Marcello Caroti

From Jesus to Marx

Or

Birth and Death of a Civilization

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May 2018

SommarioIntroduction.................................................................................................................................3I - Jesus of Nazareth, the story...................................................................................................4

The sources.............................................................................................................................4A bit of history of Palestine......................................................................................................5Apocalypticism........................................................................................................................7Jesus of Nazareth, the beginning.........................................................................................11

II - Jesus of Nazareth, his revelation........................................................................................15The revelation of Jesus in the Gospels.................................................................................15The revelation of Jesus, the Chosen....................................................................................17The revelation of Jesus, love and hatred..............................................................................21Jesus of Nazareth, the end...................................................................................................25

III - Christianity, its nihilism.......................................................................................................27Nihilism and the Cross..........................................................................................................27Faith.......................................................................................................................................29Nihilism, from Jesus to Christianity.......................................................................................34Monasticism, the negation of life...........................................................................................39

IV - Christianity, a new civilization............................................................................................43A New ethics.........................................................................................................................44Saint Paul, a new religion......................................................................................................48Ritual Sacrifices.....................................................................................................................55Slavery..................................................................................................................................57The administration of justice.................................................................................................58The Human Life.....................................................................................................................64The Western Monks, the First Europeans............................................................................66

V - Was Jesus a Christian ?.....................................................................................................69VI - The clash of two cultures...................................................................................................72

The Last Roman....................................................................................................................73The enemies of light..............................................................................................................80Foolish Frenzy.......................................................................................................................81The City of God.....................................................................................................................86

VII - Pagans Vs. Christians.......................................................................................................90The Great Whore...................................................................................................................90A most mischievous superstition...........................................................................................93A depraved, excessive superstition......................................................................................94Other Christians, orgies and cannibalism.............................................................................98The persecutions.................................................................................................................101

VIII - Death of a Civilization....................................................................................................108The Invasions......................................................................................................................110The blood of the martyrs.....................................................................................................114End of the Empire and birth of intolerance.........................................................................116A mini Reinassance............................................................................................................119Islam, the Dark Ages...........................................................................................................126

Catholicism, a new civilization begins....................................................................................131The Urban Civilization.........................................................................................................131Saint Francis and his syndrome..........................................................................................131

The Reformation, the Modern Age.........................................................................................133The Enlightenment, Western Civilization................................................................................134Socialism, the Totalitarian State.............................................................................................135Progressivism, the demise of Western Civilization.................................................................136Bibliography............................................................................................................................137

Introduction

There is a sentence that I have been hearing for so many years and that has always irritatedme: Jesus Christ was a communist!This statement irritated me for several reasons. First of all because it put Jesus in a position ofinferiority relative to Marx as if Jesus could be considered a disciple of that great man of Marxand because, since Marx lived 1800 years after Jesus, it would have been more sensible to saythat Marx was a Christian; something that would have left me perplexed anyway.In fact I could not see anything in common between those two characters; as far as I knew themessage of Jesus did not have anything violent and it seemed clear to me that Jesus refusedpolitical initiatives; the sphere of influence of his thought was strictly reserved to the spiritualfield. Jesus refused social or political revolutions.

Than it happened something that radically changed the way I was looking at these matters be-cause, actually, my irritation was hiding an indefinable feeling that there was something true inthat statement.

It happened that the glowing success of the book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, made medecide to start studying the history of Jesus because I knew, more or less, that that book wasfull of nonsense but my knowledge of the history of Jesus was that of the average Christianraised in the Catholic faith; therefore was traditional and superficial. The success of that book gave me the urge to know more and so I started searching for seriousexperts who could make me know the state of the art of the history of Jesus; I needed historythe real one. I realized immediately that this search was not easy because there were so many“fairy tales” which made Dan Brown appear as a rigorous scientist. At some point I stumbled on two American scholars and I started my study.

It was this study of mine on the history of Jesus that made me sense, by chance, what I was notlooking for: the connection between Jesus and Marx, between Christianity and socialism.

No, don’t worry, Jesus was not a disciple of Marx; the point is that there is an evolutionarythread that connects these two persons.

They were both Jewish Apocalyptic Prophets.

I - Jesus of Nazareth, the story

It is not easy to write the history of Jesus for several reasons. First of all the mental conditioningdue to the entrenchment of a religious faith that has produced a character, Jesus Christ, that isnot compatible with a historical analysis. In fact historians do not want to deal with a characterthat is both man and god, born from a virgin and resurrected from death.

The sources

We must add to this miraculous dimension the problem of the sources. Up to now the researchof the scholars has identified up to forty Gospels produced by various Christian sects. Many ofthese Gospels are similar to those we know, the canonical Gospels, but many others are verydifferent and many of these are clearly a delirium. Contrary to what has been divulged in these later times by certain secularists cultural move-ments which want to throw all Christian faith into the dustbin of history as if it were just a gigan-tic hoax, what surprises most the scholar is how much interest this “Marginal Jew” has arousedso many years after his death. The secularists doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has ever existed but this seems nonsense to me.How is it possible that so many people put themselves to the task of writing the life, the worksand the teachings of a man who never existed?On the contrary, we should pause to think what this “Marginal Jew” had so special to motivateso many people to write about him to interpret his message.It is an evident fact that no person of antiquity has provoked such an interest for so long.

Unfortunately Jesus did not leave us anything written although he could read and, probably,write. The information we have about him, that arrived to us, have been written by people whodid not meet him in person but who had access to several oral traditions and to several docu-ments that were produced right after his death. Many critics affirm that our Gospels are nottrustworthy as historical sources because they were produced many years after his death bypeople who never met him, but this is not correct. First of all oral traditions are more dependablethan you may think, in fact almost all ancient history was written in this way; that is it was writtenmany years after the events starting from oral traditions and several documents that were in cir-culation. The canonical Gospels too were produced in this way, by putting together many historiespassed down by word of mouth or written on documents that disappeared afterwards and there-fore cannot be analyzed by us anymore, but which were produced many years before ourGospels and therefore very near our events and, probably, by eyewitnesses.

So begins the Gospel of Luke: Whereas many have undertaken to write a narrative of thosethings which are most surely believed among us, just as they were handed down to us by thosewho from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to mealso, having accurately investigated all things from the very beginning, to write to you an or-derly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you might know the certainty of the things whichyou have been told. (Luke 1:1-4).

The scholars think that Luke was written between 80 and 85 AD, therefore 50 years after thedeath of Jesus. Here Luke tells us clearly that he drew on sources which originated from eyewit -nesses. Unfortunately we have never seen these sources.

Of one of these sources we can guess its existence, it is the most important: the Q Gospel.

Q stands for “Quelle” that in German means “source” because the scholars think that thisGospel was the source from which our canonical Gospels have drawn a good part of their sto -ries. We know that this Gospel existed because two of our canonicals, the synoptic Matthewand Luke, have several sentences which are identical therefore they must have been copiedfrom an existing document. Unfortunately this Gospel disappeared because the Christians didnot think it necessary to copy it to divulge it; each Christian sect was busy spreading its ownGospel. In fact, in those times press and paper did not exist and each copy had to be handwritten by ascribe on papyrus that is not a very resistant materiel, therefore, if the book was not copied any-more it disappeared because the papyrus on which it was written withered away. To copy abook was an expensive endeavor and few people could afford it. This is the reason why all thisliterature is no more available to us; we can only imagine its existence by analyzing the docu-ments we have.Many “new” Gospels have been found in the last sixty years just because they had been hiddenin the Middle East, in very warm and dry places. An exceptional situation.

Here is a short chronology of our sources according to what the scholars consider historicallytrue. Being stated that no original exists of our sources and that all our documents are copies pro -duced several years later, the first Christian documents in our possession are the epistles ofSaint Paul. They have been produced between 50 and 60 AD. Nothing we know of the hypothetical Q Gospel besides that it should have been written beforeMark that was produced between 65 and 70 AD.Luke and Matthew between 80 and 85, John around 95. After the year 100 we have the apoc-rypha which, save one, do not have any content that could be considered of historical value.

In this work I will take into consideration only the Canonical Gospels in the Modern English Ver-sion (MEV).

The main problem that the scholars of the history of Jesus must face, is that all Gospels are sofull of miraculous events that the doubt arises that it could all be a made up story and, more-over, there are several differences between our Gospels where you can tell the intention of thewriter to “fabricate” an image of Jesus for the purpose of starting a Christian faith in compliancewith the ideas of the Christian sect that had decided to write that Gospel. It happened that as the scholars progressed into the search for the historical Jesus, a multitudeof Christian sects emerged which competed for the primacy by suffocating the others and eachof them pretended to be the only one who knew the real Jesus. Each produced its own Gospel.

At this point the scholars had to devise a set of criteria to separate history from fantasy. A noteasy thing to do. I will not annoy you with these studies; you have already understood that I ad-here to the thesis that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. This is the thesis accepted bymost of the scholars of the history of Jesus; I will introduce it to you in the next chapter.

A bit of history of Palestine

Before starting to talk about Jesus of Nazareth I must give you a short history of Palestine at thetime of Jesus otherwise it would be impossible to understand what I am going to present you.

The Romans conquered Palestine in 63 BC and in 40 they appointed Herod king of the Jewswho will reign until 4 BC, the year that, we suppose, Jesus was born.

During the years of the Jesus ministry Palestine was divided in two, Galilee (where Jesus per -formed his ministry) is ruled by the son of Herod, Antipas, while Judea (where Jerusalem is lo-cated) was directly ruled by the Romans through a Prefect who at the time of Jesus was PontiusPilate.The Roman dominance was not meddlesome; they cared for two things only: order and taxes. For all other things the people subject to the empire enjoyed all possible autonomy.The taxes were heavy but not excessive and, together with the order, guaranteed to the peopleof the empire a peace never seen before. The empire asked much to its subjects both in term of taxes and fealty to the authority of theemperor and of his functionaries, but it also gave much to everybody.All subjects were aware of this and accepted, more or less willingly, the authority of the empire.I think that we can state that no other empire obtained such an obedience and consent for solong by so many different people as the Roman Empire.The freedom of movement of people, goods and ideas together with the notable increase in thegeneral welfare, produced a Classical civilization so brilliant that it is recorded as one of themost important civilization in history.All people of the empire appreciated, participated and enjoyed this civilization, but one: theJews.

For the Jews Palestine was not just their land, as for all other people, it was the land that Godhad donated them and therefore to have a foreign power to dominate over this land was an af -front to their faith; and they considered themselves the chosen people of God. Here the Romans collided with something they did not know and could not comprehend: faith.

The religion, in the Classical, Greek-Roman, Civilization, was paganism an anthropomorphousreligion where the gods were like humans with all their virtues (few) and vices (many) and didnot pretend to offer a model of ethical behavior independent of the laws or costumes of society.In the Greek-Roman civilization ethics was a branch of philosophy, not of religion. Paganism did not have the Ten Commandments and did not “force” the faithful to a behaviorthat could oppose the laws of the State. The Jews, on the contrary, were possessed by their faith and refused, up to the supreme sacri-fice of their lives, to obey those norms which were against their faith; an absurd and incompre-hensible behavior for the Romans.Moreover, the Classical culture was an existential threat for the Jews. It was a matter of life ordeath because this culture, just for being so brilliant, penetrated the people and Judaism wasrisking a cultural annihilation. The Romans did not force anybody to live with their lifestyle but,even without any obligation, the charm of such a sophisticated culture, as the Hellenistic culturewas, attracted many Jews like a magnet.

All these elements meant that all the history of the Roman domination of Palestine was a historyof irreducible conflicts; a unique feat in the history of the empire. The armed revolts were frequent, sometimes they were spontaneous and sometimes they wereorganized. A few examples.

In 6 AD the Romans deposed the son of Herod to install one of their functionaries and initiated acensus for the payment of taxes; a revolt explodes that is repressed in blood.When in 26 AD Pilate took command, he put several standards with the image of the emperoraround Jerusalem. The Jews rebelled and asked for the standards to be removed. Hundreds ofthe leading citizens staged a sit-in at Pilate’s residence in silence. After five days Pilate had theprotesters surrounded by troops threatening to kill all of them. The protesters offered their necksto the swords of the soldiers. Pilate relented and removed the standards.

A few years later the emperor Caligula decided to install his statue in the Temple. Thousands ofJews gathered to oppose the move and stood against two roman legions sent to enforce the or -der of the emperor. The situation remained tense for a few days and a blood bath was avoidedjust because in those days the emperor was murdered. When the Jews celebrated Passover the Romans sent troops to Jerusalem to keep in check thecrowd of Jews that filled up the Temple for the ritual sacrifices. The troops stationed in the Tem-ple and in 50 AD it happened that a roman soldier on the wall of the Temple turned his back tothe crowd of Jews and made a vulgar noise to show them his contempt. A revolt explodes andthousands of Jews were massacred to restore peace.In 70 AD the Romans put their hands in the treasure of the Temple. The Jews revolted and theRomans decided to put an end to the state of Israel with the first Jewish war. Four legions at thecommand of Titus destroyed the Temple and chased the Jews out of Jerusalem. The last resis-tance of the Jews on the mount Masada ended three years later with the death by suicide of allthe besieged rebels.

I think we can see a strategy of the Roman domination in Palestine. When confronted by non violent revolts which did not spill any blood, the Romans gave in hop-ing, perhaps, that in time the Jews would have adapted to their rule as all the other people ofthe Empire. They even went as far as to exempt the Jews from the service in the army. When confronted by an armed revolt the Romans intervened by exterminating the insurgents upto the last man and without any hesitation.But the Israelis did not accept their rule and the Romans resolved to destroy the Jewish state.

Now I want to express a few considerations that are indispensable to comprehend this story.

The Romans never opposed the Jews or Judaism; they collided with the refusal of the Israeli toaccept the rule of the Empire. The Jews of the Diaspora who lived in the Empire enjoyed thesame freedoms of all other subjects. Why the Romans left the Jews free to live according to their ways?Because the Jewish faith did not promote proselytism. The Jews did not want to spread theirfaith among all the people as Christians will do later. They paid their taxes and were obedient. They lived in their closed communities in order not todisperse among the gentiles and therefore they were not a problem for the public order. For these reasons the Romans thought that they had no reasons to persecute them. The Jews were even free to refuse to pay homage to the emperor, a thing that could have car -ried the death penalty for the other subjects. Could this be due to the fact that the Romans felt confident?There will be two more Jewish wars that ended as the first with the extermination of the rebels.However the Romans never initiated a war against Judaism in spite of the fact that the Jewsnever accepted the authority of the Empire.

From this story it is evident that the Israelis did not have the force to free themselves of the Ro -mans; against the Empire they did not have any chance.Moreover it was inevitable that, in time, the Classical culture would have provoked a dilution ofthe Jewish faith in the soul of the Jews with the risk of compromising forever the identity of thechosen people of God.This dramatic situation (from their point of view) where they could not see any light at the end ofthe tunnel of desperation provoked two different reactions on the part of the Jews. On one sideendless, useless, attempts at violent revolts and, on the other side, a phenomenon known asApocalypticism.

Apocalypticism

Apocalypse is a term that comes from the Greek, it means revelation (from a superior being),and therefore an apocalypticist is a visionary, someone who has visions, because he has beenrevealed something by God. With time, after Christianity, the term Apocalypse is used to indicate the “end of the world” be-cause this was the vision of Jesus. In this document I will use it with this meaning, “end of theworld”, even if it is not its correct meaning.

Apocalypticism is an ideology which began in Israel following the disastrous events that over-whelmed the Jewish nation, the last being the Roman domination.The Jews believed they had entered a compact with God: He would have protected them if theyhad respected the Law. The Law was a complex and debated collection of precepts. Among them: the circumcision ofboy infants, the refusal of certain food, the rest on the Sabbath and many more. In exchangeGod would have taken them to the Promised Land and would have made them triumph on theirenemies. It was evident that this had not materialized. Israel had been conquered by several other peo-ple, it had been exiled and now, in the last, the Roman domination which called into questionthe very existence of Israel. Here the complexes of guilt enter.

Many prophets before Jesus put the blame for these calamities on the Jews who did not respecttheir compact with God and had fallen Israel into these tragedies.However, as these tragedies continued, many Jews started thinking that it could not just be thefault of their sinners but there must have been a wicked power who was raging against Israel inorder to oppose God. This dark power had a name: Satan. Here paranoia enters the play. Paranoia takes with it hallucinations and delirium.

It is inevitable that when confronted by a threat which can destroy your world and cannot beavoided, humans start producing hallucinations that give to their psyche the illusion to be able toovercome the disaster. This system of “self protection” of the human psyche can be describedwith the term: delirium.

The apocalyptic prophets started representing a situation where God had been, somehow, de-feated and Satan had taken control of the world; this was the reason why the Righteous (theJews who observed the Law) were suffering. Therefore the salvation could come only by an in-tervention of God in this world to defeat Satan permanently by means of a global upheaval thatwould have overturned this world, would have chased Satan and given birth to a new worldwhere there would have been no more Evil. Thus the Righteous would have had their reward forthe eternity.

Both before and after Jesus several documents were produced, called Apocalypses, whichgave their vision of these events and of the future of humanity.

In general Apocalypticism foresees a dualist reality where Good and Evil fight for the control ofthe world and at the end God wins. It is a very pessimist vision of the present reality becausehumanity cannot do anything to defeat Satan. This “impotence” of men causes that you had towait for the intervention of God. At the end the Righteous will be vindicated by God, Evil will becrashed and expelled from the world. The Good News (Gospel) was that this intervention ofGod was imminent; it would have arrived in a short time:And He said to them, “Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste deathbefore they see the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark 9:1).

According to Jesus the apocalypse and the salvation would have arrived in a few years, beforesome of his disciples would have died; therefore we suppose not beyond twenty years.

To understand our thesis it is important to point out that not all of humanity would have beensaved by God, only the Chosen. What an individual should have done to be among the Chosen,besides to repent for his sins?This is the fundamental element that distinguishes Jesus from the other apocalyptic prophetsand it will be the subject of this work of ours. Who are the Chosen? What must you do to be aChosen? We will see this in the next chapter.

Both before and after Jesus, several apocalyptic prophets appeared in Israel; a short list.

The sect of the Essenes, we know it also from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of these Essenes, athousand people, even withdrew from the Israeli society in a kind of monastic community, nearQumran, to wait for the arrival of God. In the near future, at the end of time, God would have arrived and would have led the “childrenof light” (the Essenes) against the “children of darkness” (the renegade Jews and all other na-tions). God would have triumphed in a final battle (the mother of all battles) and the children oflight would have entered a new wonderful kingdom. It is believed that this community of Qumran joined the rebels in the first Jewish war thinkingthat the time of the final battle had arrived. They were wrong; they were completely destroyedby the Romans.A few years after Jesus a prophet called Theudas assembled a large crowd of followerspromising miraculous events that would have freed the Jews. The Romans did not wait forthese events and, fearing that the situation could worsen, sent their troops, massacred therebels and took the severed head of the leader to Jerusalem.A few years later a prophet called the Egyptian assembled a crowd of followers promising totear down the walls of Jerusalem and marched on the city. Again the Romans did not wait; theyintervened and exterminated the crowd. Just before the first Jewish war, another prophet appeared who, by chance, was called Jesus,the son of Ananias. This Jesus went around crying to repent because the end was near. Thepriests of the Temple delivered him to the Romans asking to execute him but the prefect of thetime, who was no more Pontius Pilate, decided not to humiliate the Roman justice to the foolish-ness of the Jews and, after having flogged the wretch almost up to his death, satisfied himselfthat he was just a poor fool and there was nothing to be feared. He sent Jesus free. This Jesusdied during the siege of Jerusalem hit by a stone thrown by a Roman catapult while he was go-ing around crying the end of the world.The most famous prophet of all, we know him from the Gospels, is John the Baptist. The intro-duction of John the Baptist requires an extended analysis because he will have a decisive influ -ence in the life of Jesus.

John the Baptist had abandoned society, had withdrawn himself to a desert place on theshores of the river Jordan, near its mouth on the Dead Sea and from there he was preachingthe end of the world.Jesus of Nazareth was attracted by this prophet, left his family in Galilee and joined him thusgetting started in his conversion as an apocalyptic prophet. We suppose he was thirty years old.In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.(Mark 1:9).

The Gospel of Matthew presents us the Baptist: In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying: “The voice of one crying in thewilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make His paths straight.’ ”

This same John had clothing made of camel’s hair, a leather belt around his waist, and his foodwas locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region around the Jor-dan went out to him, and were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins.But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said to them,“O generation of vipers, who has warned you to escape from the wrath to come? Therefore,bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not think to say within yourselves, ‘We have Abrahamas our father,’ for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abra -ham. Even now the axe is put to the tree roots. Therefore, every tree which does not bear goodfruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.“I indeed baptize you with water to repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier thanI, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean His floor and gather His wheat into thegranary, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Matt 3:1-12).

I want to note that John the Baptist practiced baptism and confession. These rituals were not inuse in the Judaic religion, it seems they were original of the Baptist. They will become two sacraments of the Christian faith.

We cannot but being impressed by the strong charge of hatred which motivated these prophets.What did the Sadducees and Pharisees do to provoke such anger?These sects were very important in the Jewish society of the time; we must introduce them be-cause they will have a determinant part in the life and, most of all, in the death of Jesus.

The Pharisees were a sect of Jews ultra observant of the Law; pedant and fanatic to the pointof manic obsession. The problem was that the Law had not been defined precisely by the Bible.For instance, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath, a crime which carried the death penalty inthe Bible, did not specify if traveling was to be considered work and, if this were the case, howfar you should go in order to be considered work and therefore to be forbidden. The Phariseesput themselves to the task and produced a set of rules that will be included in the sacred text ofthe Talmud two centuries after Jesus. To do this they had to live apart from the other Jews in or -der not to be contaminated by their sins; matter of fact they put themselves into a ghetto insidethe Israeli society. It is very important to comprehend the Pharisees because Jesus will distancehimself from such a fanaticism and the Pharisees will offer the Christians the benchmark to de-fine Christianity relative to Judaism. This is why in our Gospels there are many events whereJesus measures up to them even if this does not seem possible. The Pharisees were a smallpart of the people and they could not be everywhere to meet Jesus wherever he went. The Pharisees did not enjoy the sympathies of the Israeli public opinion because of their manicobsession with the Law so that they focused all their efforts in the observance of formal rulesforgetting the love of neighbor although this was a precept of the Bible too.

The Sadducees were considered the Israeli aristocracy; they were mainly made up of thepriests who administered the Temple of Jerusalem. The Temple was the most important building of the Jews because it was the house of God. Godwas everywhere, of course, but he dwelled in the Holy of Holies which was the innermost roomof the Temple where only the High Priest could enter, just once a year, to perform a sacrifice toatone for the sins of all the Jews. This room was totally empty and there was no image of Godbecause God is a supernatural being and cannot be represented. The Law of Moses prescribed that ritual sacrifices of animals had to be done in several occa-sions and these sacrifices could be done only in the Temple. Problem was that there was oneTemple only for all the Jews of the world and all the Jews of the world had to contribute with atax to the building and maintenance of the Temple.It was a huge building; its construction was started in 516 AC and was terminated thirty yearsafter the death of Jesus. It was destroyed by the Romans seven years later; what a pity.

The administration of the Temple was, matter of fact, a huge exploitation of the Jewish people.First of all the faithful had to change their money into the official currency of the Temple at thedesks of the money changers who were at the entrance, afterwards they had to buy one of theanimals kept in the Temple (if they did not take this animal with them) to have it killed. TheLevites, who where the assistants of the Sadducees, took care of the animals. They selectedthem for the sacrifice, then quartered them and gave the meat to the faithful to take home toeat. All this was expensive, starting from the money change. For this reason the Temple and theSadducees were unpopular with many Jews and, in particular, they were hated by the apocalyp-ticists who considered all this matter a blasphemy.From their part, the Sadducees considered themselves the only interpreters of the Bible andconsidered blasphemous the work done by the Pharisees who had produced their interpretationof the Law. Since the Bible was the word of God, nothing could be added to it even if in manycases the faithful remained in doubt of what was the right thing to do.However, the majority of the Jews accepted these rituals because so it was written in the Bible.The Sadducees were the most authoritative chaste of the Israeli society which they ruledthrough a council, the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees with their Sanhedrin were the only authorita-tive interface the Roman prefect had in Judea. The Romans needed the Sadducees to keep incheck the people of Israel; the Sadducees needed the Romans to keep alive the cult of theTemple. All this, of course, made the Sadducees particularly unpopular with many Jews whoconsidered them traitors who had sold out to the enemy.

It was an explosive situation that could be hold only if the parties concerned, the Romans, theSadducees, the other sects and the mass of the Israeli population were ready to step back butwithout compromising their power.

It is important to consider the relationship that Pontius Pilate had with the Sanhedrin and espe-cially with the High Priest, Caiaphas. In fact Pilates managed to achieve a truce, unstable butlong lasting, with the Sanhedrin which lasted throughout his administration, bearing all the in-sanities of the Israelis and thus obtaining a peace and a respect for the Roman administrationthat will cease when Pilate was removed and substituted by another prefect who will not havethe same tolerance of Pilate and will provoke the final break up between the Roman Empire andIsrael.

Moreover, as far as the history of Jesus is concerned, we must specify that the Sanhedrin inJudea, like the king Antipas in Galilee, had ample powers and also a few troops to enforce itsauthority but it could not execute death sentences. The Romans had kept this power to them-selves; therefore, the Sanhedrin had to find a way to convince Pilate to sentence Jesus todeath.Jesus could perform his ministry and provoke the Jews for so long, three years approximately,without being killed thanks to the “pax romana” that Pilate had realized. I think that without this “protection” by the Romans Jesus would have not lasted so long.In other words, would we have had Christianity without the presence of the Roman Empire inPalestine?

Jesus of Nazareth, the beginning

Our story, the preaching and the death of Jesus, begins when Jesus decides to leave the com-munity of disciples that was born around John the Baptist. He returns to his region, Galilee, buthe does not return to his home in Nazareth. We suppose he had cut off contact with his familywhich, probably, did not approve his conversion to apocalypticism. The majority of Israelis was

faithful to the priests and to the cult of the Temple and was suspicious of these prophets whosowed disorder and pitted one Jew against the other.Since then Jesus will be based in Capernaum.Now when Jesus heard that John was put in prison, He left for Galilee. And leaving Nazareth,He came and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali,… From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is athand.” (Matt 4:12-17).

It happened that king Antipas had started a relationship and then married the wife of his brother,although he was already married. John publicly and repeatedly denounced the scandal withoutrelenting. At the end Antipas had him arrested but, fearing the ire of the people, he kept him injail and didn’t dare to execute him. But the new wife too hated John and after some time shemanaged to have him executed by Antipas.

The Gospels tell us about the differences between Jesus and John. Jesus did not agree with John on the method of preaching, on his life style and on the content ofthe message to be preached to the people: his revelation was different and he wanted to an-nounce it.

John set himself apart from society by withdrawing into the desert and the people had to travel along journey to listen to him and to be baptized; his message was full of resentment and hatred. Jesus on the contrary, wanted to go among the people, he would have lived among them, andhe would have eaten and drunk with them without caring if they were law abiding or sinners (avery inconvenient thing for a rabbi) because the sinners were those who needed his word. Hewould have preached the Good News (Gospel) that the Kingdom of God was near, he wouldhave brought a message of hope and not of condemnation: the hope in the salvation.

The arrest of the Baptist made Jesus decide to leave the community of the Baptist and to starthis own ministry with his own disciples. However he will remain in contact with his old teacher by means of his disciples.Now when John had heard in prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and saidto Him, “Are You He who should come, or should we look for another?”Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sightand the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and thepoor have the gospel preached to them. Blessed is he who does not fall away because of Me.”As they departed, Jesus began to say to the crowds concerning John, “What did you go out intothe wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A mandressed in soft clothing? Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. Then whatdid you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. For this is he ofwhom it is written:‘Look, I am sending My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You.’Truly I say to you, among those who are born of women, there has risen no one greater thanJohn the Baptist. But he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the daysof John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has forcefully advanced, and the strongtake it by force. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willingto receive it, he is Elijah, who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. (Matt 11:2-15)

Here Jesus expresses his pain for the fate of his teacher, John, that he believed had been sentby God. You can perceive his frustration and resentment against the people of Israel who didnot recognize the greatness of John, thus rejecting the will of God.

This is how Jesus continues his lament against the people of Israel:

But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like children sitting in the markets, calling to theirfriends, saying:‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge to you, and you did notmourn.’For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Mancame eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a gluttonous man, a drunkard, a friend of taxcollectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is justified by her children.” (Matt 11:16-19).

Here “Son of Man” refers to Jesus himself.

Jesus acknowledges with bitterness that the people of Israel did not convert to the apocalypticmessages neither his nor of the Baptist in spite that they had tried two very different ap-proaches.The Baptist was a hermit and preached condemning the mores of his time with violence and thepeople had judged him possessed by a demon.Jesus had chosen a different style, living among the people, preaching love and they hadjudged him a gluttonous and a drunkard, friend of the sinners.

Jesus compares this situation to a play played by the children in the villages. When a group of children mimed flute players the other group should have danced but if agroup played a lament the other should have mimed a weeping.The people of Israel were similar to these children who do not want to play along and quarrelbecause they do not want to follow the other and do not react neither if encouraged to joy nor tosadness.

In these few pages we have explained the situation in Palestine and how Jesus started his mis-sion.

Before illustrating the revelation received by Jesus, we want to clarify two expressions that oftenarise in our Gospels: “Son of Man” and “Son of God”.These two characters appear in the Bible where they have a meaning opposite to what youcould think.The Son of Man was a divine being, not a human, which God will send down on earth to un-leash the apocalypse. Would he have been an angel? The Son of God was a human being whom the Jews considered so exceptional as to seem theson of God, he was a super hero but absolutely human. The king David, for instance, was calledSon of God. The God of the Jews was a transcendent being who did not make children.

In the Bible this is quite clear but in the Gospels these characters, Jesus, Son of Man and Sonof God, are mixed up and they overlap up to the point of producing a Jesus who synthesizes allthese characters but not in their biblical meaning. These expressions will acquire a new, all Christian, significance.

You can understand this if you consider that the pagan religion was full of mythological beings.The Gods often descended from the mount Olympus and copulated with human women produc-ing children who were humans but super gifted. This for Judaism was unthinkable and blasphemous because the Jewish God is a transcendentbeing and cannot possibly copulate with women producing human children. For this reason Christianity had to introduce a divine being, the Holy Spirit, which would have in-seminated Mary without an actual sexual intercourse, leaving her virgin and producing a beingthat was at the same time god and man.If Jesus had been born out of an actual intercourse between God and Mary, he would haveended up in the multitude of super heroes which crowded the Classical mythology and wouldhave never become the God venerated by the Christians.

In other words, without the virginity of Mary Christianity would have not even started.

II - Jesus of Nazareth, his revelation

What was the revelation received by Jesus? Jesus prophesized that a divine being sent by God, the Son of Man, would have descendedfrom the sky to put an end to this world and start a new world, the Kingdom of God, peopled bya minority of Chosen people. The Son of Man would have put an end to this world with a cosmic cataclysm, a tragic eventthat, in order to destroy this world would have provoked death and devastation on a scale neverseen before in history. Nobody could escape this devastation therefore the suffering would havebeen immense. Not even death could have been a refuge because at the end of the apoca-lypse, when the divine fury would have ceased, everybody would have been raised from thedead to be subjected to the Universal Judgment. The doors of the Kingdom of God would haveswung open for the Righteous while all others, the majority, would have been thrown into theeternal flames.This apocalypse was indispensable because the world had arrived to such a state of perdition, itwas so infected by Evil that it was no more possible to redeem it. The wrath of God would haverun wild to destroy it in a way to make it possible to create a new world, always on this earth,where Evil would be no more.Nobody could foresee when this apocalypse would have arrived but surely it would have hap-pened in the space of a generation, therefore it was indispensable for the Righteous to be pre-pared to face this imminent catastrophe.

The revelation of Jesus in the Gospels

This is how the Gospel of Mark describes the apocalypse:After John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe thegospel.” (Mark 1:14-15).Whoever therefore is ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation,of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with theholy angels.” (Mark 8:38).As He sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew askedHim privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen, and what will be the sign when allthese things will be fulfilled?”Jesus answered them, “Take heed lest anyone deceive you. Many will come in My name, say-ing, ‘I am He,’ and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not betroubled. For such things must happen, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise againstnation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be earthquakes in various places, andthere will be famines and troubles. These are the beginning of sorrows.“But take heed. For they will hand you over to councils, and in the synagogues you will bebeaten. You will be brought before rulers and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them. Andthe gospel must first be preached to all nations. But when they arrest you and hand you over,take no thought beforehand, or premeditate what you should speak. But speak whatever isgiven you in that time, for it is not you who speaks, but the Holy Spirit.

“Now a brother will betray his brother to death, and the father the son; children will rise upagainst their parents, and will cause them to be put to death. You will be hated by all men forMy name’s sake. But he who endures to the end shall be saved.When you see the ‘abomination of desolation’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet standing whereit should not be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the moun-tains. Let him who is on the housetop not go down or enter the house to take anything out ofhis house. Let him who is in the field not turn back to take his garment. But woe to women whoare pregnant and to those who nurse in those days! Pray that your escape may not be in winter.For in those days there will be distress as has not been from the beginning of the creation whichGod created to this time, nor ever shall be.“Except the Lord shortened the days, no flesh would be saved. But for the sake of the elect,whom He chose, He shortened the days. Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’or ‘Look, there He is!’ do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and showsigns and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. But take heed. I have told you allthings beforehandBut in those days, after that distress, ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give herlight; the stars of heaven will fall, and the powers that are in heaven will be shaken.’“Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. Then He willsend His angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the farthest part of the earth tothe farthest part of heaven.Now learn a parable of the fig tree: When her branch is yet tender and puts outs leaves, youknow that summer is near. So also, when you see these things come to pass, know that it is near,even at the doors. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these thingshappen. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. “But concerning that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, butonly the Father. Take heed, watch and pray. For you do not know when the time will come. Forthe Son of Man is like a man leaving on a far journey who left his house and gave authority tohis servants and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.“Watch therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, in theevening, or at midnight, or at the crowing of the rooster, or in the morning— lest he come sud-denly and find you sleeping. What I say to you I say to all: Watch!” (Mark 13:3-37).

The description of the apocalypse in Matthew is almost identical, just Jesus puts more empha-sis on how it is unpredictable but that it should happen after the Gospel is announced to all thepeople of earth. Moreover it seems that it identifies Jesus with the Son of Man:As He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, whenwill these things be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt24:3).And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the world as a testimony to all na-tions, and then the end will come. (Matt 24:14).For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of theSon of Man. Wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together.“Immediately after the tribulation of those days, ‘the sun will be darkened, the moon will notgive its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’“Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth willmourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and greatglory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather Hiselect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. (Matt 24:27-31).“Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord will come. But know this, that ifthe owner of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watchedand not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for in an hourwhen you least expect, the Son of Man is coming. (Matt 24:42-44).

“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit onthe throne of His glory. Before Him will be gathered all nations, and He will separate them onefrom another as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep at His righthand, but the goats at the left. (Matt 25:31-32).

In Luke the description of the apocalypse is very similar but it ends in a less dramatic way:“Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts become burdened by excessiveness and drunkennessand anxieties of life, and that Day comes on you unexpectedly. For as a snare it will come on allthose who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Therefore watch always and pray that you maybe counted worthy to escape all these things that will happen and to stand before the Son ofMan.” (Luke 21:34-36).

In John the apocalypse is almost absent:And He said to him, “Truly, truly I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven opened and theangels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” (John 1:51).Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see thekingdom of God.” (John 3:3).

Now we must inform our readers that this apocalyptic vision of Jesus was not original of him.This divine character, the Son of Man, is taken from the Bible, from the book of Daniel (Dan 7:2-14) that was written two centuries before Jesus.I must point out that all the vision of Jesus is well rooted in the Bible but, through his preachingfirst and with the advent of Christianity after, this vision will have an evolution completely newand unpredictable for the people of his time. This evolution, started from the Bible, of the preaching of Jesus first and of the Christian faith af -terward, will bring to life a new religion: Christianity.

The revelation of Jesus, the Chosen

Let us shortly analyze the teachings of Jesus to see what the Righteous should do to enter theKingdom of God.Many are the teachings of Jesus and it is difficult to separate those that can be attributed to thehistorical Jesus from those inserted by the evangelists during the years of the “building” ofChristianity.

What is important is to be aware that the teachings given us by Jesus were necessary to theRighteous to enter the Kingdom of God, they were not meant to build a more fair and progres-sive society because it would have been useless since this society would have ended soonwhile in the Kingdom of God Evil was absent and those who entered it would have remainedRighteous for the eternity. For the Christians, on the contrary, who promoted a new religion that would have lasted until theend of time, the teachings of Jesus were a real code of ethics that should have been acquiredby the Christian societies and, possibly, inserted into the law. This has created huge ambiguities and contradictions in the Christian ethics that have forcedthe interpreters of the Gospels to perform difficult intellectual acrobatics to accommodate theseteachings with the political life of the Christian societies.

Moreover, even if the message of Jesus is deeply anchored in the Bible, he often deviates fromit sometimes radically.For instance, to be a Jew and to follow the Law of Moses would not be sufficient to enter theKingdom. The gentiles too who have faith in him, Jesus, can be among the Chosen:

“But He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know you, or where you come from. Depart from Me, allyou workers of iniquity.’ “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham,and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrustout. They will come from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south andwill sit down to dine in the kingdom of God. Listen, there are the last who will be first, and thefirst who will be last.” (Luke 13:27-30).

This vision of Jesus puts him in an incurable contrast with the very foundation of the Jewishfaith because its fundamental element is that the Jews are the chosen people of God. This di-vine intervention of the Son of Man would have involved all humanity not just the Jews and,moreover, even following the Law would not have been enough to be among the Chosen; evi-dently the gentiles too could enter the Kingdom.It was inevitable that most of the Israelis would want him dead.

Another instance of how it is difficult to define the apocalyptic message of Jesus is given by thefollowing episode. We all know the most famous teachings of Jesus present in the Gospels:One of the scribes came and heard them reasoning together. Perceiving that Jesus had answeredthem well, he asked Him, “Which is the first commandment of all?”Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God isone Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, andwith all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. The second isthis: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater thanthese.”The scribe said to Him, “Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth, that there is one Godand there is no other but Him. To love Him with all the heart, and with all the understanding,and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is morethan all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, He said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom ofGod.” After that, no one dared to ask Him any question. (Mark 12:28-34).

Now I must hurt the good Christians because these two commandments are not original teach-ings of Jesus: they come from the Bible. The first from Deuteronomy (Deut 6:4-5) and the sec-ond from Leviticus (Lev 19:18). They are biblical precepts that were currently taught and de-bated in the synagogues. The point that we must clarify to comprehend this work of ours is that the teachings of Jesus,that concern the salvation of the Chosen, are not among the precepts promoted by the Bible,they are all original of Jesus.In order to be among the Chosen it is necessary to do something else besides what prescribedby the Bible. That is why Jesus tells the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God”, and hedoes not tell him that he will be one of the Chosen and will enter the Kingdom.

To enter the Kingdom it is necessary to follow precepts that are original of Jesus and are notpresent in the Bible, here they are:When He had called the people to Him, with His disciples, He said to them, “If any man wouldcome after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wouldsave his life will lose it. But whoever would lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s will saveit. (Mark 8:34,35).He came to Capernaum. And being in the house, He asked them, “What was it that you dis-puted among yourselves on the way?” But they kept silent, for on the way they had disputedamong themselves who was the greatest.He sat down and called the twelve. And He said to them, “If anyone desires to be first, he mustbe last of all and servant of all.”

He took a child and set him in their midst. And when He had taken him in His arms, He said tothem, “Whoever receives one of these children in My name receives Me. And whoever receivesMe receives not Me, but Him who sent Me.” (Mark 9:33-37).

That is what is necessary, to annihilate yourself, to destroy yourself, to become as weak and in -offensive as a child, to give all of you today, even your own life, because this would have as -sured you the eternal life in the Kingdom of God in a few years. It is necessary to suffer, humili -ate yourself, to accept injustices and abuses.You must take your own cross; therefore it is necessary to accept sufferings, malice and all theevil of the world. It is indispensable to “lose” your own life to conquer eternal life in the Kingdomof God.

The discourse of the Beatitudes tells us clearly who the Chosen will be:He lifted up His eyes on His disciples, and said:“Blessed are you poor,for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now,for you shall be filled.Blessed are you who weep now,for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you,and when they separate you from their company and insult you,and cast out your name as evil,on account of the Son of Man. (Luke 6:20-22)

The Chosen, the Blessed, the Righteous are the “losers” of life, they are the defeated. They arethose who suffer because they are powerless to have justice in this world. They must be humblepeople and inoffensive who cannot (and must not) do anything to ameliorate their situation, theymust accept all misfortunes because only a divine intervention can destroy this evil world andmake justice in the Kingdom of God that is coming in a short time.It is exactly their impotence that will let them be among the Chosen. These are the Good News; this is the Gospel that Jesus preaches to the poor of the earth: youcannot make justice by yourselves, it will be the task of God to make it for you and afterwardsHe will take you to His Kingdom making you pass ahead of your persecutors:“Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take Myyoke upon you, and learn from Me. For I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest foryour souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.” (Matt 11:28-30).

To be admitted among the Chosen you must put yourself behind the others:But Jesus called them together, and said, “You know that those who are appointed to rule overthe Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall notbe so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoeveramong you would be greatest must be servant of all. (Mark 10:42-44).For he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. (Matt23:12).“So the last will be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matt 20:16).

Only those who put themselves at the end of the line will enter the Kingdom thus becoming thefirst, but those who strive to advance in power or riches to have success in this wicked world willbe damned for the eternity:“Therefore, I say to you, take no thought about your life, what you will eat, or what you willdrink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body thanclothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into

barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they? Who amongyou by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?“Why take thought about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: They neither work, nor do they spin. Yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. Therefore, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is here and tomor-row is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore, take no thought, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’(For the Gentiles seek after all these things.) For your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be given to you. Therefore, take no thought about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought about the things of itself. Sufficient to the day is the trouble thereof. (Matt 6:25-34).

Is this love? No, it is nihilism.

So who are these Chosen who will be saved? In the vision of Jesus the Chosen are those who have renounced their self, their interest andtheir personality. In order to be saved a total annihilation of the individual is required. This is the message of Jesus.

The evangelical message of Jesus is an expression of nihilism.Nihilism is the main theme of this work of ours which will lead us up to Karl Marx.

It is astounding to what extreme Jesus takes his nihilism.Since the apocalypse will destroy the present world, to be attached to the material goods of thisworld is a nonsense that can prevent you from entering the Kingdom. You must be ready to de -prive yourself of all you have:So likewise, any of you who does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple. (Luke 14:33).“But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those whocurse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek,offer also the other. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic aswell. Give to everyone who asks of you. And of him who takes away your goods, do not ask forthem back. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. (Luke 6:27-31).

