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In order to avoid a repetition of past errors, a reassessment of Antonio Vieira’s role in History is necessary. Certainly, reevaluating him in the History discipline does not imply dethroning him in the Literature discipline, in which the poet Fernando Pessoa rightly anointed him as Emperor of the Portuguese language. In the end, literary evaluation helps to explain how a notorious traitor managed to go down in History as a symbol of nationality: being a rhetorical genius, he was capable of doing the impossible.

Vieira’s nationalism is linked to Sebastianism. The history of Sebastianism is as follows: in 1578, the young King Sebastian of Portugal “disappears” in Morocco during the battle of Alcácer-Quibir. He was unmarried and an only child, so his death should have caused — and in fact did — the thing most feared by the Lisbon court: the loss of Portugal’s independence from Spain. After Portugal commits the extravagance of crowning an old cardinal as king, the crown is inherited by the Habsburgs; more precisely, by Philip II of Spain. Thus, Sebastianism is a movement of independence, insofar as the return of King Sebastian would lead to the return of Portuguese sovereignty. An anti-Spanish movement, therefore.

Why be against Spain? The courts were different from the common people. The people was enthusiastic about the Trovas do Bandarra (something like “The Songs of the Troubadour Bandarra”), which is the founding poem of Sebastianism and was recited by illiterate people on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a century. The shoemaker Bandarra died in 1556, even before the disappearance of King Sebastian. And, importantly, the Songs were prophetic; they announced “the political and religious unification of the entire world under the scepter of a mysterious Occult King” (A. J. Saraiva, “Antonio Vieira, Menasseh Ben Israel et le Cinquième Impère”, p. 27). Given the disappearance of King Sebastian, it was understood that he was the Occult King who could return at any moment to restore Portuguese glory in great style.

And why were people so excited about the prophetic dreams written by a shoemaker? Because of the marks of Judaism, a religion that lives in wait for the Messiah and, therefore, worships prophets who help it not to fade away. Portugal forcibly converted Jews in 1497 — the conversion is important because it puts people under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. This conversion left new Christians in a kind of religious limbo, as they did not actually become Christians, nor did they have any more access to Jewish training. This opened space for figures like Bandarra to be treated as a religious authority in areas with a large new Christian population, which was the case in his home area.

One more very important thing to understand Sebastianist nationalism: the Portuguese Inquisition was not as harsh as the Spanish one. Thus, the disappearance of King Sebastian also implied the subjection of new Portuguese Christians to the feared Spanish Inquisition.

Let us note well the paradoxical, almost schizophrenic situation: Jews jealous of their own independence can use the image of the very Catholic King Sebastian, who died fighting Moors for the faith, to represent their cause. And Portuguese Catholics can still drool with hatred for Spain while de facto supporting the cause of the Jews.

To complicate the issue a little more, the Jews who did not want to live as new Christians, subject to the Inquisition, left Portugal and settled in Netherlands, Spain’s arch-enemy at the time. The interest in Portugal was so great that during the Iberian Union the Netherlands even had an aspirant to the Portuguese throne, Manuel, son of the Prior of Crato, who claimed the Portuguese Crown during the Iberian Union.

Now let’s go to Vieira. Born in Lisbon in 1608 and deceased in Salvador da Bahia in 1697, he witnessed the Iberian Union (1580 — 1640), the Dutch Invasions (1624 — 1654) and the Restoration War (1640 — 1668). The Jesuit was born in Lisbon, but came to Bahia as a child and was educated here. Here, he also witnessed the first Dutch invasion in 1624. That year, the Dutch captured Salvador and, the following year, saw the Spanish Armada cross the Atlantic to recover Bahia. It was the high point of the Iberian Union’s popularity among the Portuguese. (I wrote in greater detail about it in this article.) In 1626, Vieira’s literary gifts were already recognized, and the Jesuits commissioned him to write the Annual Letters, which reports on the war against the Dutch.

The Portuguese mood would change when the Netherlands returned to conquering lands in Brazil, giving them the impression that the Habsburgs only governed for Spain. This did not take long to happen, as in 1628 the Dutch began their promising conquests in Pernambuco, and ten years later (1638) they tried to conquer Bahia again, which resisted and tried to help Pernambuco. In 1639, Vieira gave a sermon that gave biblical proportions to the war. There is, therefore, nationalist material from Vieira against the Dutch, if anyone wants to represent him in those lights.

Vieira arrives in Portugal in the middle of the Restoration, and his great charisma makes him ingratiate himself with the new king: John IV, first king of the Braganza dynasty, the last and longest-lasting Portuguese dynasty.

John IV’s claim was weak, and Portugal’s financial situation could hardly withstand a war against Spain and the Netherlands at the same time. For the first question, Vieira tried to use Sebastianism: he “corrected” a verse, changing Fuão (So-and-So) for João (John), causing John IV to be “announced” in the prophecy. To increase the revenues of the Portuguese Crown, in 1642 Vieira came up with the idea (accepted by the king) of charging taxes to the Church and ending the tax privileges of the nobility. Thus, Portugal greatly anticipated the French Revolution in adopting this clearly liberal trait. But as this would not solve the fiscal problems, Vieira found creditors in the Portuguese Jews of the Netherlands. These same Jews were often shareholders of WIC, the Dutch chartered company that was conquering lands in Brazil. Evident conflict of interest: after all, emancipating itself from Spain wasn’t necessary because it neglected Brazil? It wasn’t the only reason, but it was undoubtedly a weighty reason. Another reason was Spanish heavy taxes, which were also increased in Portugal.

Another attempt to improve public accounts, made in 1643, was the proposal to bring Portuguese Jews back, so that they could bring money. (Thus, we see that two years before the abdication of Cristina of Sweden, commented on in the previous article, there was this plan to make Portugal a kind of an Amsterdam.) Vieira was unable to convince the king at the time, but he formulated a constant line of action: he would be the defender of the Jews or new Christians and an opponent of the Inquisition. The first were seen as good for the treasury, and the Inquisition as causing losses.

In 1645, the Pernambucan Insurrection began, the aim of which was to expel the Calvinist Dutch and their Portuguese Jewish partners from an immense area of ​​the Brazilian Northeast. In 1646, Vieira was devastated by the news of the successes, as he considered that it was better for Portugal to give up Brazil to ally with the Netherlands against Spain. The following year, already integrated with Menasseh Ben Israel (Portuguese rabbi from Amsterdam), Vieira proposed to the king that Portugal buy Pernambuco from the Netherlands and pay Portuguese Jews to bribe the Dutch authorities. In the same year, he wrote an apocryphal document in which he practically called for the end of the Inquisition, proposing that it would not bother new Christians and end the distinction between new Christians and old Christians. Still in 1647, Vieira bought used warships in the Netherlands so that Brazil could defend itself against the Netherlands itself. In 1648, however, the Inquisition put an end to Vieira’s fête, arresting the new Christian Duarte da Silva, an organizer of the purchase of ships and a money lender for the Braganza King.

In 1647, Vieira devised a crazy plan to “help” Portugal: marry the little Prince Theodosius (who did not reach the throne because he died before) with the daughter of Gaston d’Orleans, who was plotting (unsuccessfully) to steal the throne from his brother Louis XIII of France. At the time, France was at war with Spain. King John IV would then abdicate the throne and go into exile (imitating Cristina of Sweden?), leaving Portugal (and Brazil) under the regency of Gaston d’Orleans for the duration of Theodosius’ minority, of whom Vieira himself was tutor. The plan did not go ahead because the French did not want it, and the fact that the king accepted reveals the dimensions of the influence that Vieira had over the first king of the Braganza Dynasty.

In 1649, after the first Battle of Guararapes in Pernambuco, which was very important for the Brazilian victory, Vieira writes (and the king approves) the “Papel Forte” (“Strong Paper”), in which he argues that it is impossible for the rebels to defeat the Dutch and defends that Pernambuco be handed over to the Netherlands. Fortunately, the Strong Paper was weak, as the rebels defeated the Dutch in spite of Portugal, counting on the help of the governor of Bahia.

Then, both because of the Inquisition and because of the indignation that the Strong Paper brought, Vieira lost his ascendancy over the king. His last European intrigue occurred on a trip to Rome in 1650: he offered Portuguese money so that the Neapolitans would once again rebel against Spain (the same Naples so coveted by Cristina of Sweden at the time). His plan was to offer a weakened Spain the marriage of Prince Theodosius with the Spanish Princess, reuniting the Crown — but transferring the capital to Lisbon. An Iberian Union in reverse. To please the Spanish, King John IV would abdicate in favor of his son. Vieira made both proposals at the same time in Rome: to the Neapolitans and the Spanish. Spain discovered the plan for Naples and warned the Jesuit superior that Vieira had to leave quickly, otherwise he would be killed.

Well then. There’s the Sebastianist hero’s curriculum. The source I used for these deed is the book Antônio Vieira, by Prof. Ronaldo Vainfas.

If Vieira’s offensive against Brazil at this point needs no comment, Portugal’s case is more subtle. After all, all of Vieira’s plots were made with the aim of preventing the reunification between Portugal and Spain: giving up lands overseas, giving up the regency of their own country, getting into debt with the Sephardim in Amsterdam… Although, on a literary level, Vieira made Portugal a great world empire in his History of the Future, on a political level, Vieira was the architect of today’s tiny Portugal: a country closed to the overseas, with a tiny territorial extension, a poor population which apes Anglo-Saxon racism and which does not inspire the slightest respect for Brazil (the feeling of Brazilians for “Brazilian Guyana” is in no way similar to the feeling of Spanish America for Spain).

When the Songs of Bandarra appeared, Portugal was a rival sailing power to Spain. During the Iberian Union, it was a part of the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Since the triumph of Sebastianism as a national symbol, Portugal has never again managed to achieve its former glories.

