon soured, and the mood in Europe darkened as war clouds gathered on the horizon, just as in 1914. The Pope marshaled his political allies to support the emperor, while Protestant powers like Sweden dispatched troops to support Protestant factions within the Holy Roman Empire.

Virtually every polity in Europe was eventually dragged into the fighting. Because it considered the Holy Roman Empire an enemy, Catholic France entered the war on the side of the German Protestants. What started as a conflict over religious freedom descended into a bitter struggle for power as the entire Medieval political paradigm descended into chaos. These falling dominoes were eerily similar to the mutual declarations of war that electrified the public in the summer of 1914, after the assassination of the Archduke.

Like WWI, the Thirty Years’ War caused significant loss of life, with estimates of casualties ranging from 4.5 to 8 million people. Many regions experienced extreme violence, famine, and disease. Cities and villages were looted and destroyed, leading to economic collapse and population displacement. The brutality of the war left deep scars on the European landscape and psyche. Up until the outbreak of WWI, the Thirty Years’ War was the most brutal tragedy Europe had ever endured.

Conclusion

J.R.R. Tolkien recalled the horrors of World War I he’d witnessed first-hand when he later described the desolation of Mordor. The events of WWI supplanted the Thirty Years War as the worst thing that ever happened to Europe. Beyond the sheer loss of life, the two conflicts were remarkably similar in their genesis. Like the Serbs, the Czechs are a Slavic people. Both populations were subjugated to German Empires, and both turned to violence in their desperation to throw off rule from Vienna. American President John F. Kennedy encapsulated these events with his phrase, “those who make peaceful reform impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” But perhaps Mark Twain best summed up the bizarre similarities between the Thirty Years War and World War I with his classic quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

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But in Prague Count Heinrich von Thurn pleaded with the Protestant leaders to prevent the ardently Catholic Archduke Ferdinand from taking the throne of Bohemia. Emperor Matthias had left five deputy governors to administer the country during his absence. The governors overruled the Protestants in disputes about church building at Klostergrab, and sent the objectors to jail. On May 23, 1618, Thurn led a crowd of irate Protestants into Hradschin Castle, climbed to the rooms where two of the governors sat, and threw them out the window, along with a pleading secretary. All three fell fifty feet, but they landed in a heap of filth and escaped more soiled than injured. That famous ‘defenestration’ was a dramatic challenge to the Emperor, to the Archduke, and to the Catholic League. Thurn expelled the Archbishop and the Jesuits and formed a revolutionary Directory. He could hardly have realized that he had let loose the dogs of war.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, 1961, page 556

Key Takeaways:

• The Roman Catholic Church restricted Bible translations to maintain its role as the sole interpreter of Scripture.

• The Church condemned and punished outlaw Bible translators at the Council of Konstanz in 1415.

• After the invention of the printing press in 1440, Martin Luther touched off the Protestant Reformation that destroyed Church’s intellectual monopoly.

Translating the Bible

Medieval Europeans believed that the Roman Catholic Church was their sole connection to God. By the late Middle Ages, the Church was shamelessly monetizing that monopoly. One of the most infamous ways it did so was by charging people for sin forgiveness through the Sale of Indulgences. Through this and other means, the Church built up an immense hoard of wealth that remains legendary to this day.

Awkwardly, the vast wealth of the Vatican directly contradicts actual scripture, where Jesus teaches that, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

During the Middle Ages, the Church managed to get away with this obvious contradiction by maintaining strict control over the translation of the Bible into common tongues. Most people had no choice but to accept the Church’s interpretation of scripture, where it deemphasized a harsh condemnation against wealth that is a major theme of the New Testament.

But in the 1300s, one man boldly defied the Church with his translation of the Bible into English. He was John Wycliffe, a preacher so scandalized by what he discovered in the New Testament that he began using fiery sermons to advocate for the total abolition of private property, and of Church property in particular.

