The extraordinary influence of the Iliad and Odyssey
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the-tls.co.uk
I think the writer sells short the comparison of Homer to the bible. It goes a lot deeper than "the one book everyone knows."
Homer is often thought to be describing events during the bronze dark age, the period between the collapse of middle eastern bronze age empires and the rise of iron age empires (like the greek one).
This is what the bible is too, to a large extent. The exodus, judges, King David, prophets, heros... Stories about the legendary dark age written by decendants during the early iron age.
As civilization (and population) re-grew these stories formed a cultural core. Judeans got swept into the aramean, babylonian, persian and later hellenic empires. The library of knowledge grew enourmously. But, the old stories still remained at the heart of the cultural.
Something similar happenned in greece. Greeks civilisation grew. greek scholarship got advanced, and worldly. They later created a world empire, existed under the roman empire. Still the stories remained, a stable foundation for more culture to graft onto.
In both cases, we have stories from the bronze age, that somehow remained important enough for 100 generations to remain at the heart of cultures today. Stories of desert nomads and aegean pirates on the margins of civilisation.
I do think there's universality of moral and philosophical questions. King Cyrus and #metoo debated the same questions. Plato/Socrates, René Descartes & The Matrix constructed story worlds to highlight the same epistemological problem (what if the world isn't real).
Good stories give you a richness of scenarios and questions to discuss, whether you agree or dissent to the author's conclusions.
Moral badness.... Realistically, every morality other than one's own is bad and so statistically...
A lot of philosophical and moral questions are fairly universal. They get discussed in ancient law codes, scripture & modern parliaments. Is prostituion immoral? What defines rape? King Cyrus ruled on these. They're discussed in the Bible. You'll find similar debates in modern courts and legislatures.
For Odysseus, some big philosophical themes are hubris/pride, worthiness. Ancient Greek literature is pretty obsessed with these, especially pride.
These aren't really big moral themes/questions today, but they are pretty popular literary themes. Maybe it's universality. Maybe it's Greek influence. Maybe it's coincidence.
I don't think these texts surveillance be because of universality. I do think that because they survived, we learn that some things are pretty universal, that we have deep spiritual similarity to bronze age Aegean pirates.
Now we have no man like Odysseus in command
to drive this curse from the house. We ourselves?
We’re hardly the ones to fight them off. All we’d do
is parade our wretched weakness. A boy inept at battle.
Oh I’d swing to attach if I had the power in me.
By god, it’s intolerable, what they do—disgrace,
my house a shambles! You should be ashamed yourselves,
mortified in the face of neighbors living round about!
Fear the gods’ wrath—before they wheel in outrage
and make these crimes recoil on your heads. (2.57-67)
“But if you decide the fare is better, richer here,
destroying one man’s goods and going scot-free,
all right then, carve away!
But I’ll cry out to the everlasting gods in hopes
that Zeus will pay you back with a vengeance—all of you
destroyed in my house while I go scot-free myself!” (2.141–5)
In such a society an atheist or godless person could not be trusted. Right after Telemachus threatens the suitors with a curse, Zeus sends a sign down in the form of two eagles. One of the old townsmen, who excelled in reading omens and bird signs, said that the eagles were a sign from Zeus that the suitors would get what is coming to them. And the suitors respond:
“Stop, old man!”
Eurymachus, Polybus’ son, rose up to take him on.
“Go home and babble your omens to your children—
save them from some catastrophe coming soon.
I’m a better hand than you at reading portents.
Flocks of birds go fluttering under the sun’s rays,
not all are fraught with meaning.” (2.177–83)
(Quotes are taken from the excellent Robert Fagles translation)
It does not seem that fear of gods would move people in town to do anything there. I read it more as expression of Telemachus anger and helplessness. He can do nothing except threaten gods, people in town know it and don't care. The gods don't come to help either. Only Athena helps them, but it is because Odysseus is her favorite and she is helping him whether he is right or wrong. Poseidon would not help Odysseus, because he blinded his son. Poseidon would not care one bit about what happen in the household and prefers Odysseus dead. Athena don't care about Poseidon son in particular.
It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong. They just are and are strong and characters invoking them don't necessary mean anything for gods actions. (It was also my impression that characters like to blame gods for their own bad decisions when they are about to talk about their own mistakes.)
> It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong.