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In June 1654, Queen Christina of Sweden, at the age of 27 and unmarried, abdicated the throne. On Christmas Eve, in Brussels, then the capital of the Spanish Netherlands, she secretly converted to Catholicism. When the conversion became public, it caused a great scandal in Lutheran society. The Vatican, on the other hand, received her with pomp and circumstance in 1655, seeing in her a great asset for propaganda.

There is an excellent work on the life of the eccentric queen: Christina of Sweden and Her Circle, by Susanna Åkerman. More than Christina’s circle, the work sheds light on the intellectual environment of the 17th century, showing that, far from being a prelude to the Age of Reason, it was a period of hallucinatory messianism and occult fever, especially in the Jewish and Calvinist worlds – but with penetration into the Catholic world, especially among Jesuits and Germans (because of the credulous Emperor Rudolf II). In the years 1664 and 1665, two comets gave occultists certainty that the end times were approaching, and in 1666 Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself messiah, enthusing Jews all over the world.

Christina’s life illustrates this mentality. She had a cousin who would succeed her if she had no heirs. Thus, he secretly sponsored an astrologer to tell her that she was not fit for conception. After the abdication, her cousin did indeed gain the throne, and he was expected by Protestants in Eastern Europe to be the Lion of the North, who would liberate them from the Catholic yoke. They believed in the prophecies of a Polish Calvinist woman named Kristina Poniatowska.

It would be inaccurate to portray Christina as simply credulous. On the one hand, she believed in alchemy and astrology; consequently, in alchemists, astrologers, and other occultists. But this was part of her self-image as Christina Minerva, which included, since she was queen, the ambition to transform Stockholm into a center of free thought in Europe, welcoming all types of religious people (including Jews and Muslims), except Unitarians (due to a prior issue in Sweden, not Christina in particular – incidentally, she would be a financier of the Polish Unitarian agitator Lubieniecki in exile).

The most illustrious philosopher Christina ever met was René Descartes, who went to Sweden to be her teacher. However, she did not have much appreciation for him, and shortly after his death she invited his Epicurean rival Gassendi. After her conversion to Catholicism, Christina caused some scandal by telling her acquaintances that her religion was that of the philosophers, which, although imprecise, is best expressed by Lucretius’s De rerum natura – a pioneering work in explaining religion as a simple consequence of ignorance and anxiety.

Despite her Lutheran upbringing and conversion to Catholicism, Christina is best understood as a heretical freethinker, as credulous as the rationalists of the time, who sought in Kabbalah and occultism a supposed ancient and true knowledge, forbidden by the Catholic Church (a subject we have already seen when discussing Francis Bacon). If she had this profile, then why did she insist on changing religion and losing a throne? Susanna Åkerman’s interesting thesis in Christina of Sweden and her Circle is that the queen had a theological-political plan sustained by the credulity of the time. Christina was power-hungry and never gave up on conquering a crown – even if it was the Swedish crown, when her cousin died and her plans further south were thwarted.

While still in Sweden, Christina secretly negotiated with Spain through Jesuits. Not surprisingly, it was on Spanish soil that she converted to Catholicism. Her initial plan was to win a crown in Flanders or Naples, both Spanish dominions. When Christina saw that Spain would not grant her any regency (in fact, Spain wanted her to stay in Sweden and marry a Catholic), she secretly switched sides to France and incited the French to invade Naples with the aim of giving her the island’s crown. In short, Christina converted to Catholicism because she had greater ambitions than the Protestant world could offer her. She had universalist ambitions refrained by Luteranism. And to see what those ambitions were, one must look at Marrano messianism, that is, the messianism of the more or less Christianized Portuguese Jews.

When Christina abdicated, she moved to the home of a rabbi in Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands, and left her income in the hands of Jewish bankers, so that it would multiply. What would be the interest of the Jews in this queen without a throne? Given her intellectual profile, “if indeed Christina’s intent was to rise up as a liberal, Catholic regent in Flanders, or when that failed in Naples, then the hopes of Jews and intellectuals for a new realm of freethought in Europe (of a type they knew existed in Amsterdam) were no longer just a dream” (Åkerman, 223-4). A Catholic Amsterdam in Naples was what Christina aspired to along with the Jews. If occultists were making prophecies to manipulate politicians, it is quite possible that the young queen, orphaned of father and daughter and insane mother, was being guided from before her abdication.

After the abdication, it is known that three messianic figures surrounded Christina: La Peyrère, Menasseh Ben Israel, and Antonio Vieira. The first was a French New Christian raised as a Calvinist, of probable Portuguese origin (since Peyrère is a Frenchified Pereira). In 1654, as secretary to Prince Condé, who aspired to the throne of France, La Peyrère moved into a house adjacent to Christina’s residence. His most famous work is Prae-Adamitae, printed in 1655 with money from the newly Catholic Christina. In it, he states that Adam is the ancestor only of the Jews, that Mosaic law applies only to them, and that the Jews have a different relationship with God than the Gentiles – who descend from other men older than Adam, the pre-Adamites. The book enraged both Catholics and Protestants, and in 1656, supposedly repentant, La Peyrère followed in his patroness’s footsteps and converted to Catholicism.

The Portuguese rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, born Manoel Dias Soeiro, lived in Amsterdam and is famous for having negotiated with Oliver Cromwell permission for Jews to establish communities in England (so that, by spreading further across the earth, they would hasten the coming of the Messiah). Another activity of his was Jewish proselytizing to the Christian public. He translated the Talmud into Spanish (perhaps omitting parts offensive to Jesus?) and wrote the curious work El Conciliador, which “which compiles 210 Hebrew and 54 Greek, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese sources to show that the proposed inconsistencies of the Bible all can be rendered plain with correct exegesis. Authorities such as Euripides and Vergil, Plato and Aristotle, Augustin, Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus are cited along with the Zohar and the Midrash, Maimonides and Leon Hebreo, Gabirol and Nachmanides, Paul de Burgos and Nicholaus de Lyra, Isaac Luria and Moses Cordovero. As the sheer length of this list of Greek and Jewish philosophers, poets, and Kabbalists indicates, the work is a gigantic attempt to bring philosophical thought, Christian and Jewish, to the problem of biblical interpretation. Grounded in Jewish traditional reasoning, the work also introduces Kabbalist methods and Apocalyptic projections.” (Åkerman, p. 185) You know those neo-Pentecostals full of Judaizing prophecies? Well, Menasseh Ben Israel was accessed as a repository of biblical knowledge, especially by Calvinists, since he resided in Amsterdam and there was this search for a non-Catholic authority. It would be worthwhile to conduct research to discover how much of the Scofield Bible theology draws from on this 1632 work.

The Jesuit Antonio Vieira, as Ronaldo Vainfas points out in his book Antônio Vieira, was probably of Jewish origin on his mother’s side. He did not have a very special known role in Christina’s political life. However, it was an important sign of status for her to have him as her confessor in Rome, since he was the favorite orator of the celebrities of the period.

Of the trio, the one who had the greatest direct importance was Peyrère. Another controversial work of his is Du rappel des juifs (1643), where he intends to establish a universal monarchy based in the Holy Land. Prince Condé will become King of France, defeat the Turks, return the Jews to the Holy Land and rule the world from there. Apparently, Peyrère followed the work Le Thresor des propheties de l’univers (1547) by a Christian Kabbalist named Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), according to whom there are two Messiahs: Christ, the universal messiah, and a descendant of the King of France, who would be the political and particularist messiah expected by the Jews. This work was available in Antwerp, and with Christina, Israel Ben Menasseh probably met Peyrère.

Now let’s go to Vieira, the emperor of the Portuguese language. A very useful article is “Antonio Veira, Menasseh Ben Israel et le Cinquième Empire”, by A. J. Saraiva. It is well known that Vieira had numerous problems with the Inquisition, and that the genius of rhetoric was not quite right in the head. For example, a trial began after he wrote to the Bishop of Japan that John IV of Portugal would be resurrected. To make matters worse, instead of renouncing his own ideas (which was the norm), Vieira tries to convince the inquisitors that he is right and the Church is wrong. The fact that he escaped only shows the extent of his political power.

Well, thanks to this extravagance, Vieira’s heretical ideas are well known, and in the aforementioned article Saraiva argues that he was repeating Menasseh Ben Israel, whom he himself told the inquisitors was his interlocutor, and the messianic scheme of the Rappel des juifs. The two important issues learned from Menasseh Ben Israel were: 1) that of the lost tribes and 2) the nature of the Messiah. The Jews believed that the lost tribes of Israel were hidden, and in 1644 our rabbi made known the “discovery” that the Indians of South America were, in fact, lost Jews (is that why Vieira defended it so much?). The fact that they had appeared indicated the approach of the Millennium, and Vieira was repeating a completely fictitious story of the Sabatic River, invented by the rabbi. As for the Messiah, the term designates two different things: the one of the Christians and the one of the Jews, the latter being the man who will free the Jews from captivity and lead them back to the Holy Land. While Christ is spiritual and universal, the Jewish messiah is earthly and particularistic (referring to the Jews). Thus, if King John IV were to resurrect, confront the Turks, and lead the Jews to the Holy Land, he would be the Messiah of the Jews, and would begin the Millennium. In it, a new religion would emerge, which would surpass the Church in the same way that the Church surpassed the Synagogue. It would be a new universal religion for the new universal kingdom.

Let’s leave the details of Vieira’s beliefs for another time, so as not to go on too long. What I wanted to highlight here is that Christian Zionism as we know it has clear precedents in the 17th century, and that Menasseh Ben Israel is a key figure. There was this attempt to create a new Catholic Amsterdam in the Mediterranean, and, with Vieira, there was a notorious attempt to maintain or restore a new Calvinist Amsterdam in the Brazilian Northeast. Both projects were opposed to the Spanish Empire, and took place amidst the Thirty Years’ War and the Restoration War (which followed the end of the Iberian Union).

