Explaining the Catholic Church

Summary

Podcast Summary: History 102 — Explaining the Catholic Church

Podcast: History 102 with WhatifAltHist’s Rudyard Lynch & Austin Padgett
Host: Turpentine
Episode Date: October 11, 2025

---

Overview

This episode delves into the origins, evolution, and influence of the Catholic Church, tracing its journey from inception through ancient, medieval, and modern times. Rudyard Lynch, known as WhatifAltHist, and Austin Padgett explore how the Catholic Church has managed to persist and adapt over two millennia. They compare its endurance to that of Confucian China, discuss the relationship between universal values and local context, and examine the interplay between spirituality, doctrine, politics, and social structures across history.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Enduring Institution ([00:40]–[03:26])

• Rudyard Lynch:
  • The Catholic Church is remarkable for its longevity, rivaling Confucian China.
  • Its continuity is credited to its organizational structure, moral vetting, and adaptability.
  • “How is this still a functioning organization? …there’s been this consistent effort … to revitalize Christianity in distinct contexts.” ([01:23])
• Christianity’s spread and resilience hinge on periodic renewal and contextual adaptation.

2. Local Context & Universal Values ([03:26]–[10:17])

• Austin notes the logistical challenges of preserving tradition in ancient times.
• WhatifAltHist:
  • Christianity modeled itself for local contexts (e.g., interpreting "lamb" as "seal" for Inuit culture).
  • Vital theological disputes (sometimes over a single word) led to schisms and even wars, demonstrating the importance of translation and local conceptual frameworks.
  • Cites missionary models for guilt, shame, and fear-based cultures (from “The 3D Gospel” and analysis of Western lens on the Bible).
• Quote:
  • “Universal values exist, but they have to be filtered through local context.” — Austin ([07:00])

3. Archetypes & The Evolution of Morality ([07:25]–[12:52])

• WhatifAltHist:
  • Archetypes are essential to human understanding (masculine/feminine, east/west).
  • The evolution of God’s nature mirrored sociopolitical development:
    • Moses: fear-based
    • Prophets: shame-based
    • Jesus/Christianity: guilt-based, with individual conscience placed above group (“the first and only major individualist religion”).
• Quote:
  • “Christianity is the first and only major individualist religion.” ([11:52])

4. Institutionalization — Constantine to the Fall of Rome ([18:30]–[36:19])

• WhatifAltHist:
  • The transformation from persecuted minority to state-endorsed religion under Constantine, catalyzed by his victory at Milvian Bridge ([20:15]).
  • The Roman system’s collapse led to elite conversion—a mechanism for social and political survival rather than belief.
• The shift from lineage-based (blood) religion to universal membership upended old Roman order.
• St. Augustine’s City of God responded to Rome’s fall by redirecting focus to spiritual rather than earthly citizenship.

5. Catholic Organization & Social Engineering ([36:19]–[49:38])

• WhatifAltHist:
  • “The Catholic Church was the attempt to establish Plato’s Republic.”
  • The Church created incentives for personal improvement, emphasizing free will and social trust rather than forced enforcement. Inquisitions appear only centuries later, reflecting changing needs for doctrinal defense.
• The Church’s preservation of knowledge (monks, literacy), and unique bent toward improvement and humanism, laid the groundwork for Western civilization.

6. Schism, Medieval Power, and the Rise of Islam ([49:38]–[61:43])

• The fracturing of Christianity over nuanced doctrinal disputes (Arianism vs. Catholicism) made space for Islam’s rapid expansion in former Christian centers.
• Catholicism became isolated to a rump of Western Europe, surviving amid Viking, Arab, and Hungarian invasions.
• Monastic life, Irish missionary work, and urbanization kept Catholic culture alive during the darkest periods.

7. High Middle Ages: Catholic Zenith and Internal Revolutions ([61:49]–[75:29])

• Medieval Christendom’s fabric:
  • Christianity became the defining identity (“we are Christendom, not Europe”).
  • The rise of universities, republican institutions, and early stock markets rooted in or influenced by the Church.
• Internal reforms:
  • The Inquisition as an instrument for defining limits of permissible debate.
  • The value (and danger) line between innovation (e.g., Abelard, Galileo) and heretics (e.g., Cathars).
• Monastic orders (Franciscans, Dominicans) inject new energy and creativity.
• Quote:
  • “Without the monastic orders, you would have removed the majority of Catholicism’s creative ability.” ([73:36])

8. Medieval Conflicts: Papal vs. Secular Power ([75:40]–[81:38])

• The Papacy faced off against the Holy Roman Emperor, often leveraging local nobility to weaken centralized royal power.
• Catholicism’s focus on dogma, over time, suppressed mysticism and emphasized logical, legalistic thinking.
• The Church’s dependence on scriptural passages fostered a uniquely “Western” mode of thought and eventually a split between the mystical and the rational.

9. Late Medieval Crises and Renaissance Decadence ([84:03]–[96:34])

• The Avignon Papacy (“Babylonian Captivity”) and rival popes eroded legitimacy.
• The Renaissance era saw the Church both sponsor incredible art and descend into corruption (notably the Borgias), undermining credibility and fueling the Protestant Reformation.
• The Reformation redefined Catholic identity as more “Latin/romance” and seeded lasting oppositions—conservatism and authoritarianism (Counter Reformation) vs. Protestant creativity.
• The Catholic Church's geographic and cultural heart shifted toward Southern Europe and later, Latin America.