In general, I agree with this statement. I think one needs to stretch to find justice in the Odyssey, and even more so in the Iliad. That being said, I do believe there are some early inklings of justice and morality which evolved and grew with Greek civilization, and by the later classical period, Zeus was increasingly associated with Justice.
Also, Hesiod, who wrote at about the same time as Homer, certainly associated justice with Zeus. Here is a quote from Works and Days:
> You too, my lords, attend to this justice-doing of hours. For close at hand among men there are immortals taking note of all those who afflict each other with crooked judgements, heedless of the gods' punishment. Thrice countless are they on the rich-pastured earth, Zeus' immortal watchers of mortal men, who watch over judgements and wickedness, clothed in darkness, traveling about the land on every road. And there is the maiden Right, daughter of Zeus, esteemed and respected by the gods in Olympus; and whenever someone does her down with crooked abuse, at once she sits by Zeus her father, Kronos' son, and reports the men's unrighteous mind, so that the people may pay for the crimes of their lords who balefully divert justice from its course by pronouncing it crooked.
Homer mentions a somewhat similar (although different) idea in book 19 of the Iliad:
"Zeus be my witness first, the highest, best of gods!
Then Earth, the Sun, and Furies stalking the world below
to wreak revenge on the dead who broke their oaths---
I swear I never laid a hand on the girl Briseis
The 1951 article, "The Gods of Homer," by G. M. A Grub, has an interesting discussion of morality in Homer and how it evolved. You can read the article for free, if you have a JSTOR account, here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1086075
Grube's main premise is that the gods of Homer came from an earlier conception of the gods as "forces of nature." After Homer, or the poets before Homer, personified the gods, it was inevitable that they would become moralized over time. Grube believes that Homer is near the start of this process. This would explain why some of the stories in the Iliad and Odyssey represent the gods as being essentially unethical; these stores were from before the gods were expected to be moral.
These archetypes are compounded lessons that we've absorbed culturally for millennia, and continue to reflect on via our own recreations in the various arts.
It is short and more fun to paint or tell then Penelope being helpless alone in her chamber.
I'm not sure your disparagement of classical painters holds much weight though, given they painted plenty of naked women without needing an "excuse". The motivations seem more to do with notions of depicting beauty or purity than just being lecherous.
And I think that some painters liked to paint naked women and customers liked those paintings without it being necessary disparaging. The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
Nevetheless, it is a projection of own ideas into old story, because we want to see ourselves in the oldest known poems. People want our civilization to spring from that, so they project onto it. It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
I wasn't claiming they were. Just that that seemed to be the classical framing of them. I can see how luring in sailors with beautiful song could be transferred onto luring with physical beauty and how that could map to classical femininity, but the relation does not affect the original meaning.
> The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
I don't think it is. Lechery is linked to sexual gratification, basically voyeurism. I'm essentially saying I don't think these paintings existed for sexual purposes. Beauty is more of an aesthetic appreciation, or can be used as a symbol for higher values (and ugliness as a symbol for moral ugliness).
> It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer. They give us symbols with which to reason, and so much of our conversational reasoning is performed using metaphors and idioms.
That has more to do with artist then original poem. Sirens promiss knowledge, in particular knowledge of who did what and how who ended during trojan war. Odysseus is tempted to learn what happened to his friends during war. The classical feminity of Christian culture is not the same thing as story in original poem. It changes meaning a lot, into a different story. Projection and replacement of original knowledge/war info into "classical feminity" is the sort of thing I was talking about.
As for beauty, I don't see much difference. Or rather, I don't find it important for anything except value judgement of painter. If painter used sirens as excuse to paint nude sirens out of sense of beauty, my original point applies the same. The poem does not really have higher values there anyway. It has less to do with poem itself and more to do with what artists wants to paint for his own reasons.
> This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer.
Why do you think Odysseus is moral tale? It does not read like moral tale. Whatever moral tales are seems irrelevant to original poem. This one is even the part of story told by Odysseus himself when he is trying to please audience instead of by neutral narrator. The poem is pretty clear about Odysseus not being completely reliable narrator. Odysseus lies or pretends to be someone else often, so treating whatever he says as moral tale strikes me as odd.
To sum it up, Odysseus is the pursuer of knowledge par excellence, hero and everyman at the same time. And this is arguably one of the cornerstones of the (western, at least) way we see ourselves.
