- 15 Oct 2018 15:47
#14953720
The OP is spot-on.
however, the "Age of Christendom" in the west suffered from great calamaties and set-backs. I think the renaissance was really the full-blooming of the worldview and societal form of that epoch, but the blooming had been greatly retarded by the Islamic conquests, The Mongol conquests, the Viking Conquests, the Black Plague, and the Little Ice Age.
These were all things that seriously hindered the development of the western Christendom and as i've said elsewhere, from a purely praxeological analysis, the decentralized conditions of medieval Europe would have yielded the equivalent conditions we saw in the renaissance in the 9th century had it not been for the aforementioned calamities.
Thus, given these disasters, we can't be too hard on those who in the light of rediscovering the triumphs of ancient Greece and Rome looked on the Age of Christendom as a dark era, a net-loss of human achievement. They saw the end of the Empire not as an advancement of human liberty, but of plunging mankind into ignorance and superstition. It is no wonder that these renaissance and enlightenment men turned to the very forms of government that had been responsible for the collapse of Rome in the first place, for if you see the fall of Rome as a tragedy, you will invariable see its state as a model to be followed and blame the Christians for the collapse in a silly post-hoc fashion. Its was all too predictable.
The very seeds of hatred towards the family, the church, and property are rooted in this gross oversimplification of historical interpretation. Had the renaissance men saw their renaissance as more deeply rooted in the traditions of the Age of Christendom than in the notions of Rome and Greece, we would never have know communism in the 20th century, or nation-states in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The fetish for ancient folly (democracies, republics, emperors, absolutism, secularism, rationalism, decadence, etc, ) shall be the seeds of our own failure just as it had been for these ancients. They should only be regarded as sages inasmuch as they bear warning not to follow them too closely.
"It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals... is incompatible with freedom."- Patrick Henry