Jesus Christ and Civilisation

Notes

1. The attempt to explain the case of either Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler as evil master-minds, is not permitted by the relevant evidence. Think of them as in the tradition of Roman Emperors such as Caligula, Nero, and Caracalla, whose awful atrocities reflect not their strength of intellect, but rather the lack thereof. In revealing moments of crisis, both showed themselves for the wimps they really were. The threat they represented, partook more of the nature of a virus than an intellect. What makes a Governor Bush or a Vice-President Gore so serious a threat to the nation, is not the stuff within them, but rather what is fairly described as a certain lack of stuffing in either.

2. Plato, Timaeus. Critias relates to Socrates and friends, a story told him by his grandfather, who said that "the achievements of the city in the old days, now forgotten because of the passage of time and the destruction of human life, were great and marvelous." The grandfather described an encounter between Solon, the ruler of Athens, and a very old Egyptian priest. The priest tells Solon that the Greeks are but children, and do not possess "one old belief rooted in ancient tradition, nor any learning made hoary by age." "You recall only one deluge on earth, even though there were many," he tells the astonished Solon. "Moreover, you are ignorant of the fact that the best and finest breed of men once lived in your land and that you and your whole city derive from a small remnant of their seed. This you have forgotten because for many generations the survivors died leaving no written record." The priest goes on to explain that "the present civilized order in our part of the world," according to sacred texts, was established 8,000 years ago. But even 9,000 years ago, there existed a culture with many fine achievements, including trans-Atlantic navigation, which the priest describes. (Timaeus, translated by a team of LaRouche associates in The Campaigner, February 1980.)

3. During, and immediately following, my April 1975 visit to Iraq, reflecting on my 1950s studies of the archeology of that region, I commented on how far the region had fallen since the time of the celebrated Caliph Haroun al Rashid. Such are the saddening evidences of the rise and fall of civilizations past.

4. It was Nicholas of Cusa and his associates, who responded to the fall of Constantinople by organizing ecumenical voyages into the waters to the west and east of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, liars have perpetrated frauds in the effort to deny and conceal the documented evidence showing the means by which Christopher Columbus received the maps, and Cusa associate Toscanelli's other technical assistance in navigation, and the support which led him to rediscovery of the Americas. The English colonization of North America, best typified in the onset by the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a product of the same, continued policy which had been launched earlier by Cusa and his circles.

5. The statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith can be found at http://www.vatican.va/roman_cur.../rc_con_faith_doc_20000626 _message-fatima_en.htm. See also Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Call Them the 'Baby Doomers,' " EIR, July 21, 2000, p. 36, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "Third Prophecy of Fatima: A Summons to Repentance," EIR, July 21, 2000.

6. The mortalist Pomponazzi was a central figure of the launching of the Sixteenth-Century anti-Renaissance; it was those Venice circles which orchestrated Venice's taking control of King Henry VIII. Venice's Paolo Sarpi, the founder of modern empiricism and intellectual controller of Seventeenth-Century figures such as Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, set into motion both the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and prepared the way for the consolidation of Venetian influence over the English and British monarchies, beginning the tyranny of William of Orange.

7. "Enlightenment" signifies, broadly speaking, the founding of empiricism by Venice's Paolo Sarpi and Sarpi's lackey, Galileo Galilei. However, the use of the term "Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment," signifies the Europe-wide network created by Sarpi's most influential successor, the Paris-based Venetian spymaster Abbot Antonio Conti. It was Conti's Europe-wide network of anti-Leibniz salons, which created Voltaire, Quesnay, and all principal varieties of the so-called French and English Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century.

8. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), and in his infamous Chatham House address of May 10, 1982: "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary."

9. Friedrich Schiller, "What Is, and To What End Do We Study, Universal History"" Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988).

10. The Greek name of Athena associates her with the founding of the original city of Athens, under Egyptian sponsorship. In the legacy of Classical Greece, she is associated with the principle of cognition, as distinct from both simple irrationalism and deduction. On a related matter, see Diodorus Siculus on the mythical real-life origins of the Olympus cult.

11. As distinct from, and opposed to the mechanistic, so-called equal-tempered system. Bach, as typified most efficiently by his crafting of his A Musical Offering, and in his The Art of the Fugue, followed Plato and Kepler, in defining the musical domain as what Gauss and Riemann later defined as a multiply-connected manifold. It is the ironies of juxtaposition of bel canto-trained singing voices, not a mathematical calculation in any ordinary sense, which locates the "orbital pathway" in which contrapuntal values of the sung tone lies. It is, as Wilhelm Furtwangler emphasized, "between the notes." Today's popular schoolbook doctrine on the subject of tuning, is to be viewed as typical of the witless quality of contemporary pedantry.

12. After, most notably, the relevant work of Leonardo da Vinci, the great Classical Renaissance paintings, such as those of Raphael Sanzio and Rembrandt, are premised upon the locating of events as reflecting, implicitly, a physical space-time which is most fairly described as Riemannian. In this way, the great Renaissance painters brought into painting the same way of representing ideas associated with that of the Classical Greek sculptors, such as Scopas and Praxiteles, who captured their subjects in mid-motion, rather than as dead objects in "Euclidean" space-time. This Rembrandt work is, for the sensitive modern viewer, among the boldest of successful examples of that method of portraying ideas.

