Vulcan, of course, is just one of six now conventional
yet always false and destructive gods of Olympianity. With devotion to him came
adoration of the others as well. With remarkable speed, Olympianity replaced
Christianity as the defining religion of the West and Christendom dissolved
itself into Europe.
Devotion to Vulcan and the other Olympian gods, rather
than to Jesus, led to radical changes. One, it resulted in “an increase in
wealth and power that, for scale and speed, was perhaps unprecedented in the
previous history of any civilization” (Arnold Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion [1956], 196). This
unprecedented growth came as a result of the exuberant commitment of
unprecedented numbers of human beings to Vulcan and the manifest power that he
made possible.
With Olympianity as the defining religion of an Exuberant
Olympian Civilization, tolerance of non-Christian religions grew as the
difference between Christian and non-Christian paled in significance to that
between Olympian and non-Olympian.
Over time, this led to the abandonment of Catholicism or
Protestantism, and eventually of Christianity itself, as a norm for admission
to universities in Europe. Universities began accepting even non-Western,
non-Christian students. These students, in turn, began to seek admission to
Western universities to learn the military technology needed to defend their
societies against an increasingly powerful and aggressive Olympian
Civilization.
Second-rate powers Poland-Lithuania and Sweden, for
example, had been able to use superior military technology to cause Russia to
suffer a “Time of Troubles” (1603-1613). In response, Peter 1st
committed Russian political and intellectual leaders to Westernization after
1689. Peter: the Exuberant Olympian with advantageous access to Western
technologies in Holland and England.
Vienna successfully resisted the second Ottoman attempt
to capture it in 1683. Afterward, Western countries put the Ottoman Empire on
the doomed defensive.
The Ottoman Empire suffered humiliating defeat in the Great
Turkish War (1683-1699). Afterward, the sultan hired nominally Christian
technicians without first requiring conversion to Islam. After the subsequent defeat
of Ottoman forces by Russia (1768-1774), Sultan Selim 3rd (r.
1789-1807) decided “to make the first attempt at a thorough-going
Westernization of the Ottoman armed forces” (200).
Seeing the ascendancy of the Austrian Empire over the
Ottoman, Greek Christian Serbs sought to transfer their allegiance to Austria
without first converting to Latin Christianity. Latin Christian Austrian
leaders agreed to their condition.
Non-Western rulers and peoples had no interest in Western
civilization beyond learning enough military technology to avoid being
conquered. As the Ottomans had learned, however, this was impossible. Civilizations are
integrated wholes. Modification of one part, like the military, modifies the
whole.
Western military superiority
sprang from the use of Western weapons by disciplined troops; and [201]
military discipline is the apex of a pyramid of social achievement. It is the
fruit of law and order in civil life; for it cannot be established without
effective hygiene and without regular pay. Effective hygiene in the armed
forces requires a corresponding standard of public health in civil life,
maintained by physicians with a Western medical training. The regular payment
of troops requires sound public finances. Sound public finances require business
ability and a productive economy. And the economy must be productive, not only
of agricultural produce for feeding the troops, but of industrial skill for the
manufacture of armaments in the Western style (Toynbee, 201-202).
In 1667, when Thomas Sprat wrote his History of the Royal Society, he could plausibly regard a
commitment by Western Christian intellectuals of his day to the advancement of
technology as good. He, and others like John Locke, saw it as a remedy for
fanaticism rather than an anti-Christian devotion to a false god.
Yet, in the historical
perspective given to Posterity by the lapse of 300 years, this narrowly
utilitarian seventeenth-century self-portrait looks like an expression of the
Late Modern West’s reaction against the evils of Western religious fanaticism
in the immediately preceding age, and not like an objective self-appraisal; and
it was assuredly a misrepresentation, and indeed almost a caricature, of the
actual spirit of the Western Civilization either at the close of the
seventeenth century or in any subsequent generation (203).
An exponentially technologizing West imposed itself on
all other civilizations: “they must Westernize without reservations, and must
extend this total revolution to every department to every department of human
activity, if they intended to be successful in preserving their societies by
mastering Western military technique” (202). The great irony: these traditional
religious cultures, such as Greek Christian Russia, Ottoman Muslim Turkey, and
Arab Muslim Egypt, all, without exception, had to subordinate their religion to
Olympianity. To maintain any integrity at all relative to the Exuberant Olympian
West, they themselves had to become primarily Olympian. What a Latin Christendom had ever failed
to do, an Exuberant Olympian West had thoroughly accomplished in a remarkably
short period of time.
Copyright © 2018
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.