10. Catholicism, Modernity, and Secularization ([97:26]–[122:50])

• As modernity (science, industry, secular philosophies) flourished, Catholicism (especially in France, Spain, Italy) struggled to integrate and became "reactionary."
• Centralization and conservatism stifled innovation; in contrast, Protestant societies embraced change and often saw higher growth and industrialization ([113:05]).
• In the 20th century, the Catholic Church became more politically left/socially aligned but lost influence in traditional homelands like Ireland, Quebec, and Italy.
• Protestantism's adaptability and open-source structure spurred rapid expansion, particularly in the Global South.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “The Catholic Church stands with Confucian China as the two organizations that stand apart from others in longevity.” — WhatifAltHist ([01:06])
• “Human life doesn’t make sense without archetypes.” — WhatifAltHist ([07:25])
• “The Church had higher degrees of validity… the Catholic Church was the attempt to establish Plato’s Republic.” — WhatifAltHist ([36:19])
• “Without the monastic orders, you would have removed the majority of Catholicism’s creative ability.” — WhatifAltHist ([73:36])
• “Medieval Europe is the foundation of our economic system. They had the stock market, science, parliament—all based either one or two steps from the Catholic Church.” — WhatifAltHist ([63:18])
• “The idea of equality stems from Christianity. The idea of a rationally consistent universe… from Christianity.” — WhatifAltHist ([78:16])
• “The religions as presented in Western civilization are just lists of rules… Modern Christianity doesn’t leave a lot of space for God.” — WhatifAltHist ([102:41])
• “If Catholicism is going to survive or win, they have to pull on their deeper, more holistic tradition… The Protestants beat Catholics in their flexibility to context.” — WhatifAltHist ([119:34])
• “The way to beat open source is by having good leadership. That would require a highly capable Pope, though.” — WhatifAltHist ([120:56])
• “The way is not right, it is not left, it is forward.” — WhatifAltHist ([116:09])

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Topic | |-------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | [00:40]–[03:26] | Introduction & Endurance of the Church | | [04:14]–[10:17] | Adaptation to Context; Translation and Doctrine | | [10:17]–[12:52] | Evolution of Morality; Individual vs. Collective | | [18:30]–[36:19] | Constantine, Roman Decline & Christianity’s Institutionalization | | [36:19]–[49:38] | Church as Social Engineer; Plato’s Republic Analogy | | [49:38]–[61:43] | Medieval Fractures; Rise of Islam; Irish Monks’ Influence | | [61:49]–[75:29] | High Middle Ages, Universities, Inquisition, Monasticism | | [75:40]–[81:38] | Power Struggles: Papacy vs. Holy Roman Emperor; Dogma vs. Mysticism | | [84:03]–[96:34] | Padal Crises, Renaissance, Reformation, Counter Reformation | | [97:26]–[122:50] | Decline in Europe; Modernity; Expansion in the Global South; Protestant Competition |

---

Memorable Moments

• The anecdote about a pope’s mummified corpse being enthroned by mafia families as part of Italy’s "bad sequel" era ([56:33]).
• The symbolic explanation of the Cross as “vertical (kingdom of heaven) and horizontal (terrestrial existence)”—spiritual elevator ([38:33]).
• The candid discussion on the intellectual openness and abuses of the Inquisition, and the fine line between creativity and heresy ([64:47]–[69:00]).
• The parallel drawn between Catholic dogma/logical consistency and “Western ideological autism”—a double-edged sword ([78:16]).
• The lively banter about the “open source” advantage of Protestantism and what it would take for Catholicism to compete ([120:24]-[120:56]).

---

Conclusion

The Catholic Church’s history is one of adaptation, internal struggle, and periodic renewal, deeply intertwined with the evolution of Western society. From persecuted sect to global institution, its endurance lies in its ability to synthesize spiritual, cultural, and organizational innovation—yet its future will depend on whether it can balance tradition with the open, dynamic pressures of the modern world.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hists, Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Whatifalth]

Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102 with myself and Austin. And today's episode is on the history of the Catholic Church.

[Austin]

Hello, I'm Austin, and I figure I should, besides saying hello, say something like, you can follow me on Twitter link in the description by Merch.

[Whatifalth]

Nice. You guys know my channel, so I have no need for that. The Catholic Church stands with Confucian China as the two organizations that stand apart from others. Where how have these things kept going for 2,000 years? And it's quite remarkable that the Catholic Church is a descendant of the organization that Constantine formed in the three hundreds, and it descends earlier to Christ himself. And it's lasted continuously without any real disturbances. There are a few sort of disturbances, but nothing that you'd see in any organization like that. And the reason I compare it to Confucian China is both of them are the creation of a ruling class that is based around moral principles, and they vet people through said moral principles and studying the sacred texts. And they've lasted for 2,000 years. And in China, without the Confucian bureaucracy based around the shared principles they were pulling from, China would not have survived. Two of the or three of the things that have held China together are the emperor himself, the Chinese language, and the Confucian bureaucracy. And then you look at the Catholic Church and you think, how is this still a functioning organization? And it speaks to the sort of universal recurrence of Christian leadership, where the reason Christianity is the largest religion on earth, stemming from a Carpenter's son 2,000 years ago, is that there's been this consistent effort which has occurred over a dozen times, to revitalize Christianity in distinct contexts. So we're going to look at the history of the Catholic Catholic Church and split it into the ancient, medieval and modern segments. But this is in large part the story of funding the legacy of Christ and then rebuilding it with each age of History and how this core message is something that has been reinterpreted over the course of a variety of contexts, with the sacred fire that stems initially from Galilee being spread across it.