13. The only valid form of a modern working definition of physical science, is that typified by Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, a dissertation whose development is premised, as Riemann insists there, on the preceding development of the notion of multiply-connected manifolds, by Carl Gauss. Thus, science rejects simple sense-certainty and, therefore, also, "Euclidean" notions of physical space-time, as the standard for interpretation of the crucial phenomena underlying the discovery of validatable universal physical principles. Only experimental validation of a universal scheme, as anti-Euclidean <i>physical</i> geometry defines this, a universality itself composed solely of experimentally validated as universal physical principles, deserves the name of physical science.

14. The relevant standard of rigor is that exemplified by Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, in which all formal-mathematical derivations of notion of universality, are outlawed, that in favor of a physical-experimental determination of the curvature of the entirety of the physical-space-time within which the relevant action is situated. All efforts known to me to show an earlier dating for the idea of ideas, rest, to my knowledge, on arguments which include demonstrably crude, aprioristic assumptions.

15. Cognitive, as the term is employed here, should be recognized as signifying the Mind of the Creator, as distinct from idols which purport to represent God in the image of the mere mortal body which the mind of the person inhabits. Thus, Classical sculpture and Renaissance painting, as contrasted with Archaic and Romantic styles, locates the image of the personality in the idea whose existence must be adduced by the mind of the viewer, the idea which lies ontologically within the mid-motion ironically represented.

16. i.e., as elaborated by Plato in his Timaeus dialogue, and as typified by Paul's I Corinthians 13.

17. Admittedly, some enthusiasts have argued that Christ represented a "New Dispensation," so argued from the dubious standpoint of Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries "Biblical archeology." Despite such apologetics, which tend to be associated with gnostic varieties of pornographic and numerological sophistries derived from their readings of the Old Testament, Christianity's redemption of the intent of Moses' utterance, did represent a break from the dogma of a "chosen people," a break without which such benefits as the Eighteenth-Century emancipation of the European Jews could not have occurred. Characteristic of, and often coinciding with such gnostic aberrations in theology, are all those varieties of pro-oligarchical apologetics, which locate morality almost hermetically in narrow matters of sexual behavior and family and community relations in the small, thus avoiding all the big issues of Christian morality, such as the evil inhering in the fostering of policies and arrangements which foster racial discrimination and other expressions of policies of oligarchical practice which treat some people as actually, or virtually human cattle. Typical are arguments to the effect: "Do not offend the rich and powerful," sophistries typical of gnostics such as the Bogomil (Cathars) cult and its derived, pro-satanic, "free trade" dogma, that of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and their followers of the Mont Pelerin Society cult today.

18. The adopted view on the antiquity of the Latin Filioque by the great ecumenical Council of Florence, was established by the work of the later Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who presented the proofs from Greek sources he collected in Byzantium. An account of this, "Nicolaus of Cusa and the Council of Florence," was presented (in German) at Rome, to the 550th Anniversary of the Council of Florence, by Helga Zepp LaRouche on May 5, 1989. See Fidelio, Spring 1992, for the English-language translation of her address.

19. Bernhard Riemann, Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (1854), Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953), pp. 272-287.

20. See Jonathan Tennenbaum, "How Fresnel and Ampere Launched a Scientific Revolution" and Jacques Cheminade, "The Ampere-Fresnel Revolution: 'On Behalf of the Future,' " EIR, Aug. 27, 1999; Laurence Hecht et al., "The Significance of the 1845 Gauss-Weber Correspondence," 21st Century Science & Technology, Fall 1996; Laurence Hecht, "Optical Theory in the 19th Century, and the Truth about Michelson-Morley-Miller," 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1998.

21. This includes the qualifying notions of improvement of the demographic composition of the population, both as considered in terms of households, growth-rates per capita, life-expectancies, and so on.

22. Remember, that physical principles themselves are assorted among three sets of a multiply-connected, Riemannian-type manifold: principles adduced from non-living physical processes, physical principles peculiar to living processes, and physical principles peculiar to validatable cognitive processes as such.

23. e.g., Bernhard Riemann, Theorie der Abel'schen Functionen (1857), Werke, pp. 88-144.

24. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961).

25. Among the most striking examples of this, is the commonplace evasion of the evidence which demonstrates that living processes represent the existence of a universal physical principle, of life, not to be derived from non-living processes. The evidence is conclusive; but, the passion needed to face the implications of that proof, excepting cases such as Pasteur and Vernadsky, has been usually lacking.

26. In German, this is called Entschlossenheit.

27. With Venice's successful deployment of yet another crusade, the Fourth Crusade (A.D. 1202-1204), this time to establish the Latin kingdom, and the virtually simultaneous onset of the Mongol invasions of western Europe, the Republic of Venice emerged as the de facto dominant imperial power in the Mediterranean region, an imperial position it maintained until the close of the Seventeenth Century. During the course of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, Venice established a strong foothold at the court of Henry VIII, and, later, consolidated its grip on the English monarchy, through the agents of Paolo Sarpi. William of Orange typifies the takeover of both the Netherlands and the British Isles by Venetian rentier-financier interests during the interval 1688-1714, the process of takeover which concluded with the War of the Spanish Succession and the accession of George I to the newly established British monarchy of the United Kingdom.

28. Typical of that Byzantine corruption is the pro-oligarchical hoax known as "The Donation of Constantine."