This self humiliation must be taken up to the point not to judge anyone because the judgment ofGod is coming who will make justice forever:“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged.And with the measure you use, it will be measured again for you. (Matt 7:1-2).

But, how can you live without ever judging anybody?In fact you cannot unless you decide to annihilate your own personality.This annulment of the self can be done only by means of the faith. It is indispensable to have faith, you must believe and repent:… Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and prostitutes enter the kingdom ofGod before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him.But the tax collectors and prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not af -terward repent and believe him. (Matt 21:31-32).

Faith is so important that even the prostitutes will pass ahead of the Jews who, even if they ob-served the Law of Moses, did not have faith in his revelation or in John the Baptist.Faith is so important because to let yourself be “possessed” by the faith is a way to “lose” yourindependence of mind, your free will. We will see in the next chapter a more in-depth analysis of this issue.

The revelation of Jesus, love and hatred

We have seen that Jesus intended to launch a message of love and hope but the Gospels alsocontain a good deal of resentment if not hatred. This analysis of ours may seem shocking but it is indispensable to make you see how easy it isfor love to turn into hatred.Nihilism can be considered a manifestation of sadism that can be turned against the others oragainst yourself, but naturally sadism breaks out when the people do not conform to the visionof the prophet.

In fact it happened that his revelation and his interpretation of the Law of Moses, that hepreached in the synagogues of Galilee, had provoked hostile reactions and he realized that hismessage would have been accepted by few:When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue. And many hearing Him were as-tonished, saying, “Where did this Man get this? What is this wisdom that is given Him, thateven miracles are done by His hands? Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary and the brotherof James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” And they took of -fense at Him. (Mark 6:2-3).All those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath. They rose upand thrust Him out of the city and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built,that they might throw Him down headlong. But passing through the midst of them, He wentHis way. (Luke 4:28-30).

His reaction to these hostilities contradicts all we have seen before:Thus Jesus vents his anger towards the towns where he did his preaching and his miracles butdid not repent and accept his message:Then He began to reprimand the cities where most of His mighty works were done, becausethey did not repent: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty workswhich were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long agoin sackcloth and ashes. But I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the Dayof Judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, who is exalted toward heaven, will be broughtdown to Hades. For if the mighty works which have been done in you had been done in Sodom,it would have remained until this day. But I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for theland of Sodom on the Day of Judgment than for you.” (Matt 11:20-24).

If you consider that Sodom was destroyed by God with a rain of fire and sulphur for its wicked -ness it is clear that there is no trace of love or forgiveness in his words.

He had declared: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take Myyoke upon you, and learn from Me. For I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest foryour souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.” (Matt 11: 28-30).

Actually he was neither humble nor meek. When he sends seventy two of his disciples aroundthe country to proselytize, these are his instructions:“When you enter a city and they receive you, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick who arethere and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But when you enter a cityand they do not receive you, go your way out into their streets and say, ‘Even the dust of yourcity which clings to us, we wipe off against you. Yet be sure of this, that the kingdom of Godhas come near to you.’ But I say to you, it will be more tolerable on that Day for Sodom than forthat city. (Luke 10:8-12).

It must be clear to our readers that only God, by means of the Son of Man, could act and givethe right punishment both with the Apocalypse and the Last Judgement. The disciples of Jesusare not supposed to react lest they would have not been included in the Chosen who must al -ways be passive; violence is not allowed to the Christians.However it will be inevitabile that, once gone to power, many Christians will decide to act with -out waiting for the Son of Man.

We must notice that words of hatred and resentment appear several times in his message evenwhen he promotes the love of neighbor.The Gospels are full of calls to love your neighbor in a way that goes even beyond what wascommanded by the Bible:When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. Before Him will be gathered all nations, and He will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep at His righthand, but the goats at the left.“Then the King will say to those at His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in. I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you visited Me, I was in prison and you came to Me.’“Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? And when did we see You sick or in prison and come to You?’“The King will answer, ‘Truly I say to you, as you have done it for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you have done it for Me.’ (Matt 25:31-40).

Love of neighbor must go beyond actions, your mind too must have a part, and you must be-ware even your thoughts and your intentions:For I say to you that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes andPharisees, you will in no way enter the kingdom of heaven.“You have heard that it was said by the ancients, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘Whoever mur-ders shall be in danger of the judgment.’ But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brotherwithout a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca,’shall be in danger of the Sanhedrin. But whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be in danger of hell fire.(Matt 5: 20-22).“You have heard that it was said by the ancients, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say toyou that whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her alreadyin his heart. (Matt 5:27-28).

The annulment of yourself must reach the depth of your soul, good deeds are not enough.We must notice that even when Jesus promotes love, he does it in a way that nihilism is stillpresent in the form of the annulment of your personality and your instincts.

After having declared blessed those who suffer, Jesus adds the condemnation for those whoare not suffering and here hatred emerges again:But woe to you who are richFor you have received your consolationWoe to you who are filledFor you shall hungerWoe to you who laugh nowFor you shall mourn and weepWoe to you, when all men speak well of you For so their fathers spoke of the false prophets (Luke 6:24-26).

What is wrong with being full or joyful? Don’t you wish these things to the people you love? The point is that the Chosen are those who suffer while those who are content with their life, be-cause have been successful, they will be damned. Here nihilism reaches a level that is manifestly pathological. We will see this hatred for the “rich” at work again in the socialism.

The problems created by this nihilism emerge again tragically when he speaks of the missionarywork of his apostles and the hatred explodes that would be unleashed by the contrasts pro-voked by his teachings: “The brother will deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child. And the children willrise up against their parents and cause them to be put to death. You will be hated by all men forMy name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved. But when they persecute you inthis city, escape into another. For truly I say to you, you will not have gone through the cities ofIsrael before the Son of Man comes. (Matt 10:21-23).

Jesus was aware that the spread of his faith would have provoked violent reactions against hisdisciples who should have had such a strong faith to face without fear the persecutions whilewaiting for the Son of Man. Nihilism will penetrate so deeply into the psiche of Christians thatthey themselves will look for these persecutions to be sure to be includend in the Chosen whenthe Son of Man or the day of Judgment will come. This is the ideological foundation of the Cult of the Martyrs which will be actively practiced bythe Christians. In this way Christianity prepares the ground to socialism. This glorification of martyrdom will en-ter so deeply the psiche of the Christian people that when socialism arrives, the communists willeasily find people determined to face martyrdom to realize the vision of Marx: the dictatorship ofthe proletariat.

Here the historian must pause and consider these messages of Jesus. How could this unknownjew who lived in a remote corner of the empire, how could he know what faith would have pro-voked? It is evident from what he tells us that he knew quite well what would have happenedamong the people, and among them and the authority, as a result of his preaching. Before himno faith had come to shake society and these reactions were not foreseeable. This confidenceprompted him to sacrifice himself; he knew what he could acheive with his personal sacrifice. Faith will provoke reactions so violent that even family relationships will be put into crisis:“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but asword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and adaughter-in law against her mother-in-law, a man’s foes will be those of his own household.He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son ordaughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.(Matt 10:34-37).

Here we can see the highest expression of his nihilism: to hate your own life and your own fam-ily because everything must be sacrificed to the faith. How strong this faith must be to make youbreak your ties to your family?Large crowds went with Him. And He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to Me anddoes not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, andeven his own life, he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and followMe cannot be My disciple. (Luke 14:25-27).

Here sadism under the form of masochism breaks out again. It will have dramatic consequeceswhen Christians (the monks in particular) will find out tortures more and more fanciful to tormentthemselves thus taking nihilism to pathological levels of self punishment:

Woe to the world because of temptations! For it must be that temptations come, but woe to thatman by whom the temptation comes! Therefore if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cutit off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life lame or maimed than having two handsor two feet to be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out andthrow it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than having two eyes to be throwninto the fire of hell. (Matt 18:7-9).

We must state it clearly that these words were not meant to push his disciples to commit any vi -olence, they were meant to convince the people of the importance of their behavior and to warnthem about the severity of the punishment they would have received from God.The problem with this preaching is that it is all addressed to the repression of the basic instinctsthat are necessary to preserve the life of the specie. This breeds paranoia that will penetrateChristian civilization so deeply to make it vulnerable to systemic outbursts of criminal folly.

To enter the Kingdom no half measures are allowed, the dedication to his revelation must be to-tal; he who wants to enter must be ready to sacrifice all of his self, if necessary.

Nothing was necessary in the Kingdom of God, neither goods nor riches and not even a family.It was necessary to sever these ties to dedicate yourself to the mission. In fact to let yourself be possessed by such a nihilistic faith would have provoked the break ofthe relationships entertained by those who were entering this faith. His family members were shocked by his interpretation of the Bible and his apocalyptic vision.They considered him a fool. He broke his ties to his family which abandoned him:Then they entered a house, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eatbread. When His family heard of it, they went out to seize Him, for they said, “He is besideHimself.” (Mark 3:20-21)Then His mother and His brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to Him, calling Him.The crowd sat around Him and said to Him, “Your mother and Your brothers are outside ask-ing for You.”He answered, “Who are My mother and My brothers?”Then He looked around at those who sat around Him and said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is My brother, and My sister, and My mother.” (Mark 3:31-35).

Jesus knew by experience that his faith would have broken the ties that make up the family:Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among hisown relatives, and in his own house.” (Mark 6:4).

Jesus had forsaken sex and marriage to dedicate the entirety of this person to his mission:But He said to them, “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given.For there are some eunuchs who have been so from birth, there are some eunuchs who havebeen made eunuchs by men, and there are some eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchsfor the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Matt19: 11-12).

This voluntary renouncement of Jesus will be crucial in shaping the position of Christianity rela-tive to asceticism and sexuality. Another manifestation of nihilism.

To abandon all you have is a very painful sacrifice that few people are willing to do if not withthe promise of a generous reward:Peter began to say to Him, “Look, we have left everything and have followed You.”Jesus answered, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left a house or brothers or sisters orfather or mother or wife or children or fields, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, who shall

not receive a hundred times as much now in this age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields, with persecution, and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:28-31).

He had chosen twelve apostles because twelve were the tribes which made up the people of Is-rael, therefore his apostles would have been put at the head of each tribe; a great promotion forpeople of modest origins:Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on His glo-rious throne, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelvetribes of Israel. (Matt 19:28).

As we will see later, these words will get him a death sentence.

Jesus of Nazareth, the end

Most of the people of Israel had remained hostile to him. Not only his nihilist message was diffi-cult to accept; also his interpretation of the Law of Moses was regarded as blasphemous by themajority of the people. Problem was that his Judaism was quite different from the definition that the large part of Jewsgave of their religion. First of all the fact that Jews and gentiles would have had the same treatment, would have beenput together in the apocalypse and would have had the same chances to enter the Kingdom ofGod. This was totally against the very essence of Judaism where the Jews are the only chosenpeople of God. His interpretation of the Law regarding the Sabbath, women, divorce and others, differed fromthe Biblical tradition.On top of this he was against the cult of the Temple with its animal sacrifices. His Apocalypsewould have destroyed the Temple, the most sacred site of the Jews:As He went out of the temple, one of His disciples said to Him, “Teacher, see what great stones and what great buildings are here.”Jesus answered him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone shall be left upon an-other that shall not be thrown down.” (Mark 13: 1-2).

This has made some people doubt whether Jesus was a Jew but, if we consider the history ofall dissident Jewish movements, this hostility towards the cult of the Temple is not exceptional.

It was inevitable that many Israelis and most of all the custodians of the orthodoxy, Phariseesand Sadducees, were looking for a way to have him executed by the Romans. The problem for the Sadducees was that they could not denounce him for having betrayed theirreligion; this was not a crime for the Romans. They had to find something in his activity ofpreacher that was a crime so grave for the Romans to have him sentenced to death.For this reason the Sadducees with their Sanhedrin found a way to pay off Judas to make himbetray Jesus and reveal the details of his preaching that would have compromised him to theRomans. It was not difficult. Jesus was preaching the advent of the Kingdom of God where his twelve apostles would havebeen put at the head of the twelve tribes of Israel therefore it was inevitable to suppose that,since he was the chief of his disciples, he considered himself a future king of Israel. For the Romans this was more than enough for a death sentence.

We can suppose that, after three years of ministry, he was disappointed by the result.

His teacher John had been executed and he had not opened a breach into the orthodoxy of theIsraelis.No other choice remained to him but to take his nihilism to its extreme consequences with thesupreme sacrifice of his own life. At Easter of the year 30 AD he decided to go to Jerusalem to confront the Sadducees and theRomans, to provoke their reaction:And they came to Jerusalem. Jesus went into the temple and began to drive out those who soldand bought in the temple, and He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats ofthose who sold doves. And He would not allow anyone to carry any vessel through the temple.And He taught them, and said, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer forall nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’ (Mark 11:15-17).

During the interrogation in the Sanhedrin, before being put to death, he issues his message forthe last time:Then the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, “Do You answer nothing? What is itwhich these men testify against You?” But He kept silent and answered nothing.Again the high priest asked Him, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”Jesus said, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and com-ing with the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14:60-62).

The following day the Romans put him on the cross under the charge of having declared himselfking of the Jews.Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium, and gathered the whole de-tachment of soldiers before Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him, and whenthey wove a crown of thorns, they put it on His head and put a staff in His right hand. Theyknelt before Him and mocked Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They spit on Him, andtook the staff and hit Him on the head. After they had mocked Him, they took the robe off Him,put His own garments on Him, and led Him away to crucify Him. (Matt 27:27-30).They put His accusation over His head, which read: This is Jesus the king of the Jews.Then two thieves were crucified with Him, one on the right and another on the left. (Matt27:37-38)

III - Christianity, its nihilism

We are afraid that many good Christians will be puzzled or even dismayed by this historical Je-sus, so different from the Christ of their faith, but this is what emerges from the studies thathave been done for many years to comprehend and describe the man who, somehow, got thisnew religion started: Christianity.

We must make it clear that we have put in evidence one facet only of the ministry of Jesus to il -lustrate our thesis; these few pages cannot possibly exhaust the topic of the history of Jesus.We have highlighted the component of nihilism present in his evangelical message and now, inthis chapter, we will examine and analyze the existential implications of this new faith that willproduce a new civilization.

We must add that this apocalyptic view, accompanied by such a nihilist ethics, would havehardly been capable to attract so many converts and produce a new universal religion likeChristianity and, moreover, it seems impossible that nihilism alone could give life to a new civi-lization.It is evident that Christianity cannot be reduced to nihilism alone.

Therefore, while in this chapter we will examine how nihilism characterized the origins of Chris-tianity, in the next chapter we will see how other values of Christianity have originated a newcivilization that cancelled from history the Classical civilization, a new beginning for the peopleof Europe and of the Mediterranean.

In order to further qualify our thesis, we want to add that the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth hasmarked a milestone in the evolution of homo sapiens because the psychic implications of thisnew faith will produce a new man and we are convinced that this justifies the fact that the his -tory of humanity is divided into before and after Christ.

We are going to analyze here the elements of this novelty. These elements will follow us all the way to Karl Marx.

Nihilism and the Cross

We will start by explaining the nihilist meaning of the Cross, the instrument of torture and deathwhich the Romans reserved to the most wretched of criminals.

To do this we will read again that passage that is called the discourse of the Beatitudes:He lifted up His eyes on His disciples, and said:“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they separate you from their company and in-sult you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man.

“Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for indeed, your reward is great in heaven. For in likemanner their fathers treated the prophets.“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are filled, for you shall hunger. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers spoke of the false prophets (Lc6:20-26).

The first part is the glorification of the losers and the second is the demonization of the victors.This is exactly the opposite of what the persons of common sense think who are in their rightmind.To be defeated is glorious and will make you enter the Kingdom, while if you have been suc-cessful and the people admire you you will be damned.It is not surprising that many Jews will remain hostile to his preaching. It is difficult to swallowsuch an absutd reversal of the values of life.

This mental attitude, expressed in his preachings, is paralyzing. If accepted it would block anyeffort to improve yourself and to conquer new goals. It would not only castrate the aggressivity(good or bad) that humans normally have in their dealings, it would also remove the curiosity ofknowledge, the satisfaction to build, the pleasure of a work well done.The result would be dehumanizing, a people of impotent zombies. To a superficial observer itcould seem a positive thing because it would result in a pacific society without contrasts, but re -ality is not like that. Human aggressivity serves to the survival and mature people know how tocontrol it and use it when it is necessary to produce a harmonious and well functioning society.If you castrate the aggressivity of the masses you obtain an anarchic society which will produceoppression and misery. This is the society that was produced by communism in the twentiethcentury.We will come back to this topic when we analyze the San Francis syndrome.Afterwards it will come again to our attention when we examine the Antiamericanism of ourdays.

Here we want to put in evidence that Jesus did not limit himself to preach this ethics; he realizedit by means of his own person.When he decided to go to Jerusalem to provoke the authorities, both Jewish and Romans, heknew what he was going to meet: a trial performed with tortures and the torment of the cross.The execution by means of the cross was one of the most humiliating and paiful possible. Thecondemned man was exposed on the cross to the contempt of the people who were fascinatedby the spectacle of death. In fact death came slowly by suffocation due to the traction of thebody on the arms which impeded to breathe. For this reason the condemned tried over and overto raise his body by pushing on the ankles nailed to the cross and this pressure was verypainful. The show consisted in watching for how long the condemned man could overcome thepain on the nailed ankles to lighten the weight on the arms. Obviously this had a term given bythe force and the ability to endure the pain. The strongest the man the longest the show. Some-times, to give more satisfaction to the crowd, the romans nailed a little board to the trunk of thecross below the buttocks of the condemned man so that he could lean on it; in this way theshow and the torment would have lasted longer. If there was no time or, for any reason, the romans wanted to put an end to the execution, theybroke the legs of the victim so that he could not push anymore on his ankles. Death came fast,in a few minutes and so ended the show.Usually the corpses of the executed were thrown into a dump to be eaten by the dogs. It wasdue to the intervention of a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, an influential per-son, that the corpse of Jesus was given to his family to be buried.

By going to his own sacrifice willingly Jesus gave the exemple and put himself in the position ofthe last of the defeated. After such a death he would have surely been among the most qualifiedto become a blessed and enter the Kingdom.

It was inevitable that after this feat his disciples considered him the greatest of the prophetsand, after that faith on his resurrection was accepted, they elevated him to the status of theMessiah sent by God to redeem Israel and all of humanity.By following the teachings of Jesus they overturned the scale of values which was consideredobvious in their society and elevated to “Son of God” the man who had realized this overturningon his own skin by dying a humiliating and painful death.The Cross becomes the symbol and the realization of Christian nihilism. From an instrument ofdeath it is transformed into a symbol of the heroism of he who has faith, from an instrument ofhumiliation becomes the key to the heavenly glory. Not only it does not destroy the reputation ofJesus, it becomes the symbol of the perfection of Christ: the victory of life over death.The Cross is taken as banner and symbol of this new faith; a foolish and absurd thing for thepagans and the Jews.

Problem was when these Christian Jews had to face the hostility of the orthodox Jews whenthey tried to convert them to this new faith.The Messiah, the anointed of the Lord mentioned in the Bible whom the Jews were waiting for,should have been a powerful leader who would have liberated them from Roman dominance,would have made them triumph over their enemies and would have conquered for them theplace that the chosen people of God deserved.The Christians were proposing as a Messiah a nobody come from a little town in Galilee, ofhumble origins, dead of an atrocious and humiliating death between two thieves.This idea was for the Jews: ridiculous, absurd, insane and blasphemous. How could have sucha nullity lead the people of Israel to the conquest of the leadership of all their neighbours?Inevitably the mass of the Israeli, not to mention their leaders, considered this initiative of theChristians to convert them as an insult to their faith, their intelligence and their dignity and un-leashed a fierce persecution as Jesus had foreseen.

At the light of these reasonings the decision of Saint Paul to proselityze among the paganswould have been the only choice: it would have been very unlikely that this Christian nihilismcould convince the Jews of the divine nature of Jesus.It remains to be seen how was possible that Christianity had such a success among the pagansto the point of deleting from history the Classical civilization.We will see this in the following chapters.

Faith

Faith is the huge novelty that Christianity brings to the evolution of Homo sapiens.We have already mentioned this in the preceding chapters; we have already said about the bigdifference between religiosity in the classical world and in Christianity.Now we want to further our analysis of this topic: faith.

We will start by giving an example of the religiosity in the classical world to compare it withChristianity.Let us read a letter written in the third century AD by a young man, Aurelius Dius, to his fatherAurelius Horion. Dius had been sent by his father to study in Egypt:

“Aurelius Dius to Aurelius Horion, my sweetest father, many greetings. I make supplication foryou every day before the Gods of this place. Now do not be uneasy, father, about my studies; Iam working hard and taking relaxation; I shall do finely. I salute my mother Tamiea and my sis-ter Tnepherous … I pray for your health father.” (Oxyrhinchus, P.Oxy.1296).

Here we see a young man who prays for the health of his father, but he does not pray the Godsof his family that was far away. He prays the Gods of the country where he was living becausehe thought that since these Gods were nearer to him his prayers would have been more effec-tive. Religion served this purpose, to obtain the favor of the Gods for any necessity; therefore,the most influential Gods were prayed. The Egyptian Gods, being their cult very ancient, wereconsidered very authoritative. The young man thought that, since he was living in Egypt, if hehad prayed the Gods of his country, Greek-Roman, the Egyptian Gods could have taken of-fense risking a grave damage to his family.

With the advent of Christianity all this would become unthinkable.If a Christian would have prayed the pagan Gods, or any other God, it would have been consid-ered a treason of his faith.

Pagans recommended themselves to the Gods with prayers but, more important, with sacri -fices. This was the main occupation of priest and priestesses, to kill a poor animal by sacrificingit to the chosen God who would have considered himself in debt and would have conceded therequired favor. Since these sacrifices were expensive, the faithful needed the counsel of priestson how the sacrifice should have been performed and to which God, in order to obtain the bestresult from his investment. All this was done in special events or in recurrent festivities.

All communities of the empire sacrificed regularly to their Gods to respect the traditions other -wise these Gods would have taken offense. The meat that was produced in these sacrificeswas eaten by the believers during the ceremony and if some meat was left it was put for sale.The Christians refused to participate in these sacrifices and to eat this meat.For the pagans this behavior was equivalent to a sabotage of the efforts of the community to in-gratiate the Gods; it was an act of rebellion that could have caused a great damage to the com-munity. This was the reason why sometimes the rage of the pagans exploded who reacted bypersecuting and killing the Christians.

Another reason to turn to the Gods was when people needed to foresee the future in occasionof special initiatives like a war.The ruses invented by the haruspices were the most diverse. Someone looked at the entrails ofthe sacrificed animals: liver, intestine, and others. Someone looked at the flight of the birds.Someone threw some bones on the ground and from their position understood the future. It is a list funny and depressing if you consider how very intelligent people, who made history,could rely on these “superstitions”.Actually not everybody believed this; Cicero was saying that he could not understand how twoauspices who met did not burst into laughter.All these “superstitions” will be done away by Christianity but … not entirely.

Ethics. Faith has its ethics. In the classical world ethics was a branch of philosophy not of reli-gion. The pagan religion did not pretend to impose an ethic behavior to the faithful.The enforcement of a certain behavior was an exclusive power of the State that had its rulesand laws and the personnel to enforce them.Paganism would have never interfered in these matters.

Paradise and Hell did not exist (not to speak of Purgatory), there was no Last Judgement, andno divinity would have punished or rewarded the people in the afterlife because there was noth-ing comparable to the Ten Commandments.

The pagans generally believed in the existence of the soul but the soul of the pagans was notthe same thing and it did not carry the same implications as it was for the Christians because nopriest could threaten the faithful with the death of the soul and with the Eternal Damnation.The meaning of “soul” was not the same for the two communities.

Ethics give us the selection criteria of the Righteous, the Chosen who will enter the Kingdom.Jesus gives us these selection criteria which exasperates the nihilism present in the human soultaking it to impossible levels.All this produces an anxiety-inducing situation where the individual feels forced to obey thepriests, the custodian and interpreters of the Faith, in order not to lose salvation.

Thus an attitude is produced of “us versus them” where them are not only the infidels but alsothe sinners who live among us who are an obstacle to salvation.The mind of the individual is split in two in the sense that now the people feel forced to obeyboth the authority of the lay community, the State, and the religious authority, the Church, thatcontrols the Faith. This split is present both inside each individual, in his conscience, and insidethe society where several groups of individuals are formed with different feelings and thereforewith different interpretations of this conflict between Church and State.

Eschatology. It is the most important component of the Faith. The whole history of humanitytends to a unique end that is the Kingdom of God. This is a completely original idea for the Clas-sical civilization which did not envisage any end for humanity. The Gospels offered the ultimateend for humanity and for the universe to which all people are asked to participate since it is in-evitable and it is written in the revelation (Apocalypse) that a transcendent being (God) hasgiven to the Prophet.We must insist on the concept of inevitability because it is determinant for the effectiveness ofthe eschatology: the believers must be sure that what promised will be realized.To convince the followers of the inevitability of the goal is the main task of the Prophet becauseonly in this way he can conquer the soul of the initiated and this can only be done by appealingto a revelation received from the Being who rules history and the universe.

We think that this is the most powerful element that conditioned the mind of the converts bymaking them see the world with different eyes and by giving them the determination to professthe faith even at the risk of their lives; it determined the success of faith in the classical world.The eschatology proposed by Jesus, with the Apocalypse and the Kingdom of God, gives a pur-pose to the believers and gives them the illusion to participate to a universal movement that willconquer the world and liberate it from Evil.

These hallucinations are very powerful because they offer a very effective antidote to the Exis-tential Angst.

It is a matter of fact that, in order to survive, all living beings on Earth, man included, must killand eat another living being. No life can exist by eating stones; we all are obliged to kill in orderto live. Every day all living beings must face a world full of other creatures that can offer food fortheir lives or can kill you for their own life.To a superficial observer it may seem that vegetables are excluded from this ordeal but alsothey must defend themselves from herbivores and must fight other vegetables for their livingspace and then feed themselves from the humus produced by their death.This situation cannot be overcome; all our life will go on like this and, in spite of our best efforts,one day we too will die. This is inevitable!It is natural that this problem creates the angst of having to live.For what purpose we must spend our lives killing other beings, for what purpose we must over-come the fear of being killed, if at the end all of us will die?

Eschatology gives us a reason to live because it lets every person enter a community where hewill not be alone anymore because all together they are going to build a new world that will berealized without any doubt. This is possible only if the Prophet has enough charisma to con-vince the neophytes of the inevitability of their success. In this new situation death will not be sorelevant anymore because it can be overcome by the immortality of the soul and so the Right-eous can enter this wonderful new world where there is no Evil, that nurtures angst, and enjoy itfor the Eternity.

The Classical culture had no eschatology. The philosophers tried to give a meaning to life butthey could not produce anything convincing because their Gods were not transcendent beingslike the God of the Jews. This “existential void” was clearly expressed by the saying: “He diesyoung who is dear to the Gods”.The supreme poet Homer has beautifully described this void when he lets Ulysses, the manwho wanted to know everything, go to the realm of Hades, the afterlife.The afterlife of the Greeks had nothing in common with the Paradise or Hell of the Christians;there were neither prizes nor punishments, just nothing. The Hades was positioned at the bor-der of the Ocean and the souls of the dead wandered around non-stop, inactive and uncon-scious. To communicate with them it was necessary to sacrifice an animal and make the soul,with whom you wanted to communicate, drink the blood. Among the others Ulysses meets his mother. He asks her about his country Ithaca and his fam-ily that he had not seen for 20 years. At the end of their meeting:“She said: I, thinking to myself, would have wanted to hug the shadow of my dead mother.Three times I threw myself, my heart neededto hug her, and three times from my arms she flew away like a shadow or a dream.”(Homer, Odyssey, song XI)

Nothing describes better than this song of the Odyssey the vision of the Greeks of the meaningof life: tragic and useless.

Justice. Faith produces a hallucination that is called “Justice”, which has nothing to see with themanagement of the relationships between the people that serves to produce an ordered andfunctioning community.From now on, when facing a novelty, people will ask themselves: “is it right or wrong”.Instead of “is it true or false” or “is it useful or useless”.This tormented search for justice will become a problem for Christian societies which will beshaken by the contrasts provoked by the different interpretations of justice produced by the dif-ferent pulsions of the unconscious of the groups, social cultural religious, of society.When this hallucination, Justice, hits against reality, it will produce the psychic explosive for theCriminal Madness. We will see at work the power of this hallucination with socialism.

Fishers of Men. Jesus had just settled down in Capernaum and was beginning to put togetherthe first disciples:As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and An-drew his brother, throwing a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And He said to them,“Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They immediately left their nets and followedHim. (Matt 4:18-20).

The convert is possessed by the faith but he also acquires from it a magnetic force that attractspeople and makes him a “fisher of men”.All the elements we have described produce in the human mind an effect of addiction and de-pendence that can be compared to the effect of the drugs.

It is a sad reality that the force of penetration of the drugs, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin,and so on, is given by the obsession of the people who have been infected to proselytizeamong their friends. This urge to Proselytize is one of the main characteristic of faith which by means of Christianitywill enter the world that will not be the same any more.The converts cannot hold themselves from making converts among their fellows.New characters were born, the Preacher and the Missionary, people dedicated to proselytizing.Faith annuls the critical thinking faculties of the mind and makes the believers like marionettespossessed by their hallucinations or by the authority of the priests who interpret the faith. This“loss of yourself” present in the preaching of Jesus is a fundamental requirement to become aChosen and enter the Kingdom; you become like “children” but at the same time you acquirethe force to face pain, persecutions and death and, at the same time, this force gives the mis -sionary the power to make converts.A phenomenon unknown in the classical world and therefore incomprehensible to the Romans.

The Gospels describe perfectly this force given by faith when Jesus gives instructions to theApostles before sending them on mission:Look, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, take no thought of how or what you will speak. For it will be given you at that time what you will speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks through you. (Matt 10:16-20).

This is the gift of he who is possessed by Faith. Faith will speak for him and in him giving himthe force to fish other men.

Sectarianism. Faith produces in the believers a Manichean vision of the world as the battle-field of Good against Evil. Obviously the converts see themselves on the side of Good whiletheir enemies are with Evil. This exasperates Paranoia to pathological levels up to delirium andproduces incurable contrasts where Hatred and Intolerance dominate the people without anypossibility to compromise. Since each believer sees Faith in his own way, very soon the believ-ers split up into sects. With the advance of Christianity throughout the empire, this sectarianismproduces so many sects that modern day historians are at work to list them all. Later on, Chris -tians will give the best of themselves to fight each other. One of the last pagan authors willwrite: “Not even the fierce beasts are as ferocious as the Christians when they fight each other”.Socialism will produce the same problem.

We want to conclude by listing the elements which are necessary to have a faith. They are allindispensable for the success of the faith:The Prophet, a man is indispenable who has an overflowing charisma and a message. Hischarisma is indispensabile to make his followers believe that he received the message from aSupreme Being. His charisma must be so strong as to outgrow all his followersThe Holy Book, the message and the interaction of the Prophet with the Supreme Being mustbe fixed in a book which will be “sacred”. A book to adore or hate, to preach or burn.Eschatology, it is the Ultimate End contained in the message, it is indispenable to “justify” thelife of the faithfuls. It makes them “righteous” in front of the Supreme Being and gives a sense totheir lives.

Nihilism, from Jesus to Christianity

The nihilism proposed by Jesus to the chosen would have made life impossible in any society.No human community, even if scarcely developed, could have survived if its members hadadopted at the letter the vision of Jesus.This to Jesus was irrelevant because he did not want to start a new society, he wanted the Cho-sen to adopt a certain life style (unattainable) to wait for the Apocalypse and enter the Kingdom.This life style, so nihilist, was not meant to build a more “just” or “progressive” society becausein a few years the Son of Man would have arrived and all the present world would have beenupset and destroyed, therefore it would have been useless to build a new society. The chosenshould have adopted a life style insanely passive to enter the Kingdom, not to build a better so-ciety.The first Christian Jews accepted this proposal and started proselytizing provoking, as Jesushad anticipated, a violent persecution by the orthodox Jews. They faced persecution and deathalways waiting for the Apocalypse. But this Apocalypse did not arrive so, with the passing of theyears the Christians had to modify the message of Jesus in order to produce a new religion withnew ethics which allowed the civil coexistence in a new civilization. This evolution of Christian-ity, which began a few years after the death of Jesus, pushed the Christians to produce sometexts that could be used as guidance to the new converts: the Gospels.The life and the message of Jesus will be modified in these texts with the passing of time and atthe end they were settled by the sect of the Orthodox Christians with the four versions of theCanonical Gospels, producing a new religion and new ethics.Actually, we must point out that the evolution of Christianity has never stopped.

The four Canonical Gospels that we have taken into consideration were not written to be histori-cal records. They have been produced by some Christian communities that we do not know, tofix on a written document their idea of Jesus and of Christianity.In order to understand this, we must keep in mind that right after the death of Jesus severaldocuments and stories started circulating, the most diverse, about this character who somehowhad fascinated many Israelis; perhaps for having spontaneously offered himself to the sacrificeof the cross or because, as his disciples were saying, was resurrected after death.Inevitably these stories and the written documents, which did not arrive to us, were not identical,they did not give the same idea of Jesus and his message.Therefore, some Christian communities, which we will call proto-orthodox, decided to collect thefunds to entrust a scribe to write on papyrus their vision of Christianity, not of the historic realityof Jesus, whom they had never met. They wanted to make converts to their cause.These Christians decided from the start that their message should have been universal there-fore the “lingua franca” of the time should have been used: the ancient Greek.Their tongue was not Greek probably it was Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and it is unlikelythat they could write in Greek so they had to appoint a professional scribe to have a documentwritten in a good Greek to make it circulate in a vast public that evidently was not all Israeli.The production of the first copy of each Gospel must have been very expensive, but also eachfollowing copy was expensive.Probably many Israeli knew a bit of Greek, same way as today many people know a bit of Eng-lish, but not so well to be able to write or read it.The spreading of these documents was done by means of meetings of interested, or just curi -ous, people where a person who could read well the Greek was reading out loud the document.In those times, when someone was saying to have read a book, he did not mean that he hadtaken the book in his hands and had read it himself. Usually he had listened from an expertreader reading it aloud in those meetings because in those times the books were very expen-sive, too expensive for the poor people where Christianity was born.

Reading these books was very difficult. The words were written attached to each other, therewas no space, and the punctuation did not exist. There were neither paragraphs nor chapters,not to speak of the table of contents. The reading of these books was difficult; it was easy to getit wrong.

Moreover we must put in evidence that there was no guaranty that those who copied the textwould have done it without modifying something, besides the inevitable errors.We know that some episodes have been added later to the Gospels.

Today a scholar who would want to know who really the man Jesus was would be in difficultybecause it is evident that the Christians who produced the Gospels wanted to present their vi -sion of Christianity so, right from the beginning, their books were not entirely true. To this wemust add all the modifications and mistakes of the scribes who in the following 1000 years haveproduced the copies that we read today. Our problem today is to devise reasonable methods to discern what is true (historic) in the fourGospels and what has been added, invented, distorted by the Christians who produced them.

As far as our work is concerned, we can affirm that the original nihilism of Jesus’ message hasbeen exasperated by inserting a few episodes which cannot be traced to the historic Jesus buthave been added by those who produced the books. For the purpose of our analysis, that wantsto take us up to socialism, the most important is the one that deals with the danger of riches:When He set out on His way, a man came running and knelt before Him, and asked Him,“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”He said to him, Why do you call Me good? No one is good, except God alone.  You know thecommandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false wit-ness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.”He answered Him, “Teacher, all these have I observed from my youth.”Then Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and said to him, You lack one thing: Go your way, sellwhatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come, takeup the cross and follow Me.”He was saddened by that word, and he went away grieving. For he had many possessions.Jesus looked around and said to His disciples, How hard it will be for those who have wealth toenter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:17-23),

We must notice that there is no episode in the Gospels where a follower of Jesus gives anythingto the poor. Actually, there are several episodes where you can understand that his apostleshad left everything to follow him (home, tools, family, work), but they did not give it to the poor;somehow everything remained in the family. We can also assume that if someone had some-thing to give, he should have given it to him, Jesus, to support all his followers who were many.Jude Iscariot was in charge of keeping the money. It is clear that only in exceptional circum-stances Jesus solved the problem with the “multiplication of the loaves and the fish”.

It seems evident that this episode has been invented on purpose by the Christians to exasper -ate the nihilism present in the preaching of Jesus. It will have a disastrous effect in the ChristianCivilization.

This is confirmed in the Acts of the Apostles in an episode that made many socialists happy.So the Acts describe the beginnings of this little sect of Christian Jews:All the believers were of one heart and one soul, and no one said that what he possessed washis own. But to them all things were in common. With great power the apostles testified to theresurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on them all. There was no one among themwho lacked, for all those who were owners of land or houses sold them, and brought the in-

come from what was sold, and placed it at the apostles’ feet. And it was distributed to each ac-cording to his need. Joseph, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means, Son of Encouragement), a Levitefrom the land of Cyprus, sold a field he owned, and brought the money and placed it at theapostles’ feet. (Acts 4:32-37).Now a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. He kept back partof the proceeds with his wife’s knowledge, and brought a part of it and placed it at the apostles’feet.Then Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to deceive the Holy Spirit and keepback part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, was it not your own? Andwhen it was sold, was it not under your authority? Why have you conceived this deed in yourheart? You did not lie to men, but to God.”On hearing these words, Ananias fell down and died. And great fear came on all those whoheard these things. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buriedhim.About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter said to her,“Tell me whether you sold the land for this amount?”She said, “Yes, for that much.”Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look!The feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.”At once she fell down at his feet and died. Upon entering, the young men found her dead andcarried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear came on the entire church and onall those who heard these things. (Acts 5:1-11).

In the Acts too it does not exist any episode where the Apostles give anything to the poor; it wasrequired of all who could to give the Church a part of their riches.We are stunned by this episode; is it possible that from the very beginning Christians were soferocious when dealing with money? We will see this ferocity at work in the socialism.

Now we go back to the vision of Jesus to analyze its elements and see how they have beenchanged after his death with the evolution of Christianity.

Physically real. The Kingdom of God, according to the vision of Jesus, will be realized on thisearth, it will be a real entity here in this world, not a metaphysical entity in the afterlife. Our worldmust be upset by the Apocalypse to eradicate Evil and to give life to a new reality, here on thisearth, where there will be no more sin, misery, illness, death. According to the Gospels the dead will return to life to be judged and this will happen here onthis earth after the Apocalypse. Everybody will be judged, the sinners will be thrown into Helland the Righteous will enter the Kingdom.We must suppose that Hell too was on this earth, we do not know where and how but there isno element to believe that Jesus wanted to create metaphysical entities in the afterlife.

This vision of Jesus will be radically modified by the evolution of Christianity because all thisshould have happened in a short time, not beyond the present generation of the Apostles. With the passing of time, the first Christians realized that all this was not going to happen, there-fore, the evangelists were obliged to put the mute to the Apocalypse. They produced a new vi-sion where the Apocalypse would happen at “The End of Time”, a very distant time, when theEarth would be obliterated. The Christians will create a new character, Christ, who absorbs thecharacters of: Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah and Redeemer. Thus the Christiansproduced a new religion which will break away from Judaism but keeping its roots in the Biblebecause all those characters were biblical characters anyway.The Christians had to produce two metaphysical entities, Paradise and Hell, which are not onthis earth. This earth will remain a “valley of tears” hopelessly compromised by Evil to whom

you cannot oppose. At the End of Time the Apocalypse will arrive with the return of Jesus-Sonof Man-Son of God, this earth will be destroyed and the dead will resurrect to be judged in theLast Judgment. The sinners will go to Hell, the righteous will go to Paradise and everything willremain like this for the Eternity.

Liberation from want. It is the most important feature of the Kingdom because, since there isno Evil, the Chosen would have had a heavenly life free form any need.This is the eternal dream of humanity.Death would be defeated by the resurrection of the dead; no more illnesses, hunger, war, forthe eternity. This is the Good News that Jesus preaches to the Israeli.

Universalism. All people on earth will be involved in the Apocalypse. Jesus (or Saint Paul?)takes the monotheist Jewish faith out of the miniscule Jewish community and spreads it aroundthe world involving all humankind. This novelty marks a milestone in the evolution of Homo sapi -ens because faith is going to change the mind of the people.Universalism is a feature that is indispensable to produce a convincing eschatology.We will see that socialism only will have a universal eschatology by which it will unseat Chris-tianity. All Gospels insist that the Good News must be preached also to the gentiles (the non Jews) andso this faith will be preached around the world thanks to the incessant work of the missionaries.We must specify that we are not sure that this feature originates from the historic Jesus andwas not inserted into the Gospels by the Christians following the work of Saint Paul. We must keep in mind that all Gospels were written years after the death of Saint Paul.Anyway, after Jesus the world will not be the same anymore.

Vocation to Martyrdom. Christians must be ready to sacrifice all they have, even their lives.The vocation to martyrdom is the highest expression of a nihilism that is turned against yourself.The blood of the martyrs will be a determinant element for the victory of the Christian faithover the pagan religions. We will see how the Christians will “fish” the pagans just by havingthemselves martyred.

Anarchy. The teachings of Jesus proposed an insanely anarchic society; it would have beenimpossible to make the law and order respected in this society. Moreover any initiative to im-prove the standard of living was condemned; ambition, progress and search of knowledge weresinful and the people who would have been successful would be damned.Today the historian has a difficult task when trying to reconcile such a nihilist anarchy with theethics developed by the Christian civilization. How is it possible that this anarchy evolved up tothe severity of the ethics enforced by Christians in the following centuries?In the next chapter we will see how the Christians have overcome the evangelical anarchy toproduce a new civilization.

Family. Jesus had voluntarily renounced having sex and his own family because he wanted togive all of himself to his mission. Here the nihilism of the Gospels is ambiguous; it seems thatthe renunciation to sex and family is necessary only to that small part of the chosen who hadjoined him in his preaching while the others were supposed to dedicate themselves to their fam-ilies. It is clear that the evangelical message is rooted in the Bible and in the Ten Command-ments where people are ordered to “honor father and mother”. But it is also evident that thechosen must place the message of Jesus before the duties implicit in the family and this is alsoexpressed in a very violent manner:“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but asword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and adaughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s foes will be those of his own household.

“He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son ordaughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. (Matt 10:34-37).

It seems clear that Jesus considered the family an impediment to the realization of the right-eous. Also on this matter the Christians had to “ignore” the most violent parts of the Gospels to pro-duce ethics strongly oriented towards the values of the family.This topic will put in difficulty Christianity in front of socialism which will propose without hesita-tion the abolition of the family.

