E Michael Jones European History with Gemma O'Doherty

[Gemma O'Doherty:] Tonight I want to talk to you more specifically about the greatest disaster to befall Western civilization and that I think you would agree was the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. I want you just to talk us through the early church and then we're going to get into the meat of how the Reformation led to Decades of war and how we are why the reason why we're in this mess today. So can you just talk us through the first 1500 years?

[E Michael Jones:] Yes, can I have a second per Century?

[Gemma O'Doherty:] I'll give you 10 seconds. You see the point I'm trying to make. We had 1500 years of the Catholic Church, okay, it wasn't perfect but by and large, you know, and then when they took over and split the church in the way that they did and caused how many thousands of Protestant denominations which don't know what they stand for really the trouble began.

[E Michael Jones:] We know that the evangelization of Europe, if by Europe we mean North of the Alps, began in Ireland. The Irish monks first of all established monasteries in Ireland, and then they started going up the Rhine and down the Danube because this was the main thoroughfare for the Germanic peoples. So you can come in right at the Rhine, you can sail up the Rhine, but the main focus I think was coming down the Danube. The center of that was the Fulda Gap. It was crucial during the Cold War, but at this point these monks would establish monasteries along what used to be the border of the northern border of the Roman Empire. So there was a Senator there during the late Roman Empire and he said "the Germans are the saddest people in the world because they don't have grapes and they don't have olives." Well, they still don't have olives, but they do have grapes.

I told this to a bunch of Amish children. I had the good fortune to teach a class in an Amish school. These are all German Anabaptists, descendants of German Anabaptists (who were terrorists at a certain point but now they're all pacifists). I said to them: the only reason that you are a farmer is because of Saint Benedict. I said if it weren't for Saint Benedict you'd still be chasing pigs through the forest. Saint Benedict did this by establishing monasteries, and the monasteries established orchards and vineyards and basically allowed the Germans to create a sedentary lifestyle, agriculture and wealth.

After the Roman Empire lost its police power, it was overrun by barbarians like my German ancestors. At this point it was Vikings from the North, it was Saracens from the South, and the only way you could survive is if someone had a fortress or a castle. Because when the Vikings showed up, everybody had to get into the castle and there was a kind of siege and you had to just wait it out. That's what they had to do.

Hesse says that this is where the German farmer lost their liberty because in order to get protection you had to become a serf and you had to basically give up the land. The lord owned the land and you worked on the land and you worked a certain number of days a year. This was before a monetary economy, so gradually, he said, because they stayed on the land, they gradually regained power over the land and they began to have a de facto ownership, even though you could not sell the land. That remained for a long time in Germany. You could own the land but you couldn't sell it, and this led to a kind of stable lifestyle that was complementary to the Benedictines who also took a vow of stability. This is where our civilization came from. I mean I feel partial here because I'm half Irish and half German and that's the story that we're talking about right here.

[Gemma O'Doherty:] Around 300 Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Just talk a little bit about what was happening then with the very early Church.

[E Michael Jones:] What was the most significant thing that happened then is that the Christians had a lot of time to talk to each other and think things over. This is really different than what happened with Islam. Islam burst on the scene, it's about around the middle of the 7th Century they burst on the scene. Because they were warriors and they conquered everybody, I mean it was like overnight. It was like the Blitzkrieg back that time and they suddenly became the ruling force in all of North Africa all the way over to Persia. They conquered Persia too which was a high culture, and the Arabs were not, and so as a result they had to administer immediately. They weren't intellectually capable. They were camel jockeys and they were goat herders and that's all they knew. Even up until the 1970's, 85 percent of the people in Saudi Arabia earned their living by animal husbandry. This was culture that was inimical to thought, and inimical to Logos, and inimical to dialogue as they ruled by fiat. Basically it was the caliph, and God became an exalted caliph, and all you did was submit.

That's what Islam means, you submit. You bow down. You put your head on the ground and you submit to the will of Allah, and that's it period. Whether it's rational or not. Well, the Christians had a different situation. They were a persecuted minority. Persecutions came and went. They basically took over the corrupt culture of Rome. What what do I mean by the corrupt culture? It was usury that had destroyed Roman culture. The independent farmer had been destroyed because of war, taxation and usury, and he was now working as a slave on these large farms that were called Latifundia. As a result these people had no allegiance to the Roman Empire. It's like America right now. It's an Empire. All Empires are the same. They want taxes and cannon fodder and you're on your own otherwise. That's what it was in Rome.

"Civis Romanus Sum."(I am a Roman citizen) That didn't mean anything anymore because you were a slave and you were crushed by debt. So what happened is the Christians gave them a new identity. They had a new identity. It filled that identity gap, and they started identifying with each other and they built little communities and gradually these communities became so strong because of the virtues these people practiced that they were ready to take over when the empire collapsed. Now that's 411 AD, 475 depending on how how you want to talk about it. That's four centuries after the death of Christ. Four centuries of just sitting around talking and taking care of each other.

The great achievement during this time was coming up with the doctrine of the Trinity. I mean this was serious intellectual endeavor, and if you didn't speak Greek you were out. You were just not part of the discussion. The Latin bishops were not part of it. People like Augustine were really not part of this dialogue, but it hammered out something that was absolutely crucial. And we know it was crucial because all we have to do is look where they didn't have this idea, and that was Islam. And the train of Logos left the station without the Muslims. They were basically standing on the platform for centuries largely because of this hostile Arabic attitude toward Logos. It was hostile, and Islam became hostile to Logos and that's like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

So finally, after waiting for four centuries, they finally take over because they're the only order now. 'Diocese' used to be a geographical designation for the Roman Empire and now it's a designation for the Catholic Church. Those Benedictine monasteries were places where you could hide out when the Vikings came, or hide out when the Saracens came, and then go back to work after they left. And they also produced books. You had Charlemagne as the culmination of this type of development. Benedict created the Rule of Benedict, where he writes the rule for this type of thing, and that's what saved civilization because they passed those books on.

Classical civilization could not survive this transition. The guy in this regard was Boethius, who was an educated, sophisticated Roman. He wrote a great book called 'The Consolation of Philosophy' and he was murdered by, I think it was Theodoric because he was a barbarian. He may have been baptized, I think he was an Arian, but he was a barbarian. He didn't understand any of this type of stuff. You simply couldn't transmit classical culture of the kind that Boethius had anymore. It was Christianity that had some kind of immediate implication rather than the Platonism of Boethius (even though he was very influential in the Middle Ages). That's what carried the day until finally when the barbarian invasions stopped (largely because they started to convert to Christianity as well) suddenly you had the rise of the city and that was the beginning of high civilization.

So you had Paris, but the most important cities were all in Italy. These were the city-states that made the transition from the 'Dark Ages' to the high Middle Ages. And you had the art that went along with that. If you want to read the crucial turning point in that regard, I cover it in 'The Dangers of Beauty'. Where Thomas Aquinas says that existence calls essence into being (a reversal of Platonism), based on a deep understanding of the fact that the creation created an incarnational world. Neither Plato nor Aristotle knew that the world had been created. They thought it was eternal. This had an effect on Giotto, who started painting in a completely different way. He abandoned the Greek models, and then you've got this huge surge of these city-states, Florence, Venice, Rome, Bologna...

All these places had an enormous burst of creativity in everything from finance (double-entry bookkeeping came into being in Venice), art (obviously everyone knows that), cloth manufacturing, science (with a guy like Galileo, the beginning of science) all of these things grew out of that initial nucleus that was Thomas Aquinas, that was Albertus Magnus, and this type of thing. Now that is an enormous, a tremendous step forward of the type that the world has ever seen before. The world had never seen that type of painting. The world had never figured out how to do a double-entry book. It was all these Italian city-states that were the cutting edge of Logos in human history at that point. And everything is great, right?

Except no, it's not great. And what is it? What is always going to be the problem? Moral decline is always the problem. It always brings about the collapse of civilization. So the man who stood up against this in this period was Savonarola. He was a great reformer in Florence who basically mobilized and electrified the entire population of Florence into a huge moral reform that took place toward the end of the 15th century. This is symbolized best by the Bonfires of the Vanities where everybody would take things that led them into sin and throw it in the bonfire and burn it. The entire population is swept up in this religious fervor, including Botticelli who threw his own paintings on the Bonfire of the Vanities. Now we don't know which paintings he threw on, but I suspect he was doing pornography because that's what was happening at that time and the Medici were promoting that.

The Medici were in charge of Florence and they were decadent. So what is the infallible sign that your culture is decadent? It's sodomy and it's usury, which is the two pillars of our Jewish culture right now. The man who understood this classically was Dante, who put sodomites and usurers in the same circle in Hell and everybody's shocked by this. But why is that? Because the sodomite takes what is fruitful (which is sex) and makes it sterile, and the usurer takes what is sterile (namely money - Aristotle said money is sterile and it is) and makes it fruitful through compound interest or usury. Florence is the culmination of this, and Rome should have run up to Savonarola and kissed his feet and proclaimed him a saint on the spot. But that's not the way the world works and so what we had is the Medici collaborating with the sodomites and the usurers, and unfortunately the Pope went along with it.

So they murdered Savonarola. He was put to death. They say he was burned at the stake, but he wasn't burned at the stake. They hanged him first and then they burned his body. After they burned his body, women ran out onto the public square in Florence and gathered up his ashes because they knew he was a saint. And he is a saint, in my humble opinion. The only reason he's not declared a saint is because of the Jesuits, but that's another story. Okay, so that was the last warning. This is God's warning to the Church: you you kill the prophet, you will pay a price. And the price was that the next time it comes around it's not going to be some saintly Dominican. It's going to be a German on the other side of the Alps, and this man's name is Martin Luther. This time it's different.

So now you've got a Medici (Pope Leo the 10th was a Medici) and he says, I'm going to enjoy the papacy! I think God made me this, and I'm going to have a good time! Then someone said, well there's this big uprising in Germany, and he says, oh, it's just a quarrel among monks. Well, that was a disastrous misdiagnosis of one of the great cataclysms in European history. Okay, now what was the hubbub about? It goes back a hundred years, to the Hussite Rebellion in Bohemia. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, wrote his Historia Bohemica in 1458, in which he said that eighty percent of all property was owned by the Church. Well, we have something similar all across Europe and there's a certain group of people who really do not like this idea. The symbolic person here would be Ulrich von Hutten, who was a contemporary of Martin Luther. A brilliant Latinist himself, but unfortunately a dissolute brilliant Latinist, who had the distinction of being one of the first people in Europe to contract syphilis.

Syphilis came to Europe through the army that conquered Venice. France's First Army marched down the Italian peninsula and spread syphilis wherever it went. It was incredibly virulent. Nobody understood what it was. The story is that a lot of these people sailed with Columbus, they came back after contracting syphilis in the New World because that's where it came from and they spread it throughout all of Europe. Ulrich von Hutten's got syphilis, he's trying to cure himself, there's that whole story there, but he's also one of those petty nobles who is now being moved out. They are losing their their social significance because there's a new class of people rising up, and these are the merchants. And the best symbol of that would be the Fugger family from Augsburg, who were the successors to the Medici for being the Papal bankers.

So now you got a new group of people. The displaced powers are upset. There's all this resentment. There's all this turmoil. The Fuggers are collecting the money for the Holy See from indulgences and so this becomes a flash point. Martin Luther is upset about the indulgences because all the gold is bleeding down to Rome and the Germans are being impoverished. And so what you have is the rise of nationalism, but more importantly, you've got the revenge of the aristocracy. They see this moment of turmoil, this moment of insecurity as their moment of opportunity and basically they steal the property of the Catholic Church. This is all that the English Reformation was. It was nothing but a looting operation. It was a looting operation in every Protestant country in Europe, but in Germany they had a theological veneer of respectability, and that was Martin Luther who came up with all of their theories. He was a dissolute man, a man who could never control his passions. If you want to read about that part of Martin Luther, read my book Degenerate Moderns. "Be a sinner and sin strongly but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ." This is a man who could not control his passions. He was a man who was angry all the time. He was a drunk and this led him to have difficulty controlling his sexual passions.

And so as a result, he's now living with a group of liberated nuns (you know what they're like). Basically the Reformation now is not just a looting operation with the petty nobility, now it's women's liberation. What do I mean by women's liberation? The Protestant thugs in Germany would basically break into a convent, drag all the women out (some of them were only too happy to leave) and then pimp them. I hate to say this, I know our separated brethren are not going to like this, but Martin Luther, in addition to being a drunk, was a pimp. Now why do I say that? Because he wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz and said, basically, if you come over to the reform party we'll give you the best-looking nun of the lot here that we just liberated from cloister Nimbschen. Luther was no stranger to this. He married one of those nuns. I don't know what he did before he married her, but at a certain point there was a lot of scandal there and so he married her.

Now, in doing this he broke his vows and she broke her vows, and so how am I going to get around this? You know, this is not good. What am I going to say? I know! I know! I'll say God made me do it! Which is exactly what he did. He wrote the treatise 'De Servo Arbitrio', which is on the 'enslaved will'. Basically, that was that theology where I sinned because God sinned through me. I can't control my passions, you can't control your passions. Nobody in Germany can control their passions anymore. He got all these horny nuns and monks running around creating communes like the Anabaptist commune in Munster (which was about 60 miles from where I taught school). No, all we'll have is Grace. Three principles of the Reformation: Sola Scriptura (only scripture), Sola Fide (faith alone) and Sola Gratia (by grace alone). These are the pillars of the Reformation and they all go back to Luther's inability to lead a moral life and control his own passions. So I can't do it, I'm going to run up the white flag, but God will take care of this. He will cover my sins with His Grace, the way snow covers shit. That was his theology.

So the Germans were always famous for that type of, you know, frank language. Luther created the German language. His Bible basically created the German language at that point as as a written language. He had a devastating effect on the Catholic Church.

[Gemma O'Doherty:] So up until then we had 1500 years of Catholicism! I think it's really important to say that. And yes, there were corruptions but with Luther everything was thrown out. Aquinas, the saints...

[E Michael Jones:] Right! This started in England.

The English are responsible for this, particularly William of Ockham. Ockham was a Nominalist. Nominalism had a devastating effect on thought, on Logos, on philosophy because it was at the age of piety and so the culture split at that point into science and religion. This is the era when Galileo is coming around these people. They're they're talking about the universe in a different way, also a result of Catholicism, also the result of Albertus Magnus (who was the father of science)... Okay, and that meant that religion became private. Private religion means devotional religion. So you have this kind of split that is not healthy for the Church and the Jesuit exercises are an example, and Thomas à Kempis' 'The Imitation of Christ'. This is all this pietism that came out and Logos kind of disappeared. Where is Logos here? We we have lost sight of it. Then Descartes comes along and basically codifies this split by saying there are two realms of 'res extensa' (which is matter) and the 'res cogitans' (which is mind) and there's really no connection. That's the world that we grew up in. To this day!

I had a long conversation with an Iranian woman and she was a nuclear physicist who got hornswoggled in by her father and the mullahs into a one-year marriage with an Irishman. Well, that's not a good idea! You know? You see what I'm saying. You have pious but irrational religion, and you have rational but atheistic science. So what you're going to choose? Well this is a dilemma, basically, for the entire world right now, but particularly in Iran where they never had that. Philosophy disappeared in Iran because it was too dangerous: if you said something philosophical, the caliph was liable to chop your head off! Which is exactly what Saladin did to Suhrawardi! He got a son to become a disciple of Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, and then he told his son: this guy's too dangerous, chop his head off! That sent a message through the Persian culture and at that point they all converted to poetry. And now they have the greatest poetry in the world. It's part of their identity, but they didn't have this ability to deal with the world in philosophical terms.