Would Menasseh Ben Israel be a geopolitical genius of the caliber of the Zionist Henry Kissinger? We should abandon the 20th-century vice of explaining the world solely through materialistic causes and seek the intellectual/spiritual origins of a warlike messianic ideology that seems to have been active and successful at least since the 17th century.

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Em junho de 1654, a rainha Cristina da Suécia, aos 27 anos, solteira, abdica do trono. Na véspera do Natal, em Bruxelas, então capital dos Países Baixos espanhóis, ela se converte secretamente ao catolicismo. Quando a conversão foi tornada pública, tornou-se grande escândalo na sociedade luterana. O Vaticano, por outro lado, em 1655 recebe-a com pompa e circunstância, vendo nela um ótimo ativo para propaganda.

Há uma excelente obra sobre a vida da excêntrica rainha: Christina of Sweden and Her Circle [Cristina da Suécia e seu Círculo], de Susanna Åkerman. Mais do que do círculo de Cristina, a obra trata do ambiente intelectual do século XVII, mostrando que, longe de ser um prelúdio da era da Razão, era um período de messianismo alucinado e febre ocultista, especialmente nos mundos judaico e calvinista – porém com penetração no mundo católico, em especial entre jesuítas e germânicos (por causa do crédulo Imperador Rodolfo II). Nos anos de 1964 e 1965, dois cometas davam aos ocultistas certeza de que o fim dos tempos se aproximava, e em 1666 Sabbatai Zevi se proclama messias, entusiasmando judeus do mundo inteiro.

A vida de Cristina ilustra essa mentalidade. Ela tinha um primo que a sucederia, caso ela não tivesse herdeiros. Assim, ele patrocinou secretamente um astrólogo para dizer-lhe que não estava apta para a concepção. Após a abdicação, de fato o primo ganhou o trono, e era esperado por protestantes do Leste Europeu como o Leão do Norte, que iria libertá-los do jugo católico. Eles acreditavam nas profecias de uma calvinista polonesa chamada Kristina Poniatowska.

Seria uma imprecisão representar Cristina como uma simples crédula. Por um lado, ela acreditava em alquimia e astrologia; por conseguinte, em alquimistas, astrólogos e demais ocultistas. Mas isso fazia parte de sua autoimagem de Cristina Minerva, que incluía, desde quando rainha, a pretensão de transformar Estocolmo num centro de pensamento livre na Europa, recebendo todos os tipos de religiosos (incluídos judeus e muçulmanos), exceto unitaristas (por uma questão prévia da Suécia, não de Cristina em particular – aliás, ela seria uma financiadora do agitador unitarista polonês Lubieniecki em exílio).

O filósofo mais ilustre que Cristina conheceu em toda a sua vida foi René Descartes, que foi para a Suécia ser seu professor. No entanto, ela não tinha muito apreço por ele, e pouco depois de sua morte convidou seu rival epicurista Gassendi. Já depois da conversão ao catolicismo, Cristina causou algum escândalo dizendo aos seus conhecidos que sua religião era a dos filósofos, que, embora imprecisa, é melhor expressa pelo De rerum natura, de Lucrécio – obra pioneira na explicação da religião como uma simples consequência da ignorância e da ansiedade.

Apesar da criação luterana e da conversão ao catolicismo, Cristina é melhor compreendida como uma livre pensadora herética, tão crédula quanto os racionalistas da época, que buscavam na cabala e no ocultismo um suposto conhecimento antigo e verdadeiro, proibido pela Igreja Católica (um assunto que já vimos ao discutir Francis Bacon). Se ela tinha esse perfil, então por que ela fez questão de mudar de religião e perder um trono? A interessante tese de Susanna Åkerman em Christina of Sweden and her Circle é que a rainha tinha plano teológico-político sustentado pelas credulidades da época. Cristina era louca por poder e nunca desistiu de conquistar uma coroa – nem que fosse a coroa sueca, quando seu primo morreu e seus planos mais ao sul foram frustrados.

Quando ainda estava na Suécia, Cristina negociava secretamente com a Espanha por meio de jesuítas. Não à toa, foi em terreno espanhol que ela se converteu ao catolicismo. Seu projeto no início era ganhar uma coroa em Flandres ou Nápoles, ambos domínio espanhol. Quando Cristina viu que a Espanha não iria lhe dar nenhuma regência (na verdade, a Espanha queria que ela ficasse na Suécia e se casasse com um católico), passou secretamente para o lado da França e incitou os franceses a invadirem Nápoles com o fito de dar-lhe a coroa da ilha. Em resumo, Cristina se converteu ao catolicismo porque tinha ambições maiores do que o que o mundo protestante poderia lhe oferecer. Ela tinha ambições universalistas limitadas pelo luteranismo. E para ver que ambições seriam essas, é preciso olhar para o messianismo marrano, ou seja, o messianismo dos judeus portugueses mais ou menos cristianizados.

Quando Cristina abdica, ela se muda para a casa de um rabino na Antuérpia, Países Baixos Espanhóis, e deixa na mão de banqueiros judeus as suas rendas, para que se multipliquem. Qual seria o interesse dos judeus nessa rainha sem trono? Dado o seu perfil intelectual, “se a intenção de Cristina era ascender como uma regente católica liberal em Flandres ou, quando isso falhou, em Nápoles, então os anseios dos judeus e dos intelectuais por um novo espaço para o pensamento livre na Europa (de um tipo que eles sabiam que existia em Amsterdã) não eram mais só um sonho” (Åkerman, 223-4). Uma Amsterdã católica em Nápoles era o que Cristina ambicionava junto com os judeus. Se ocultistas faziam profecias a dedo para manipular políticos, é bem possível que a jovem rainha, órfã de pai e filha e louca, tenha sido teleguiada desde antes da abdicação.

Após a abdicação, sabe-se que de três figuras messiânicas rondando Cristina: La Peyrère, Menasseh Ben Israel e Antonio Vieira. O primeiro era um cristão novo francês criado como calvinista de provável origem portuguesa (pois Peyrère é Pereira afrancesado). Em 1654, na condição de secretário do Príncipe Condé, que aspirava ao trono da França, La Peyrère se muda para uma casa anexa à da residência de Cristina. Sua obra mais famosa é Prae-Adamitae, impressa em 1655 com dinheiro da recém-católica Cristina. Nela, afirma que Adão é ancestral apenas dos judeus, que a lei mosaica se aplica somente a eles, e que os judeus têm uma relação com Deus diferente dos gentios – que descendem de outros homens mais velhos que Adão, os pré-adamitas. O livro enfureceu tanto católicos quanto protestantes e em 1656, teoricamente arrependido, La Peyrère segue os passos de sua patrona e converte-se ao catolicismo.

O rabino português Menasseh Ben Israel, nascido Manoel Dias Soeiro, morava em Amsterdã, e é famoso por ter negociado com Oliver Cromwell a permissão para os judeus constituírem comunidades na Inglaterra (de modo que, espalhando-se ainda mais pela terra, acelerassem a vinda do Messias). Outra atividade sua era a de proselitismo judaico para o público cristão. Ele traduziu o Talmude para o espanhol (terá incluído partes ofensivas a Jesus?) e redigiu a curiosa obra El Conciliador, que “compila 210 fontes hebraicas, e 54 fontes gregas, latinas, espanholas e portuguesas para mostrar que as supostas inconsistências da Bíblia podem ser esclarecidas com a exegese correta. Autoridades como Eurípides e Virgílio, Platão e Aristóteles, Agostinho, Alberto Magno e Duns Scotus são citadas junto com o Zohar e o Midrash, Maimônides e Leão Hebreu, Gabirol e Nachmânides, Paulo de Burgos e Nicolau de Lyra, Isaac Luria e Moisés Cordovero. Como a simples extensão dessa lista de cabalistas, filósofos e poetas gregos e judeus indica, o trabalho é uma tentativa gigantesca de aproximar os pensamentos filosóficos cristão e judeu no problema da interpretação bíblica. Lastreado no pensamento judaico tradicional, o trabalho também introduz métodos cabalistas e projeções apocalípticas. El Conciliador deveria ser uma ponte entre o mundo judaico e mundo cristão.” (Åkerman, p. 185) Sabem esses neopentecostais cheios das profecias judaizantes? Pois é. Menasseh Ben Israel era acessado como um repositório de conhecimento bíblico especialmente por calvinistas, já que residia em Amsterdã e existia essa busca por uma autoridade não-católica. Seria conveniente uma pesquisa que descobrisse o quanto da teologia da Bíblia Scofield não se lastreia nessa obra de 1632.

O jesuíta Antonio Vieira, como aponta Ronaldo Vainfas no seu livro Antônio Vieira, era de provável origem judaica do lado materno. Ele não teve um papel muito especial conhecido na vida política de Cristina. No entanto, foi um importante sinal de status ela conseguir que ele fosse o seu confessor em Roma, já que ele era o orador predileto das celebridades do período.

Do trio, quem teve maior importância direta foi Peyrère. Outra obra controversa sua é Du rappel des juifs (1643), onde ele pretende instaurar uma monarquia universal sediada na Terra Santa. O Príncipe Condé se tornará Rei da França, derrotará os turcos, devolverá os judeus à Terra Santa e governará o mundo de lá. Aparentemente, Peyrère seguia a obra Le Thresor des propheties de l’univers (1547) de um cabalista cristão chamado Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), segundo o qual há dois Messias: Cristo, o messias universal, e um descendente do rei da França, que seria o messias político e particularista esperado pelos judeus. Essa obra estava disponível na Antuérpia, e com Cristina, Israel Ben Menasseh provavelmente conheceu Peyrère.