Private property. This matter too, as for the family, is rather ambiguous. In the Gospels it isclearly stated the duty not to steal as expressed in the Ten Commandments. However we mustnote that although Jesus did not expressly condemn the private property his teachings imply itsrenouncement. If to be among the Chosen you must renounce riches, if you must not opposetheft and violence, if you must not even try to recuperate your stolen things, what is left of yourright of property?Moreover, his disciples were supposed to put in common at least part of their riches to supporttheir movement.This matter too will put Christianity in difficulty in front of socialism which will clearly propose theabolition of private property in a time when the Christian societies had established strong ethicsoriented towards the respect of the private property. Socialism will make the abolition of privareproperty the main element of its faith, with monstrous results.

Equality. Equality among men is not clearly stated in the Gospels but it is obvious that if theChosen must renounce their self and annihilate their ambitions all the Chosen will becomeequal. None of the Chosen must try to excel therefore they will all become equal. It is difficult toimagine a society more egalitarian than the one proposed by Jesus.Also in this case the Christian societies will have to perform intellectual acrobatics to establishsets of laws that will allow the huge inequalities that are inevitably produced in a society thatwants to progress. Socialism, in all his versions, Leninist, Maoist, Castrist and so on, will overcome this uncertaintyand will try to fully realize this hallucination with monstrous results.

Revolution. In the times of Jesus the idea of Revolution did not exist because this archetypewas invented in the Western Civilization many centuries later. It did not exist this idea of a vio -lent uprising that would have produced a new society, radically different and more “just”.Today we must notice that the preaching of Jesus implied a radical revolution because the lastwould have become the first and vice versa. The rich and powerful would have been destroyedby the Son of Man while the Kingdom would have been opened to the righteous who wouldhave remained poor and helpless. It is evident that nobody has ever proposed a revolution moreradical than the one proposed by Jesus.This matter too has undergone a radical evolution in the Christian doctrine which has repudiatedat least the most radical expression of this revolution.This revolutionary component has not been understood in our modern Civilization because Je-sus asked for a complete passivity from the Chosen. All the violence would have been pro-duced by God through the Son of Man while the Chosen, the beneficiary of this revolution, weresupposed to do absolutely nothing. In our culture, on the contrary, the idea of revolution is asso-ciated with a violent uprising produced by the people who are supposed to be its beneficiaries. All along the history of Christianity this topic will be treated in an ambiguous way, with opposingattitudes that sometimes wanted the people passively obedient to the power, other timespushed the people to stand against the authority. Sometimes the Church was teaching to obeyany authority, sometimes encouraged rebellions against the state but this was not done to pro-

duce revolutions, it was done to impose the will of the Church in the conflict between state andchurch.Socialism owes much to this mental conditioning that Christianity has instilled in the people andhas skillfully exploited this ambiguity of Christianity, managing to unseat it from the mind of thepeople by means of the Cult of the Revolution which will become part of its eschatological vi-sion. Also in this case with monstrous results.

Nihilism, Sadism, Masochism. Nihilism is basically sadism exasperated by Paranoia which isan integral part of the Faith. Sadism can be turned against the others but also against our -selves, Masochism. It seems that Jesus turned it mainly against himself but, however, we must notice how theApocalypse is presented:But woe to women who are pregnant and to those who nurse in those days! Pray that your es-cape may not be in winter. For in those days there will be distress as has not been from the be-ginning of the creation which God created to this time, nor ever shall be. (Mark 13:17-19).

What did humanity do to deserve such a punishment? Where does all this hatred come from?Here we can see how the Apocalypse of Jesus is an expression of sadism. In fact his Kingdomcan be realized only with a tremendous sacrifice, with much suffering and with the destruction ofa great part of humanity. Only after such a colossal sacrifice the Chosen can have peace andhappiness. This is the purpose of the Revolution: to produce such a heinous suffering uglyenough to appease the Complexes of Guilt.

The socialist Cult of the Revolution is the product of this sadism.

These two components of love and hatred, which are present in the Gospels, will be alwayspresent in the evolution of Christianity and will provoke conflicts both inside the conscience ofthe believers and inside the community.

Monasticism, the negation of life

We think that Monasticism is the most extreme realization of Christian nihilism and for this rea-son we want to present it in a separate chapter.

With the spread of Christianity in the empire, a phenomenon starts where thousands of people“abandon the world”, go away from society to live, alone or in community, in solitary places tolive in solitude, poverty and chastity, pray, meditate, worship, to atone for the sins of humanity.We have assembled this phenomenon in the term Monasticism, but it comes in many differentforms: stylites, dendrytes, ascetics, anchorites, hermits, monks, nuns, recluses, and more.

This phenomenon was unknown and incomprehensible in the Greek-Roman world. We knowthe story of Diogenes who lived in a barrel, but this was an isolated case that could be dis-missed as a case of lunacy. Here we are talking of a movement made up by a relevant part of the population that was ad-mired and even venerated by the community.

We must put in evidence that the renunciation to sex and money implies the renunciation to lifebecause without sex (heterosexual) you do not have children and without money you starve.

It is a matter of fact that sex and money are indispensable to life and therefore it is natural thatboth are desired. In the Classical civilization this desire was considered natural and no feeling ofguilt prevented the people from enjoying them.Christianity has instilled in the mind of the people a feeling of guilt for this desire because, ac -cording to this new ethics, sex and money would have made it impossible a spiritual elevation toa closer contact with God and would have made you risk the eternal damnation.The despise, but we could say the fear, that motivated the monks is the symptom of a nihilismthat implies the renunciation to life.

Stylites. The stylites were people who lived on top of a column to publicly testify their faith.They remained there for a few years but more often until death. They were assisted by volun -teers who brought them food and water. A variant were the Dendrytes who lived among the branches of a tree.This form of asceticism was practiced in the oriental part of the empire where it lasted until thebeginning of the second millennium. In Russia it lasted until the XV century.We can see an example of this practice from Saint Simeon the Elder, a stylite who lived in thefirst half of the V century.Having a very devout mother, he was fascinated by monastic life since his youth. To better iso -late himself from the world he went to live on top of a rock of a mountain in the north of Syria;but such was his fame as an ascetic that a continuous stream of pilgrims went to see him. Hedecided therefore to have a platform built on the top of a column 4 meters high and to live upthere.With the passing of time and given the increase of the crowds, this column was elevated to upto 15 meters; the platform was 4 meters wide.Women were forbidden to come close to the column, including his mother.He spent the rest of his life, 37 years, on that column without ever coming down, until death.He was continuously busy with visitors who, having been authorized, went to talk to him bymeans of a ladder, in order to have his opinion on matters of faith.Although he was in a “difficult” situation he produced a quantity of correspondence to give judg-ments and advices. All emperors wrote to him and also the Council of Calcedonia wanted tohave his opinion.When he got sick the emperor sent him three doctors who asked him to come down to be vis-ited, but he refused saying that he would have rather entrusted himself to God.Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches made him a saint.Today a monk from Georgia has been living for 20 years on top of a rocky pillar 40 meter highon the mountains of Georgia, daily assisted by his fellow monks who live in a convent at thebase of the pillar. But he is not exposed to the elements; he has built a minuscule stonedwelling on the top.

Anchorites or Hermits. These are men, but also a few women, who go to isolated places inthe wilderness to escape from the crowds, to live in solitude and to achieve a better “spiritualperfection”. This movement begins in the III century in the Middle East when Christianity wasstill persecuted by the empire; it quickly reaches relevant numbers.Usually their refuge was a cavern, the branches of a tree or a makeshift hut. In the Middle Eastthey lived in the desert while in Europe they chose the forests or the mountains.They made a living by some little cultivation, by gathering what nature made them available, butmore often they were helped by shepherds or by the people of a nearby village.The hermits do not want to be engaged in the world, they want to stay alone to meditate and tocontemplate the divine mysteries.With the passing of time and with the scarcity of isolated places, these hermits started gatheringin communities. In this way the first coenobium and then monasteries were born where the her -mits built themselves little cells where they could stay in solitude This aggregation was alsomade necessary by the fact that they needed a church and a priest to be assisted in their spiri-tual life.

Monks and Nuns. Since the number of men and women who wanted to live an ascetic life wasgrowing fast both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches realized that this movement had to bemanaged and, most of all, that they had to protect themselves from the danger of the heresieswhich found a breeding ground among these people who lived away from the community andwere visited by a crowd of pilgrims who were very vulnerable to ideas not liked by the hierarchy.So the monastic orders were born.These were groups of hermits who built themselves a common house where they could live insolitude, pray, meditate and mortify their flesh. This implied that a Rule had to be drawn to de -fine the organization of the common life and the purpose of their mission. This Rule had to bewritten and presented to the Pope to be officially approved by the Church.To all the vows are required of poverty, chastity and obedience.Thus monasticism gives us the most advanced realization of Christian nihilism.Nihilism manifests itself with this desire to “exit the world”, a desire that could seem comprehen-sible if you consider that Europe at that time was upset by the barbarian invasions but the as -cetic practices that these monks forced upon themselves were the clear manifestation of apathologic masochism. They were real tortures.The idea was that the monk could not reach a more intimate union with God if he had not “puri -fied himself in the crucible of the ascesis”. In other words, suffering was indispensable to reachGod, therefore tortures were indispensable. Sleep disruption, fasting and self-flagellation were the most used practices.The cilice was an especially useful torture to mortify own flesh; it was a belt or a band made of acloth, rough and prickly, that was tightly tied to the body in order to irritate and to wound. Theyeven produced bands of metal with points which entered the body and provoked pain at eachmovement.The list of these tortures is very long because during the centuries new monastic orders em-ployed the best of their masochism to invent new ones.

Recluses. They were men, but more often women, who had themselves locked into a cell of amonastery or a church to better remain in solitude and avoid the distractions of the world. Thisreclusion could last for a determined period of time or could be for life; it was considered a sym-bolic “death to the world” in the hope to find a way to God in the calm, peace and tranquility. In the most severe forms the door of the cell was walled and a little opening was left for light, airand to bring food. In the XIV century in Rome there were 250 recluses scattered around several churches andmonasteries, in the XVI century four recluses lived in Saint Peter’s, in the XVII century therewere several recluses in France and we can find recluses in Russia up to the XIX century.This practice was subject to a rule; the candidate was to remain for a few years in a monasteryunder observation, then the candidate was to be examined by the bishop who would ascertainthe sincerity of his purpose and had to give his formal approval.The door of the cell was walled during an official ceremony at the presence of the bishop, with agreat feast of the community who was accompanying the ceremony with the songs of the de -funct. Having a recluse was much appreciated by the community, the convent or the town, be -cause she would have spent the rest of her life praying for them, not just for herself.

Going on with the years, these religious orders did not limit themselves to mortify their ownflesh; they also set themselves to mortify the lay people because they had not given up thepleasures of the world as they, the monks, had done. For centuries the lay people, when at the point of death, were persuaded, encouraged, we canalso say blackmailed, to cede to the monastery their properties in order to obtain the forgive-ness of their sins. In fact, the lay people had not despised sex and money as they, the monks,had done and therefore had a great need to be forgiven. These properties could not be regis-tered at the name of the monks or the monasteries, they were under the vow of poverty, and

therefore they found creative ways to amass more and more properties while still remainingpoor; these properties later will become inalienable. When there is a will, there is a way!A few centuries later, the Church and its religious orders were the biggest landowners in Eu-rope; in some regions they arrived to own up to 80% of all cultivable land. No bad for a “spiri -tual” movement that was born to “mortify the flesh” and to live in evangelical poverty.

What we said here above does not exhaust this matter. As incredible as it may seem, in thenext chapter we will see how monasticism became the force that will make Europe overcomethe Dark Ages and supplied the ideal thrust to start a new civilization.

IV - Christianity, a new civilization

In this chapter we will see the other face of Christianity. We will see that movement which wasborn out of the ruins of the Classical civilization and was the starting point of what we call todayWestern Civilization.The demise of the Roman Empire and the dissolution of its civilization are very controversialtopics debated by historians because it is not easy to answer the questions that arise from anin-depth examination. We think that this is a unique phenomenon in the history of mankind; such a sophisticated civi -lization, surrounded by people much less civilized, that let itself be destroyed and deleted fromthe earth.The most striking fact to be considered is that the Classical civilization was destroyed by Chris-tianity.Matter of fact, Christianity wiped the slate clean and gave a new beginning to all the people ofthe Empire. All religions present in the Empire disappeared, cancelled forever. Only the ruinsare left of their temples. All cultural, philosophic, artistic movements were cancelled; Christianitybecame the only lead: in the arts, in the thinking, in the architecture, in the sciences, in politics,in everything.Today, it has become a common place, much abused, to affirm that Greece was the cradle ofour civilization because our democracy was born there.This seems to us a beautiful nonsense, very beautiful and even a bit romantic, but that is nothow it happened.Our modern democracy comes from Christianity, by means of the interaction of the radical anddissident protestant movements with the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

In the preceding chapter we have seen that the pattern of behavior proposed by Jesus, to beone of the Chosen, were not rules (foolishly nihilist) necessary to establish a new religion or anew society; they were needed just to enter the Kingdom. We have also highlighted that theseprecepts were all his originals; they did not come from the Bible although many of the Biblicalprecepts should have been respected anyway.

But Jesus’ ministry was not limited to this. Besides preaching the Apocalypse Jesus also promoted his personal vision of the ethics of theBible. This vision of his contrasted with the ethics which were commonly accepted in Israel, thatof the Pharisees and Sadducees. They pretended to be the most authoritative interpreters of theBible and did not like to be contradicted on these matters. For this reason Jesus felt he had theduty to face them and to counter them to state his interpretation of the biblical precepts thus go-ing to meet his death sentence because his interpretation was considered blasphemous by boththe leading classes and the public opinion.

We are not sure if this evangelical ethics (or which part of it) was original of Jesus or was in -serted into the Gospels by the first Christians but, for the purpose of this work of us, this distinc-tion is irrelevant because we want to study how all this evolved up to the point of producing anew civilization regardless of where this ethics originated that is irrespective of who started thisevolution, Jesus or the Christians who wrote the Canonical Gospels.

This ethics contained in the Gospels has suggested that Jesus wanted to be a reformer of Ju-daism rather than the founder of a new religion. We cannot answer this question.

A New ethics

The prohibition to eat the impure foods was among the most important commandments es-tablished by the Law of Moses. The Bible lists all foods that the Jews must not eat not to breakthe holy pact made with God.In the following passage Jesus makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of this Law of Moses andpoints out, in very strong terms, his difference from the Orthodox Judaism:When He had called all the people to Him, He said, Listen to Me, every one of you, and under-stand: There is nothing from outside a man that by entering him can defile him. But the thingswhich come out of the man are what defile him. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”When He had left the people and entered the house, His disciples asked Him concerning theparable. He said to them, Are you so without understanding also? Do you not know that any-thing from the outside that enters a man cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart,but into his stomach, and goes out into the sewer, thus purifying all foods?”And He said, What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heartof men, proceed evil thoughts, adultery, fornication, murder, theft, covetousness, wickedness,deceit, licentiousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride and foolishness. All these evil things comefrom within and defile a man.” (Mark 7:14-23).

To declare that all foods were pure was an insult to the faith that the Orthodox Jews would havenot forgiven him.

Work on the Sabbath was to be punished with death. On this matter the Bible leaves no doubt,but here too, in spite of the extreme gravity of his remarks, Jesus proclaims his dissent:At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry and began to pluck the heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!”But He said to them, Have you not read what David and those who were with him did when hewas hungry, how he entered the house of God and ate the ritual bread, which was not lawfulfor him to eat, neither for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you notread in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, but areblameless? I say to you, in this place there is One who is greater than the temple. If you hadknown what this meant, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned theinnocent. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Matt 12:1-8).

The logic of the orthodox Jews was that to pick up the heads of grain, to rub them to separatethe kernels and eat them was a work so it should not be done on the Sabbath. The Pharisees dedicated many of their energies to define with the most possible precision whatwas a work and what was not. They gave us an example of this manic obsession when they debated the case where someoneor an animal had fallen into a well on a Sabbath. What could have been done to save him? Wasit lawful to go home pick up a rope to pull him up? No way, claimed the Pharisees, that was awork. Therefore you should have waited until dark to pick him up, hoping that the guy had notdrowned. But there was another possibility; those who were close to the well could take their own clothesand make a rope to throw at the guy: this was not to be considered a work!

It seems that all this was lived with much hypocrisy by the people of Israel if Jesus addressesthe Pharisees in this way:

He said to them, What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Then how much better is a man than a sheep? Therefore, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Matt (12:11-12).

It is not surprising that Jesus, or the first Christians, attacked the hypocrisy of the Pharisees:Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, butinside they are full of extortion and greed. You blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cupand dish, that the outside of them may also be clean.Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which indeedappear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness. Soyou also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.(Matt 23:25-28).

To honor the truth, we must tell another of these invectives:Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You tithe mint and dill and cumin, but have ne-glected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to havedone without leaving the others undone. You blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow acamel! (Matt 23:23-24).

Here Jesus refers to the fact that the Pharisees considered a duty to pay, at the time of the pur -chase, the tithe (one tenth of the price) on all agricultural products, even on such insignificantproducts as mint, dill, cumin. This because the Law prescribed that those who sold agriculturalproducts should pay the tithe to the Temple, but it could happen that the seller did not pay thetax therefore the Pharisees, for their peace of mind, paid the tax when buying a product so thatthe Temple would have received its monies, or perhaps the double. Jesus knew that the Phar-isees were taking on themselves a tax which was not theirs but for him the matter of taxes wasnot the most important thing of the Law.

The role of women in the society is substantially changed by Jesus.So the Bible tells the creation of man and woman:Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils thebreath of life, and man became a living being. (Gen 2:7).Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpersuitable for him.”Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, andbrought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every livingcreature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, andto every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept. Then He took one of his ribsand closed up the place with flesh. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, Hemade into a woman, and He brought her to the man.Then Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;she will be calledWoman, for she was taken out of Man.”Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they will be-come one flesh. (Gen 2:18-24).

In Hebrew man is said “’’ish” and woman “’isshah” which means from the man or for the man.It is clear that the Bible considers the woman a creature inferior to man, created by God to helphim in a manner suitable to him since the animals could not do it. The woman is created to be a companion to man.

The situation of the woman in the marriage was not easy.

The Bible states that the wife is a property of the husband as the house, the land and the ani -mals. She has, of course, a special position since from her the sons are born who will inherit thename of the father and will ensure the continuity of his (of the man) family.The Ten Commandments order: “don’t desire the woman of others”. However this does notmean that the man would have been unfaithful to his wife. The adultery would have been com-mitted against the man who was the owner of this other woman: father, husband, brother. Since the wife was the property of the husband, she had no right to his fidelity.The penalty for the infidelity of the woman was death by stoning; however she would have com-mitted it.In the Israeli society of the time of Jesus man was the only protagonist and the woman an ob-ject.Divorce did not exist because it implies that both man and woman can take the initiative to di -vorce. Divorce existed in the Greek-Roman society which sometime earlier had begun a “pro-gressive” evolution and women could find a job which allowed them a certain independencefrom man. But as we have seen, the Israeli refused to participate in this evolution.At the time of Jesus there was the repudiation of the wife which could be done by the man onlyand at his will. The husband was not accountable to anyone for his decision; no sentence of anytribunal was needed.A problem could arise for the husband only if the family of the woman were opposed becausethe repudiation was an offense to the family of the woman.Repudiation was a tragedy for the woman. If her family was not strong enough to oppose, itcould take her back home but it could also refuse to do this because a repudiated woman was ashame for the family. In this case the woman had two choices only: she could go in front of asynagogue and beg the charity or she could prostitute herself. We do not know of any possibilityfor a woman to find a job in the Israeli society which allowed her to survive.Jesus clashed with the Pharisees on this matter:The Pharisees came to test Him, asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and to divorce her.”Jesus answered them, “Due to the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.  But fromthe beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female. For this cause shall a manleave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. So then theyare no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asun-der.” (Mark 10:2-9).

This passage will mark forever the doctrine of the Catholic Church concerning divorce.

Here Jesus condemns in no uncertain terms the cruelty of repudiation. According to his interpre-tation of the Bible, an interpretation all his personal, Moses had ceded and granted men thepower to commit such a cruelty just because he knew how “hard” their heart was and so he wasforced to yield.

From the start Jesus puts women in a new position. A few women enter from the very beginningin the circle of his disciples and follow him along his entire ministry, up to the feet of the cross.The women will be the first to see his empty tomb and will be the first to announce his resurrec-tion.The fact that a few women were going around the country together with a crowd of men, alonewithout their husbands or brothers, was considered extremely improper. Such“promiscuity” was an extremely dangerous precedent.As far as we know, these who accompanied Jesus, were women rich and powerful who couldafford to support themselves and also to contribute with their resources to supporting the crowdof the disciples, thus rendering a very useful service to the movement. However, even if the roleof these women was the traditional role, because they served and provided for men, this situa-tion provoked the rage of the orthodox Jews.

The women in the first Christian communities will have an even more active role because theywill participate in the preaching of the Gospel. We know this from the letters of Saint Paulwhere the apostle mentions the name of several women who were active in the community,more active than many men. We must not see this as an anticipation of feminism because Saint Paul proposes, anyway, atraditional role for the women in the family and in the society, but at the same time he encour -ages them to come forward and work for the movement and he also pays homage to their con-tribution.After the spread of Christianity, when this new religion affirms itself as the official religion of theempire, women will be ordered to return to “their place”. However, all this will change the cultureof Christian society and, with the passing of the centuries, it will bring a change to the role ofwomen in western societies which will be unique in the history of mankind.

The children were considered small adults too week and powerless to be useful for anything,the only thing they had to do was to grow up as fast as they could to take their place in the soci -ety.Jesus did not see it this way:They brought young children to Him, that He might touch them. But the disciples rebukedthose who brought them. But when Jesus saw it, He was very displeased and said to them, “Al-low the little children to come to Me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of God.Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall not enterit.” And He took them up in His arms, put His hands on them, and blessed them. (Mark 10:13-16).

This new way to consider women and children must be seen as a confirmation of his vision be-cause these surely were the last in the Israeli society and therefore would have become the firstin the Kingdom of God. As we see it, we prefer to think that Jesus wanted to give love some room in a society extremelyrigid and tormented by religious fanaticism, without having to wait for the Apocalypse.

Jesus makes it clear without any doubt what is important for his ethics: sincerity, honesty, com-passion, forgiveness. That is, those virtues which keep a human society together:But let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these comes fromthe evil one. (Matt 5:37).

Meanwhile, when thousands of the crowd were assembled, so as to trample on one another, Hebegan to say to His disciples first, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Forthere is nothing covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Thereforewhat you have said in the darkness will be heard in the light. And what you have whispered inthe ear in private rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops. (Luke 12:1-3).

“Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that your brother has some-thing against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go on your way. First be reconciledto your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matt 5:23-24).

O generation of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance ofthe heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth goodthings. And an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. But I say to you that forevery idle word that men speak, they will give an account on the Day of Judgment. For by yourwords you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matt 12:34-37).

“Be sure that you not do your charitable deeds before men to be seen by them. Otherwise youhave no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

“Therefore, when you do your charitable deeds, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hyp-ocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be honored by men. Truly I say toyou, they have their reward. But when you do your charitable deeds, do not let your left handknow what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deeds may be in secret. And your Fa-ther who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly. (Matt 6:1-4).

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not see the beam that is in yourown eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the speck that is in youreye,’ when you yourself do not see the beam that is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First re-move the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is inyour brother’s eye. (Luke 6:41-42).

This new ethics that Jesus proposes and that should replace the Law of Moses can be con-densed in a few words:Therefore, everything you would like men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law andthe Prophets. (Matt 7:12).

What we have seen in this chapter makes of Jesus a unique character in the Israeli theater (andin history) because of his aversion for the formal compliance with the rules, lived in a manic ob-sessive way, of the Jewish orthodoxy. According to Jesus this had made the Jews forget whatwas for him the fundamental commandment: love of neighbor. We think that you can see in the words of Jesus the anger and outrage for this treason of thedeep meaning of his faith. From this anger his decision was born to preach a new ethics whichwas on a collision course with the Jewish orthodoxy, taking him to a death sentence.

So in the Gospels we have two characters: the apocalyptic prophet and the preacher of a newethics. The first foolishly nihilist and the second absolutely positive.

The problem for the historian is that this ethics seems to put aside the Jewish orthodox ethics,which was produced from the Bible, because it was so different to make us think that Jesuswanted to start a new religion antagonist of Judaism. It is true that Jesus insists, in the Gospels,that nothing will be changed of the Law of Moses but his interpretation of the Bible is so “origi -nal” that leaves the historian perplexed. However, the powers that be in Israel understood the explosive force of his message and did allthey could to eliminate him. If his ministry lasted so long, three years, it was due to the presenceof the Romans who kept the Israelis from “arranging” their problems between themselves.But in the end, things did not went the way these powers had wanted because the few followersof Jesus who were left after his death did not disperse, they assembled determined to start anew religion … at any cost. They defied first the Israelis then the Romans and after three cen-turies they overwhelmed their adversaries. They deleted the Classical civilization from the faceof earth while the Jews remained a persecuted minority, without their own country and foreign-ers wherever they went.

Saint Paul, a new religion

For the historians, the entrance of Saint Paul is another problem again.He was born from a well to do Jewish family, a Roman citizen, he became a Pharisee and, as agood fanatic he felt the duty to dedicate himself to fighting this new Jewish sect, the Christians.Few years after the death of Jesus, in a short time, he distinguished himself for his zeal in therepression but all of a sudden and without any apparent reason he converted to the faith that hewas persecuting.

He tells us how it happened:But I reveal to you, brothers, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according toman. For I neither received it from man, neither was I taught it, except by a revelation of JesusChrist.For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyondmeasure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism above many of my equals in myown heritage, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when itpleased God, who set me apart since I was in my mother’s womb and called me by His grace, toreveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the nations, I did not immediately conferwith flesh and blood, … In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie! (Gal 1:11-20).

As you can see, here Saint Paul puts all his authority and credibility.But how could it happen, such a radical conversion?For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: how Christ died for our sins accord -ing to the Scriptures, was buried, rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and wasseen by Cephas, and then by the twelve. Then He was seen by over five hundred brothers atonce, of whom the greater part remain to this present time, though some have passed away.Then He was seen by James and then by all the apostles. Last of all, He was seen by me also, asby one born at the wrong time. For I am the least of the apostles and am not fit to be called anapostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1Cor 15:3-9).

He tells us, he gives us his word of honor, that all of a sudden God revealed him his resurrectedson Jesus and from him he received all the truth.

Being Saint Paul a Pharisee, he believed in the resurrection of the dead. Evidently, his activity of persecutor of Christians put him in contact with many Christians andhad to learn how to know them in order to single them out. From these contacts he knew of theircult of Jesus, son of God, who had sacrificed himself for us on the cross and that God the Fa-ther had resuscitated from death. We must suppose that he was stricken by this idea and sincehe believed in the resurrection of the dead and he also knew from the Bible of the prophecy ofthe arrival of the Son of Man, he must have concluded that if it was true that Jesus had wondeath, he was the Son of Man who would have unleashed the Apocalypse. Perhaps, in a mo-ment, he realized that the Apocalypse was imminent and that Jesus was the Messiah whom theJews were waiting for, merging in himself the Son of Man, the Son of God and the Redeemer.

For the historian this conversion is an extraordinary feat and difficult to explain since it is full ofsupernatural elements which cannot be analyzed by history. Unfortunately the letters of SaintPaul that reached us are few, fragmented and confused; we do not have his complete and de -finitive vision of Christianity in a Gospel of his.

However the conversion of Saint Paul will be decisive for the beginning and the establishmentof this new religion: Christianity.

We can affirm that he was the one who drove this new faith out of Judaism towards the world ofthe gentiles. He definitively abolished the Law of Moses: it will no more be necessary to becomea Jew to save yourself.

Salvation comes from the faith in Christ the Redeemer, as it happened to him:We are Jews by nature, and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a man is not justified by theworks of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Christ Jesus, sothat we might be justified by faith in Christ, rather than by the works of the law. For by theworks of the law no flesh shall be justified. (Gal 2:15-16).

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith which works through love. (Gal 5:6).

A few years after the death of Jesus Saint Paul affirmed resolutely and without compromisesthat the death and resurrection of Jesus overcame the Law of Moses. The pact that the Jewshad done with God was only the beginning which was necessary to open the road for the faith inJesus Christ. Therefore the Christians were not, in any manner, bound by the rules, that he callsthe “works of the law”, established by the Bible and that Christians had to abandon the Jewishfaith.

Saint Paul had this approved by the other apostles with a certain difficulty and after strong con-trasts. He left us just a few lines to tell us how he realized this radical transformation but weknow that after him Christianity will be no more a Jewish sect.

This is how a new religion was born.

Christianity was born in two steps. The first took place when the followers of Jesus believed in His resurrection, thus giving birth toa new Jewish sect which worshiped Jesus as the Messiah who had come into this world to an-nounce the coming Kingdom of God. This was a sect made up of Jews and therefore they wereall bound to obey the Law of Moses, that is: circumcision, rest on the Sabbath, ritual sacrifices,forbidden food, and all the deeds that Saint Paul calls the “works of the law” which set apart theJews from the Gentiles.

The second step took place when, tanks to Sant Paul, almost all members of the sect decidedto abandon Judaism renouncing the idea of the chosen people of God and took Christianityamong the Gentiles. At this point the “works of the law” had to be abandoned because Chris-tians had to clearly separate from the Jews. Christians had to live according to the ethicspreached by Jesus and Saint Paul, basically the Ten Commandments, but among the heathensto convert them. Christians should not live apart from the gentiles as the Jews were obliged to do; they had tolive among them to proselityze and … they succeded.

A small Jewish sect of Christians will remain in Palestine who wrote their own Gospel: theEbionites. Unfortunately nothing arrived to us of these Ebionites, besides their name and a few fragmentsof their Gospel because they have been quoted in the works of the proto-othodox intellectualswho were fighting heresies.

Saint Paul was convinced and adhered to the apocalyptic message of Jesus; this is how he sawthe Apocalypse:For if we believe that Jesus died and arose again, so God will bring with Him those who sleep inJesus (those already dead). For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who arealive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who are asleep. For theLord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and withthe trumpet call of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and re-main shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so weshall be forever with the Lord. (1Thess 4:14-17).

From this description it seems that the Kingdom of God is not on this earth but in the sky. HisApocalypse is much less dramatic than the one described in the Gospels, but it is as much un-predictable, nobody knows when it will come but for sure when some of them are still alive:Concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need that I write to you. For youknow perfectly that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say,

“Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor upon a woman withchild, and they shall not escape. (1Thess 5 1-3).

We notice that the Gospels will use the same example: a thief in the night.

The few elements of nihilism present in his preaching are much less radical than those presentin the Gospels. Saint Paul explicitly addresses the issue of sexuality:Now concerning the things about which you wrote to me: “It is good for a man not to touch awoman. ”Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let every man have his own wife, and letevery woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to the wife due affection, andlikewise the wife to the husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but thehusband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wifedoes (1Cor 7:1-4).

Marriage is necessary to avoid fornication therefore it is the duty of both spouses to satisfy thesexuality of the other. Each spouse “has authority” on the body of the other and in this they areequal; there is no hint of male chauvinism that is common place in other cultures, Judaism forone. As far as sexuality is concerned both sexes are on a par. A huge novelty of Christianity.However, Saint Paul somehow blames sexuality:For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man has his proper gift from God, oneafter this manner and another after that.I say to the unmarried and widows that it is good for them if they live even as I am. But if they cannot restrain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion (1Cor 7:7-8).

Same as Jesus he too abstained from sex and had renounced having a family. He considersthis to be a “gift” which was given to him so that he did not feel the ardor of desire and thereforehe did not need to marry.Unlike the Gospels, he clearly advises against getting married and recommends abstinence toall who can. Evidently chaste people are considered to be superior to the others who “burn withpassion”.

What Saint Paul tells us is a challenge to psychoanalisys.How is it possible to remove in such a radical way the urges of sex?

He suggests to everybody to remain in their present status, masters or slaves, married or nu-bile, Jews or gentiles because, in a short time all the righteous will enter the Kingdom of God ir -respective of their status.

It is surprising to read who these Righteous are for Saint Paul:Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be de-ceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor ho-mosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inheritthe kingdom of God. Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, andyou were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus by the Spirit of our God. (1Cor 6:9-11).

Here Saint Paul manifests a substantial difference from the Gospels.The selection criteria for the Righteous (he does not speak of Chosen) is given by a strict obser-vance of his ethics, while it is not present in his letters any reference to the annulment of yourperson, he never says that the last will be the first and that only the losers will be saved.Salvation is in the faith and in his new Christian ethics, an ethics absolutely positive that has notrace of nihilism.

His ethics is similar to that preached by Jesus in the Gospels that we have illustrated above:sincerity, honesty fidelity, compassion and forgiveness. But most of all, love.Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall notsteal, You shall not give false testimony, You shall not covet,” and if there are any other com-mandments, are summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Loveworks no evil to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Rom 13:8-10).

He asks his converts to be open to contacts with the pagans even when they are sinners, but tobe absolutely intransigent with their Christian brothers who do not respect this ethics:I wrote to you in my letter not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I did notmean the sexually immoral people of this world, or the covetous and extortioners, or the idol-aters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But I have written to you not to keepcompany with any man who is called a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or anidolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner. Do not even eat with such a person.For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who areinside But God judges those who are outside. Therefore “put away from among yourselves thatwicked person.” (1Cor 5:9-13).

Nobody before him spoke of love as a glue for the society of the Righteous, nobody had insistedfor a loving and compassionate solidarity that does not become permissive. He speaks of joyand self-control:Now the works of the flesh are revealed, which are these: adultery, sexual immorality, impu-rity, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, rage, selfishness, dissensions, heresies,envy, murders, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I previously warned you,that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, andself-control; against such there is no law. (Gal 5:19-23).

We must notice that joy enters the religious ethics, a new feat that is original of Christianity Thejoy mentioned by Saint Paul is the joy to love your neighbor.Forgiveness is a duty and all sinners must be given the opportunity to redeem themselves, al -ways doing this with love.Brothers, if a man is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore such aone in the spirit of meekness, watching yourselves, lest you also be tempted. Bear one another’sburdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if someone thinks himself to be something when heis nothing, he deceives himself. (Gal 6:1-3).

Nobody before him spoke about love in these terms:Love suffers long and is kind; love envies not; love flaunts not itself and is not puffed up, doesnot behave itself improperly, seeks not its own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil; rejoicesnot in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, andendures all things. (1Cor 13:4-7).So now abide faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love. (1Cor 13:13).

He speaks of equality but not in an apocalyptical, destructive way, he does it with the intentionto give life to a community more supportive and cohesive where love is not just an ideal but areal attention at the needs of your neighbor.For if there is a willing mind first, the gift is accepted according to what a man possesses andnot according to what he does not possess.I do not mean that other men have relief, and you be burdened, but for equality, that yourabundance now at this time may supply their need, and their abundance may supply your need—that there may be equality. As it is written, “He who gathered much had no excess. And hewho gathered little had no lack.” (2Cor 8:12-15).

In many of his letters he tells about a collection he is promoting to send some monies to thepoor Christians in Palestine:But this I say: He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifullywill also reap bountifully. Let every man give according to the purposes in his heart, not grudg-ingly or out of necessity, for God loves a cheerful giver. God is able to make all grace aboundtoward you, so that you, always having enough of everything, may abound to every goodwork. As it is written:“He has dispersed abroad, He has given to the poor; His righteousness remains forever.” (2Cor9:6-9).

His ethics has no trace of nihilism; he applies it to the world of work and business. A special at -tention must be given to our body that must be cared for and respected because it has beengiven us by God:For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality,that each one of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor,not in the lust of depravity, even as the Gentiles who do not know God, and that no man takeadvantage of and defraud his brother in any matter, because the Lord is the avenger in all thesethings, as we also have forewarned you and testified. (1Thess 4:3-6).

Unlike the Gospels, in his letters there are neither anger nor hatred for those who do not want toreceive his preaching. Saint Paul does not hate Scribes and Pharisees as the Jesus of theGospels and, most of all: Saint Paul does not hate the rich people. This is a huge difference from the Gospels, here we can see that his nihilism is much more sub -dued.

Mutual assistance, generosity, forgiveness is his recipe for the salvation:Now we exhort you, brothers, warn those who are unruly, comfort the faint-hearted, supportthe weak, and be patient toward everyone. See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone. Butalways seek to do good to one another and to all.Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God inChrist Jesus concerning you. (1Thess 5:14-18).

Saint Paul has also anticipated the idea that all humans are created equal:You are all sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized intoChrist have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, andthere is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you are Christ’s, then youare Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:26-28).

Saint Paul poses a problem to the historians.He wrote many years before the canonical Gospels were written and we are not aware that anyGospel existed when he was writing his letters; he does not mention any written document be-sides his own letters.He too was an apocalyptic Jew, he received a vision: Jesus resurrected appeared to him andgave him all the “truth”. The problem for the historians is that his vision differs substantially fromthe vision of Jesus described in the Gospels.In fact his nihilism is very low key; it does not exist any mention of the selection of the Chosenas it is expressed in the Gospels where the last will be the first tanks to their passivity. This ex -pression, the last will be the first and the first the last, does not exist in his letters. On the contrary he expressed his ethics with much force, it does not seem that his Righteousare as passive as the Gospels would want. His ethics is the best you can have to build a societywell knit, orderly and happy; the ethics proposed by Saint Paul is not needed just to enter theKingdom, it is particularly useful to create a new society better than the present.What will happen to this new society after the Apocalypse?

If it is possible to build a society as beautiful and happy, why this world should be destroyed bythe Apocalypse? If humans can better themselves as Saint Paul wants, why God should send the Son of Man todestroy us? It is evident that in Saint Paul does not exist any trace of hatred towards the Scribes, Phariseesand Sadducees that is so pervasive in the Gospels. Actually there is no hatred at all. There isno trace of hatred in his Apocalypse as opposed to the Apocalypse of the Gospels where thesuffering that the people should face highlights the deep hatred of the prophet towards human-ity. Saint Paul does not hate those who work to improve their condition, on the contrary he seemsto approve and encourage those who work to earn money. He himself was a tradesman whoworked leather, he maintained himself with his work and he tells it with pride. He did not beg tomake a living and to travel while he was preaching his ministry; on the contrary, if what he tellsus is true, his is a terrific performance.

We must notice that in the Gospels there is no element to suppose that Jesus ever worked.

However, we must notice that in his letters he manifests a strong resentment and we can alsosay hatred, against those preachers who, while qualifying themselves as Christians, tried tomake converts in the Christian communities that he had founded but to a different Christianity,perhaps Ebionite, which wanted to remain inside of Judaism and pretended that the gentileswho converted to Christianity had to circumcise themselves like the Jews. This unleashes thewrath of Saint Paul.

Why the evangelists gave us these Gospels (all written after the letters of Saint Paul) thatpresent us a Christianity so different from that of Saint Paul?

All these objections leave the historians perplexed because it becomes difficult to identify thefounder of Christianity, Jesus or Saint Paul?Perhaps the more likely answer is: both.We want to notice that in spite of their differences they were both killed by the Romans.

Now we must return to the subject of our work that is the evolution of nihilism in the Christiancivilization. As we already said, it is not correct to reduce Christianity to nihilism and this chaptershould have shown to our readers how Christianity, with its ethics, has overcome its own ni -hilism and produced the basis for a new civilization.The two components, nihilism and positivity, will both remain in all the expressions of this newcivilization.

This up to the arrival of Luther who with his Reform will try to eliminate nihilism fromChristianity causing a fracture in the Western Catholic world.

In order to complete the thesis of this chapter we will analyze below some issues which arenever mentioned in the Gospels but can give a good idea of how this new religion evolved pro-ducing a new culture, Western Civilization, that will radically deviate from the norms used in therest of the world.

Ritual Sacrifices

At the time of Jesus all people who lived in Europe and in the Mediterranean area practiced rit-ual sacrifices and they had been doing this for centuries. Nobody ever expressed any doubtwhether it was sensible to kill a poor animal, when they were not dealing with humans, to ask afavor to the Gods. As far as we know a large part of humanity went through this phase in itsevolution when they believed it was their duty to kill an animal not to risk the wrath of the Gods.And the people we are dealing with where not the worst. Just think of the pre-Columbian civi-lizations of America; in these civilizations human sacrifices reached monstrous levels, as far ascannibalism.To have a good idea of this problem we must realize how powerful the hold of this “superstition”was in the human mind. It seems that it was impossible to those civilizations to free themselvesof this folly.

In the Gospels, Jesus does not ever mention the sacrifices that were performed in the Templeto abide by the Law of Moses. There is no critic or objection to the killing of all these animals.There is, and it is striking, the intervention that he does in the Temple a few days before beingexecuted, let us read it again in the version given us by John:The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple He foundthose who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers sitting there. WhenHe had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. Hepoured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. He said to those who solddoves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house ofmerchandise!” (John 2:13-16).

In this passage, it seems that he condemns the cost of this cult for the poor Jews who were ex -ploited by the caste of the priests; he does not condemn the practice, barbaric and useless, ofkilling animals outside the normal need to feed yourself. Moreover the Gospels tell us that aftera few days he celebrates the Jewish Easter together with his Apostles, therefore we must inferthat he bought an animal in the Temple and had it sacrificed in order to eat it in the Last Supper.This is what we can assume from what has been written, but … was it really like this? We doubtit.

Is it credible that Jesus puts on such a violent and blasphemous show and afterward he buys ananimal to celebrate Easter? This seems incredible to us.

Now let us read Saint Paul. He condemns without any compromise the cult of the ritual sacrifices. The “works” as he callsthem, must never again enter the life of Christians and specially the sacrifices.It happened that one of his disciples had bought the meat that was left after the pagan sacrificesbecause it was sold at a low price. Saint Paul strikes against this practice because, even if hisdisciples ate it at home outside the pagan ceremony, this could have put in doubt the sincerityof their faith and would have made people doubt if by chance they were still secretly tied tothese superstitions.Therefore, never eat this meat for no reason and in no circumstance.

Here the historian is in trouble. If Saint Paul in his letters condemns with such a force the practice of the sacrifices, why in theGospels this matter is totally ignored? What is the point of the violent protest put on by Jesus in the Temple?If Christianity abolishes the sacrifices (it will), what is the point of the Last Supper?

Now we are going to try to make sense of all this and to do it we will start from the end, that isfrom the result of the victory of Christianity over paganism.As far as ritual sacrifices are concerned, Christianity marks a milestone in the evolution ofHomo sapiens. When Christianity takes control of a society the sacrifices disappear.This is the result of the victory of Christianity.Given the great importance of this development in the history of humankind the historian tries tocomprehend how we arrived at this point. Here we will give our interpretation of what happened.

We think that it is not credible that Saint Paul took the initiative himself to condemn the sacri-fices; somehow this cultural revolution must have arrived to him from the ministry of Jesus andthis implies that the evangelists have ignored this matter. In other words, there is a “hole” in theGospels and this should not be a surprise if we consider how the Gospels were put together.

According to us Jesus was opposed to the cult of the Temple (as many Jews were) and veryopposed to the sacrifices. That incident in the Temple, told us by the Gospels, has not been de-scribed correctly. According to us Jesus wanted to denounce all the cult of the Temple, sacri-fices included, that is the idea that God wants that we kill someone to satisfy him. This is in ac -cordance with all of his ministry.The Last Supper has not been the celebration of the Jewish Easter because this consisted inbuying an animal in the Temple, its sacrifice, the preparation of the meat to be cooked andeaten. The Last Supper has been what its name tells us: the Last Supper of Jesus with hisapostles before being put to death. This is how Saint Paul describes it to us:I have received of the Lord that which I delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus, on the night inwhich He was betrayed, took bread. When He had given thanks, He broke it and said, Take andeat. This is My body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. ”In the same man-ner He took the cup after He had supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Dothis, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me. ”As often as you eat this bread and drinkthis cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. (1Cor 11:23-26).

We must notice that all the Gospels will repeat the same words as Saint Paul.Jesus knows that he is going to offer himself as a sacrifice for his cause; he knows that hisdeath will be an inspiration for his disciples to continue on the road traced by him. He is againstritual sacrifices and he wants that his sacrifice be the last one. He knows how powerful is thepush that forces humans to kill in the name of God and therefore he wants that his disciples re-member his sacrifice in order to exorcise this specter. Therefore he invites them to repeat thisceremony of the bread and the wine so that everyone keeps in mind that he died so that nobodybe killed any more.

We know that the believers have interpreted all this in a different way but from the point of viewof the historian we do not see how else this could be explained.

Now we want to deviate from the subject of this work, which is the evolution of nichilism inChristianity, to show our reader how difficult it is to analyze and understand the documents onwhich we must study this matter.We have already seen the sect of the Ebionites, Jewish Christians who considered Christianityas a sect of Judaism and did not want to start a new religion; therefore they were consideredheretics by the Christians. They believed that Jesus was a prophet, an exceptional man, bornfrom a normal intercourse between Joseph and Mary and “adopted” by God as his Son to makehim the Messiah who will save Israel, which, by the way, is the correct meaning of “Son of God”in the Bible.These Ebionites believed to be their duty to observe all the works of the Law, which were dis-avowed by Saint Paul, with the exception of the sacrifices in the Temple. The Ebionites wereagainst ritual sacrifices.

We know this from the works of a proto-orthodox Christian, Epifanio, who in his book againstthe heresies quotes this commandment of the Ebionites which would have been given by Jesushimself in their Gospel of the Ebionites.In a passage of this Gospel the disciples of Jesus ask him where they should have eaten theEaster lamb and He answers: “I do not have any desire to eat the meat of this Easter lamb withyou … I have come to abolish sacrifices; if you do not stop to sacrifice, the wrath of God will notcease to weight on you”.Is this the “hole” in the Canonical Gospels of which we have spoken?If we take for good these words of Jesus then all we have illustrated above makes sense and itappears clearly that Saint Paul did not invent himself the abolition of ritual sacrifices.Today the historian can suppose that the proto-orthodox eliminated these words from theirGospels to take the distance from the heretical thesis of the Ebionites.

What ever happened, in the four centuries that follow the death of Jesus all the people of theEmpire converted to Christianity and the sacrifices ceased.Three centuries after a new faith, islam, invades the southern and eastern part of the Empireand here the sacrifices start anew because islam is fanatically attached to the sacrifices.Today, following the de-Christianization of western societies, that ritual of the bread and winethat exorcises the need to sacrifice has disappeared from our culture. Is it for this reason thatsome westerners are approaching islam? Is it because they feel the fatal and irresistible attrac-tion of this ugly superstition?

Slavery

At the time of Jesus all the world practiced slavery. All the people who had passed the phase of“hunting and gathering” owned slaves or risked to become slaves. He who lost became a slave,if he was not killed.In the Bible slavery is considered a normal fact of life.There is no mention at all of this institution in the Gospels, although we suppose that being theslaves the very last of the society they were the most interested in the message of Jesus.Saint Paul wanted that everyone remained in the condition where he was, waiting for the Apoc-alypse. In particular we have one of his letters that deals with a slave, a Christian, who had es-caped from his master, another Christian converted by Paul. In this letter we see that Saint Paulhad no objection regarding the existence of slavery but the slaves should have been treatedwith humanity. In this case he suggests the master to present him the slave since he did not geton with his master.The Church, with the passing of time, developed an ambiguous attitude towards slavery. In the-ory, if everyone was a Christian it would have been unacceptable that someone were the prop-erty of someone else, but there was not a clear push towards abolitionism. However, matter offact, in time slavery was seen as intolerable in a Christian society and it was abolished. One ofthe first communities to make it official the abolition of slavery was the newborn city of Venice.We must keep in mind that the Christians had to face a string of barbaric invasions that prac -ticed slavery and it was not easy to convince the winner that he was wrong.

When Catholicism spreads over Western Europe nobody was made a slave any more even ifthere was no written official condemnation of this institution by declaring it incompatible withChristian civilization.This ambiguity came to light when in the XIV century some Italian cities decided that the hea-thens could be taken slaves. However the number of these slaves was irrelevant and it was suf-ficient to convert in order to pass to the status of serf, which was not much better.

The problem begun when the Spanish and the Portuguese sailed around Cape Dakar, the mostwestern point of Africa, bypassing by sea the muslim countries and came in direct contact withthe black people of the African South West who, naturally, practiced slavery. These had been tormented for centuries by the insatiable hunger for slaves of the muslim coun-tries to the North and were used to offer them their slaves as goods to be traded or as the priceto be left alone. They did the same with the EuropeansThe ambiguity of Catholicism on this matter provoked the return of the Spanish and Portugueseto the practice of slavery, which now will be strictly based on race.

The tragedy explodes when the Spanish and the Portuguese of the American colonies discoverthat blacks made good slaves as opposed to the poor indios who could not resist the harsh con-ditions of forced labor. So the deportation of black slaves from Africa begins. At the beginning ofthe XVII century the English enter this trade by employing a much more sophisticated organiza-tion and start a colossal mass deportation.

The entry of Great Britain, that recently had become Anglican protestant, into the slave tradecauses the birth of a few protestant sects, opposed to Anglicanism, that declare without any am-biguity that slavery is incompatible with Christianity giving birth to abolitionism for the first time inthe history of humanity. These sects have gone down in history as protestant sects radical anddissident; the most famous the Congregationalists better known as Puritans.The importance of the Puritans for our story is due to the fact that they emigrated to NorthAmerica and there, in the Northern colonies, they developed a new civilization absolutely aboli-tionist. Since they were British colonies they had to put up with the introduction of slavery untilthey rebelled against England and, once obtained their independence, declared slavery incom-patible with their civilization and abolished it.This will be the turning point of Western Civilization that, in the following century, will becomeclearly abolitionist and then with its colonialism will eradicate slavery almost completely from theface of earth. Today the decadence of Western Civilization together with its de-Christianizationis allowing slavery to resurface in a few countries putting in doubt the progress already done,because abolitionism is an exclusive idea of Christianity and has never existed outside of theChristian Western Civilization.

The administration of justice

We have seen in the preceding chapter that faith brings with it a certain idea of justice which isa product of the paranoia associated to the faith.This is not our subject now. Here we want to talk of that function that is exercised in all humansocieties that should be used to keep this society together and to make it work.At the time of Jesus, the empire was probably on the forefront of the administration of justice ifwe compare it to its neighbors but, however, it was an administration that today we would callbrutal and uncivilized. The judicial investigations were performed with beatings if not tortures, itdid not exist a real procedure to be followed to guarantee the rights of the defendant; it did notexist the idea that everybody is innocent until proven guilty in court. The methods were hastyand it did not exist a debate in front of an impartial jury. We can say that it worked because it kept the peace and the order and it was accepted by allthe people of the empire, but the punishments were cruel and given out so lightly that it makesus shudder.Naturally the barbaric invasions did not make things better; the collapse of the central powerproduced anarchy and the administration of justice was left in the hands of the small communi-ties or of the military power, that is the most ferocious bandit of the region. Justice was needed

just to keep the people subjugated and this was accomplished by instilling the fear of it not theconfidence in it. In order to understand the situation, we must analyze what “justifies” power to the people. Natu-rally they believed that power comes from God, but how the peons justified power?Power was credible only if it stroke fear. Punishments were ferocious and bloody not just to sat -isfy the thirst of blood and the sadism of the community; they were like this because powerwould not have been credible and would have not kept the peons subjugated.The Church was the only protection, the only refuge for the peasants. The priests and themonks were the only ones who, protected by their dresses, faced the masters to obtain morehuman conditions for the people.We could mention thousands of examples where we can see the Church that tries to convincethe people in power to consider other methods, less stupid and barbaric.We have chosen the intervention of Pope Niccolò I who in 866 writes to the khan of the Bulgari-ans, Boris, who had just converted to Christianity. The Bulgarians were a barbarian people thata few years earlier had taken possession of a region north of Greece:“You are telling me that in your country, when you arrest a suspect of theft, who insists to denywhat he is accused of, the judge clubs him on the head and beats on his sides with an iron produntil he does not manifest the truth. Now, this behavior is against the divine law and the humanone, because the confession must be spontaneous and not extorted. Moreover, if it happenedthat even after these tortures it would not be possible to establish the truth about what you ac -cused the poor unfortunate, would you not be forced to feel ashamed of yourselves and to ac-knowledge at last how unjust are your ways when you administer justice? And if afterwards thedefendant being incapable to resist the torments confesses crimes that in reality he did notcommit, tell me by grace, on whom falls the responsibility of such a crime if not on he who, bymeans of an unjust procedure, has obliged the hapless to lie? But it is well clear that his cannotbe called a confession, since he said with his lips what in his heart was forced to deny since itwas not true.”1

You must consider that in those years Christian Europe was barely surviving under the attacksof the Vikings from the North and of the muslims from the South. We can say that Europe washolding its soul by the skin of its teeth.Those were the darkest years of civilization and it is astonishing that Christian Europe managedto survive.For this reason we cannot but be impressed by the courage with which these Christians foughtto affirm their civilization. The barbarians were the new victors and it was not “prudent” to tellthem they were uncivilized; but Christians were not afraid of martyrdom. Evidently a new civilization wanted to come to life, but one thousand years will have to pass un-til those words of Pope Niccolò enter the common sense of our civilization.

The Church had another opportunity to promote this civilization when it had to fight heresies bymeans of the Inquisition.As we have seen in the preceding chapter, Christian sectarianism makes Christianity a volcanoof heresies; it produced them all the time.

In the XI century the heresy of the Cathars, or Albigensians, starts breeding and spreads mainlyacross Southern France. They had a totally Manichean vision of the world. God created the world but the devil had takenhold of all visible things and oppressed the souls by enclosing them into the bodies. The spiritonly is good while the flesh is evil The Old Testament is a product of the devil and so God hadto send to this earth three angels: Jesus, Mary and John the Baptist. The body of Jesus wasonly an appearance; he did not die and did not resurrect.

1 Mariano d’Alatri, E l’Inquisizione?, (Roma: Edizioni Paoline, Roma 1959) pag.64

Marriage is an institution of the devil because it is used to produce more bodies. Therefore freelove was the right solution (we do not know what they suggested to avoid pregnancy). Theywere vegetarians and loved the animals. They preached anarchy and encouraged not to re -spect the laws neither of the State nor of the Church; they refused the oath of feudal fidelity andopposed all the initiatives of the earthly justice.They had one sacrament only: the Consolamentum. Their “priests” were the “perfects” while the people were the “believers”. The believers had toprostrate to the ground in front of the perfects and had to put at their disposal all they had.They were totally amoral because if the Consolamentum was given at the point of death every-thing was forgiven; matter of fact they could commit any crime with total impunity. In this case,the perfects waited until the believer died because he should not remain in this world. If bychance he recovered, the perfects suffocated him or they remained near his bed to prevent hisrelatives to feed him until he starved to death. This practice was called Endura.Catharism was a delirium that took Christian nihilism to the level of criminal folly. Today, at thelight that the Cathars were persecuted until their obliteration, the all Christian stupidity whichconsiders heroes those who are persecuted, has transformed them into poor victims of theCatholics but this is just another manifestation of the genetic cretinism of Christians.

When Catharism starts putting in crisis the cohesion of society, violence begins both on the partof the Cathars and on the part of Catholics and the secular authorities. Problem was that theseauthorities were not used to deal with such a situation and reacted incoherently amid the gener-alized violence. Moreover, since the wealth of the heretics had to be confiscated, those whowere in power took advantage to accuse of heresy those whom they wanted to rob. In a shorttime, the regions where Catharism had penetrated plunged into anarchy. The Pope, naturally,wanted to take the initiative because it was the task of the Church to decide who was hereticand who was not, not of the secular power, it was not its business, Moreover it had become in-dispensable to take out of the hands of the secular power the search of the heretics because itsbrutality and its corruption were intolerable; the Church could not collaborate with practices in-compatible with Christian charity.

To have an idea of how bad was the problem that the Pope was facing, let us read how justicewas administered in the city of Assisi at the time of Saint Francis, around the year 1230:“In vain the mayor is raging against the culprits with the most barbarian torments; he cuts thehand of the false witnesses and the right hand of the manipulators of false documents and thefoot of the looters; he condemns to the fire the poisoners and the sodomites; he orders to bequartered those who betrayed the republic and, as a penalty for their crime, dragged by the tailof a horse through the streets and after the execution hanged, to shreds, at the gallows raisedin front of each of the city doors, one quart of flesh for each door …; and the famous thieves heblinds, he brands them on the forefront with a hot rod, hangs them at the tower on the road toSpello and on the road below Valecchie. We can hear, in a note in the Legend of saint Bonaventura, the desperate cry of the thief thatthe judge Ottaviano condemns, innocent, when he pleads Saint Francis for his salvation, whilehe is dragged to the atrocious punishment by order of the mayor, Ottone. The executioner in-sists on poking with a knife the orbits of the condemned and the eyes shells out that are thrownto the ground. The spectators, to better taste the voluptuous pleasure of the torment, turn in thedust with their sticks those poor dead globes and they point them to each other with an avid andbeastly curiosity. The people participates at the execution of the sentences, enjoys the blood ofthe executed, quenches its thirst with their agony, with the ferocity of the wild beasts that jumpon those between them that fall in the fight, to devour them”.2

2 Arnaldo Fortini, Nova Vita di san Francesco, (Milano, 1926) pag. 127

Consider that this was happening in the very civilized Assisi during the flourishing of the civiliza-tion of the communes, in a city, rich and governed by a city council, not by a ferocious feudallord.Problem was that cruelty and sadism were spread among the people; they were not the productof the arbitrary rule of the aristocracy (which perhaps was not so ferocious).

At this point the Church had to invent a method and a stable organization to administer justice inthe cases of heresy: the Inquisition.The task of the Church was to put to work a wedge to be inserted between the secular authorityand the people to sort out the heretics, without interferences from the secular power, and toconvince these heretics to retract. If the Church failed, it withdrew itself and delivered the hereticto the secular power that would have dealt with him as it wanted. But this would have beendone only after a regular trial to ascertain objectively if the suspect was a heretic or not.

There were several attempts at starting a tribunal of the Inquisition that failed because they en-tangled the Church even more in the anarchy and violence that dominated the communitieswhere Catharism had infiltrated. At last, in the first half of the XIII century Pope Gregorio IX organized the tribunal of the monas-tic Inquisition, so called because it was managed by the Dominicans and Franciscans (whowere friars and not monks). These were two brand new mendicant orders which were born justto help the Church fight the heresies.

The whole structure was centered around the person of the inquisitor. He should have had from the start a good cultural training, both religious and legal, helped byseveral manuals and handbooks.The inquisitor was totally independent from any authority both secular and religious, he an-swered only to the Pope who had put him in charge. He could take to court any baptized personbut the Pope himself. He was elected by the provincial ministers of the Franciscans or Domini-cans, had to be at least forty years old and his assignment had a term but renewable. He had avicar to whom delegate some work and a companion who was taking his confessions and pro-vided moral assistance.The inquisitor was both an investigating magistrate and a judge, but he was bound to let thebishop participate to all his sentences. He also needed the consent of the boni viri, a college ofup to fifty people chosen from time to time among the most representative of the community:priests, men of law, professionals or magistrates. They had an advisory capacity and they hadto receive all written acts relative to the investigation but without the name of the investigatedperson to avoid cronyism or vendettas; their collaboration was free of charge.A notary was helping the inquisitor to write all depositions and all sentences; he was helped bya few scribes because everything had to be written down and copied several times to be trans-mitted to those who needed it: the investigated person, his lawyer, the bishop, boni viri and theVatican. Each trial involved a considerable amount of work.The inquisitor was assigned armed men for his protection, they delivered the subpoenas and ar -raingements; they could also arrest the investigated person if he did not show up.At the beginning the inquisitor went to the town where he was assigned the search of theheretics, he presented his written credentials to the authorities of the place and he started hiswork by asking the help of all inhabitants in a public meeting where he exhorted the people tocollaborate.Those who had come close to the heresy could present themselves spontaneously, in a fewmonths time, and they were pardoned with simple punishments. After this grace period the workbegun; the suspects were asked to appear and they had up to one year to present themselvesotherwise they were sentenced in absentia. Jail was only for the dangerous suspects. This phase of the investigation was secret but at the time of charging the defendant should havereceived all written documents and could appoint a lawyer who had to have access to all docu-ments. This lawyer could bring evidence in favor of the defendant and could correct the deposi -

tion already given by him. During the trial one witness was to be considered null and two insuffi -cient.The trial was public at the presence of several witnesses as a guaranty for the defendant. Hecould ask to have all the written depositions against him but after he had to answer to all in writ-ing. The defendant could have those witnesses excluded whom he deemed to be prejudicedand he was fulfilled; if the defendant insisted to deny he could be asked a formal oath.They arrived at the sentence if there was the confession or if the proofs were deemed sufficient.It was always required the opinion of the bishop and of the boni viri.You could have the acquittal, the confession or the conviction. In the case of a conviction the condemned could appeal to the Pope; all the documentation wassent to Rome to a special tribunal that would have examined the behavior of the inquisitor. If hewas found at fault the sentence could range from his dismissal to a life in jail.The sentence was to be put in writing with its motivations and was to be pronounced in public atthe presence of the people and the secular authorities: the “auto de fe”.The Inquisition conceded defeat with this sentence because it had identified a heretic but hadnot been capable to recover him from his error.At this point the activity of the Inquisition was over and the condemned was handed over to thesecular authorities who would have executed their sentence. There was not much to debate, theemperor Federico II, the stupor mundi, had no doubts: the fire.However, even after having ceded the heretic to the secular authority, the Inquisition did notcease to try to have the heretic recant his error and followed him up to the feet of the stake. If after the sentence the condemned recanted the Inquisition had to face the secular authoritiesand the people who were thirsting for blood to take back the repented man. If he was a pauperthe sentence was to carry a mark on his dress or a pilgrimage. If he was rich he had to contrib -ute to the common welfare by building a road, a bridge or something else. The jail was reservedto the hard ones.The inquisitor could mitigate the sentence or revoke it altogether and they did it often becausethe purpose of the Inquisition was to recover the heretics, not to kill them.

In the case of the sentence to the stake, the Inquisition wanted that the condemned man wereaccompanied to the fire by a fraternity in order to avoid that the people could take their revengeon the hapless guy; there was a great need of them. At the exit from the jail this fraternity stoodin between the condemned and the crowd so that he could arrive unharmed to the fire.To understand how much this service was needed let us read a historian of the middle ageswho describes the procession that accompanied those sentenced by secular tribunals to theirexecution:In most cases they were taken to the place where they had committed their crime, barechested, and the executioner, during the long and painful route, cut their hands, their ears, theirtongue, their nose, pulled out their eyes or tore the flesh to shreds with hot pincers, from thechest, from the arms, from the thighs, and then he poured into the wounds spoonfuls of boilingoil, flaming resins, liquid sulphur. This was done because they considered fair for the con-demned to taste such an agony in all its atrocity in order to fully satisfy the vengeance of the pri-vate hatred and of the law.3

These few lines cannot, however, do justice to the effort made by the Church; the situation wasmuch worst, so much that we cannot describe it in a few lines.The monastic Inquisition is another expression of this new civilization which wanted to come tolife but was systematically suffocated by a hostile world obsessed by death and blood. The In -quisition is a masterpiece of equilibrium and justice which was not equaled almost to thesedays. Today, since we know how difficult has been for our civilization to arrive at a management

3 C.Reviglio della Veneria, L’Inquisizione Medioevale e il processo inquisitorio, (Torino, 1951)pag.128

of justice that we might call civilized, we are surprised by how the Church could elaborate amethod and an institution so complex in a world haunted by religious fanaticism and by the thirstof blood.

It is a sad fact that the world did not understand the effort of the Church and therefore it foughther in every way. Let us tell shortly this story.

Since the beginning the Church could not select men who had understood the letter and thespirit of this new way of administering justice.In Germany it starts with the inquisitor Corrado di Marburgo who continued the brutal ways ofthe secular trials and provoked the protests of the bishops who asked for his removal, but it wasnot necessary because he was murdered by the Cathars.In France it starts with Robert the Bulgarian who had been himself a Cathar and had repentedentering the Church as a Dominican friar. He too went on using the brutality of the secular trials.The bishops protested, Robert was put on trial by the Pope and sentenced to a life in jail.In France, in Toulouse and in Vienne, the Pope tried to sweeten the impact of this new institu -tion by associating a Franciscan friar but the reaction of the heretics was such that in 1242 theinquisitors with all his retinue were murdered by the Cathars. The French bishops ask to take intheir hands the fight against the heresy.Also in Italy the violence of the heretics against the inquisitors made their work difficult; in 1249the heretics of Orvieto beat the inquisitor and put him out of business.The emperor Federico II asks Gregorio IX to be more severe but he himself, more than once,helps the heretics. It happened that in Italy the fight between Guelphs and Ghibellines had giventhe heretics a few safe zones where the Inquisition could not enter.Gregorio IX, discouraged, suspends the activity of the Inquisition.One of his successors, Innocenzo IV, takes again the initiative and starts anew the Inquisition.For reasons that we do not know, he approves the use of torture in the trials. Perhaps he did itto cede to the insistences of the secular authorities who used it regularly, in fact the use of tor -ture will be in use in Europe for four more centuries in the secular tribunals up to the XVIII cen -tury and today it is still in use in some parts of our planet.However the inquisitors used it very little because, since everything had to be put in writing, theydid not like to be associated to a practice that they considered stupid and against the Christianethics. In Toulouse, between 1309 and 1323, 636 trials were held and only in one the torturewas used.With the turn of the century, at the beginning of the XIV century, the heresy of the Cathars wasfading and this was due only for a small part to the Inquisition because it had so many guar -anties that it did not have a great impact. The reasons for the disappearance of the Catharswere mainly due to its nihilist and criminal insanity which alienated the sympathies of the peo-ple, moreover, very useful was the work of the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans,who went among the people and convinced them of the folly of Catharism. The Inquisition wasuseful in the sense that gave the faithful the assurance that the Church was with them, it hadtaken the initiative and would have helped them against the violence of the Cathars.

We want to continue to put in evidence to our readers that the story which has been told us hasbeen heavily twisted in the XIX century, together with the invention of the chastity belt and theius primae noctis, by the Freemasons who represented us a Middle Ages not to be believed,pushed by their ideological hatred for the Church.

In the following centuries many new heresies pop up that have in common with Catharism a ni-hilism taken to impossible levels that could not be tolerated.Waldensians, Spirituals, Fraticelli, Beguins, Bizzocchi, Sorcerers, Wizards, Scarbacks, Wyclifi-ans, Hussites, Lollards. All these heresies put at the task the society of the end of the MiddleAges.

As far as the Inquisition is concerned we can affirm that it too died with the Cathars becausefrom now on, either its organization was upset or its management was taken by the secularpower so it is not possible to talk any more of tribunals of the Inquisition. These tribunals an-swered to the king who had no intention to keep the rules established by the popes who createdthis institution. In these years the Church distinguished itself for its irrelevance.

The Spanish Inquisition conquered a special fame. De facto or de jure it was directed by theking by means of clerics appointed by him and who answered to him only, in spite of theprotests of the Vatican. Fra Tommaso Torquemada, a Dominican friar, was the confessor ofQueen Isabella and King Ferdinando who put him in charge of the Spanish Inquisition for fifteenyears; he sent to the stake 2000 people. To honor the truth not all the Spanish Church approved and remained silent. The bishop ofGrenada, Talavera, distinguished himself by taking the defense of the “moriscos”; he was ac-cused of heresy but he was saved by the Vatican. In all, in its 350 years of existence, it hasbeen estimated that this Inquisition sent to the fire from 10000 and 15000 people. The Inquisi -tion in the Spanish colonies distinguished itself because it put to trial the Pope himself.Lucky for him, Sisto V had just died.

This new civilization that wanted to come to light was suffocated in the Catholic countries but itwill not stop, it will take other routes that pass through the anglo protestant countries but itwould not be fair not to remember the attempt of those popes we have mentioned:“The Inquisition is a page of the history of the Church; but, perhaps, it makes a chapter of thehistory of Western civilization. It is the product of a certain moment of European civilization, towhich it has rendered undeniable services”.4

The Human Life

The shows of gladiators was started as an especially cruel form of capital punishment: “adgladium”. Since the Romans were practical people they thought that, given that some criminalswere sentenced to death and therefore they had to die, it would have been a good idea to havefun watching them fighting each other in the desperate attempt to live one more day. In this waythey would have combined profit with pleasure.It seems that the first show was organized in the year 264 BC in Rome. In time these shows became more and more elaborated and sophisticated because they at -tracted as a magnet crowds of people and of Roman matrons fascinated by the blood. The peo-ple wanted more shows and more blood. Shows of fights with exotic animals brought from Africa were also staged: the people wantedblood.It happened something very worrisome; also free men wanted to participate to these fights todisplay their valor and because of a morbid fascination for blood and death.

At this point these shows became less bloody and more “sporty”, but the risk to be killed was al -ways present.At the top of the popularity of these games the killed gladiators were less and less because agladiator was very expensive and if he died the manager had to be reimbursed of the future lostgain.

4 Mariano d’Alatri, E l’Inquisizione?, (Roma: Edizioni Paoline, Roma 1959) pag.8

The gladiators were, besides those sentenced to death, also free men and slaves trained foryears in special schools and therefore their life was expensive. The blood of the gladiatorspoured on the arena was traded as a tonic and aphrodisiac.The candidates in search of fame and popularity poured enormous amounts of money for pro -paganda purposes, with a great loss for the finances of the state because afterwards they wouldhave made up for it with tax money. Very often the state took the initiative to pay for theseshows to celebrate recurrent feasts. Problem was that more shows were staged more showsthe people asked.This phenomenon of addiction of the people was limited to the western part of the empire; in theeastern part the people loved horse races and plays.With the spread of Christianity a movement starts of rejection of these shows. At the beginningof the third century the Christian writer Tertullian defines these shows a “… murder, to watchthem is spiritual and morally damaging, the gladiator is the instrument of the pagan human sac-rifice”. In the fourth century, after his conversion to Christianity, the emperor Constantine forbids theshows: “therefore we order that there must be no more gladiator fights. Those who have beensentenced to do the gladiator will go to work in the mines. So they will pay for their crimes with -out having to spread their blood”. But he had to swallow his word because he could not quenchthe thirst of blood of the people. The shows went on but the Christians did not relent and, while the Roman civilization was fad-ing, they managed to extinguish the blind fanaticism with which the people were craving for thisblood. In 399 the gladiator schools of Rome are closed.In 439 the last show of gladiators is hold in Rome.The insistence of the Christians and the collapse of the Classical civilization put an end to thisphenomenon.

The Ritual Mutilations of newborn males was a duty for the Jews: circumcision. On this the Bible leaves no doubts; all newborn males in the family of a Jew, even those of hisserfs or slaves, must be circumcised. With the spread of Christianity the idea takes hold that our body has been given to us by theLord and we must take care of it. Saint Paul is very clear in his condemnation of circumcision. In the Christian countries the circumcision stops with the exception of the Jews who have neverceased this practice.Today the de-Christianization and the “progressivism” of western countries have made the cir -cumcision a mass phenomenon because of the mass of immigrants of muslim origin. At the be-ginning this superstition has been accepted because they wanted to respect their culture butlater we arrived at the point where some Italian regions pay for this operation with the NationalHealth Service.The ugly thing is that circumcision is extending itself to the female one which hopefully is still il -legal, but for how long? Problem is that muslims do not have the faintest intention to uniform to the Christian ethics andthis phenomenon is now endemic in the muslim communities of Europe tanks to the “tolerance”of Europeans.

Suicide was not considered a crime in the Classical culture. On the contrary in certain cases itwas an honorable choice and brave if it avoided an intolerable defeat.Christianity always condemns suicide in every case because life has been given us by God andwe must do all we can to preserve it.Up to now in all Christian societies suicide has been opposed and condemned; we do all wecan to avoid it. But today we have a new problem that is given by a large number of people who are ill but canstay alive for a long period, longer than they want; they are forced to keep living even if theyconsider a burden the life they are living.

Public opinion is divided on the issue of “assisted suicide”.We must point out that this situation is not comparable to that of two thousand years ago.We are living today a problem caused by medicine which can keep alive people that a few yearsago would have died. We think we must formulate new definition of suicide without compromis-ing the respect of human life. Not an easy thing.

The Hospital did not exist in the Greek-Roman civilization. Those who fell sick remained athome and called a doctor, if they could afford it. This building dedicated to the treatment of sickpeople was born with Christianity and in particular with the civilization of the Italian communesduring the Middle Ages. It was financed only in part by the patients while for the rest they reliedon Christian charity that is on donations given by those who could afford it and on the work of“volunteers” which was given for the love of God, that is without remuneration.Also this character, the “volunteer”, was born with Christianity. The desire was born, but wecould say the need to give a meaning to one’s life, to contribute to the common welfare that is tothe well being of the community and in particolar of the people in need.

The Western Monks, the First Europeans

In the preceding chapter we talked about monasticism and we defined it the most accomplishedrealization of Christian nihilism.Now we will analyze a phenomenon which will produce a monasticism so different that will be -come the spring that will start the idea of Europe and the beginning of Western Civilization.Monasticism was born in the eastern part of the empire and grows irresistibly in the western partin the fourth and fifth centuries.Irish monasticism became famous for its ascetics practices meant to “mortify the flesh” and forits practices to atone for your sins, therefore a monasticism imbued of nihilism and sometimesbordering with insanity.In the sixth century saint Benedict enters the scene in Italy. He was born in Norcia, just after thedemise of the Western Empire; he establishes his monastic movement with a very original Rulethat excludes the ascetic practices, manifestly masochistic, while puts the emphasis on buildinga community of monks which could gather the pieces of the civilization that had just collapsed.Ora et labora, pray and work, is the most famous of his precepts.To pray is not enough, we must work because there is an entire civilization to be rebuilt. His Rule establishes: Idleness is the enemy of the soul, therefore monks must dedicate to workat certain times and in others, also predetermined, to the study of the word of God.Afterwards the Rule gives the monks a timetable for each period of the year to fix this duty.Saint Benedict gives us an extremely original monasticism which distances itself from the otherforms of monasticism for its moderate character, sage and discreet, but most of all, deprived ofthe nihilism typical of monasticism. His monks too had to take the vows of poverty, chastity andobedience but after they would dedicate their life to the progress, material and cultural, of thepeople that were entrusted to them.

In 816 the emperor Ludwig the Pius, son of Charles the Great, makes an assembly of abbotsadopt the Rule of saint Benedict as the only rule accepted in the Holy Roman Empire.For the future all abbeys of the empire, male and female, become Benedictine and around themEurope starts rebuilding a new framework after the collapse of the Roman Empire. At theirwalls, that guarantee hospitality and shelter in a dangerous and hostile world, the roads arrivewalked by the pilgrims. The ancient layouts are cancelled and substituted by new and saferroutes that lead from one monastery to the other and along them commerce flourishes and ur -ban settlements and cultivated areas.

All the Western Roman Empire had fallen apart and a movement was started that divided thepeople into many little groups settled in their own territory and in a permanent conflict betweeneach other. The unifying Benedictine rule, the Latin spoken by all monks, the ancient stability of the monas-teries furnish the most visible sign of unity in a continent broken into several ethnic groups, juris -dictions and cultures that are hostile to each other.Slowly but stubbornly the monks cover Europe with a network of monasteries which are thespearhead of a new civilization which was painfully opening its route among the ruins of themost famous empire in history. They get started the works of clearing and reclamation that re-cover to the agriculture the lands covered by woods after centuries of abandonment. The tools of labor are improved in the monasteries: they pass from the wooden plough to theiron one. Mechanical inventions are used like the water and wind mill that make work more pro-ductive and less laborious.

These monks come from all countries of Europe but they speak the same language, Latin. Evenif they belong to different nations they work and travel around Europe kept together by theirfaith. From Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily their monasteries serve all people in thesame way, receive the pilgrims, assist everybody, organize the work in the field and in the recla-mations while violence dominates unchallenged outside of their monasteries.They are the only refuge and hope for the peasant people which are at the mercy of the manytyrants, bandits, criminals who torment their lives.The peasant people were attached to these monks and, even if they were forced to fight againstall their neighbors because it did not exist anymore a unifying power, through the monks thesepeople realize that they belong, together with their neighbors, to a new civilization that did nothave a name yet. The monks transmitted to everyone an idea: the idea of Europe.

These monks are the first Europeans.

The idea of Europe did not exist in the Roman culture; Europe was just the name of one of themany pagan goddesses. For the first time, in the documents written by these monks, the name of Europe appears toidentify the geographical area where they worked. We do not know why they used the name ofa minor pagan goddess to identify this area.This idea of Europe did not manage to push the people to build a political entity that could putthem all together as the Roman Empire had done but, from now on, even if the Europeans givethe better of themselves to fight against each other they all will have in mind the idea that theywere Europeans. What a disgraced family!

Equally important is the contribution that these monks gave to our civilization by saving from de-struction a great part of the literature produced by the classical writers.We owe them if the memory of the Classical civilization has not been obliterated and was notcancelled from our history.In all monasteries there is a library that contains many books produced before Christianity. Be-sides this library the monasteries also have a scriptorium, a place where a few monks dedicatetheir life to copy ancient manuscripts on new books made of parchment.Parchment is derived from the skin of sheep or goats and it can become a support for the writ -ing only after a cumbersome preparation. It was very expensive. Papyrus could not arrive in Europe anymore because of the conquest of Egypt by the muslimswhich had cut off this supply. For this reason the monks had to spend a fortune to copy theseancient texts.All we know of the Classical civilization, besides what can be had from archeology, comes fromthe work of these monks who dedicated their life and their financial resources to save this civi -lization from oblivion.

At the light of what we said in this work of us, we could affirm that Saint Benedict ignored theApocalyptic Jesus to adopt the Christianity of Saint Paul. Today we are hard pressed to understand why a person who wanted to dedicate his life to theprogress of his community had to take the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience and becomea monk.We also struggle to understand why they dedicated so much work and money to save fromoblivion the civilization that they had just destroyed.Evidently the will was widespread not to sink deeper into decadence and a new civilizationwanted to come to life. This push had to use the ways allowed by the force that was dominant atthat time: Christianity

V - Was Jesus a Christian ?

In this chapter we are going to leave the narrative of this work to ask ourselves a question andto see if it is possible to give an answer.

What we will examine in this chapter is beyond the logic of our work. We decided to dedicate afew pages to this topic because we are sure that many of our readers could ask themselves thesame question.In fact this is an absolutely legitimate question and logically springs from what we have ex-plained in the previous chapters: did Jesus intend to start a new religion ?

Let us examine the issue.After hundreds of years of Christianity it was taken for granted that this religion had beenfounded by Jesus of Nazareth but after the Enlightement many scholars started a critical analy-sis of the Holy Scriptures to find out who was the man Jesus; who was the man who startedChristianity. This search was not the exclusive domain of agnostics or atheists, many believerspartecipated in these studies because the Christian faith, defined in the Creed of Nicaea, clearlyestablished that Jesus was both man and god at the same time. Therefore both for a lay histo-rian and for a man of faith there is a man to be discovered and understood. This search of theman Jesus has put in crisis the certainties that Christians had about the Holy Scriptures, whichhad already entered a crisis after the Protestant schism. Since then the scholars have producedmany questions which we are not sure we can answer.

An aside: we leave out the issue if Jesus really existed because it is such a foolish question thatit does not deserve an answer.

The question we want to answer is essentially as follows: did Jesus want to start another reli -gion distinct from Judaism or he only wanted to be a radical reformer of Judaism?In other words: if he had not been killed, would he have become a kind of Martin Luther of Ju-daism? Or he would have been the first Pope of this new religion?

A person of faith would not want to follow us any further because according to the faith Jesuswas not killed by an iniziative of the Sanhedrin but he was sent to this earth by the Father to re -deem humanity from the original sin by means of his death. His answer would be unequivocal:Jesus was not a kind of Martin Luther and could not become a Pope because he had to die toresurrect and return to the Father.

A historian must ask himself this question.

If we go into detail the question is reduced to ask whether the decision of Sant Paul to leave Ju-daism and preach to the gentiles had already been decided by Jesus or it was his. Was it aSaint Paul’s iniziative which Jesus would have not agreed to?

It is not easy to answer this question because the Gospels were written many years after SaintPaul when Christianity had already moved towards the separation from Judaism and had be-come a new religion in its own right.This is to say that it is difficult to establish if the evangelists had inserted the idea that theGospel had to be preached to all of humanity because it was an idea originated from Jesus him-self or to adapt to Saint Paul.

We have seen that when Sant Paul was preaching his version of Christianity another Jewishsect of Christians, the Ebionites, was growing. These Ebionites believed that Jesus was a manlike any other. He was, however, a great prophet and a teacher of life who had correctly inter -preted the Bible and had discovered the true meaning of the Law. The Ebionites, being Jewish,had kept the duty to observe the “works of the Law”, defined in the Bible, with the exception ofthe sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem. We have already explained our thesis that Jesus toowas against these sacrifices and therefore he seems to be closer to the character of a reformerof Judaism like the Ebionites.How strong these Ebionites were we do not know because the proto-orthodox Christiansdeleted all other forms of Christianity which were born in the empire, but if we consider howstrongly Saint Paul and, after him, how many proto-orthodox writers felt obliged to fight this sect,we could conclude that they had some weight up to the third century. Therefore there were arelevant number of Jews and gentiles who adhered to Judaism but inside a Christian sect.These people believed that Jesus was a reformer of Judaism and was not a founder of a newreligion. The gentiles who entered this sect had to convert to Judaism, circumcision included formales.

Let us now examine the Gospels. We have seen that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, he preached the end of this world andthe birth of the Kingdom of God. The end of this world would have been such a radical eventthat would have disrupted the life of all humanity; it is difficult to imagine an apocalypse as dra-matic as the one described in the Gospels which would have affected only the Jews. It seemsevident to us that his vision concerned all humanity and therefore his message could not beconfined among the Jewish society. This, however, would not exclude an Ebionite Jesus.

Still on the view of an Ebionite Jesus, we must notice that only once in all his ministry he entersin contact with a gentile and this would seem to be a definitive observation.Only once in the Gospels Jesus has a contact with a Roman centurion to heal his son but thisis not his initiative, it is the centurion who sends for him.If the Gospel had to be preached to all humanity, why didn’t he start it?One could object to this observation that in Isralel, at that time, it would have been extreemelyunbecoming for a rabbi to address a gentile (and a centurion, for that matter). Therefore wecould suppose that Jesus was too engaged to win the resistance of the Jews and could havedecided not to add this problem to his difficulties.We are again in a dilemma.To further support the view of an Ebionite Jesus we must notice that in the Kingdom of God histwelve apostles would have been put in the position to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. This is avery important topic because it allowed the Sanhedrin to have Jesus sentenced to death.It must be noticed that Jesus did not foresee any of his Apostles to judge the gentiles in theKingdom of God. This would make the view of a Christian Jesus an unlikely proposition.

On the other hand, if we examine the Gospels and we see how far Jesus wanted to reform Ju -daism we could have the definitive answer in favor of a new religion, because his ideas were sodifferent from the teachings of the Bible concerning marriage, work on Saturdays, forbiddenfood, hypocrisy of the Pharisees and their formalism that would make us think that Jesus in -tended to fund a new religion. This view could be confirmed by the reaction of the orthodoxJews: Pharisees and Sadducees. If they did all they could to kill him evidently they were surethat Jesus’ religion was incompatible with theirs, and they knew Judaism quite well.This view is further streghtened if we compare the Bible to his apocalyptic view where the lastwould become the first and viceversa. If we consider that the Chosen to the Kingdom of Godwould have been the loosers in their lives this idea is absolutely contrary to the very essence ofJudaism. In the Bible the Jews were the chosen people of God who would have brought them totheir promised land and would have them triumph over all their enemies. The Bible is not a paci -

fist document, on the contrary, the force of Isralel is exhalted and war is the tool of its achieve-ments. The apocalyptic vision of Jesus is the opposite of the letter and of the spirit of the Bible.

On the other hand, if we consider the differences between Jesus and Saint Paul we would bebrought to the view of the reformer. Saint Paul was the architect of the conversion of Christianity to a new religion. Why the Apostlesdid not start themselves in this way after the death of Jesus? Why Saint Paul had to intervene?And he could not convince all the disciples; in fact the sect of the Ebionites remained. Thiswould make us think that Jesus was a reformer and not a founder.Moreover, how can we explain the differences between Saint Paul and the Gospels?In the Golpels the main element which qualifies the Chosen is to be a looser: the first will be thelast and the last the first. This expression is never mentioned in the letters of Sanit Paul, hisChosen are such by means of the faith in Jesus and a strict observance of his ethics. The Cho-sen of Saint Paul are very different from the Chosen of the Gospels.If Jesus intended to found a new religion, Christianity, why his Christianity is so different fromthat of Saint Paul? Why Saint Paul did not feel the need to conform to the Christianity that willbe later defined in the Gospels? Is it because the Gospels did not expose the true intentions ofJesus? Is it because Saint Paul wanted to preach a religion different from Judaism regardless ofthe real intentions of Jesus?

At this point we are afraid we have created a great confusion in the mind of our reader, but thisshould not worry him; we too are confused.

If we can venture to express our opinion we would deceive him.We think it is not possible to give a firm answer to this question.What we know about Jesus of Nazareth is not enough to give a definitive answer.

However the question we asked ourselves in this chapter is legitimate, it is not extravagant andit is not due to the desire to look original.If we examine Jesus of Nazareth for a historical research, we must resing ourselves and acceptthe fact that we cannot know everything because the sources we have do not tell us.Those who have faith can go on without problems, the historians can only make their peace.

Now we can go on with the thesis of our work.

VI - The clash of two cultures

In the next chapters we will examine how Christianity established itself in the Roman Empireand how it contributed to its demise.

