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The Long Waves of Time

	Long Waves of Time
	Chapter I Rise of Christianity
	Chapter II Saeculum Obscurum
	Chapter III Carolingian Reformation
	Chapter IV Age of Byzantium
	Chapter V Crusades
	Chapter VI Renaissance
	Chapter VII Reformation
	Chapter VIII Age of Enlightenment
	Chapter IX Resurgence of Religion
	References

Reformation

Augustine’s Vision of Hell
The burning stakes and bruloirs were justified that since the hell is a cruel place, cruelty that lasts less than an hour is preferable to cruelty that stretches over eternity. In most texts on philosophy and theology, Saint Augustine receives acclamation. His self-reflection is extolled, as is the ornate language of his psalms, and the depth of his faith. Let us look at one of the less well-known of Augustine’s narratives, as it is accessible only in Latin: the description of Hell in his 69th address to his fellow hermits ''Ad Fratres in Eremitate Sermo LXIX,'' where St. Augustine describes how Satan seized the female's damned soul and commanded his fellow devils to

“pierce her eyes with forks as she enjoyed looking at unclean things, pierce her mouth as she used them for blasphemy, pierce her heart, as she did not harbor piety, compassion, clemency, and forgiveness there, pierce her hands with the heavy fork forged in Hell since she reached with them at things unclean and did not use them to distribute alms and help her neighbors, use the fiery forks to pierce her legs she used to dance and meet her lovers.'
 
After performing these tasks, devils spread out their black wings and transport the stabbed soul to the Hell. When the gates of Hell open,
 
'"out steps a hideous, horrible dragon, always ready to devour souls. The dragon inserts the soul into his mouth, full of stench. After chewing and digesting the soul, the dragon vomits the soul into a fiery lake, where millions of other sinful souls wait for their trial by our Lord."
 
This is sick and sickening, as are the similar narratives about females fried for eternity in oil and males in their own sperm.

 

 

The Renaissance of the classical learning of Greeks and Romans with its stress on humanism and reason was opposed by the Protestant Reformation. The Age of Reformation has two distinct periods, the Spanish Century and the Time of Royal France. Reformation coincided with the times of witch burning. Although the witch-hunts occurred sporadically from about 1450s, they emerged as a major social event in 1500s, reaching their height around the times of the Thirty Years' War, when witch trials became ubiquitous throughout Western Europe and spread to the American colonies. The upsurge in witch burning during these years reflected the heightened tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as each side of this religious controversy was convinced that the opposing side was inspired by the devil. The witch burning ceased around the time of the French Revolution

During Reformation religious conflicts escalated and culminated during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). There was widespread interest in the occult,  magic, horoscopes, and astrology.

 

 

 

 

Isabella of Spain (1451-1504)

The Spanish Century (1525 -1648)

The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella is best known for their sponsorship of Columbus' voyage in 1492. This marked the beginning of the Spanish Empire. In the remaining 24 years of their reign, exploration and exploitation of the West Indies expanded and accelerated. Upon Ferdinands death in 1516, the Spanish crown went to their grandson, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Charles V (1500-1558). By inheritance, he became the ruler of Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, Hungary, Netherlands, and parts of Italy and France. Moreover, Charles V's Spanish subjects conquered vast territories in Central and South America. No other Emperor has ruled so vast a region. Charles heraldic coat-of-arms bore the inscription plus ultra (always further) and his conquistadores referred to their sovereign as the ruler of the world.

Columbus Flagship Santa Maria

Heralding the Century of Spain is the Columbus voyage to the West Indies. Columbus ships Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria sailed from Spain in 1492 and Pinta and Nina returned in 1493.Vicente Pinzn who had been the captain of Nia on Columbus' first voyage, left Spain in 1499, explored the coast of Brazil, discovered the Amazon River, and returned to Spain in 1500. Pinzn voyage is a prototype of many expeditions that followed Columbus 1492 westward sailing.

 Among Emperor Charles V explorers were - Hernan Cortes who defeated the Aztecs in Mexico; Francisco Pizzaro who conquered the Inca kingdom in Peru; Francisco Coronado, who searched for the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cibola and found the Grand Canyon instead; and Ferdinand Magellan whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the world. Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships in 1519 of which one, Victoria, arrived in Spain in 1522, three years after leaving. 

Luther greeted Charles election as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire with great enthusiasm. He wrote that God gave us as our head a young person of noble bloodand evoke in our hearts great, good hope and wanted to enlist Charles' support to fight the papacy: 'Magnificent Emperor Charles, Christian nobles,devoted to Christ, how long are you going to sufferthe devils voice of the papal Antichrist? However, Charles did not let himself be swayed by his personal antipathy to the Pope into an inimical stance to the papacy. Charles and Luther are the embodiments of the great Catholic-Protestant controversy. Shortly after Charles election, they faced each other at the Diet of Worms (1521). Luther summarized his position and ended that

Here I stand, my conscience tied to the word of God.

Charles replied that he will not hesitate

'to stake my kingdom, my realms, my friends, body and blood,
life and soul to defend the unity of Christians.

Luther departed Worms for Wartburg and continued his campaign promoting Protestant ideas. Charles was forced by other pressing matters to leave Germany and did not return for many years. During this time, Luther's teachings took hold in Germany and spread to the other states of Europe. Charles was preoccupied by the war with France, the Turkish invasions culminating in the 1529 siege of Vienna, the corsairs who threatened the Spanish shipping in the Mediterranean, and by the matters of his growing overseas empire. Charles underestimated Luther. He thought his problems with Protestantism would fade when Luther and Henry VIII died in 1546. However, in 1551 the German Protestant princes allied with France against Charles and forced a war during which Charles nearly lost his life. He narrowly escaped and found refugee in the Alpine city of Villach. The war was concluded by the Peace of Augsburg granting the German princes the right to choose either Catholicism or Protestantism and to determine the religious character of their territory: cuius regio, eius religio.

