Integral Worldview

My reflection this year on worldview, as the skeleton or framework on which our ideals lie or the Magna Carta that governs our thinking and our lives, was inspired by reading a book called, The Powers That Be, by the Protestant theologian Walter Wink. The book is not about worldview, but about the powers that govern this world. However, in five pages of this book, Wink describes the 5 worldviews that have governed the imagination of human beings thus far.

These 5 worldviews are as follows: the ancient, the spiritualist, the materialist, the theological, and the integral. I understand that there are more worldviews than those cited in this book, and also many more beyond the ones I mention in this year's articles. As can be seen, three of the worldviews that Wink mentions are part of my study: the materialist, the spiritualist, and the integral, the latter is the topic of this text.

As we have said, the materialist worldview is the one that governs the world of culture, politics, arts, science, high finance, and universities. These environments have been completely sterilized of any religious sentiment, manifestation, thought or symbol. Western culture, the daughter of Christianity, has thrown its mother in prison and carried out an "ethnic cleansing" of many elements associated with Christianity.

As for other elements, Western culture stole them without mentioning their Christian origin, like for example, the baptismal registry books that the republicans that overthrew the monarchy in Portugal,  stole from the Churches to begin the civil registry. It also stole other elements by changing their names; historians, instead of saying before or after Christ, say before or after the common era to denote year.  

Western society has become so materialistic that it is almost inhuman, cold, selfish, and where nobody cares about anyone; individualism and selfishness have grown out of proportion; atheists and agnostics say they have values, but we do not see them in action anywhere. In this climate of such materialistic inhumanity, many take refuge in spiritualism and, following the law of the pendulum, adhere to a spiritualism that denies and demonizes all matter. They constitute small communities that are authentic oases in this materialistic desert.

The integral worldview is a worldview that seeks to reconcile man with his nature. As we have already said, we understand that modern man represses religious feeling in the same way that a Puritan society represses sex. The integral worldview also aims to overcome the dualisms typical of the spiritualist worldview, to seek the synthesis of these thesis and antitheses: spirit vs. matter, soul vs. body, creationism vs. evolutionism, sacred vs. profane, pure vs. impure, etc.

This new mentality, this new worldview, this new optic, and way of seeing things, is rising from the ashes of materialism, like a Phoenix reborn. It is not a crude, ignorant, reactionary spiritualism that has science as its enemy, but the living of religious feeling in the light of science, in constant dialogue with it. It is a faith that allows itself to be purified by science from all myths, superstitions, and irrationalism; it is a science that allows itself be guided and inspired by faith, that is not ashamed of it. Few are those who already live in this dimension, the majority of the population is either materialistic or spiritualistic.

History of Materialism
From religion to anti-religion, the history of materialism is a history of evolution of the experience of religious feeling. It all began with matter impregnated with spirit, breathing spirit through its every pore: this was the stage of animism. As human beings got to know the material realities of the world around them, they started stealing the souls of these realities.

In moving from animism to polytheism, human beings stole the souls from countless material realities, and to those handful few they did not know, they attributed to them the status of gods, that is, of leaders of a reality such as time, sea, love, war. For the sake of simplification, human beings concentrated these unknown realities into one single deity, but they did not stop there.

Because of the scientific discoveries of the 19th century and their practical applications in the 20th century, human beings began to think that they had discovered everything there was to discover. They became proud and so full of themselves that they destitute the religious sentiment, declaring that it was not God who had created man in his image and likeness, but rather man who created God in his image and likeness. Later, not content with his delusion, he killed God and put himself in his place.

Little by little, however, modern man is realizing that religious sentiment is neither an invention of ignorance nor an explanation for unexplainable things. The very fact that no matter how much the human being knows, there will always be things that he still does not know, proves that matter seems to have certain properties in common with Spirit after all.  

Some intellectuals of our time, not defining themselves as religious, go so far as to say that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented. Yes, because they recognize that this world, as it is structured, presupposes that most human beings are believers. Because if the contrary were true, things would not be as we find them in this world. So, as I have said elsewhere, atheists and agnostics are lucky that most are believers. In fact, the world as it is structured can survive with an agnostic minority, as long as the majority, as is the case, is a believer.

The integral worldview is going to suppose a return of what was stolen back to its owner; giving Spirit back to matter, because neither matter is as material as materialists think, nor is Spirit as immaterial and incorporeal as spiritualists think. The integral worldview will somehow imply a return to animism, but not the same uninformed animism of primitive men or ours when we were children; it will be an animism that will place the spirit at the center of every thing. Today we know from science that visible matter is after all composed of invisible and intangible subatomic particles.

Physics is the Soul of Science
When we talked about worldview and science, we said that scientific discoveries make us change our perspective about everything around us, the way we relate to the environment, our view of life; it is not the same to think that the Earth is the center of the universe than to think that it is not the Earth, but the Sun, and ultimately not even the Sun, is the center of a universe that probably has no center. It is not the same to think that matter and energy are two realities of a different nature than to think that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter, just as water exists in three different physical states, and none is similar to the other, so much so that they even look like different realities.

Every scientific discovery can provoke a metanoia, a conversion, a change of mind, a worldview, or a new way of looking at things. Our mind, our faith, and our life have to adapt to the evolution of our knowledge of the reality that surrounds us and with which we relate. The science that can most stir our worldview is Physics, because it is the one that studies the most basic and fundamental things of our life, such as matter and the cosmos.

It is in this sense that we can state that the materialist worldview is out of fashion because it has not kept up with the latest scientific discoveries in the field of physics, especially quantum physics. The materialist worldview is right and makes sense in the context of mechanistic physics like Newton's, where reality works with the precision, cadence, rhythm, and prediction of a Swiss watch.

This worldview was itself misleading because it featured a watch without a watchmaker. But more than that, since Einstein we know that reality has nothing to do with the precision of a watch, but if it were a watch, it would not be precise as the Swiss kind, because it would be relative, that is, it would not always mark the same hours.

The New Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics changes our minds, modifies our paradigms, attacks the logic that has governed science and our lives, because it breaks down boundaries that used to seem insurmountable and puts an end to the dualisms that opposed realities that we used to think were very different and even contrary, such as matter/energy, static/dynamic, visible/invisible, tangible/intangible, predictable/unpredictable, material/spiritual, scientific/philosophical.

Matter/Energy – The heart of matter is intangible like energy; the heart of matter, the world of atoms and subatomic particles is, in fact, energy.

Atoms can be matter, insofar as we try to weigh and measure them; but the particles that compose them have electric charges and move, that is, they exhibit the properties of energy. We can conclude that they are matter in their essence, describable, qualifiable and quantifiable, but that they are energy in their existence, because they exhibit a voltaic power, they react, and create waves.

Matter is energy in potential, energy is matter in potential. Combustion transforms matter into energy: this is what happens at the center of the sun, where hydrogen atoms fuse, creating helium and energy.

Visible, solid matter is composed of invisible elements, and the further we travel to the center of matter, the less matter (mass) and the more empty space we find, so matter seems to be reduced to tiny vibrating fibers of energy. Subatomic particles are in fact manifestations of energy. Therefore, what seemed so visible and solid is now reduced to electromagnetic waves. As the result, we can conclude that our body and everything that materially exists is reduced to vibrating energy.

Matter in itself does not exist, for it is merely a storehouse of energy, it is nothing more than condensed, accumulated energy. For example, plants, through photosynthesis, convert the radiant energy of the sun into chemical energy that is stored in organic molecules, as if the plant were a battery, a storehouse of energy.

Matter/Spirit - Materialism has no reason to exist, because matter is formed by invisible, almost spiritual elements, and we certainly cannot understand matter without knowing its soul. The atom is the soul of matter, so not only human beings have souls, matter does too. The soul of matter is as invisible as ours within our body.

Inert/Living - It is no longer clear that life only exists in organic matter; there is no longer such a big difference between organic matter and inorganic or inert matter. Subatomic particles reveal to us that life exists not only at the level of cells, but also at the subatomic level of quarks. Of course, this is a different form of life.

Visible/Invisible  - "If quantum mechanics hasn't shocked you deeply, it's because you haven't understood it yet. Everything we call real is made up of things that truly cannot be understood as real." Niels Bohr

The boundary between the visible and the invisible is also broken in matter. The mass of an atom is less than 1% of its size, the rest is void, that is, the space between the nucleus and the electrons. As stated above, if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a basketball, the electrons would be several kilometers away from the nucleus.

Static/Dynamic - The matter that forms objects appear static, it seems stationary, but in fact, this is an illusion: in reality, everything moves. As stated earlier, the electron orbits around the nucleus of the atom at a speed of 2,200 kilometers per second. Matter is therefore not static as it seems, but dynamic.

In quantum mechanics, everything is an illusion: visible matter is composed of invisible elements; it is apparently static, when in reality it is in motion; it is apparently very different from energy, but it is in fact a form of energy.

Pure/Impure - There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile, (Mark 7:15). ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ (Acts 10:15)

There was a time when the sexual act was seen as something dirty, ugly, sinful, and impure; It was only seen as a lesser evil when it was performed in the context of marriage for the sole purpose of procreation. But even then, Christian couples were advised not to enjoy the pleasure of sex and to abstain completely from sexual intercourse during Lent. For the rest, it was seen as a " remedium concupiscência", a palliative for voluptuousness, not as an act of love.

Love is the soul of the sexual act, which is one of the expressions of love in its function of uniting people into one body and one soul. And since it is the act by which the two will become one flesh (Mark 10:1-12), then resulting in three, the genesis of a human being is the fruit of the unitive love between two people, hence in no way can it be an impure act.

