Saint Patrick, A (Mental) Power Story
Mental power is the ultimate power, and the power of life, in the end, is all about intelligence. The argument has been made by many a top biologist (and not just Lamarck, but recent contemporary biologists, some Nobel laureates) that life is intelligent. That eukaryotic cells are intelligent.
Intelligence is much more Machiavellian than Machiavel. An example is Christianism, a triple headed system of thoughts and moods, which appears very different, depending the way one looks at it. Key to its success is that its secret God is the essence of humanity, the Logos. Saint Patrick’s day is a good day to remember this. Irish Catholicism, in its first phase, as taught by Patrice, and as mitigated by the people of Ireland, four centuries before the centuries of savage wars with the Vikings, was extremely open-minded.
Ireland was conquered by the Logos, not by the Sword. That is the difference with many other lands conquered by other religions (in particular the lands conquered by Islam which, in the first century at least, were all conquered by the sword, and a sword drenched in the blood of millions!)
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Judges Can Be Of Some Use For The Progress of Civilization:
Today in New York the Alien Tort Act was activated by a Federal Judge. She ordered Germany to pay reparations for the attempted eradication of the Herero and Nama people, between 1904 and 1908. Half of the Nama were assassinated. This holocaust was warm-up for the German attack on the world in August 1914, another war crime, even greater. Neither the Namibian massacre nor the war crime of the German engineered world war of 1914 were excoriated, condemned, nor, a fortiori understood. Hence the repetition by the Nazis.
(A few years ago, Germany presented formal excuses to the state of Namibia, and “helps” Namibia; however that does not directly addresses the legitimate grievances of the Herero and Nama…)
Teaching The Heathen, Or What Philosophers Have Always Done, And Will Always Do. Thanks to the Conversion of Ireland, Romanitas, the Greco-Roman Civilization Spread Where The Legions Didn’t Reach
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The Difference Between Sotus and Scottus:
Saint Patrick started as an English boy. During one of many raids of the savage Scotti on Roman Britannia, he was captured when he was 16. He was enslaved for 6 years.
The Romans called the Irish, “Scottus”, and so did the Europeans for centuries to come. Charles the Bald, king of Francia Occidentalis and Roman emperor as Charles II, was a promoter of fundamental research. He became an excellent friend of the philosopher Scotus Erigena (“Erigenus” means Iris-born). Charles had named Erigena head of the Palatine Academy of Laon, thus becoming a successor to Alcuin of York. (Alcuin was Prime Minster of Charles I, Charlemagne). Erigena spoke many languages, including Irish, Frankish, Latin and Greek.
Once the emperor and the philosopher were pleasantly drinking across a table. The emperor asked Erigena: “Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum? (What separates a sot from an Irishman?”[“sot” means idiot, the word sot is still heavily used in French]).
Quick as lightning, Erigena retorted: “Tabula tantum” (Only a table). So Erigena called the emperor an idiot.
Of these little piques great civilizations are made.
Notice in passing the difference of smarts with Islam: even if nowadays one calls Muhammad a “sot” (a particularly uninteresting idiot), the righteous Muslim will want to kill you. Or, at the very least will have to kill you. If said Muslim considers that what is written black and white in the Qur’an is an order from “Allah”, as it is supposed to be.
And the same extends to all the Caliphs, and other Muslims in authority (Surah 4, verse 59). So no wonder Islam never acquired a sense of humor, let alone supreme intelligence. Remember the context above: Charles the Bald headed an empire mightier than the Islamist empire (as it had heavily defeated it in the Eight Century, and would push Islam out of Europe for centuries… before ending all the way to Jerusalem a bit more than 2 centuries later). But Charles II, like Charles I, had a sense of intellect, humor. Although “sacred” by the Popes, they didn’t take their own holiness too seriously (European emperors would quarrel with popes, on and off, for the next 11 centuries…)
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Saint Patrick Was a Franco-Gallic Product, to a great extent:
But let’s come back to Saint Patrick, four centuries earlier. He escaped slavery and Ireland, by hiding on a ship, and fled to what was becoming Francia (as the Franks, in military control conferred to them by the Roman Empire were slipping into governmental control).
The cleric Patrice was educated in Auxerre, Tours, and Cannes, Provence, more exactly at the monastery of the Lérins Abbey. He then returned to Ireland. (When Patrice came to Ireland, his name was mispronounced as “Patrick”.)
Hence Saint Patrick was pretty much a product of the Gallic-Catholic church (in contradistinction with “Roman-Catholic”). That Gallic-Catholic church would soon get in a conflict with the Pope in Rome, about secular teaching. The gallic-Catholic church thought that secular teaching was necessary. The Pope, as a good Jihadist keen to bring forth further apocalypse (the apocalypse in Christian and later Muslim texts, was a precondition for the Final Judgment, a desired act where the worthy are welcomed to paradise; hence its desirability). The conflict between Gallic bishops and Rome got so vicious, that Pope Gregory the Great threatened to have the bishop of Dignes burned alive, if he persisted with secular teaching (late Sixth Century). But the Gallic bishops had the army of the Franks, that is, the Roman army, to protect them (this fight between Gallo-Romans and the Popes was thus a continuation of the conflict of the Frank Arbogast, Magister Militum of the Occidental Empire with the Catholic fanatics of the Orient, in 394 CE).
Saint Patrick no doubt succeeded in Ireland, because he was taught tolerance in Gallic Francia.
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Christianism As The Triumph Of The Logos:
After making Christianism the official Roman religion, Rome used what Constantine called “Universalism” (= “Catholicism”) to spread Romanitas at a distance and through the limes (armed physical border of the Roman empire, the “Wall”). That worked extremely well. And, to be honest, so great was the appeal of Christianism to the uncouth that under Nestorian form (for example), it spread ahead… All the way to Mongolia (Genghis Khan was adopted as a refugee child by a Christian tribe).
Thus, when the Barbarians invaded, they were already Christian, so they looked up to Rome spiritually. But for two significant details:
1) the Franks spurned Christianity, as their association with Rome was older… and founded upon a sturdier, deeper basis, secular law.
2) Eastern Europe, outside of the Roman Limes, had been converted to Christianism by Arianus and his disciple. Arianus, an Egyptian bishop, did not believe in the Trinity (this is also why the Muslims don’t believe in it, either). This would bring their disappearance: the dozens of millions of Roman citizens were Catholics. Craftily, when they “converted”, the Franks decided to become Catholics. That can be viewed as a testimony of their political acumen.
But there is much more: converting to Catholicism was converting to the Logos, to debate, the intellect, thus, tolerance. Let me explain.
The Franks helped Constantine, who started by fighting them, conquer the entire Roman empire. They refused to convert for nearly two centuries, as they knew how the Christian sausage had been made and why. Then, under Consul-King Clovis (“Louis”), they got the better idea to do as Constantine had done, and rewrite Christianism, their way.
The subtlety of the Trinity escaped the Arians totally. The Trinity meant that the Logos, that is, LOGIC, was God. And even as a primacy to the rest. That helped convert to Christianism the millions of Neoplatonists who led the empire. It also meant that all those who thought that the (secular) law of man, the Logos, came before any superstition, could also be Catholic without contradiction.
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θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος: LOGIC IS GOD:
This genuflection to logic is the master idea of Christianity, hidden in plain sight: the Evangel of John starts this way: ”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
In the original Greek, the last four words of John 1:1 are: “θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος”. Literally “God was the Logos”.
If Europe is the modern Rome, as it is, or used to be, what is the modern equivalent of Roman Christianity spreading ahead of Romanitas? The United Nations machinery, spreading around the planet the religion of democratic secularism, the only religion worth having. Because that’s the only religion corresponding to the deep nature of the humanoids.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 