> nor is he seeking knowledge except that short incident
Well let us just agree to disagree here. Most of the episodes boil down to "The gang lands to get (rest/food/water), Odysseus wants to know more about the place, many die". Just look at Book Nine: the Lotus Eaters and Polyphemus incidents are totally Odysseus' fault. There was no need at all to explore these lands.
> And frankly, I dont think he really represents something you should strive for.
I agree with you: while in the antiquity he has been regarded as a model, today Odysseus represents who we actually are, as beings torn between knowledge and suffering.
2.) She tells him exactly what to do. He does not devise plan.
3.) No Odysseus is not seeking knowledge unless you are really trying hard to see it there. Looking what I can steel can be twisted into knowledge seeking, but I don't think it is too good interpretation.
4.) There is no reason to think Odysseus was seen as model in antiquity. That is projecting 19 century adventure books interpretation into much more nuanced and much better written text.
Odysseus is not torn between knowledge and suffering. He seeks to go home plain and simple and weeps when it fails. He wants to go home and he led all his men to death.
TO your point: my example about justice in ancient Greece is clearly not a timeless moral lesson, since it doesn't make much sense today.
There's nothing good about Odysseus; he's a bad person and, IMHO, one of the most annoying, obnoxious personalities in literature. He leads his group around murdering and pillaging, not to mention using and manipulating - he's renowned for his lying and trickery. He gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego - at one point much of his fleet is sunk and men die because he pointlessly taunts enemies as they sail away. But if someone should act against him, he switches to victimhood and moral outrage - poor Odysseus! All his troubles and tribulations!
In the end he returns home alone, having gotten all his men killed, and encounters the 'suitors', who presume that with him missing for 20 years, likely he won't return. They are peaceably [EDIT: up to a point then that changed; see the reply below], though obnoxiously in some ways, competing to see who gets his throne and his wife's hand - leaving the choice to her [EDIT: though as the reply below states, she is being forced to marry one of them; she can't say no]. He slaughters them all, indiscriminately, for their presumption. The slave girls (did I mention that he takes and keeps slaves?) that are suspected (there is no trial or evidence or anything more than someone's accusation) of the grave crime of dalliances with the suitors, he unceremoniously has a rope wrapped around all their necks and hangs them together. Then he says, we need to replenish our stocks - depleted so unfairly by the mean suitors! - so we'll soon set out to raid and steal them.
Is this a good man? Did the good guy win? The Odyssey is a rich story of and study in personality and in human relations, and in politics; it's not at all about justice.
Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose. Telemachus ask them to leave the house openly, they refuse and treat him badly.
Penelope wants Odysseus come home soon and hopes for him coming home, because only him is assumed to be able to get suitors out of house. So much for Penelope freely choosing from them.
Odysseus is pirate and warlord through and poem is not hiding it. It is about warlord without glorifying the said warlord the way action movies tend to glorify similar characters.
Agreed, those are major omissions on my part (due to writing quickly and not thinking it through, sorry). However, they don't change my overall point. The worst person in the story is Odysseus (unless I'm overlooking some secondary character), who would have done the same and worse, and if there was any justice he would have been captured, tried, and imprisoned long ago - by the Trojans before the story began, in fact.
> Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
That's not a reason to murder people. Also, the narrator is very sympathetic to Odysseus and makes his enemies unlikable, as narrators do. I take the narrator's depictions of them with a grain of salt.
The characters complains are concrete and provide multiple vitnesses to the abuse. The suitors are described to be abusive, threaten people living in house, mistreat them, kill animals and refuse to leave with open threat of violence if you try to make them leave.
The good innocent boys interpretation is not supported by the text, even if you mistrust the narrator. You can make that case about cyclop where Odysseus is intruder, but not about suitors.
That's not at all what I'm saying. I don't think we disagree very much.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.
I think you are mistaken to take this cliche and try to apply it to real people. I'm not really interested in your characterizations of me. Stick to the subject and leave other commenters out of it.
It's a mistake to take the narrator at face value. When Odysseus yells his real name to the Cyclops - without which Poseidon wouldn't have had a vendetta and kept them on that long journey - or when he taunts the giants who throw the boulders and kill his men and destroy his ships, it is his recklessness and not his men's that gets them killed. When he dallies in his flings with Circe and Calypso, while others wait and suffer, that's on his lust and ego. His men do some stupid things too, but it would not be hard to attribute that to his leadership - there are no bad followers, as they say ...