Now we enter the core of our intuition which motivated us to produce this document and wewant to begin by shortly outlining this intuition of ours to anticipate our reader on what he is go -ing to read and the logic we will follow.

Same way as Christianity contribuited to the destruction of the Greek-roman civilization,so socialism is dragging us to the demise of Western Civilization.

The central part of our thesis is that in both cases nihilism was the main element of the forceswhich brought these civilizations to destruct themselves.In the first case it was the nihilism of Christianity, in the second the socialist nihilism or, better,the Christian-socialist nihilism.

The demise of the Roman empire is an extremely complex issue which requires deep and ex-tensive research but here we need only examine how Christianity, with its nihilism, contributedto the destruction of the empire. When the English historian Gibbon expressed his opinion thatChristianity was in part responsible for the decline and end of the Empire, he started a debatethat after two centuries fascinates historians. In all likelyhood this debate will go on for manymore years; here we are going to give our contribution.

We must warn our reader from the start that all documents relative to ancient Rome which wehave, have been copied by monks in the medieval monasteries; we do not have any original ofthose documents. This implies that not always we can trust what we read if the subject is Chris-tianity because it is probable that these unknown monks have edited and corrected the textswhich were not deemed appropriate to their faith. Lately the scholars of ancient texts have de-bated the credibility of these works; we will present you the texts which have been approved bythe majority of the scholars.

Moreover, our reader must know that the pagan literature which opposed the penetration ofChristianity was much more abundant than the little that reached us for the simple fact thatthose monks did not think it should be transmitted to posterity. The little we know we know it be -cause was quoted inside Christian documents which opposed those pagans. We are talkingabout fragments, short quotes which still let us know that pagan intellectuals did not seat ontheir hands and worked hard with an abundant production of works that meant to oppose this“evil superstition”; but it was all in vain.

We will start by illustrating the method we want to use to examine this issue.When we talk about the demise of the Roman Empire we must distinguish between the entitieswhich were destroyed.First of all the administrative-political entity, then the civilization as the body of knowledge scien-tific, cultural, philosophical, artistic and more, then the physical realities which were built likebuildings, roads, harbours, waterworks and more.

This distinction is indispensable because these entities were not destroyed at the same time,not for the same causes and not by the same destroyer. Moreover, to complicate our analysis,this tragedy played in different ways and times between the two halves of the Empire, Westernand Eastern.

We are going to do this with a somewhat original method, we decided to start from the end. Wewill examine three authors, one pagan and two Christians, who lived at the end of the RomanEmpire. We will see why and in which way they faced each other and fought.

The Last Roman

We are in 1494 in the monastery of Bobbio in the Italian Appennines. An Italian scholar, GiorgioGalbiati, discovers by chance a manuscript in Latin that will go down in history because it is thelast work of the Latin literature that reached us. After this work nothing else. The end, the dark-ness.This manuscript is incomplete, the last part is missing even if another scholar has found, fiftyyears ago, in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino more fragments of this work. This may be thereason why we do not know its title. Our scholars have titled it: Return.

The author is Claudius Rutilius Namatianus and at the discovery of his book he was a completestranger to our historians. All we know about him we know it from what he tells about himself inhis book.Rutilius was not Roman. He was born in Southern Gaul (modern France) by the end of the IVcentury probably near present day Toulouse where his family had large farmlands. His ethnicitywas Gallo-Celtic but he had been conquered so deeply by the Roman civilization that he consid-ered himself a Roman and dedicated his entire life to serve in public offices the Roman civiliza-tion that he loved.His father had been the Governor of Tuscia and took him with him to Tuscany. From here Rutil-ius goes to Rome to participate in the government of the city where he makes a splendid careerto become praefectus Urbi, one of the highest offices of the empire.

Now, in order to understand this story, we must give our reader a brief account of the events ofthat period.Rutilius was born, probably, under the reign of the Emperor Theodosius I, a Spanish by birth.Theodosius was an Orthodox Christian faithful to the creed established at the Council of Nicaeaeighty years before these events. In 381 Theodosius outlaws the non Orthodox Christianity, es-tablishes the week with a mandatory day of rest, Sunday, and forbids pagan rites provokingseveral revolts which are repressed in blood. The pagan temples are converted into Christianchurches or destroyed.He also forbade the Olympic Games putting an end to this millennial tradition of the Greek civi -lization. The Christian religious intolerance is enforced by Theodosius without any hesitationboth against the pagans and the non Orthodox Christians: Arians, Gnostics and many others ofwhich we have lost any trace. After centuries of persecutions Christianity is in power and showshis new face: violent and totalitarian.

The intolerance of Theodosius keeps growing. The Christians who had returned to the pagancults are persecuted and for those who perform pagan sacrifices there is the death sentence.Thus disappears a piece of the Classical civilization, the freedom of religion, and the rhythm oftime of society is changed; now it is divided into weeks.This happened in both halves of the empire.

Theodosius moves the capital of the empire to Milano; he dies in 395 and to him succeed, in thewestern part, his ten years old son Honorius and in the oriental part his son, Arcadius. Arcadiusis eighteen years old and is under the guardianship of the prefect Rufino.Honorius will move the capital to Ravenna.

It is under the reign of Honorius that our Rutilius makes his career.

This is a time when life must have been considered a nightmare by the inhabitants of the em-pire. The Roman ethnicity was long gone and the “Roman army” was made, in good part, bysoldiers of German ethnicity; they were taken from the same people who were invading the em-pire because the people subject of the empire were no more capable to do the soldier. Naturallythese people did not have any sense of fidelity towards the empire and they fought for their owngain; you could not trust anybody. Everybody could betray anybody else, everybody fought against anybody else and it was al -ways uncertain who was standing for whom. Murder was the normal method to dispose of anunwanted politician or general. At that time few were the people in power who died of a naturaldeath.The most feared enemy were the Goths, a German people who pushed to take possession of aregion of the empire to settle down. They had been chased from their land by successive wavesof invaders coming from the Russian steppes; the Goths were led by Alaric.The Roman army of the west is under the command of Stilicho who belongs to another Germantribe, the Vandals.Taking advantage of the weakness of the two young emperors Alaric rebels and invades theBalcans, Stilicho moves against him but he is stopped by Arcadius who, evidently, feared the in-terference of his brother more that he feared Alaric. Stilicho sends troops to defend Costantino-ple under the command of Gainas, a general of Goths origins but faithful to the empire (per-haps). These troops kill Rufino who is replaced by the eunuch Eutropius in 395.Alaric takes advantage of this situation and puts Greece to fire and sword, Stilicho movesagainst him but Eutropius appoints Alaric commander in chief of the Eastern Imperial army.Moreover he favours an uprising of the troops in Northern Africa that cuts off the supply ofgrains to Rome, thus starving the city. This insurrection is broken and the supplies resume. The Eastern Goths, under the leadership of Tribigildo rebel against Eutropius and kill him.In the year 400 the command of the Eastern Empire is, matter of fact, in the hands of the wife ofArcadius who opposes the inroads of the Goths, therefore, Gainas allies with his fellow Tribig -ildo and occupy Costantinople. But the inhabitants, who did not love the barbarians, rebelagainst the Goths, massacre them and another Goth general, Fravitta, attaks Gainas and killshim. Shortly after Fravitta is accused of treason and killed. In the Western Empire Stilicho is under pressure on the river Rhine by other invaders: Vandals,Swabian and Alans. Alaric takes advantage and moves against Italy. Stilicho is obliged to taketroops out of the Rhine front to face Alaric. The barbarians Vandals, Alans and Swabians breakthrough the limes and invade France.

Somehow Stilicho defeats Alaric but does not kill him, he lets Alaric free perhaps thinking to usehim later against the Eastern Empire.In 406 a Goth chieftain, Radagaisus, at the head of an army made up of several German tribesmoves against Italy, attacks Florence but is defeated by Stilicho who kills him and takes into his“Roman” army the invading Germans In 407 the “Roman” troops in Britain, under the command of the rebel general Costantino, crossthe Channel and enter France to fight against the invaders and to cut out a kingdom for them-selves. As a matter of fact England becomes free but remains defenseless, it is no more part ofthe Empire. Another German tribe, the Saxons, who resided in Northern Germany and weregood at sailing, take to the sea and invade England, after a few years they are followed by theAngles. The celtic people of England are forced to submit or flee. Thus were born the first anglo-saxon people.

Alaric takes advantage of the situation and blackmails Honorius claiming the sum of 4000pounds of gold. Honorius must humiliate himself and pays.In 408 Arcadius dies and Stilicho tries to use Alaric to attack Costantinople, but Honorius sus-pects a treason and has Stilicho murdered.Alaric comes back to Italy, puts siege to Rome. The Romans must pay a high ransom to befreed from the siege, but soon Alaric asks again for lands to settle down with his people; he isdenied. Alaric attacks Rome and in 410 sacks the city with three days of destructions and mas-sacres.It is outrageous, Rome, the capital of the world, plundered by the barbarians.

Alaric leaves Rome with a considerable booty and the half sister of Honorius, Galla Placidia,who is kept hostage. He goes south, perhaps he wants to go to Africa but he dies of a naturaldeath. His brother in law Athaulf succeeds him.Athaulf cannot cross the sea to Africa therefore he goes back up along the peninsula and dev-astates all the lands he crosses. He agrees with Honorius and goes to France to repress the re -bellion started by Costantino. He conquers Narbonne where, in 414, he marries Galla Placidiawith great pomp as if he wanted to make himself emperor.The “Romans” block all French harbours so that he cannot receive grains from Africa and theyforce him to leave France. Athaulf passes to Spain and devastates all the lands he crosses.

The lands of our Rutilius are among these.

In Spain Athaulf has a child from Galla Placidia but is murdered in 415 by his own men. His suc-cessor too is murdered. The Goths stop for a couple of years.

That’s where the story fits in of our Rutilius’ Return. The South of France is relatively in peacefor a couple of years and so our Rutilius decides to leave Rome to go to his possessions to re-pair the damages brought by the Goths and restart the works.

We have shortened this story not to annoy our reader but the real story is much more compli -cated and tragic then our description.The empire was falling apart while Christianity took power and suffocated in blood, if necessary,all voices of dissent. In those years a movement begins which split all provinces of the empireinto smaller and smaller political-administrative units. Since the central imperial power was un-able to defend them the communities organized to put together a resistance to the invaders. Anattempt as tragic as useless, the barbarians were too strong for these small territorial entities.Only one of them succeded: Venice.It was in those years that the islands of the lagoon started to fill with people who were fleeingfrom the devastations of the barbarians.

Now we can resume the analysis of Return.

The scholars have placed the date of production of this work between 415 and 417. Rutiliuslives in Rome and gets news of the disaster produced by the Goths of Athaulf in his lands;therefore he decides to leave the city to go back home to dedicate himself to the reconstruction.The journey is possible because in those years the barbarians have stopped and a relativepeace has been established in France and Italy.Return is the diary of this voyage of Rutilius from Rome to the South of France.

We must put in evidence that Rutilius had remained a convinced pagan. He detested Christian-ity even if this implied that he could risk the wrath of the emperor. Luckily for him Honorius wasmore tolerant than his father Theodosius, so much that it seems that he preferred to put in the

highest posts of the empire pagans like Rutilius. It may be that he had realized that Christianscould not be trusted since they did not love the empire and romanity.

The diary starts with the parting from his friends and with an invocation to his pagan gods:“Grant me, I beg you, a calm sea …. If I did not disappoint you when I administered the Romanjustice … But the circumstance that no crime hath caused me to draw my sword must not beascribed to the glory of me, when I was prefect, but to the people.”5

In spite of being rich and powerful he had kept the modesty of the good people who performtheir duty with commitment. He is telling us that he did not have to impose any death sentencenot because of his wisdom but because of the people who behaved. This seems an extraordi -nary feat if we consider that the city had been devastated by the Goths just 5 or 6 years before,therefore anarchy should have dominated the city, but, evidently, that was not the case.

We are struck by the means he uses in this voyage: by sea with a small fleet of boats.“I chose the sea because the land routes in the plain are inundated by the rivers and in the hillsthey are strewn with stones. Since the Tuscan countryside and the Aurelia road, having suf-fered the sword and fire of the Gothic hordes, do not have any more hostels to make a stop inthe forests, nor bridges to cross the rivers, it is better to entrust the sails to the sea, even if it istreacherous.”

Three years before Athaulf had devastated all the lands he crossed to go from Calabria toFrance. The Aurelia road, one of the most important of the Roman roads, had been disabled somuch to prefer to travel by sea in an unsuitable season.In those times you traveled by sea with large ships only from Spring to Autumn because in win-ter there were high chances to encounter a storm: mare clausum.

It was late fall and Rutilio put together a small fleet of cimbe, large row boats with a square sailwhich could not sail against the wind, in this case they were rowing along. However, theseboats were not too big and when the sea was rough they were dragged on the beach waiting fora better weather. For the night they built a shelter with the sails resting on the oars planted inthe sand.This was a way of travelling that could be defined as primitive, something from the stone age. This was the situation to which Roman society had been reduced.

Deep in his heart Rutilio knew he would not have returned to Rome, the great love of his life:“We fix abundant kisses on the gates that must be left behind, unwillingly our feet pass the holythreshold. With tears we beg forgiveness, and we make an offering with praise, as far as weep-ing allows our words to run:”

Then he writes us a passionate ode to Roman civilization that scholars have called: Hymn toRome:“Hear, fairest queen of your world, Roma taken up among the starry skyes. Hear, mother ofmen and mother of gods: we are not far from heaven through your temples. You we sing andwill always sing, while the fates allow: nobody can be safe and forgetful of you. … Africa did notslow you with her flame-wielding sands, the Bear armed with her ice did not repel you. As far aslifebringing nature has stretched towards the poles, so far is the earth open to your courage.You have made from many nations one fatherland: under your rule it has benefited the lawlessto be captured. And while you offer the conquest a share in your own laws, you have made acity what was previously a world. … Victorious clemency softens armed strength … Hence your

5 All quotes are translated by the author from: Claudio Rutilio Namaziano, Viaggio di Ritorno, byTommaso Picone (Como: Edizioni Graficorp, 1987)

equal pleasure in combat and in mercy, which overcomes those it feared, which loves those itovercame.You goddess, you every corner of the Roman world honours, and wears a peace-bearing yokeon free necks. All the stars which maintain their everlasting orbits have seen no fairer empire …nor you at your birth were more powerful or strong, but you had more wisdom and sense of jus -tice. Noble in the lawful causes of your wars and in peace without haughtiness, your gloryreached the highest splendour. What you rule is less than what you deserve to rule. You sur-pass your mighy destiny with your deeds”

No empire in history has ever had such a declaration of love.

The Rome that Rutilius loved had founded it’s empire on its military valour: the strength of its le -gions. He tells us that its wisdom and its equilibrium were added to this force so that an empirewas built in a way that all vanquished people could live together as if they were one community.Nobody doubted in the pre-christian world that war was legitimate. It was a simple fact of lifethat the relations between peoples was based on the use of force; the originality of Rome was inhaving added to this force the wisdom of a good governance.This was the best you could have according to the pagan ethics.Not so for the Christians who always condemned the use of force and militarism: war was al-ways evil. Their nichilism reached the point where Christians not even took into considerationhow useful was to have an institution so effective for the common welfare as the Roman Em-pire. When Rutilius was writing Christianity had become the official religion of the empire, some-thing absolutely antithetic to the Classical civilization, and still the Christians detested romanityand its empire.The fracture was deep because romanity, the way that Rutilius describes it, was the opposite ofwhat the Christians wanted to realize in their human relations.

Five days later Rutilio arrives at Faleria, near today Piombino, and lands.“By chance just that day, the people of the town, merrily, at the country cross-roads partied theirtired souls with sacred plays; in fact that day Osiris, resuscitated at last, sprouts the flourishingbuds for the new crops”.

The cult of Osiris, born in Egypt many centuries before, entered the Roman world and was cele-brated in autumn as the goddess of vegetation. At the cross roads in the countryside, peoplecame together to celebrate the rebirth of life after the planting. It was a country fair and joyous;Rutilio puts in evidence this joy to compare it with the sadness that pervades the revealed reli -gions.As we can see, the pagan frame of mind was such that what counted was the “power” of theGod in question to obtain the hoped for performance. Osiris was considered very powerful sinceafter winter she never failed to resurrect the fields with new crops. The fact that this cult wasborn in Egypt and was not original of their religion was totally irrelevant for the Romans. Whatcounted was only the result.The Christians called all that “superstition”. For the pagans, instead, the judeo-christian faithwas a “devastating illness”.

“Landing, we seek lodging, and stroll within a wood … But we were made to pay dear for the re -pose of this delightful halting-place by the innkeeper … For a grumpy Jew was in charge of thespot, a creature to whom human food loaths. He charges in our bill for damaging his bushesand hitting the seaweed, and bawls about his enormous loss in water we had sipped. We makethe insults worthy of that filthy race, which, shamelessly, practices circumcision, a race that is asource of folly, to whom the cold Sabbaths are dear, yet their heart is chillier than ther creed;each seventh day is condemned to ignoble sloth, almost languid image of their weary god. Ithink not even a child can believe all the ravings of this masnada of impostors. … The contagion

of this pestilence, seemingly wiped out, spreads out into wider space and the vanquished peo-ple oppress their victors”.

Evidently it was not Christianity who invented anti-Semitism.

Rutilius had remained proudly pagan, he hated Christianity and it is not surprising that he hatedJudaism too because he actually hated faith that forces people to absurd behaviors when ob-served rationally.We can clearly sense his outrage for the circumcision of male babies, a sadistic and incompre-hensible practice. As it is incomprehensible too to refuse some food even if perfectly suitable fornutrition. He despises the “ignoble sloth” of the Jews that cannot perform on the Sabbaths any-thing which resembles work.What is most surprising is the last phrase we quoted. He uses the word “pestilence” as if he wasdealing with a contagious illness and he tells us that it was spreading so much that they, theJews who had been won with up to three Judean wars, managed to “oppress” the Romans whowon them. We know that the Jews did not proselytize systematically and we cannot understandhow they could oppress the Romans. Evidently in this outburst Rutilius confuses and puts to-gether Jews and Christians. In fact it had been a long time since Christians persecuted the pa-gans and repressed their events; at the end of the century paganism disappears, totally deletedby Christianity.What we cannot understand in Rutilius is his conviction that the Jews oppress the gentiles; thiswill become a refrain of anti-Semitism up to our days. A conviction which is impossible to eradi-cate in spite of its absurdity.

The following day they have headwinds and must pass Populonia by rowing.“As we advance at sea, Capraria now rears itself; the island looks squalid, full of men enemiesof light. Their own name for themselves is a Greek one, "monachoi" (monks), because theywish to dwell alone with none to see. They fear Fortune's gifts, as they dread adversities: wouldanyone, to escape misery, live of his own choice in misery? What foolish frenzy of a distortedbrain is it to fear evil and not be able to tolerate good? Either they are like prisoners who de -mand the appropriate penalties for their deeds, or their melancholy hearts are swollen withblack bile”.

The island of Capraia was one of the favorite destinations of Christians who wanted to becomemonks. The term monk comes from the Greek and means a person who lives in solitude. Rutil -ius here is joking on the fact that so many went to such a small island to stay in solitude that,matter of fact, created a crowd. With the expression “men enemy of light” he refers to Chris-tians, probably, because of their mania to dig underground tunnels, the catacombs, to bury thedead and to gather to pray. Here we can see the deep aversion that Rutilio has towards Christianity even if he does nottalks of Christians, just of monks. Their island is called “squalid” but we inderstand that he doesnot refer to the island; this is what he thinks of Christianity. To openly criticize Christianity wouldhave been dangerous for a pagan, you were risking death because Christianity was the statereligion. Instead to criticize monasticism was possible since many Christians were also doing it.Here Rutilio perceives the nihilism of Christians and is disgusted. We note the words “ foolishfrenzy” and “distorted brain”. Rutilio is stunned by the fact that men, who in their everyday livesdid not manifest any mental imbalance, once possessed by the Christian faith exile themselveson a rock to serve time for “deeds” never done.

The following day, the seventh of the jouney, they advance with tailwinds towards Pisa andpass by the Gorgona island. Here Rutilius vents again his resentment against Christians.“Here rises in the midst of the sea the wave-bound Gorgon with Pisa and Corsica on either side.A rock rears itself which reminds us of a recent scandal; here a fellow-countryman dwelt, buriedalive. In fact not long ago, this young man, one of our youths of high descent, with wealth to

match, and marriage-alliance equal to his birth, seized with madness, he forsook men and theworld, and, gullible, he lives as an exile in a filthy hiding place. Fancying, poor wretch, that thereligious sentiments feed on filth and tortures himself more ruthlessly against himself than theoffended gods. Surely, I ask, this sect is not less powerful than the drugs of Circe? In her daysmen's bodies were transformed into beasts, now it is their minds”.

It happened that one of his acquaintances, “one of our youths”, one who belonged to the elite ofthe rich and powerful of Rome not just for his family but also for a good marriage, abandonedeverything to bury himself alive “in a filthy hiding place” affected by this mental illness: Christian-ity.We can feel in the words of Rutilio the pain, the dismay and the resentement for this incurableillness which kept advancing unstoppable and incomprehensible. He compares it to the episodein the Odissey where the magician Circe transformed the bodies of the companions of Ulyssesinto pigs, but their bodies only are transformed, their minds remain intact.Christianity, on the contrary, is an illness of the soul it transforms the souls of men into bestialsouls because as if they were pigs they abandon civilization to go live in “ filth”. So this “gullible”exiled himself voluntarily on an island and “tortures himself”, with more cruelty than the godswould have done, for non-existent faults.This had been a “recent scandal” in his circle of friends because this man was a traitor: traitor ofRome, traitor of civilization. The following day Rutilio lands to go to Pisa as a guest of a friend.“Here was shown to me the statue of my revered father, erected by the Pisans in their market-place. The honour done to my lost parent made me weep: tears of a saddened joy wet mycheeks with their flow. For my father once was governor of the land of Tuscany”.

From this episode we know that Rutilio did not consider Christianity the worse danger for theempire. Corruption was more dangerous which his father and, we understand, he too hadfought with force pushed by their dedication to the ideal of the empire:

Did not that most upright dispenser of the Imperial Treasury repel in his days the Harpies whogathered round it? Harpies, whose claws rend asunder the world, their sticky talons dragging offwhatever they touch … public thieves, they devour among the guardians the stolen public mon-eis; but their hundred-handed pillaging did not escape Lucillus, whose single hand checkmatedall their hands together.

This diary arrives as far as Alassio; nothing we know of what happened afterwards.In all likelyhood he managed to get to his home where he put together this memories, or thenotes he took during the voyage, by writing everyting in this diary. For sure he did not return toRome. This good “Roman” disappears swallowed into the whirlpool of the wreckage of the em-pire. Just a copy of his diary remained afloat among the debris of the shipwreck ending, for anobscure design of fate, in a monastery on the Italian Apennines.But, more important for our story, the latin literature disappears.The latin disappears as the tongue spoken by the people, it shatters into many dialects whichwill become the national languages of Europe. The latin will remain just as the universal lan-guage of the Catholic Church.

We notice that Rutilius did not think that Rome was about to die, he did not think its decadencewas terminal.He quotes a few episodes of its history, when the Gauls conquered Rome or when Hannibalcame close to destroy it, and many more. Everytime Rome raised stronger than before: “fromyour adversities it is customary to hope for fortunate things; you undergo enriching losses in thefashion of the heavens. … Things that cannot be sunk rise again with great force, and leap outhigher when driven in to the deepest waves”.

Rutilio believed in the deepest of his soul that Rome would have never died: “ the time you haveleft is not subject to limits, while the lands shall stand and the sky holds up the stars; what un-does other kingdoms restore you: it is the law of your rebirth to be able to grow from evils”.

Lucky for him Rutilio will not have to see the death of his great love.Sixty years after these events, the barbarian Odoacer, of arian faith, king of the German tribe ofthe Erulis and chief of all German troops standing in Italy, was made by the Roman Senate apatrician of the diocese of Italy. Strong in this power he decided to put an end to the fiction of anempire that did not exist anymore, he deposed the child emperor who had been put on thethrone, he did not appoint anybody else emperor and sent to Costantinople all the imperial in-signia thus recognizing the authority of the Eastern Empire over Italy. He became the first kingof Italy.

Thus ends the Western Roman Empire in 476.

Rutilius could not even imagine that Christianity would have deleted from the face of earth hisbeloved civilization. So he ends his Himn to Rome because hope is the last to die: “Whether itbe granted to end my life in my ancestral lands, or wheter you will someday be restored to myeyes, I shall live happy and more blessed than anything I could pray for, if you would deign al -ways to remember me”.

The enemies of light

Now we take cue from the denunciation that our good Rutilius makes of Christianity to analyzehow its nihilism contributed to the demise of the empire and of the Classical civilization.

Rutilius calls the Christians: “men enemies of light”. We suppose this is due to that phenome-non, obscure and incomprehensible, of digging tunnels to bury the dead: the catacombs.This phenomenon is a challenge for the historians to find an explanation.Time ago it was said that they did it to hide from the persecutions, but this is nonsense.When Christians started this practice, the catacombs were already in use by the Jews who livedin Rome. The Christians went on with it and dug up several miles of them.They started in the second and stopped in the fifth century when, at last, the bishop of Romeforbade this practice. What may help to understand this phenomenon is that the bishop hadthem closed when Christianity became the official religion of the empire and he took possessionof the city, that is when he had become the only authority above what was left of the Romansenate and of the big landowners who were feared in a city deprived of a credible government.Some scholars support the thesis that Christians did this because of their faith in the resurrec -tion of the flesh. In fact Roman society used cremation which destroyed the bodies and wouldhave prevented their resurrection.This thesis leaves us puzzled because also the burial destroys the bodies in a few years and wecannot see the difference, Christians could not be so stupid. Matter of facr these bodies wereeaten in a few days by an army of rats and roaches. In fact they were deposed along the wallsof the tunnels inside of niches dug in the wall. A stone slab was put to close the niche and tocover to the eye the havoc the rats would have done to the corpse; so, away from prying eyes,the little beasts could eat in peace.

We consider this burial practice one of the most inhuman manifestations of Christian nihilism.

The catacombs were excavated, maintained, decorated, with paintings and other artefacts, byteams of workers specialized in all the works necessary to keep them functioning; they were ex-pensive.The relatives were accompanied by special guides to the burial of their dead because it was im-possible to orientate in that labyrinth without the help of people who had memorized all the cata-comb.The air was very heavy because there were only few pits which descended from the surface tolet some air and light enter, but very little since there was no ventilation. You must consider thatthe catacombs could reach 5 floors below ground; very little air reached the bottom. It is not easy to imagine the stench which assailed those who entered and had to walk up tohundred of yards among corpses some of which were still decomposing.The rich families excavated along the walls a space of a few square feet, called cubicles orcrypt to be used as the burial place of the family. In these spaces they could gather to pray onthe anniversary of the death.It is not surprising that pagans hated and despised Christians. We do not understand why theauthorities did not forbid this practice; evidently the tolerance of the pagans was higher thanwhat we have been told.And yet Christians did not stop until the Pope forbade them.It may help to understand this phenomenon is we consider that after having forbidden this prac-tice the growing Catholic Church “removed” from the memory of the people the very existenceof the catacombs. In a short time the entrances collapsed, the pits closed and even the memorywas lost of their existence. It was by chance that in the XVII century some scholars found one ofthese tunnels and “discovered” the catacombs. These discoveries went on until the XIX century.It is evident that there had been a removal of this phenomenon from the collective psyche of theCatholics.Why this removal?Our opinion is that the Catholic authorities realized, once in power, that this burial practice wasdegrading and inhuman. At that point the progressive part of Christianity took over on the nihilistpart and not only they closed the catacombs but removed from the memory a practice whichcould have been considered a shame not suited to the dignity of this new faith.

Foolish Frenzy

We have seen that our Rutilius, in his Return, vents his resentment towards this new religionwhich he calls a “foolish frenzy of a distorted brain”. He writes that the monks deluded them-selves that “the religious sentiments feed on filth”.This may seem to be just an insult to the religion he detested, but this is not so. His contempt was founded on well known facts.Today, following the de-christianization of our society, we cannot imagine what it meant to be aChristian in those times, it is therefore necessary that we draw near to those people who startedChristianity to try to reconstruct in our mind an image of their way of life.We want to show our readers how Christianity provoked an involution in the costumes, thoughtand behavior which contributed to the demise of the Classical civilization.Our problem of modern people is that we cannot understand the first Christians if we do notread what they wrote us. Our mentality and culture are so far from their “spirituality” that if we donot read what they wrote this document of ours would become incomprehensible and useless.In the following chapters we will try to see to it that our reader enters the psyche of the firstChristians to understand the validity of our thesis .

We are going to read another book written in the same years of Return by a Christian who livedin the same years of our good Rutilius.We have taken as touchstone The Lausian History by Palladio from Galatia.Palladio becomes monk in 386, he goes to the Egyptian desert to be a hermit and remains therenine years together with many other hermits. In the year 400 he becomes bishop of Elenopoli inBitinia, in the northern part of present day Turkey, he gets involved in certain theological dis-putes and for this he is exiled but after a few years he is reinstated in his post. Before dying hewrote this book in memory of the nine years he spent as a hermit. The book contains tens ofshort bios of his hermit companions and gives us a good idea of how these hermits lived in thedesert.It seems that all started with the monk Pacomio to whom an angel appeared to dictate the rule:“And he gave him a bronze tablet on which these words were engraved: …”6

The angel told him how to build the monastery, where to put the food, how to sleep (sitting),how to dress, how to organize different fraternities (identified by a letter of the Greek alphabet).While eating they had to wear something on their head in order not to be seen to chow, theyshould not talk and should not look away from the plate.It was specified how many prayers they should recite every day.

Several monasteries had adopted this rule for a total of seven thousand menThese communities tried to be self sufficient but sometimes someone had to go to the market inAlexandria to sell their produce and buy what they did not produce.Palladio lists us many different jobs: “There I saw fifteen tailors, seven ironsmiths, four carpen-ters, twelve camel drivers, fifteen fullings. They practice every art, and with what remains tothem they maintain the nunneries and the prisons”.They are all busy doing something and the table is always ready because each fraternity eats atdifferent times.Everybody must learn the Scriptures by heart.There also is a nunnery beyond the river that the monks cannot cross apart the priest and thedeacon but on Sundays only.It seems that the jail was very useful, in fact the tensions between monks and nuns were fre-quent. One episode, the most ancient case of mobbing that we know, shows us that the atmos-phere was not idyllic. A nun, a novice, had been seen talking to a passing stranger and “… another nun having seenthe two, when after a certain time a quarrel exploded, inspired by the devil and pushed by astrong perversion and a raging wrath, she slandered her in front of the community; a few morenuns associated with her in this wickedness. The novice was taken by a great pain thinking shehad been the victim of a form of slander that she was not even able to conceive and unable toresist she threw herself into the river and died. The slanderer having acknowledged she hadslandered out of wickedness … she took herself and hanged.”

The book is made up of a series of bios of monks he knew or about whom he had been told forthe purpose of edifing the reader and show him the road to sanctity.“Therefore, they were up to two thousand the very noble and fervent men whom I met and livedwithin the hermitages that are around Alexandria, for the time of three years: I retreated thenfrom that place and went to the mount Nitria . … about five thousand men live on this mountwho have different life styles: each one does what he can, so that it is possible to remain aloneor in the company of one or of many. There also are seven oven for the bread that serve thesemen and the anchorites of the desert, who number six hundred”.

These communities of monks (there were women too) disciplined themselves in a very originalway: “On this mount Nitria there is a big church with three palms: each had a whip hung. The

6 Translated by the author from: Palladio, La storia lausiaca (Mondadori, Verona 1974)

first is used to punish the men who sin, the second the thieves, if they are caught, the third foranyone else: in a way that all who sin and are shown to be worthy of beatings embrace thepalm, and after they have received on their back the given beatings they are absolved”.The travellers are welcomed in a hostel for all the time they want, even years, until they decideto leave. They can rest for some time, afterwards they are assigned a job. Among the other jobsthere are also doctors and pie makers, wine is produced and everybody makes his own clothes.

The first hermit of whom he tells us is Isidoro “… an extraordinary man, who both for his moralcharacter and for his culture was ennobled by every gift: Isidoro presbyter … I visited his cell onthe mount Nitria. … Up to his death he never wore any linen cloth besides a bandage for thehead, he never took a bath, never eat meat … I saw him many times breaking into tears at thetable and I heard him say: I am ashamed to participate to a material nourishment , while I am aspiritual being … “.According to Palladio never taking a bath was a noble idea that showed a strong moral charac-ter as well as to be ashamed to nourish yourself.It seems that washing yourself was considered a vanity and not a virtue

The monk Evagrio taught his disciples: “Since I came to the desert I did not touch a lettuce, norany other green vegetable, nor fruit, nor grapes, nor meat, nor water to wash myself”.

Even worst the saint Melania. During a voyage to Egypt together with the deacon Iovino “… ithappened that Iovino, having taken a bowl, he washed carefully hands and feet with a very coldwater, and after having washed himself he laid down to rest. Melania approached him like awise mother to a real son, and was teasing him for his refinement, telling him: how do you dare,at your age, when your blood is still hot, to pamper in such a way your vile flesh, without realiz-ing the dangers which arise from it? Well, believe me, in sixty years of life neither my foot, normy face nor any of my limbs ever touched water, besides the ends of my hands”.

These hermits thought that to wash yourself was a vice because to take care of “your vile flesh”was a source of dangers. Today we are hard pressed to understand which were these dangers,but for the pagans too this was an inconceivable thing. Our Rutilius rightly denounced the insan-ity of the monks because they really believed that “the religious sentiments feed on filth”. As youcan see this was not an insult of an enemy of Christianity, it was the denunciation of a wide-spread behavior.

Palladio insists in praising this saint Melania: “She proved to be a woman of high culture andshe was taken for the love of the Scriptures …” as far as to read up to eight times the works ofthe most important theologians of the time. “By this means she could elevate herself from whatis wrongly called science, and by the grace of those books she made wings to her flight: beingnourished of good hopes, she transformed herself in a spiritual bird and made a leap as high asChrist”.So, the pagan science was false while the hallucinations of the Christian theologians couldmake you fly as high as Christ.

Sex was obviously considered an obstacle on the way to perfection.We have the example of Amun who had been obliged by his family to marry and so, the night ofthe nuptials he convinced his wife, Sacred Scriptures at hands, of what great gift was virginityand he convinced her. They lived in chastity for eithteen years then he gave her their house andwent to the Nitria to be a hermit. He built a dwelling for himself where he lived for twenty yearsin solitude up to his death.

More tragic and disgusting the destiny of young Alessandra “… who having left the city andclosed herself in a tomb received through an opening what was necessary to survive withoutseeing the face of a woman or a man, for ten years. In the tenth year she laid down and entered

the eternal sleep … Melania too spoke about her … I never saw her face, but standing near theopening I invited her to explain me the reason why she had closed herself in the tomb. She,through the opening told me: a man has upset his mind for me and, so that it did not seem that Iwanted to make him suffer or expose him to slander, I preferred to bury myself alive in thetomb, rather than scandalize a soul made in the image of God”.That’s why she punished herself with a punishment that lasted ten years until she killed herself.

Palladio tells us about the hermit Ammonio who “… together with three brothers and two sisters,having reached the top of the love for God, made the desert their home, men and women set-tled down in separate places so that there was enough distance among them. Since the manwas an extraordinary expert of the holy books …“ some people asked him to be their bishop buthe refused and, since they insisted too much, in order not to hear their demands “ … while theywere looking at him he took a pair of scissors and cut off his right ear up to its base”.But that was not all his madness: ”They narrate of Ammonio an extraordinary gesture: whenvoluptuous temptations arised in him, he never had regard for his miserable flesh, but after hav-ing turned red an iron he applied it to his body, so much that he was all covered with wounds”.According to Palladio Ammonio did this because he had reached the top of the love for God.

Macario had an original way to celebrate Lent: “… he stood upright in a corner, and until fortydays had passed and Easter arrived he did not touch neither bread nor water, he did not kneeldown, he did not lay on the ground; he did not take anything besides a few leaves of cabbageand this on Sundays only in order to give the appearance of eating”.His asceticism continuosly required new methods, more and more insane, to mortify his ownflesh: “I was taken by another desire: I wanted to ensure that for at least five days my mindwould never be distracted from God. Having taken this decision, I closed my cell and the court -yard so that I did not have to answer anybody, and I kept myself still starting from the secondday. … After having resisted for two days and two nights, I irritated the devil so much that hebecame a flame and burned all that was in the cell; even the carpet on which I was standingtook fire and I thought that I too would have completely burned. At last, hit by fear I gave up thethird day; I did not succeed in forcing my mind to be immune from distractions”.It is not surprising that the devil is a constant presence in the tales of Palladio; nonstop this devilpassed from a hermit to the next to torment them and prevent them from reaching perfection. Itis not possible to comprehend and interpret this devil-flame without the aid of psychoanalysis.This Macario also performed miracles: “Under my eyes a boy was brought to him who was pos-sessed by an evil spirit. Having placed a hand on his head and the other on his heart, heprayed till the boy was floating in mid air. The boy became swollen like a goatskin and he be -came inflamed as to seem to be ill of erysipelas. All of a sudden, having cried, he started topour water from all the openings of his senses, at last he calmed and returned to the size hehad before. … In such a way the boy recovered”. Here Palldio tells us that all this happened un-der his eyes.

Faith can also replace anesthesia. This is what he tells us of the monk Stephen of Libia: “Ourvisit caught him when he fell prey to a terrible disease; just in his testicles and on his penis, hehad formed a wound which is called gangrenous ulcer. We found him when he was assisted bya doctor; with his hands he was working intertwining palm fibers and he was talking with us,while the rest of his body was operated; he behaved as if they were hairs; he was rendered in -sensitive by the height of his religious experience”.So Stephen explains how he internalizes and justifies this force of him: “ It may be that thesemembers of mine were debtors of a punishment, it is useful that they are punished in this worldrather than after having left the arena of life”.

These episodes show us what our Rutilio exposes when he writes that the monk “ tortures him-self more ruthlessly against himself than the offended gods”. The list of these tortures is longand we do not want to annoy our reader with more descriptions; we can already see from these

examples that their fantasy was the only limit to invent new tortures and to find new pretexts toapply them.If we consider that thousands of men, in all the empire, “left the world” in this way, if we considerthat many of these were rich and powerful and destroyed all their riches in “works of charity”, wehave a clear imagine of the folly with which Christian nihilism was destroying the Classical civi -lization.

We must however repeat our opinion that all this cannot be traced from the nihilism of the Jesusof the Gospels.In the Gospels there is no suggestion that to wash oneself was a symptom of vanity, and doesnot exist any episode were self inflicted tortures are glorified.Surely we could affirm that Jesus himself gave the example because he went of his own initia-tive to be tortured and killed and there is no doubt that the example of Jesus was the springwhich pushed so many people on this road.But Jesus had a goal in mind that he wanted to accomplish and he sacrificed himself becausehis ministry was not giving the desired results, so he decided to resort to extreme methods: hispersonal sacrifice.His sacrifice was not an end in itself, it was done to convert the Jews to his vision of the Bible sothat they would concentrate on the love of neighbor and abandon the obsession for the “worksof the Law” as the Pharisee did and, moreover, he did it to terminate the cult of the Temple withrelative sacrifices. The sacrifice of Jesus had a well defined purpose and obtained the desiredresult: he had a resounding success.

From this point of view, those monks worked in the opposite sense to the one proposed by Je-sus. Contrary to what those monks thought, we think that these forms of nihilism are not accord-ing neither to the spirit not to the letter of the Gospels.This our opinion is strenghtened by the example of Saint Paul and in this regard we cannot un-derstand why these monks were not curbed by his teachings. Perhaps Saint Paul was not an object of cult in the first years of Christianity?From these tales of Palladio we see that Christianity went much beyond the evangelical nihilism(not to mention Sant Paul).

We will have to wait for Saint Benedict for Christianity to take a road more appropriate to the Je-sus of the Gospels and to the ethics of Saint Paul but at that point the Roman Empire did notexist anymore.

The central point of our thesis is that the nihilism produced by Christianity started an evolution inthe psyche of the people of the empire going far beyond what you might expect from a readingof the Gospels. This evolution of nihilism produced self destructive behaviours which, not onlymade a great damage to the people victims of this folly, but in the centuries that followed con-tributed to the demise of the Roman civilization.We think that nihilism, once started by the Gospels, took a life all its own that had nothing to seewith Christianity however you want to interpret it.This nihilism will arrive to produce a destructive ideology like socialism.We do not have knowledge of psychoanalysis or of psychiatry to be able to analyze how thishappened. We can only tell the facts and put in evidence a phenomenon incomprehensible toour reason.

Before leaving Palladio and his story we want to mention an episode which confirms our thesisthat Christianity was not just nihilism but had in itself the elements of progress necessary tostart another civilization.Here is another story of this book that makes us see the positive side of Christianity.It’s about Efraem, a deacon of the church of Edessa: “A severe famine hit the city of Edessaand he, moved by pity … approached rich men with great wealth and said them: Why do you

have no compassion of human nature that is dying and in the mean time you leave your richesto rot for the condemnation of your souls? They, after having reflected answered: We do nothave anybody we can trust for the purpose of putting himself at the service of those whohunger, everybody is exploiting this situation to traffic. He asks them: What opinion do you haveof me? They answer: We know you are a man of God. Than he says: Trust me, here I appointmyself hospitaller. Having received some money, he divided the porches with barriers andplaced in them around three hundred beds; he assisted the starving, he buried the dead andtook care of those who had a chance to live; in a short time, to all who came pushed by hunger,he gave hospitality and assistance every day, using the resources that he was offered. Afterone year, since abudance had set in and everybody went back home, not having anything to dohe entered his cell and died after a month; God had conceded him the chance of this work,which was like a crown at the end of his life”.

Again for the purpose to show the positive side of Christianity we mention another passagewhich tells us an attitude towards women which will take the Christian civilization to revolution-ize the relationship between the sexes: “It is necessary to remember in this book some womentoo of virile strength, to whom God conceded the grace to sustain struggles equal to those ofmen so that it could not be brought as a pretext that they are too weak to perfectly practicevirtue. I saw many of these, and I met many women of noble character both virgins and wid-ows”.

The City of God

We go on reading the texts produced by the first Christians to comprehend their hostility to-wards Rome.We are going to examine one of the most authoritative fathers of the Church: Saint Augustin.He was a contemporary of our good Rutilio and of Palladio too.As we said, we want to analyze the decline of the Classical civilization by starting from its end.These characters lived, the three of them, in the same years at the turn of the year 400.

Augustin was born in 354 in Numidia, today Algeria, from a well to do family with a mother ob -sessively Christian who will imprint in his mind, in a permanent way, the need to have a faith.

