ARTISTS OF MEASURING

The title of this entry alludes to Sir Isaac Newton’s description of geometry as “the art of measuring.” Although its subject is apparently not another round of Newton, but Euclid and other Greek scientists, there is a close link between them, that can be generalized in the challenging capsule at the end of this entry.

Continuing our conversation about the philosophicality of science, we are now entering the peculiar era of post-Aristotelian science, which can be identified as the non-philosophical age of Greece. Here, following in the wake of Alexander’s Hellenization of the world, the pure scientist-genius comes forward immensely proud of his “science,” while haughtily dismissive both of its philosophical underpinnings, and sometimes even of all practical applications of it, especially those of his own, as was the case with Archimedes. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy: The Hellenistic World names four such Greek geniuses: “Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes and Apollonius [as] content to be mathematicians, while in philosophy they did not aspire to originality.” (Take notice of the words “did not aspire,” which I’ve underlined. Russell fails here to capitalize on the subtlety of his own phrase but I would go further to insist that they downplayed their philosophical originality, to the detriment of future scientists and scholars, and going even further, to the detriment of every homo sapiens. We shall return to this thought at the end of this entry.)

Among these, Euclid in particular is the epitome of a great schoolman, whose name, many would agree, is synonymous with the science of geometry, although his contribution to it mainly consists in systematizing and expounding in a scientifically articulate manner what others had already discovered in previous times. This fact, however, does not diminish his genius as the foremost teacher of geometry to many generations of students over more than two thousand years of mathematical education, a phenomenal achievement!

Although Euclid and the previously mentioned Archimedes are the best known among the four, the others are no less deserving of undying memory, but not as fortunate to get a place of comparable prominence in it. Aristarchus of Samos, in particular, was the most exciting of all astronomers of the ancient world, as he was the first one to develop the Copernican system of the Universe some 1800 years before Copernicus!

Apollonius, on the other hand, is most noteworthy for his work on conic sections, unspectacular, one may say, yet of lasting importance to the scientific discoveries of the later ages, thus all the more remarkable as we take into account this non-glamorous, but deeply charged with potentiality, aspect.

The list of these “non-philosophical” scientific geniuses of post-Aristotelian Greek thought is by no means limited to the four greats of Bertrand Russell, but what has been said already sufficiently upholds the main point, or rather the leitmotif of this concluding subsection on Genius, namely, that no great science exists without an accompanying wisdom, in other words, the question of non-philosophicality of great science is not a distinction of principle. Philosophy is always at the bottom of the scientific well, and it is only about how much credit it gets at the end, that we may be talking distinguishing pure philosophy as such from its scientific applications.

All great artists of measuring are at the same time great artists of thinking, even when they try to disparage their own philosophicality, pushing forward their scientificality, disingenuously disattached from the thinking process which had led them to their great scientific discoveries in the first place.

Furthermore, I insist that for general educational purposes, if the educators’ goal is to cultivate talent and a superior thinking capacity in the students, the philosophy of science may be even more important than the science itself. Only the future professionals in the field can benefit from the intricacies of a scientist as an artist of measuring, but all aspiring achievers in all fields of human knowledge and understanding are sure to benefit from his legacy as an artist of thinking. There is no better educational tool than the study of how great scientists think, as extracted from their scientific writings, rather than gleaned from some generalized empty declarations about the superiority of science over philosophy.

As for the actual state of philosophy of science as an academic discipline, I find it shockingly below par. In the future, I hope, it can be developed into a full-blown and meaningful branch of educational philosophy, and the time to start doing it is now. With all this talk about “civil society” these days, people need a better education in thinking, rather than any more  incitement to shocking and usually thoughtless action, proudly mislabeled as protest and opposition.

NEWTON'S FLIGHT

During my visit to Great Britain in 1969, I visited London’s Westminster Abbey, the place where the great Englishman Oliver Cromwell had been buried, and he wasn’t there, except for a stone marking the place from which his body was pulled and desecrated after the 1660 Stuart Restoration. But another great Englishman was there for me, hidden inside an aesthetically perfect tomb with a no less perfect Latin inscription on it, which I loved so much that I remembered it literally by heart, and quoted it over a hundred times in the next forty-plus years: “Hic depositum est quod mortale fuit Isaaci Neutoni.” I happen to be quite partial to such personal experiences, as you may have noticed already, and from then on, Isaac Newton has been forever associated in my memory with that quiet resting place inside Westminster Abbey, and has thus transcended a normal interest I might have had in his person, through the sheer force of that encounter. On yet another, sadder occasion, in the now so distant past, I almost bought a rare early edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica for my book collection… Well, I procrastinated, and it did not happen, to my huge disappointment, but the above-mentioned accidental personal bond between me and the shadow of Newton was thus further strengthened, despite the fact that, as a person, he couldn’t have a particular appeal to me, while some of his actions, such as his shabby treatment of the astronomer John Flamsteed, and his anti-Leibniz campaign, were little short of reprehensible. To all of which I will only say: Let not the legend be judged by the man…

I do not intend in any way to steer toward Newton’s straightforward biography now, which, of course, can be easily obtained from any conventional reference source. For stock reference, however, his fame rests in particular on his discoveries in optics, of the composition of white light, in mechanics, of the three laws of motion, constituting the law of universal gravitation, and in mathematics, of the infinitesimal calculus. As far as his philosophical preoccupations were concerned, his early interest in Aristotle and Dèscartes later shifted toward mechanical philosophy (Gassendi) and, surprisingly, its ostensible Hermetic antithesis (Henry More), their unlikely combination shaping his own philosophical disposition. Eventually, he tried to reconcile the mechanical and the Pythagorean tradition (asserting the mathematical nature of reality) through the concept of force.

My special interest here is in Newton as a philosopher. There can be no great science without a philosophy behind it. Not surprisingly, most great scientists of the past were also philosophers, and this organic combination, although somewhat diminished, has not become extinct even in more recent times.

It can be justly argued that in most cases of the scientists-philosophers, as distinguished from philosophers who have also been scientists (the latter belong to my Philosophy sections, and thus, will be conspicuously absent from this extremely short subsection), the nature of their philosophy is mainly derivative, or applied within the limits of the science appointed to them by their genius. For this reason, it would be foolish and useless to try to extend their field of application to areas closer to our own intellectual home, but, even so, the uniqueness and great value of their scientific thought ought not to be detracted from, as in conjunction with their scientific genius, it is their very own distinctive wisdom, rather than that of a Plato, or a Kant, or a Nietzsche, that supplies the only creditable key to the phenomenon which they represent.

Not every great scientist can be readily identified in that broader philosophical sense, of course, but in such cases it is rather the paucity of our knowledge about their thinking than the lack of a proper philosophical basis for it, which is to blame. With enough time on our hands, and a certain persistence in penetrating the mental process going on in each of their scientific universes, revealing itself through their writings, I insist that an adequate understanding of a great scientist’s philosophy can be attained. In the future I will be much tempted to attempt doing precisely this, significantly expanding the present subsection, and going well into the depths, in each particular case. At the moment, however, my sole statement of intent to do it will have to suffice, further underscoring the gigantic scope of the task lying ahead for me.

The titanic figure of Newton, the extraordinary number two on the Hart List, belongs here, in this series, far more properly than as an originally intended separate entry in the Significant section, titled The Greatest Arian. (Referring to Newton’s espousal of religious Arianism, as manifested by his anti-Trinitarian treatise, which he sent to John Locke, yet withdrawn by him from publication for fear of an unwelcome exposure of his unorthodox religious views, and eventually appearing in print--alongside another such work--only after his death.) And so, in violation of decent subsectional chronology, here it is!

Newton was a brilliant, but psychologically confused man. Historians and biographers call him a rationalist, and such is the image he himself was desperately trying to project. As if he were terribly scared of the inner irrationalist in him, probably treating irrationalism as a manifestation of a mental illness. Hence, he was so anxious to convince the world, and himself above all, that his sanity was unimpeachable.

He was wrong, of course, and in denial, concerning the evident irrational element in his psyche. The story of Newton’s apple does not suggest to me a ponderous scholar who would spend years trying to figure out why an apple falls down the way it does. It rather suggests that he was supremely capable of intuitive brainstorms, which it must have been, and I daresay his greatest discoveries had to be of intuitive, rather than of rational origin.

As a result of his denial of irrationality, Newton was intellectually flawed as a philosopher-scientist. In fact, he was an anti-irrationalist extremist. Ironically, this very trait of militant rationality that presumably makes a perfect scientist, that is, his insistence on scientific law and order, has become the greatest weakness of his otherwise incredibly rich legacy. Assuming the absolute necessity of strict laws governing nature, and thus formulating the classic Newtonian law, he intimidated by his superhuman authority the scientists who came after him, and turned what he probably never quite believed in himself, his psychiatric remedy against the demons of irrationality, into an exclusive religion of many a scientist, to the detriment of science as such.

Not by reason alone does man acquire knowledge and understanding. Newton’s discoveries, although very greatly influenced by the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, could not be made without a great deal of the other essential component, intuition and inspiration, which Newton must have possessed to an extraordinary degree yet denied to the subsequent generations by his insistence on the scientific infallibility of his own transcendentally begotten child.

On the whole, though, Newton’s scientific thinking conceals, rather than reveals, a perfectly legitimate philosophy, which is the prime mover behind his great discoveries, but whose elixir of immortality can very easily turn into poison, if indiscriminately transplanted from its organic host to other potentially fertile bodies.

NAPOLEON'S GREATNESS AND FOLLY

Those who regret that Alexander died too early should save their sympathy for those who died too late. Alexander was lucky. Had he lived longer, he might have spoiled his all too perfect legend, and the lovely barrel of pure honey he left us with would never have tasted so sweet.

On the other hand, there have been many rulers and leaders throughout the ages, whose greatest misfortune was living too long. Had they died “younger” by at least a few years, history would have been much kinder to them, but now this is all water under the bridge: the portraits are drawn, and what could, or should have been can’t have any effect on the past…

Among the winners and losers of history Napoleon occupies a special place. Defeated and forced to end his life in the custody of his enemies, his legend somehow survived and flourished, as if history just this once decided to forgive this loser his and her humiliation… Well, history is a temperamental lady! One can only imagine how Napoleon’s legend might have looked, had it not been blemished by the fall.

Waterloo? Silly Monday morning quarterbacking! Napoleon’s “Waterloo” was not Waterloo, but Moscow, and Napoleon himself realized it only too well! Code Napoleon and Tilsit, followed by the folly of the Russian campaign?! In his final exile on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon complained: “I ought to have died in Moscow!” To which I can only somberly add that he ought to have died before Moscow, or, even better, he ought to have left Russia alone altogether! (And he ought to have left a message for Hitler about it too.)

Somewhat paralleling the circumstances of Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, Napoleon’s administrative and statesman’s genius was only allowed to be revealed as a result of his spectacular military success at Toulon. In his case (although at a much younger age) he seemed to be destined for permanent disgrace and eventual oblivion had he not been remembered two long years after Toulon, when the Republican cause was severely threatened, in October 1795, by a Royalist revolt, and there were no capable commanders left on the Republican side to organize the defense of Paris. Napoleon seized this opportunity, and from then on was unstoppable (…that is, until he stumbled over Russia).

While all glorious Napoleonic achievements are well known, and hardly need a recapitulation here, there is a demonstrable need to concentrate on the causes of his fatal folly. Why did he invade Russia at all, with a 600,000-strong army, leaving it with utterly demoralized scraps of between 22,000 and 40,000? Before this reckless campaign, Russia’s Emperor Alexander I was an admirer of his, and so were the flower of Russian nobility. Why would they threaten his domination of Europe, as long as Russia’s interests were not in direct conflict with those of France? Moreover, several defeats suffered by the Russian armies fighting on foreign soil had been convincing enough to keep the Russians away from challenging the French in classic combat, further evidenced by the Russian reluctance to engage Napoleon’s armies in such battles during his Russian adventure. Napoleon ought to have realized that in pre-nationalist Europe, where neither Germany nor Italy had yet existed, and England, although victorious at sea, would never challenge him on the continent proper where its power would dwindle for the lack of logistics, he was, by the summer of 1812, the unquestionable master and would have stayed that way through his brilliant political and administrative maneuvering for as long as he lived. And yet he dared to challenge the intensely nationalist giant Russia on her own turf with no inkling, it appears, of the impending disaster awaiting him and his Grand Armée there.

…This is not to say that he had not been warned. The great Talleyrand, his adviser of genius, was a staunch French patriot, whose judgment was always guided by the national interest of France, which allowed him to live a long life of eighty-four years appreciated by the Revolution, the Directory, the Empire and eventually the Restoration. He saw a friendship with Russia as the cornerstone of French foreign policy, to the point that he quarreled with Napoleon over it, and was dismissed.

So, what determined Napoleon’s fateful anti-Russian slide, leading to the catastrophic 1812 war? I am well aware of the relentless activities of some prominent Polish nationalists, designed to induce him to help them bring the sovereign Polish State back into existence, after its final partitioning between Russia and Prussia, in 1795. (And who would blame them for trying?) But it was no less the work of his Jewish petitioners who successfully seduced him with money and tempting promises, into the impossible mission of emancipating the less fortunate Jews residing in the Russian Empire. Once again, the Jews were understandably pursuing their own Jewish interest, but their interest not only did not coincide with the French interest, but, by imposing itself on Napoleon’s will, it actually led to the dire consequences that sealed the fate of the Napoleonic Empire. After all, a man, even of Napoleon’s stature, must know his limitations…

…It was only in retrospect that Napoleon was able to realize the extent of his folly. “I ought to have died in Moscow!” was in effect his recognition of it, while his suddenly bitter bias and resentful anger toward the Jews, whose greatest benefactor (“righteous Gentile”) he had been throughout his reign, was expressed in a single venomous comment to Gaspard Gourgaud at St. Helena: “The Jews were a cowardly and cruel people.” Observe the use of the historic past tense “were” in this sentence!...

But of course he had only himself to blame.

PROTECTOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Cromwell’s unusualness is not in the fact that some have seen him as an evil tyrant, while others, as a great hero. This always happens to men like him, particularly, as he is such a supremely controversial figure: a regicide in a nation which is still keeping its monarchy today and proud of it. Yet even this capital offence to royalty has not prevented him from snatching a spot among the top ten greatest Britons of all time, according to the 2002 national poll, conducted by the BBC.

His unusualness, though, lies mostly in the fact that he is somewhat hard to accept as a genius, and the story of the first forty-plus years of his life is rather gray and uneventful. Until the ripe age of forty-one, he was a mere small time country squire, married, with nine children. To make matters worse, during this period he did get a fair chance to distinguish himself, and blew it. From 1628 to 1629, he was a Member of Parliament, where his one-year stint went largely unnoticed, and the only speech which he made at the time, left a poor impression. This hardly fits the portrait of a political genius, who is supposed to seize such an opportunity, to reveal himself in full glory. However, it is as if history conspired to turn Cromwell into a genius virtually ex nihilo and in spite of himself, and gave him a second chance in 1640, when he joined the Parliament again, and now this time he was distinguished by the circumstances, although his genius would be revealed by fits and starts, almost reluctantly. As he would humbly call himself at the height of his power, a mere constable, or watchman, that’s what he was; and he was not describing himself this way in jest, or vaingloriously. The explanation of such strange humility was his intense and sincere religiosity that managed to transform a potentially debilitating weakness into Cromwell’s greatest strength.