The narrator, either in earnest or maybe with some tongue in cheek, loves Odysseus no matter what he does. But if we are to read any story critically, we can't trust narrators any more than the characters they describe, something especially true in epics from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Moby Dick.
In the Odyssey people talk about the politics of power, how angering the gods gets bad results and so you'd better respect them; and they talk about fairness for themselves in the selfish way that everyone does - disregarding how they treat others. But those things aren't morality. The same things others are cursed for are what Odysseus is lionized for by the narrator and others. The only higher 'morality' is the politics on Olympus of Athena's and Poseidon's dispute over Odysseus' fate.
There is much discussion of the treatment of strangers and guests, one of those rules of the gods. However, I see it as more an issue of human relations - what do you do with strangers? whom do you trust? - there is no consistent enforcement by the gods or consequence when the rules are violated.
I didn't get the feeling that the author sold short the analogy between the Bible and the Iliad. After all, he says:
> How close is the analogy with the Bible? In terms of sheer cultural ubiquity, pretty close.
The Bible's cultural influence on the West is immense and goes much beyond being "the one book everyone knows." Many of Jesus' ethical ideals have become so engrained in our culture we are not even aware of where they came from. For example, the idea expressed in John 9, that a person who is blind from birth is not blind because of the sin of their parents or a sin he was expected to commit. This blame thinking was pervasive in antiquity; you can see a glimpse of this ideal in Book 2 of the Iliad.. Thersites is specifically called out for being ugly and club-footed, before he berates Agamemnon until Odysseus knocks him on the head. Everyone in the assembly praises Odysseus saying "terrific strokes ... he's put a stop to this babbling, foulmouthed fool!" We no longer believe that ugliness and badness are associated. Note that while I suspect this transformation in values is because of the New Testament, I have not researched this carefully and would appreciate being corrected if someone knew more about this. Even if this particular example is not correct, I suspect there are many other similar examples of the influence of the hidden Bible on our culture.
I think the author of the review is not trying to discount the association between the Bible and the Iliad, but instead is trying to dismiss the misconception that the Iliad was a "sacred text" like the Bible is.
The Iliad is filled with references to the gods, sacrifices, libations, oaths, prayers, and other trappings of religion---but it is poetry that was meant to entertain and Homer took poetic license. And the Greeks knew he took poetic license--that he "lied." The stories about Hera seducing Zeus and Ares having an affair with Aphrodite are comic, and were comic to the Greeks like they are to us. It appears that the Iliad influenced religious practice significantly, but it still doesn't seem right to call it a religious text.
Thus, I think the author of the review makes a fair comparison between the Bible and the Iliad.
I just think that's only the tip of an iceberg. Some of the other points of analogy (like both emerging from the same dark age, on different outskirts of a collapsed civilization) are worth mentioning too.
Maybe I phrased that badly. What i meant was "yes, and also."
I like several of your other comments:
> Homer is often thought to be describing events during the bronze dark age, the period between the collapse of middle eastern bronze age empires and the rise of iron age empires (like the greek one).
> This is what the bible is too, to a large extent. The exodus, judges, King David, prophets, heros... Stories about the legendary dark age written by decendants during the early iron age.
> As civilization (and population) re-grew these stories formed a cultural core. Judeans got swept into the aramean, babylonian, persian and later hellenic empires. The library of knowledge grew enourmously. But, the old stories still remained at the heart of the cultural.
I think there are many parallels between the two.
https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...
Also, this seems to me to be utterly unfounded: “Which poem is better, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes.“
The "which is better" is unanswerable but in terms of popularity, the evidence seems to show that The Odyssey is more well-known to today's readers.
One reason is that many USA high schools use The Odyssey instead of the The Iliad in reading assignments.
As for another datapoint to popularity, compare the number of ratings & reviews of The Odyssey (~760k) vs The Iliad (~305k) on Goodreads[1][2]. Similar popularity differences can be found on Amazon for other translations.
The 2004 film Troy may have increased awareness of The Iliad but it still seems like The Odyssey is more popular.
The Golden Apple, the beauty contest of the goddesses, Helen’s elopement with Paris, the Greeks burning their boats, the story of Achilles and his famous vulnerable spot and death, the wooden horse, the destruction of Troy.
Its a huge fund of anecdotes, sayings and archetypes that infuse western society.
