Ethiek, eeuwigheid & akelige keizerrijken?!

Ethiek, eternal bliss & eary empires Re: 3-4-'04

OF COURSE
THE OLDEST EMPIRES
IN THE WORLD
were religious empires,
centring upon the worship of a god or
a god-king?

Alexander was
treated as a divinity
and the Caesars were gods in so much as
they had altars and temples devoted to them
{like Isis and Horus, Jesus and Mary,
Madonna & HIM and so on later on?}
and the offering of incense was made a test of loyalty
to the Roman state!

BUT these older religions were essentialle religions of act & fact:
they did not really invade the mind!?!

IF man offered his sacrifice and bowed to the god,
he was left not only to think
but to say practically whatever he liked about the affair ...

But the NEW sort of religions that had come into the world at THAT time,
and particularly Christianity,
turned INWARD?!

THESE NEW FAITHS THEN
demanded not simply some kind of CONFORMITY but
UNDERSTANDING BELIEF ........
Natyrally fierce controversy ensued upon the EXACT MEANING
of the things believed!
THESE new religions were CREED religions ...

THE WORLD WAS CONFRONTED WITH A NEW WORD: ORTHODOXY,
and with a stern resolve to keep not only acts but also
SPEECH and PRIVATE THOUGHT WITHIN THE LIMITS
of a SET teaching .............

For to hold a wrong opinion,
much more to convey it to other people,
was no longer regarded as an intellectual defect but as a moral FAULT
that might condemn a soul to everlasting
DESTRUCTION .............

BOTH
ARDASHIR I
who founded the Sassanid dynasty
in the third century A.D., and CONSTANTINE the Great
who reconstructed the Roman Empire in the fourth,
turned to religious organisations for help,
because in these organisations they saw a NEW MEANS
of using and
CONTROLLING
the wills of men .............

And already before the end of the fourth century
BOTH empires
were PERSECUTING free talk and religious
innovation
.............




In Persia
Ardashir found
the ancient Persian religion of ZOROASTER {or ZARATHUSTRA} with its priests and temples
and a sacred fire
that burned
upon its altars,
ready for his purpose as
a STATE RELIGION ...
{a little bit like the U.S.-FLAG, the USSR-Communist Party
or the German Fuehrer hundreds of centuries later could & would be used by Senator Joe McCarthy, Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler or for instance
in our 'own' days Hindu, Jewish, Christian & Muslim a.s.o.
"Fundamentalists"!} ........

BEFORE THE END
of the third century Zoroastrianism was persecuting Christianity,
and in 277 MANI, the founder of a new faith, the Manichaeans, was also
crucified and his body
flayed!

Constantinople,
on ITS side, was busy hunting out Christian heresies!

Manichaean ideas infected Christianity and had to be fought
with the fiercest methods;
in return,
ideas from Christianity affected the purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine?


ALL IDEAS BECAME SUSPECT!


SCIENCE,
which demands before all things the free action of an untroubled
mind, suffered a complete eclipse throughout this phase
of myDi-intolerance ...

WAR,
the bitterest theology,
and the usual vices of mankind
constituted Byzantine life
of those
myDi-days ...

It was picturesque,
it was romantic; it had little sweetness or light?

When Byzantium and Persia were not fighting the barbarians from the north
they wasted Asia Minor and Syria in dreary and destructive
hostilities .............

EVEN in close alliance these two empires would have found it a very hard
task indeed to turn back the barbarians and recover
their prosperity?

The TURKS
or TARTARS first come into history as the allies
first of one power and then of
another.

In the sixth century
the two chief antagonists were Justitian and Chosroes I; in the opening of the seventh the Emperor Heraclius was pitted against
Chosroes II {580} ...

At first
and until after Heraclius had become emperor {610} Chosroes II carried all before him: he took Antioch, Damascus and Jerusalem and his armies reached Chalcedon, which is in Asia Minor over against
Constantinople.

In 619 he conquered Egypt.

THEN Heraclius pressed a counter-attack home and routed a Persian army at Nineveh {627}, although at that time there were still Persian troops at Chalcedon ...

In 628 Chosroes II was deposed and murdered by his son, Kavadh, and
an inconclusive peace was made between the two exhausted empires!

Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war.

But few people as yet dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the deserts to put an end for ever to this aimless,
chronic struggle ...

WHILE
Heraclius was restoring order in Syria
a message reached him.

IT had been brought
in to the imperial outpost at Bostra, south of Damascus;
it was in ARABIC, an obscure Semitic desert-language, and it was read to the emperor, if it reached him at all, by an interpreter ...

IT was from someone who called himself "Muhammed the Prophet of God."

IT called upon the emperor to acknowledge the only ONE TRUE GOD and
to serve him: what the emperor said is not recorded ...

A SIMILAR MESSAGE came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon.
HE was annoyed, tore up the letter, and bade the messenger begone ...

This MUHAMMED, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader/merchant,
whose headquarters were in the mean little desert town of Medina ...
HE was preaching a new religion of faith in the One True God!
"Even so, O Lord!" he said; "rend Thou his Kingdom from Kavadh!"

And by now we know
what became
of that?
engel
11 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 13 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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