Perhaps the most important occurrence in Cromwell’s life prior to 1642, the defining moment of his genius, was his ardent embrace of Puritanism. As a result, he may have become known, and even accepted as one of their own, by some very important people who then gave him much more authority in the Long Parliament than he could ever have been given otherwise, on his own merit. But still, this was not a sufficient reason for him to be given command (first as a small troop commander, then as a Colonel, and then as a General!) of the best cavalry troops in the English Civil War on either side, the famed Ironsides. The secret to his fast promotion was in Cromwell’s religious passion. After witnessing the defeat of the Parliamentarian cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, he derisively wrote to a fellow Parliamentarian leader, actually his cousin Sir John Hampden: “…Your troopers are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters; and Royalist troopers are gentlemen’s sons, young sons, persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows as ours will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honor and courage and resolution in them?” A rather cruel and unpleasant indictment of his own, and yet not only did he get away with it, but it just proved the winning attitude for him.

Cromwell’s answer to such Parliamentarian deficiency was the religious zeal of his fellow Puritans. He was committed to base the strength of his army not so much on military skill as on the sheer force of its passion. Having shown to everybody what his Ironsides could do, he became unstoppable as the army commander, and at the end of the Civil War, the most powerful force in the nation was eating out of his hand. In return, he treated his soldiers not as his subordinates, but as a mighty weapon of God, divinely entrusted to his care. No other military commander in the history of warfare has ever looked at his troops this way, and it paid off in a spectacular way.

Thus, it can be said that Cromwell’s latent genius was activated and fed by his religious passion, and that, in fact, zealously religiosity was its very essence.

At the end of the war, and following the King’s execution, Oliver Cromwell’s authority reached a virtually superhuman standing. His Protectorate officially lasted from 1653 until his death in 1658. In 1657 he was offered the British Crown by a fawning Parliament, which earlier he personally had managed to install, as the former Parliament had not been good enough to do God’s work for his country. All the trappings of an authoritarian dictator in the making? Surely Napoleon after him could not resist assuming Imperial power! But Cromwell did not fall for this temptation. In a historic speech on April 13^th, 1657, he resolutely refused the flattering offer: “I would not seek to set up that, which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.”

When he died the next year, His son Richard’s rule as Lord Protector was perfunctory, extremely reluctant, and quickly ended in his resignation in 1659, after which the Restoration of the monarchy was just a matter of speed.

After the Restoration, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and gruesomely “executed.” But despite the natural vilification of a regicide under the restored monarchy, his historical legacy was never tainted for all time. Even the British Monarchy would come to peace with him. In 1840, sub Victoria Regina, Thomas Carlyle thus spoke of him in a London lecture on Heroes and Hero-Worship:

“He stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart with the naked truth of things. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men.”
In 2002, as I already said before, he was voted the tenth greatest Briton in history in a BBC national poll…

…An extremely interesting subject regarding Oliver Cromwell is the 1656 Readmission of Jews to England, whence they had been expelled in 1290 by King Edward I. In my childhood reading of a History of England published in the nineteenth century, I learned that Jews were in fact living in England in his time, but incognito, under the guise of foreign (Spanish, in particular) merchants. It was further alleged that the Jews had offered Cromwell money to wage the war against King Charles I at the time when the parliamentarian army had run out of money. The money was received, facilitating the Parliament’s victory, and the promise after several years of waiting and negotiations between Cromwell and the Jewish emissaries, was honored in 1656, but only after a pledge of more Jewish money to the coffers of the Commonwealth was made, and started being fulfilled.

Even more curious, after the Restoration, the Jews were never persecuted in England as Cromwell’s collaborators, but were actually embraced as a welcome community, as long as they had enough money to spare for the British Crown to further its domestic and Imperial interests around the world. It goes without saying that the Jewish growing power in England was the major contributor to the democratization of the British society and the subsequent collapse of the old caste system which put the nobility on top of the social pyramid. It wasn’t for nothing that Lord Byron semi-jokingly complained in early nineteenth century:

“Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign

O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal?

Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?

(That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)

Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain

Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?

The shade of Buonaparte’s noble darling?

Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.”

One thing is certain here that at least in so far as Merrie Olde England is concerned we can definitely trace Lord Byron’s “Jew Rothschild, holding the balance of the world,” to none other than our ultimate Christian zealot, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, the tenth Greatest Briton of all time, and genius malgré lui, Oliver Cromwell.

GENGHIS THE GENIUS PART II

(Continued from yesterday.)

...Now, there is a terribly interesting angle to the Russian attitude toward the Tatar-Mongols at the time of the invasion, which officially started in 1237 and culminated in the destruction of Kiev in 1240. The unbelievably barbaric atrocities perpetrated upon their Russian quarry by the invading Asiatic hordes could not possibly endear the plundering, civilization-wrecking heirs of Genghis Khan to the Russian heart. But this seeming truism is not quite as simple as it looks at first sight.

The Genghis Khan phenomenon, coming out of nowhere and sweeping half of the world in an unstoppable typhoon, a violent force of nature, more than a carefully engineered brainchild of one exceptional man, has several dimensions to it. If the hallowed Russian warrior saint Alexander Nevsky found nothing wrong in his close association with the invaders, and even became a pobratim, blood-brother, of Genghis’ grandson Batu Khan’s son Sartak, by taking the Mongolian oath anda, things could not be all ‘black and white’ there, bringing to mind a similar situation, in which the Jewish prophet Jeremiah virtually6 bonded with the fearful Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, seeing him not as a pagan invader from hell but as an instrument of God Himself. In Russia’s case, the Mongol invasion would help St. Alexander Nevsky defeat several dangerous threats from the West, namely, the Swedes in 1240 (the same year in which Kiev was burned to the ground by his new allies) and the Livonian Knights in 1242, where Tatar and Mongol blood was spilled as well, in a remarkable display of Russian "knowhow," to ensure the Russian victory. Furthermore, by formally submitting to the invaders’ supremacy, Alexander was able to mitigate their plunder of Russia, redirecting their destructive energy westward, where they would defeat combined European forces in several bloody battles at Legnica, Mohi, Budapest, Breslau, etc., terrifying the rest of Europe; before they suddenly stopped, and retreated, following Genghis Khan’s famous strategy of never being stretched too thin, and always securing the rear.

St. Alexander’s unlikely alliance with the heirs of Genghis Khan directly led to the spectacular rise of Moscow: Russia’s Third Rome, by demolishing the power of Kievan Russia’s natural capital Kiev, thus strongly suggesting, in retrospect, a truly supernatural act of Destiny. (The reader needs to realize however that there was no “United Russia” at the time, but a multitude of principalities vying for power, thus, St. Alexander’s personal elevation among the other Russian Princes was a step forward in the eventual Russian unification.) No wonder, then, that Saint Alexander Nevsky was canonized as a saint, and has recently been voted “the Greatest Russian.” He obviously had nothing to do with the fall of Kiev, but he was definitely the smartest of all Russian Princes at the time. No wonder either that the name of Genghis Khan and his heirs is shrouded in a mystique in Russia, bordering on admiration, despite the horrific memory of the invaders’ atrocities, and the ensuing two-plus centuries of the much-lamented “Tatar-Mongol yoke”! Here is yet another of your “riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma…”

In my case, there are more than one personal connections to the name of Genghis Khan. Alexander Nevsky, Genghis’ great-grandson’s blood-brother, happened to be, of course, my patron saint, in whose honor I was named and baptized by my parents. Alongside that connection, goes my ever-memorable 1954-1956 trip to China with a grand total of four deliciously lengthy Moscow-Peking-Moscow-Peking-Moscow journeys on board the legendary Trans-Siberian train via the steppes of Manchuria, where, to my great delight, the train would be making a short stop at the station by the name Genghis Khan, where the Chinese authorities were building the Genghis Khan Mausoleum at the time, to commemorate not so much his “technical” birthplace (historians normally point to a different place in Inner Mongolia to the West from there, south of the Lake Baikal) or even the purported place of his death, in Outer Mongolia, during his last military campaign, and actually not far from this place at all. It was more a symbolic place where his foot may have stepped, and where his tent may have once stood, and so this kind of symbolism would not escape from me even at that very young age, so that I insisted on getting off, even if for a short time, at this unique and so precious train stop to touch the ground saturated with the great warrior’s memory. Needless to say, that literally firsthand life experience would play an enormous role in my subsequent childhood development.