Also, if anything can be described as "a collection of stories", it strikes me that Books 9-12 of the Odyssey (Odysseus' stories about the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the Lotus-Eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, the Cattle of the Sun, etc.) fit the bill much better than anything in the Iliad.
This is highly subjective. The influence of the Iliad on European literature, art, and culture has been absolutely colossal.
Indeed, given that the Odyssey was itself influenced by the Iliad, you might say that anything the Odyssey influences should ultimately be credited back to the Iliad.
On the other hand, it's a line of thought that leads to stuff like Shay's Achilles in Vietnam and Achilles in America, stuff which has value.
In the past, if you were wealthy and powerful, or nationalistic, you'd try to trace your ancestry or your people's lineage back to Troy. Caesar did it, the Habsburgs did it, and so did Trithemius, for some reason.
That is Johannes Trithemius, a 14th and 15th century librarian and abbot with a marked interest in the occult. (Turns out he was also an early practitioner of cryptography.)
Early on, Trithemius built an awesome library at his monastery, but then they split up and he became a counselor to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian. The Emperor was of Habsburg descent, and the Habsburgs and other Franks were claiming Trojan ancestry... so Trithemius wrote an elaborate fake history of the Franks, leading back to Troy, and had it published.
There's a lot more to this guy than just that. He wrote "Steganographia" and "Polygraphia", which are dripping with occult influence but turn out to be a combination of fake alphabets and substitution ciphers. But because of his man-crush on Maximilian, he committed this extremely intricate forgery and obliterated his reputation. That's how significant the Trojan War was in the 1500s.
Fun fact: Polygraphia's fake alphabets include Theban, which Wiccans now use to write spells, and two fake Frank languages (one that he said was used by a fake Frank philosopher) to bolster his fake Frank history.
Oh and he invented the bibliography. Here's one now.
https://books.google.com/books?id=6lE-OdAQPJsC&lpg=PA59&ots=...
http://microcosmographia.com/2012/12/15/johannes-trithemius-...
https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/...
http://old.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19980629bspirit1.a...
The Christianization of the Byzantines was not some crude "Old Testament as literal truth" kind of dogma, but a mix of New Testament ideas with neo-platonism and influences from ancient Greek thought. The early theologians (considered "saints") had all studied those philosophies and had extended knowledge of ancient Greek thought.
Early Christianism was much more subtle than the crude version of Christianism post protestantism (protestantism itself being a fundamentalist movement, to go "back to roots" and back to the book, it's easy to understand why. It was a version of the religion for simple minded Germanic folk at the time that couldn't handle much subtlety).
Homer, to get back to the point, was official reading in Byzantine school education.
Worth noting, that unlike the western empire, that had the rule of the pope, the Byzantium had separate church and state.
This is an utterly bizarre misinterpretation of Orthodox Christianity. The position of head of the Orthodox Church was in the gift of first the Eastern Roman Emperor and then the Ottoman Emperor until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor didn’t have total control, the Church was an autonomous power centre of some note but the balance of power between the Church and the temporal power was more similar between Islam and Orthodox lands than the Eastern and Western Churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesaropapism
Caesaropapism's chief example is the authority that the Byzantine (East Roman) Emperors had over the Church of Constantinople and Eastern Christianity from the 330 consecration of Constantinople through the tenth century.[4][5] The Byzantine Emperor would typically protect the Eastern Church and manage its administration by presiding over Ecumenical Councils and appointing Patriarchs and setting territorial boundaries for their jurisdiction.[6] The Emperor exercised a strong control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the Patriarch of Constantinople could not hold office if he did not have the Emperor's approval
In fact the link you posted admits so:
"However, Caesaropapism "never became an accepted principle in Byzantium."[10] Several Eastern churchmen such as John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople[6] and Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, strongly opposed imperial control over the Church, as did Western theologians like Hilary of Poitiers and Hosius, Bishop of Córdoba.[11] Saints, such as such as Maximus the Confessor, resisted the imperial power as a consequence of their witness to orthodoxy, . In addition, at several occasions imperial decrees had to be withdrawn as the people of the Church, both lay people, monks and priests, refused to accept inventions at variance with the Church's customs and beliefs. These events show that power over the Church really was in the hands of the Church itself – not solely with the emperor."
If anyone reading wants to understand how weird Western Christendom was compared to comparable civilisations Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order is a good place to start.
If you’re interested in the relationship between Ummah and state in Islam which is very similar to Church State relationships in the Eastern Roman Empire look at Timur Kuran’s work.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67518/timur-kuran/the...
