Latin Christian
Civilization’s Decline
At its best (1073-1201), Latin Christendom formed a
commonwealth of self-governing states under the religious authority of the pope.
It delicately balanced his power as ruler of the Latin Christian Church
with the freedom of political rulers and leading intellectuals.
The unusual balance of power and freedom embodied by this
commonwealth began to break down in 1201. That is when the ruler and leaders of
the Latin Christian Church increasingly abandoned the freedom of Jesus Christ
for the power of the six conventional yet false and destructive Olympian gods.
Latin Christendom disintegrated during a malicious, destructive, yet
inconclusive civil war lasting from 1521 to 1648. An estimated 6-17 million
people died during this 127-year period as a result.
Exuberant Olympian
Civilization’s Beginning
After 1648, Christian intellectuals happily though
mistakenly abandoned theology for technology. They easily led ordinary people
into a new civilization based on Olympianity rather than Christianity.
Let us pause and reflect on this. The ruler and leaders
of the Latin Christian Church increasingly abandoned Jesus and his freedom for
the six Olympian gods and their power. This eventually resulted in the
disintegration of Latin Christendom because this lust for power by Latin
Christian leaders, supposedly devoted to Jesus, discredited them, their theology,
and, tragically, Jesus himself.
It would have been more honorable if, after this severe
discrediting, Latin Christian leaders had repented of their lust for power, their
misplaced and destructive devotion to the six Olympian gods, and had returned with humble and contrite hearts to their one true lord and savior Jesus Christ.
Instead, they steadily left him—the source, center, and goal of all means for
questioning power—in a past they flippantly dismissed as medieval superstition.
Life in Exuberant Olympian Civilization seemed
unimaginably wonderful for over 250 years. Toynbee was born in 1889. At that
time, leaders and people of Olympian Civilization, he later wrote, felt supreme
self-satisfaction. They believed their civilization was perfect, permanent, and
the standard against which all previous and present civilizations were to be
measured. There would be no better one beyond it.
Olympian
Civilization’s Increasing Menace
Toynbee was 25 years old at the start of war in 1914. For
him, as for many of his generation, that war destroyed the illusion of Olympian
Civilization’s perfection and permanence and the smugness that went with it. “We…realized
that, in discarding, in the seventeenth century, the doctrine of Original Sin
together with the rest of the West’s Christian religious heritage, Western Man
did not slough off Original Sin itself (152).
Earlier in his book, Toynbee defined Original Sin as
self-centeredness and a pursuit of power indifferent to the cost of this
pursuit for others. He contrasted it with self-devotion or the willingness to
voluntarily embrace the suffering needed to love others.
Following the catastrophic destruction and death of the
War of 1914, of a self-centered pursuit of power based on the falsehood that
Original Sin no longer existed, Toynbee thought it was time to give the truth
some renewed consideration. It was time to allow the truth of Original Sin to
provide Olympian Civilization with some meaningful feedback concerning its
wicked ways.
There are two types of feedback. Positive feedback
increases existing trends. Want more of the same? Feed it with carrots.
Negative feedback decreases existing trends. Want that foolishness to stop?
Beat it with a stick. The Olympian gods know this well. They ceaselessly bully
(negative feedback), bribe (positive feedback), and deceive us into behaving as
they desire.
The War of 1914 caused the death of 17-23 million people
in four short years, Toynbee thought this existing trend of increasing
lethality needed to decrease. Some negative feedback was necessary. He proposed
that Olympians moderate their lust for power by renewing “the struggle with
Original Sin—which we have ignored and neglected for more than 300 years”
(152).
Then came the War of 1939 which killed an estimated 50-80 million and ended with the use of two atomic bombs. Toynbee did not believe
that modern people were more wicked than medieval or ancient ones. Their technological
means, however, were far more harmful. Toynbee reflected, “No doubt it was
always true that the ‘wages of Sin is Death’ [Romans 6:23]; but today, when we
find ourselves once again forced by events to face, and grapple with, Sin, the
truth of St. Paul’s warning cannot be ignored” (153).
Toynbee was 56 years old in 1945 when the War of 1939
ended. He still believed, as he had when he was 25 and the War of 1914 began,
that facing and grappling with sin would provide salutary negative feedback to
an Olympian civilization growing exponentially more destructive.
No Meaningful—Negative—Feedback
without Repentance
Toynbee was 67 when he published his reflections on
religion. His concluding thoughts on our Olympian Civilization and its need for
negative feedback:
Indeed, among the public in a
Westernizing World in the later decades of the twentieth century, there might
be a revulsion of feeling against Science and Technology like the revulsion
against Religion in the later decades of the seventeenth century. Once again, a
mental activity by which the public had been continuously obsessed over a
period of many generations might be repudiated by its former devotees because
it had become known, by its fruits, to be a shocking vent for Original Sin and
a serious threat to Man’s welfare and perhaps even to his existence (238).
Religion along a new line of
approach which, if humbler, will be spiritually more promising (238).
Toynbee was wrong to anticipate a late 20th-century
revulsion of feeling toward the six gods of Olympianity: (1) Jupiter, god of
politics; (2) Mars, god of war; (3) Vulcan, god of technology; (4) Venus,
goddess of sex; (5) Pluto, god of money; and (6) Bacchus, god of consumption.
In 2018, we love them the world over more than ever.
He was right, however, to say that this revulsion might
come. This won’t happen, however, before a significant minority of Christians
and churches repent of their lust for power and devotion to the Olympian gods. Only
with this repentance and a simultaneous return to Jesus—the only true God and
Man of freedom—will Olympian Civilization get the negative feedback it needs to moderate its exponentially destructive ways.
That’s one important difference between Christian and Olympian
civilizations. Jesus Christ himself, speaking through the Bible itself, as well
as in the thoughts and through the words of Christians, calls Christians and
their leaders to repent of their lust for power and its gods and return to his
path of freedom and to him their only true savior.
Not so with the Olympian gods. When we devote ourselves
to them, who’s to call us back to freedom? No one. From
their point of view, if power fails us, then we simply failed to use it
effectively enough. We didn’t bully, bribe, and deceive others well enough.
There is no source, center, and goal of freedom inside
Olympianity, its civilization, and its system. That can only come from the
outside—from Jesus. And Jesus will only do this through Christians and churches
willing to abandon the gods and serve him despite the increasingly severe
difficulties involved. Only Christians devoted to Jesus and living his freedom can provide our neighbor Olympians with the desperately needed, meaningful, negative feedback that power does not lead to life. Only freedom in Jesus does that.
Copyright © 2018
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.