Legendary historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote that translation of the Bible into common languages was, “a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects, the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto. Peasant and proletarian alike found in it a divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished, and the poor would inherit the earth.”

The Council of Konstanz

John Wycliffe died of old age on the very last day of 1384, almost a century-and-a-half before the Protestant Reformation shattered the intellectual monopoly enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church.

Enemies of the Medieval Church like Wycliffe seldom achieved death by natural causes. But in his day, England was a long way from Rome. By the time Church authorities formally condemned and excommunicated Wycliffe at the Council of Konstanz, he had already been dead for 35 years.

But the attendees at the Council of Konstanz would not be disappointed by a lack of blood. Another firebrand preacher named Jan Hus has been inspired by Wycliffe to formalize a translation of the Bible in Czech. For that literary crime, Church officials summoned him to the German city of Konstanz under a guarantee of protection. Despite the guarantee, they ordered him tied to a stake and the flesh burned off of his body until he died in agony.

Back in Prague, Jan Hus had a huge following. A few years after the treachery at Konstanz, they formed an angry mob and stormed the Town Hall. There, they seized the Catholic members of the city council, and hurled them out of a second-story window to their deaths onto the cobblestones below.

Those seven broken bodies on the streets of Prague were the first casualties in a long and bitter struggle against Church power that eventually claimed millions of lives. But the broader movement that became the Protestant Reformation was still a century away. The monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church survived Jan Hus’s death and remained intact until a marvellous invention changed everything.

The Theses of Martin Luther

Both John Wycliffe and Jan Hus made names for themselves by translating the Bible into common languages. But while they defied the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, they couldn’t have imagined destroying its monopoly.

History credits that feat to another Bible translator, one of history’s most grumpy and least agreeable figures. The monk Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, but he didn’t stop there.

Luther painstakingly compiled an exhaustive list of his complaints against Church corruption. Chief among them was the infamous Sale of Indulgences. Legend has it that he then made his way through downtown Wittenberg to his local church and nailed these so-called “95 Theses” to its door. In those days, the doors of public buildings served as makeshift bulletin boards. The year was 1517, and Luther’s bold act of defiance marks the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The reason Luther’s protest against Church power exploded into a mass movement was the advent of the printing press. 25 years after Jan Hus had met his grisly fate at Konstanz, Johannes Gutenberg put the finishing touches on a machine that used moveable type to mass-produce documents.

The era of copying manuscripts by hand was over, and so was the political supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Printing presses churned out Bibles in common languages faster than Church authorities could confiscate them. Martin Luther’s complaints about Church corruption spread to every corner of Europe via mechanically-produced pamphlets. Within a century, the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church collapsed in an orgy of violence that was the Protestant Reformation.

Conclusion

The Church’s dominance of European politics was wholly dependent on its ability to control the public narrative. The invention of the printing press obliterated that control. The Protestant Reformation that followed could never have happened without brave characters like Wycliffe or Hus or Luther. But like a fire that requires both fuel and oxygen to burn, bravery alone was insufficient to escape the awesome gravity of Church power. The Reformation could only flourish after the intellectual monopoly on which Church power rested was finally broken. John Wycliffe and Jan Hus bravely confronted the Church. But because Martin Luther’s protest came AFTER the invention of the printing press, it ignited a mass movement that plunged all of Europe into chaos, ultimately demolishing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and ushering in the modern historical era.

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The religious revolt offered the tillers of the fields a captivating ideology in which to phrase their demands for a larger share in Germany’s growing prosperity. The hardships that had already spurred a dozen rural outbreaks still agitated the peasant mind, and indeed with feverish intensity now that Luther had defied the Church, berated the princes, broken the dams of discipline and awe, made every man a priest, and proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man. In the Germany of that age Church and state were so closely meshed- clergymen played so large a role in social order and civil administration that the collapse of ecclesiastical prestige and power removed a main barrier to revolution. The Waldensians, Beghards, Brethren of the Common Life, had continued an old tradition of basing radical proposals upon Biblical texts. The circulation of the New Testament in print was a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto. Peasant and proletarian alike found in it a divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished, and the poor would inherit the earth.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 382

Key Takeaways:

• Centuries after the Fall of Rome, the Pope crowned Charlemagne as a Roman Emperor.

