LAWRENCE BROWN'S BASIC POINT | 2008-03-09
To ME, and maybe not to him, Brown made a point I cogitate about.
I read the Da Vinci Code and realized that accepted history still obsesses on Constantine. In the Code, he was supposed to have unilaterally changed the whole Church and made it wholly male-dominated. That reflects the usual accepted history doctrine that there was a united Church that was perverted when Constantine saw those words, not a Cross, in the sky.
But one man didn't do all that, whether in accepted history or in the Da Vinci Code. My thesis, which is open to correction, is that Constantine was practical politician of his own time.
I stressed the importance of realizing one's POINT OF VIEW. Brutus is right that Brown was an engineer and a mathematician, so he looked at things from that standpoint. That is an important observation.
My background is power politics, so naturally I look at things that way.
What Lawrence made me look at was the historical PROCESS that Constantine was dealing with. "Rome" didn't FALL. What was ROME became two distinct societies. History does not even recognize that the Levantine Civilization which included the Eastern Mediterranean for so long was a "Great Civilization" unto itself.
In Levantine Civilization, what we see as the religious groups were the actual nations. When a people became Moslem, they wrote in Arabic script. The Jews wrote in Hebrew script, including the ones who became Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew characters. As Russia shows us, the Orthodox Christians wrote in Cyrillic.
The West, contrary to accepted history, did not languish in unbathed barbarity until the rediscovery of Classical Literature gave us a Rebirth. We became the West. We were a separate entity from Mankind in general.
This is one of the most important transitions in history from ANY point of view. It was the origin of not one, but TWO "Great Civilizations," even if you discount the special importance of the West.
And it is totally ignored.
We have a giant hole to fill in history. It should be fun.