Agora vamos a Vieira, o imperador da língua portuguesa. Um artigo muito útil é “Antonio Veira, Menasseh Ben Israel et le Cinquième Empire”, de A. J. Saraiva. É bem sabido que Vieira teve inúmeros problemas com a Inquisição, e que o gênio da retórica não era bom da bola. Por exemplo, um processo teve início após ele escrever para o Bispo do Japão que D. João IV iria ressuscitar. Para piorar, em vez de renegar as próprias ideias (o que era o normal), Vieira trata de convencer os inquisidores de que ele está certo e a Igreja está errada. O fato de ele ter escapado só mostra o tamanho do seu poder político.

Pois bem, graças a essa extravagância, as ideias heréticas de Vieira são bem conhecidas, e no artigo supracitado Saraiva convence de que ele estava repetindo Menasseh Ben Israel, que ele mesmo contou aos inquisidores ser seu interlocutor, e o esquema messiânico do Rappel des juifs. As duas questões importantes aprendidas com Menasseh Ben Israel eram: 1) a das tribos perdidas e 2) a natureza do Messias. Os judeus acreditavam que as tribos perdidas de Israel estavam escondidas, e em 1644 nosso rabino tornou conhecida a “descoberta” de que os índios da América do Sul eram, na verdade, judeus perdidos (será por isso que Vieira defendia tanto?). O fato de terem aparecido indicava a aproximação do Milênio, e Vieira repetia uma história totalmente fictícia do Rio Sabático, inventada pelo rabino. Quanto ao Messias, o termo designa duas coisas diferentes: o dos Cristãos e o dos judeus, sendo este último o homem que libertará os judeus do cativeiro e os reconduzirá à Terra Santa. Enquanto Cristo é espiritual e universal, o messias judaico é terreno e particularista (referente aos judeus). Assim, se D. João IV ressuscitasse, enfrentasse os turcos e conduzisse os judeus à Terra Santa, ele seria o Messias dos judeus, e daria início ao Milênio. Nele, uma nova religião surgiria, que superaria a Igreja do mesmo jeito que a Igreja superou a Sinagoga. Seria uma nova religião universal para um novo reino universal.

Deixemos os detalhes das crenças de Vieira para outro momento, para não nos alongarmos demais. O que eu queria destacar aqui é que o sionismo cristão tal como o conhecemos tem precedentes nítidos no século XVII, e que Menasseh Ben Israel é uma personalidade chave. Houve essa tentativa de criar uma nova Amsterdã católica no Mediterrâneo, e, com Vieira, houve uma notória tentativa de manter ou restaurar uma nova Amsterdã calvinista no Nordeste brasileiro. Ambos os projetos eram opostos ao Império Espanhol, e davam-se em meio à Guerra dos Trinta Anos e à Guerra de Restauração (que se sucedeu ao fim da União Ibérica).

Seria Menasseh Ben Israel um gênio geopolítico do quilate do sionista Henry Kissinger? Convém abandonarmos o vício do século XX de explicar o mundo somente por causas materialistas e buscarmos pelas origens intelectuais/espirituais de uma ideologia messiânica bélica que parece estar ativa e exitosa pelo menos desde o século XVII.

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Before the Scientific Revolution, if we asked what a man is, the standard answer would be “rational animal.” That’s the Aristotelian answer. Before the Scientific Revolution, science (scientia), synonymous with knowledge, was a cohesive body in which there was an answer to questions from all disciplines: from the formation of the rainbow to the nature of angels, including marriage and interest rates.

Nowadays, if we ask what a man is, there simply isn’t a definition that claims to be unequivocal and valid in all fields of knowledge. The biologist’s answer will be one, the psychologist’s another, the anthropologist’s a third, and the philosopher’s a fourth – and no scientific authority will bother to reconcile all the answers with objective reality. Although modern science emerged with the purpose of understanding objective reality, its subdivision into countless specialties has led to a kind of practical relativism, since each discipline can deal with the same aspect of the object, without verifying with scientists from other disciplines how they see the same object. Let physicists say that glass is a liquid and chemists say that glass is a solid, because physics and chemistry are, in departmental practice, autonomous and self-sufficient disciplines.

When it comes to the humanities, and especially philosophy, the situation is even more chaotic. If we ask in a humanities faculty “what is man?”, the closest thing to a consensus will be that “there is no human nature”, which is the same as saying that man cannot be defined. This absurd idea, which Sartre defended in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) with a purported refutation of scholasticism, is repeated by postmodernists at every corner as if it were a self-evident truth, without even citing Sartre. Since these postmodernists inhabit the departments of all the humanities, for this reason, and only for this reason – only due to a political contingency, not a scientific matter – this is the closest thing to a consensual answer.

In a philosophy department, one would expect someone to know how to say that man is a rational animal. However, the one who repeats Aristotle and Thomas is the historian of philosophy, whose task is not to say what a man is, but rather to record and transmit the history of the philosophers’ opinions. Postmodernists aside, philosophy departments can offer analytical philosophers (who debate classical questions diachronically, generally linked to the world of exact sciences) and philosophers of mind, who debate science fiction and pretend to be serious just because they have many peer-reviewed articles.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it is no wonder that our era, even having sent man into space and deciphered his genetic code, does not know how to differentiate between men and women. Now, if there is no intellectual authority capable of giving a definition of man that is recognized by all areas of knowledge, only common sense prevented important people in scientific and political institutions from determining that women have penises.

It is easy to follow the drivel and see where this absurdity comes from: from Sartre’s philosophy, according to which there is no human nature, but rather a free existence that must make its own project without being bound to anything natural. In this spirit, his wife would say that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one”. In a veiled way (since it did not present itself as philosophical), cultural anthropology fostered this deconstruction of human nature even before Sartre’s existentialism. Margaret Mead’s lies about distant Western Samoa were from the 1920s; Sartre’s pamphlet, from the 1940s.

The lack of dialogue between disciplines is notorious, and throughout the 20th century, there was no shortage of attempts to solve the problem through curricular changes. What was, in fact, a serious epistemological problem, was mistaken for a simple curricular issue. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, wise men were not more complete because of a curriculum, but because of their conception of knowledge.

To understand this well, let’s compare three Renaissance figures: the scholastic, the modern scientist, and the alchemist. The scholastic is Aristotelian-Thomistic, and there is an Aristotelian-Thomistic answer for everything. The modern scientist was trained in scholasticism, but discovered that geocentrism and the theory of the five elements are wrong, so the Aristotelian-Thomistic system cannot be entirely true. What the whole truth is, he does not know. Finally, there is the alchemist, who even during the scientific revolution continues to use the theory of the five elements and the implicit geocentrism of astrology.

The scholastic and the modern scientist share a vision of knowledge as a whole: if Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were right, then it is impossible that the element earth is not at the center of the cosmos; Copernicus and Galileo must be wrong. But if Copernicus and Galileo are right, then the entire marvelous edifice built by Thomas Aquinas on Aristotelian foundations is compromised and must be re-examined. As for the alchemists, who pursued Plato, Aristotle, Kabbalah, astrology, and Persian magic, they were omnivores incapable of the systematic thinking required to found or refound Science.

Faced with a truly objectivist conception of knowledge, the natural thing is to invent an institution responsible for increasing and systematizing it within a hierarchy: the university, which studies the universus. It studies everything, or the whole, for this was the meaning of universus before becoming a synonym for cosmos.

On the other hand, we saw in the previous article that Bacon represents the sorcerer’s side of modern science, the side that draws from the alchemists who were never able to create a universalist project. Regarding Bacon, it is worth quoting Jason Josephson once again:

“Bacon’s conception of knowledge was predicated on human fallibility, made worse by a universe he described as a vast dark labyrinth, full of blind alleys, hidden passages, and intricate convolutions. […] Bacon argued that because the human mind was profoundly defective and the world fundamentally enigmatic, the best a person could hope for was a fragmentary form of knowledge, and even then, this was only possible by means of faith in God.” (The Myth of Disenchantment, p. 47) However, the experience of the present century teaches that fragmentary knowledge is the same as no knowledge at all, because it leads to relativism in which each discipline has its own truth.

Ultimately, the fact is that the Scientific Revolution caused a trauma both in the Catholic Church and the University that is still felt today: once a whole system was overthrown, nothing whole was put in its place. What remains are these sciences that have no authority over each other, organized into anarchic bureaucracies that go by the name of university.

The current state of affairs – in which no one has the authority to say what a man is, and how many sexes the species has – shows the need for an institution responsible for producing and systematizing knowledge. An institution that was invented before, in the Middle Ages, with the name of University.

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In the previous article, we touched upon the fact that Kabbalah was studied by men who made very important contributions to modern science, which emerged in the Catholic world. We also saw that these men were not Jewish; thus, an influence of Kabbalah on science is not the same thing as the influence of Jewish scientists on science. In fact, contrary to what the current revisionism undertaken by IQ fetishists professes, the participation of Jews in modern science was insignificant until emancipation, and this was due to the peculiar obscurantism of medieval Judaism.

Curiously, in the Renaissance and the beginning of modernity, men of science became superstitious, renewing, for example, interest in astrology (a discipline refuted since the time of Cicero). In an era of urban enrichment and increased book production, there was no shortage of opportunities for the human interest in what is presented as hidden, veiled, and highly secret, to manifest itself. If alchemy aimed for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, capable of making anyone rich and young forever, Kabbalah promised something close to that, and which was perhaps a requirement for alchemy: mastery of the secrets of Creation.

In On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem presents an exposition on the golem (a legendary Jewish creature) which includes a myth very close to the current conception of science, and therefore suggests that today’s science is influenced by a Kabbalistic view of nature.

Let’s first look at what a golem is: a living clay doll, made by a Jewish sage that emulates God’s creation of Adam. In the aforementioned book, we learn that for the Jew, man has much more power to create than for a Christian. For example, by spilling sperm outside the woman’s body, the man becomes the father of demons, of spectral creatures that seek a body (from which one can only conclude that the Pornhub rabbi wants to fill the world with demons…). Thus, at a man’s burial, it is necessary to prevent the legitimate heirs from attending before the purification of the body, since their spectral, bastard brothers want to harm them. Hence, it can be seen that the idea of ​​man creating life magically was not foreign to the Kabbalistic mind.

“Kabbalah” comes from Hebrew and means “tradition.” Instead of clinging to the letter of the Old Testament and Talmudic interpretations, the Kabbalist seeks to have access to a mystical tradition, older than Judaism itself, and uses this magical knowledge to relate to the Torah. He may, for example, say that the Torah is a set of letters that can be read in a variety of ways; that the Torah is, in its entirety, a great name of God in full; that in the New Age the white of the Torah (the paper) will be legible and the Law will change, because today only the black (of the letters) is readable. In short, a lot of nonsense. Imagine saying that “Do not step on the grass” is a name, or that it is equivalent to “No dot pest no eth ragss”. It becomes difficult to tell someone not to step on the grass.

In any case, the divine character of the Torah is not denied – quite the contrary. Having knowledge of the Torah means having divine knowledge and thus acquiring magical powers. Therefore, by mastering the Torah, a very righteous man could perform a crazy ritual (which perhaps includes filling the house with earth and dancing in circles) to create a golem: a humanoid made of clay, capable of following instructions and acting as a servant. Although there are precedents in the Zohar (Sephardic) and even in an anecdote from the Babylonian Talmud (when rabbis make a calf and eat it after studying a certain Book of Creation), the golem, with that name, is an invention of the Ashkenazim.

In the most usual versions of the myth, the golem has emeth, “truth,” written on its forehead. When a letter is erased, meth remains, meaning “dead,” and the golem dissolves into inanimate earth. It is advisable to kill the golem because it will grow indefinitely and become dangerous to its creator.

However, Scholem found a, let’s say, Nietzschean version of the golem myth dating from the beginning of the 13th century in Languedoc:

“The prophet Jeremiah busied himself alone with the Book Yetsirah [Book of Creation]. Then a heavenly voice went forth and said: Take a companion. He went to his son Sira, and they studied the book for three years. Afterward they set about combining the alphabets in accordance with the Kabbalistic principles of combination, grouping, and word formation, and a man was created to them, on whose forehead stood the letters YHWH Elohim Emeth [God is truth]. But this newly created man had a knife in his hand, with which he erased the aleph from emeth there remained: meth. Then Jeremiah rent his garments [because of the blasphemy: God is dead, now implied in the inscription] and said: Why have you erased the aleph from emeth? He replied: I will tell you a parable. An architect built many houses, cities, and squares, but no one could copy his art and compete with him in knowledge and skill until two men persuaded him. Then he taught them the secret of his art, and they knew how to do everything in the right way. When they had learned his secret and his abilities, they began to anger him with words. Finally, they broke with him and became architects like him, except that what he charged a thaler for, they did for six groats. When people noticed this, they ceased to honor the artist and came to them and honored them and gave them commissions when they required to have something built. So God has made you in His image and in His shape and form. But now that you have created a man like Him, people will say: There is no God in the world beside these two! Then Jeremiah said: What solution is there? He said: Write the alphabets backward on the earth you have strewn with intense concentration. Only do not meditate in the sense of building up, but the other way around. So they did, and the man became dust and ashes before their eyes. Then Jeremiah said: Truly, one should study these things only in order to know the power and omnipotence of the Creator of this world, but not in order really to practice them.”

Propaganda is the soul of business. Despite recommendations against its use, the fact is that Kabbalist masters claimed to possess magical powers similar to those of God himself. The idea was that deciphering Creation through religious studies gave such powers. The mere belief that so-and-so has unlocked the domains of creation serves to exert power over all credulous men, whether Jewish or not. Hence the possibility of the influence of Kabbalah infiltrating science even when Jews did not participate in it.

The Kabbalah becomes all the more seductive the more common sense gets used to believing that “they” are lying to you, and that the Truth was hidden in a certain period of History. In other words, this truth became more seductive in Protestant environments of the early modern period, where anti-Catholic propaganda claimed that everything your parents and grandparents believed was a lie, because since the times of the Roman Empire Christendom had been deceived by an ecclesiastical gang founded by the Devil. The environment was all the more favorable because, by promising that purity is found in more ancient times, it positions the Jews as privileged inhabitants of this uncorrupted world.

Protestantism aims to rewind the history of Christianity to a point before Catholic corruption. Once one begins to rewind, nothing prevents one from reaching Judaism and, consequently, Kabbalah. This was full of pseudepigraphical texts, that is, books with authorship falsely attributed to a third party. For example, if the Babylonian Talmud alluded to a Book of Creation capable of making rabbis produce a calf, in 1562, in Mantua, someone thought it a good idea to print a volume in Hebrew entitled Book of Creation and attribute its authorship to Abraham, the Old Testament patriarch. In other words, during the Renaissance, Jews and occultists read a magic manual made in contemporary Italy and believed it to be a secret work of Abraham.

Regarding the relationship between the golem and modern science, Scholem gathers various versions of the golem to point out that, in one of them, there is a more accurate anticipation of Paracelsus’ homunculus, since the golem is created from clay inside a retort. And so we learn that the Father of Toxicology believed he was capable of producing a homunculus by placing human sperm along with the rotten uterus of a mare and other disgusting things inside a retort.

What stands out in the version of the golem story reproduced above is its modernity, or even postmodernity. In it, man is able to “kill God” (to make him insignificant) through knowledge of the secrets of Creation – or, in modern terms, through knowledge of nature. The function of science becomes pragmatic: to unveil the secrets of nature in order to manipulate it as if it were its author. In Francis Bacon’s formulation, to torture nature to extract its secrets, because knowledge is power. Knowledge is instrumental, since theory is subordinate to technique.

While Bacon’s ideas of torturing nature and that knowledge is power are well-known, the same cannot be said of his idea that science is magic. In this regard, it is worth quoting the scholar of religions Jason Josephson:

“Bacon described his famous experimental method […] explicitly in terms of magic. As he put it in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (The dignity and advancement of learning, 1623): ‘Magic aims to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculation to a greatness of works,’ which was exactly what he was trying to do with his own project. Bacon further defined magic ‘as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature.’ Magic was a pragmatic, or instrumentalist, form of natural philosophy of exactly the sort Bacon saw as missing from scholasticism. Bacon […] also aimed to improve magic. As he argued in De augmentis, ‘I must here stipulate that magic, which has long been used in a bad sense, be again restored to its ancient and honorable meaning. For among the Persians magic was taken for a sublime wisdom, and the knowledge of the universal harmony of things.’” (The Myth of Disenchantment, p. 46)

In other words, once you start rewinding history, there’s no need to stop, and every book that’s supposedly older than the Roman Church is a potential bearer of secrets that “they” don’t want you to know. That’s the mentality behind the occult surge of the Reformation era.

Finally, another thing that stands out in this view of science is the possibility of man placing himself as an “other” in relation to nature. In fact, God is literally supernatural (the author of nature is above it). Man, however, seeing himself as an emulator of God, ends up placing himself as a kind of supernatural manipulator of nature, as if he were outside the scope of scientific studies (except for the physiological aspect). Human nature, which occupied classical philosophy so much, disappears with the advent of modern science, which so privileges technique and the domination of nature.

The situation becomes even stranger when we consider that technology is now captivated by the delusion of recreating human intelligence (AI), and that this fantasy already had a mythological precedent in the golem.

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Lately, we have seen here at SCF that modern science has its origins in the Western Catholic world, that it also was very strongly developed in the Protestant world (which competed with the Catholic world) and, later, in the atheist communist world. On the other hand, the Islamic world made exceptional mathematical and technological advances in the Middle Ages, but the contradictions between science and the Quran meant that science, and not the Quran, was defenestrated (an attitude contrary to that of the Protestant world, which, seeing contradictions between the holy book and science, generally preferred to become atheist).

This question of the relationship between religious cultures and science, today, is usually approached with a mixture of the End of History and ethnic-racial determinism. Science would have emerged in Western “Judeo-Christian” civilization because we are superior. This “we” is ambiguous, because the proportion of Ashkenazi Jews who win the Nobel Prize is often mentioned, and it is explained that their DNA gives them superior intelligence. (Indeed, scientific racism has been replaced by genetic determinism and a fetish for the heredity of IQ.) The fact that they are Ashkenazi Jews serves to explain why Arabic-speaking countries, which also have a significant Jewish population, are not great Nobel laureates. After all, neither the Iberian Jews (Sephardim) nor the Jews of the Islamic world (Mizrahim) are Ashkenazi. On the one hand, it is claimed that it is anti-Semitism to say that the Ashkenazites descend from the Khazars who converted to Judaism and are not related to Jesus; on the other hand, it is claimed that only Ashkenazi Jews have a peculiar genetics that make them superior to non-Jewish whites and non-white Jews. It’s not something that makes a lot of sense.

All this talk that superior genetics would explain scientific advances also makes no sense. If Europe has had Ashkenazi Jews since the Middle Ages (when the Khazars converted to Judaism), why didn’t modern science develop among them first? It is not worth saying that it is because of the persecution of the Catholic Church, since DNA does not change with conversion, and since the Jewish faith has always had separate writings and studies. Poland was full of Jews, it was always a peripheral country, and yet the first key character of modern science is an old Polish Christian (Nicholas Copernicus).