Sacred/Profane - When St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and when Jesus tells us that instead of praying to be seen by others, we should do so in our room (Matthew 6:5), we should pray within ourselves in spirit and truth, not on Mount Gerizim or in the temple of Jerusalem (John 4:23-54), where then lies the profane? Was not everything created by God? If everything and everyone was created by God, nothing is profane, everything is sacred.

Good/Bad - Love as a human need (to love and to be loved) does not seem, at first glance, to be connected with morality, but it really is. When we judge we do not love, when we love we do not judge; universal love, especially love of enemies, overcomes the dualistic thinking of good versus evil, and can take us to the eternity that is God, the one who makes rain come down on the just as well as the unjust, and loves everyone unconditionally. We are called to be like Him.

It is also said that love is blind; that lovers tend not to see each other's faults and shortcomings, and naturally refrain from judging each other. And it also seems that when love disappears, only defects and deficiencies are seen. This leads us to conclude that only love can free us from being hypercritical of each other, taking us back to the Garden of Eden.

God/Devil  - There is only God, the devil does not exist, his myth was created to exonerate God from the creation of evil. Evil, or individual evils, were created by man when he misused his freedom. The possibility that this would happen, that is, the possibility that men could sin, choose evil, was created by God in making man free. There is no equally viable alternative to good, to God; he who does not gather with me, Jesus says, scatters, for there is no devil with whom he can gather....

Quantum Mechanics Proves the Power of Faith
Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’  Matthew 17:19-20

In classical deterministic mechanics, knowing the initial position and momentum (mass and velocity) of all particles belonging to a system, we can calculate their interactions and predict how they will behave.

This is not the case in quantum mechanics; Heisenberg's Principle highlights that it is impossible to know both the exact position an electron occupies in the electrosphere of an atom and the speed at which it moves around the nucleus; the more we know about its speed, the less we will know about its position, and vice versa.

According to Niels Bohr, when measuring a subatomic particle, the very act of measuring forces the particle to give up all possible places where it could be and (uncertainty principle) selects the location where you can find it; it is the act of measuring that forces the particle to make that choice.

Unlike Einstein, Bohr accepted that the nature of reality was inherently confusing; Einstein preferred to believe in the certainty of things in themselves and at all times, not just when they are measured or observed. Bohr even went on to say that he "would like the moon to stay in its place even when I'm not looking at it." When Einstein, already quite annoyed, said that "God didn't play dice," Bohr impassively replied, "Stop telling God what to do.”

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot be behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." Max Planck (1858-1947) Nobel laureate, founder of quantum theory.

Integral Worldview
‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’  Mark 2:21-22

Those who still have their minds shaped by the deterministic principles and precision of mechanistic physics cannot understand quantum physics and mechanics. Their materialistic wineskins cannot understand a matter impregnated with spirit, bizarre, illogical, judicious, mystical; the Dane Niels Bohr, one of the creators of the new science, once said that only those who did not understand quantum physics were not scandalized by it.

The integral view of reality sees everything as having an outer and inner aspect. Heaven and earth are thus seen as the inner and outer aspects of a single reality. The spirit is at the center of every created thing. This inner spiritual reality is inextricably related to an outer form or physical manifestation.

Heaven or spirit is not up and matter down, but rather the spirit is within the matter. It is in a sense the immanence of God who is at the center of everything. Everything is in God and God is in everything. This is not pantheism that everything is God, but panentheism: everything is in God and God is in everything. This worldview is shared by Native American religions, which speak of father heaven and mother earth.

The soul or spirit, as described by St. John, is also governed by the same principle of uncertainty that governs the interior of matter in the subatomic particles from which it is formed: ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ John 3:8.

The integral worldview reconciles science with religion, matter with spirit, the inner world with the outer world. The enchanted world of subatomic particles has proved to the scientist that after all he cannot grasp everything with his reason and be the master of reality that he thought he was during the time of Newton's mechanistic physics. The new physics tells the man of today to "Grow up!”

Conclusion: the agnostic materialists, out of touch with the reality of today's quantum physics, continue to be formatted according to Newton's mechanistic physics; by robbing the spirit of matter, they eat a bread that feeds but tastes like nothing. The spiritualists, denying the corporeality of matter, live like penitent souls in a world that, being in itself a valley of pleasures and joys, has become a valley of tears. By stealing matter from spirit, they eat a bread that may taste good, but does not nourish. The integral worldview is like a whole grain bread, which nourishes and tastes good; it gives health to the body and joy to the soul.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Spiritualist Worldview

When we speak of the Christian worldview, we are referring more to the contribution of Christianity to humanity and how humanity is indebted to it in many respects as a global religion. As we have spoken about the biblical worldview, referring to the Hebrew people, and therefore to the Old Testament; in speaking of the Christian worldview, we focus more on the content of the Christian narrative or, if you will, on Judeo-Christianity. The spiritualist worldview is a Christian worldview, but with a strong Greek influence.

During the time of Christ nothing was written down, in any language; the New Testament writings report in Greek the events that happened in Hebrew and Aramaic. That is, the authors of the New Testament were at the same time writing and translating. “Traductor, traditor” says the wise Latin proverb meaning the translator is a traitor.  The historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth occurred in a purely and exclusively Hebrew context; however, those who reported them to the world did so in a foreign language: Greek, knowing that they were doing so for Christian communities in the diaspora and that the new faith had little future in Israel.

From the Italian Peninsula to the west, the Romans imposed their language on the populations they conquered, because these peoples were primitive and did not know writing; but to the east of the Italian Peninsula, Greek prevailed, because it was the language of the soul of the rich Hellenic culture, which in many ways was superior to the Roman’s. For this reason, and because all the authors of the New Testament beginning with St. Paul knew Greek, it was in this language that they poured out the Word of God made Man.

Unbiblical Christian Worldview
‘…because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’ When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. Acts of the Apostles 17:31–33

Paul's discourse in the aeropagus is a clash of two different cultures, based on two different anthropologies or the human being’s ways of perceiving: the Greek dualistic one of mortal body and immortal soul, and the holistic biblical one of both the body and the soul can be mortal and immortal, depending on whether or not they adhere to the God of life.

The spiritualist worldview is not from biblical revelation, but rather an adaptation or enculturation of Christianity to the Hellenic culture, dominant in that time and place. This unrevealed worldview was imposed on the Church and governed it throughout the Middle Ages. It still rules many consciences today. As often happens in life, you go to others with the intention of converting them and they end up converting you. This is what happened when the new faith began to walk in the paths of ancient Greece.

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:31

In both the Old and the New Testaments, creation is a work of love. God liked what he made, never giving up on his work, especially the creation of human beings who, unlike other creatures, were created in his image and likeness.

In the second century, a new worldview emerged that challenged this Judeo-Christian belief that creation was basically good. In this new worldview, creation is not good, but evil. It represents the fall when the spirit or soul that lived with God was exiled into the body, into matter. The soul or spirit is intrinsically good, the matter is intrinsically evil. The world is a prison and as such, a "valley of tears”.

If the human being is composed of two opposing elements, then he lives a schizophrenic life as if he had two personalities. If this is so, how can we look positively on the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ?

Having become trapped in mortal bodies, the spirits became subject to the warped and ignorant powers that govern the world of matter. Consequently, sex and earthly life in general were considered evil. The task of religion was to rescue the spirit from the flesh, to recover the spiritual heaven from which the soul had fallen.

Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and the sexual attitudes associated with Puritanism, continue to be powerful factors in spiritualism today, in addition to sexual disorders, eating disorders, negative self-images, and the rejection of one's own body that led to the self-flagellation widely practiced by saints and non-saints, by friars, monks, and nuns, as well as by lay people.

This spiritualistic and negativistic view is reflected in the spirituality of many to this day, in placing much emphasis on gaining and not losing Heaven. As the catechism taught, the enemies of the soul come from three sources: the world, the devil, and the flesh, referring of course to the body, especially the sexualized body.

Spiritualism in the Bible
This negative worldview of the body and the world, of matter in general, infected the later writings of the New Testament, since they were already written at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second. Admittedly, we do not find this tendency in the earlier writings when Hellenism was not yet dominant in the Church.

Negative view of the world in St. John's writings
We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. 1 John 5:19

The word "world" appears 185 times in the New Testament, 78 in the Gospel of John, 8 in Matthew, 3 in Mark, and 3 in Luke. In the three letters of St. John, it appears 24 times. Compared to the other gospels and other New Testament’s writings, John uses and abuses the word "Cosmos" or world, why?

To the Greeks the world is not a divine creation. In this, John differs from them, since in the prologue of John’s Gospel, it is clear that the world is from God. However, John's description of the fallen world has many connotations to the Hellenistic conception of the world as completely opposed to God. The dualism in John is ethical rather than philosophical, that is, the struggle between the good of God and the evil of this world.

The world mostly appears in a negative light, as being the habitat of sin. Christians are in the world, but not of the world – this reminds us of Plato's cave and how in this world we live as exiles. The world was good in its essence because it was created by God, but once fallen, it is existentially evil. As St. John often repeats, this world, or the prince of this world, is a synthesis of all the forces inimical to God.

We conclude that the exaggerated use of the term "world," as well as the negativity associated with it, in comparison with other biblical authors, denotes an approximation of St. John to the Hellenic conception of the world as something fallen. In contrast, he then says that God wants to save the world, which represents a Christian thought, because for the Greeks the world has no salvation because it was neither created nor willed by God. He then turns around and says that the disciples, although they are in this world, are not of this world, a thought which is very dear to the Greeks.