[Austin]

That was a great summary. And it's interesting to think of the logistical challenges with the Catholic Church maintaining, you know, this tradition and civilization largely through it is really difficult because now basically there's so much ability to communicate. You basically just need not to get shut down. Right. There's Bibles everywhere. There's people know what it is and how to access different information networks. But back then, it was just so fragile and such a cloud of confusion that without some sort of structure, it would have been easy to see how it could dissipate or get lost.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, there's this remarkable. They've done research on this and there's been a remarkable continuity in biblical texts, for example. So the Bible 2,000 years ago, or at least after the codification with Constantine, is very similar to the Bible we have today. The main exception being differences in terminology. And this is one of the things that Christianity does that's interesting, where Christianity always bills itself for whatever local culture they have. I'll give two examples of this. Lots of concepts that exist in Greek do not exist in English. And a lot of theological disputes over history have occurred over singular words in Greek where Christ himself likely spoke Aramean. But then the Bible and the Gospels were written in Greek. And so the word nos and nous are different in Greek. Nos is a spiritual inner knowledge. And then nous is sort of like the mind. It's like a sort of intellectual mental dimension. I'm not going to articulate that. But the Catholic theologian, for example, Teilhard de Chardin, he talks the newest sphere, or the. Back in the 60s, Teilhard predicted that there would evolve a sort of creation that would be consciousness, and now that's AI. So he was looking at the trajectory of paleontological evolution and. And he said that this will result in the growth of consciousness. So he thought there'd be a thing developed called the noosphere, which is consciousness personified into a mechanism or a machine. And that's the AI. And so that's been something I've been thinking about, but he talks that uses the word nous. And so nos and nous. And they had to find the words in the older Germanic language to articulate these concepts because they didn't exist. Or there was a huge theological dispute about the word iota as it related. The word iota is like Greek for a concept and figuma joke for something small. So they were literally arguing over an iota that related to the state of Christ's divinity at the specific moment of resurrection. And this caused multiple civil wars in the Byzantine Empire. So you see these things where there's the attempt to maintain the historic tradition which has to be diversified for context. Where when Christian missionaries went to the Arctic, they told the Inuit that the Lamb of God was a seal, because in Inuit culture, because they had no domesticated animals, their closest mental equivalent to a lamb was a seal.

[Austin]

Right. And this gets back to our point about how universal values exist, but they have to be filtered through local context. Where some people dismiss universal values or, and break everything down into pure subjectivity. Or some people just kind of want to assert a universal value without having to actually filter it through a translatable mechanism.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, the world really doesn't make sense without archetypes. Archetypes. The most common one I use is the masculine and the feminine. Is it so obvious? But also sort of the west and the east are archetypes, higher and lower forms. And human life doesn't make sense without archetypes. And the attempt to integrate a worldview without archetypes causes all of this sort of logical sort of scrimmaging. And over the course of Christian history you've seen the grappling with the fundamental archetypes versus the local context. And there's. I read two interesting books, one of which was the 3D Gospel. And it's a book on how Christian missionaries communicate core Christian concepts to guilt, shame and fear based cultures. Watch my video on the topic if you're interested. And in guilt based cultures, that's the Christian framework the vast majority of the viewers of this show will be aware of. So I'm not going to get into it. In shame based cultures, it's explaining all as much of Christianity as possible through familial relational terms. So in shame based cultures are like Asia or parts of Africa. And so you talk about how you must respect God in the manner of your father and God helps you like your father and you should treat your other church people like your brothers and sisters or cousins in fear based cultures and talk about the power of God magically. Fear is tribal peoples like parts of Africa or Latin America. So you talk about how you must submit to God for the overwhelming power he has. And the, the second book, it's a book on understanding scripture through Western eyes. And it's a study of how when we read the Bible, we project lots of Western cultural norms onto non Western Middle Eastern peoples. So it's going through the Bible and explaining what are cultural disconnects based on context. And those both show sort of interesting anthropological takes on Christianity.

[Austin]

That sounds like a really interesting analysis because if you went through enough examples, you'd start to elucidate patterns about how this works and it would be very clear that you need a filtered approach. Yeah, I was also thinking kind of funnily that it makes sense that Baptists do well, Baptist missionaries do well in Africa. If it's about submitting for the fear of God due to his power, which is something that the, the Baptists that fear angle is something they focus on a little bit more relative to some other churches. Some go more love, some go fearsome. Mix it up.

[Whatifalth]

When you look over the course of the rise of Christianity and to the Abrahamic tradition in general, or even religion in general, you see the evolution of the concept of God at the same time as the development of the human societies, where I have an idea called Dream Time, which is basically the society's collective and conscious, which it uses to pull new ideas and innovations out. And so as a society develops, so does its dreamtime. And so the religions have to catch up with the level of development. And I don't think that's a sign that religion isn't real. It's a sign that the divine reaches humans through the term that's going to work where the divine gives humans the idea they're most advanced for. And then as humans advance, the divine is also working with us. And one of the big things modernist people don't get about religion, because modernist people conceptualize all of their relationships in mechanical terms. They can't perceive the God. They can't perceive a sentient God which thinks like a human. So for the religious person, the reason they're praying is like if you want to ask your friend for a favor, you'd ask a friend you have a closer relationship with and then you build the points in that relationship over time. So religion is based on a concept of dealing with the world on a relational basis, because its core assumption is that consciousness is the driving principle of the world. But over the course of the Abrahamic tradition, Moses around 1000 BC was very clearly fear driven because the God of the Old Testament is, I will crush you if you disobey me. Then you see with the prophets a more shame based tradition, which is them saying, if you guys don't fix your crap, we're going to have all of Israel collapse. And then by the time you get to Christ, you have a guilt based ideal, which came from the Greeks, that Christ said, if your family doesn't approve of your search for God, you can leave your family. The community is in the wrong with Christ, which had a huge impact on Christianity's development because with the crucifixion, you see, God is judging the community to be in the wrong and Christ is in the right, which means that the individual can have moral superiority over the group, which was a concept that existed in European cultures beforehand. But Christianity is the first and only major individualist religion.

[Austin]

So it's almost like filtering it through that cultural context in that sense elucidated more clear and accurate understandings of what Christianity was trying to say in the first place. Because the Greek concept of truth. Right. Truth, individual confined truth that's absent the social approval kind of relates to God and the truth of God transcending that social approval as well. Which is kind of an important part.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

Which gets back to interpreting the gospel. Right. Because we're not. There's this feeling with the Catholic Church. Right. That we kind of have it. Everything is so chaotic that we want to have a clear, certain, logically canonical interpretation of the Bible and the Catholic Church is older and so we can feel like secure and their determination of it or call or lean back on that. But in reality, like, we've been trying to interpret the gospel and in better ways for a long time. So there is. There's no, like, easy answer. We have to keep trying to figure it out.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Sponsors, Limu Gamu and Doug.

[Whatifalth]

Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Varian Written by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Excludes Massachusetts.

[Whatifalth]

It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Did you know you can get matched.

[Whatifalth]

With credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't.

[Whatifalth]

Hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Inquiry which may impact your credit scores.

[Austin]

Experience at New Balance. We believe if you run, you're a runner.

[Whatifalth]

However you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way.

[Austin]

And that's what running is all about.

[Whatifalth]

Run your [e-mail] Running.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Freedom begins with privacy. Zcash protects your freedom. The right technology reshapes politics and culture in favor of a freer, wealthier society. Zcash has been called the machinery of freedom because of this. Zcash is unstoppable private money that protects your freedom by using encrypted description. It's like bitcoin with its 21 million hard cap and fair token distribution, but offers privacy and soon planetary scale. Zcash has been said to be the last thousand X in crypto because unseen wealth is unseizable wealth. Try zcash out download Zashi Wallet. You can post your shielded address on X and tag at Gen zcash for encrypted welcome notes to get started. Follow NZCASH to learn more.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Being an entrepreneur, I can say from personal experience, can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one and you might find yourself fighting fires alone in the e commerce space. Of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, just as if you had your own design studio with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines and even enhance your product photography. It's like you have your own content team and with the ability to easily create email and social media campaigns, you can reach your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling, just as if you had a full marketing department behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Cha Ching With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com cognitive. Visit shopify.com cognitive once more. That's shopify.com cognitive.

[Whatifalth]

So there is the core sort of spiritual thing and you can relate to that based on the context of your society. And religions build in a degree of anti fragility where there's the rules and, and the rules are liberating in some cases because they give you a framework to explore. Because if you're in a space with no rules, it's just chaos and you can't actually do anything with that. That's what the Congo is like. And so America is a freer society than the Congo because anarchy does not produce freedom. Good rules produce freedom. And so there's that built in structure. And I am not going to get into the tangent about what I dislike about modern theological analysis. You can poke me enough if you want it and I'll go on that rant, but I don't think it fits here. But this does create a good segue where I was reading this Russian author named Uspensky and he said you have to clarify the difference between Christ and Christianity because there is one where there's this duality between how do you take the teachings of a wandering mystic and then turn it into the dominant social code for an entire civilization? And that's what happened with the turning point from Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which is in the early 4th century, Emperor Constantine fought a civil war against another candidate and won at the battle of Milvian Bridge, which may be one of the most important battles in human history. Maybe the Christians would have still taken over the Roman Empire, I don't know. But what Constantine did was Christianity beforehand was the religion of around 10% of the Roman Empire's population. And they had been brutally oppressed beforehand. They were easily the most oppressed group in the Roman Empire, more so than the Jews, who were the second most. And if you know the Romans, they were pretty tolerant. And the reason for that is the Christians were an utter rejection of the shared social constructs of the classical world. And Fustel de Coulange, a 19th century French writer, wrote the best book on this topic on the ancient city where to shorten his brilliant take, in the classical world, religion was based off blood. And so this was a huge issue in ancient Greece where you couldn't assimilate people into the different Greek city states because your social status in the city was predicated on having a blood lineage where you could pass through the ancestral gods and you couldn't fake that. But the way they got around this in the classical world and the Romans were sort of politically and religiously genius for doing this is they develop corresponding gods between cities. So if you sacrificed to the Roman Mars, you were also sacrificing to the Greek, the Greek Ares, the Norse Frigg, I forget the Celtic war God. It's not the Morrigan, she's the God of dead corpses. And then Persian Mithras. And so the Romans had this highly complex sort of parallel system of gods to unify their empire. To say we all secretly have the same Pan religion under Zeus, who is the universal king. The problem is that no one actually believed that. And it was a sort of more polite mirage. And what the Christians said, we have the one true God, yours are fake and gay, and this entire order is a joke. And the problem was that that was true enough that the Romans couldn't accept the Christians bluff. Because the core of this Roman sort of religious social bluff was that the emperor is the choice of Jupiter. And so if you get rid of Jupiter's power, the emperor is invalid. And so the Romans referred to the Christians, as they called them atheists because the Christian concept of God was so different from the Roman concept of God that the Romans just processed them as not even religious. It's comparable to the Marxists today and.