One answer to this is the obscurantism of Jewish orthodoxy itself, which would make Sunnis look like Enlighteners. Here is what Israel Shahak (1933 – 2001), of Jewish Polish origin, reported about the intellectual life of Ashkenazic Jews from the Middle Ages until emancipation:

“The rabbinical authorities of east Europe furthermore decreed that all non-talmudic studies are to be forbidden, even when nothing specific could be found in them which merits anathema, because they encroach on the time that should be employed either in studying the Talmud or in making money – which should be used to subsidise talmudic scholars. Only one loophole was left, namely the time that even a pious Jew must perforce spend in the privy. In that unclean place sacred studies are forbidden, and it was therefore permitted to read history there, provided it was written in Hebrew and was completely secular, which in effect meant that it must be exclusively devoted to non-Jewish subjects. (One can imagine that those few Jews of that time who – no doubt tempted by Satan – developed an interest in the history of the French kings were constantly complaining to their neighbours about the constipation they were suffering from…) As a consequence, two hundred years ago the vast majority of Jews were totally in the dark not only about the existence of America but also about Jewish history and Jewry’s contemporary state; and they were quite content to remain so.” (Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 24)

In other words, the ancestors of Einstein, Freud, Marx, Chomsky, Polanyi, Edith Stein, Lise Meitner, Trotsky, Sholem Aleichem and a bunch of Nobel Prize-winning scientists didn’t know about the existence of America in the 18^th century because the rabbinate didn’t let them and they obeyed. Without a doubt, a great loss of human potential. This serves to reflect on how much theology matters for the development within people of the same society, since in the 18^th century the Christian ancestors of any peasant were more informed about the world than the ancestors of so many intellectuals and men of science who began to appear in the 19^th century.

If it is true that IQ is decisive for the promotion of science by a given ethnic group, and that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest in Europe (if not in the world), then Ashkenazi Jews should have enlightened the world with the discovery of modern science. However, what did this was Western Christianity, which maintained, at least until the 20^th century (when criticism of “white science” began to appear), the appreciation for universality in the sphere of science (in the religious sphere, Protestants rejected it).

All the blame for the backwardness of pre-19^th Century Ashkenazi Jews must be sought in Judaism itself, that is, in the religion embraced and (regionally) led by Ashkenazi Jews. As we mentioned above, the Jews never stopped having their bibliographical production. In the Middle Ages, Kabbalah appeared, whose books were written by both Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews. The thing becomes all the more curious because the alchemists and esotericists, who made important contributions to modern science, were influenced by Kabbalah – however, among them, to my knowledge, there is no Ashkenazic Jew. Newton was an esoteric Protestant who studied Kabbalah, and discovered universal gravitation and the law of gravity. Paracelsus was a Renaissance occultist who is considered the father of toxicology. Since the Egyptian priests and Pythagoras, it is not uncommon for mysticism to go hand in hand with astronomy and mathematics. Uncommon is the case of the Jews, who before emancipation had no substantive contribution of this kind to offer to the world, no matter how much they spent their time studying.

Given such stagnation, it is a wonder that Ashkenazi Jews have freed themselves. This liberation coincided with civil emancipation, when they did not need to be baptized to be recognized as full citizens. Thus, liberalism was the first contact that many Jews had with universalism, and there was a demand to create a Reformed Judaism that would take place in a typical liberal Protestant society. In Eastern Europe, poor Jews, concentrated in Poland, remained under the yoke of an oppressive rabbinic authority until they rebelled and became Marxists, exchanging the beard of the religious prophet for that of the scientific prophet.

Given the material advancement of Western Christianity, easily related to the Scientific Revolution, it would be impossible for Jews to live in a mental ghetto for a long time. Only if they became rural communities like the Amish, but then it would be difficult to raise a lot of money to finance Talmudic studies.

From all of this we conclude that the history that places the Jews as great geniuses of the West can only be written if most of it is left out, as the Ashkenazic Jews lived most of the time in ignorance induced by their own religious leaders, and were only saved from that state because of their coexistence with Christianity.

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After the political turmoil in Brazil, let’s return to the subject of modern science, which emerged in the Catholic West and developed, initially, among Catholic and Protestant scientists. As we have seen, the West has been rationalist for longer than it has been Christian, and, when invited to choose between atheistic rationalism and Christian irrationalism, it opts for the former. Even before the invention of modern science, the Arabs passed very quickly from tribal status to that of a sophisticated civilization. The Islamic world dominated Greco-Roman philosophy and made formidable advances, such as the invention of algebra. However, the Muslim majority (the Sunnis), thought differently from the Western world; and, faced with theories that could contradict the Quran, they preferred to sacrifice philosophical speculation and never recovered.

To reflect on the subject, I used Georges Minois’s History of the Middle Ages. From there, we can also observe that the narrative that opposes religious obscurantism to atheistic science has more plausibility in the history of Russia than in the history of France, because while the French Revolution guillotined Lavoisier, the communists actually took an agrarian Russia and, in less than a century, placed it in the space race. If we are to believe Minois, this has to do with the tutelage of Orthodox monks over Byzantine public life.

In fact, the Byzantine branch of Christianity seems to have privileged philology over philosophy, which led to a freeze in time: while the Roman branch of Christianity risks doing social theory (see Rerum novarum and its developments) to try to guide humanity amidst social changes, the Byzantine branch remains fixed in the past. The very fact that Russia became a scientific power was not accompanied, as far as I know, by any Orthodox equivalent of Father Georges Lemaitre or Friar Gregor Mendel. On the other hand, the most important Russian for science is Mendeleev, who, having died before the Russian Revolution, had every reason to be a perfect Orthodox Christian, and yet he was a Deist.

Thus, looking at the history of the relationship between science and religion, it is clear that theology matters more to the development of science than factors such as ethnicity or climate (which 19th-century science preferred to emphasize). Consequently, we must ask ourselves whether in a militant atheist era it is still possible to have good science.

It seems to me that it is not, since today’s decadent science has everything to do with a worldview that has replaced causality with statistics. First of all, let us note that nowadays scientific curiosity has shifted from nature to technology. It is as if the certainty of the End of History also applied to science. Everything happens as if the universe (including humanity) were fully known and explained, so that the only pertinent question is operational in nature, namely: how to take all this knowledge and create an omniscient supercomputer capable of thinking for us? AI is a panacea; transhumanism, a superstition of rich people who, just because they are rich, think they are very intelligent.

The triumphant view today is very similar to that of occasionalism, the theory invented by the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali according to which there are no natural causes, but only supernatural causes. The main occasionalist in the West was Nicolas Malebranche (1638 – 1715), a French priest influenced by Jansenism who wanted to sweep Aristotelian-Thomistic influence from the Church and replace it with an idiosyncratic combination of Saint Augustine and Descartes (which made him quarrel with the Jansenists, who had a different combination of Saint Augustine and Descartes). In the end, everyone ended up on the Index.

Since Descartes has a notorious difficulty in explaining the interaction between body and mind (res extensa and res cogitans), Malebranche solved the problem in a radical way: body and mind actually have no impact on each other, and all the causes we witness in nature (and not just the mind-body interaction) are nothing more than the expression of the uniformity of the divine will. Fire does not burn every day because of some intrinsic characteristic, but only because God has the general will to associate burning with fire (if the fire does not burn one day, it will be by a miracle, a particular will of God). We do not need an improvised Cartesian pineal gland to explain how the spirit of the murderer manages to move the arm that holds the knife: it is God who makes our volitions coincide with our actions, through his general will.

If the use of Saint Augustine against Aristotelianism was a hallmark of Calvinism, it is therefore not surprising that Malebranche’s philosophy crossed the English Channel and ascended to the land of John Knox, where the Scottish skeptic David Hume removed God (and Descartes) from the equation and created his famous theory according to which causality is not in nature, but is a human projection. Because of Habit, a principle of human nature, man does not need to see fire burn a thousand times, nor see the sun rise a thousand times, to infer that fire burns and that the sun rises every day. Thus, instead of philosophizing with five elements and four causes (like the Aristotelian-Thomists) we should philosophize only on the basis of the constant conjunction of observable phenomena. Fire burns because fire burns, that is, because the phenomenon of burning has a constant conjunction with that of fire. Investigating nature is discovering causal relationships, which, in essence, are nothing more than statistics.

Nowadays, science isn’t much different from statistical manipulation. The structure of a paper is to select a sample, conduct experiments, produce statistics, and claim causality according to the sponsor’s interests. If a given number of test subjects received a Covid vaccine and contracted less Covid than the test subjects who didn’t, then the vaccine causes an increase in protection against Covid (even though, before 2020, vaccination meant not a reduction in the chances of getting sick, but rather the certainty of not getting sick). When, after mass vaccination, the general population began to experience a lot of heart attacks, sudden death, and cancer, the vaccine couldn’t be blamed because “correlation does not imply causation.” To make matters worse, we can’t even compare the data from populations that haven’t undergone Western vaccines (like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China) because their governments are “authoritarian” and therefore their data is not “reliable.”

Now, in the statistical or secular occasionalist conception of science, correlation is the same thing as causality. What these secular priests who go by the name of science communicators want to do is monopolize the differentiation between coincidences and causes – along with the available empirical basis itself, since only data from liberal countries are valid. David Hume knew that man does not need a peer-reviewed paper to understand that fire burns, but science communicators think that the lay population needs papers and peer reviews to make causal inferences. Wanting a human being to take a Covid vaccine, get sick, and not connect one thing to the other is like wanting a child to stick their finger in a socket, get a shock, and learn nothing. It’s unnatural.