Negative view of the body in St. Paul’s writings
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh… Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:16-25

This classic text of St. Paul, written in his own handwriting, foreshadows a fundamentally Greek and unbiblical belief that the soul or spirit is essential and intrinsically good and, to paraphrase the gospel, is known by its fruits graphically described above. The body, or the flesh as Paul calls it, unlike the soul, is existentially and intrinsically evil. That is, neither the body can do good works nor the soul can do evil works.  

In biblical understanding and according to biblical anthropology, both body and soul can be evil, either one or the other can be good; there is no body without a soul and no soul without a body, many of the deeds listed above do not originate in the body, but in a perverted spirit, such envy for example, have little or nothing to do with the body.

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile. Matthew 15:17-20

St. Paul's text on the works of the flesh is diametrically opposed to Jesus’ way of thinking in the gospel. Evil does not come from the world outside, but when it enters the body, the soul is already infected and corrupted; in other words, evil resides in the soul, it comes from within, it does not come from outside. Contrary to what St. Paul has said, evil does not originate in matter or in the flesh and then influences and corrupts the spirit, but the other way around, evil comes from the spirit which corrupts matter or flesh.

When we see an apple with a small hole on its skin, the hole was not made by a larvae trying to get into the apple, but by a larvae trying to get out of the apple. We are apples with a bug inside of us. Just as the apple was conceived with a worm, that is, when the plant was flowering, an insect deposited its egg which then hatched into a larvae, so we were conceived with the original sin, so that evil resides in us in our spirit, not in matter or body which is intrinsically evil according to Greek philosophy and anthropology.

Hebrew Anthropology
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Hebrew anthropology, underlying biblical anthropology, is fundamentally unitary. This means that it intends to contemplate the entire personal reality from a certain perspective. Firstly, the human person is all of him "basal," that is, flesh. Secondly, the human person is "nefes", that is, he possesses a personality that we can approach from a psychological point of view (the psyche). And lastly, the human person is also all of him, "ruah", that is, spirit, insofar as we understand ourselves as beings open to the transcendent. We find clear testimony of this Old Testament anthropology in 1 Thess. 5:23, which is ultimately unitary because it looks at the whole of human reality from a certain perspective.

Greek Dualism
The Greeks are dualists in the purest of sense; for them there are two kingdoms, that of this world, which is existential, visible, transient, sensual, sensible, and deceptive, and that of God’s Kingdom, which is the essential, eternal, and unchanging. The human being has one foot in this world and one foot in the other world. His soul belongs to the realm of the essential, unchanging, and eternal, to God, and his body belongs to the realm of this world, of existence.

The body is not evil in itself, but it is a hindrance to the soul, a heavy burden. The body is the prison of the soul. Salvation, for Plato, lies in reason, which enlightened can come to dominate the passions of the body, governing life itself. With death, the soul is freed once and for all from the prison of the body to finally enjoy the immortality that is reserved for it, precisely because it is immortal in nature.

The French philosopher Descartes (1596–1650), an exponent of this kind of dualism, goes so far as to say, about the relationship between the soul and the body, that it is like that of the horse and rider; the soul is the rider, and the body is the horse that must be spurred on and guided by the rider. They are of a different nature and the connection between the two is very slight.

Theological Problems Raised by Greek Dualism
"This is all very confusing, please explain to me, Father," asked an Irish parishioner, "when we die our body goes to earth, our soul goes to Heaven and we, where do we go?"

According to Jewish anthropology, the human being is wholly saved or wholly condemned. We resurrect with a spiritual body that is the image of our physical body and composed of everything that the physical body has done well. We cannot do good without the body, without the head that thinks and projects, the heart that feels, and the hands that do work; therefore, the spiritual body is the glorification of our thinking head, our loving heart, and our working hands.

If the soul is immortal, if it is not biodegradable, then hell is eternal torture; however, if the soul is mortal, as biblical anthropology affirms, hell is eternal death, because eternal life is not contrary to eternal torture, but eternal death. Some Catholic theologians go so far as to say that hell is a nothingness, not a postmodern nihilistic nothing however, but something like an analgesic that would spare us the suffering of not having lived the life that God had reserved for us; it will be a nothingness, but a nothingness that hurts like fire. I find this position little different from the classical Catholic one: nothingness cannot hurt, and if it hurts, then it is not nothing, but eternal suffering.  

In Jewish anthropology, man does not have a mortal body and an immortal soul; man is all mortal if he is outside the Grace of God and all immortal if he is with God. Jesus tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body and can do nothing to the soul. What we should fear is the One who can kill both the body and the soul, (Matthew 10:28).

Hell, understood as eternal death, preserves both the goodness of God and the freedom of man. But what is eternal death? It is to return to the nothingness from which everything was created. He freely goes back to nothingness who answers "Nothing" to the 3 fundamental questions that every human being asks himself when he reaches the age of self-awareness: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of my life?

As stated above, the spiritualist worldview manifests itself in sub-worldviews, such as Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Puritanism, and what I call disintegrated schizophrenic dualism. Let us see what each of these mini worldviews is.

Gnosticism and Docetism
It is an ideology that predates Christianity that infiltrated Christianity when it first emerged. Fundamentally, Gnosticism repeats the Greek idea that what is human in us is our soul which is eternal and of divine origin, while the physical body, the prison of the soul, and its habitat, everything that surrounds it, the cosmos, that is, the world, were created not by God but by a demiurge, an imperfect spirit.

The final and definitive liberation only comes with death, but until this occurs, we can obtain a relative freedom through the acquisition of "gnosis", or knowledge, to be able to overpower the body and its base instincts and desires. Since Christianity is liberation from sin, and Gnosticism is liberation from ignorance, some Gnostics have assimilated Christianity, just as some Christians have allowed themselves to be carried away by Gnosticism. However, there is a radical difference between the two. Christianity is public, it is for everyone and not just for an occult elite of initiates, while Gnosticism is private and elitist, it is only for a few enlightened ones.

Docetism, a legitimate child of Gnosticism, comes from the Greek word "dokesis," meaning appearance. In the first and second centuries A.D., the Docetists claimed that Jesus Christ only appeared to be human. They considered the material world, including the human body, as to be so evil and corrupt that God, who is all good, could not have taken a true human body and human nature. Jesus' human nature is therefore feigned.

The Gnostic antagonism between the spiritual and material worlds led the Docetists to deny that Jesus was a true man. The Docetists had no problem with Jesus' divinity, they just did not believe in his true humanity. If Jesus' humanity is an illusion, then his passion and death on the cross with the suffering that this involved were also an illusion, they did not really happen.

The Christianity of Alexandria, which abandoned the Church with the council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. later called Coptic, as well as that of Ethiopia, are Monophysite Docetists, believing only in the divine nature of Christ. It is no coincidence that Docetism arose in Egypt, precisely where years before Christianity Gnosticism had emerged. When I was in Ethiopia, I remember hearing a Coptic Christian hymn in which it said that Jesus did not suffer on the cross, he was content and happy.

Manichaeism
It was a very ancient religion of the Fertile Crescent, which disappeared with the rise of the great religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What we know of Manichaeism is presented to us by some who were Manichaeans before they were Christians, such as St. Augustine (430 A.D.). Mani (277 A.D.), the founder, belonged to a Judeo-Christian group before founding his own religion. He felt he was the heir of the great prophets Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, and Mohammed, and sought to make a synthesis of their teachings. He proclaimed himself an apostle of Jesus, because of all the religions, he found himself closest to Christianity.

Manichaeism is a form of Christian Gnosticism, so dualistic that the very word Manichaeism has historically become synonymous with absolute dualism. In the world there are two forces that oppose each other: light/good and darkness/evil. The soul, of course, belongs to light and the body to darkness, so the goal of human life is for light to prevail over darkness. Mani advised his faithful to lead an ascetic life, not to kill any living thing, not to eat meat, not to drink alcohol, and to live a celibate life.

Puritanism
Historically, Puritanism was a 16th and 17th century movement that sought to "cleanse" the Church of England from the remnants of Catholicism.

It was not entirely successful in England, but in the New World of America, the movement flourished and became a way of life, very evident even in their way of dressing.

Today’s modern usage of the word puritan has nothing to do with its historical root, but more to do with a negative view of sex and the pleasure associated with it. Sex was restricted to marriage, which in this sense was seen as a remedy for concupiscence, and as a means for procreation. It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion, as St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 7:8-9).

The excessive value placed on virginity, especially that of female physical virginity, that is, an intact hymen, has led to the declaration that Mary was a virgin before, during, and after childbirth. I can understand that she was a virgin before childbirth and after childbirth, and I accept and believe that she was, but I do not see why she has to be a virgin during childbirth, something that is unnatural and unnecessary which I can only understand in the context of a negative view of sex and an extrapolated valuation of physical virginity at the expense of motherhood.

Virginity has no value in itself, but is oriented towards motherhood, whether it is a physical motherhood of a woman who is the mother of a baby, whom she nurtures and nourishes to make it an authentic human being, or of a woman who puts marriage aside to be the mother of more children in a spiritual and educational sense, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Virginity understood in this way has nothing to do with whether or not the hymen is ruptured, because it is a human value for both men and women.

Disintegrated Schizophrenic Dualism
In this sub-worldview, we find many intellectuals and men of science, arts, politics, high finance who are, at the same time, profoundly Christian, that is, they do not follow the materialistic worldview that is dominant in these circles.  

These skilled professionals in their field – scientists, doctors, university professors, politicians, and journalists – in failing to reconcile their faith with science, made within themselves a gentlemen's agreement, that is, they have placed these two dimensions in separate rooms of the same house that is their mind. These are closed rooms that do not communicate with each other, that is, they live simultaneously in their minds a dualism and a mental and existential schizophrenia.

