The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West - Softcover

Holland, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307278700 ISBN 13: 9780307278708

Verlag: Anchor, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A grand narrative history of the re-emergence of Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire. At the approach of the first millennium, the Christians of Europe did not seem likely candidates for future greatness. Weak, fractured, and hemmed in by hostile nations, they saw no future beyond the widely anticipated Second Coming of Christ. But when the world did not end, the peoples of Western Europe suddenly found themselves with no choice but to begin the heroic task of building a Jerusalem on earth.

In The Forge of Christendom, Tom Holland masterfully describes this remarkable new age, a time of caliphs and Viking sea kings, the spread of castles and the invention of knighthood. It was one of the most significant departure points in history: the emergence of Western Europe as a distinctive and expansionist power.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tom Holland is a historian of the ancient world and a translator. His books include Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, Persian Fire, In the Shadow of the Sword and The Forge of Christendom. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilization of Ancient Greece and Rome.” He lives in London with his family.
Visit the author's website at www.tom-holland.org.

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1
The Return of the King
The Whore of Babylon
"All these will I give you," said Satan, showing Jesus the kingdoms of the world, "if you will fall down and worship me."1 But Jesus, scorning empire, refused the temptation. And Satan, confounded, retired in great confusion; and angels came and ministered to the Son of Man. Or so, at any rate, his followers reported.
The kingdoms shown to Jesus already had a single master: Caesar. Monarch of a city which had devoured the whole earth, and trampled it down, and broken it to pieces, "exceedingly terrible,"2 he swayed the fate of millions from his palace upon the hill of the Palatine in Rome. Jesus had been born, and lived, as merely one of his myriad subjects. The rule proclaimed by the "Anointed One," the "Christ," however, was not of this world. Emperors and their legions had no power to seize it. The Kingdom of Heaven was promised instead to the merciful, the meek, the poor. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."3 And Jesus -- even facing death -- practised what he had preached. When guards were sent to arrest him, his chief disciple, Peter, "the rock" upon whom it had been prophesied that the Church itself would be built, sought to defend his master; but Jesus, healing the man wounded in the ensuing scuffle, ordered Peter to put up his weapon. "For all who take the sword," he warned, "will perish by the sword."4 Dragged before a Roman governor, Jesus raised no voice of complaint as he was condemned to death as an enemy of Caesar. Roman soldiers guarded him as he hauled his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and out on to the execution ground, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Roman nails were hammered through his hands and feet. The point of a Roman spear was jabbed into his side.
In the years and decades that followed, Christ's disciples, insisting to the world that their master had risen from His tomb in defiance of Satan and all the bonds of death, not surprisingly regarded the empire of the Caesars as a monstrosity. Peter, who chose to preach the gospel in the very maw of the beast, named Rome "Babylon";5 and it was there that he, like his master, ultimately suffered death by crucifixion. Other Christians arrested in the capital were dressed in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, or else set on fire to serve the imperial gardens as torches. Some sixty years after Christ had departed from the sight of His disciples, a revelation of His return was granted to a disciple named John, a vision of the end of days, in which Rome appeared as a whore "drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs," mounted upon a scarlet beast, and adorned with purple and gold -- "and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: 'Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth's abominations.'"6 Great though she was, however, the doom of the whore was certain. Rome would fall, and deadly portents afflict mankind, and Satan, "the dragon, that ancient serpent,"7 escape his prison, until at last, in the final hour of reckoning, Christ would come again, and all the world be judged, and Satan and his followers be condemned to a pit of fire. And an angel, the same one who had shown John the revelation, warned him not to seal up the words of the prophecy vouchsafed to him, "For the hour is near."
But the years slipped by, and Christ did not return. Time closed the eyes of the last man to have seen Him alive. His followers, denied a Second Coming, were obliged to adapt to a present still ruled by Caesar. Whore or not, Rome gave to them, as to all her subjects, the fruits of her world-spanning order. Across the empire, communities of Christians spread and flourished. Gradually, step by tentative step, a hierarchy was established capable of administering these infant churches. Just as Jesus had given to Peter the charge to be shepherd of His sheep, so congregations entrusted themselves to "overseers": "bishops." "Pappas," such men were called: affectionate Greek for "father." Immersed as they were in the day-to-day running of their bishoprics, such men could hardly afford to stake all their trust in extravagant visions of apocalypse. Though they remained passionate in their hope of beholding Christ's return in glory, they also had a responsibility to care for their flocks in the present. Quite as much as any pagan, many came to realise, they had good cause to appreciate the pax Romana.
Nor was justification for this perspective entirely lacking in Holy Scripture. St. Paul -- although martyred, as St. Peter had been, in Rome -- had advised the Church there, before his execution, that the structures of governance, even those of the very pagan empire itself, had been "instituted by God."8 Indeed, it struck many students of the apostle that the Caesars had a more than incidental role to play in his vision of the end of days. Whereas St. John had portrayed Rome as complicit with the Beast, that demon in human form who was destined, just before Christ's return, to establish a tyranny of universal evil, seducing men and women everywhere by means of spectacular miracles, chilling their souls and dimming the Church beneath a tide of blood, Paul, it seemed, had cast the empire as precisely the opposite: the one bulwark capable of "restraining" Antichrist.9 Yet such an interpretation did not entirely clear up the ambivalence with which most Christians still regarded Rome, and the prospect of her fall: for if the reign of Antichrist was self-evidently to be dreaded, then so also might it be welcomed, as heralding Christ's return. "But of that or that hour," as Jesus Himself had admonished His disciples, "no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."10 That being so, many Church fathers concluded, it could hardly be reckoned a sin to hold Rome's empire in their prayers.
For redeemed though they hoped to be, even the devoutest Christians were sinners still, fallen and fashioned out of dust. Until a new heaven and a new earth had been established upon the ruins of the old, and a new Jerusalem descended "out of heaven from God,"11 the Church had no choice but to accommodate itself to the rule of a worldly power. Laws still had to be administered, cities governed, order preserved. Enemies of that order, lurking in dank and distant forests, or amid the sands of pitiless deserts, still had to be kept at bay. As the fourth century of the Christian era dawned, followers of the Prince of Peace were to be found even among the ranks of Caesar's soldiers.12 Later ages would preserve the memory of Maurice, an Egyptian general stationed at the small town of Agaunum, in the Alps, who had commanded a legion entirely comprising of the faithful. Ordered to put to the sword a village of innocent fellow Christians, he had refused. And yet, as Maurice himself had made perfectly clear to the infuriated emperor, he would have found in an order to attack pagan enemies no cause for mutiny. "We are your soldiers, yes," he was said to have explained, "but we are also the soldiers of God. To you, we owe the dues of military service -- but to Him the purity of our souls."13
The emperor, however, had remained toweringly unimpressed. He had ordered the mutineers' execution. And so it was that Maurice and the entire legion under his command had won their martyrs' crowns.
Ultimately, it seemed, obedience to both Christ and Caesar could not be reconciled.


A New Rome
But what if Caesar himself were a servant of Christ? Barely a decade after Maurice's martyrdom, and even as persecution of the Church rose to fresh heights of ferocity, the hand of God was preparing to manifest itself in a wholly...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anchor
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307278700
• ISBN 13: 9780307278708
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 512
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar