This month, I'm delighted to welcome W.
Lindsay Wheeler back to "Sparta Reconsidered" with a new -- highly thought-provoking - guest blog. He would welcome feed-back, so don't hesitate to contact him at the email address provided at the end of the article.
The True Parellel to Sparta is Christendom
Far too many modern textbooks put Athens at the start and center of our
cultural understanding. Skipping over two thousand years, we go, as it were, from
Athenian democracy straight to modern civilization. But there is a bump in the
road, the English Classicist J. Burnet, for example, notes that “…The Platonist
tradition underlies the whole of western civilization”. (93) The Platonist
tradition had nothing to do with Athenian democracy; Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, all, excoriated democracy. That being the case, the question then
becomes where did Plato’s teachings arise? From Sparta as Socrates points out.
Many modern textbooks equate Sparta with dictatorship and
totalitarianism with a number of academics conjoining Sparta with Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany
If Sparta
provoked Socrates and Plato, then what is the true parallel of Sparta should be
in line with the Platonist tradition, right? The real parallel of Sparta is
Christendom! *
The
most glaring characteristic shared by both was serfdom of the helots in both
Crete and Sparta and the feudalism exhibited by
most of Europe . Just like in India
There is a continuation of Indo-European life and
practice from the Doric Greeks of Crete and Sparta ,
thru Rome Roman
Empire .” (Urquhart) Roman laws, ideas, institutions, practices were
carried over into Christendom.
From her early history, Rome and her culture have been
influenced and directed by Doric customs for both Cicero and Plutarch point to
the tribes of the Sabines as bringing Doric (Spartan) Culture to bear upon City
upon the Tiber, during the earliest kingly reigns: the idea of mixed government
of King, Senate, and assemblies, the regard for religious involvement
(auguries), and military customs and dress. There is a continuum from Sparta to
Rome and then from Rome to Christendom.
At the Fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fell into a state
of war brought on by the countless invasions of migratory nations. This state
of Nature forced all nations to create, naturally and organically, into the
warrior caste system which mirrored Sparta, of King, Aristocracy and commons.
As Diachercus of Messina labeled Sparta
Another grand parallel is that the Doric Greeks, the
Romans and Christian Europe were heavily intertwined with religion. Spartan and
Roman kings and later Roman Emperors along with other Roman office holders had
religious duties. Sparta and Rome Rome
“Two there are, august emperor, by which this world is
principally ruled: the consecrated authority of bishops and the royal power.”
(Mastnak quoting Pope Gelasius I c. 494 A. D., pg 2)
The idea of Church and State formed an integral whole
from Sparta , thru Rome
The Altar was Roman Catholicism. And here too, not only
did Sparta lay the groundwork for Hellenism that created the environment for
Christianity’s birth and growth through Plato but also, thru Plato, formed the
consciousness, intellectualism and dogma of Roman Catholicism. In his book Plato’s Gift to Christianity, The Gentile
Preparation For and The Making of The Christian Faith, Prof. Ehrlich all
but names Plato as the founder of Christianity. Cochrane observes that there
are “…undoubted affinities between Christianity and Platonism.” (pg. 376) As
Rome Hellenized (Horace), Christianity in turn Hellenized and itself, in turn,
took up Roman clothing accoutrements, laws, titles and customs thus creating
Roman Catholicism.
Christendom was a Catholic theocracy, and the English
Anglican divine, W. R. Inge, writes that
“If we had to choose one man
as the founder of Catholicism as a theocratic system, we should have to name
neither Augustine nor St. Paul, still less Jesus Christ, but Plato, who in the Laws
sketches out with wonderful prescience the condition for such a polity, and the
form which it would be compelled to take.” (26)
Nature
created the warrior cultures of Europe. They did this by the natural
effervescence of environment and racial proclivities (Dumezil’s
trifunctionality) and second by reinforcing those proclivities by consciously
copying and imitating the Natural Order, the Cosmos that is embedded in Plato’s
writing down of Doric philosophy. The Natural Law, found in the Dorian’s
creation of philosophy, formed the basis of Western Culture’s religion, ethics,
contemplative thought and the order of their societies, consciously and
subconsciously.
The Sparta/Rome/Christendom/Christianity
continuum was all formed by Nature and God. Western Civilization has a
continuous trajectory from classical times to the Throne and Altar of
Christendom. And this belies the grandest equivalent between Sparta and
Christendom, the telos of these societies was directed toward spiritual
objectives—theosis for the Dorians (Wheeler) and salvation for the Christian,
thus the authoritarianism of both these societies. On the other hand, the whole
modern world is from the imagination and will of mortal, fallen man not only
divorced from Nature but from God, all based on hatred. That the historical
event of Christendom doesn’t even touch the minds of modern academia and to see
all of modern academia miss this so obvious correspondence is scandalous.
If
the German National Socialists were channeling the whole of Sparta, it
woulda/shoulda recreated Christendom but they were egalitarians, having a great
hatred for royalty, aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church. Hitler was a
demagogue. Where else have demagogues appeared? Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn
traces Nazism to Athens and its democracy where demagogues lived and ruled.†
There
were no demagogues in Sparta. Sparta is not only the foundation of the Throne
but of the Altar of Christendom as well. Sparta’s true parallel is Christendom.
W. Lindsay Wheeler, November 12, 2014
wheelerplatsis@hotmail.com
wheelerplatsis@hotmail.com
Notes:
* Christendom: “In
its historical sense, the term usually refers to the medieval
and early modern period, during which the Christian
world represented a geopolitical power juxtaposed with both paganism and
especially the military threat of the Muslim
world.” (Wikipedia) For this purpose, from the Edict of Constantine to the
French Revolution, where the Roman Catholic Church, Monarchy and the classical republics such as Venice,
existed as a unified civilization of Europe.
† “The
modern totalitarian parties are all
fundamentally ‘democratic’.” (Kuehnelt, 246) In the anakylosis,
Socrates and Plato both said that dictatorship comes out of democracy. “It was German liberalism and German
bourgeois democracy which had turned National Socialist”. (ibid, 262)
References:
Burnet, J. (1924)
Philosophy. In R. W. Livingstone, (Ed.) The
Legacy of Greece. Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press.
Cochrane,
Charles Norris (1940) Christianity and
Classical Culture, A Study of Thought and Action From Augustus to Augustine.
NY: Oxford University
Inge, W. R.
(1924) Religion. In R. W. Livingstone, (Ed.) The Legacy of Greece ,
Oxford , England
Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
Erik von [1952](1993) Liberty or Equality.
Front Royal, Virginia: Christendom Press.
Mastnak,
Tomaž (2002) Crusading Peace:
Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. Berkeley , CA : University of California
Urquhart, F.
(1908). Christendom. In The Catholic
Encyclopedia. New York :
Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved November 10, 2014 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03699b.htm
Wheeler, W.
Lindsay (2011) Macrocosm/Microcosm in Doric Thought. Self-published:
academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/1619468/Macrocosm_Microcosm_in_Doric_Thought_Part_I