[Austin]

Kind of like when you make God into so materialistic that God is within the material, which kind of just invalidates the concept of God itself. So it can be viewed as being equal to an atheistic position.

[Whatifalth]

Yes, I'm glad you said that. That's also a very like philosophically complex point. That's like. Yeah, like a lot of people get postgraduate degrees in philosophy and they cannot state the thing you just said. But so with the Christians invalidated this old order and they sort of bubbled up under the surface. But the problem is that as Rome went many centuries of lots of issues like barbarian invaders or constant civil wars or plague killing over a third of the population and other very pleasant things, the Romans sort of lost legitimacy as a culture. And the Roman Empire at this point was being run by their equivalent of Appalachian hillbillies in the White House, where Diocletian, who was the anti Christian Roman emperor, he tried to persecute them. He was from the Balkans. One of his successors, after maybe one or two dictators between, was Constantine, who was also a Balkan tribal warlord. And he saw that Diocletian's attempt to unify the Roman Empire under the old gods had failed and the Christians grew stronger. So it occurred to Constantine, and there's the cynical and the sincere interpretation on Constantine that historians debate. Some historians think that Constantine was looking at this unified religion with the death of the Roman culture and thought, let's install this as our new culture to unify our empire that's been declining for centuries. Where Gibbon said that Christianity killed the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire as a political institution was already dying for centuries, what Christianity did was sort of wipe the slate clean for classical civilization and then replace it with a new mutated version. And the sincere interpretation is that Constantine genuinely believed in Christianity. And it's probably a mix between these. But what happened very quickly is that comparably to the rise of communism in places like the USSR or China, Christians went from a minority of less than 10% of the population to to after Constantine, the state supported universal religion. Where firstly they would say Christians were pagans, wouldn't be allowed to get government jobs, they wouldn't be allowed to own land. And there was this progressive pushing out of the pagans until they were the very most rural people. And there was a destruction of the previous pagan cultural in religious institutions. And the Catholic Church formed out of this. Where it's hard to create a clear demarcating line for the rise of the Catholic Church, where you had the Imperial Roman Church that gradually mutated into the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Churches. But it wasn't until the 11th century that the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches fully split apart. But they had already de facto been different churches for centuries up to that point. And the way to see it is that you had the Imperial Roman Church and that was based around a series of ideological doctrines which they had formed to unify the empire together. And places like the Council of Nicaea. Emperor Constantine got all of these Christian theologians and effectively said, you guys need to make a sect of Christianity which causes the least strife. But my father, for example, once said that it's impossible to make priests happy where you give the priests the ability to have the universal empire of the Roman Empire. And then they immediately started squabbling over doctrinal differences. And with the failure with the Council of Nicaea, you saw the creation of the Nicene Creed, which is still the. The unified list of sort of doctrinal positions that the Catholic Church is based around. And what happened with Nicaea and then I think Chalcedon as well, you saw the Romans build Christianity around the European parts of the empire where the Greeks and the Romans ended up having the predominant faction of Christianity. Well, it sidelined the older Middle Eastern populations where Christianity at this point was a predominantly Middle Eastern, North African religion. It only went into Europe with the conversion of Constantine where in Egypt the Coptic branch of Christianity they became heretics. The Nestorians in Syria and Iraq and through Asia became heretics. And you saw a variety of other heretics like the Monatists of. The Monatists of North Africa, the Aryans who, no Nazi connection, they became the predominant sect of Christianity for a lot of the Germanic barbarians later. And you had other, various other ones like the Pelasgians who were from Britain. But with the unification of the Roman Empire around Christianity you suddenly saw the division of Christianity among all these different sub sects.

[Austin]

So it immediately started going into that dynamic which we were discussing in which the values are filtered through local context almost at the same time as they're being established in the quote unquote original. Yeah, Catholic Church. And this might be too much of a tangent, but I was wondering how did Constantine get the elites on board with Christianity? Because it's a big ask.

[Whatifalth]

So I actually know that there's a book which covers this called through the Eye of the Needle by Peter Brown, who I've met him actually, and he's the biggest, he's the founder of the field of late antiquity. He was quite affable to me. And this was back in high school and the book is about that thing, about that very topic where the reason the elites got on board was Rome was a heavily unequal society. Late Rome was one of the most unequal societies ever in human history where the vast majority of people lived in grinding poverty and you had a small, very wealthy elite. And it was also a socialist state controlled economy where craftsmen and a huge part of the population had to report to the state directly as their employers. And then all of the major landowners were either allies with the state to avoid taxes or reliant on the state's funding. So the reason was that the government had a complete throttle on the society. So the elites converted to Christianity to appeal to the emperor and then it trickled down through the population because there was no countervining social pressure because once your landlord told you to convert to Christianity you were effectively a serf to your landlord. You would do it.