Whether Genghis Khan was indeed born in Manchuria, and not in Mongolia as one reasonably expects, has no relevance here. He and his kin were nomads, always on the move. There is an element of homelessness in the life of a nomad, but, apparently, a born wanderer has no desire to find for himself a permanent home, but keeps his homelessness as a feature of his lifestyle. Manchuria, like Mongolia, provided a well-familiar landscape for these nomads, to be considered their “home,” in a larger sense. Having so many comfortable places to choose from, Genghis would hardly have preferred to end his days in their foreign luxury. In fact, he died in a military camp, during his last campaign of plunder and conquest, now passing the fiery torch to his capable sons and even more capable grandsons, whose own belligerence had been, by then, already well groomed and tested.

As I observed before, it wasn’t so much the historical opinions of his contemporaries and of the subsequent generations, but his phenomenal overall achievements, that are objectively testifying to his world-historical greatness and to his undeniable personal genius. Practically ex nihilo he created for himself and his Mongol nation a name and an indelible front-row place in world history. In his conquests, he was not seeking solely personal glory. He was happy to retreat at the right time and to change the main thrust of his effort, in order to ascertain the enduring strength of his rear. In the language of the Three Little Pigs, he was “building his Imperial house out of brick.” The Mongol Empire did not reach its uttermost limits on his personal watch, but he was surely the one who made it possible for his successors, of whom his grandson Kublai Khan has, arguably, been the most brilliant. The magnificent ruler of China for nearly forty years, he became a sort of apotheosis for his brilliant grandfather, on the one hand, consolidating Mongol power over one of the great civilizations of the world; on the other hand, assimilating much of the Chinese culture into his lifestyle, so that eventually the Mongol period of the Chinese history would end without leaving as much as a speck on the temporarily conquered people. Ironically, in just a couple of centuries, the roles of the conquerors and the conquered would be reversed, and the history of the Mongols would become that of a long subjection to the Chinese rule. Even in the historical glow of achieving national independence Mongolia would no longer be claiming an exceptional status among the world’s nations. But, by the same token as the paltry status of modern Greece shall never cast a shadow on the glory of Ancient Greece, the woefully diminished stature of the modern-era Mongolia has no relevance on the exceptional role played in world history by Genghis Khan and by his immediate heirs. In fact, modern Mongolia cannot possibly make an exclusive claim on the person of Genghis Khan, and even less so, on the persons of his famous grandsons Batu and Kublai. All of them are part of world history, and not of separate national histories. (Even those which like Napoleonic France would produce the strongest possible impact on the others, fall into a different category, summarized in the next paragraph.)

After the homeless Genghis Khan and his displaced grandson Kublai Khan, come other great rulers, but, as we are now entering the modern age of strong national identity, all of these belong to the nations that claim them as their own, and thus, to a totally different category.

GENGHIS THE GENIUS PART I

The first noteworthy mention of the Mongols comes in the fourth century AD, although not under their own name, but as the Huns, made famous by Attila, who terrified Europe and almost took Rome, but with whose death the name of the Huns evaporated as quickly as it had come to be known. Still, although historians are in general agreement that the Huns must have come from the whereabouts of modern Mongolia, they are not so generous as to make a positive identification of the Huns as the Mongols. This must be all right with the hero of the present entry, about whose Mongolian origin no one has doubt, leaving him without any historical competition whatsoever.

The man who gave the Mongols a foremost world-historical status was born in 1162, and his name was later to become known as Genghis Khan. There is no other nation in history whose birth and whose glory were so closely identified with a single man. Unlike Attila, he was not only a ruthless conqueror, but even more so a wise empire-builder, who was never too busy conquering the world to groom his sons and grandsons to succeed him with great distinction, and whose empire, consequently, was to last for more than his lifetime, as his own glory was magnified by being shared with his sons, grandsons, and various other kin, all striving to make their nation great by making it literate; and unabashedly, unapologetically, and unequivocally benefiting from the existing established cultures of the conquered peoples.

There is an almost contemporary Mongolian account of his life and times, coming to us as “The Secret History Of The Mongols.” Written in an adopted literary language and alphabet, it is unmistakably hagiographic. Although it surely supplies historians with many invaluable details, it is otherwise untrustworthy, having been manufactured by those same Mongols and their obedient literate servants who had a vested interest in glorifying their own at the expense of everybody else. As if Genghis Khan’s amazing genius ever required any embellishment. In fact, raw truth would have been infinitely more flattering to the Great Khan than any man-made retouch of it, and our astounded fascination with the genius of this great man is hardly based on the biased opinions of either his friends or his enemies, but on the sheer objective magnitude of his historical accomplishment.

To make it “fair and balanced,” there is the other, “unembellished” side, too. The thirteenth-century English monk-chronicler Matthew Paris calls the Mongols a “detestable nation of Satan, that poured out like devils from Tartarus, so that they are rightly called Tartars.” Genghis Khan was a Mongol, and the name Tatars applied only to a portion of the nomads he had brought under the general Mongol rule in his empire. This is not to say that there had not been a lot of mingling between them, to the point of making the Tatar-Mongols on Russian soil indistinguishable, and habitually called Tatars for sheer linguistic convenience. But starting with Matthew Paris’s Tartarus pun (I don’t mind the …Rus in Tatar-Rus, though), and with Europe eager to embrace his neat “etymology,” Genghis Khan and his heirs had been thus associated with Hell, and the Tatars are even today commonly misspelled as the Tartars.

(Except in Russia, where they still have their primary home and where they have been properly known as Tatars. I must add that following the invasion, there was massive Tatar assimilation in Russia, to the extent that in every Russian Tsar from Ivan Grozny on, flowed Tatar blood, while his temporary non-Rurikid successor as regent and Tsar, Boris Godunov, was a 100% Tatar.

Most Russians ever since have had Tatar blood in them, and, as an example of this, the great Russian writer and historian of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century Nikolai Karamzin traced his lineage directly to the prominent Tatar Kara Murza, from whom he inherited his Russified name. It goes without saying that every Russified Tatar accepted the Russian Orthodox Faith, and being properly baptized, became 100% Russian in the eyes of the Russian Church and consequently of the Russian nation. This is by no means to say of course that all Tatars in Russia are Russified. There are at least seven million of them unassimilated and predominantly Moslem, living in Tatarstan, Bashkorstan and elsewhere around Russia, maintaining their distinctive, albeit not entirely pure, ethnic and cultural identity.)

…To be continued tomorrow…

THE PATH OF DHARMA

Whereas Christianity was born on the Road to Damascus, Buddhism had its own “Saint Paul,” little-known to most Western students of religion, as, in order to discover him, we must take a detour from the Via Appia of Western Civilization to visit the remarkable historical unicum King Ashoka, who happened to rule India around 265-238 BC.

The reason why Ashoka belongs here as an international figure, and not in the National section as a hero of India proper, is that he is closely associated with the religion of Buddhism, which he helped propel from an insignificant group of faithful adherents to one of the world’s great religions, which however has been and will forever remain a pariah religion in his native India, where Hinduism is firmly in control, as the one and only established national religious practice, not to mention the other constituent parts of the former greater India: the predominantly Moslem Pakistan and the Moslem-Hindu country of Bangladesh, where Buddhism accounts for less than 1% of their respective populations.

Under these unfavorable circumstances, King Ashoka’s propagation of Buddhism, and the fact that the story of his life has certain curious similarities with the life of the Buddha, could not possibly have endeared this great sovereign and sage to the people of India, who, therefore, cannot really count him as their own. At the same time Ashoka can’t be seen as a major religious figure either, because he was, first and foremost, a ruler enlightened beyond belief and even normal comprehension, but still a bona fide ruler of his nation.