• By crowning Charlemagne, the Pope established himself and his successors as the kingmakers of Medieval Europe.

• Church corruption ultimately brought an end to the political supremacy of the papacy.

The Christmas Surprise of AD 800

The coronation of Charlemagne is one of those crucial historical moments everyone should have learned about in school. Over the centuries, the story has been garnished by legend. But the classic tale has Pope Leo III ambushing Charlemagne with an imperial crown on Christmas Day in the year 800.

Centuries earlier, Roman civilization had ebbed from the Italian peninsula like the tide retreating back out to sea. The Roman Catholic Church was left behind without a military to protect it. But during the 700s, Charlemagne stepped up to fill that void.

He defended the Papal States from the Lombards (or the “long beards”) of Northern Italy, and then set to work converting great masses of Germanic pagans—at sword-point—to Christianity. Charlemagne made himself the military arm of the papacy. Meanwhile, a delighted Pope Leo III hatched a plot to lock this convenient relationship into place indefinitely.

According to legend, the Pope crept up behind Charlemagne as he knelt to say his Christmas prayers at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Leo suddenly placed a crown on his unsuspecting head, and then led startled onlookers in the same chant used centuries before during the coronations of Roman emperors.

The legend of Charlemagne’s Christmas coronation comes down to us from his contemporary biographer, Einhard. Modern historians remain skeptical of his version of events. But the traditional story of a surprise coronation captures the rise of a Medieval political hierarchy where the crowned heads of Christendom were generally subordinate to the Pope.

To this day, the declaration made when a new pope accepts the papal tiara still reflects that political hierarchy, “take the tiara, and know that thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar on earth of our savior, Jesus Christ.”

By elevating Charlemagne to the status of emperor, the pope asserted his own authority over the Frankish king. Leo cleverly established his office as the kingmaker of Europe, setting the stage for the ensuing Middle Ages.

Continuity with Rome

Other eyewitnesses to the coronation claim that Leo assembled the Roman nobility and Frankish warriors beforehand, and that they saluted Charlemagne as the Roman Emperor with the words: “To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor of the Romans, life and victory.”

This detail is a major reason that modern historians question Einhard’s testimony. With all those people pre-assembled, the coronation couldn’t have been the surprise that Einhard emphasized. It’s more likely that, for political reasons, Charlemagne wished to be portrayed as a reluctant emperor.

What’s for certain is that the pope invoked the Roman Empire to give his new arrangement with Charlemagne an air of permanence. By making Charlemagne the leader of a new Roman Empire, Pope Leo III created a sense of timelessness and legitimacy that made the new political hierarchy endure for centuries.

The coronation took place in St. Peter’s Basilica, which was already five centuries old on that chilly Christmas morning in the year 800. The St. Peter’s that now stands on Vatican Square in Rome was designed by Michelangelo during the Italian Renaissance, when the basilica known to Charlemagne was finally torn down to make way for the building we see today.

The original was built in the 4th century by the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine. During Roman times, the Vatican was a hillside cemetery outside the city gates, where Christians were massacred and St. Peter himself was crucified upside-down. Constantine filled in that hillside with earth to create a foundation for his basilica. Some of the columns laid by him are still visible in the grotto beneath the present basilica.

Another legendary detail of the coronation is that Charlemagne knelt on a large, circular slab of red porphyry stone set into the floor in front of the main altar. This stone is called the Rota Porphyretica, and it became the site where all subsequent Holy Roman Emperors were crowned. When old St. Peter’s was demolished to make way for the new basilica in the 1500s, this precious red stone was built into the floor of the new structure. It can still be seen today, directly inside the main entrance. Most tourists step right over it, having no idea of its significance.