They are at the same time men of science and men of faith; however, since they have not found the formula to reconcile the two, and since they somehow think they are irreconcilable, they live the two dimensions separately, as if it were a modern state where religion does not meddle in politics and politics does not meddle in religion. To such State-Church separation, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

By way of example, such scientists and professionals during the week are evolutionists, that is, they believe in the theory of the evolution of the species, and on Sunday, the Lord's Day, they are creationists, that is, they believe in the book of Genesis as if it were a history book; as long as they never put the two positions in dialogue, there is no problem.

What happens inside these scientists and good professionals in their field is what happens in society in general: science lives with its back turned on religion and considers it the stuff of ignorance, while defensive religion takes refuge in its churches and demonizes science.

Conclusion: The materialist worldview ignores the spiritual dimension of human life, just as the spiritualist worldview demonizes the corporeal dimension. Truth requires that the two dimensions integrate and harmonize: no spirit without matter, no matter without spirit. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Materialistic Worldview

The materialistic view of reality is opposed to the spiritualistic view that reigned throughout Middle Ages, part of Ancient Times, and which still exists today. Both have historical roots, but they are not linked to a single period in history, like the Medieval or the Renaissance worldview, nor to a particular culture, like the Western or the Chinese. Both the spiritualistic and materialistic worldviews are past and contemporary, transversal to many cultures.

They are more typical of one time than another, as well as more clinging to one specific culture than another. They are worldviews in the broadest sense of the term, since they are more comprehensive in both historical time and cultural space. Historically, the Middle Ages was all spiritualistic, while from the Renaissance onward, throughout the Modern and Contemporary Ages, they are more materialistic.

Whether it takes on a theoretical character, in the form of philosophy such as atheism or agnosticism, or a practical character, in the form of capitalist consumerism, self-gratification and the absence of values, materialism is today the philosophy of life or the worldview that governs most people. It clearly governs the world of politics, economics, and health, because money has always been a religion in itself, beyond the world of science, universities, the media, and culture in general.

I once asked someone if he was religious; offended, he replied, "How can I be religious? I'm a scientist." Being materialistic, agnostic, or atheistic, is fashionable nowadays, while being religious is out of fashion and connotes ignorance. Therefore, even the few who are religious, do not present themselves as such in order not to lose friends, jobs, or social position.

To the materialists, who live without meaning since matter does not give meaning to life, one can apply that famous phrase of the Dalai Lama: "They live as if they never had to die, and they die as if they had never lived." In fact, Karl Marx, the ultimate exponent of dialectical and historical atheism, faced the question of death in the same cynical way by saying that death should not concern us, because as long as we exist, it will not exist; when it eventually becomes a reality, we will no longer exist.

In other words, death should not be a cause for concern because we will never coexist with it. The fact is, however, no matter how much we hide it in society, it will show up, when first we lose our parents and our aunts and uncles, then our older siblings…

The Medieval society lived reconciled with death, in harmony with it, and in a quasi-friendship, even going so far as to give it a feminine form, dress it in white, and invite it to a circle dance and play chess to see if one could beat, deceive, or distract it. Contrastingly, the modern and contemporary society is afraid of death, afraid that it will take everything away because death is eternal, so they repress the thought of death, in the same manner the Victorian Puritan society repressed sex.

From Animism to Atheism
From animism to materialism there is a gradual materialization of matter and symbiosis with Man, the thinking being that analyzes and relates to it. In the beginning, everything had a soul, even the most material matter had a soul. In a materialistic world like today's, it is hard for us to think that this was the case in the past; however, without going any further, we all experienced a stage of animism in our childhood when we got hurt by something, we would hit, blame, and call that thing bad, as if it were a living entity.

At the adult level, superstition is a remnant of animism, that is, when one grants spiritual value or power to something that is purely material, such as a key or a horseshoe, this is animism, today called superstition.

Knowing certain material realities, knowing how it works and for what purpose, robbed them of their souls, so they became inanimate and returned to being just matter. However, it was not possible to know certain realities scientifically, or they were not easy to know, or it was not possible to completely know and master them. To these realities they were given the name gods and thus was born the god of war, the goddess of love, the god of time, the god of wine, the god of the sea, etc., and consequently polytheism came into being.

For the sake of simplification or in order to unite various peoples and avoid the quarrels of "my god is greater than your god", which could instigate holy wars or other disputes, man intuited that God must be one Lord and creator of everything and everyone. Thus, monotheism emerged in its absolute form, in Judaism and Islam, and in its trinitarian form, in Christianity.

Finally, when scientific progress allowed man to dominate most realities, he decided to kill God (psychoanalytic concept) in order to put himself in God’s place as superman (Nietzsche). In this dialectic of stealing the soul from the known, man ended up stealing the soul of God himself, affirming as Feuerbach did, that it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his own image and likeness.

As the result, the dialectical or philosophical materialism emerged, then the historical materialism and the communist revolution with Karl Marx, and the atheistic psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche declared "God is dead, long live the superman" and after God's burial, came Nietzsche's own nihilism followed by Sartre's Nausea about the banality and emptiness of existence.

Materialistic Ideology
This worldview became prominent during the Enlightenment, but it is as old as Democritus (370 B.C.). The materialistic worldview asserts that there is no spirit, no god, no soul. Nothing that cannot be known through the five senses and reason.

Nothing exists beyond nature that has causal influence or acts on nature itself. There is, therefore, no higher being that created nature and exerts any power over it. There is only material nature and nothing beyond it. Life on Earth arose by itself, when all the right conditions to support life came together by chance, from natural substances, by natural selection for natural purposes.

The supernatural or spiritual is a chimera, it does not exist, it is not observable. If something has no explanation, it is not because it is supernatural, but simply because the human being does not know everything yet; In the future, science may be able to explain it. So, it was and has been in the past: realities that were once seen as gods, today they are completely explainable.

The spiritual world is therefore an illusion (an infantile consolation, as Freud calls it). There is no higher being, we are mere complexes of matter, and when we die, we cease to exist, and the simple elements that make up our body will return to their simplicity as our body disintegrates. Since there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe, people have to create values for themselves. There is no right or wrong, except what society dictates, for purposes of survival and tranquility.

Many do not even create values to guide their lives by, because it is difficult to establish ethics without religion. Materialists are fortunate that more than 90% of humanity believes in the existence of a higher being, the foundation and guarantor of the social structure we have; otherwise, 1% of humanity could not have more wealth than the remaining 99%, as is the case today.

If human beings did not believe in life beyond death, the ultimate foundation of ethics, there would be no army or police powerful enough to contain human anger against injustice.  Napoleon Bonaparte was right when he said that religion is what makes the poor not kill the rich.

If what happens after death is the same for the just and the unjust, then it is difficult to distinguish justice from injustice if both have the same end: nothingness. That is why most materialists drown their sorrows in consumerism. Life is bread and circus, as the Romans said, Tempus fugit, Carpe diem, time escapes us, let us seize the day, or "Die Martha, die with a filled belly ".

The processes of evolution or change are essentially random, they have no predefined objective, because there is no intelligent design, as religious believers believe. Randomness reigns: dinosaurs were not predestined to disappear, if that meteorite that destroyed their habitat had not fallen, they might still be alive today, and humans would never have emerged. Beyond randomness, what exists is a natural selection governed by the law of the fittest or whatever adapts best to the circumstances of an ever-changing environment.

It is this and only this that determines why some living beings survive and others perish. Materialists believe that this unconscious, undirected "selection" process, together with random genetic fluctuations (i.e., mutations), are the keys that explain the origin of the world and the living things as we know them today, ourselves included.

Since there is no intelligent design nor any goal that nature has to fulfill, intelligence itself and what we call spiritual are the result of complex natural and material processes that are possible to know and explain. We do not need God to explain anything in the physical-chemical nature. There is nothing in the universe that is personal, everything is impersonal. The human person is another chimera created by spiritualists, there is nothing in the human person beyond complicated physical-chemical processes.

"Scientific" Analysis of Materialism, Atheism or Agnosticism
It is true that we can neither prove the existence of God nor his non-existence, so both theism and atheism or agnosticism are beliefs. That is, one is faith the other is anti-faith, but both involve faith.

Atheists or agnostics like to pose as scientists, friends of science, rational and enlightened. Science is logical-deductive, like mathematics, or intuitive, like Einstein's theory of relativity.

Atheism or agnosticism is not logical – It makes no sense that human beings are, as Karl Marx says, the moment when nature gained thought or self-consciousness, only to realize our misery, that is, that we come from nothing like everything else and will return to nothing along with the flea, the louse, and the bedbug.

If we gained self-consciousness for this, merely to know that we are the only living beings aware of our misery, we would be better off not being aware like the rest of the living beings. It is like knowing the day and circumstances of our death: I do not think there is a single person who is interested in that information.

Unlike the rest of living things, the awareness that we exist for a while and then cease to exist, instead of being a greatness of evolution is rather like going from a horse to a donkey. Where is the greatness of being aware of our own misery, with no solution to remedy it?

Unlike the rest of the living beings that, living in symbiosis with nature, have no freedom, autonomy or independence from it, human beings have their life in their own hands, they have a certain freedom to do with it as they want. Why this freedom, if no matter what we do, the end will be the same for everyone? On the other hand, having freedom is also taking a risk, in the sense that I can make bad choices and turn my life into hell, something that other living beings cannot do.