A man of great culture, at the beginning he adheres to the sect of the Manichaeans but soon heabandones it embracing the Christian faith. He is baptized in Milan by Saint Ambrose at thirty-three, afterwards he returns to Africa and becomes the bishop of the city of Hippo in 395.He will spend the rest of his life, 35 years, fighting the heresies which nonstop were unleashedagainst his orthodoxy. Violence was endemic and he even risked to be killed. He had to answerthis violence with force and repression, but he never approved the death penalty for theheretics.He spent all his life preaching to achieve the unity of Christians by means of persuasion. Wordand pen were his arms.

His literary production is huge, in his most important work, The Confessions, he tells us abouthis road to the faith which took him to become one of the most important fathers of the Church.In The City of God he defends Christianity from the accusations of pagans who resisted its pen-etration among the people of the empire.It happened that after the sack of Rome of 410 many pagans had taken refuge in Africa andwere spreading the idea that the fall of Rome was provoked by the pagan gods for having theempire adopted Christianity as the state religion. Augustine rejects these opinions in his book

and affirms that Rome had been rightly punished by the Christian God because it was the mostegregious realization of the Earthly City which opposed the City of God.It has been estimated that in those years around half of the people of the empire had remainedpagan or had not adhered to Christianity.The empire was officially Christian and it had to employ all its force to repress paganism whichsecretly kept worshiping its gods. Augustine was perfectly aware of this situation and he tells usclearly in his City of God:“… in the meantime we had to explain how the false gods worshiped, once openly and to thisday secretly, are nothing but unclean spirits, exceedingly wicked and deceitful demons …”.

It seems he had no remorse for the fact that pagans were forced to worship secretly their Gods.

In his City of God, Augustine argues that the alternative to live “by the flesh” and to live “by thespirit”, present in every men, can be found in history too. In fact history is dominated by an eter-nal fight between the Earthly City and the Hevenly City. The Earthly City, born after the fall ofAdam and founded by Cain, houses the men “dominated by a foolish greed of dominance thatinduces them to subjugate others”. Instead, the Heavenly City originates from the angels withthe community of righteous men who discovered God and who “offer themselves to each otherin service with a spirit of charity”. The Roman Empire, born out of the fratricide of Romulus(which recalls that of Cain), is the highest expression of the Earthly City. However, the govern-ment is not necessarily considered an evil because it aims to guarantee the welfare of the peo-ple; however, material goods must not become the ultimate goal to be pursued.The two cities are at present united and confused together but with the Last Judgment they willbe divided at last. As far as history is concerned Augustine divides it in six epochs according tothe six days of the Creation: the first goes from Adam to the Great Flood, the second from Noahto Abraham, the third from Abraham to David, the fourth from David to the Babylonian captivity,the fifth arrives up to the birth of Christ and the sixth begins with the birth of Christ and will beconcluded with his return at the end of the world: “There we will rest and see, see and love, loveand praise. Here is what you will have endlessly in the end. For what else shall our end be, thanto come to the kingdom which shall not end?”

His is an escathological vision of history, perfectly in line with the Gospels: totally nihilist.So he judges the Roman Empire and all empires which had preceded it:“If justice is not respected, what are the States if not great gangs of thieves? Why, also thegangs of brigands what are they if not small states? It is still a group of individuals that is gov-erned by the authority of a leader, it is bound by a social pact and the spoils are divided accord-ing to the law of their convention. If the wicked band increases with the addition of perversemen so that they have lands, establish residences, occupy cities, subjugate peoples, it moreopenly assumes the name of a state which is now granted matter of fact not by the lessening ofthe ambition to possess but by a greater security in impunity. A pirate captured responded inthis sense to Alexander the Great with finesse and truth at the same time. The king asked himwhat idea he had in mind to haunt the sea. And he with bold bravado: "The same as you to in-fest the whole world; but I am considered a pirate because I do it with a small ship, you a leaderbecause you do it with a large fleet".

It is an anarchic vision of society based on his idea of “justice”. The Roman state was not “just”because it was one of the many realizations of the Earthly City: the product of the thirst forpower and of the violence of war. Unfortunately Augustine did not explain us how a state shouldbe organized to be “just” and he could not because his “justice”, as we have already seen, is ahallucination. His vision of reality was too nihilist to conceive and propose an organization of so-ciety which would have made it “just”.According to his escathological vision of history all men are imbued by the Earthly City and sojustice could only happen with the end of the world and the Last Judgement which would haveseparated the righteous from the sinners: there was a long time to wait.

This anarchist vision of his was not even softened by the fact that the Roman Empire had de-clared itself Christian and was suffocating with force paganism and all heresies, a fenomenonabsolutely antithetical to the Roman civilization.

“The love of self brought to the contempt of God generates the earthly city; the love of Godbrought to self contempt generates the heavenly city. That aspires to the glory of men, this putsabove all the glory of God. The citizens of the earthly city are dominated by a foolish greed ofdominance which induces them to subjugate others; the citizens of the heavenly city offer them-selves to one another in service in a spirit of charity and obediently respect the duties of socialdiscipline. (City of God, XIV, 28).Here we see a frame of mind which will become the root of Christian pacifism, but for us it is amanifestation of nihilism. According to Augustine the City of God can be reached when the loveof God is taken as far as despising yourself; a statement clearly psychotic.

But as we have stated, nihilism will always go together with positive thinking in the Christian civ-ilization and we can see it in this statements of Augustine. In fact it is positive the condemnation of the devastating aggressivity of humans.As we shall see about the end of the empire, the delusional thirst for power of the high militaryand political ranks of the empire was killing Roman society and civilization. We cannot but agreewith the contempt of Augustine when he states that they “are dominated by a foolish greed ofdominance which induces them to subjugate others”.Problem is that this greed can be stopped only by a serious determination to put on the line yourown life fighting with the arms to stop this insanity; words and persuasion are not enough.The last sentence expresses the contribution that Christianity will give to the birth of socialism:“the citizens of the heavenly city offer themselves to one another in service in a spirit of charityand obediently respect the duties of social discipline”.

Augustine dedicated all his energies to stop the violence provoked by the heresies and by theraids that the tribes of the desert, the Mauri, were making into Numidia. He tried to resolve thedifferences between the authorities of Numidia and the empire because the weakness of theempire encouraged the Mauri to devastate the region.So he writes in a letter to the imperial envoy:“The greatest title of glory is precisely that of killing war with the word, instead of killing men withthe sword, and procuring or maintaining peace with peace and not with war. Sure, there is nodoubt that also those who fight, if they are good, they are looking for peace, but at the price ofshedding blood. You, on the contrary, you have been sent to avoid that more blood be shed”.

A beautiful proposition and in line with the Gospel; it seems that he was deluding himself that vi -olence could be stopped by means of persuasion. But the empire was breaking apart and its au-thority did not scare anybody, neither the heretics nor the barbarians. Actually, since he whomthe gods want to destroy first they make him crazy, someone from Numidia, for his own rea-sons, called the German tribe of the Vandals to be set free from the empire.The Vandals had established themselves in Spain but were under pressure from the tribe of theGoths who wanted them out to thake possession of Spain.Genseric, the chief of the Vandals, seized this suggestion, crossed the strait of Gibraltar in 429and invaded Nortern Africa determined to conquer a reign all his own.The imperial troops offered a poor resistence (of course) and the towns of Numidia could onlyrely on the stones of their walls to save themselves. Hippo had a very good wall and refused tosubmit to the Vandals who were Christians but Arians.The Vandals lay siege to Hippo.

Augustine thinks it is his duty to stay to share the sufferings with his people, he opens the townto a mass of refugees and prepares to sustain the siege.So it is narrated by one of his biographers, Possidio, in his Life of the saint.

“Tears were, more than usual, its bread night and day and, having arrived at the end of his life,more that the others he dragged his old age in bitterness and mourning … For he saw, the manof God, the slaughter and the destruction of the cities, the ruin of the houses in the fields, andthe inhabitants slain by the enemy, or on the run and driven away, the churches deprived oftheir priests and ministers, the holy virgins, and the clerics scattered from every side. Amongthem, others who failed under the tortures, others killed by the sword, others taken prisoner, lostthe integrity of soul and body and even faith, reduced to painful and long slavery by the ene -mies”.

Not even this tragedy causes a rethink and makes him reconsider his judgement on the empire.Augustin will never express any regret for having lost the strength and authority of the RomanEmpire which had secured centuries of peace and prosperity to his land.He dies in 430 in his Hippo under siege which will resist for a year and a half. Then the walls willcrack to the efforts of the Vandals, Hippo is put to fire and sword and its inhabitants massacred.The Vandals take control of the region and start their reign.The Roman Empire loses another piece.With difficulty some of his disciples managed to remove his remains from the fury of the victorswho wanted to destroy them and his body was taken to Cagliari. Three centuries later a Lango-bard king brought them to Pavia where they still rest.

VII - Pagans Vs. Christians

Now let us jump backward and go to the origins of Christianity, few years after the death of Je-sus. We will see how the contrast between these two cultures was born and evolved and how atthe end one overpowered the other.We are going to read the works that have been preserved, not many, which testify how thisclash had been bloody and irreducible.We want to show that the contrast between pagans and Christians was profoundly ideologicaland therefore irreducible.Both proposed two incompatible societies. One of the two had to die.

The Great Whore

The book of Revelation, better known as the Apocalypse of Saint John, is a book of the Canon.It was written at the end of the first century in the island of Patmos, in the Aegean sea, by anunknown Christian whose name was John, but he was not the beloved apostle of Jesus and noteven the author of the fourth Gospel. This is the only book of the Canon where the name of theauthor is specified. It was written, in all likelyhood, after the persecutions of Nero and the de -struction of Jerusalem by the Romans with the first Jewish war. It is not surprising that Chris-tians and Jews hated the Romans.In this book John addresses a few Christian communities from seven towns of Asia Minor, nearPatmos, to exhort them to endure persecution, to fight against the false prophets and to standfirm in the true faith.This book is the tale of his vision where Jesus reveals him how the end of the world will takeplace and how God will punish Rome for its wickedness.I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of JesusChrist, was on the isle that is called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony ofJesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a great voice like atrumpet, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and “What you see,write in a book, and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Perga-mum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.” (Rev 1:9-11).

John turns to see who is speaking and sees Jesus:I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And when I turned, I saw seven golden candle-sticks, and in the midst of the seven candlesticks was one like a Son of Man, clothed with a gar-ment down to the feet and with a golden sash wrapped around the chest. (Rev 1:12-13).

Here follows a description of Jesus, extravagant to say the least, very different from what weimagine today; among other things:He had in His right hand seven stars, and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword. Hisappearance was like the sun shining brightly. (Rev 1:16).

Jesus dictates John seven letters to be delivered to the seven Christian communities and tellshim to write all that he is going to see, that is the end of the world.

For this reason John is taken to the sky where he sees the throne of God; a person is seated onthe throne with a book in his right hand where the future of the earth is revealed but the book isclosed by Seven Seals.Only a worthy person can break the seals and among those present no one is worthy. At thispoint a lamb appears, it seems it has been sacrificed (an image of Jesus). The lamb takes thebook and starts breaking the seals. At the fracture of each seal a catastrophe hits the earth:war, plagues, famines, floodings and so on. At the fracture of the sixth seal it seems that theend is coming, the sun becomes black, the moon red like blood, the stars fall from the sky andthen the sky itself disappears. But this is not yet the end; the end arrives at the breaking of theSeventh Seal. As soon as it is broken a silence of death descends on the earth, then seven an-gels appear who pour on humanity a disgrace after the other with monstrous animals thatemerge from the sea to hunt and torment humans.The seventh angel, with the sound of a horn, announces the beginning of the end when the An-tichrist descends on earth together with his prophets. This unleashes the wrath of God whosends seven more angels carring cups full of his ire, these cups are poured on the earth.One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me,“Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who sits on many waters, withwhom the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were madedrunk with the wine of her sexual immorality”. (Rev 17:1-2).

The angel takes him to the desert and shows him a woman covered with jewels and luxuriousrobes:The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones andpearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filth of her sexual immora-lity. On her forehead a name was written: mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of prostitutesand the abominations of earth.I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.(Rev 17:4-6).

This woman represents Rome (John calls her Babylon): “The woman whom you saw is that great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth.” (Rev17:18)

But the angel reassures him: the Christians will win her.Therefore he sees another angel descending from heaven to announce that Rome had fallen:Then I heard another voice from heaven saying: “ ‘Come out of her, my people, lest you partakein her sins, and lest you receive her plagues. For her sins have reached up to heaven, and Godhas remembered her iniquities. Render to her as she has rendered to you, and repay her doublefor her deeds; in the cup which she has mixed, mix a double portion for her. To the extent thatshe glorified herself and lived luxuriously, so give her torment and sorrow; for in her heart shesays, I sit as a queen, and am no widow, and will see no sorrow. Therefore her plagues willcome in one day death and mourning and famine. And she will be utterly burned with fire, forstrong is the Lord God who judges her. (Rev 18:4-8).

An indictement of Rome follows, of its crimes, its luxury and the description of its ruin.Rejoice over her, O heaven and saints and apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you against her”. Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying: “With such violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more. The sound of harpists and musicians, flute players and trumpeters, shall not be heard in you any more. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you any more, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you any more. The light of a lamp shall shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and of bride shall be heard in you no more. For your mer-chants were the great men of the earth,and all nations were deceived by your sorcery. In her

was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all who were slain on the earth.” (Rev 18:20-24).

All Christians on earth rejoice for the demise of the Great Whore Rome:After these things I heard a great sound of many people in heaven, shouting:“Alleluia! Salvation and glory and honor and power belong to the Lord our God! For true and righteous are His judgments, because He has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the ear-th with her sexual immorality; and He has avenged on her the blood of His servants.” (Rev 19:1-2).

Once Rome has been destroyed Christ starts a battle with the Antichrist, he wins him andthrows him into a lake of incandescent sulphur to be tormented for the eternity; Satan too is de -feated and imprisoned in a bottomless pit. At this point the Last Judgment can start when allmen rise again to be judged.Those who lived for the Christ are taken to his Kingdom while the enemies of Christ are takenaway towards an eternal torment together with Satan and Death.Then John is offered a vision of the Kingdom of God. A new Jerusalem descends from heaven,its roads are paved with gold, there are neither fear nor darkness, there are no sufferings, evil ordeath. Here the Righteous and the Good will live for the eternity.

In this book we see hatred and thirst for revenge, not exactly evangelical feelings. We must notice that the persecutions were started by chance, not for a planned decision of theRomans to destroy Christianity. They were started because Nero chose by chance the Chris-tians to put on them the blame for the fire of Rome. At the end of the first century Christianitywas a small sect unknown to the majority of the inhabitants of the empire and the persecutionswere sporadic and occasional, we think it is not possible that these persecutions had provokedsuch a deep hatred.Our opinion is that this hatred has a deep ideological motivation: the rivality and incompatibilitybetween the Roman civilization and Christianity.The pagan religion provided that all the population participate in the pagan worship and sacri -fices to gain the favor of the gods, therefore those who refused to participate or, worse, whoclearly showed their contempt and their sense of superiority to paganism, they were naturallyseen as enemies of the community.Today we can hardly understand this situation. The pagans believed that, together with hu-mans, the earth was inhabited by the gods and they had all vices of men with few qualities.Envy, jealousy, resentment, vanity, pride, and so on. It was indispensible to avoid their resent-ment and adulate their vanity otherwise they would have taken their vengeance. All people inthose days seriously believed this and were seriously resentful of the blasphemy of the Chris-tians; pagans really believed that their community would have been punished for the lack of re-spect that Christians showed to their gods.

Another thorny issue was the cult of the emperor. When the decadence of the empire started tobe evident some emperors thought to remedy by pretending to be venerated like gods. This wasanyway on line with the ideas on power and religion in the oriental part of the empire, but did notfit with the culture of the western half.Obviously the cult of the emperor met the firm opposition of Christians who refused to payhomage to a man-god other than their.Moreover the Roman Empire was based on the cult of force and on the military strength of itslegions. The empire was kept together, besides the desire to participate to such a sophisticatedcivilization, also by the fear of the reprisals of the Roman army.

On the contrary Christians always condemned war and the use of force, their dream was tobuild an empire of consent based on their religion and regulated by their bishops and popes.

We will see later that this will prove impossible (of course), but in those days Christians believedit, as you can see in Saint Augustine. Today a modern historian could consider this attitude of Christians a product of what he consid-ers “superstitions”. We consider it a product of Christian nihilism because Christians had noreservation to destroy an empire which assured peace and wellbeing to all (more or less) to fab-ricate a new and unattainable society. It was not possible to reconcile the ideological rivalry be-tween Christians and pagans. One of the two had to die. We will see this nihilism at work in socialism.

We are surprised by John’s confidence when he says that Christianity will win Rome:These will wage war with the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lordsand King of kings. Those who are with Him are called and chosen and faithful. (Rev 17:14).

This is the prophecy that the angel makes him and the historian cannot but put in evidence thatthis small sect, since the beginning, was bound to destroy the civilization in which it was born.Even if it sounds incedible, Christians started a long march that will take them to victory as faras the demise of the most illustrious civilization of history.This self assuredness is the product of the eschatology given by the faith. The Christians weresure they would have won because they believed, they knew that God would have made themtriumph because all the world had to be prepared for its end as it was written in the Gospels togive the Kingdom of God to the Chosen. It is not possible not to be astonished by this assured -ness of the Christians; they were a flea on the shoulders of a giant, how could they believe theywould have destroyed this giant? In the following pages we will explain how this happened.

A most mischievous superstition

Now we are going to see the point of view of the pagans.We will start from the first documents written by pagans concerning Christianity.

The first documents written by pagans about Christians have been written in the occasion of thepersecution of Nero following the fire of Rome. We are in july 64 therefore just 30 years after thedeath of Jesus. The historian Tacitus tells about it in his Annales, written 50 years after theseevents, and also the historian Suetonius who also writes half century after the fire.Tacitus tells us that Nero had the idea to put the blame on Christians for having started the firein order to remove from his person the suspicion that he was responsible; it seems that Nerowas not loved by the people and so he needed to give them a culprit to hate.According to Tacitus one of these rumors, which circulated among the people, was that Nerohad started the fire to destroy a part of the city to build on it a huge mansion, which actually wasbuilt, the Domus Aurea: “Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and in-flicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians bythe populace”.Tacitus tells us that Christianity was fairly widespread in Rome, enough to be known and hatedby the people. We already described the reason of this hatred, but we do not know if Tacitusrefers to the same reason. He does not tell us the motive why the people of Rome hated theChristians so much.It seems that Tacitus shared this opinion because he too detested Christians: “Christus, fromwhom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at thehands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thuschecked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even

in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centreand become popular”. In those days many mystery and esoteric cults converged in Rome,which he calls “superstitions”, because they were alien to the cult of the pagan gods which wasthe foundation of Roman religiosity. Tacitus calls these cults “hideous and shameful” and hethinks they are a symptom of the decadence of Roman civilization which he contrasts to thevigour of the German people. In particular Christianity is defined as an evil. According to Tacitus Nero starts a ferocious persecution against Christians: “Accordingly, an ar-rest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitudewas convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mock-ery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn bydogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serveas a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle,and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a char-ioteer or stood aloft on a car.”Here it seems that Nero started a witch hunt just for sadism, “as of hatred against mankind”, in-volving in this way “an immense multitude” of innocent people in the sense that they were notChristians, besides not being responsible of the fire.Tacitus also tells us that this sadism turns against him because it arose the compassion of thepeople: “Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, therearose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut oneman's cruelty, that they were being destroyed”.To be fair we must add that perhaps the idea that the Christians were responsible for the firemay not have been entirely fabricated.We can deduce it because Tacitus also tells us that: “Nobody dared to fight the fire, because ofthe many threats of many peole who forbade to put it out and because there were others whoopenly threw torches and shouted that they had received the order to do it, both to steal moreeasily and for having really received these orders”.From these words we could suppose that there were people who were actively responsible ofthe fire.Is it possible that these were Christians who wanted to vindicate the death of Jesus?We do not have any confirmation of this, therefore it will remain an hypothesis.Unfortunately Tacitus’ story is confused, we cannot understand which was the guilt of the Chris-tians since he tells us that the accusation of Nero was fabricated.It is possible that some Christians decided to act having seen that the fire was out of control andthe Roman authorities could not stop the disaster. They may have thought that the time hadcome to take their revenge. These are all guesses even if they are theoretically possible.What we must note for the purpose of this work of ours is the despise and hatred that Christianshad already raised from the very beginning.

What Tacitus tells us is confirmed by another historian, Suetonius. So he writes in his Vita Nero-nis: "He subjected Christians to torture, a race of men of a new and evil superstition".Also here, despise and hatred towards the Christians.

A depraved, excessive superstition

We are in the Roman province of Bitinia, northern part of modern day Turkey on the shore ofthe Black sea; the emperor is Traianus who put as governor of the province Pliny the younger,the nephew of Pliny the elder who died in the disaster of Pompei.It is the year 113, fifty years after the fire of Rome, we are at the time of Tacitus and Suetonius.

Pliny never had to do with the Christians and by chance, without having he looked for them, heencounters this phenomenon and he does not know how to behave. He then writes to the em-peror to ask for counsel.According to us, this is the most important document that survived the wreckage of the empire.This is the document which sheds more light than any other to understand the contrast born inthe empire in those days. All historians consider it authentic, evidently the copyst monks did agood job, without their work of all this would have disappeared: “It is my practice, my lord, to refer to you all matters concerning which I am in doubt. For who can better give guidance to my hesitation or inform my ignorance? I have never before partici-pated in trials of Christians, so I do not know what offenses are to be punished or investigated, or to what extent. And I have been not a little hesitant as to whether there should be any distinc-tion on account of age, or no difference recognized between the very young and the more ma-ture. Is pardon to be granted for repentance, or if a man has once been a Christian is it irrele-vant whether he has ceased to be one? Is the name itself to be punished, even without offen-ses, or only the offenses perpetrated in connection with the name?Meanwhile, in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have followed the following procedure: I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confes-sed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who per-sisted I ordered executed. For I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubborn-ness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished. There were others possessed of the same folly; but because they were Roman citizens, I signed an order for them to be transfer-red to Rome.Soon accusations spread because of these proceedings, as usually happens, and several inci-dents occurred. An anonymous document was published containing the names of many per-sons. Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods, and also cursed Christ – none of which those who are really Christians can, it is said, be forced to do — these I thought shouldbe discharged. Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then de-nied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years. They all worshipped your image and the sta-tues of the gods, and cursed Christ. They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn andsing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to do some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to as-semble again to partake of food — but ordinary and innocent food.Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with yourinstructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessa-ry to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition. I therefore postponed the in-vestigation and hastened to consult you. For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it.It is certainly quite clear that the temples, which had been almost deserted, have begun to be frequented, that the established religious rites, long neglected, are being resumed, and that from everywhere sacrificial animals are coming, for which until now very few purchasers could be found. Hence it is easy to imagine what a multitude of people can be reformed if an opportu-nity for repentance is afforded”.

Pliny tells us that he had never encountered this “Christian problem” before. Evidently, alreadyat the beginning of the second century, Christians were considered a problem for the empireand so serious to deserve a death sentence.Unfortynately, as in the case of Tacitus, he does not tell us why they were such a serious prob-lem. This is even less comprehensible when we read that “all their fault or error” was to gatherto sing a himn to Jesus as if he were a God and to swear “not to do some crime” but to committhemselves to be honest and sincere! He tells us he did not have the evidence of any crime!On the contrary, he tells us that these Christians were exemplary citizens; then, why death?These first Christians could be defined as the “boy scout” of the time. That’s what bothered the Romans so much?We must tell our reader that at the times of Pliny there was no law or imperial edict which for-bade the Christian faith. Each single governor should have behaved according to what hethought was more appropriate or just.For this reason it is surprising when he writes: “I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of theircreed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished”.He affirms they deserved death for their obstinacy, but obstinacy in which fault?A fault he does not know! What confession from them is he looking for?Always in search of who knows what, he puts to torture two slaves called deaconesses “to findout what the truth was”; the truth about what?Therefore with much disappointment he tells us he found “nothing else but depraved, excessivesuperstition”. Why this superstition was such a problem for the empire to deserve a death sentence?A question arises to us: what was Pliny looking for?He speaks of Christianity as a superstition, folly, danger, a mental illness that in some wayscould damage the empire for being extremely contagious.This fault of the Christians perhaps we can guess it when Pliny tells us he set them free “whenthey invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to yourimage”. It seems that the problem was that Christians did not want to worship any of the gods ofthe Empire and the image of the emperor.This was the problem, and we know it from other literature on the subject, but then, what wasPliny looking for? Why he does not tell us clearly that this was the fault of Christians which justi -fied the persecution?He tells us that a true Christian could be uncovered by a very simple method: when “he cursedChrist”.This is true and from this we can assume that he was dealing with proto-orthodox Christians. Infact this was the only Christian sect which considered a duty and a privilege to face martyrdomand never abjure faith. All other Christian sects, and there were many, thought that this was sillyand they had no scruples to abjure faith to resume it when the persecutions ceased. We willdeal with persecutions more extensively later on.We must notice that, according to him, Christianity spread in his region in a way secret anddeep both in the cities and in the countryside, it had conquered so many people that the tem-ples and the sacrifices had been abandoned, they could not even sell all the meat of the sacri-fices. In fact, as we have already seen, Saint Paul had forbidden the faithful to buy this meat forany reason.We see in this document that Pliny is a serious faithful and sincere servant of the empire; wesee a lost soul in front of an incomprehensible phenomenon which he cannot even investigateand this, obviously, scares him.He realizes that he had started a wich hunt and stops, he ask for help and counsel from his su-perior because he does not understand.

Now let us see the answer of the emperor Traianus:

You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been de-nounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it — that is, by worshiping our gods — even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.

Here we see a serious person of noble sentiments, surely not a vile tyrant.He confirms to Pliny that Christianity deserved death but they had to be given the chance to re-pent and abjure that folly. He too declares that the problem could be solved if “whoever deniesthat he is a Christian and really proves it that is, by worshiping our gods”. This was the problem.But we are amazed by one thing: he tells Pliny that “They are not to be sought out”.Christians must be persecuted only following a clear tip that must not be anonymous.They must not be sought out!But if Christianity is such a problem to deserve death, how is it possible that they must not besought out, identified and repressed?What is the point to let them grow secretely and intervene only if someone, who knows why, de-nounces them in a manifest way?It does not make sense!Let us try to find a sense to all this.

What we are trying to understand is the reason for a certain reluctance, almost passivity, of theempire towards the expansion of Christianity.In our opinion, there were essentially two reasons for this.First of all the Romans never really understood what was going on. They did not understand theconsequences that the spread of this faith would have meant for the cohesion of society and therespect for the authority of the empire.They could not understand because there had never been a faith in their society; they could notknow that faith would have conquered the hearths and minds of the people provoking an evolu-tion that would have produced another authority, different from the state, that would have im-posed itself to the people conditioning them in their decisions and their behavior. Hence the be -wilderment and the unbelief of Pliny in front of an incomprehensible phenomenon.

The second reason was the “superstition” of the Romans. The Romans believed, actually theyknew, that the world was peopled, besides the humans, by a multitude of divinities which wentfrom the lares and penates to the gods of the Olympus to the Egyptian divinities, and so on.These divine entities interfered every day with all natural phenomena and with humans andwere the main cause of the problems and disgraces which befell humanity.These Gods were: jealous, envious, vindictive, liars, cunning, dishonest, brawling; in short, theyhad all possible defects and no qualities of men.It was indispensable, for their survival, that men tried to curry favor with these gods; every god.This was the point; all gods conceived by all civilizations present in the empire could be thecause of some disgrace, not just the gods of the Olympus which they had borrowed from theGreeks.Also the Jewish god could be the cause of a problem. In fact this god was very ancient, moreancient of theirs and was also strongly rooted in the Jews besides the Christians. Also this godcould have made troubles or could have helped the Romans against their adversaries. Was it prudent to make an enemy of him?

In our opinion, the Romans did not decide to engage in a deep struggle to destroy Christianitythat grew among them because they never realized the consequences that Christianity would

entail for their existence and at the same time they feared to make an enemy of a very ancientand authoritative god.

Other Christians, orgies and cannibalism

We have seen so far the relations that the Romans had with the Christians of the proto-orthodoxsect, that is with those who won on all other Christian sects and made the world know their ver-sion of Christianity.We can deduce that, in all likelyhood, from what they tell us about them.But the proto-orthodox were not the only Christian sect active in the empire, there were manyothers. We already stated that Christianity, for its own nature, is a vulcan of new interpretationsof the message of Jesus, a vulcan that never ceased to erupt. This was even truer in thosedays.Naturally Romans could not know about this because Christians, all of them, tended to operateon the sidelines and in secret. Surely Romans confused them with the Jews.

The scholars had to investigare a lot to reconstruct the situation and they are still at work tocomplete the list of all sects active in ancient Rome.Here we will limit ourselves to showing a couple of these sects to illustrate the scope and pene-tration of nihilism outside the proto-orthodox.

Marcus Aurelius Fronto was an orator and a writer active in the middle of the second century.He was the tutor of an emperor, he had been a consul and at his death the emperor made him amonument. He had been a very serious and influential person; his opinions had a weight.We are going to see how he describes a Christian sect. We do not know if he had met them inperson or if he had of them just second hand news.He does not tell us the name of this sect, he only knew they declared themselves Christians:“Who, having gathered together from the lowest dregs the more unskilled, and women, credu-lous and, by the facility of their sex, yielding, establish a herd of a profane conspiracy, which isleagued together by nightly meetings, and solemn fasts and inhuman meats — not by any sa-cred rite, but by that which requires expiation — a people skulking and shunning the light, silentin public, but garrulous in corners. They despise the temples as dead-houses, they reject thegods, they laugh at sacred things; wretched, they pity, if they are allowed, the priests; halfnaked themselves, they despise honours and purple robes. Oh, wondrous folly and incredibleaudacity! They despise present torments, although they fear those which are uncertain and fu-ture; and while they fear to die after death, they do not fear to die for the present: so does a de-ceitful hope soothe their fear with the solace of a revival.Assuredly this confederacy ought to be rooted out and execrated. They recognize each other bysecret marks and signs; hardly have they met when they love each other, throughout the worlduniting in the practice of a veritabale religion of lusts. Indiscriminately they call each otherbrother and sister, thus turning even ordinary fornication into incest. … It is also reported thatthey worship the genitals of their pontiff and priest, adoring, it appears, the sex of their “father”… The notoriety of the stories told of the initiation of new recruits is matched by their ghastlyhorror. A young baby is covered over with flour, the object being to deceive the unwary. It isthen served before the person to be admitted into their rites. The recruit is urged to inclict blowsonto it, they appear to be harmless because of the covering of flour. Thus the baby is killed withwounds that remain unseen and concealed. It is the blood of this infant, I shuddder to mentionit, it is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribuite eagerly; this is

the victim by which they seal their covenant; it is by complicity in this crime that they arepledged to mutual silence; these are their rites, more foul than all sacrileges combined. ... On aspecial day they gather for a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers, all sexes and all ages.There, flushed with the banquet after such feasting and drinking, they begin to burn with inces-tuous passions. They provoke a dog tied to the lampstand to leap and bound towards a scrap offood which they have tossed outside the reach of his chain. By this means the light is over-turned and extinguished, and with it common knowledge of their acrions; in the shameless darkwith unspeakable lust they copulate in random unions, all equally being guilty of incest”.

What unbridled fantasy could have put together such an ugly story?Fronto was a serious character, how could he believe this stuff?Moreover our reader could ask himself how was it possible that the copist monks had spenttime and resources to copy such a defamation of the Chritians.Actually it was by pure chance that these words of Fronto have escaped oblivion. They havebeen included in a book, Octavius, written by a Christian apologist, Minucius Felix, to show howpagans were slandering Christians. This is how these words reached us.

It remains to be seen how Fronto could have believed all that.I propose a few considerations.The orgiastic feasts were not unknown in imperial Rome, we know that several times the au-thorities had to forbid the celebration of the Bacchanals, a feast in honour of the god of wineBacchus, because they degenerated into orgies and crimes.Infanticide was a very common practice. By the Roman law the father had the right of life anddeath on all his family therefore, if someone did not want to have a baby he killed him after birthwithout thinking twice about it. We must notice that abortion was not a safe practice for thewoman; better to deliver and then throw the baby away.These are evident symptoms of a civilization which did not want to live, we will came back tothis in the next chapter.We must also clarify that Romans could not comprehend the Christian ceremony of Eucharist.The celebrant transforms the bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus and then thefaithful eat it. For the Romans this was without any doubt a ceremony of ritual cannibalism.

We want to believe that in denouncing these “Christians” Fronto wanted to put in evidence andmake people think on the crimes that were committed with impunity in the Roman society of hisdays: the ugly face of decadence.

So the above was all slander?No, definitely something was true.At this point we must illustrate a couple of Christian sects which were active in Rome in the sec -ond and third century. We have news of these sects because the proto-orthodox spoke of themin their works written to combat and denounce these deviations from the message of theGospel.

The Carpocratians were a sect of Gnostic Christians which we know from the book of Saint Ire-naeus, bishop of Lyon, Against the Heresies.Shortly, Gnostics believed that the matter was Evil while the spirit was good. Therefore the Godof the Jews who created this world was the God of Evil. The divine spirit that is present in manymen is trapped into the material body which is a prison that prevents him to go back to the Fa-ther. To set itself free the soul must achieve the knowledge (gnosys) of the Absolute. This canbe done only after having experienced all possible experiences, both moral and immoral, andthis implies the contempt of the laws to put an end to the tyranny of the inhibitions imposed bysociety; it was therefore necessary to accept passively all desires. As long as the individual did

not arrive to the knowledge of the Absolute he was doomed to reincarnate himself in anotherbody upon his death. Consequently, the Carpocratians practiced libertinage and the rejection of marriage, the aboli -tion of social ranks and the sharing of their properties (a form of communism ante litteram) andwere devoted to the magic arts and the preparation of love filters.They were opposed to private property of all goods, but most of all of wives. Therefore allwomen had to be put in common in a way that everybody could experiment everything.It seems that homosexuality was included.

An aside: we will see again a modern reinterpretation of these sexual impulses in the Manifestof the Communists Party by Marx.

From here comes the fame of the Carpocratians to be extremely promiscuous and to practicewild orgies. We have no news of cannibalism.To publicize their faith they adopted a Gospel of their own that they had derived from an imagi-nary Secret Gospel of Mark adding some stories to it. The Secret Gospel of Mark has remaineda secret and nobody ever saw it. We also never saw their Gospel where the stories they in-serted described Jesus as a homosexual who took advantage of young converts to take them tobed.These stories were circulated in 1958 by an American scholar (who by the way had the utmostconsideration) but after a heated debate the community of scholars rejected them as fakes. Thisscholar was homosexual and it seems he wanted to have fun in fooling his colleagues.

The Fibionites, another Gnostic sect, were active in Egypt in the third and fourth century.We know about them from Saint Epiphanius in his book Panarion:“Sumptuous meals were served with meat and wine although they are poor. When they eat to-gether in this way and fill their veins, so to speak, they turn these extra energies into excite-ment. The man, leaving his wife, says to his own wife: "get up and make love with our brothers".So the wretched mate with each other and indeed I am full of shame in saying the shamefulthings they do … After they have given themselves up to fornication, they lift up their blas-phemies to heaven. The man and the woman take in their hands the liquid ejaculated by theman, they stand up and look up to heaven, the hands stained with impurity, they say: "We offeryou this gift, the body of Christ", then they eat their own ignominy, saying: "This is the body ofChrist and this is the Easter for which our bodies suffer and are forced to confess the sufferingof Christ". The same happens with the woman: when it happens that she has the flow of blood,they collect the menstrual blood of her impurity and eat it together saying: "This is the blood ofChrist".

Epiphanius tells us that since they were Gnostics, they believed that the body was Evil, theprison of the soul, therefore they were against procreation. If one of their women was pregnantthey had her abort, the fetus was poured over with honey and spices and eaten by the commu-nity as an Eucharistic meal.Those men who had reached perfection did not need women anymore and could dedicate tohomesexual intercourses.Epiphanius knew this sect because he was contacted by two beautiful Fibionites women whotried to seduce him to make him enter the sect but he stood firm in his faith, the true one, andrefused. Afterwards he had more information on this sect by several documents that they hadwritten to spread their faith.

We must state that from the documentation produced by the Gnostics that reached us an ex-tremely ascetic sect emerges exactly the opposite of what reported by those proto-orthodox au-thors.

However, we do not think that all this was false. Orgiastic "religious" feasts or ceremonies havealways existed (just think of the black masses) and we should not be surprised if these urges forsexual unrest penetrated into Christianity too.

We think that Fronto was not totally wrong and moreover we want to have our reader think onthose words which in our opinion are the most beautiful description that a pagan has done ofChristians:“They despise present torments, although they fear those which are uncertain and future; andwhile they fear to die after death, they do not fear to die for the present: so does a deceitfulhope soothe their fear with the solace of a revival”.

The persecutions

The Goncourt brothers wrote that “mediocre minds judge yesterday by what is today”.This observation highlights what is the main difficulty for a historian: to describe ancient peopleand facts without being influenced by the ideas, ideologies, religions, philosophies of his owndays.The problem is to be able to observe the past at the light of the frame of mind of the people wholived in those days. This is particularly difficult when dealing with the persecutions which pagansdeployed against Christians.We already mentioned this, but now we want to explain these persecutions in full and we wantto see them at the light of the ideas of the ancient Romans.

If we consider that almost all modern historiography defines the Romans “tolerant” towards reli-gion, we want to deepen this topic.We want to state that Romans were not tolerant at all.This must be clear to our reader. Tolerance is a “virtue” of our days unknown in the classicalworld because in that world faith did not exist, therefore it was not necessary to be “tolerant” toreach a consensus necessary for coexistence.In those days everybody was absolutely intolerant for the matters which were important to him,of course!It is obvious that on the matters that do not count for us we are tolerant; apart those who havean ugly character.In the Roman Empire two things only were important: order and taxes. Nothing else!On these matters Romans were totally intolerant. When they could afford to, obviously.On everything else the subjects of the empire could do whatever they wanted, religion includedand this because Romans had no reason to prefer one religion over another.In other words there was nothing that the Romans were required to tolerate.

Now we must understand the “religiosity” in the classical world. In the classical world, according to the culture of all its people, all natural phenomenon were in-fluenced by the whim of some god, all illnesses, wars, plagues, defeats or disappointmentswere decided by a god depending on who he liked or disliked.The society of that time was much more vulnerable than ours to natural disasters and to ill -nesses. They did not have the Canadairs to throw water on fires neither huge pumps to pumpwater to irrigate large lands in times of drought. They did not have chemicals to defend fromparasites or from illnesses the crops which wher indispensable to their survival. If a vindictive god thought he had not been respected by a certain community, he could unleasha natural disaster in any moment.

If the enemy that we were fighting against had made more sacrifices than us to the god of war,there was the serious risk to lose the war.This vision was part of the common feeling of all the peoples of the empire, it gave the chanceto gather to pray a god to hope for a better future, it marked the time with its recurrences, it wasthe tradition. It was part of the popular culture as is Christmas today even if the majority of thepeople are not believers.

For all pagans the problem was how and when to venerate the gods, These ceremonies wereexpensive and had to be done in a way not to make jelous any other god; they had to be as ef-fective as possible. It was very important to decide who was the most influential god for the mat-ter you wanted to deal with, not necessarily he had to be a god of the Greek-roman tradition.What counted was the outcome.The Romans were ready to accept and consider any cult of any god worshiped by any people ofthe empire because all could be useful in the daily fight for life.The statement that Romans were tolerant is neither right nor wrong, it just does not makesense.Naturally Romans assumed that all people of the empire respected their gods and even morethe emperor. The cult of the emperor was not to be intended in the oriental way where themonarch in power was considered a god (as it was in Japan), it was to be intended as the re-spect for the authority that ruled the empire. You can consider it as the pledge of allegiance thatstudents in the States did at the beginning of the lessons.

Now we are going to see why Christians clashed in such a dramatic way with the Romans.We have already seen in the Apocalypse of Saint John that Christians openly declared their ha-tred for the empire and for romanity. We have seen that Christian nihilism expressed itself in -equivocally against the values of romanity which were the cult of force, the ambition to conquer,the thirst for power and money of the patrician Roman elites who wanted to dominate the world.Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, wrote the supreme Virgil; he who did not want to sub-mit to Rome was to be considered a superb!This is exactly the opposite of the ethics expressed in the Sermon of the Beatitudes. If in theKingdom of God the first were to be the last, then the Romans would have all gone to hell.Problem was that Christians expressed openly this nihilist ethics of theirs and with it an evidentcontempt for the values of the Romans, their gods, their religiosity, their cults, their priests, theirfortune tellers, and so on.Sant Augustine declares they were: “unclean spirits, exceedingly wicked and deceitful demons”.

Publicly and obstinately Christians refused to participate in the cults of the empire, to pray theRoman gods, or the Egyptians or any other god. They refused to eat the meat produced in thesacrifices, they refused to listen to the fortune tellers.Moreover, with the advance of the decadence of the empire and with the disintegration of its so-ciety, the emperors insisted ever more in pretending the homage from the subjects which con-sisted in burning a little incense in front of the statue of the emperor. It was not very importantand the Jews were exempted from this duty, but not the Christians who opposed a firm refusal.The clash of these two cultures was inevitable because of the total intolerance of Christians to-wards any other cult or religion.The Romans would have included the Christian god in their Pantheon but Christians would havenever accepted. Christianity is a monotheist religion and there cannot be more than one god:theirs. The Christians wanted to conquer the world and destroy all the institutions which werenot compliant to their vision of life and of the supernatural. Never they would have consideredany compromise.This confrontation started in the lowest layers of society because here Christianity was born andhere the people are more sensitive to the offenses done to their culture. The popular classes donot have the aristocratic detachment of the leading classes, they are more sensitive to the dam-ages that society can suffer from asocial behaviours because they are the first to suffer them.

The people knew that the blasphemy of Christians would have provoked some disaster un-leashed by the offended gods.

This situation has been well described by Tertullian, a Christian writer and apologist who livedaround 200 in Carthago.“They (the pagans) think that Christians are the cause of every public disaster, of every afflictionthat hits the people. If the Tiber raises up to the walls of the city, if the Nile does not send its wa-ters to the fields, if the sky does not give rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is a famine orplague, immediately the cries are: the Christians to the lions!” (Tertullian, Defense 40).

In the first centuries the emperors and the governors of the provinces found themselves in thesituation of having to mediate between the rage of the people and the obstinacy of the Chris-tians to bring order to the region. But the people did not relent, if any disaster had hit the com -munity the people wanted revenge.

This hatred towards Christians manifested itself also as a result of personal rivalries.For example, let us see how the pagan Apuleius tries to generate the suspect that one of hisenemies, Emilian, is secretely a Christian:“I know that a few – and our Emilian is first – find it amusing to deride the divine matters. Infact,I have known from citizens of Oea who know him, that up to now he never prayed any divinitynor has frequented any temple; if he passes in front of a hallowed ground he is convinced thatto hold your hand to your lips in the act of adoration is an ungodly gesture. Not even to the godsof the countryside, who give him to eat and to dress, he dedicates any first fruits of the harvest,of the vineyard or of the flock; no sanctuary, no ground or holy wood is to be found in his fields”.(Apuleius, Apology,56).

Here we can see what the Romans thought of the Christians: traitors.Apuleius expresses his indignation for an unworthy behavior: “Not even to the gods of the coun-tryside, who give him to eat and to dress … “. Not even the most elementary gratitude can deterChristians from their blasphemy. This is what Romans believed in their most complete sincerity;the produce of the fields were a gift of the gods who at every spring made nature raise again togive humans its fruits.

The popular classes lived in crowded areas of the city, they inhabited big buildings, the insulae,where all together had to live. The leading classes lived in luxorious mansions, spacious, withrunning water and gardens, besides the servants. But their detached attitude was not solely theresult of their condition of privilege; they had the responsanility to govern and in the Classicalcivilization nobody was ever killed for religious reasons. Never ever!It is perfectly comprehensible what we have seen about Pliny and Traianus. The leadingclasses were absolutely reluctant to lower themselves to the level of Christians to start a war ofreligion because in their society there never had been one. For this reason they could not un-derstand what was going on; for the first two centuries they thought that sooner or later Chris-tians would have behaved like all other people of the Empire. But it was not so.

Therefore these persecutions against the Christians were rare not programmed and not wantedby the imperial authorities. It did not exist any norm or law which prohibited Christianity.

We are going to introduce our reader to a couple of episodes of these persecutions.We start with the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius bishop of Antioch. We are in 110 in the city of Smyrna, present day Turkey, therefore not much distant from the Bi -tinia of Pliny and in the same years.Ignatius had been involved in some disturbances in his city of Antioch and had been sentencedto death. We ignore the background of this matter, we do not know which was the indictement.

We can suppose he was sentenced to death by the Roman governor of Antioch just for being aChristian. In this case the governor had the idea to send Ignatius as a gift to the people of Rometo be eaten alive by the beasts in a Roman circus. The Romans were practical people and ifsomeone had to die, it would have been a useful thing to entertain the plebeians with an excit -ing show where beasts could be seen devouring a man alive.

The governor of Antioch put Ignatious into the hands of a team of soldiers and sent him toRome, a long journey.The group stops in the city of Smyrna to rest for a few days. The Christian communities of thesurrounding area knew about this and sent delegations to meet Ignatius. Our reader could thinkthey did this to try to convince the Roman authorities to desist from such an atrocity. None of it.We must suppose that it would have been useless, however, the authorities of Smyrna let allthese people meet the prisoner and discuss their matters regarding the true faith. On this occa-sion Ignatius wrote four letters, three to these communities and one to the Christians in Rome toinform them of his arrival.Today we can hardly understand this situation and why the Roman authorities were so “under-standing” towards a person who had to be given as a meal to the beasts. What is the sense tolet Ignatius free to meet with his friends and talk about their religion which, according to theseauthorities, deserved the death penalty?But if this is difficult to comprehend, what Ignatius writes to the Churches of Rome is even morestunning.Here our reader can see what meant to be Christian in those days.This is the highest expression of the Cult of the Supreme Sacrifice:“I am writing to all the Churches to proclaim that I willingly die for God, if you do not stop me. Ibeg you not to have for me an inopportune benevolence. Let me become the meal of the wildbeasts by which I can reach God. I am the wheat of God and to be ground by the teeths of thebeasts to become pure bread of Christ. You must rather caress the beasts so that they becomemy tomb and nothing they leave of my body and I don’t weigh on anyone. Then I will really be adisciple of Jesus Christ, when the world will not see my body anymore. … I wish I could enjoy the beasts which are prepared for me and I wish they would devour mequickly. I will tease them so that they would devour me and that it won’t happen that awed, as ithappened to someone, they did not touch him. If they will be unsure, I will force them. Forgiveme, but I know what suits me” (Ignatius, To the Romans).

Ignatius writes to the Christians of Rome begging them not to spoil his feast: he wants to bemartirized because he wants to be an “imitation of Christ”.For the proto-orthodox martyrdom was a privilege that took you closer to the Kingdom of Godbecause it made you similar to Christ.So Tertullian writes to us:“Do not be worried by the separation from the world (death): in fact, if we keep in mind that theworld is the real prison, we realize that you left a prison instead of entering it” (Tertullian, To themartyrs 2).In the case of Ignatius, according to tradition, he obtained what he wanted: he was eaten by thebeasts.

The word martyr comes from the Greek and means “witness”, this because the Christian testi-fied his faith in front of the people by means of his martyrdom. If he had abjured, the peoplewounld have not known of this new faith which wanted to conquer the world.Many Christians among the pagans watched these executions that evidently left a mark in thepsyche of everybody. There is no doubt that for the Christians who watched the show the mar-tyrs were imitators of Christ because, as he had done, they went voluntarily to sacrifice theirlives as an offering to the victory of the faith.If their bodies were buried the bishops gathered the faithful to celebrate the event and to fix thememory of the hero. The body of the martyr was unburied, was made into pieces to be distrib -

uted to all the churches and worshiped as it were the body of Christ: so the cult of the relics wasborn.

At the opposite the sect of Gnostic Christians, for exemple, considered all this a folly. The Gnos-tics abjured all that the Romans wanted from them and afterwards they took again their faith; to-day we could say that they fooled them.But if we consider that the proto-orthodox defeated all the other sects and deleted them fromhistory we may understand how this new religion succeeded in sweeping away all its enemies.Tertullian wrote: “Therefore we conquer in dying; we seize the victory in the very moment thatwe are overcome” (Tertullian Defens, 50).And so it was.

The Scillitan martyrs have been recorded in history thanks to the discovery of the Acts of theScillitan Martyrs, the first document written in latin of the Christian literature. Probably the docu-ment records the minutes of the proceedings, therefore it gives us a good illustration of howthese persecutions unfolded.We are in 180 in Carthago and the Roman proconsul Saturnino has summoned six people, menand women, at his presence to face charges of being Christians and of not wanting to givehomage to the pagan gods:Saturnino: “You can obtain the indulgence from our sovereign if you return to thoughts of right-eousness”Sperato (a Christian): “We have done no evil, neither have we committed any iniquity, neitherhave we said any evil of any man, but have always rendered good for evil; for which we obeyour emperor”.Saturnino: “We too are religious and simple is our religion. We swear by the genious of our sov-ereign and we pray the gods for his salvation, which you also must do". Sperato: “If you listen to me calmly, I’ll explain the mystery of simplicity”.Saturnino: “I will not listen to you in this initiation where you offend our rites; but rather swear bythe genius of our sovereign."Sperato: “I do not know the power of the century but I am subject to that God that no man hasever seen or can see with his eyes. I have never committed a theft, but every time I make adeal I always pay tribute because I obey my sovereign and emperor of kings of all ages".Saturnino: "Desist from such conviction!".Sperato: "It’s a bad system to threaten to kill if you don’t perjure yourself".Saturnino: "Do not adhere to this madness!".Cittino (a Christian man): "We have no one to fear but our Lord who is in heaven".Donata (a Chrisian woman): "Honour to Caesar as sovereign but fear only to God".Vestia (a Christian woman): “I am Christian”.Seconda (a Christian woman): “What I am is what I want to be”.Saturnino: “Do you insist in declaring yourself a Christian?”.Sperato: “I am Christian”. And all of them asserted to his words.Saturnino: “Do you want some time to decide?”.Sperato: “In a matter so clearly right, the decision is already made".Saturnino: “What do you have in your box?”.Sperato: “Books and letters of Saint Paul, a righteous man”.Saturnino: “You have an extension of thirty days to reflect".Sperato: “I am Christian” and all of them agreed with him.Saturnino: “It is decreed that they are behaded Sperato, Nartzalo, Cittino, Donata, Vestia, Sec-onda and all the others who declared to live according to the Christian religion, because, al -though they were given the faculty to return to Roman traditions, they stubbornly rejected it".Sperato: “Praised be the Lord”.Nartzalo: “Today we will be martyrs in heaven. Let us thank the Lord”.The proconsul had the crier read the sentence, the defendants were beheaded.

The history, written by Christians, has given us many more stories of these persecutions butthey are full of supernatural events and we do not want to annoy our reader.

In 250 the emperor Decio completely changes the strategy. A persecution begins in all the em-pire, he does not wait any more for someone to denounce the Christians, he goes in search ofthem.We do not know the reason for this turnabout, perhaps it was due to the fact that Decio adheredto the cult of the Sol Invictus, a monotheistic cult. More probably the Romans had understoodthat Christians would have never accepted the pagan and Roman culture and therefore theywere inevitably an enemy of the empire.The emperor ordered that all subjects of the empire prove their faith in the religion of the Stateby sacrificing to the Roman gods in front of a committee. A certificate was given to those whoperformed these sacrifices, a kind of certificate of "good religious behaviour". For those who re-fused there was the death sentence.The Romans could not go far enough in this persecution; the Christians had already taken con-trol of a large part of the people of the empire and had built an authority of their own by meansof an extensive organization where the bishops were the leaders of the community. The bishopswere real estate owners, they had also succeeded in having an official juridical capacity forwhich they could make property in the name of the church.It seems that Decio arrived too late.

After a few years the emperor Valerian confiscates the bishops of all their properties; we mustnotice that he does not kill them.In 260 emperor Gallienus returns all confiscated properties. The persecutions cease.In other words: too little too late!

This was even more evident in 303 in the last persecution, that of Diocletian.It has been called the Great Persecution; the scholars have estimated in three thousand the vic-tims of this persecution that lasted ten years and ended without any result. Christianity hadspread around too much, had entered all social layers of the empire, it could not be destroyedanymore. In 311 emperor Galerius puts and end to the persecutions and returns to the Churches all con-fiscated properties.The final turn happens with the emperor Constantine who evidently had made his the slogan: ifyou cannot beat them join them.With the Edict of Milan, in 313, Christianity becomes an approved religion that can legally makeits proselytism.In 392 emperor Theodosius I declares Christianity the official religion of the State and outlawsthe pagan cults. From persecuted Christians become persecutors.Moreover he refuses the title of Suprime Pontiff, a title which was automatically given to all em-perors. The bishop of Rome, with a smart and unscrupulous move, takes on himself this title sothat he can destroy all pagan temples or transform them into Christian Churches.Orthodox Christianity has won a total victory, it has deleted all its enemies from all the lands ofthe empire.

Before moving to the next chapter we want to evaluate these persecutions in terms of numbersand of the impact they had on the society of the time.The numbers of the persecutions of the Romans are very modest, the estimations we know tellus of less than 10.000 victims in three centuries.In the clash between the arian Germans and the orthodox Romans that happened in the fifthcentury in Northern Africa in the kingdom of the Vandals, the arians tried to repress the ortho-dox and made 4.000 victims in five years with no results.With the protestant reformation there were more persecutions and just to look at some numbersin the night of Saint Bartholomew the French catholics killed 30.000 Huguenots.

In Japan in 1600 the repression of Catholicism made 40.000 victims in a few years. Catholicismwas deleted from Japan, a “final solution”.With the French Revolution the numbers start growing.Robespierre tried to substitute the Catholic faith with the cult of the Goddes Reason and he didnot spare any effort. The priests were ordered to renege the Church of Rome and swear to theRepublic. Almost all refused and this provoked an anti-revolutionary reaction in the stronglyCatholic region of Vendée. The republicans started what is considered the first genocide ofmodern times: 117.000 victims.The numbers jump higher with the totalitarian regimes of the XX century, in particular with com-munism.In 1917, the year of the Communist revolution, the Orthodox Church counted around 210.000clerics (priests and monks), by 1941, 150.00 had been executed. The bishops numbered 300,250 were killed.In 1941, the year of the nazi invasion of Russia, the persecutions cease and in the moment ofthe highest panic Stalin appeals to the Church to help against the invaders. In this way the lastclerics of the Russian Orthodox Church survived and the complete destruction was avoided.After the war and the death of Stalin the communist regime proceeded in the repression of theChurch but without executions. The communists were sure that shortly communism would havetriumphed and religion would have disappeared from the country. They were wrong.We do not want to annoy our reader with more lists of atrocities; just to conclude we say that inthe course of history the Christian victims of persecutions have been estimated in 70 millionsbut of these up to 45 millions just in the XX century: Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox.As far as the XXI century is concerned, if we judge from the beginning it is going to be one ofthe most tragic in the history of Christianity.

Looking at these numbers we can evaluate the impact that the Roman persecutions had. Evenif they were performed on the modest number of the inhabitants of the empire (50-60 million),we should judge them irrelevant.

VIII - Death of a Civilization

In this chapter we analyze the demise of the empire and the end of Classical Civilization.We need to distinguish between these two events because they did not happen at the sametime.The empire was a political-administrative structure which was destroyed first of all by its owndecadence, to whom Christianity gave an important contribution, but the final end was sealed bythe German people. Civilization, that is that set of ideas, religion, language, human relations,way of life was cancelled by Christianity. But if we consider civilization as culture, scientificprogress, civil and military infrastructures, farming techniques, control of waters, commercial ex-changes, streets and fleets, we will see that all this will not be destroyed neither by the barbar-ians nor by the Christians; all that will be destroyed by the Islamic and Viking invasions in theseventh and eighth centuries.After this annihilation Christianity started an evolution in the Western half of th empire thatbrought us towards a totally different civilization that we call today Western Civilization.

We must give an example to explain this matter to our reader.When Gengis Khan invaded China he did it by taking death and destruction to a scale neverseen before but he did not destroy the Chinese civilization. After him the Chinese kept living,dressing, worshiping their gods, working, speaking, writing, producing art, as they did before.The Mongol dynasties lived as the Chinese customs wanted and moreover introduced reformsand novelties which brought new elements of progress to the Chinese civilization.In fact the Mongols did not intend to destroy that civilization, on the contrary, they wanted to en-joy it and if possible improve it. They did it with what has been recorded in history as the “paxmongolica”. The rule of the Mongols created a political-administrative structure which allowedChina, for the first time in its history, to have regular and stable contacts with other people as faras Western Europe. An exceptional feat in Chinese history which will end with the end of therule of the Mongol dynasties because the Chinese were not interested in having these contactswith far away people.

In the case of the demise of the Roman Empire and of its civilization we have an all differentstory and more complicated.The German barbarians destroyed the empire but not (at least not completely) its civilization be-cause both them and the Christians did not want to destroy it. Christianity produced a differentcivilization because Christians wanted to live in a civilization all their own, but they did not de -stroy the civilian infrastructures which delivered welfare to all the empire.This final destruction was done by islam.

We can trace the beginning of the decadence of Rome from the defeat of the Gracchi brothers.As a result of this defeat the character of the peasant soldier disappears whom had made Romegreat and upon whom the strength and cohesion of society was based. The big land owners ap-propriated the lands of these Roman peasant who were forced to take refuge in the city and toentrust themselves to the “assistance” of the government. Thus a class of unemployed Romanplebeians was born in the city who saw as their only chance of survival the help of some patri-cian to whom they relied as "clientes".This evolution was worsened by slavery which brought a mass of slaves from all provinces ofthe Empire with whom the patricians could do without the work of the Roman proletarians. Thepoor Romans are more and more estranged from their society and, matter of fact, strangers intheir own land. In fact it was rather common for the patricians to set free some of their slaves

who had given proof of having qualities useful to the master. These freedmen remained tied tothe patrician and became important people in the Roman society because being the men oftrust of the patricians, that is of the masters of the empire, they ended up to be very influentialcharacters. The Roman plebeians sunk deeper and deeper into misery and anonymity.It is not surprising that Roman society was teared apart by a series of civil wars because themass of urban sub-proletarians did not have any sense of fidelity to the Republic and they couldnot help to side with their own patrician and with the political side to which he belonged.When August put an end to the Republic he did not have to do a great effort; the people ofRome did not have any sense of belonging to this Republic. And the slaves, freed or not, evenless, of course.The empire kept filling up Rome with masses of slaves and the Roman ethnicity disappearedsubmerged by a mass of immigrants, both slaves and freemen, who emigrated to the capital ofthe empire.Immigration provoked the obliteration of the Roman ethnicity.A large part of the plebeians who infested Rome was maintained by the government with dona-tions of grains imported from Egypt where it was abundant and inexpensive.The city of Rome became a gigantic bloodsucker who lived at the expense of all the empire.It has been estimated that the city absorbed 10% of the revenues of the Empire. This put intocrisis the port of Ostia which could not process all the goods that Rome needed. The port ofPozzuoli had to be used.The more the government spent moneis in Rome, the more immigrants came to the city (slavesor not), the more the financial situation of the State worsened which had to spend more andmore moneis to keep calm this mass of proletarians. A vicious circle that no emperor couldbreak. The city reached one million people. The government had to give food to a good part ofthese people and water to allow them a minimum of higene and gladiator games and horseraces to entertain them. A disastrous situation.Roman society was divided into a very small minority of ultrarich patricians, with enormousfarmlands cultivated by their slaves, a mass of urban workers dedicated to commerce and craftsand an even higher mass of sub-proletarians chronically dependent on the public assistance.The Patricians, senators or knights, were a very small part of the people but had all the powerboth in the city and in the provinces. To them the emperor entrusted all the positions of govern-ment.In the countryside the class of the small owner farmers disappeared (especially in the westernpart of the empire) giving way to huge estates cultivated by slaves or peasants who since birthwere considered a workforce at the disposal of the owners; they were not slaves but they couldnot leave the land where they were born and the owner of the land. Thus serfdom was born; aninstitution that will characterize the Middle Ages.

The Roman army becomes an army of paid professionals; the soldiers were no more Romans,they were taken from all provinces of the empire. They were well paid and they had the right toa part of the booty derived from victories over the enemy.With time, the empire could not fill the ranks with his subjects and was forced to enroll barbar-ians, mostly Germans. With this evolution the empire put itself in the hands of these tribes, itwas putting at risk its future. But it seems it could not do without it.

From an institutional point of view, no emperor ever managed to put in place a credible political-administrative organization which defined with a certain clarity the method of appointment of theemperors and governors of the provinces. Many emperors relinquished power following a vio-lent death. Few of them died in peace in their beds.At a certain point the emperors were all military commanders who were nominated by acclama-tion from their troops. Any general who had obtained a certain success could think he could be-come emperor. There was a moment when up to four pretenders were fighting each other.

It is surprising to see how the thirst for power blinded so many generals. They knew that very of -ten power took them to a violent death, still all the time from the high ranks of the army con -tenders for the office of emperor emerged. He who lost in this contest lost his life too and oftenalso that of his family.

At this point the historian must ask himself what kept together the empire.Here we can see the genius of Rome. The Roman patricians had no problem to take into theirranks the wealthy classes of the provinces. These were super rich people anyway who wouldhave done all they could to keep the privileges of their own class and at the same time theygave the government of the empire the authority and legitimacy to rule the provinces. With thismethod the dominating class kept its power and allowed the empire to govern the provinces.

Here resided the force of the empire, in the provinces. The city of Rome was an enormous para-site which consumed resources from all the empire without producing anything.The provinces produced and lived their civilization under the protection of the empire which en-sured order, peace, progress and defence from the barbarians (up to the third century). Itseems that the people of the empire had adapted and they lived oblivious of what was happen-ing in Rome between the masters of the empire.Evidently all the people were aware of what they would have lost if the empire had collapsed;there never was a popular revolt to free themselves of the yoke of the empire, a part the Jews.The only ones who did not share this enthusiasm were the Christians; they never provoked anopen revolt against the empire but they never accepted its authority. They wanted the City ofGod. Never they expressed any sense of belonging to the empire not even in the darkest mo-ment of the invasions when it seemed that everything was collapsing. Here the Christian ni-hilism emerges: not even in the worst moments when everything was destroyed by the inva-sions the Christians showed any rethinking on the usefulness of this empire.

The Invasions

The last invasion suffered by the Romans at the hands of German tribes occurred at the end ofthe second century BC, they were the Cimbri and Teutons. They came from the North of Den-mark and inflicted very heavy losses to the Romans provoking a panic in the city which fearedto be attacked. After hard sacrifices the Romans destroyed both tribes. Since then nobody con-sidered again the danger posed by the Germans; the empire felt confident.All of a sudden, as a bolt from the blue, in 170 AC a disaster explodes.

Before this date, the empire had kept in peace the German tribes without having to egage in awar. The northern border was manned by troops stationed on the frontier and residing in variousfortifications.The Roman army was busy fighting the Persian Empire to take control of Armenia andMesopotamia, two rich and advanced regions.Germany, poor and barbarian, was of no interest to them. It was inhabited by many tribes in ab-solute contempt of any discipline or organization. As Tacitus wrote: “nothing is dearer to theGermans than their freedom”.They had never been amenable to a central government under a king of theirs, they never hada capital, they were always fighting each other and with people who came from the East.The Romans exploited skillfully these divisions and felt confident.It happened in the middle of the second century, that these barbarians started building alliancesand federations between tribes for the purpose of attacking the empire. For the Romans thetroubles were beginning.

They had to take notice in 170 under the emperor Marcus Aurelius, one of the best emperorsthat Rome ever had. The empire was engaged in a war with Persia and had suffered a disas-trous plague which had decimated the army.The Marcomanni and the Quadi attacked and crossed the middle course of the Danube, theCostoboci attacked in the lower course of the Danube at a thousand miles distance. The Costo-boci invaded Greece arriving as far as Athens. The Marcomanni destroyed the Roman army onthe border and invaded the North East of Italy putting siege to the city of Aquileia. The purposeof these invasions was to sack, destroy, kill. In this first phase of the invasions they were notlooking for a land to settle down.The Costoboci were destroyed by the Romans in Greece while the Marcomanni remained oneyear occupying the North East of Italy. After one year, having destroyed and sacked all theycould, the uncultivated land was not producing anything and they had no food. They went backhome carrying with them all the booty they could. They were intercepted by the Romans at thecrossing of the Danube and destroyed.This first clash was concluded with a complete victory of the Romans but an attentive observercould not ignore the tragic reality of the situation: the borders of the Empire were indefensible.

On the North the border started at the delta of the river Rhine in the North sea, it run southwardalong the river, it crossed the Black Forest and passed along the river Danube up to its delta onthe Black sea. Three thousand kilometers impossible to defend.In the South the border passed along the edge of the Sahara desert from the Atlantic to the Redsea and then north of the Arabian desert.To the East there was the Persian empire, a formidable enemy, and east of the Black sea theendless euro-asiatic steppes which lured invaders from as far away as the Chinese borders.No matter how many resources the empire could dedicate to its defense they would have neverbeen enough.The empire was condemned, if there is one thing that amazes the historian is how it managedto resist so long.

Tragedy breaks out in the following century. Evidently the barbarians had passed word thatthere was a very rich land but inhabited by a debauched people who were incapable to defendthemselves. You just had to reach out and take their wealth.The Romans made a few efforts to submit the Germans but did not succeed. The problem wasthat the Germans did not have a kingdom to subjugate, did not have a chief to defeat, did nothave a capital to conquer, did not have an economy to destroy. When the Roman army attackedthe tribe disappeared into the forests. It was tragically evident that the conquest of Germanywould have been difficult, dangerous, but most of all: useless.Moreover the Germans by their nature were not made to integrate into the Roman civilization;they would have never recognized the authority of the empire over that of their tribes. Any pactor alliance the Romans would have done the Germans would have betrayed it at any momentthey would have judged it usefull for them.The relationship that the Germans had with Rome was ambiguous. If it was useful to them theyjoined the Roman army and had an instinctive desire to live in the empire to enjoy its civilizationbut without having the will or the capacity to behave in a way compatible with this civilization. Orthey preferred to take up arms and go fetch what they liked unleashing a senseless destructivefury, the "Teutonic fury", which terrorized all the people of the empire.

This new wave of invasions begins in 212 and goes on till the end of the century. These areGermans and Sarmatians, a group of tribes of Iranian origins. These barbarians do not come toconquer lands, they come to sack, and kill. They have left their families at home. They attack byland and by sea, The Saxons start by sea from the north of Germany on the North sea and dev-astate all towns on the coast of France as far as Nantes. The Goths, again by sea on the Blacksea, devastate the towns of the cost of Asia Minor and then those of the Aegean sea as far asCyprus.

We must notice that a few towns, if their people had decided to defend themselves and if theirwalls were strong enough, managed to save themselves trom the massacre. This to show thatthe barbarians were not invincible, when the inhabitants of the towns fought valiantly they wereable to repel them; a clear symptom of the weekness of the central power and of the relativehealth of the provinces.A new federation of barbarians, the Francs, who were stationed in present day Holland, at -tacked France through the Rhine border and went on as far as Gibraltar. Italy was invaded up toAncona and then the Balcans and Greece. Also the Persians attacked in Syria and devastatedthe region.The empire was also attacked in Northern Africa, a disastrous situation that was about to kill ittwo centuries in advance.It was saved in a very strange way.

It was saved by means of two secessions: the empire of the Gauls and the Kingdom of Palmira.

On the Rhine border, in 260, the leader of the Roman troops, Postumus, had defeated the bar -barians and had got a big haul of booty which he had distributed to his troops, but the son of theemperor, Saloninus, ordered him to deliver him the booty. Postumus moved against him but hedid not have to fight because the troops of Saloninus gave to Postumus both him and their com-mander, Silvanus. Postumus killed both and declared himself emperor of the Gauls putting to-gether Britain, Gaul and Spain. He printed his own coins which were better than the coins of thecentral empire in Rome. His reign lasted 10 years. He administered well and repulsed all inva -sions ensuring peace to his small empire, the capital was first established in Cologne and thenin Treviri. He also repulsed the attempts from the Roman emperor to retake his provinces. Hewas murdered by his troops.More emperors succeded him who, obviously, were murdered.This mini empire was reunited to the empire in 273 by Aurelianus.

In the middle east develops the story of the queen Zenobia. It seems she was of arab origins,she spoke Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian and latin too. She was the second wife of a glorious Ro-man general, Odenatus, who alredy had a son from his first marriage. In 267, having deliveredher own child, she had her husband murdered and her step son too in order to have her sonthat she just had from Odenatus declared king of Palmira. Afterwards she also has the murderermurdered. She declares herself regent in the name of her son who was one year old.So starts the Kingdom of Palmira form the name of its capital. Zenobia makes peace with thePersians, wrests from the Empire Turkey, Arabia and Egypt. She invents her own descent fromCleopatra, from the Ptolemies dynasty, and has herself nominated by the Emperor Aurelianus“August and Queen of Egypt” with faculty to mint coins which had on one side the image of herson and on the other the image of the emperor Aurelianus. Aurelianus recognized this Kingdomof Palmira because he was too busy fighting the Germans in Norhern Europe and because heconsidered Zenobia a good administrator and, most of all, she could keep the Persians incheck.But in 271 Zenobia had herself proclaimed “Imperatrix Romanorum” and had the image of theemperor removed from her coins. Aurelianus reacted.He easily conquered the kingdom of Palmira, put to siege and conquered the city in 272. Zeno-bia was taken prisoner to Rome where she was presented a mansion near Tivoli. She married asenator who evidently was a brave man.

These two secessions had stopped the invasions and had given the emperor in Rome the timeto put together a new Roman army. Thus starts the recovery of the empire, the barbarians arechased back to their lands and Rome reconquers its borders.But it is evident to everybody that now the empire is the ghost of itself. Too many of the armycommanders have no sense of fidelity for the empire; it is not exaggerated to say that thesecommanders put more energy to fight each other than to repulse the barbarians, It must not sur-

prise that when the inhabitants of some cities found the force to organize they were more suc-cessful than the Roman army to repulse the barbarians.The Roman ethnicity had disappeared and the mass of the subjects found themselves in a mul-ticultural cauldron where it did not exist any sense of belonging to a people or civilization. Theyresisted the invasions and officially remained subjects of the empire because they knew whatthey would have lost with its collapse, but this was not enough to create that union, that spirit ofsacrifice and that dedication which would have them join the army and, perhaps, could havesaved the empire.

In the fourth century the invasions change their character, they are no more done to sack andkill. Some German people invade the empire with all their families because they do not haveanymore a land of theirs. Other invaders drove them out of their lands: the Huns.These were a body of people who came from Central Asia, from present day south Siberia andWestern China. At the time of Christ they had already built a huge empire which went from an-cient China to the Russian steppes, a few steps from the Roman Empire. In the fourh centurythey attack all German tribes pushing them beyond the Roman border.

In the fifth century the incursions of the Huns cease and the German people who had settled, bylove or by force, inside the empire carve out to themselves a number of barbaric kingdoms tak -ing away from the empire almost all its western part. As we already said, the Germans did notintegrate into Roman society and not even between themselves.The kingdoms were born of the Francs, in northern France, of the Ostrogoths in Italy (with thecapital in Ravenna), of the Vandals in Northern Africa, of the Visigoths in Spain and France.Moreover, smaller kingdoms of the Swabians in north west Spain, of the Alans in south westSpain, of the Alemanni on the middle couse of the river Rhine and of the Burgundians in Bur-gundy.Since the Germans did not submit to any authority but theirs, these kingdoms had a strange or-ganization. Each person was subject to the laws of his ethnicity. The Germans made the militarycaste and were judged according to German laws while the “romans” made the administrativecaste and were judged according to Roman laws: two legislative structures lived together on thesame territory. A very unstable situation. With the passing of time the last traces of romanity dis-appeared, the barbarians converted to Christianity, of the arian sect, and the two peoplesmerged. The Western Empire dies.

In these years of ininterrupted wars, everybody against everybody else, Christianity grows anddoes not change its opinion on the Roman Empire. The Christians always refused to payhomage to the emperor. How was it possible, the Romans thought, that these Christians did notrealize that they lived in the best possible society you could have in those days? How was itpossible that they were so blind not to see that the only alternative to the Roman peace andprosperity was the barbarity of the people who lived beyond the border and who threatenedthem? The Christians declared they loved humanity, but how did they not see that humanitynever had a better success than in Rome?The pagans were disconcerted by the force of penetration of Christianity, but they did not real-ize how deep was their decadence.The most evident symptom of this decadence was the collapse of the birth rate provoked byabortions and most of all by infanticides. Tragic symptoms of a civilization which did not want tolive any more.The Christians, on the opposite, did not admit to these practices and were clearly against thekilling of babies. This can help explain how the Christians were growing into an ever higher partof the people of the empire.The penetration capacity of Christianity is a complex phenomenon, to understand it we mustanalize the forces acting in the depth of the human psyche.

The blood of the martyrs

Tertullian wrote: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians” (Apologeticum, 50, 13).

There was surely some truth in these words but, in our opinion, this blood is not enough to ex -plain how Christianity managed to conquer all the inhabitants of the empire substituting itself tothe pagan religions and deleting them from history.Without any doubt the witness that the martyrs gave voluntarily of their faith by having them-selves devoured by the beasts in the circus, rather than abjure, left a mark in the psyche of thespectators. Also the people who hated the Christians could not help but be impressed by their“courage”.In fact the martyrs were repeating the sacrifice of Jesus who voluntarily had provoked his death.This act, Jesus understood it very well, captivates and we can say hypnotizes and subjugatesthe public opinion. The Christians repeated it thousands of times, surely it conquered many peo-ple.There is no doubt that many, impressed by so much devotion decided to approach Christianity.But this is not yet enough to explain its victory.

We must go deeper and analyze those events to explain how Chrisianity had such a terrific suc-cess.Christianity has been the first monotheistic faith which appeared in the history of humanity andtried to conquer it.We must review the elements that we have analized in the III Chapter, the elements that char -acterize faith.

First of all eschatology. For the Christian faith all history of humanity tends to the Kingdom ofGod that will be inevitable. All humanity will be involved in this event and will be divided intoRigtheous and Damned.This selection will be done according to the Christian ethics thus producing a strong paranoidpush because everybody wants to be among the Righteous. This paranoia is also exasperatedby the ultimate end of eschatology which would have produced a reality were the Righteous willlive free from want; an irresistible temptation for the mass of proletarians and slaves deprived ofthe sense of belonging to a community.All that exasperates the hatred that obviously the faithful nurture for those who do not believeand block the realization of these dreams. This produces an irresistible push for proselytism.Eschatology supplies the antidote for the existential anguish, while the sacrifice of the martyrstakes to parossism the complexes of guilt.

All that happens in the deepest recesses of the psyche of the individual, at a completely incon-scious level.It was therefore useless for the pagans to argue that the empire was the best of the possibleworlds, although it was an evident statement, because:

reality and reason are absolutely powerless in the face of the ghosts of the unconscious

The pagans never understood what was happening because they had never experienced a faithand, moreover, they did not have a Sigmund Froid. Perhaps they could have blocked Christian-ity if they had mananged to block their own decadence; we will see this now.

We want to go even deeper because we think that what has been said above is not yet suffi -cient to explain the success of Christianity.

It is an opinion commonly accepted by historians that Christianity contributed more or less to thedecline and demise of the empire, but we want to take our reader towards a more elaboratedthesis.We want to overturn the approach to this matter and we want to propose the thesis that it wasthe decadence of the empire which provided the necessary environment for the penetration andgrowth of Christianity who later on destroyed the Roman civilization together with all the otherChristian sects which were born in this society.In other words, Christianity and decadence have influenced each other to the point of producingthe victory of Christianity and the death of the Roman civilization.This is where Christian nihilism fits in.

The popular classes had no power and had to obey the rich and powerful but these masters ofthe empire did not show any sense of fidelity and dedication to the society they were dominatingand, with the passing of time, they proved unable to stop its decadence.Even in the face of illiterate barbarians with a low level of technology they proved not to be up tothe task.As a result, even the Roman gods proved to be inept and useless for the purpose for which theywere venerated.Perhaps another God would have given a better result.The eschatology was the determinant element in the conversion of the pagans because whileeveryting collapses and the leading class proves useless, the people turn themselves towardsother solutions that move the fulfillment into the future: in the Christian afterlife.The roots of the problem for the popular classes, especially in the provinces, were that theywere in a desperate situation from which they could not escape. They could not possibly over -turn the ruling class and the power of the army to give themselves a better governance and fightback the barbarians to save themselves. No way out!We want to repeat the words of Fronto: “… so does a deceitful hope soothe their fear with thesolace of a revival”.So their only way out was to sink deeper and deeper into Christian nihilism and resign to thedeath of civilization at the hands of the barbarians.

As our good Rutilius told us, also the ruling classes converted to Christianity. In this case deca-dence had an even stronger influence because these masters of he empire could not help beingdiscouraged by their impotence. Romanity expressed itself with the power of its arms and thewisdom of its command. They could not help wondering what was left to them of the virtues ofthe Romans. Evidently the gods to whom they sacrificed had abandoned them. It was neces-sary to turn somewhere else.

This tendency to abandon the old Roman gods manifested itself also with the success of themystery and esoteric cults which were coming from the orient. These cults, matter of fact,tended towards a religiosity similar to Christianity. Monotheism, mysticism and the afterlife be-came more popular among the leading classes.Another important contribution to the success of Christianity was given by Neoplatonism. It wasa philosophy which exalted the virtues of the soul against the vile matter and projected humanstowards a transcendent religiosity.These cultural-religious developments paved the way to Christianity because they showed theinadequacy of the pagan gods to meet the needs of a decadent society that was dying. Theypointed the way towards transcendence and mysticism but they could not supply a cult as satis-fying as Christianity.Chistianity had no difficulty to show its superiority against these doctrines. They did not have aProphet, an Eschatology and the Holy Scripture. Christianity had all three.The decadence of the empire, the corruption of the leading classes, the impotence of Rome inthe face of the barbarians, showed a future without any hope. Just death and destruction.The Kingdom of God and the Heaven for the Righteous, filled the void produced by desperation.

But also this explains only in part the success of Christianity.The last determinat element was repression. We are going to see this now.

End of the Empire and birth of intolerance

The crucial year for the revolution we’re looking at was 313.The Empire had been divided in two, Constantine was the emperor of the Western part afterhaving defeated Maxentius in the battle of Ponte Milvio near Rome.This division of the Empire is important for our story. It is from this division that our Western Civ-ilization will take its name, the civilization which evolved in the Western part of the empire in thefollowing millennium.

Legend has it that it was on this occasion that Constantine decided to ask for the support of theChristians in his fight against Maxentius, a support that will lead in 313 to the Edict of Milan.This edict was also called the Edict of Tolerance, an absolutely inadequate title.A headstone in a church in Milan recalls this fact: "... Licinius and Constantine in the year 313recognized Christians the right to freely profess the faith, an example to the world of religiousfreedom".Nothing could be more false (Licinius the emperor of the East continued to persecute the Chris-tians).With this edict Christianity liberates itself from the persecutions, takes power and turns from per-secuted to persecutor.

Intolerance enters the world that will no longer be the same

A tragic error of Constantine?He probably had no choice. Christianity had shown an unbeatable resilience from persecutions,with the bishops having established an organization throughout the empire far more solid thanthe scarce authority of the imperial officials.Probably Constantine decided to use Christianity to streghten the authority of the empire. A dis-astrous decision; Christianity will use the authority of the empire to delete all other religions andthen the same Roman civilization.By means of this Edict Christians can freely profess their faith and proselityze, they obtain thefiscal immunity for all properties of all clerics, ecclesiastical tribunals are authorized to rule overcases concerning them. Moreover donations are encouraged to the Church which will make itthe richest organization in the empire. This happened at a moment when the currency coined bythe empire was so poor and shoddy to force the people to resort to barter. Disastrous.In other words the Church was matter of fact authorized to be a state inside the state.

It has been estimated that in those days Christianity had conquered 10% of the population ofthe empire. At the end of the century they were 50% because Christians managed to have theirreligion declared the state religion. Now Christianity can use the power of the state to crush dis -sent. In the following century the Western Empire collapses and Christianity becomes the onlyreligion professed in the empire: the 100%, at least officially.A stunning success.This success was not obtained just by means of persuasion or with the blood of the martyrs: re-pression was determinant. Paganism and the other sects were destroyed by all means.

This repression was mainly directed against the other Chritian sects. In fact by this victoryChristians exasperated even more their internal struggles. Christianity became a volcano ofheresies that had to be repressed.It was soon evident to Constantine that it was indispensable to define this faith as clearly aspossible otherwise the empire would have been torn also along the fracture lines of Christianity,in addition to the enormous fractures that already existed.Constantine had reunited the empire under his authority, killing Licinius and his family, but theempire’s authority was more fragile than ever: Christianity had clearly worsened the situation.We do not know if Constantine ever regretted his decision but a few years after his Edict he wasforced to convene the first Christian Ecumenical Council. In 325 Constantine convenes and presides over the first Council of Nicaea.The bishops asked to participate were 1800, 1000 from the east and 800 from the west, but only300 delegates participated. The bishop of Rome sent a delegation made of two priests; he willnever attend any of the “eastern” Councils. Only five of the attendees came from the west.The purpose of this Council was to heal the differences that had arisen in the Church of Alexan -dria of Egypt, then spread widely, on the nature of Christ in relation to the Father. In particular,whether he was "born" of the Father and thus of the Father’s eternal nature itself or whether, asArius taught, he had been "created" by the Father and thus had a beginning in time.

We do not know how Constantine managed to handle a debate on a topic so absurd for a “Ro -man”. The delegates came to blows and force had to be used.At the end the Orthodox thesis won, two delegates only voted for the Arian doctrine. Arius wassentenced to exile and so Arianism was preached to the barbarians only who became all Ari -ans.Anyhow these contrasts never ceased; a struggle without quarter. Arius was rehabilitated andsentenced again till he was welcomed by Constantine at court where he died soon in circum-stances not clarified.

However the Council of Nicaea has been a milestone in the history of Christianity because it es-tablished once and for all the act of faith of Christians.As of today it is the only act of faith of Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants.

With the act of faith of Nicaea Christianity was officially born and was born Orthodox.

We think it is necessary to state that Catholicism did not exist yet. The word “catholic” comesfrom the Greek and means universal, but all Christian sects considered themselves universal,obviously.In the Council of Nicaea Orthodox and Arians faced each other, there were no Catholics. We also want to clarify that the name Pope was an honorific title which was awarded to fourbishops, all Orthodox, indicating a primus inter pares, it did not give any primacy on the otherbishops because the head of the Orthodox Church was the emperor of the East. Orthodoxy wasa state religion. The emperor appointed the bishops and intervened in the most crucial deci-sions concerning the faith.In the Orthodox Church the Popes were the bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, Costantinople andRome because these were the most important cities of the empire relative to the faith.We must suppose that it was for this reason that the bishop of Rome did not participate at anyof the councils carried out in the Eastern Empire. Perhaps he was resentful for having to acceptdecisions taken there. He, being the bishop of Rome that is of the true and only capital of theempire, never accepted to submit himself to decisions taken by others.

There is no doubt that the Edict of Milano decided by Constantine weakened further the empire.The Christians, even if they had reached power, did not stop opposing “romanity” as it is tragi -cally evident in Saint Augustine. Christians were dreaming of the City of God and did not fear

the destructions brought by the barbarians. They despised the worldly riches and the use offorce. Moreover they added their own bitter contrasts to the anarchy that was killing the empire.

After Constantine the empire was divided in two again. This was also due to the deep differ -ence, cultural and social, between the people of the East and of the West. The Eastern Empiredid not let the barbarians settle into its own territories. If they employed German troops theywere always under the command of Roman officers. Moreover they did not destroy the class ofthe small land owners. They always had a currency which circulated normally, they never had toresort to barter. Unlike their western brothers they did not sink into decadence.

In the western part the authority of the empire could not resist the push of the barbarians andgave in by agreeing to them to settle in the empire; but, as we have seen, the Germans couldnot be integrated into the Roman civilization.By 476 the Western Empire was split into about ten barbaric kingdoms, only Italy had remainedofficially under the authority of a Roman emperor in Ravenna. At this point the German generalOdoacer deposes the child emperor, has himself acclaimed Rex Italiae by his troops, all Ger -mans, and sends to Byzantium a delegation of Roman senators who delivered to the emperor ofthe East the insignia of the imperial Roman power thus putting themselves under the authorityof the Eastern emperor. Odoacer mints his own coins but with the image of the Eastern emperor on one side.Thus ends the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Empire will live on for many more centuries. Our historians have called it theByzantine Empire from the name of its capital, the Greek city of Byzantium. However, we mustmake it clear to our reader that they did not call themselves “Byzantines”, they spoke Greek (thelatin name imperator becomes basileus) but they spoke of themselves as “Romans” and theircountry they called it “Romània”. The city of Byzatium appointed itself the Second Rome, but itwas just a claim. It was a Christian empire, a culture, a civilization which had nothing to see withromanity and the Classical culture.An aside: when Byzantium was conquered by the Turks, one thousand years later, this Romantitle was taken by Moscow which declared itself the Third Rome: the power of a name!

Christianity had conquered everybody, barbarians and romans, easterners and westerners.Everybody was Christian; a new civilization had to come to life. It will be called Western Civilization because it was born in the Western part of the Empire.