[Austin]

So basically they were just kind of desperate to go along because their position was so fragile anyways due to the social destabilization.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, paganism had also lost its real fiber by this point. There were. Paganism had become such a hollow religion.

[Austin]

That it wasn't a big deal for them.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, people. People didn't really care. I mean they were classical Civilization had gone into these Eastern mystery cults like Mithraism or Cybele or the Orphics or the Neoplatonists. They had over rationalized their religion and they had gotten their real spiritual experiences already from Eastern mystery religions. And so it wasn't seen as a huge deal. And interestingly, the last philosophic defenders of paganism were by and large people who were making sort of the normie lib arguments. Now they would say we support paganism because it's rationally consistent, because it protects freedom of speech and freedom of thought, because it's the thing our institutions are built off. And, and when people make those arguments, and I'm sorry fellow classical liberals, it means you've spent your cultural energy already. And so the Roman Empire, with that process of the elites converting, there is this interesting duality where a lot of the things we would see today were happening, where you would have very wealthy Romans throwing away all of their profits to live in poverty as Christian monks. And then this would cause social collapse because their tenants and their slaves couldn't support themselves without their Lord. Because it was just social collapse because if the Lord just becomes a monk, then there's no one to manage this complex apparatus. And so bandits show up. And this was a really tumultuous period where Christianity filled a spiritual void in the collapse of the society where again, it's highly unequal. The Roman Empire had sort of descended into its Latin America phase where it was just utter corruption, constant backstabbing. The Romans could not raise armies because they were too corrupt to do so. And the Romans had no desire to fight, so they were dependent on these Germanic barbarians who just ravaged Western Europe. And the Roman Empire was actively falling. And so you see these two counterveaning, the collapse of the public Roman society and then the rise of the Church as the counterviewing measure. And St. Augustine's City of God is really a good example of this because he was responding to the idea that was popular among Roman philosophers that Rome fell once they abandoned the pagan gods, because the pagan gods were true in punishing rome. And what St. Augustine said is that as the Roman Empire fell, we need to build the new Roman Empire in the Kingdom of Heaven, where City of God, the city of man, is Rome. And as Rome falls, the City of God and Heaven is the thing that's going to replace it. And this is symbolic for how the Catholic Church based out of Rome, like the old capital of Rome. And even after the Roman Empire moved their capital to Ravenna or Milan, the Catholic Church stayed in Rome as a sort of symbol that this was the real spiritual descendant of the fallen Western Roman Empire.

[Austin]

And so the Vatican being the City of God.

[Whatifalth]

Yes. No. So the City of God was the symbolic kingdom of heaven. So that Rome was violated. There is the Kingdom of Heaven. One of the things that modernists do that I hate is people tend to interpret Christianity as like a moral or an ethical or a political code. But Christianity is a spiritual path to reach the kingdom, Kingdom of Heaven. That, that's the point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right?

[Whatifalth]

It is a legitimate way. Why does this bug me? It's like Christianity is a way to reach God through the Kingdom of Heaven. It's not like a list of ethical rules or saying like you should love your neighbor geopolitically or like you should have equality.

[Austin]

And well, it's those interpretations of what to do geopolitically based on the word get very complicated because the world is complex. So it's all there's people have. There's a problem, a correct problem, with people kind of trying to take theology as a definitive answer for their politics. But at the same time you can't separate politics and religion in a large sense. I was going to ask you about this because maybe I'm doing the thing that was bothering you about what modernists do, but in my mind I connected it to the idea of like when your kingdom is falling and when you're being invaded by foreign armies, it's harder to justify the religion. People are like, oh, our God has failed, their God is stronger. Right. That's how it kind of started. So Rome is heavily socialist at this period and, and failing already. So obviously the, the like pagan gods were not, didn't have like you couldn't justify them based on this flourishing success. Basically, yeah.

[Whatifalth]

The Church did rise to the occasion though, so the Church had higher degrees of validity. And I'm going to say this before I forget it. The Catholic Church was the attempt to establish build Plato's Republic because if you look at the structure of Plato's Republic, you have a meritocratic elite assorted through various methods, which has a self regulating leadership. And Plato's Republic is a society where they remove personal benefit. The ruling class cannot have children, they cannot grow rich. They build a worldview based upon the Platonic archetypes or God, and then operate over the course of centuries to guide the society towards spiritual advancement. So you can see the Catholic Church as the realization of Plato's Republic. And I think that's brilliant. Something Will Durant said in Nietzsche said that Christianity is Platonism for the masses. And I also think that's true because Platonism is the desire to reach these abstract moral ideals. What Christ did was make a populist sort of spiritual direction for how to attain the kingdom of heaven.

[Austin]

Oh, perfect. It's a, a good way to distinguish it is that it's about alignment. Right. And if you have this proper alignment through truly seeking Christ and being immersed in the Word, then it should, it. It will translate to better outcomes in other spheres. But if you try. But you have to focus just on the alignment and let the other stuff be automatic. If you try to let prove your alignment through a theological argument towards an issue, then it gets stuck. Yep. So it requires constant discernment and going back to the drawing board of alignment.

[Whatifalth]

It's the spiritual symbolism of the cross. This axis, the horizontal one is terrestrial existence. And then the diagonal. What's the up, down thing called again? Not horizontal.

[Austin]

The lightning? The arrow?

[Whatifalth]

No, what's it, what's it when it's up, down?