In life, living beings are happy, they do not need to work, or to study, or to suffer. We, human beings, can be happy or unhappy in life, but even those who are happy always have relative happiness, because the thought that one day we will cease to exist poisons any joy or pleasure, turning it into sadness and depression.

Atheism or agnosticism is not deductive – If the universe was not expanding, if it were static and not dynamic and constantly changing, like the waters of Heraclitus' river, if it had always been the same, if there had been no changes, no evolution, no revolution, we could deduce that it had always existed, that the universe was the god of itself.

This is what science once thought before the Hubble telescope, located far out in space, showed that galaxies are moving away from each other, which led us to deduce that the universe is expanding. The deductive Big Bang theory that states that galaxies are moving away from each other was formulated by the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. According to him, the universe began with a big explosion; in this big explosion time/space and matter/energy were created.

In Nature, ignitions or explosions do not happen spontaneously. Everything happens on a cause/effect basis: there is no cause without effect, no effect without cause, there is no water without thirst, no thirst without water. Or, as the people say, "when the pot is made, the lid is made for it”. Furthermore, we do not observe in nature anything that creates itself; it is therefore more logical to deduce the existence of a creator than to deduce his non-existence.

If the universe did not always exist and then began to exist, then there was a "time" when it did not exist at all. And there will be a time when it will cease to exist. Only the Bible spoke of the end of the world, and the so-called scientists used to laugh at this idea and at Christians. Since he who laughs last, laughs the hardest, now we are the ones laughing. Faced with indisputable evidence, science had to concede that the world will cease to exist one day.

Atheists reacted to the Big Bang theory by coming up with their own Big Crunch theory, that is, that the universe would be expanding, as if it were a rubber band, until it could expand no further, then initiating the reverse process of contraction until it collapses on itself, with matter coming together all over again causing a new Big Bang. Thus, the universe would be a succession of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

However, the second law of thermodynamics disproved this theory, because matter does not transform into energy without some loss. If this was not the case, it would be possible to make a machine that manufactures the energy it needs to keep itself going indefinitely. The sun will use up all its hydrogen and helium, just as the universe will use up all its energy until it disappears, and the little matter in this future universe will not have enough force of gravity to bind together. At that time, the universe will turn into a black hole.

Atheism or agnosticism is not intuitive – Intuition is the opposite of logic and deduction; if it was not for intuition, Einstein would never have arrived at the theory of relativity, for it is neither logical nor deduced from any observation. Intuition is both a qualitative and a quantitative leap. If I start from the observation of reality, I am catapulted by intuition to a reality that is neither observable nor experienceable, but that is related to what I observe and gives meaning to everything I observe.

In this sense, faith is an intuition; God is reached by intuition, but not only God: much of today's quantum physics, heir to the theory of relativity, is intuitive. Much of today's astronomy is intuitive, as we have no way yet of observing certain realities.

Atheism or agnosticism is inductive – Atheism or agnosticism is instigated; it is forced and supposes the repression of religious feeling, which is connatural to the human being and which we can observe in all times and in all places, and in most of the human beings who inhabit our planet today.

Theists have always made up more than 80% of the inhabitants of this planet in all eras, and in all cultures. To this day there have been many cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there have never been any without religion.

Therefore, atheism or agnosticism is induced by fashion, by the consumer society, by communism, or by any ideology that seeks to remove all orientation from the human being; thus, disoriented and bewildered, he is much easier to manipulate and turn into an obsessive and neurotic consumer, which is very good for the economy since this makes the GDP grow but reduces the health of individuals. The healthier the economy, the sicker the individuals who feed it.

And for this, the religious feeling natural to the human being and present in all cultures of all times must be ignored at first, but since it always resurfaces, it must be repressed, hidden.

I maintain that there are no true atheists or agnostics, but rather polytheists, that is, they deny the existence of the one true God in order to pay homage, veneration, and worship to many small gods. Money would be the father of this pantheon, just as Zeus and Jupiter were the fathers of the Greek and Roman pantheons, respectively. Then there are gods who are the patrons of certain realities that the atheist or materialist relates to: power, beauty, pleasure, fame, entertainment such as football, etc.

What would a world governed by the materialistic worldview look like? It would be a world without music, without art, without poetry, without literature, without human rights, without ethics, an authentic barbarism, an authentic anarchy. What does the materialistic consumerist society leave for posterity?

Given that the reflection of religious feeling has left us almost all of the most beautiful monuments and works of humanity, the pyramids of Egypt, the Gothic cathedrals, the mosques, the Hindu temples, what could materialism leave us but the nausea of Sartre, the Soviet gulags, and the current Chinese concentration camps to brainwash the Uighur people?

Conclusion - Materialists claim that the human being is merely the point at which matter becomes self-aware. However, it makes little sense for matter to awaken only to realize it is matter. Self-awareness is a spiritual activity, suggesting that matter is oriented toward the spirit, not the other way around. Atheists and agnostics repress the innate religious feeling present in all ages and cultures, much like Puritans repressed sexuality.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Renaissance worldview

The European world understands that there is no cultural, scientific, and philosophical continuity between the Ancient Times and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages was like a trauma that paralyzed the world, and put it in a coma for a long time. The city is the place of culture, because it is where the largest number of people are concentrated, where a countless number of transactions and communications take place, and where a countless number of professions are practiced.

In the bucolic countryside only agriculture is practiced, people live isolated from each other. The medieval world was a rural world. It is true that the countryside is where one has a place to live and food to eat, but a life dedicated only to subsisting can hardly be called human, only animals spend their lives exclusively subsisting, that is their time is entirely devoted to look for food.

Agriculture is therefore the foundation of culture. However, the goal of agriculture should not stop at subsistence, but to create surpluses that will then be the basis of trade, which will allow the acquisition of other goods and promote the relationships between people, giving rise to other activities. In short, they will foster culture and development.

During the Renaissance, cities began to reappear. Europe, realizing the cultural discontinuity between the Ancient Times and the ten centuries of the Middle Ages, tried to perform a bypass, by passing over the Middle Ages to go back to the past to the Greco-Roman world to resurrect this culture without the mediation or the lenses of the Church.

Inspired by the values of classical antiquity, the Renaissance man has the idea that everything medieval is bad and everything belonging to the ancient world is good. This perspective is mistaken on multiple fronts. Philosophy, for example, though of Christian inspiration, advanced in the Middle Ages; architecture, especially Gothic architecture, took a huge step forward during Medieval Times.

The somewhat crude architecture of Greek and Roman times was recreated during Renaissance with the monumental style that lost to the Gothic style in beauty; it is merely monumental, that is, big, immense. For example, St. Peter's Basilica is monumental, it is Renaissance, but it is certainly not more beautiful than the simplest Gothic cathedral.

With the emergence of the burgh, a term that means city, at the end of the Middle Ages, another social class was born in the midst of the people, the bourgeoise, or literally the city dweller. They were not, of course, dedicated to agriculture, but to commerce, arts, and skilled trades which emerged as life became more diversified and no longer revolved around subsistence. This physical aspect was entrusted to the people and their work in agriculture, the spiritual and moral aspect was entrusted to the clergy, and the security aspect was entrusted to the nobility.

Origin of the Renaissance
In the Italian peninsula, cities never totally disappeared and the peoples did not stop trading or using money. There was, however, a decrease in these activities during the Middle Ages. Due to the geographical situation of the Italian peninsula in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, several riverside cities such as Venice, Genoa, Florence, Rome, among others, benefited from trade with the East. Marco Polo is said to have paved the way.

These regions grew rich with the development of trade on the Mediterranean Sea, giving rise to a rich merchant bourgeoisie class. In order to assert themselves socially, these merchants sponsored artists and writers, who inaugurated a new way of expressing art. The Church and the nobility were also patrons of artists like Michelangelo, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro della Francesca, among many others.

The new bourgeoise social class that emerged in the Renaissance had money but no status, unlike the clergy and the nobility. On the other hand, since they had money, they did not fit in with the peasants. Thus, they sought to invest their wealth by sponsoring works of art, in order to be socially recognized.

Reborn
‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.’ John 3:3-5

In mid-14th century, a transition began between the medieval and modern worlds. This transition is known as the Renaissance or being born again, as the Gospel suggests.

The movement began in Italy which had been the center of Greco-Roman culture and its last stronghold, the center of the Roman Empire. It was also the place most dominated by the Church, since almost all of Italy at the end of the Middle Ages was a Papal State, made up of lands that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne gave to the Church. Therefore, those who call the Church obscurantic forget that it was the greatest promoter of Renaissance in the field of architecture, painting, sculpture, and other art forms. And that Greco-Roman culture was reborn precisely where it had been made extinct by the barbarians.

The Renaissance encompassed almost every facet of life, economics, politics, philosophy, and art among many, and especially science. The major contributors to the Renaissance (such as Petrarch, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Dante) classified the medieval period as slow and dark, a time of limited education or innovation. They saw the medieval period as an interruption of culture between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance.

The idea of community distinguished the medieval period. The people—clergy, nobility, and peasantry —faced real threats of famine, disease, and war, which were dangers that fostered community dependence in areas such as labour, religion, and defense. For example, a medieval tradesman belonged to an association that dictated every aspect of his business. The idea was that all craftsmen would earn an equitable living, and not that some would earn more than others.  Uniformity was the norm; each profession had its own way of dressing, even prostitutes had their distinct habit, a way of dressing that distinguished them from other women.

The Renaissance, on the other hand, underlined the importance of individual talents. This idea, known as individualism, is visible in the philosophy and art of the time. Moreover, while medieval scholars had studied ancient Greek and Roman documents to learn about God and Christianity, Renaissance scholars studied them to discover more about human nature. This new interpretation was known as humanism.