The difference between an ordinary man and a scientist should be precisely the knowledge of causes. Instead of tables filled with selected data, the scientist should have a theory at their fingertips that explains the causes. Instead of an occasionalist response, such as “the wave of heart attacks and sudden illness followed Covid, therefore it is due to Covid,” the response should be “Covid works this way, the vaccine works this way, so the wave of heart attacks and sudden illness is due to this and not that.” As for the current wave of cancers in young people (which no one has yet dared to attribute to Covid), journalistic articles that talk about lifestyle only have the capacity to convince the captive public, since, until proven otherwise, we have no reason to believe that young people only started eating poorly after Covid vaccination. It is, as can be seen, a tyrannical monopoly of causal reasoning, a reasoning which is natural to man. In current science, only an establishment can determine which correlation is causality and which is not, and the people need to ask for the blessing of peer review before putting two and two together.

Secular occasionalism is also the father of “science” based on mathematical models. Ultimately, models are based on numbers, and this eliminates the need for critical thinking. If the data indicates that the proportion of evangelicals is growing at x% per year in Brazil, then within y years Brazil will become a country with an evangelical majority. Following this reasoning, one day Brazil will reach 100% evangelicalism, and both I and the YouTubers who are fans of Dawkins will buy the towel with Pastor Valdemiro’s tallow. It looks like bullshit, and it is. Nevertheless, during the pandemic, the YouTuber Átila Iamarino came up with a mathematical model from Imperial College and predicted three million Covid deaths “if nothing was done.” Instead of admitting that using models uncritically is stupidity, people preferred to say that something was done, while accusing Bolsonaro of genocide for doing nothing. It is the typical reasoning that fails Popper’s falsifiability test, which science communicators now only cite to “punch Nazis.”

Thus, two problems stand out in science as it is done today: the triumphant spirit of the End of History, which means that research into nature is no longer conducted and instead the focus is solely on technological innovation; and this secular occasionalism, which abandons the search for causes and only manipulates statistics.

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In Botticelli’s masterpiece Pallas and the Centaur (1482-83), to be seen at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Firenze-Athena parallel is unmistakable, with Florence depicted as the new Athens.

Pallas Athena (or Minerva), after all is the Goddess of Knowledge. Here a flowery Firenze – or Firenze Flora, to remind us of another Botticelli masterpiece, the Primavera – is shown as the quintessential emblem of civilitas.

Pallas and the Centaur, by Botticelli (1482-83)

In the painting, Pallas totally dominates the violence of the Centaur – here deprived of cunning, an attribute of the fox, as Machiavelli described. But as in all things Botticelli, the gesture of the goddess – hair-pulling the beast – is quite ambiguous. She’s not dominating it just by mere persuasion or the art of subtle rhetoric. Pallas/Minerva here is much stronger – and even ready to decapitate the Centaur with her pick.

Call it the emblem of civilizational violence.

How far have we drifted from neo-platonic heights. If a pop Botticelli with an Andy Warhol streak would remix Pallas and the Centaur today, Pallas/Minerva would forcefully represent the power of Italian civilitas – the most cultured and influential civilization-state in the history of the West. And the Centaur would be an artificial perversion, the European Union (EU).

Call it Firenze-Athena defeating Brussels.

The endless wonders of Italian civilization

This is what I saw – call it fragments of civilization – as part of the immense privilege of hitting the road across the Italian civilitas, in a mini-tour connected to the launch of my latest book, Il Secolo Multipolare (“The Multipolar Century”). The book, via 46 columns, essentially tracks the year 2024, the last year of the now defunct “rules-based international order”, and arguably the first year of the definitive push towards a multipolar/multi-nodal world.

By a delightful accident, this is the first of my books not launched initially in the U.S.; a different version is being translated and will be launched soon also in Russia.

Starting on November 30, we held a series of conferences connected to the book, organized by the ground-breaking association Italianinformazione, near Udine in the Friuli; in the free territory of Trieste; in Bologna; in Ivrea in Piemonte; in Florence; and then, independently, in Spoleto in Umbria. This coming Saturday there will be a special conference in Rome, including, among others, Italy’s former ambassador to China and Iran, Alberto Bradanini.

As soon as I arrived in Venice, the tone was set: I received as a gift a custom handmade cap with the inscription “Make Roman Empire Great Again”. The Circus Ringmaster in Washington would have loved it. Who would he be as an Emperor? Caligula?

In Friuli, close to Slovenia and Austria, I was surrounded by NATO bases, many of them invisible underground. In the free territory of Trieste – where many remember fondly the hands-off approach of Austria – my hosts helped me dive deeper into the militarization of the port, which NATO wants to configure as the essential node in the Intermarium: Mediterranean, Baltic, Black Sea, all of course to become “NATO lakes”.

In Ivrea, we enjoyed the privilege of a comprehensive, 8-hour guided tour of the Olivetti complex, led by former top exec Simona Marra, who lovingly provided a detailed overview of one of the most extraordinary experiments in industrial humanism in history (this will be the subject of a special column).

Dante’s typewriter. At the iconic Olivetti complex in Ivrea, Piemonte. Photo: P.E.

Firenze-Flora, of course, is on a whole new ultra-high level. Banners in communities reject NATO’s wars. At the San Marco museum – a former Dominican convent – an extraordinary exhibition, the first of its kind, celebrates Fra Angelico, the master of color and perspective in the early Florentine Renaissance, retracing his entire career and the creative, unique dialogue with others masters such as Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia.

Fra Angelico: The Annunciation fresco (detail) at San Marco. Photo: P.E.

The frescoes that Fra Angelico painted in the convent are priceless jewels representing the mix between Faith and Art. And then San Marco offers other marvels. San Marco was where the humanist Academy in Florence was born. Here was the site of the first public library in the world.

San Marco, Florence: the first public library in the world. Photo: P.E.

The bones of Poliziano are buried in the chapel. Right behind a statue of Savonarola, the “animus in vita” of Savonarola and Pico della Mirandola is celebrated in marble. Their bones may have been separated “post mortem”; yet even as “antipodes”, they were bounded by love.

In Spoleto, in Umbria, after fabulous interactions with the young members of the Aurora Center of Studies, under the early morning fog, the Fonti del Clitunno appears like a ghostly dream. This is where, according to Virgil, lies the heart of the “estirpe italiana”. Byron was mesmerized when he visited it.

Spoleto, in Umbria: the Fonti del Clitunno. Photo: P.E.

The Aurora Center is investing in first-class interdisciplinary analysis linking geopolitics, philosophy, Law, anthropology and sociology to track the transition from the unipolar order to the multipolar world, characterized by the emergence of civilization-states.

These are the ontological, strategic and normative poles of the future. And that’s where Italy as a civilization-state belongs.

Can Stoics and Humanists save Italy?

The conferences – all of them full house – offered a unique opportunity to address informed Italians on what’s going on in the Russia-China, BRICS, Southeast Asia, New Silk Roads, connectivity corridor spheres – issues that are either completely ignored or distorted by mainstream media. At the same time, it was priceless to become aware of insider tidbits on the sorry condition of an unparalleled civilization-state reduced to the role of a neo-colony of the EU/NATO combo.

And then there are the bibliography highlights. Like finally finding in the best bookshop in Venice a priceless Bompiani collection of all fragments of the Early Stoics – Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus. And in the pristine Galleria Imaginaria in Firenze-Flora, the rare Einaudi first edition of a collection of Italian humanist writings – Thought and Destiny – from Petrarca and Marsilio Ficino to Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli.

To quote T.S.Eliot, we can say that “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” When it comes to Fragments of Civilization, Italy is Jupiterian. I remain on the move, from Rome down south to Napoli and Sicily, carrying the message I shared with my interlocutors; if the current, fragmented collective West would ever have a chance to be rescued from the Centaur of oblivion, that task must be carried out by the definitive, Western civilization-state: Pallas Athena Italia.

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The second Trump administration is trying to be the government of tariffs. A more erudite Trumpist might argue that the early stages of United States history are intertwined with the history of tariffs; after all, the U.S. South was run by farmers who favored free trade, while the North defended tariffs to protect its nascent industry from English competition. Since the U.S. became a superpower because of the North and not because of the South, it’s clear that the Lochner era (which preceded the 1929 crisis) and Reagan’s neoliberal deregulation, conceived in partnership with Thatcher, are deviations from the path that led the U.S. to success. However, liberal propaganda, greatly aided by anti-communism, managed to portray free trade as essential to the very identity of the U.S.

Therefore, it is worth reflecting on the words of the economist Friedrich List (1789 – 1846), one of the greatest defenders of the “American system” or “national system of political economy,” which administered tariffs to protect the domestic economy: “I would admonish the people of these U. S. who rely on the celebrated system of Smith, to take care not to die of a beau ideal. Indeed, sir, it would sound almost like sarcasm, if in after ages an historian should commemorate the decline of this country in the following terms: ‘They were a great people, they were in every respect in the way to become the first people on earth, but they became weak and died – trusting in the infallibility of two books imported into the country; one from Scotland [Adam Smith], the other from France [Jean-Baptiste Say]; books, the general failure of which was shortly afterwards acknowledged by every individual.’ ” (Outlines of American Political Economy, Letter 1)

First of all, what is striking in the 21st century is someone calling free trade, or economic liberalism, a utopia. This is due to the fact that economic liberalism is presented to the public as the ironclad laws of science that must be applied, under penalty of serious consequences. This strategy is nothing new: when Chesterton was alive, he already complained about this expedient. Both Malthusianism and social Darwinism present their tragic public policies as necessary. Of these two, social Darwinism has an inseparable relationship with economic liberalism.

Nevertheless, reading List, we note that Adam Smith and other defenders of free trade envision a world without wars, in which no one has to fear running out of supplies due to political issues. For example: in 1827, just 51 years after independence, American congressmen who were followers of Adam Smith “asserted quite seriously that it would be better to import gunpowder from England, if it could be bought cheaper there than manufactured here. I wonder why they did not propose to burn our men of war, because it would be better economy, to hire, in time of war, ships and sailors in England.” (Letter 2). War is the least of it. Proponents of free trade envision a world in which there are no economic wars.