[Austin]

Oh, vertical, Vertical.

[Whatifalth]

And then the vertical is towards the kingdom of heaven. So it assesses your position in terrestrial existence, then tries to shove you up vertically towards the kingdom of heaven like an elevator. That's what the symbolism of the cross is. And it was a wide known thing in early in Christianity of this era that Christianity was the tree and the cross, that the cross was this elevator towards, towards the kingdom of heaven. And the tree of life was the entire spirit world consciousness. So there was this idea that Christianity existed within a broader enchanted world where meaning was wrought into existence itself, where you had angels and demons and gods and these things. And so when you look at ancient, medieval and modern Christianity, they've taken on different evolutions where at the time of the fall of Rome, Christianity was an ecstatic religion. And it's interesting to read primary sources where people will like see the relics of a saint and then break into physical ecstasy or entire towns will burst into just religious experiences at once. Or these holy men would sit on top of pillars for years straight or live in caves or they be able to do magic or whatever. And these saints were seen as the heroes of the society and the Catholic Church stepped up where I think the fathers of the Church were absolute geniuses. And I think the reason I say that is they had an incredibly strong understanding of human nature. Where part of the reason Western civilization did so well is Christianity understood human nature as fallible, but through social pressure and free will it can ascend to higher levels. And it structured good and evil and it established all of these subconscious incentives for improvement which you later saw in Western civilization. And so what the Fathers of the Church do is that they took the Greco Roman classical heritage, where the only reason we have the writings of Greece and Rome is that the Catholic, the founders of the Catholic Church, like Gregory of Tours or St. Augustine or Origen or all of these figures, they made the active effort to keep track of Greco Roman classical literature and then pass it on to the next generations of Europeans through the Dark Ages. So the monks are the people who kept the classics going in that time period. They were the only people who taught literacy in the Dark Ages. And you look at the development of later European civilization. The humanist element exists in Europe because the Catholic Church carved out a place for humanism distinct from the religion. And this was true even in the Dark Ages. Or the reason that the west has this idea of improvement over time and sort of creating a system where you can gradually. So you're at a certain place and then you use the religion as a stabilizer to improve rather than the static of Asian religions, is that in the Dark Ages they cross referenced the classical tradition with the Christian tradition. Or they developed the idea that time is linear because between Christ's coming and the revelation, you see the direct motion of history. And there's a great author I've read a bunch of books of recently named Chris Dawson and he just goes through all of the sort of philosophic concepts in the west that stem from Christianity in the Dark Ages. And it's a variety of things between the creation of the individual, which occurred in 6th century Italy with the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage and individualism's had a huge impact in Western history. The establishment of modern kingship in the idea of sort of the Western structure of legitimacy in government that stemmed from Catholic thinkers in that era. Our intellectual traditions, artistic traditions, even very granular stuff stem from the Fathers of the Church seeing the fall of Rome and thinking we're going to build the structure of the Catholic Church, much like Asimov's, the foundation, so that we can rebuild civilization. Where they took a moment and went through all the historic record and thought how do we structure the Catholic Church as well as possible? And that's the reason the organization survived 2,000 years.

[Austin]

And as part of that lens of the people focus, their idea that hey, we can preserve civilization not by just controlling people or creating a specific scheme, but just improving people.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

So that it follows the positive things follow logically from. From that. That was kind of the change in focus.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. What they did there was very brilliant. And it sort of presages the worldview of the founding fathers where the founding fathers knew that if you let people play to their own self interests and if you build structures where when each player picks their self interest, the entire group benefits, they knew that that would create a successful system. The Fathers of the Church did that for social organization where they said humans are self interested and broken. So let's make a code that operates under that assumption. Then how do you get people to improve? And so their ideal was the Catholic Church is not going to enforce these things on people. This is sort of something that exists that, that exists for the society as a social institution that people will start to use and then build up social trust. So the Catholic Church didn't have any inquisition until the 13th century. So for the first, I'd say for the first thousand years, the Catholic Church literally did not have an enforcement mechanism. You had church law and state law. And the reasoning for that was not because they were tolerant, it was because Western Europe was such a rural and backwards society during the dark ages that they never developed cities or enough critical mass to have dissenting ideas. But it was not this hyper oppressive structure where the Catholic Church was good at working inside the structures of older religions, turning old gods into saints incorporated in the classical tradition. They had the most space for humanism of any culture in that era and in a variety of other institutions.

[Austin]

Wow. So this relates to my point about the information issues and the fog of war. It's basically the Catholic Church was super helpful and key in organizing that information. But once enough cities popped up that could be their own centers of diffusion of ideas, then the Catholic Church went from being kind of a purely helpful institution to being like, hey, only we can do that.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

And the changing factor isn't just that long term fight changing, it's the actual conditions that you mentioned with the cities emerging.