This is crucial! Practical reason is morality. That's a big part of philosophy and if you don't have it... if you're trying to figure out how you should act, how you deal with your sexual passions, and all you have to deal with it is nuclear physics and one-day marriages, it's not going to work out. Well, that was precisely the disintegration that took place over this period of time. So I mean, just to bring this to a close, Adolf Hitler now wants to unite Germany and the first thing he realizes is that half of my people are Protestant and half of them are Catholic. How am I going to do that? And he goes to them and he realized: I can't do it, so the hell with it! I'm going to go back before Christianity. I'm going to go back to the Nibelungenlied. I'm going to go back to Richard Wagner and create my own crazy mythology to unite the German people! Which spells disaster for Germany.

A whole part of what I've left out of this whole thing is the tragedy for Ireland. What you really need to read here is Cobbett's 'History of England and Ireland'. Cobbett said: for 900 years England was a Catholic country and the wealth of the country was devoted to the people of England through the charitable organizations of the Catholic Church. You could go (I think he said) six miles in any direction and you would find some Catholic institution that would take you in for the night and if you got sick they would nurse you back to health. All of that disappeared when the aristocracy decided: I want that property. And that's what the Reformation was, and when they got that property they drove the serfs off the land. Now they've got no place to live. They've got no way of earning a living. They're going to have to raise sheep now (because the Italians would buy up every speck of wool that they could produce in England) and that's how they're going to make money. And the poor people have no way to earn a living and so they all become robbers and highwaymen. Well okay, we'll have to pass laws against highwaymen.

Belloc says that these people never recovered until the Industrial Revolution. And so it was until when they finally got jobs in those big factories, and that's another whole problem that they had to deal with. Tawney called them the upstart aristocracy. "The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon!" That image is just so powerful of a description! That's the Reformation! That was the upstart class, the carcass was the Catholic Church!

The main difference between France and England is that they allowed the French people to buy up the church property whereas the English aristocracy kept it all to themselves. As a result you had enormous allegiance to the revolution, up to this day among certain groups in France. Because they were bought off! Because they were complicit in the looting of the Church. But you're right, the English were responsible for this. The Whig Party took power with the Glorious Revolution. They brought in King Billy the Dutchman simply because he was a Protestant. They would not allow the Bonnie Prince Charlie or any of the Stuarts to come back.

When Bonnie Prince Charlie finally got to the highland lairds, they immediately went to his side and they started marching on London. They had Claymores: big, two-handed swords which were deadly at close combat, and they got within 40 miles of London. That's when Cumberland brought cannons over. A sword is no match for a cannon and so they lost. The heirs of the defeated Jacobites were then brought down to Cambridge and Oxford and given education so they could turn them into Englishmen. Adam Smith was one of the tutors of those people. That was his job, as a a Scots Presbyterian, to basically initiate these people into the new regime. The people who weren't lucky enough got sent to places like North and South Carolina as indentured servants. And were going to be dead within seven years, because they were going to be worked to death. And those who didn't, escaped into the mountains - and that became the Scotch-Irish basis for Appalachian culture to this day.

We're talking about 500 years of hatred of Catholicism. Five hundred years of people like the Cromwell family. Cromwell lived in a Dominican Monastery! And every day he woke up and said: crime pays! I'm in this house because we stole it from the Catholic Church and I'm not going to give it back! We're never going to give it back! And that fueled the animosity of the early Cromwell, and then that same Cromwell later went to Ireland. By the time he got there he was convinced that these Catholics were sub-human, and he treated them that way. Look at what happened in Drogheda. Because what you had was a group of oligarchs. The Protestants were the oligarchs of their day. It was an international conspiracy against the people of their own countries. Exactly what we're talking about today! Exactly the situation in Ireland. The Protestant aristocracy view the Irish people as the enemy. Just the way Varadkar views the Irish people, as their enemy because they are the servants of the oligarchs. They are servants of the World Economic Forum and so on and so forth.