The Sale of Indulgences

Following Leo’s clever maneuver, the popes maintained their dominance over European politics for the next 500 years. But a universal human tendency toward wealth addiction eventually undermined the Church’s reputation and shattered the Medieval political order Leo established.

Leo’s distant successor, Pope Boniface VIII, hatched another plot in the year 1299. He declared the Jubilee of year 1300 would celebrate the turn of the century by accepting money from pilgrims to Rome in exchange for remission of their sins.

Dante Alighieri was recorded among the pilgrims of that first jubilee. But several centuries after Dante’s time, this infamous “Sale of Indulgences” became a major flashpoint in the violent fracture of Christendom that was the Protestant Reformation.

Having no idea how severe the fallout eventually would be, Boniface rejoiced at the revenue generated by his jubilee. He donned the dress and insignia of the ancient Roman emperors and paraded through the streets of Rome. Boniface held two swords high in front of him, which symbolized his dominance over both the spiritual and secular realms. Heralds preceded him, crying out, “Behold! I am Caesar!”.

The way Popes ruled over kings during the Middle Ages was reminiscent of the way the Caesars once ruled over the kings of their client kingdoms. Like the Caesars, the Popes exacted economic tribute. But they didn’t rely on pure military might to do so. Instead, they took advantage of the fact that Christians like Charlemagne believed the Pope was their exclusive connection to God. The Church was perceived to hold a monopoly on access to the divine, and Boniface shamelessly set up a toll booth on that route.

Conclusion

Pope Leo III deliberately invoked the customs of imperial Rome to legitimize a new political order. But the parallels between the Roman Empire of Antiquity and the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages don’t end there. The great irony of the Roman Catholic Church is that Christianity began as a group of outlaw radicals rejecting the corrupt economic hierarchy of the Roman Empire. But Christianity became the state religion of Rome during its fall, then adopted Roman symbolism as the Church gradually calcified into a corrupt authority very much like the one early Christians rebelled against. By succumbing to wealth addiction, Pope Boniface VIII and the Roman Catholic Church completed the same tragic, wealth-addicted narrative arc as the Roman Empire.

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On Christmas Day, as Charlemagne, in the chlamys and sandals of a patricius Romanus, knelt before St. Peter’s altar in prayer, Leo suddenly produced a jeweled crown, and set it upon the King’s head. The congregation, perhaps instructed beforehand to act according to ancient ritual as the senatus populusque Romanus confirming a coronation, thrice cried out: “Hail to Charles the Augustus, crowned by God the great and peace-bringing Emperor of the Romans!” The royal head was anointed with holy oil, the Pope saluted Charlemagne as Emperor and Augustus, and offered him the act of homage reserved since 476 for the Eastern emperor.
The coronation had results for a thousand years. It strengthened the papacy and the bishops by making civil authority derive from ecclesiastical conferment; Gregory VII and Innocent III would build a mightier Church on the events of 800 in Rome. It strengthened Charlemagne against baronial and other disaffection by making him a very vicar of God; it vastly advanced the theory of the divine right of kings. It contributed to the schism of Greek from Latin Christianity; the Greek Church did not relish subordination to a Roman Church allied with an empire rival to Byzantium. The fact that Charlemagne (as the Pope desired) continued to make Aachen, not Rome, his capital, underlined the passage of political power from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, from the Latin peoples to the Teutons. Above all, the coronation established the Holy Roman Empire in fact, though not in theory. Charlemagne and his advisers conceived of his new authority as a revival of the old imperial power; only with Otto I was the distinctively new character of the regime recognized; and it became “holy” only when Frederick Barbarossa introduced the word sacrum into his title in 1155. All in all, despite its threat to the liberty of the mind and the citizen, the Holy Roman Empire was a noble conception, a dream of security and peace, order and civilization restored in a world heroically won from barbarism, violence, and ignorance.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 469