The separation was having two different sources of power -- as opposed to one, and those sources having relative autonomy.
Whether the two occasionally collaborated, or one occasionally imposed its will on the other and vice versa, is something different than having both religious and state power concentrated into one entity (caesaropapism).
Nothing in historical affairs is "perfect". Separation of church and state in the modern West has not been "perfect" either, even where e.g. the constitution guarantees it.
Modern scholars on Byzantium disagree with that it was an example of caesaropapism -- and your own source tells as much.
> Worth noting, that unlike the western empire, that had the rule of the pope, the Byzantium had separate church and state.
The Wikipedia article on Caesaropapism is enough to disprove that, which is why I used it. The fact that there were disputes between the Emperor and Church does not change the facts that (a) It was usually the Enperor (b) By any modern standard there was no separation of Church and State.
The Saud family do not provide all the imams in their kingdom, nor do they unilaterally decide on doctrine in case of disputes. The ummah have substantial autonomy and can and do argue take part in political discussion.
If you’re willing to call that separation between Church and State we disagree only on labels. Otherwise you’re wrong.
I wasn’t arguing for Caesaropapism, just against separation of Church and State in the Eastern Roman Empire.
While the pope had plenty of temporal power in the renaissance, it's certainly incorrect to say that any pope ruled anything that could be called the western empire before that. Instead of a strict separation of church and state, the Byzantine emperor Justinian appointed 3 successive popes after re-conquering Italy from the ostrogoths.
The new theology caught on as a simplified "back-to-basics" doctrine for the masses, and shed a lot of the subtlety of earlier theology.
Instead of being less indoctrinated protestants became more fundamentalist and less nuanced than Catholics -- which can be seen in a very crude example in today's "bible belt" version of christianity (and even someone like Nietzsche alluded to that kind of influence by Luther).
Not them (as people), their doctrines (and eventual audience). It was a simplified and fundamentalist approach to theology -- and owes a lot to its translation to common folk language and the political interests of the day for its quick adoption.
>Instead of a strict separation of church and state, the Byzantine emperor Justinian appointed 3 successive popes after re-conquering Italy from the ostrogoths.
That was a power move, in an always tense political climate in the Eastern empire. There were the opposite moves as well -- the patriarch at war with the emperor, criticizing public policy, and so on, depending on the balance of power.
Such incidents aside (across a millennium of state history), they remained two separate domains, not a single unified source of church and state power.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3163118?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228931 and marked it off-topic.
The legacy of be blical stories is far deeper tham dogma. The other day, i watched a (very sacreligious) cartoon (castlelvania e1). In it, Dracula's wife is burned at the stake for witchraft, by the church. On her way out, she calls out to dracula. "Forgive them! Don't take vengence. They don't know what you're doing."
This is exactly what the author is talking about. The dogma isn't there. If the scene was boring or banal it wouldn't have been recreated in the cartoon.
Still, its a reference everone gets, and the metaphor is extremely deep.
TLDR; https://thegoldenone.se/2018/02/21/dominique-verner-epic-quo...
linked from 'about' page: https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/new-right-vs-old-ri... quote: "Second, because of the leading role of the organized Jewish community in engineering the destruction of European peoples, and because the United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world today, the North American New Right must deal straightforwardly with the Jewish Question."
Holy shit.
also, https://thegoldenone.se/2015/04/20/why-hitler-is-so-popular-...
Even if I knew I would have proposed this link to a document in my opinion pertinent and where I don't find any racism-preaching (this particular website/the Web/the universe all have their share of shit).
I'm all for exposing and debunking dumb and dangerous doctrines instead of feigning not to know about them and letting some think that they have to be true because no one criticizes them, therefore I don't refrain to directly link to such material, while expressing at least that (and, better, why) I don't agree (as you just did).
The author discussed in the documents I linked to is Dominique Venner. He wrote a book titled "Histoire et Tradition des Européens: 30 000 ans d'identité" which seems pertinent to me in this thread because it exposes a thesis about the relative importance in European cultures of Homer's literary work. Venner was considered far-right, I don't know he was nor if it extended to sheer racism and such fuckery, but it may explain why one may find many material from/about him on such websites but not much elsewhere as, IMHO sadly, censorship and ad hominem are far too common. Racism is as dumb and dangerous as censorship.
Fuck these people