Thus, a humanism not directly linked to Christianity emerged, that is, a secular humanism that would grow exponentially throughout the Modern Times. In fact, the Renaissance was the first stone of the materialistic humanistic worldview opposed to a spiritualistic worldview that reigned throughout the Middle Ages.

Renaissance art also reflected this humanistic worldview. While medieval art was intended to teach a lesson, perhaps tell a biblical story, like the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance art glorified the humanity of the individuals portrayed. Medieval statues tend to be of saints and in an unnatural mystical position. In contrast, Michelangelo's David, the Pieta, and Moses seem to be more realistic. The statues stopped being frozen images of piety and began to reveal human emotions, appearing ready for action.

Renaissance Values
Rationalism – Reason was the only path to reach knowledge. Everything could be explained through reason and science. Medieval scholasticism also valued reason, but not exclusively. Faith is another way of knowing, which Renaissance ignores, as does culture in general after it.

Scientism – For the Renaissance, all knowledge should be demonstrated through scientific experiments. The expression "experience is the mother of science" is from this period. Today we know that experience is not the only mother of all sciences. Science is not only the result of logic and deduction, but also of intuition, as demonstrated by the theory of relativity.

Individualism – Human beings sought to assert their own personality, showcase their talents, achieve fame, and fulfill their ambitions through the concept that individual right was above collective right. Thus, liberalism in all its forms emerged. We will have to wait for the socialist revolution to talk more about equality, because the equality of the French revolution was an equality where some are more equal than others, as George Orwell puts it.

Anthropocentrism – Places man as God’s supreme creation and the center of the universe. The phrase “man is the measure of all things” is from this time. God begins to be cast aside, until he is completely replaced by Nietzsche's superman.

Classicism – Artists looked to Greco-Roman Classical Antiquity for inspiration to realize their works. The idea was that any moment in the past is better than the Medieval one.

Renaissance Writings
Great writers who are still famous worldwide are from this time, because they wrote world-renowned works for all times, as well as becoming ex libris or representative of the culture where they arose.

• Dante Alighieri: Italian writer, author of the great poem "Divine Comedy". It deals with the three instances after death – Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory – and is a jewel of universal literature and the ex libris of Italian culture.
• Machiavelli: author of "The Prince", a precursor work of political science where the author gives advice to the rulers of the time.
• Shakespeare: considered one of the greatest playwrights of all times. In his work, he addressed human conflicts in the most diverse dimensions: personal, social, political. He wrote comedies and tragedies, such as "Romeo and Juliet", "Macbeth", "The Taming of the Shrew", "Othello" and several others. Ex libris of English culture.
• Miguel de Cervantes: Spanish author of "Don Quixote", a scathing critique of medieval chivalry. Ex libris of Spanish culture.
• Luís de Camões: stood out in Renaissance literature in Portugal, as the author of the great epic poem "Os Lusíadas", ex libris of Portuguese nationality.

Renaissance Arts
We highlight Leonardo da Vinci who is the ex libris, stereotype or prototype of the Renaissance man; the man of a hundred trades. He was a mathematician, physicist, anatomist, inventor, architect, sculptor, and painter; he was the Renaissance man who mastered several sciences. For this reason, he is considered an absolute genius. The mysterious Mona Lisa and the Last Supper are his masterpieces. When someone tells us about the Last Supper of Christ, the image that always comes to mind is that of Leonardo da Vinci's timeless painting.

Scientific Renaissance
The Renaissance was marked by important scientific discoveries, notably in the fields of astronomy, physics, medicine, mathematics, and geography. The Polish Nicolaus Copernicus denied the geocentric theory defended by the Church, inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy, by stating that "the Earth is not the center of the universe, but simply one of the many planets that revolves around the Sun”. The new center was now the sun. Today we know that neither the Earth nor the sun is the center of the universe. The universe may not have a center...

Galileo Galilei discovered the rings of Saturn, the sunspots, the satellites of Jupiter. Persecuted and threatened by the Church, Galileo was forced to publicly deny his ideas and discoveries. "And yet it moves," Galileo is said to have said as he left the courtroom where he was forced to lie, the ‘it’ refers to the Earth. The Church was wrong to look at the Bible as a book of science.

Galileo said that it was the Earth that went around the sun, but he never managed to prove it because what people saw was the opposite: empirical experiment in this case tells us the opposite of the truth. Poor Galileo could have simply said that when we ride or move in a horse carriage, we know that it is we who move; yet our eyes see the trees moving. In the same way, we see that it is the sun that moves, even though we know that it is fixed in relation to us because we, inhabitants of this planet, are riding in the motion of a moving planet, like the carriage.

In medicine, knowledge advanced with works and experiments on blood circulation, cauterization methods, and general principles of anatomy. The first autopsies to investigate causes of death and learning about the human body and how it works are from this time.

Conclusion: upon waking up from a dream that had lasted a thousand years, the Renaissance realized that the Middle Ages, from the trauma of the barbarian invasions, was not a logical continuation of the Ancient Times that had been buried alive. The Renaissance was a bypass from the classical world to the present day, without passing through the Middle Ages. It was the drinking of the fountains and putting down roots in the Ancient Times as a model of inspiration, and casting aside the Middle Ages as if it had never happened.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Medieval Worldview

In historical terms, the Middle Ages was so named because it lies midway between the Ancient Times and the Modern Age. It begins in the 5th century, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and ends in the 15th century, with the Renaissance transition to the Modern Age. These ten centuries of history of Western civilization are usually divided into two periods: the High Middle Ages, from the 5th to the 10th century, and the Late Middle Ages, from the 10th to the 15th century.

Causes of Medieval Cultural Regression
There are those who tendentiously blame the Church for the fact that the Middle Ages was a cultural regression. It is true that the Church filtered out of the Greco-Roman culture only what was of interest to it, but it also kept much of this culture; if this had not been the case, it would not have preserved the ancient manuscripts, which would have made Renaissance impossible.  

For those who are not tendentious or biased, the main factor that plunged Europe into a limbo or a thousand-year dream was the takeover of power by the barbarians, who were more than 2,000 years behind the Greco-Roman culture. This is certainly the main factor, but there are others that contributed to or accentuated the Dark Ages.

Europe lived during the Middle Ages in a climate of constant instability. Culture does not grow in times of war. The Pax Romana had provided for cultural development; but now, the isolation, the lack of trade and communications that feudalism caused transformed the urban world and its culture into a rural and closed world where agriculture was the only activity, and the constant wars between small kingdoms and, within these kingdoms, between the feudal lords did not provide for a cultural development.

While inside Europe, the Church was dedicated to educating the barbarians, outside Europe, it was constantly threatened by other barbarians. On the western side, the Muslims, who had occupied all of North Africa, invaded the Iberian Peninsula and reached as far as the heart of France, to Poitiers, where they were defeated by Charles Martel. The Ottoman Empire threatened from the east to extend into Europe. To the north, the Vikings appeared, another Germanic tribe from Scandinavia that made quick incursions to the coasts of England and France, with the sole purpose of robbing, plundering, and killing.

These are all factors that made Europe, united under the Roman Empire, a bunch of estates or fiefdoms disconnected from each other, with the sole concern of survival. The Church or Christianity was present in all these states and in all of them, it was the only uniting factor. That is why ventures like the crusades were possible, because there was no other factor that could unite the peoples and make them leave their fiefdoms.

High Middle Ages
The High Middle Ages is the time period furthest away from us and closest to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. During this period of barbarian occupation of the Roman Empire, the urban centers were destroyed, the people returned to the countryside. The barbarians formed small kingdoms using the structures of the Roman Empire.

In the 7th century, both North Africa and the Middle East became Muslim; the latter had been part of the Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire (the longest empire in history). This Empire continued to exist for a while longer, until 1453, already in the Late Middle Ages, when it succumbed to the Ottoman Empire which in turn lasted another 600 years and ended sometimes after World War I, in 1922.

During the High Middle Ages, Christianity, which constituted itself as the heir to the Greco-Roman culture, spread throughout Europe and, as we saw in the previous text, the Germanic tribes were giving in to this religious narrative that was far superior to their own. When the chief of the tribe converted, the whole tribe converted, as a matter of loyalty, a very important value among the barbarians.

Still in the High Middle Ages, an attempt was made by the Franks during the Carolingian dynasty, to restore the old Roman Empire. The Carolingian Empire emerged in the 8th and 9th centuries by the unification of the Frankish and Germanic kingdoms during the Carolingian dynasty, which began with Charlemagne.

Later, this Empire split off from this division; the eastern part of France with the rest of Germania formed the Germanic Roman Empire during the reign of the Saxon dynasty, with Otto I as emperor. He was given the title of Holy Emperor by the Pope, which gave rise to the name Holy Germanic Roman Empire.

The Germanic emperors considered themselves direct successors of the Romans. These emperors were elected by a council of four dukes of the most important kingdoms: Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria. The emperor represented the entire Empire, but each of the confederated kingdoms had autonomy over its own territory, which was governed according to the feudal system. This Empire lasted 900 years: from the High Middle Ages, through the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Period, into the Contemporary Age, ending in 1806 with the Napoleonic wars.

Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages began in the year 1000; during this period there was a great demographic growth, feudalism was the prevailing system throughout Europe; the king of each state was only a symbolic figure, he did not have great executive power. During this time, the Church established itself not only as a spiritual powerhouse, but also as a temporal one, as it managed to incite the feudal nobles to embark on a crusade to reconquer the Holy Land that the Byzantine Empire had lost to the Ottoman Empire.