Ashoka’s story reads so readily as an apocryphal tale of some zealous early hagiographer that one is tempted to dismiss it off hand as Buddhist propaganda, which is terribly unfair, because even though legend here is indeed closely intertwined with historical biography, the latter can still be distilled from the fiction with the same result of open incredulity toward the possibility that such men as King Ashoka could indeed exist.

While Ashoka’s life immediately reminds us of the life of the Buddha, as I have already observed, the story of his Road to Damascus conversion from a bloodthirsty warrior king into a man of enlightened mind and infinite wisdom elicits a comparison with St. Paul. The next question is whether it is at all psychologically possible to attain this kind of sudden life-transforming enlightenment without an immediate divine inspiration, and in this case, unless we now leave the area of scientific history and enter the waters of pure religion, the answer may be hard to come by.

The most credible account of his life does not come from the pens of his worshiping apologists, but from the lengthy series of his own edicts extant in sometimes lengthy sometimes short inscriptions, found in many places around India and elsewhere across his once vast Maurya Empire.

In the eighth year of his predictably bloody and cruel reign, as he was extending his empire yet further, he, allegedly, became acquainted with the teachings of the Buddha, and had a profound change of heart. Filled with deep remorse for the sufferings he was inflicting on the peoples he conquered, he now resolved to use his power “for goodness and niceness, rather than for evil." From now on, he would be living according to “the path of dharma” preaching it across his empire and the world, and serving his subjects and all humanity. He declared his benign intentions to the neighboring countries, initiating what he called a “conquest by dharma.”

By dharma, in his words, he understood the active practice of honesty, truthfulness, compassion, “little sin and many good deeds,” etc. He did not demand his people’s conversion to Buddhism, but in effect allowed freedom of religion across his vast domain.

Among his public works were the founding of hospitals for people and animals, planting roadside trees and groves, digging wells, and other such things. He and his delegates personally traveled across the land to hear people’s needs, and to provide immediate relief for their sufferings.

Here was an astonishing case of a classic Utopia suddenly becoming a reality, because of the single-handed efforts of one very powerful man. Here is just one quotation from an inscription of his, whose veracity can hardly be questioned, as it was a clear expression of his new policy, rather than a vain exhortation of some eccentric egomaniac: “All men are my children. As for my own children I desire that they may be provided with all the welfare and happiness of this world and of the next, so do I desire for all men as well.”

Remarkable! But, alas, a Utopia it was, even though it endured for a while on the strength of a single man, King Ashoka. But his out-of-this-world policy of dharma did not survive him. With his death, the Maurya Empire collapsed, together with his good works. Eventually, his native India also rejected Ashoka’s love of Buddhism, and returned to the traditional Hindu religions, collectively known as Hinduism. Everything was returning from too good to be true back to normal.

As for Ashoka himself, he has remained an anomaly, an ephemeral spark of bright light, a rare exception to a general rule. As all of these, he cannot be rightly considered a part of India, which has rejected his work, his religion, and therefore his person as such. Ashoka is a separate isolated event in world history, as much as he is now an isolated entry in this section, a genius leader without a country.

And as for his religion of Buddhism, it hardly makes a kinder, gentler nation, either. So what if, say, Burma is ninety percent Buddhist? Until quite recently, its military regime was among the most oppressive in the world. Other heavily Buddhist countries, Thailand and Cambodia, can hardly be called paragons of enlightened civility either. Buddhism around the world is not a state religion making national policy. The Path of Dharma was exclusively the work of Ashoka’s own hands and mind. Religion was his personal inspiration, but not an agent of change in itself.

THE FILIOQUE EMPEROR

The greatness of a genius ruler is largely determined by the magnitude of his historical consequence. Such a criterion works wonders with the historical legacy of Charlemagne, who, at the first sight already, appears to have been a one-man show, having created a colossal European empire that fell apart upon his death, and could never be reconstituted again, no matter how many times and how ardently this would be tried since.

But Charlemagne’s enormous effect on the history of Western Civilization becomes apparent as soon as we start digging beneath the thin crust. Here was a bona fide superhero who single-handedly brought to life the Holy Roman Empire (which somehow managed to last until superseded by the Napoleonic Empire); who is the secular force behind the birth of Roman Papacy as we know it today; who used to be fully credited with the creation of the First German Reich (this particular achievement, understandably, “went underground,” following the collapse of the twentieth century’s Third Reich), who though himself illiterate established the system of European education which proved extremely effective even throughout the Dark Ages of Europe; who was the prime mover behind the great split of Christianity between the East and the West; who, utterly amoral and disorganized in his own life, very successfully promoted morality and political order throughout a hopeless Europe; who was many other things too, and most remarkably, remains more modern in Western psyche than scores of European potentates who lived many centuries after him…

This entry obviously makes no attempt at recreating the events of Charlemagne’s life just for the edification of its reader, which no original entry should do, but is designed to promote and develop a particular point of personal interest to its author. In this particular case, I am specifically focusing on the unexpected historical role of Charlemagne as a religious divider, what I call the Filioque factor, that he is largely responsible for.

The unauthorized addition of the Filioque clause to the Nicaean Creed actually dates back to 587 AD when it was done locally in Toledo, Spain, under the shaky Jesus-centered homiletic logic that the Son cannot be deficient in anything: if the Father has it, Jesus must have it too! This argument, though, never amounted to much, not even to a provincial heresy, until Charlemagne (who must have seen it as a smart political move, aimed at establishing either religious supremacy over, or at worst religious independence of Rome from the East-dominated Council of Bishops) would become its vocal champion, inspired by his own spiritual advisors professing it. Ironically, it was not properly legitimized by Charlemagne’s grateful but politically weak client Pope Leo III, surviving exclusively by the power of his protector’s sword, yet hesitant to embrace the questionable novelty. To Leo III, filioque was at best acceptable, but not mandatory and it took another two hundred years to make it the official Roman Catholic dogma in 1014 under Pope Benedict VIII. Predictably the epic Great Schism, between the Rome-dominated Western Church and the Eastern Churches, took place shortly thereafter, in 1054, with both sides anathemizing each other.

A few words about the theological implications of filioque.

The seemingly odd question of whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone or from both Father and Son, is of great theological, and I’d even say philosophical, curiosity, and, in this matter, I am standing rather with the Orthodox Church than with the doctrine of Roman Catholicism, because of the following fairly obvious reasoning:

 “Now, when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus, also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape, like a dove, upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22)

In this chronologically-first Trinitarian appearance of the Holy Spirit from heaven, it is clearly proceeding from the Father, if such a dependence can be established at all. To insist on further dependence of the Holy Spirit on both the Father and the Son invites the logical conclusion of a complete dependence of one part of the Christian Godhead on the other two, thus denying the Spirit’s individuality and alleged co-equality, and even the possibility of independent existence, undermining the very concept of the Trinity turning it instead into a Duumvirate, as if the theology of the Trinity were not difficult in itself already.

It is my bold opinion, for which I have no proof, except for my strong belief that it must be true, that the said Filioque clause is so weak in its theological foundation that it would never have survived the scrutiny of an authentic Council, like that of Nicaea, and would have been declared a heresy by an overwhelming majority of Christian bishops. The fact that it would become the Roman Catholic creed, and later survive intact in the theological bloodbath of the Reformation, suggests to me not the power of the Filioque argument, but rather the legendary strength of Charlemagne’s sword, allegedly capable of slicing the horseman and the horse in half with a single blow. Still it is ironic that all his other accomplishments notwithstanding, Charlemagne’s most enduring legacy is vested in the Papacy; and his lesser-known strong involvement in theological wars as the sword-wielding promoter of the Filioque clause well justifies my dubbing him The Filioque Emperor.

JUSTINIAN AND THEODORA

There is a famous, almost truistic, adage to the effect that behind every great man stands a great woman. In our present case it is so demonstrably true that Justinian and Theodora can be called a poster couple for this wisdom. Furthermore, wading through the middle of the Genius section, we can say that Theodora’s genius was in no way inferior, but possibly superior to that of her husband.