Next, we must consider that scientism, utopianism, and political liberalism go hand in hand. Let’s see: with political liberalism, it is understood that faith is a subjective truth that should remain outside the public sphere. Nevertheless, common ground is necessary for citizens of different faiths to be able to live in society. Science appears in place of religion as the bearer of objective and universal knowledge. Thus, it is evident that science, by becoming the seat of so much power, ends up being instrumentalized and corrupted. Scientism is born, the belief in the capacity of science to determine all political and social issues.

Historically, scientism, utopianism, and secularism (which is an indispensable component of political liberalism) have gone hand in hand: there are precedents of Saint-Simonism, positivism, socialism, and communism. Thus, it makes perfect sense that a country that adheres to political liberalism ends up falling into scientism. The difference between liberal scientism and other forms of scientism is that in liberalism, the figure of the planner is not highlighted. Instead, there is a spontaneous harmony that only the liberal imbued with the scientific spirit can grasp, so that their criticisms are directed against those who interfere with the so-called natural order (imposing trade barriers, for example). While historical followers of scientism tend to be interventionists, clamoring for a technician to bring order to the chaos, liberal followers od scientism are anti-interventionists and argue that the things is always in perfect order until someone interferes.

Now, if science constitutes the common denominator in a political regime, it is of fundamental importance to create a public fund for science that prevents it from being co-opted by private agents. In List’s work, we do not find this concern: on the contrary, he follows the American philosophy, already present in the Constitution, according to which Congress should protect the intellectual property of inventors. For List, this protection causes inventions to spread through industry, instead of being lost with the death of the inventor. This may be true, but the absence of a public knowledge policy has led to the privatization of knowledge, and the doctrine of free trade, which he criticized so much, has become practically an indisputable scientific truth.

The fact that Trump reinstated the tariffs and transformed them into yet another instrument of the liberal world’s sheriff, without regard for the needs of the domestic economy, shows how the U.S. has failed to protect its intellectual heritage.

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It’s funny that demographer Emmanuel Todd is celebrated after his predictions are confirmed; after all, his assessment of countries’ failure or success is independent of the events that confirm his predictions. Todd predicts a country’s collapse based on declining birth rates and life expectancy. Indeed, for both Todd and common sense, if people in a country stop having children and life expectancy falls, that country does not have a promising future. Nevertheless, the First World actively worked to encourage people to have fewer children and is now working to encourage them to die earlier through euthanasia. The decline in birth rates and reduced life expectancy are seen as a good thing by the mainstream.

Certainly, the United States, since Kissinger (see the 1974 NSSM-200), has viewed population growth in several countries as a threat to its own national security, and strives to reduce these populations through intermediaries who promote sterilizations and abortions abroad. However, the United States also strives to reduce its own domestic population (especially that of blacks). Kissinger’s plans for global castration stem from domestic problems within U.S. democracy: if WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have few children, it is necessary to ensure that blacks and Catholics also have few children—otherwise, this will have electoral consequences in the medium and long term. It was not possible to dispense with this population and create a pure WASP nation, since someone had to do the low-paid work. A formally racist system would greatly damage the country’s self-image and, even more so, its image among the people it sought to dominate. Thus, to remain a WASP-dominated democracy, a propaganda effort was necessary to manipulate non-WASPs and reduce their birthrate. Israel’s efforts to control Arab demographics (including Arab-Israeli demographics) have this precedent in U.S. democracy.

We can therefore say that Malthusian culture is a problem Anglo-Saxons don’t want to correct. Instead, realizing they are outnumbered, they strive to reduce the numbers of others. And since their culture is genuinely Malthusian, it’s not difficult for them to find arguments to use in their propaganda: fewer children means children with more resources per capita; childlessness means more time and money for oneself—a woman’s challenge to patriarchy!—and shorter lifespans mean better quality of life—and who doesn’t want quality of life?

The fact is that Anglo-Saxons have a peculiar and counterintuitive attitude toward demographics. As we’ve seen, since the High Middle Ages, when the Angles merged with the Saxons upon invading Britain, they distinguished themselves from other barbarians by expelling native peasants from their lands, rather than ruling and mingling with them. In the Late Middle Ages, we saw that they continued the practice of ethnic cleansing and even emptied a French city (Calais) during the Hundred Years’ War to fill it with colonists recruited from England. Now, let’s continue with the Hundred Years’ War: it was there that the Anglo-Saxons developed a taste for empty lands and conceived of the state as a profit-driven oligarchy.

***

The Hundred Years’ War began with Edward III of England, Plantagenet, claiming the French throne after King Charles IV died without a son, leaving a messy succession. Edward III felt entitled to the throne because his mother was the daughter of the French king Philip the Fair; however, the French had already decided that women had no right to the throne—and if they did, the little daughter Charles IV left behind would be queen. Grandson of the cunning Philip the Fair, the Englishman wanted to seize the crown, and his adversary was the dead king’s cousin, the less-than-skilled Philip of Valois. However, no one in France wanted an English king—and even less so for his mother, the Frenchwoman who had ruled England with her lover, to become queen of France.

In England, Parliament already existed, a highly unusual institution that could both dethrone and recognize kings. When the war began, Parliament was unicameral and composed of nobles. Thus, all war campaigns led by the King of England had to be endorsed by the nobility in Parliament. Initially, the nobility was isolationist, disliking war expenditures. Nevertheless, they eventually agreed to the idea of ​​the Crown borrowing from Italian bankers to finance its war investment. Significant funds would be needed, as the Hundred Years’ War would long be a war fought by mercenaries.

Where would England’s money come from, which would alleviate fears of default? Wool. In the words of historian Georges Minois, “England possesses a great source of wealth: wool, whose role in the national economy can be compared to that of crude oil in the modern world. The country is the main supplier of raw materials for the Flemish textile industry. […] Grouped into societies that can be called capitalist, [the merchants] buy export licenses from the king, and their wealth allows them to play an increasingly important social and political role: they buy land and mansions, become creditors of the monarchy, and can influence its decisions” (The Hundred Years’ War, p. 11, Brazilian edition).

Another very relevant difference between the skittish English nobility and the French nobility was the territorial issue. While the French dominated large contiguous tracts of land, “the great [English] nobility does not identify with a territory. The barons’ holdings are dispersed, they do not form a provincial bloc […]. [The counts] do not identify with a territory, but they are wealthy and frequented by an important clientele. They have their own administration […] and efficient management of their domains” (op. cit. p. 14-15). Thus, while the French nobles were attached to the land, jealous of their independence from the crown, and lacking in esprit de corps, the English nobles could concentrate in London, form a kind of union, and discuss joint actions with the king while living off their income.

Well, for these nobles, the Hundred Years’ War was a great opportunity for business (otherwise, they would not have consented to it). Always in concert with the king, the practice of using the treasury to pay mercenaries to invade France, plunder, and take hostages was adopted. When the Crown’s coffers proved insufficient, it turned to Italian bankers and even caused bankruptcies. The profits from the looting went to everyone: the Crown, the nobles, the mercenaries, and the common people—even English women received personal belongings stolen from French women as gifts.

The war started well for the English because they innovated by hiring a professional army. In the medieval world, the nobility was typically called upon by the king to fight in the event of war. No one in France was prepared to fight a professional army.

This English innovation was capitalist in nature, more advanced than feudal warfare. I quote Minois once again: “The army is at the origin of the rise of private enterprise in England. From the beginning of the conflict, faced with a French monarchy that insisted on resorting to the ban and the arrière ban, the English king preferentially mobilized Italian bankers, whose credits allowed him to recruit troops through commercial contracts. The nobles maintained a ‘retention,’ a few dozen or a few hundred soldiers, whose services they rented to the sovereign through an indenture contract, for a set period and amount. In reality, the English army is made up of a professional workforce employed by war contractors in accordance with the laws of the market. These are private corps, private companies that, from a military point of view, offer advantages […], in particular corporatism, favored by the habit of fighting together, while the feudal army only occasionally brings together men who do not know each other” (pp. 441-2).

How did France escape this? By strengthening the state, after a thousand and one misfortunes. The French even imitated the English, but discovered that periods of peace were a terrible problem, because mercenaries became unemployed and turned into bands of raiders. The solution found by the last French king to fight the Hundred Years’ War, Charles VII the Victorious, was a reform of the state. He created a permanent royal tax, without the nobility’s consent, and was able to have a standing army—in addition to purchasing the latest military innovation, cannons. “At the end of the Hundred Years’ War,” says Minois, “one can say that France had a ’national’ army in the sense that all armed forces depended on the state, even if they included many foreigners, while England used private armies under contract” (p. 442). And we can add here: France’s victory was yet another historical event that demonstrates the victory of the national state focused on the common good over the liberal state focused on the profits of the corporations that comprise it (a topic previously discussed here). The world imitated France.

***

Let’s finally look at desertification. By invading France, Edward II, in the words of Minois, “behaved not as the sovereign of the French people, but as an enemy” (p. 90). The armies plundered the French with the aim of enriching those participating in the venture; and, furthermore, followed the normal wartime practice of destroying crops to leave the enemy undersupplied. In a letter, the Black Prince, Edward II’s son who led cavalcades through the French countryside dressed in black armor, wrote to his father: “We have devastated and destroyed this region [of Bordeaux], which caused great satisfaction to the subjects of Our Lord, the king” (op. cit., p. 122).

In addition to the war, there was also famine—which predated the war—and the plague. The result was that after the end of the war, both France and England lost 40% of their populations.

Indeed, for France, the death of the peasants led to fallow land, food shortages, and sheer poverty. The government scrambled to repopulate the fallow land. For the English, the death of the peasants meant replacing food crops with more space for wool, which was England’s main source of wealth. Thus, if the general rule is that population decline leads to poverty, the English case was an exception. Fewer people meant more wealth for the landowners.