They did conquer it, but for a short time, only to lose it once the Ottoman Empire reached its height. It will not be conquered again, not even by Richard the Lionheart, until World War I by the British. During the crusades, the Germanic tribes showed their barbaric side, so they did more harm than good. Failing to defeat the Muslims, in 1204 in the fourth crusade they turned against the Christians of the East, looting, terrorizing, and vandalizing Byzantium which, weakened, feel easy prey to the Ottoman power.

The last two centuries of the Late Middle Ages were marked by various wars, adversities, and catastrophes. The population was decimated by successive famines and plaques; the Black Death alone was responsible for the death of a third of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1350. There was also the Spiritual Black Death, with the Great Schism of the Church in the West, which had profound consequences on society and was one of the factors behind numerous wars between states.

Cultural life was dominated by scholasticism, a philosophy that sought to unite faith with reason, and by the founding of the first universities. The work of Thomas Aquinas, the masterpieces of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo and the construction of the magnificent Gothic cathedrals are among the most outstanding achievements of this period.

Feudalism
The barbarian invasion caused people to flee from the city to the countryside. Western Europe was becoming rural, and the wealth was land. Agriculture became the main economic activity, and the production of the fields  was for their own sustenance. Charlemagne promoted the distribution of land to feudal lords, demanding in exchange their allegiance and aid in event of war.

Feudalism is the term we use for every social, political, cultural, ideological, and economic organization that existed in Europe during the Middle Ages. Feudalism is the ruralization of urban Roman Europe; cities only came back into existence with the opening of trade in the Modern Period, around the time of the Renaissance.

The symbol of feudalism is the feudal lord’s castle, surrounded by farmland where the serfs, the people, work from sunrise to sunset, paying homage and vassalage to the feudal lord or liege lord, a member of the nobility. From one castle to the next, monastery after monastery were built where monks who constitute the other social class, the clergy, lived.

The nobles defend the fief because they own of the land that the people work; the clergy maintain the culture and teach both religion and agricultural techniques to the people, praying for them; the people support with their work both the nobles and the clergy, although the latter was largely self-sufficient. The Nobility (bellatores) defends, the Clergy (oratores) prays, and the People (laboratores) work: this sums up rural life during feudalism.

The Ideal of Chivalry
The medieval knight embodies values such as courage, prowess, unfailing loyalty, fidelity to his word, dignity, and honor. He usually defends the poorest and fights for justice and peace. He leads an errant life of solitude, because of the battles and skirmishes he faces. He is in love with a maiden with whom he has a platonic love relationship from a distance.

He must show temperance in battle, generosity towards both friends and enemies, and courtesy towards women. The liberality of the knight who redistributes all his possessions to people and the poor is part of his fame. The values celebrated by chivalry are the fruit of a long education.

The aspiring knight must serve his apprenticeship under a lord, first by being his servant and then his squire. He then learns both the handling of weapons and the ethics of chivalry. Once invested, he must demonstrate his worth by performing in tournaments or participating in the adventures that come his way. In the quest for glory and recognition, these errant knights will also undertake multiple quests, the most prestigious of which is that for the Holy Grail, that is, the chalice of the Jesus’ Last Supper as well as for the ark of the covenant.

The Templars
They were so called because they formed this religious military order in the temple of Jerusalem where they sought the Holy Grail. These and other members of religious military orders were the ones who best embodied the spirit of the knight, for by not marrying they devoted their entire lives to holy or just wars. They were the most feared by the Muslims because they were martyrs to the cause; in fact, when Muslims imprisoned a Templar, they were not content with just killing him as they did to any crusader, but tortured him for a long time before killing him.

The Templars grew in power and in wealth, and in France, they came to have more land, more power and wealth than the King of France himself, so the latter, together with the Pope, arranged for their dissolution. Before this happened, the armada of the Templars set sail from France and is said to have gone to Portugal, where King Denis, in a smart move, instead of dissolving the order that has been powerful in Portugal since its first king Afonso Henriques, he changed its name to Knights of the Order of Christ. The Portuguese Discoveries were made by the Templars, financed by the Jews. In fact, the Portuguese caravels carried the Templar’s square cross on their sails.

Eclesia mater ed magistra
"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the king," so says the people; the Church became a powerful and influential institution not only in religion but also in medieval society. The Germanic peoples were not at all interested in culture, they could not read or write, but they knew that formation and information represented power, so they recognized in the Church not only a religious power, but also a cultural one, as heir to Greco-Roman culture. Consequently, the Church was respected, even though, as Hitler later claimed, it had no armies to subdue the peoples.

The power of the Church was only spiritual. However, since the human being is a spiritual being, when you subdue a person’s soul, you subdue his body because the body obeys the dictates of the soul. We can see a picture of this submission in the following episode that is iconographic and representative of the Middle Ages and the relations between the Church and the Germanic peoples:

…When the ferocious chief and king of the Huns was about to invade and plunder Rome, coveted by all the Germanic tribes, Pope Saint Leo the Great went out to meet him and, certainly by peaceful means, succeeded in dissuading him from this invasion.

The Germanic kingdoms adapted their customs to those of the Romans. The Church allied itself with the kings and became the great bridge between the Germanic world and the Roman world. The barbarian peoples abandoned their old religious practices and embraced Christianity. The Christian faith expanded throughout western Europe, reinforcing the power of the Pope. It was in the Carolingian Empire, in the 7th century, that the Church managed to consolidate its dominion, continuing later in the Holy Roman Germanic Empire.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, with intense and general preaching, the Church in a short time converted the conquering peoples of the Roman Empire to Christianity. In a time of wars, disintegration, and fragmentation of power, as was feudalism, religion was the only factor uniting peoples. It was also the only institution in the ancient world capable of standing up to the hegemony of the new barbarian dominators.

It was the Church that guaranteed peace, defended the peoples from the excesses of the barbarian invaders, and fought injustices, not by the force of arms, which they did not have, but by the force of reason, decency, and ethics. The barbarians respected the Church for the ascendancy it had before the people and for being the heir of the great Roman Empire which, in fact, still existed in the East.

With the subjugation of the populations in the more rural areas, the only power was that of the bishop; moreover, at the level of Rome, the Pope was the sole representative of the Roman West. In this way, the Church became a political power, and as such, also committed some errors.

Monasticism
Monks and friars were the spiritual knights of the Middle Ages. The culture of the Middle Ages was concentrated in the monasteries. The production of Classical Antiquity was guarded, and the monk copyists had the mission of copying the ancient texts so that they would not be lost over time. Access to the monastery libraries was restricted and the work was manual.

In the Europe of the High Middle Ages, divided into so many unstable kingdoms, the Church was the only strong and efficient institution, educated, rich and present everywhere. In the cities, the bishop was often the only existing authority. In the countryside, the presence of monasteries was affirmed with the Benedictine rule of "Orat ed labora": the monk must not only pray, but also work to support himself and those in need.

Throughout Europe, Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries arose, which became economic centers and, through agriculture and animal husbandry, produced food for the populations.

These monasteries were oases of culture and granaries for it, because it was here that the ancient Latin and Greek texts were copied by hand. Without these copies, these texts would have long been lost. The barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire seems to have set the culture go back, but the Church preserved this culture, as it was the sole heir to the last civilizations illustrated: that of Greece and Rome.

Americans call this era the Dark Ages, and it was to some point. However, it is hard to believe that precisely in this age the most beautiful buildings the world has ever built were constructed: the Gothic cathedrals. Each stone was carved to occupy an exact place, without cement and without iron, these cathedrals were known for their arches, columns, ogives, and vaults, all forming a harmonious and elegant whole, illuminated by multicolored stained-glass windows, a true heaven on earth.

The Gothic Cathedral as ex libris of the Medieval Worldview
It took Greek temples and Roman basilicas for there to be Gothic cathedrals; however, whatever debt the medieval architects owe to their predecessors, the truth is that they surpassed them a thousand times over. The Gothic cathedral represents an exponential advance over Greek and Roman architecture.

The vertiginous verticality of these buildings fully reveals the transformations in taste, scholastic philosophical thought, and aesthetic ideals, translated, at the architectural level, by a renewal of techniques through the introduction of a series of original elements typical of the Gothic style: the vault supported by an ogival cross, the use of the broken arch instead of the full-turn arch,  or Romanesque arch, the use of the flying buttress, and buttresses to support the stone roof formed by a set of vaults.

It is the Christian worldview that explains the unity of spirit that characterized medieval civilization, and hence the reason for the close relationship between scholasticism and Gothic cathedrals, since the full acceptance of the Catholic conception of life generated not only an authentic and unmistakable lifestyle, but also its own philosophy and architectural style.

As the theses of St. Thomas Aquinas, the founder of scholastic philosophy, indicate, God is reached not only by faith, but also by reason, that is, by an effort of complex but refined thought, rigidly formal but rich in subtleties. These same concepts inspired in architecture the Gothic cathedrals, their ascent to God, through complex but exquisite constructions, formally rigorous, but equally rich in detail. In this way, it can be said that scholastic thought is perfectly expressed in the architecture of the Gothic cathedrals.

Conclusion: It is true that the constant internal instability caused by the barbarian invasions and the end of the Pax Romana, as well as the external instability caused by the constant threat of the Vikings to the north and the Muslims to the east, south and west, plunged Europe into a limbo of paralysis and cultural regression. However, it was also this Age that produced a high paradigm of humanity in the ideal of chivalry, and the highest exponent of world architecture in the Gothic cathedrals.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Barbarians worldview

For the Greeks, the peoples north of their borders spoke a language that the did not understand. To them they babbled to what sounded like bar-bar, which gave rise to the word barbarian, that was then used to designate these foreigners. Later, for the Romans, the Latin term barbarus was applied to foreign peoples who did not speak Latin, did not follow Roman laws, and did not participate in their civilization.