Justinian I the Great (lived 482-565, reigned 527-565) was a remarkable man in his own right, but his truly world-historical achievements as one of the greatest rulers of the Roman Empire came after he met and fell in love with the stunningly beautiful, sexually and histrionically accomplished prostitute and future saint of the Christian Orthodox Church, Theodora, who was also one of the most astute political geniuses who ever lived. (Born around 500 AD, she became Empress, coequal with Justinian, in 527, and died at the early age of 48, probably of cancer.)

The separate and joint stories of Justinian and Theodora are pretty well known, and only a few details need to be reemphasized. Although the greatest accomplishment of Justinian’s reign: Codex Iustinianus bears his name, Theodora was an active participant in it, and many laws, particularly regarding women, are ascribed to her directly.

As for her political savvy and personal courage, there is this account of her most significant triumph in that department: During the worst riot against her husband in 532, Justinian was prepared to flee Constantinople to end his life in exile, but a fiery speech from Theodora stopped him, when she chided him that it would be more fitting for an Emperor to die fighting than to show his back to the assailants. Justinian took her advice and prevailed, after which Theodora’s standing in his eyes and throughout the Empire assumed superhuman proportions.

Both Justinian and Theodora were canonized as saints of the Orthodox Church. There’s nothing particularly unusual in this fact except that Theodora’s” unorthodox” religious preference for the Monophysite “heresy” was well known, as was the fact that she provided her personal protection to the leaders of the Monophysite sect and influenced her husband to such an extent in this (as of course in all other respects) that he kept this arrangement even after Theodora’s death. I might add that the ensuing miaphysite compromise allowing the sect to reconcile with mainstream Orthodoxy was reached as a direct result of this otherwise shocking and untenable accommodation. It must be noted that Christian Churches hate religious compromises, and what happened in this case was obviously the rarest of exceptions, bowing to the hallowed memory and undying authority of Justinian and Theodore.

Thus, in every respect, Justinian and Theodora must feel quite at home in our Valhalla of world-historical rulers of genius, jointly, of course!

…Regarding Theodora, here was a feminist par excellence, a brilliant nonconformist thinker, a promoter of worthy causes, a fighter for justice and women’s rights, a paragon of women’s equality to men, and a brave and noble soul. In the course of her life she grew from the indecency of her young years to moral probity of maturity (“Go, and sin no more!”), and eventually to a deserved sainthood… She could have become a role model for the future generations of women, particularly today, when it is much easier for a woman to make it in society, as long as her goals are clearly defined and wholesome.

However, our twenty-first century is the time of a continued degeneration of feminism, when the most vocal and visible women, whom the world keeps calling “feminists,” are defining it through indecency, depravity, vulgarity, social shock bordering on hooliganism and too often overstepping that border, in other words, all such qualities which Theodora either never possessed, or shunned throughout her mature life. On the other hand, modern feminism has been depleted, by its most popular champions, of all meaning and constructive value, reduced to cheap criteria of in-your-face sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual, debauchery, and public nuisance, refusing on principle to address more important issues, thus serving as an irresponsible and cynical diversion from the real problems facing women in particular and humanity at large…

Alas, Theodora! Looking down from her eternal abode at what modern feminism has come to today, she is not a happy saint.

EN TOUTOI NIKA

There are two faces to Emperor Constantine: a sadistic murderous thug and a hallowed Christian saint. No paradox here, though. Christianity, too, has two faces: the victim and the perpetrator, the peacemaker and the warmonger. So does life itself: it gives birth, and it kills; life and death are the two faces of existence.

As a “secular” person, Constantine comes across as a reprehensible man, but no more and no less than an average run-of-the-mill Caesar. Every educated child’s cultural guru Hendrik Van Loon is particularly negative toward Constantine, in sharp contrast to, say, the glowing panegyric to him by Herbert G. Wells, who has been notorious, however, for quite a few egregious historical misjudgments. But, once again, so what if Constantine had his apparently innocent son Crispus cruelly executed for treason? Not even to mention his wife Fausta who falsely testified against her stepson and thus deserved her own sordid fate at her husband’s bloody hand. Constantine was an exceptional personality, a ruler of genius, and thus was entitled to cruelty and mayhem as much as he was entitled to deeds of historic greatness. Russia’s Ivan Grozny and Peter the Great each killed a son of their own, being none the worse for it in the historical memory of mankind!
Emperor Constantine I of the Roman Empire has been called the Great for a number of reasons, the biggest of them being his personal conversion to Christianity, and the legitimization of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
According to the famous Church historian Eusebius, Emperor Constantine, once marching with his army to a decisive battle, saw the Greek letter X in the sky, together with the words “en toutoi nika” better known in their Latin translation as “in hoc signo vinces.” This vision was allegedly interpreted to him the same night in a dream by Jesus Christ Himself as the sign of the Cross and at the same time, the first letter of the Greek word Χριστός. Let us not argue about the historical veracity of this legend, as it belongs to a separate realm of religion, and we have enough purely historical realities to argue about without starting mixing apples and oranges.
There can be no question about his ulterior motives in his adoption of Christianity. He may have been quite sincere (in fact his Serbian-born mother Helena [Saint Helena of Constantinople, to be exact] was allegedly a Christian herself, and she may indeed have had a certain influence on her son’s mind in this matter), but, mind you, such sincerity in a great emperor never precludes a clearly defined set of ulterior motives, and it certainly makes no sense to frame an argument over this as “either…or.” I will go even farther, to suggest that, had Constantine not seen his Christian conversion as an excellent political move, his mother’s religion would have had little impact on him, except, at best, to make him a closet Christian.
As it happened, though, there was an extraordinary alignment of the political and religious “planets” at that particular time, and Constantine did not have to be a cynical manipulator to acknowledge this fact and to be sincerely, and even religiously, inspired by this realization.
…This is by no means a biography of either Constantinus Maximus Augustus, or Isapostolos Konstantinos, and I have no intention of going beyond making a few points of particular interest to me in this entry. Aside from his role in the Christianization of Rome, Constantine’s remarkable statesmanship and prodigious military talents are naturally an integral part of his historical legacy, but, in my judgment, these hold a relatively small place, and I would never have considered him for this section on their account. After all, his vigorous and occasionally successful efforts to revitalize and strengthen the declining Roman Empire were doomed by history herself, whereas the triumphant power of the Christian religion over the ages was to serve as the defining monument to his greatness, just as he had been trying to use it during his own time, to achieve specific political objectives.
By the same token, Constantine’s seminal role in the history of Christianity can hardly be overstated, even though he never attempted to impose the new religion on the Roman Empire, opting instead for “freedom” of religious worship. I see this “irresolution” on his part not as some manifestation of his religious freedom-loving disposition, but as a prudent temporary measure, a first step in his gradual Christianization program, designed to avoid the otherwise inevitable clash of religions, competing in such a case not for a supremacy, but for sheer survival, thus making the odds of a decisive victory somewhat smaller for Christianity, in this scenario, whereas patience and gradual advancement were indeed the key to its eventual triumph.
Among other things, it is worth noting that the celebrated Christianization of Rome was originated in Greek rather than in Latin; that Emperor Constantine went on to choose the Greek city of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, as the New Rome of his Roman Empire. Coupled with the fact that the Christian New Testament was written primarily in Greek (with just a few words and sentences in Aramaic), this fact, normally downplayed, although by no means doctored in the Roman Catholic West, well underscores the Eastern Orthodox Church’s claim to a religious supremacy, culminating in the Russian historic Doctrine of the Third Rome developed in the aftermath of Constantinople’s fall to the Turks, during the reign of Ivan III the Great, naming Moscow as the Third, and Last Rome. (I have several entries about this throughout my book. See, for instance, Russia’s Three Romes in my composite entry The Russian National Idea, posted on 1/22/2011.)
One must not overlook the irony of the fact that the city of Rome should forever become the centerpiece of Roman Catholic Christianity, being associated with Constantine’s famous “Greek” conversion, whereas in reality Rome had been the hands-down champion of Christian persecution, yet played a second fiddle to the true citadel of the ultimate Christian victory, the Greek city of Constantinople.
As for Emperor Constantine presiding over the momentous Council of Nicaea (again, a Greek, rather than a Latin event!), his placement of himself as Caesar over the Christian priesthood there, is more indicative of the earlier Eastern brand of Christianity, than the later Roman-Catholic brand, with its supremacy of the Pontiff over Europe’s earthly rulers. I guess, the secular father of Roman Catholicism was not Constantine at all, but the glorious German regenerator of Rome Charlemagne…