However, the Emperors troubles were just beginning. In 1555 Cardinal Caraffa was elected the Pope Paul IV. Before his election, for a whole generation, Cardinal Caraffa used the Inquisition to terrorize Italy. About himself he said that

'I have never conferred a favor on a human being.'

Charles opposed Caraffa's papal nomination; however he was elected in spite of the emperor. Pope Paul IV relations with England had been disastrous. This inquisitor-turned-pope stripped Queen's Mary's Cardinal Pole of his office and ordered him to come to Rome to face Inquisition. Upon the death of Mary and Pole, he called Elizabeth 'illegitimate' and rejected her claim to the crown. As the Emperor Charles V opposed his nomination, Caraffa was consumed by hatred and declared crusade on Spain. Under the General Duque de Alba the Spanish Armed Forces prevailed, but Charles gave up. The idea that he, who had his whole life striven for Pax Christianitatis, would become a target of a Crusade was too much for him to bear.

 He transferred the rule of his Spanish dominions to his son, Philip II, his German dominions to his brother, Ferdinand I, and retired to a comfortable mansion adjacent to the monastery of San Yuste. There, surrounded by his collection of paintings, he listened to music and constructed mechanical clocks and automata. Charles died on September 21, 1558; 45 years after Vasco de Balboa saw the waves of the Pacific Ocean, heralding his eventful reign of struggle, discovery, and adventure.

Phillip was six years older than Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603). During their times, the Spanish and British Empires were engaged in a continuous struggle for world dominance, fueled on the personal side by Elizabeths rejection of Philips offer to marry her.

In 1529, Ferdinand repelled the Ottoman armies at the Siege of Vienna. In 1547 the Bohemian Protestant nobles rebelled against Ferdinand when he ordered the Bohemian army against the German Protestants, but Ferdinand prevailed and continued his life-long struggle against the tide of Protestantism. Among Ferdinand's successors were Rudolf II (1552-1612), patron of Tycho de Brahe and Johannes Kepler and Ferdinand II (1578-1637) who suppressed the second rebellion of the Bohemian Protestants in 1618 that initiated the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Among the significant writings of this era are Johannes Keplers Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Astronomia Nova (1609) and Harmonices Mundi (1619) Keplers had to move from city to a city, as his mother was accused of witchcraft and in continuous danger of being apprehended and burned at the stake. Kepler was excluded from the Lutheran church and did not convert to Catholicism either. He lost his teaching post at Graz due to his lack of religious beliefs and moved to Prague to work with the Danish astronomer, Tycho de Brahe at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II. After Tycho died in 1601, Kepler inherited his post as Imperial Mathematician. Using the data that Tycho de Brahe had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of the planet Mars was not a circle, but an ellipse, with one focus located at the center of the Sun. Johannes Kepler also discovered the basic principles of integral calculus, used logarithms in his calculations before Napier, explained that tides are caused by the Moon, discovered that Sun rotates about its axis, explained the role of both eyes in depth perception, investigated the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera, designed eyeglasses for near- and far-sightedness, coined the word satellite.

 

 

The Century of France (1648-1789)

The peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty Years' War heralded the century of France. French philosophers provided the theoretical, philosophical, and legal foundations of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 that stopped the Witch Trials and ended the Burning Times Epoch. The torture was abolished and the burning stakes were extinguished.

The ideas of France's scholars, Denis Diderot, Claude Helvetius, Marquis de Condorcet, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie asserting that the understanding of human affairs and human destiny will come from science and natural philosophy, were widely accepted. Denis Diderot edited the famous Encyclopedia, promoting a materialistic view of the universe. Voltaire opposed the intolerance of Christianity and Cesare Beccaria protested the oppressive legal justice system.

Louis IV, Roi-Soleil                 Louis XV, le Bien Aime       Louis XVI, le Dernier (r. 1643-1715)                        (r. 1715-1774)                 (r. 1774-1792)

The reign of Louis XIV, France's Sun King, a picturesque age so well described by Alexandre Dumas in his historical novels. In 1683, Louis broke the religious hold of Protestants on France by revoking the Edict of Nantes.

Louis XV's best known mistress was Marquise "Reinette" de Pompadour. She spent her adolescence in Catholic convent. At the age of nine, she was told by a fortuneteller that she would win the heart of a king, which she did at the age of 22, when she was invited to a royal mask ball at Versailles. There were eight identically costumed figures one of them being the king. Reinette, dressed as Goddess Diana, chose to dance with one of them which turned out being the king. They became friends and later lovers. When the king lost the battle at Rosbach, she consoled him with au reste, aprs nous, le dluge.

Marie Antoinette as one of the leading characters of Riyoko Ikeda's Rose of Versailles (ベルサイユのばら).

Louis XVI married at the age of 15 Marie Antoinette, Princess of Bohemia, daughter of the Empress of Austria Maria Theresa. Louis supported the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, earning animosity of the British, who together with a faction of dissatisfied French nobles continued to undermine his authority. In 1792 France was proclaimed a republic. Louis XVI was executed the following year, as was his wife Marie Antoinette. Louis was executed on charges of treason, Marie Antoinette, among others, on fraudulent charges of child molestation. They were 38 years old. In 1973, Marie Antoinette was serialized as one of the main characters of the best-selling shojo manga The Rose of Versailles, later adapted into an anime series by Japanese television.