We want to quote the opinion of a historian of Christianity because we cannot express it better:"It is impossible to overestimate the historical significance of the victory of proto-OrthodoxChristianity. The form of Christianity that emerged from the conflicts of the second and thirdcenturies was destined to become the religion of the Roman Empire: from there it developed tobecome the most important religious, political, economic, social and cultural institute of theWest for centuries, until the present. The Christians who lived during those conflicts wouldnever have imagined how important their outcome would be for the configuration of Westerncivilization. The repercussions are still felt today in ways that we too are struggling to under -stand".

These repercussions, that is what Christianity brought to the history of humanity, we have al-ready evidenced, shortly, in the IV Chapter.

The purpose of this work of ours is to go beyond that, we want to explain how Christianity pre-pared the environment for socialism which today has almost de-Christianized the Western Civi-lization. We want to demonstrate how Western Civilization arrived to socialism and how today itis committing suicide.

A mini Reinassance

We have already written that the end of the Roman Empire and of its civilization is a very com-plex subject about which historians have nevere ceased to argue. Now we will show our readerthe complexity of this subject and how it lends itself to different interpretations.

Western historiography divides our history in four epochs: the Ancient Age or Antiquity whichends with the demise of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the Middle Ages which ends withthe discovery of America in 1492, the Modern Age which ends with the French Revolution or theIndustrial Revolution at the end of 1700 and the Modern Age which is the one we are still living.We do not agree with any of these periodizations of history and now we will begin to present ourversion to our reader

We must distinguish what is destroyed and by whom.In 476 the Western Roman Empire ceases to exist, that is ceases a political-administrativestructure which still survives in the Eastern Empire. The Classical civilization does not end, ittransforms itself. Christianity takes control of all the empire and imposes a new civilization whichwill be very different from the classical one. We can affirm that with the end of the fifth centurythe pagan civilization ceases to exist, a civilization which permitted all cults that did not antago-nize the power of the empire, of course. It was characterized by a rationalist mind which re-spected reason and the search of knowledge; it did not know religious fanaticism.

The new Christian civilization, on the contrary, is absolutely intolerant and is determined to af -firm by any means its view of life, society, culture and the interaction between people which isdetermined by its interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. This brings a serious problem to societybecause the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures produces a continuous jet of different viewsabout religion (heresies); society is therefore tormented by the fractures that are produced con-tinuously by these interpretations. A torment without end, an unknown phenomenon in the Clas -sical civilization.In our opinion this is clearly a new civilization.

But if we consider the civilization produced by the empire outside of religion, we can see thatthis civilization, no more Roman and not yet clearly Catholic, does not cease to exist with theend of the Western Empire.

Roman civilization was characterized by large urban centers linked by an efficient network ofcommunication, an extensive parteciaption of the people to the cultural life and therefore a goodlevel of literacy, a wonderful production of culture and art, a good public order where the rela-tionships between people were regulated by the law, the continuous building of public infrastruc-tures (roads, harbors, aquaeducts, thermal baths, theaters, canals, sewers), good irrigation andwater control techniques, good agricultural techniques which, together with the strong expan-sion of trade, ensured a good level of subsistence to all people.The Mediterranean sea had been cleansed from pirates by the Roman war fleet and had beenmade safe. It was crossed by fleets of transport ships that ensured the sharing among the peo-ple of the empire the best of the production of each of its provinces and the best of their culture.The Mediterranean of the empire was a highway where the economic and cultural lifeblood ofcivilization flowed.

All this produced wealth and gave work to a mass of people who had left the countryside andwas crowding the cities in search of a better life.

This civilization was characterized by a strong circulation of money, both gold and silver, whichensured the fluidity of trade and the distribution of wealth.We must put in evidence that all this does not cease with the end of the Western Empire be-cause both Christians and Germans did not want to destroy this civilization. There is no doubtthat it had been much damaged by the invasions but it had not been destroyed. In other words, this is not the beginning of the Middle Ages as it is commonly tought. The Dark Ages are yet to come.

In order to understand how Europe sunk into the Dark Ages we must first of all make it clear toour reader the nature of the relationship between the two halves of the empire.The Eastern part was by far the most advanced, the richest and the more culturally evolved ofthe two. We can say that the provinces of the Western Empire were living off the light reflectedfrom the East. The city of Rome lived on the supplies of wheat from the orient, Egypt and NorthAfrica in particular. The main schools of thought were in the orient, the most populous citieswere in the orient. The most important supply that kept Roman civilization alive was the papyrusthat was produced only in Egypt. Papyrus was the only support available to produce documentsof any type, from the Holy Books to accounting, from the messages of the functionaries of theempire to the private correspondence.The libraries of the most important cities contained the top of what you could have of the cultureof those days: philosophy, literature, science. They contained a volume of knowledge withoutequal in the world; no other civilization could compare to the Eastern Empire. The Greeks hadestablished that earth was round and also measured its dimension. The astronomers had agood knowledge of astronomical phenomena although they were blocked by the theories of thehighest ellenistic thinker, Aristotle, who established that the Earth was at the center of the uni -verse. They were much advanced in medicine and surgery, they published books and gavelessons of medicine in the schools.

The communications between the eastern and western provinces were indispensable to themaintenance of Roman civilization in the West both from a strictly economic point of view aswell as scientific and cultural.For this reason we must study what happened in the Eastern part of the empire if we want tounderstand how and when civilization collapsed in the West.

With the end of the invasions in the Western Empire these relations resume with more vigorthan before even if Italy was invaded by the Langobards in the sixth century; this did not pro-duce any trauma and it could even have furnished the peninsula with a new kingdom if thebishop of Rome had not opposed.

The Roman-barbarian kingdoms had stabilized under the authority the Eastern Roman Empirewhich officially, if not as a matter of fact, comprised the Western part. The Germanic kings ofthese kingdoms wanted to be considered “Romans”. They considered themselves functionariesof the empire (Eastern), they acceped the honorific titles that the emperor bestowed upon them,they sent their children to study in Byzantium to make them become “Romans” and the goldcoins they minted in their names had on one side the image of the Emperor of the East.An example of how deep was the “romanization” of the barbarians is given to us by Theodoric,king of the Ostrogoths and of Italy. At seven his father sends him to Byzantium as a hostagewhere he receives a Roman education; at eighteen the emperor appoints him magister militumand patrician of the Empire and at last in 474 he is adopted. He marries an imperial princessand is appointed consul. His sister was a lady in waiting of the emperess.We must notice that, thanks to Christianity, these kingdoms had a low level of conflict betweenthem.Thanks to this newfound stability from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the seventh cen-turies we can see a mini Renaissance of the Roman-barbarian kingdoms in the West.

In this period of almost two centuries we see at work the positive side of Christianity and its re-sults are astonishing.The complete Christianization of the people of these kingdoms put an end to infanticides andabortions resulting in an increase of the population which had been seriously reduced by the in-vasions. This demographic pressure will push towards the resumption of that which was consid-ered civilization by both Christians and Germans.The destroyed cities come back to life and new ones are established. Efforts are made to re -store the communications by reparing bridges or substitute them with bridges of boats. Sailing is resumed.A new architectural style was born: the Romanesque.We must put in evidence that even if this new civilization is clearly Christian the society that wasproduced was “secular”. The administration of these kingdoms is secular because all power is inthe hands of lay people; no power was given to the bishops. This is not the symptom of a con-trast between the king and the church, relations between the crown and the church were goodbecause they did not try to overpower the other. The head of the Orthodox Church was theEastern Emperor, the bishop of Rome was a Pope like the other three and did not have anypower on the lay institutions of the state. The bishop of Rome is not yet the Vicar of Christ on earth.The king was a pure layman and did not need to be “approved” by the Pope to have the obedi -ence of his subjects, his power came from his birth rights and from the approval of the emperor.No religious ceremony was needed to let him have his authority: the Middle Ages have not yetbegun.The legal currency was made of gold, the sign of a florid and growing economy; a good part ofthis gold came from the east. The coins minted in these kingdoms were similar and were basedon the Roman solidus. They all had the effigy of the Eastern emperor on one side in order tofurnish one currency only to all trading activities even if they were minted in different mints. This created, matter of fact, a unified market for all transactions in all the territory of the old em-pire; a huge advantage for all these kingdoms and for the Eastern provinces too. Perhaps this isthe most important manifestation of the will of everybody not to break the unity that the RomanEmpire had given to all its provinces.The loan with interest (usury) was commonly practiced even if the Church tried to forbid it. Thestate realized by these kingdoms was a lay state and in spite of the protests of the bishops theloans with interest were practiced to a large extent by Jews and by Christians too without anyopposition from the authorities. Jews and Christians worked together in the financial sector thathad not yet invented the bank but it was close to.In the field of culture and science, the relations with the classical culture are resumed thanks tothe Benedictine monks and to intellectuals like Boethius and Cassiodorus. Neoplatonism is spo-ken of again and the works of latin classics are taught and discussed. The result is a worldwhere learning and culture were not the exclusive domain of the priestly class. People went totheatre and debated the philosophers both Greeks and Latins.Boethius gave us treaties on arithmetics and music. Although he was Christian his thought hadnothing bigoted and he had no problems to declare his admiration for Plato. In the courts of theVisigoths and Vandals the men of culture were protected and encouraged keeping the traditionsof Roman patronage. This epoch does not show any of the characters of an intolerant theocracy.We have already said of Sant Benedict and we want to mention him again; whithout him very lit -tle of the Classical culture would have reached us.

It is during these years that the first hospitals were born. For the first time new buildings arededicated to the treatment of the sick people, an absolute novelty which did not exist in the Ro-man society.They were started inside the monasteries and their treatements were free; the first example ofsocialized medicine; evidently the sacrifice of Jesus was not in vain.

The monasteries become centers of study and learning of medicine thanks also to the presencein their libraries of ancient texts of medicine. The monks study the healing qualities of herbs andgive us a start in the botanical and biological sciences.In these years the West begins to practice technologies that come from the Far East, such assilk, probably filtered through the Persian empire. The most important novelty of all was themouldboard plough which turns the sod and increases the productivity of the fields together withthe rotation of crops. A better steel is produced both for the arms and for the tools, the horsecollar is introduced for the draught horse and the saddle with stirrups. The use of the mill isspreading.This progress which lasted almost two centuries, between the end of the fifth and the beginningof the seventh, will be interrupted by the Dark Ages for three centuries, but it will be restartedagain with even more vigour at the end of this tragic interruption of civilization.

The most surprising element of this "recovery" of civilization in the Roman-barbarian kingdomsof the West is the spread of classical culture in European regions that had never been reachedby the Roman legions.The most striking phenomenon we have it in Ireland that earns itself the fame of “the Land ofSaints and Scholars” in the sixth century. The legend tells us of Saint Patrick, an English boycaptured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland. He manages to escape and go back toEngland where he becomes a priest. Afterwards he goes back to Ireland as a missionary.Here he has an extraordinary success. Ireland had not even been touched by Roman civiliza-tion, it was a barbaric land dominated by its tribes without any trace of civilization. With an as-tonishing rapidity Patrick converts the Irish to Christianity, introduces the Latin alphabet and be-gins to register the celtic oral traditions. Together with the literacy of converts the sacred textsspread but, amazingly, also the pagan texts spread both Latins and Greeks. Cathedrals arebuilt, first in wood and then in stone, that become miniature universities; everything that culturein the West could produce is studied.Evidently fired by the enthusiasm of the neophyte, Irish missionaries move to Scotland and Eng-land bringing there too the classical culture together with their version of Christianity. The most famous of all, Saint Columba, starts a monastery in the Scottish island of Iona andfrom this little island the missionaries spread to all of Britain and then to France, Germany, Italy.Thus the classical culture spreads together with Chrisianity as far as the banks of the river Elbewhere the Roman legions had been repulsed. Their most important seat will be in Italy, the Bob-bio monastery in the Italian Appennines.These monks did not fear martyrdom and were pushed by nothing else but the love of God; ahuge novelty compared to the thirst for conquest of the Roman Empire and its civilization.

England had a quite peculiar situation and different from all the other barbaric kingdoms. The in-vasion of the German Anglo Saxon barbarians had been quite different. The Anglo Saxons in -vaded Britain with a destructive fury that had no equal.They did not have any intention to enjoythe Roman civilization, they hated it, they only wanted to destroy. The cities are destroyed to-gether with the “Roman” economy; people had to resort to barter because the coins stop circu-lating.Britain, in the fourth century, really sinks into the dark ages: it is the end of civilization.But not for long; here we can see how “plastic” was the situation in Northern Europe in thoseyears.The Irish monks enter a country as barbarous as their Ireland and transform all of Britain into aChristian country and civilized. The economy recovers, the cities are rebuilt and trade with otherMediterranean countries flourishes again. One of the many evidences of these trades was givento us by the discovery in Sutton Hoo of the treasure of a royal burial of the year 600 where ob -jects imported from Byzantium have been found as well as from all the Mediterranean area.Moreover, many jewels produced in England show a competence and a technology worthy ofthe best productions of the time.

In the cultural field too progress was fast and deep. We know that the monk Alcuin, in the fol -lowing century, had a library at York with books by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Plinio and Virgil. Weknow he was well knowledged of Ovid and Horace.This Irish Christianity also produced in England a new form of art, the miniaturization of thecodes: the illuminated manuscripts of the Hiberno-Saxon culture. These are works where the ul -tramarine blue colour produced from lapis lazuli is used among others, an extremely expensivematerial which were imported from Afghanistan, the evidend sign of a florid economy and not atall inward looking. Among the most famous the Lindisfarne Gospel produced in the monasteryfounded by Irish monks in this little island near the North Eastern coast of England.

It is evident that a new civilization wanted to come to life in the Western part of Europe wherethe demise of the Roman empire had left a void that these new Roman-barbarian forces, in -flamed by Christianity, wanted to fill.It seems that they had arrived one step away from realizing the City of God of Saint Augustine.In fact in these centuries we see the entry into history of Christianity. It seems that men are nomore “dominated by a foolish greed of dominance which induces them to subjugate others”, butthey “offer themselves to one another in service in a spirit of charity and obediently respect theduties of social discipline”We see at work the positive part of Christianity.

The historian must ask himself if this renaissance could have been the starting point of the evo-lution of a new civilization. From what we know there were all the conditions for a new begin-ning, but this will not the case. History will take a whole different route.

In order to understand why we are not yet at the beginning of a new civilization, we must returnto the theme of our work: Christian nihilism.

This theme presents different characteristics in the two halves of the empire.In the West, in the Roman-barbarian kingdoms, the military situation was that the minority ofGermans had reserved for themselves the profession of the arms. They were a small minority, ithas been estimated that in none of these kingdoms they were more than 10% of the people.This shows us the level of ineptitude reached by the indigenous population as a result of thedecadence of Roman civilization and of the introduction of Christianity. They were completelyincapable to bear arms and join the army, while the Church thought them that this was right:they all would have received their prize in the afterlife. The ideology of Saint Augustine from his City of God had deeply penetrated and was not ques-tioned: war was always evil, always.The mass of the peasant people was made up of bondmen who no longer even had the force tomove from where they were born. The minority of Germans who should have assured an effi-cient army had become Christians, they had become “romanized”, that is they had become civi-lized and, naturally, after having tasted the pleasures of civilization, they did not have any inten-tion to risk everything with other wars.This is the positive part of Christianity but this Christianity did not allow any legitimacy to the useof the arms, not even for defense.

The reality is that this creates a power vacuum and power abhors the vacuum.

In the Eastern part the situation was even worse. There was a political administrative structurewhich, besides other things, also kept a standing army. But the empire was under pressure bythe invasions of the Avars and Bulgarians who had sized large areas from its European part,while in Asia they were always at war with the Persian empire, a war without end.The vast majority of the people considered the army and war as things that did not concernthem, war was none or their business, they were too busy arguing about the true faith.

This situation was made worse by the form of Christianity which had taken hold in the East; thiswas a Christianity obsessed by heresies, the manic obsession for orthodoxy had so penetratedthe people to become a collective psychosis. The empire was in serious military difficulties andwas on the verge of disintegrating both for the external attacks and for the internal anarchy.

The disaster explodes in the first decades of the seventh century.In 614 another war broke out with Persia, it will provoke the siege and loss of all cities of theMiddle East, Jersalem is conquered and rased, its inhabitants killed or deported, the Persianseven conquered Egypt. The emperor Heraclius thinks to abandon the besieged capital and tomove it to Chartago but he is dissuaded by the patriarch: its walls would have resisted.And so it was.In 628 Heraclius has freed his capital from the siege and has retaken the lost provinces, he hasinflicted a severe defeat to the Persians and so he can start an attempt at a reform of the em-pire. Amazingly his reform concerns religion.It seems that for the Byzantines the most pressing problem was not the death of the empire atthe hands of the Persians but the quarrel for the heresy of Monofysitism. We do not want to annoy our reader but it is not possible to understand the situation if we do notimmerse ourselves, at least a little, in these religious questions.We must show how Christian nihilism contributed to the ruin of civilization.

Monophysitism is a theory according to which the human nature of Jesus was "absorbed" by thedivine one and therefore only the divine nature was present in him. The Madonna could not becalled mather of Christ but mother of God the way that the Nestorian Christians wanted, theywere at the opposite of the thesis of Monofitisists because for them the two natures human anddivine of Jesus were completely distinct and could not coexist.The Council of Calcedonia condemned Monofysitism but it did not satisfy anybody.Heraclius tries to offer a compromise with a doctrine all his own: Monothelitism. This theory ar-gues that in Christ two natures exist but just one will or energy.Also this theory does not satisfy anybody and was declared heretic. The differences remainedirrevocable and were not limited to religion.

It is at this point that the new invaders enter: the Muslim Arabs. The monofysitists take sideswith them.This is how they explain it to us: “Heraclius did not admit the Orthodox [Monophysitists] to hispresence and did not accept their protests about the churches of which they had been deprived.That is why the God of vengeance, who alone and almighty ..., seeing the wickedness of theRomans who in the territories in their dominion cruelly plundered our churches and monasteriesand mercilessly condemned us, brought from the South the sons of Ishmael [Arabs] to deliverus from the hands of the Romans. And if indeed any harm we have suffered, because theparish churches which had been taken from us and given to the followers of Chalcedon[Catholics] remained in their possession, when the cities submitted to the Arabs, they guaran-teed to every denomination the temples they had at the time. (Michele Siro, II, 3).

For the empire it is a total disaster; in 638 it loses Jerusalem, in 641 Babylon, in 642 Alexandria.At the death of Heraclius, in 641, the empire is reduced to Thracia with the capital Byzantium,the West of Turkey, Athens, the big islands of the Mediterrnean and just Chartago in NorthAfrica. The empire was an agonizing ghost; from 674 to 678 Byzantium is besieged by an is -lamic fleet.By the end of the century the empire had lost all of North Africa and the Middle East; it had lostits most populous regions, the richest and more advanced in the world.In 711 the muslims enter Spain taking advantage of the divisions and of the betrayals of theChristian Visigoth chieftains. At the beginning the Moslems have no difficulty in making arrange-ments with the Christian chieftains to put one against the other. Many Spanish cities open thedoors without fighting. This advance will be stopped in the middle of the century on the moun-

tains of the North of Spain and in the South of Fance. A civil war begins in Spain, a war of ev -erybody against everybody which will last until 1492 with the final ouster of the Muslims fromSpain. A nightmare which lasted eight centuries.

This could make you think that the Christians in the East would have dedicated themselves tothe containment of the Islamic invasion, but it was not.Amazingly they found time and energies to fight between themselves in the wars for the Icono-clasm. Religion again.Always to illustrate the contribution that Christian nihilism gave to the destruction of civilizationwe will shortly tell about these wars even if we risk to annoy our reader

Iconoclasm is a Byzantine religious movement which starts in the first half of 700, therefore inthe midst of the Islamic invasion (in 718 an Islamic fleet will try again to conquer Byzantium). This movement condemned the worship of the sacred images because many thought that itcould encroach upon idolatry. The problem was that for the mass of the Orthodox faithful theobject of the worship was the image itself and not the represented character: Jesus, Madonna,or others.The movement starts with the destruction of the holy images in the churches; statues are de-stroyed and the paintings, the frescoes, the mosaics. According to some scholars this was doneto take away from the Muslims a pretext to destroy Christian churches because Islam prohibitsthe representation of images.However we must notice that, actually, there had already been very serious objections to therepresentation of Jesus and other biblical characters since it did not exist any description in theScriptures. Moreover the veneration of the images made many Christians think of the pagancults; some fathers of the Church were opposed to these representations because they led theChristians towards practices that resembled paganism.In the '20s of the 700 the emperor Leo III, having been convinced by a Christian who had con-verted to islam, that the wrath of God had been unleashed on his empire because of the sacredimages, forbade them. But the people of the capital revolts, a part of the army takes sides withthe rebels and marches on the city to impose another emperor; they were defeated and theusurper behaded. Leo tries to convince the patriarch of Byzantium and the bishop of Rome tofollow him in his iconoclasm but the two refuse.The Byzantine troops in Italy revolt and decide tomarch on Byzantium but the Pope does not allow them because he hoped to use these troopsagainst the Langobards in Italy. Byzantine troops faithful to the emperor attack Rome and try tomurder its bishop but the troops in Rome block them. The city of Ravenna revolts against theByzantines that send a fleet to subjugate it, but it is destroyed. The Langobards take advantageof all this and conquer a few cities in Italy.In spite of all this in 730 Leo issues an edict that orders the destruction of all sacred images butthe patriarch in charge revolts, Leo replaces him but now also the Church in Rome opposes andconvenes a synod to condemn the emperor. Leo sends a fleet to Italy but it is destroyed. Icono-clasm is definitively rejected and so today we can admire the Sistine Chapel.

Evidently the Christians did not think that the Islamic invasion was their main problem.

Our reader will wonder why we have devoted so much space to these two centuries. We did sobecause here we see at work the object of our work: Christianity split between its nihilism andits positive part. In fact in these two centuries there was the first attempt in history to create aChristian civilization and of course this was done according to the way people lived Christianityin those years.In the West Christianity expressed itself with the ethics contained in the City of God, a pacifismremoved from the reality of life. In the East Christianity expressed itself with a manic and raving obsession for the “true faith”.This mini Renaissance of the Roman-barbarian kingdoms in Western Europe could not be the

start of a new civilization because these kingdoms were political and military nullities: “civiliza-tion” and Christianity had made them impotent.

History will go on towards its logic conclusion: the Dark Ages will come, the end of civilization atthe hands of Islam.

Islam, the Dark Ages

The Islamic invasion is totally different from the invasions of the Germans.The Germans were pagans, they did not have a faith and the Christians managed to convertthem by letting themselves be martirized and massacred, same as they did with the Romans.Never the Christians took arms to impose their faith and not even to defend themselves.The blood of the martyrs had always worked both with the barbarians and with the Romans.Only after having attained power the Christians had to employ repression to keep it; in fact it isimpossible to keep an absolute power as required by faith just by consent, some form of repres-sion is indispensable especially with regard to heresies.

The Arabs were carriers of another faith.Islam is a monotheistic faith that seems to be specular to Christian nihilism. It is hyperaggres-sive and ultra-paranoid, it seizes the minds of the converts with a force that has never been sur-passed by any other ideology or faith in the history of humanity.Here we must introduce our reader to a new concept: the intensity of faith.The intensity of faith expresses the strength with which this faith or ideology is rooted in themind and resists its removal or replacement with another faith or ideology (or with nothing, butthis is rare).The convert loses, in a more or less profound way, the use of his reason and the possibility of arational analysis of reality; his reactions and behavior are "driven" by faith.In a more or less serious way the convert becomes a puppet.We think that the strength of this intensity of faith depends on the strength of the paranoia thatfaith manages to instill in the human soul.Islam has an intensity of faith much higher than Christianity, so it was impossible for Christiansto convert the Muslims by having themselves massacred and martyred by them.The blood of the martyrs cannot work with islam.Christians are faced with a situation that they do not understand and cannot cope with. It is notthe invading Muslims who convert (as it happened with the Germans), it is the Christians whoabandon their faith and convert to Islam. The blood of the martyrs cannot work with Islam be-cause the two faiths are complementary to each other, it seems that they were made for eachother: the nihilism of Christians is complementary to the aggressiveness of Islam.

According to Islamic theology the world is divided in two: the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam,and the Dar al-Harb, the House of War.That part of the world that has not converted must be subdued by war; the lands of the infidelsbecome the House of War because the good Muslims must not have peace until the wholeworld has been subdued by force.The declaration of war must be preceded by an invitation to the infidels to convert which is averitable ultimatum. Hostilities can start only after their refusal.Muhammad ordered about sixty attacks and he participated in twenty-seven of these.

The historian Gibbon quotes Muhammad: “The sword is the key of heaven and of hell: a drop ofbood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fast -ing or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven“.There must never be peace between islam and the House of War, at the most a truce if it isuseful to them.

Although these Islamic precepts were clear and well-declared, the unbelief of Christians is strik-ing, it seems they refused to accept reality. Let us cite a conversation of President Jeffersonwho had asked a Saracen ambassador why they attacked the American ships transiting theMediterranean; America was a new country with which they had never been at war. The an-swer: “it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their au-thority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they coul findand to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who shouldbe slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise”.Yet for centuries the Saracens had attacked Christian ships and enslaved the Europeans, howcould Jefferson not know about it?

The war to subdue the infidels is always holy (jihad), an absolutely inconceivable idea for Chris-tianity in those times. We will see later on how the Christian ideas about war will change as aresult of the fight against Islam, but only for Catholics.

The martyrdom of Islam is the opposite of that of Christians.For the Christians a martyr is a believer who "witnesses" his faith by declaring himself a Chris-tian, without hiding and without trying to avoid martyrdom. His role is absolutely passive, he vol-untarily undergoes martyrdom.

The martyrs of Islam are believers who die in the holy war; they die in the attempt to kill the infi -dels because in war it is inevitable to have casualties. Islam guarantees these martyrs not onlyParadise: they will have at their disposal 72 virgins dedicated to their satisfaction for the eter -nity.Moreover, the good Muslim must put in place all the possible tricks so as not to be discoveredthat is so as not to be martyred. He must renounce whatever is required of him if his position isnot strong enough for a victorious battle. It is a great Islamic virtue to pretend in order to deceivethe infidels because then, in time, when they are stronger they will be able to overcome them.Exactly the opposite of Christian martyrdom. This is called Taqiyya, Kitman or "holy hypocrisy"; the ability to deceive the infidel.Like many Islamic concepts, Taqiyya and Kitman were formed within the matrix of tribalism inthe Arab-Islamic concept of expansionist war and conflict. Taqiyya was used by Muslims fromas early as the seventh century to confuse and divide the enemy. A favored tactic was "triangu-lar deception" intended to persuade the enemy that Jihad was not aimed at them but at anotherenemy. Another tactic was to deny that there was a Jihad.Of course the fate of those who fell into this deception was death.This makes Islam an extremely difficult faith to eradicate because it becomes impossible to un-derstand whether the subject has abjured or not. A phenomenon that Christians do not knowhow to deal with.

The Islamists have no intention to enjoy the civilization they find in the territories they conquer,they have the duty to destroy or exploit until destruction all that does not belong to their faith. Itis not a senseless destructive fury like the "Teutonic fury", the product of a barbarous mentalitythat can evolve. It is a commitment required by faith, it is with religious dedication that Muslimsface the destruction of Classical civilization.They cannot be converted and they cannot be stopped.

One after the other the cities of the territories conquered by Islam are destroyed to not be re -built: Palmyra, Caesarea, Petra, Carthage and many others. These cities cease to live not onlyas a result of the destruction caused by the conquest, the disaster is also due to the fact thatMuslims have the right to live on the shoulders of the infidels. The Bedouins brought their ver-sion of agriculture: herds of goats that ravage the land. They believed they had the right tograze their flocks in the midst of Christian crops: they destroyed everything. In a few years theconquered lands become arid and semi-desert, the population collapses. We don’t have accu-rate estimates, just an approximate estimate that reduces the population to a tenth. NorthernAfrica that was the granary of Rome becomes desertified.

The fertile surface layer of the soil is washed away by the rain and it settles in the bottom of thevalleys, on the abandoned built-up areas, it fills the ports. This layer of dirt appears throughoutthe Mediterranean, from Syria to Spain, and indicates the end of Classical civilization. Alongwith the appearance of this layer, there is the abandonment of the lands near the sea and theflight of the population to the top of the hills.The terraces collapsed that were supported by miles of dry-stone walls that are no longer main-tained.

For Spain it was an epochal disaster.The historian Luis Bertrand wrote: “… The first part of this period, that of the Emirs dependentupon the Caliphate of Damascus … is nothing but a long series of intestinal struggles, slaugher-ings, massacres, and assassinations. It was anarchy in all its horror, fed by family hatreds andthe rivalry of tribe against tribe – Arabs of the North against Arabs of the South, Yemenitesagainst Kaishites, Syrians against Medinites. All these Asiatics had a common enemy in the no-mad African, the Berber, the eternal spoiler of cities and the auxiliary of all invaders. … Nothingemerges from this perpetual killing but the savagery, the brutality, and the cruelty of the new-comers. Under their domination … Spain got used to being ridden over and devastated perodi-cally, in a way that soon became as regular as the alteration of the seasons … Islamic Spainbecame the hub of a vast new slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of European slaves … wereinported into the Caliphate, there to be used (if female) as concubines or to be castrated (ifmale) and made into harem guards or the personal body-guards of the Caliph … this army ofeunuchs … was the main instrument of the Caliph’s authority. His power was a military dictator-ship. He maintained himself only thanks to these foreigners”.

After the Islamic conquest the Christians who did not convert could not live in peace. In theorythey were protected if they paid a tax, but the reality was that the rights of the Cristians and ofthe Jews were always subordinate to those of the Muslims in the courts because the testimonyof a Muslim had always more value than that of an infidel so that the infidel could be insulted,robbed, attacked and even killed with impunity. It was sufficient that the muslim declared thatthe infidel had insulted the prophet.It was inevitable that in time Christians would convert. Today Christianity has almost disap-peared from the Middle East and Northern Africa.

In the scientific and cultural fields we see the destruction of libraries and the repression of Clas -sical and Christian culture. The most dramatic episode of all, the burning of the library ofAlexandria: the single most disastrous loss of culture in the history of mankind.

At the turn of the seventh century Western European trade with the East ceased completely, aneconomic disaster. In particular, the importation of papyrus ceases and the West no longer hasa medium on which to write. The parchment that is obtained from the skins of sheep has a pro-hibitive cost; only the richest convents could afford to produce books. Teaching becomes im-possible and all Western people sink into illiteracy.

The merchant fleets disappear from the Mediterranean, they are replaced by the ships of theSaracen pirates: the Mediterranean becomes a bloody frontier.

The Roman-barbarian kingdoms gained most of their revenue from import duties on goods fromthe East, these revenues collapsed and with them also the authority of central governments col -lapsed.

From a military point of view the situation stabilizes around the end of the seventh century; themuslims had been repulsed from France. All their efforts were dedicated to the suppression ofthe Christian resistance in Spain.However islam will not leave the rest of Europe in peace. The war on the infidels can also bedone by means of pirate raids on the shores of Christian coutries starting from Northern Africa.These raids go way inside. The monastery of Montecassino is looted and destroyed, Rome isattacked and the Vatican is looted.These are hundreds, perhaps thousands of attacks that unleashed a wave of piracy unprece-dented in the history of the Mediterranean.The main purpose of these attacks was to take slaves; this produces a continuos state of war inall the Mediterranean without any chance of peace.From then until 1800, when the European colonial powers conquered Northern Africa, the Sara-cen raids were a constant in the life of the Mediterranean.A torment that lasted one thousand years.The coasts became unlivable, the inhabitants had to abandon them taking refuge on top of themountains, the coastal plains were no longer cultivated and there was no longer any mainte-nance of the irrigation works. These plains became swamps dominated by malaria.The Mediterranean landscape changes, the coasts are filled with watchtowers to alarm thetowns near the coast.We have no estimate of how many Europeans were deported slaves in this period, too fewsources. We have an estimate for a period nearer to us and more reliable that says that be-tween the sixteenth and nineteenth century (when the raids were terminated) MediterraneanEurope suffered the capture of more than one million slaves. Actually in that period the Sara -cens from Northern Africa reached up to Norway and Island to take slaves: blonde womenfetched a good price in the slave markets of the Califfate.

This inexhaustible hunger of the Muslims for slaves also provided the impetus for another bar-baric invasion of Western Europe: the Vikings. The official historiography marks the beginningof the Viking invasions in 793 with the Viking plunder of the monastery of Lindisfarne, but this isdue to the gravity of the fact. The Viking raids on Northern Europe had already begun for thepurose of taking slaves to be sold to the Califfate, through Ukraine. Islamic coins have beenfound in Russia that bear witness to this traffic and date it back to the beginning of the eighthcentury.The Vikings were German barbarians and pagans. For two centuries they tormented NorthernEurope with their plunderings, destructions, slaughters, and the slave trade, but in the end theblood of the martyrs had its effect, the Vikings converted to Christianity, ceased their raids andbecame a bastion of the Catholic faith.Thus Western Europe was saved from annihilation. Civilization was not.

The civilization inherited from the Roman empire, which was still alive in the West, from urbanand cultured became rural and illiterate, the major roads disappeared due to lack of mainte-nance, the cities are reduced and the construction of new buildings ceases while the inhabi-tants, overwhelmed by ignorance, use the large buildings inherited from the Romans as stonequarries, agriculture becomes more primitive, the currency stops circulating and the people re-sort to barter, Europeans have adapted to live on top of the mountains perched in fortified vil -lages, the origins of the medieval castles.

The political administrative structure of the kingdoms disintegrates into thousands of tiny areas"ruled" by the most ferocious bandit in the area that torments the people from the shelter of hiscastle. The government of the law disappears, it is replaced by the arbitrariness of these banditswho will become the medieval barons.

By the end of the seventh century, classical civilization was definitively dead.The Ancient Age ends and the Middle Ages begins.

We have described the Islamic invasion in the Mediterranean area. We also want to talk aboutIslamic expansion towards the south, in Africa, even if it is outside the subject of our work:Christian nihilism. We think that our reader must know of the tragedy of the Islamic expansion south of the Saharadesert to get a realistic idea of what the Islamic invasion brought to the world. Soon the Muslims found a way to cross the desert for their raids in search of slaves. Once incontact with the African populations they began the most colossal mass deportation in the his-tory of humanity.The Islamic people of Northern Africa had an organizational capacity and a technology muchsuperior to the African tribes who found themselves completely defenseless in the face of thisattack.They did not know how to build walls and castles as the Europeans did, their only refuge thethick of the jungle.In a few centuries these raiders reached as far as Angola and Mozambique, driven by arab war-lords or by Islamized negro tribal leaders.This tragedy only ended when the islamist raiders were stopped by the European colonial pow-ers when they occupied all of Africa during the nineteenth century and put an end to slavery.

For the Africans it was a holocaust that lasted one thousand years.

It was from these raiders that the Europeans, Spanish and Portuguese, rediscovered slaverywhen they arrived with their ships on the shores of South Eastern Africa in the fifteenth century.It was from these raiders that they bought the slaves to carry to America.A present of the “Islamic culture” to Christian civilization.

Before leaving the Roman Empire we want to invite our reader to think of what has been lostwith the demise of the empire and its civilization. Naturally it is difficult to compare our civiliza-tion to the Roman one but it is possible to make some comparisons even if very approximate.If we consider the architecture, Europe will only be able to build buildings comparable to thegreat Roman buildings after the year 1000 with the great Gothic cathedrals, so we will have towait 300 years.If we consider the arts like painting and sculpture, Europe will return to a similar level of evolu-tion with the Renaissance, after 600 years.If we consider medicine and surgery, we will have to wait 1000 years.If we consider the communications, we can estimate that Europe will have a system of commu-nications as reliable as the Roman roads after 1000 years.If we consider the city of Rome, it will return to have that population and that flow of water fromits aqueducts only in the twentieth century, one thousand and three hundred years.If we consider the level of literacy and circulation of literary works we must wait for the inventionof the press, 800 years.

We know of no such episode in the history of humanity, a civilization so sophisticated destroyedin such a radical way.

Catholicism, a new civilization begins

The military success of Islam is stunning, easily outperforming the armies of the Eastern Empireand at the beginning of the new millennium they threaten the capital of the empire, Byzantium.The Patriarch must humble himself and ask for help to the Pope of Rome.At this point in the Catholic West a surprising phenomenon occurs. The Pope realizes that onlya systematic recourse to arms can stop Islam, if they remain flat on evangelical nihilism it wouldbe the end. Shouting "God wants it" the Pope shakes the conscience of Catholics to emanci -pate them from the evangelical pacifism. It is a cry of despair: God cannot want that His faith iserased from the earth. Today God does not want that we offer the other cheek, today Godwants us to fight and kill. Catholic Europe responds with an overwhelming and completely irra-tional enthusiasm. The Crusades were an impossible task for feudal Europe that was anarchicand divided into many pieces that, even worse, will give their best to fight among themselveswhile the Pope was clearly unable to provide a military leadership, it was not his job.But now Catholic Europe has changed, it has clearly reacted to nihilism while the Orthodox arestill crushed by it. In fact, in the coming centuries, all Orthodox countries will fall under the ruleof Islam while Catholic Europe will resist and survive.

The Urban Civilization

The West will give another manifestation of its overcoming of nihilism with the splendid flower-ing of its Civilization of the Communes. The industry, commerce and the arts develop and beginto dismantle the feudal order in various parts of Western Europe. The guilt complexes are al-ways present but are exorcised in various ways; the artists mainly produce sacred art and themerchants register accounts under "The Lord" where they enter part of their earnings to be do-nated to the poor. Not surprisingly, in those years Christian nihilism reacts to this progress withone of its most dramatic interpretations, enters the prince of the nihilists: St. Francis.

Saint Francis and his syndrome

St. Francis takes to the letter the teachings of the Gospel and proposes a monasticism to thelimits of human endurance. He who enters the order must give everything to the poor turning hisfamily out of their home, you should never oppose evil but accept any offense, you should notown anything not even the convents where you live, you must always live on charity. The rule ofSt. Francis collides with reality and with the Church; it is softened and he abandons his own or-der. It is right that St. Francis was considered a second Jesus because no one attempted to re-alize the evangelical nihilism as he did. After his death his disciples try to take him closer toChrist by inventing the stigmata and the Church, reluctantly, accepts the worship of this saint.

To our history the consequences of St. Francis are different: seven years after his death, theFranciscan order starts the Inquisition.Here we see how the sadism present in nihilism can emerge at different times. There is nodoubt that St. Francis would have opposed it, he had addressed sadism only against himself.His disciples will not do the same. This, the "San Francis syndrome", is the legacy that he hasleft to Western Civilization; that is the reason why today he is the favorite saint of the commu-nists. St. Benedict and St. Francis are the two extremes reached by nihilism in the Catholic civiliza-tion.

The Reformation, the Modern Age

In the sixteenth century a radical revolt against nihilism finally explodes with the ProtestantReformation. The Protestants, especially Calvin, propose a Christianity totally different fromthe vision and teachings of the historical Jesus; in fact it is just the opposite.The successes that one has achieved in his life are a sign of predestination.The economic, social, scientific, industrial progress that you have achieved in your society toimprove it and to increase its riches (jointly with your own) are a sign of the divine approval.Every Christian should be able to read the scriptures so that he can decide according to hisconscience how to express his faith resulting in the emancipation of the individual from thechurch hierarchy that has the authority of the faith: dissent becomes legitimate.This is an odd development because it is clear that the work ethic of Calvinism is just the oppo-site of the teachings of Jesus the apocalyptic prophet. This was possible because the historicalJesus with His message were unknown; the studies on the historical Jesus began in the nine-teenth century.A new religion and a new culture arise, a new man was born that tries to escape definitivelyfrom evangelical nihilism. Very important in this development is the abolition of monasticism; themonasteries are closed and their assets expropriated. The uncultivated land will be put to pro-duction by people regularly married with children, as well as the books will be produced by print-ers, they too married and with children, who work for a profit to be obtained from the sale of thebooks on the open market.Now the Protestants absorb from the Gospels the teachings of Jesus and use them to build asociety based on Christian ethics and the Bible becomes a guide for ethical behavior in life. Inparticular, although the opposite was written in the Gospels, family and private property becomefundamental elements of society. Catholicism manages to keep its monopoly in the Latinizedcountries while Protestantism wins in the countries of German ethnicity. With the Counter Refor-mation the Church sinks even more the Catholic countries into nihilism, while the Protestantsbegin a journey that will change profoundly Western society: thus the Middle Ages end and theModern Ages begin. Among other things, after the Reformation the artists stop producing saintsand madonnas and engage in mundane subjects (praised be the Lord).

The Enlightenment, Western Civilization

After the wars of religion the Europeans react with widespread skepticism towards faith and, inparticular, the Catholic Church has lost much of its appeal because it is increasingly regardedby the intellectuals as a reactionary and obscurantist institution. A new elitist cultural movementcomes to life in Europe, the Enlightenment, that tries to recover the light of reason and thesense of reality; it is decidedly an anti nihilistic and anti religious movement. These new ideastake root among the people in America where the first state comes to life that is federal, demo-cratic, liberal and secular, a record in the history of mankind. It is a definitely anti nihilist culturewith a strong emphasis on private property and free enterprise, that will lead the United Statesto become the most advanced, the richest and most powerful country in the world in just a cen-tury. They are the epitome of Western Civilization; democracy and the abolition of slavery arethe most important contributions they have made to the history of civilization.In Europe, however, the Enlightenment had remained essentially an elitist culture with little fol-lowing among the masses and, shortly after the American Revolution, the French revolutionbreakes out that is the first attempt in history to establish a Totalitarian State. Nihilism re-en-ters the game and sadism reclaims with arrogance its contribution of blood.

Now we must clarify the concept of totalitarianism because it is a prerequisite to socialism.Christianity got started in Europe with Orthodoxy that is a state religion, in the employ of thestate. Catholicism that grows in the West has its own autonomy and authority regardless of thestate and is in competition with the state to assert its authority over the people. Kings andPopes struggle throughout the Middle Ages to win the loyalty of the people; the king needs thefaith as a tool of the state and the pope needs the armed arm of the state. Protestantism wasnot born as a state religion but it must adapt itself by necessity.So at the end of the eighteenth century the conscience of Europeans is divided between two au-thorities, the secular and the religious, and this fracture is much deeper in the Catholic coun-tries.The totalitarian state wants to overcome this division by establishing a "secular faith" withoutGod; an ideology. This ideology is “administered” by the political party that controls the govern-ment so that the state can seize control of the totality of the individual removing religion forgood.Jacobinism fails in this attempt because the nationalism that it wants to assert as the new faithdoes not have all the features necessary to a faith and fails to undermine Christianity.Nihilism must find itself another ideology to recover the space left empty by the crisis of Chris-tian nihilism caused by Protestantism and the Enlightenment. The West is ready for Socialism.

Socialism, the Totalitarian State

Progressivism, the demise of Western Civilization

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