 ...“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7)
Most things, persons, and events, with very few pathological exceptions, have two faces: good and bad. When only one of them is highlighted by historians with regard to the past, and by the mass media with regard to the current events, humanity is ill served. On the contrary, the public ought to be allowed to see both faces of each, in order to make their own judgment whether the good one may possess a sufficient redeeming value to overcome the negative effects of the bad one.
Alas, there are too many unequivocal judgments made today on the basis of selective evidence. Whatever is selected to look good, is represented as something blameless; and vice versa, whatever such judges choose to condemn, is deliberately stripped of any redeeming value.
Looking with horror at what is going on in the world of the twenty-first century, drowning in vice, violence, shameless hypocrisy and crooked propaganda, I keep wondering whether there is any redeeming value left in it at all.
What we need the most today is a “G 20” of strong-willed “Constantines,” doing more good than evil for our clueless and leaderless world simply by doing something, and perhaps also a sign of purpose and meaning, up there in the sky, with the three words in it: En Toutoi Nika!

AUGUST OF THE GOLDEN AGE

Concerning the virtues of authoritarianism, as opposed to the vices of democracy (for those who may have some doubts about my seriousness in defense of authoritarianism, I must strenuously elucidate the fact that this dissertation is most certainly tongue-in-cheek, but the wholesome grain of truth in it is most certainly flourlessly sprouting!), there is no better historical illustration than the transition of the Roman Republican democracy, plagued by horrific civil wars, taking the lives of many thousands of its citizens to the point of risking a complete depletion of the propertied classes, to the heretofore uncommon phenomenon of peace and prosperity for the Republic’s survivors, under the protective shield of Caesarian and Augustan tyranny. Indeed, the Augustan Golden Age of Rome is unsurpassed by all other despots in the extent of its despotic disposition, except that the subsequent degenerate rulers of Rome have shown us the distorted face of the unenlightened autocracy, which we are always eager to mistake for the face of autocracy an Sich…

Ironically, Mommsen’s enthusiastic opinion of Julius Caesar as “the complete and perfect man” might have been much closer to the truth, had we chosen to pretend that Julius Caesar was not one man, but two, fused together. Such fusion, in historical perspective, should be the most natural thing to do, considering that the other Caesar was everything the first one would have wished for himself to become.

His name was Octavian, but he liked to be called, like his uncle and adoptive father, Caius Julius Caesar. If the first of all Caesars descended from the gods, so did his sole and rightful heir. Careful and cunning, he was a much better judge of character than the original Caesar, but, unlike him, he turned to his advantage the fact of being underestimated by friends and foes alike, riding the last tidal wave of the Roman civil war as if it were a white stallion, carrying him straight into the heart of his beloved trophy city of Rome, as the Imperator Augustus Caesar.

Just as with Caius Julius Caesar the First, a famous story was told about a meeting between Octavian and Alexander the Great, this time not as a statue, but as the physical remains of the real man. Unlike the first Caesar, this one shed no tears. Surrounded by his overawed soldiers, Octavian coolly lifted the skull of the dead Greek conqueror from his coffin, to have a better look at it, allegedly breaking off a part of his nose! There were purportedly gasps of horror, but this time no questions were asked…

The historians who champion democracy at all cost are trying to diminish Augustus Caesar, by pointing to the discrepancy between his claims of divinity and his human frailties. His face was allegedly pock-marked like Stalin’s, he had a weak left hip (Stalin had a withered left arm!), he suffered from a perpetual head cold and had a bladder problem, often embarrassing him in public. Because of a degenerative skin condition, he never took a bath. All these disagreeable details combined were supposed to cut him down to size, that is to represent him as a pitiful invalid with a nasty penchant for murder and revenge. Suetonius however is much more generous in his description of Augustus’s appearance:

“He was unusually handsome and exceedingly graceful at all periods of his life though he cared nothing for personal adornment. His expression was calm and mild. He had clear bright eyes, in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power. His teeth were wide apart, small and ill-kept. His hair was slightly curly and inclining to golden; his eyebrows met. His complexion was between dark and fair, he was short of stature, but this was concealed by the fine proportion and symmetry of his figure…”

But even if the first picture be true, the legend of August must be stronger than such insignificant strains of verismo. Moreover, the glory of the Augustan Golden Age speaks well in his behalf. The genii of Vergilius, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and of many others who flourished on his watch, testify for him too. There was a sense of national happiness all around, in sharp contrast to the slaughterhouse years of his Republican predecessors. His brand of Pax Romana throughout the Empire has been lauded for exceptional wisdom and skillful statesmanship, where his genius is undeniable, and generally recognized as such.

The bottom line of all this, summarizing everything said and implied above, is that the legacy of Augustus rests on the recognition of the positive value of his authoritarian reign against the backdrop of a prolonged vicious strife, marring the last years of the Roman Republic, and underscoring the deficiencies of democracy, which comparison is unacceptable to the promoters of democracy at any cost.

On the other hand, his overall role in the history of Rome and generally speaking in the history of mankind, can hardly be appreciated without the continuity, and outside of the conjunction with the inaugural reign of his adoptive father Caius Julius Caesar.

Postscript. Two thousand years after August, what are the prospects of a new “Golden Age”--- today or any time soon? In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, and the alleged end of the cold war, there were many optimists in America, who saw the stock market going through the roof, their country ostensibly remaining the world’s sole superpower, and they rushed to declare the approaching new twenty-first century “the New American Century,” apparently subscribing to the feeling “Golden Age Now” (not to be confused with the 1979 American movie Apocalypse Now).

But then the twenty-first century really struck with a vengeance, and these days, even the neoconservative inventors of PNAC may not really want to own this bloody mess for America.

So, who owns this new century, anyway? There is clearly no place for Augusts in Washington, to be sure. For a while, Candidate Obama may have seemed like Divus Baracus to his optimistic supporters, but that euphoria was short-lived, and the next American Election will be won by President Obama by default, rather than honoris causa. What happened? The free world has no liking for dictators, that is, for strong, independently-minded soloists, preferring instead a concert performance of commercial musicians, with their obscure orchestra conductors conducting by remote control in a special kind of modern political music…

A new Golden Age? But there can be no Golden Age without an August, and there is no August on the horizon. Is there any hope then for the frustrated awaiters of the Golden Age? Maybe there is, but to elaborate on it any further, I have insufficient imagination…

THE FIRST OF ALL CAESARS

The story is told, by Suetonius, if I remember correctly, that, still as a fairly young man, Julius Caesar visited Alexander’s giant statue in Spain, and openly wept in front of it. When asked by one of his attendants about the reason for his tears, Caesar replied that he could not help it, considering that, at his age, Alexander had already conquered the world, whereas he, Caesar, had not as yet performed anything worth remembering.

As regards the sincerity of his tears, I will readily stipulate: Caesar was a man of intense ambition, and thus of great passion, and such a passion can quite easily translate into a tearful whimsical rant without anything to suspect some deliberate theatrics, unless the theatrics were spontaneous and in tandem with the naturality of his passion. However, as to the specific nature of his genius, the picture is somewhat more complicated.

He was a born despot, of course, and such a man has a towering sense of superiority, to the extent that even being reduced to tears in the presence of others cannot cause him any awkwardness, as nothing at all could ever hurt his self-esteem. I am sure that each witness of Caesar’s tears understood this, and none saw this as a sign of personal weakness on his part.