The barbarians who conquered the Western Roman Empire were Germanic tribes who never created culture or civilization, nor were they even interested in creating it. We are talking about the Huns, the Vandals (from which the word vandalism comes from), the Goths, the Franks, the Lombards and the Saxons, and later, already in the Middle Ages, the Vikings. It may seem derogatory to call these peoples barbarians, but they were in fact barbarians, with a very primitive culture compared to the Greco-Roman one, with few human values, and dedicated themselves to destroying, killing, stealing, plundering, and raping.

Since they did not know writing, although it had long been in existence, they were still living in prehistory, around the time of the Iron Age, as Iron was the most important element for their wars. Moreover, their cultural or civilizational development was more than 2,000 years behind the Greco-Roman culture.

Greece could have considered the Roman invasion to be a barbarian invasion since it already had a much more developed culture in general than Rome, although the latter was better at things like state administration, law, and architecture. The Roman invasion of Greece was not regarded as a barbarian invasion by the Greeks because the Romans, although more powerful, were also humbler than the Greeks in not imposing their culture, their religion and not even their language as the Greeks had done on the peoples they conquered.

The Romans accepted the culture of others, respected and were tolerant of their ways and customs, and sometimes even allowed them, as in the case of Galilee, to be ruled by their own kings, provided they paid tribute to Rome. In fact, Rome only enforced its culture on the peoples who did not have one to begin with, as was the case throughout the West. This is why neo-Latin languages are spoken in the West today: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian and 50% of the English language.

In the East, Greek prevailed and was later the language of the Byzantium Empire, or the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted considerably longer, being supplanted by a politico-religious empire, the Ottoman Empire, which in turn only ended after World War I.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Western world was plunged into what English historians call the Dark Ages. Compared to the Ancient Times, the Middle Ages represented a step backwards on all levels. The barbarians who conquered the Empire were only interested in their material wealth, not in building a culture or a civilization. Culture had to take refuge and hide in monasteries, where a Christian version of the ancient world was preserved. The Middle Ages can be seen as a long period during which the Church patiently went about educating these barbarians who held political power, with the Greco-Roman culture it had inherited.

Causes for the Fall of the Roman Empire
Given that the Empire had grown disproportionately immense, it became too difficult to govern. In the third century, Emperor Diocletian split the Empire into two parts: the West with its capital in Rome and the East with its capital in Constantinople or Byzantium. In the short term, this seemed to be a good move to better govern such a vast empire. However, over time, the parts began to diverge; in the West, only Latin was spoken, and in the East, only Greek was spoken. Without enemies, the East grew in power and wealth, while the West gradually withered away, economically as well as militarily.

One of the main causes for the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the invasion of the barbarians, led by the Germanic peoples who lived in the region to the east of the Empire’s borders. Other causes included the decay of the economy based on slaves who worked the land and were artisans, military disintegration as well as military spending on never-ending frontier wars.

The process of the Germanic peoples’ entry into the Roman Empire initially occurred gradually. In the northeast of the Italian Peninsula, the borders of the Roman Empire were demarcated by the Danube and Rhine Rivers. The peoples and tribes that lived beyond these rivers were regarded as Germanic by the Romans.

Since the time of Caesar, the Romans had known of the existence of these peoples. They were organized into clans, did not have a state institution like the Romans, and their laws were based on tradition, transmitted orally, because they did not know writing. They devoted themselves to agriculture and herding. Because of the cold weather in which they lived, they were fearless and fierce. They were warrior peoples, which earned them the reputation of being violent and cruel.

At first, in the spirit of the famous Pax Romana, the Romans established pacts with these tribes; as we said earlier, the Romans were only interested in tribute being paid to Rome, and when the dominated peoples did so, they were granted a high degree of autonomy. However, with the weakening of the central power, these peoples acquired more and more autonomy and independence, becoming true kingdoms that the weakened Rome was powerless to confront.

Around 300 A.D., barbarian groups like the Goths invaded the borders of the Empire. The Romans resisted a Germanic revolt in the late 4th century, but in 410, the Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next few decades under constant threat, before "the Eternal City" was invaded again in 455, this time by the Vandals.

Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus. From then on, no Roman emperor would ever rule again from a post in Italy, leading many to cite 476 as the year in which the Western Empire suffered its mortal blow.

Origin of the Germanic Tribes
The Germanic peoples originated from the plains of Denmark and southern Scandinavia. There are traces of human settlements in this area dating back to the Neolithic period, when men began to control nature, domesticating the land and vegetation as well as some species of animals for their own sustenance.

When we speak of Germanic tribes, we speak of many tribes of which the most important are the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, the Franks, the Lombards, the Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons.

The Vikings were also fundamentally a Germanic tribe that inhabited further north in Scandinavia. They ravaged Europe like pirates during the Middle Ages, when the Germanic tribes were already established, forming the first Kingdoms after the fall of the Roman Empire.

As the Germanic population grew and the Empire weakened, the Germanic peoples began to emigrate in all directions, but more to the south and the west, in search of better lands because theirs were no longer sufficient. The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Lombards entered Italy; the Vandals, Franks, and Visigoths conquered much of Gaul and the Celts who lived there, and the Vandals, Suebi and Visigoths invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Of these, the Vandals came to settle in North Africa, in Carthage, and the Alans settled along the Rhine and in the Alps.

In Great Britain, the Saxons joined the Angles and other local tribes to form the Anglo-Saxons who dominated England until the Norman conquest in the Middle Ages. The rest of the islands, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland remained mostly Celtic. The Celts were not a Germanic tribe. They had their own culture and inhabited Central Europe. They were the famous inhabitants of Gaul, the Gauls conquered by Julius Caesar. They had also invaded the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans, joining the first peoples who had invaded, the Iberians, from North Africa.

Culture and Organization of the Germanic Tribes
Early Germanic society was characterized by a strict code of ethics, which valued above all trust, loyalty, and courage. Acquiring honor, fame, and recognition was a primary ambition. Independence, autonomy, and individuality were highly emphasized values.

This is probably the reason why the Germanic peoples never constituted a great empire or even a unified Germanic state. The environment in which the Germanic peoples were emerged, namely their connection to the forest and the sea, played an important role in the formation of these values. Germanic oral literature is full of scorn for characters who failed to live up to Germanic ideals.

In the Germanic language, ger-man means the man of the spear. For the Germanic peoples, the loss of the spear or shield was equivalent to the loss of honor. The Germanic peoples were warriors by nature, born in war and for war; from an early age, they were trained in the art of war just like the Spartans. Loyalty and devotion to the clan they belonged to, and through it, to the tribe and its leader, was one of their highest values; this sense of unity won them many victories.

Kingship is therefore a fundamental element that unites Germanic society. As with other peoples, its origin as an institution is sacred, and so the king combines the functions of military leader, high priest, legislator, and judge.

The Germanic monarchy was partly elective; the king was elected by free men from among eligible candidates from a family that could trace its ancestry back to the divine or semi-divine founder of the tribe. Although Germanic society was highly stratified between leaders, free men, and slaves, its culture also emphasized equality. Occasionally, the freemen of the tribe would even overrule the decisions of their own leaders.

Through the influence of the Roman Empire, the power of the Germanic kings over their own people increased over the centuries, in part because the mass migrations at the time required more severe leadership.

Literature
Because the Germanic peoples did not know writing before their encounter with Roman culture, Germanic literature was passed orally from generation to generation. Its content was linked to its main purpose which was to honor the gods or praise tribal ancestors, chieftains, warriors and their associates, wives, and other relatives.

Religion
According to the Roman writer Tacitus, the Germanic peoples worshipped mainly "Mercury", but also "Hercules", and "Mars". These were generally identified with Odin, Thor and Týr, the gods of wisdom, thunder, and war, respectively. They also worshipped the goddesses Nerthus and Freya.

Archaeological discoveries suggest that early Germanic peoples practiced some of the same "spiritual" rituals as the Celts, including human sacrifice, divination, and belief in spiritual connection with their natural surroundings. Like the Romans, there was a difference between domestic worship and communal worship; in the home, the father of the family played the role of a priest.

Religious ceremonies were performed in woods, lakes, and islands considered sacred, not in temples; the Germanic peoples did not build temples to perform their religious rites. For the sacrifices offered to the gods, all kinds of livestock were slaughtered, and sometimes even humans, and the blood was sprinkled over the people who then made toasts to the gods and ate the meat. The victims, both human and animal, were hung from trees. One of the trees in the woods would be the most sacred of all, and underneath it there would be a pit in which a live man would be buried.

No common conception about life after death is known to any Germanic peoples. Some believed that the fallen hero warriors would go to Valhalla to live happily with Odin, while the evil ones could pursue the living after they were dead; if that were to happen, they would have to be killed more than once to stop pursuing the living. This is probably where the "Game of Thrones" series was inspired to create the "Walkers", the undead who had to be killed by fire to stay dead.

After the conquest of the Roman Empire, the Germanic peoples gradually converted to Christianity at different periods: the Goths in the 4th century, the Saxons in the 6th and 7th centuries, under pressure from the already converted Franks; the Danes, under German pressure, in the 10th century. Paganism held out longer in the northernmost lands, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

Conclusion: Despite lagging more than 2000 years behind the Greco-Roman cultural development and civilization, the Germanic peoples contributed to medieval Europe with their values of autonomy, independence, and freedom, based on the principle that we are all equal in dignity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC