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The first critical moment of the
Second Christian Millenium was the achievement of the Great
Medieval Synthesis, circa 1300. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had
laid the intellectual foundations for a vital and pious
Christendom. The glorious Gothic cathedrals reached skyward, an
architectural achievement that would not again be matched. An
essentially Christian agrarian civilization used the guilds to
accommodate manufacture and growing commerce, bringing both
prosperity and social order. The "Babylonian
captivity" of the Papacy, the erosion of religious piety
and discipline, and the great depopulation of Europe brought on
by The Black Plague all lay in the future.
The voyage by Christopher Columbus to
the New World in 1492 marked the second critical moment. After
the travails of the late 14th and 15th
centuries, the Europeans gained a second chance: new lands on
which to build a Christian civilization. Silver and gold quickly
twisted the Spanish colonies into campaigns of extraction and
exploitation. But in North America, rich soils fostered the
emergence of an agrarian civilization, and the planting of
churches across the continent. As late as 1776, 90 percent of
the inhabitants of England's colonies were farmers. The balance
were fishermen, craftsmen, and seaborn traders. Virtually all
worked in family-scale enterprises, where they jealously guarded
their liberties.
The third critical moment of the
Millenium was the first Thirty Years War, 1618-1648, fought over
the whole of central Europe. It symbolized the fracturing of
European Christendom into rival, seemingly irreconcilable camps,
Catholic and Protestant. The spectacle of Christians
slaughtering Christians, of whole towns with women and children
put to the sword, was the sorry inspiration for the
Enlightenment, in which the largest share of the European
intellectual class abandoned the quest for a Christian
civilization. After the Peace of Westphalia, Western philosophy
set out on a secular pilgrimage.
The fourth moment was the French
Revolution, 1789-1799, when all the Children of the Secular
Enlightenment burst out of the academy, demanding political
power. Their names were Egalitarianism, Socialism, Liberalism,
Communism, Racism, Nationalism, Feminism, Democratism, Fascism,
Industrialism, Scientism, and 'Sexual Enlightenment.' An
alliance of Orthodox Russia, the Catholic Hapsburgs, and Burkean
England finally defeated the French armies. But the
Enlightenment's Children were only stilled for a while.
And so the fifth vital moment was
what the future will call the Second Thirty Years War,
1914-1945, when those Children again took to war, sometimes
against each other. Fighting tapered off between 1920 and 1930,
but only as a temporary respite. Some of the nastier offspring,
such as German National Socialism, were crushed in the end. But
others, such as Russian Communism, grew stronger. In addition to
60 million war dead, the Nazis claimed another 10 million
corpses, the majority Jewish, in their death camps. The
Communists, meanwhile, consumed an extra 30 million lives in
Russia (and a total of 100 million, worldwide, by the
Millenium's end).
It took the armies and factories of
the New World to force a truce in 1918 and a victory, of sorts,
in 1945. Yet the North Americans paid a large price of their
own. Their agrarian population, still growing in 1914, was
sacrificed to the demands of industrialized war, and became
inconsequential by mid-century. Moreover, the United States of
America emerged in 1945 as the world's greatest power, and heir
to quasi-imperial global responsibilities. For forty-five years,
it would be locked in another war, 'cold' and sometimes 'hot,'
with Communism, which fundamentally reshaped U.S. domestic life
as well. By the Millenium's close, other Enlightenment
Children--Egalitarianism, Feminism, and Scientism--threatened to
crush what remained of the old civilization even there.
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