Yes, he was a despot, and a ruthless one, at that. However, all criticism of his authoritarian personality and ruthlessness must be dismissed right away: all genius rulers of history were bloody despots anyway, their cruelty revealing a strength of character, rather than a particular predisposition toward evil-doing. One can be cruel but just, and his subjects must surely prefer a strong dictator’s grand-scale purposeful cruelty to the random meaningless cruelties of some petty chieftains struggling for power…

[A curious comparison can be made to certain third-world dictators of our time, such as the late Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi, who were by no means geniuses, but who, through their strongman ruthlessness, were apparently capable of imposing some kind of peace and stability on their subjects. The chaos, into which their nations were plunged as a result of their violent demise, may surely make even their enemies remember the old times nostalgically. The same thing is going on in Syria right now, where Bashar al-Assad has proved himself already not competent enough, that is, not strong enough, not ruthless enough, to maintain a peace through dictatorial strength. His father Hafez would have known how to deal with the situation before it began spinning out of control. It’s worth remembering that under those dictators the national treasures of their respective domains were diligently preserved and maintained, whereas now they have been remorselessly plundered, while those that could not be sold, reduced to shambles, and now irretrievably lost to posterity. So, there is at least one, but surely more than one good word to be said about those bad dictators.]

…On the other hand, Caesar’s notorious licentiousness (“omnium mulierum vir, et omnium virum uxor,” according to Suetonius) is not in itself a debilitating quality, unless it is driving the man into a conflict with his best judgment. And it is indeed the quality of recklessness and utter disregard for elementary prudence that constitutes a personal weakness debilitating a political genius, where Caesar may have been the most vulnerable… But let us not rush to this conclusion before we lay down all the pros and cons.

Julius Caesar was a person of great mystery. On the one hand, he was undeniably a man of genius. In Hume’s perhaps excessive characterization, “All the world allows that the emperor was the greatest genius that ever was and the greatest judge of mankind.” (Considering his fatal misjudgment of the threat of the conspiracy, this sounds like a wicked joke at Caesar’s expense on Hume’s part, but it is possible that he had guessed the real reason behind Caesar’s recklessness, to which we will be returning at the end of this entry.) Mommsen, without renouncing his own historical objectivity, describes Caesar in his epic Römische Geschichte, as "the complete and perfect man." (Yet another instance of an alleged commendation reading more like a splurge of biting sarcasm than a bona fide opinion of the man, but again this may be also a false impression.) And Dante, of course, in La Divina Commeddia, provides Satan with three mouths, in which eternally to chew Judas (understandably), but also Brutus and Cassius, the two main conspirators in Caesar’s assassination, a rather excessive, but instructive honor for the target of their conspiracy, as if no other betrayer throughout the history of the pre-Dantian world had been more deserving of that same distinction.

Indeed, Caesar’s accomplishments were great, and many. First and foremost, he saved the Roman Republic from itself. The bloody era of civil wars, with the victors, each time, killing the resistance and proscribing their passive opponents may not seem to have been brought to the end in Caesar’s lifetime, but, in fact, it is to his credit that the Golden Age of peace and prosperity under Augustus Caesar was to be made possible in the first place. Other than that to his native Rome he delivered a much greater domain than he had inherited with his conquest of Gaul, plus much of other Europe with large chunks of Asia and Africa, including, even if Cleopatra were to disagree, the whole of Egypt. In between these conquests, he just happened to discover Albion. (According to Plutarch, the only reason why he had not quite conquered the Brits too was that “these islanders were so miserably poor that they had nothing worth being plundered of...”)

[Had Plutarch been living in our time, he might have taken a cue from PM David Cameron, who reacted, on his recent trip to India, to a request of the Indian Government to return one of the Indian artifacts, plundered by the British in the Colonial era, by saying that had Britain started returning all such items to their original owners, nothing would have been left of the British Museum… I am sure that Great Britain, even after having lost her great Empire, isn’t quite done with plundering, on Mr. Cameron’s watch. How many priceless artifacts from Syria, I wonder, having been kept in their original sites for thousands of years, will now end up in the British Museum?...]

…Beside this, to the world, he bequeathed the monumental Julian Calendar, which is still the staple of the Russian, Armenian and other Eastern Orthodox Churches, as well as the First of January as the start of every New Year, plus the name of the month of July. He also left a significant literary inheritance, sine qua no diligent student of Latin of yesterday, today, and tomorrow would ever have been able to learn the language (please forgive me this little exaggeration!), plus many other things which I could enumerate with a greater thoroughness, in some later revision of this entry.

And of course one of Caesar’s crowning achievements has been… his name, which was to become the title of every Emperor of Rome from Augustus to Hadrian, and later also inherited by the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Kaiser has been derived from Caesar as well. And as for Russia, the title Caesar, elliptically shortened to CÇsar, had evolved into the “Czar,” or “Tsar,” the meaning of which word is well known to billions of citizens of our planet, even to those for whom the etymology of the word itself is unknown.

Yet, on the other hand, here was a vain, reckless, pleasure-loving man who was spending far too much time with Cleopatra, both during his first time in Egypt, and back in Rome, to the point of neglecting his duties and basic demands of political prudence, thus raising the pertinent question whether he was, indeed, in the position to control the situation, or, perhaps, it was Cleopatra all along, who was successfully manipulating him… Or was it something else, like what I would call the Rasputin factor? Is it possible that Caesar was ill (and we know that he was indeed suffering from certain serious ailments!), and Cleopatra’s knowledge of exotic Egyptian pharmacology may have provided him some relief and palliation?...

And then, of course, comes up the small matter of his assassination: Was he indeed that blind, not to realize what was coming to him? Some judge of character! Napoleon may have been perfectly right to say of him: “Caesar was a failure. Otherwise he would not have been assassinated.” It is true that great men are getting assassinated all the time, but it is the circumstances of their demise which matter. Napoleon himself lost his Empire, but he was not exactly a loser, in the sense that the whole of Europe ganged up against him twice, honoring the British real-politik principle of the balance of power, and he went down, having put up a good fight (his return from Elba and the battle of Waterloo testify to that!). His critical mistake was the decision to invade Russia, but then, how easy has it been, historically, to misunderstand and misjudge the Russian riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma: America is committing that same folly today, as we speak…

In the specific case of Caesar’s assassination, the gross misjudgment on Caesar’s part appears to have been caused not so much by the occupational hazard of every dictator, nor by a force majeure, but by a personal weakness of character, displayed by Caesar here, and throughout his life. Can brilliant statesmanship of an authentic genius coexist in his nature with a blind and reckless faith in his own infallibility and invincibility and a glaring disregard for common prudence, such as displayed in Caesar’s case? Shakespeare’s answer is his stubborn fatalism and a rigid belief in predestination: “Cowards die many times before their death, The valiant never taste of death but once; Of all the wonders that I yet have heard it seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” (Julius Caesar.)

On the other hand, a totally different explanation is also possible. We already know that Caesar was suffering from certain probably incurable ailments, where even Cleopatra’s skills must have been proven in vain. Divus Iulius, a living legend deified in his lifetime, dying of a silly human disease at the age of fifty-five?

Perhaps it was not some irresponsible recklessness on his part, but some very special kind of recklessness, which prompted him, even being well appraised of the assassination plot, to choose a heroic end to a heroic life, rather than to thwart it, only to succumb to a miserable ignominious demise afflicting a slave as much as a Caesar and thus tarnishing his glory?

I would bet he had made the right choice, dismissing all those warnings, and resolutely stepping into Pompey’s Theater to add another powerful legend to his legendary life: the legend of his death.

Whichever version of events is the closest to the truth, nothing cancels out either Caesar’s world-historical evaluation as a remarkable genius (although some of the epithets showered on him by Hume and Mommsen seem far too excessive), or as a failure, in Napoleon’s view of him. What remains however is the mystery of the great man’s soul, raising some interesting questions in our own mind, and prodding us to make a challenging and inquisitive peep inside our own psyche, for traces of a similar conundrum.