[Whatifalth]

Yes. So the Catholic Church went through a lot of phases and we're going to keep the, have the, have to keep them straight. So phase one is sort of the knowledge that the Roman Empire is falling. And so how do we do Asimov's foundation, where the foundation is a novel. It's a sci fi novel by Isaac Asimov from like the 1950s and 40s. And it's about this, this guy who develops a field called psychohistory, which I guess is kind of what I do, where you look at the patterns in history to predict the future. And much like me, he predicts that the society is going to collapse. He develops a scheme to build this sort of colony of scientists and experts on the edge of the galaxy to reintroduce civilizations. And that's what the Catholic Church did. So when you're dealing with the fathers of the Church, they're doing this social engineering for how do we make this structure. And once you get past St. Augustine or sort of the Boethius generation, Boethius was a little bit later, you saw the Dark Ages kick in, where all of those thinkers in the beginning were highly steeped in classical Greco Roman lore because they grew up in it. A lot of them were Greco Roman aristocrats who then went into the Church. Then with the Dark Ages, you saw Western Europe slide back into ignorance, where the Catholic Church kept the knowledge going, the little they had, but they also lost a lot of their knowledge. So they were relying on their wiser ancestors to give them opinions. And so the second phase was the Catholic Church's isolation in Western Europe because you saw the demarcation between. So the Catholic Church didn't have to fight that many heretics. You had the Aryan Christians who, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths in Western Europe, they converted to Arianism. And all of these disputes at this time period were about what was the nature of Christ's divinity at the time of the Resurrection. And I believe the Arians said that Christ was a man who was connected to God. He was not a God. And so the Visigoths and the Visigoths who owned Spain and Ostrogoths who owned Italy, they were Arians. And then they oppressed the local Catholics. But because they were like several percents of the population, these Germanic elites eventually lost. And so you see the Frankish Empire based out of France, they were the main Germanic people in West Europe who converted to Catholicism. And they worked with the local Catholic structure, which allowed the Franks to rise to become the predominant military power in all of Western Europe, because the local classical elite went into the Church. And so when the Franks converted to Catholicism, they were making an alliance with the local ruling class. And then the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths put themselves in opposition to the local ruling class through not being Catholic.

[Austin]

And do you know what kind of political implications those theological debates about Christ being man versus God related to that? The German elite might have had an interest that was opposing from the Italian elite.

[Whatifalth]

So the Goths, they converted to Christianity before they entered the Roman Empire or at the time of. So they converted in the Balkans and then they migrated west. And for some reason, the Aryans had A better hold on the Balkans. And the Franks were from the Netherlands and Germany and they just went across the border. So I think the Goths might have built their identity around being Aryan as a way to avoid assimilation in their long migrations.

[Austin]

Right. It was kind of like, who's in charge? The people who represent this sphere or that sphere.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. And the biggest implication of these doctrinal disputes is the rise of Islam. Because what happened with the Greeks taking on the sort of writing for what's the correct doctrine of Christianity is that the Semites who made Christianity had a religion that was built for Europeans, not for them. And there's a whole process here. Chris Dawson explains this really well. And it speaks to Spengler's point that he calls it Magellan civilization. That Islamic civilization dates back centuries before the rise of Islam. That this distinct civilization developed in Syria and Iraq during the Roman Empire, that Islam sort of took power. That the rise of Islam was the sign of this underlying growing new civilization. And Western Europe didn't have that many of these heretical sects. They were the majority in Egypt and the Middle East. And so there's a real irony that most of those cities opened their gates to the Muslims because the Muslims were nicer to these heretical Christians than the Eastern Orthodox. Byzantine Christians were.

[Austin]

Right. Small differences, big fights.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. And Islam became this total supernova that rolled across North Africa and across most of Spain. And Islam boxed the Catholic Church in Western Europe. And this was a big factor of the Catholic of sort of the Dark Ages getting worse. Where now that Catholicism only survives in the northern part of Spain, France, Germany, Benelux, Italy, and it had to go back into Britain and the British Isles because Christianity died in England due to the Anglo Saxon migration. And the Celtic churches were self governing through centuries in the Dark Ages. And actually the Irish Church was the most advanced Catholic, the most advanced church in all of Western Europe. So the conversion of Germany and England was actually dependent off Irish monks and later Anglo Saxon monks. And the monasteries in France were often run by Irishmen. So Ireland was this intellectual hub, although it was still warring tribes. And they had to negotiate the Celtic Church back into the Catholic Church. And that was a whole different process where part of England was Celtic, another part was Catholic. But the Catholic Church was concentrated in a pretty small area of Western Europe. And they got cut off from the Byzantines because Italy was a total mess for the sixth century, where I think they might have lost a majority of their population in war because you had Germanic peoples like the Ostrogoths and the hey rules and the Lombards and the Franks attack into Italy. Then the Byzantines tried to reconquer Italy. And the worst Italy's cities survived the fall of Rome. The wars between the Byzantines and the Germans were what killed off Italy's cities and hundreds of thousands of people died. Rome was burnt multiple times. There was times when Rome was just looked like certain parts of Philadelphia where it's just complete despoilage and empty. And this conflict is what gradually split the Catholic Church off from the Eastern Empire. Because for parts of it, the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome, as he was called, was dependent on the Byzantine Emperor against the Lombards. However, they sort of grew this resentment over the course of their relationship that as the Pope had to interface with the Byzantine Emperor, they started to notice this ethnic drift of Italians versus Greeks. What ultimately happened was that over centuries of this tension, when the Franks invaded Italy and they marched down to Rome, the French being the people who became the Franks being the people who became the French, the Franks created a counterviewing pressure so that the Catholic Church could basically let go of their toxic ex, the Byzantines. And so once the Franks started to back the Pope rather than the Byzantines, the Pope sided with the Franks and then later the Holy Roman Emperor who was a German. And that's what solidified the split. And it also related to the Byzantines were trying to do power grabbing and they were trying to force the Pope to be part of their sort of cultural sphere which the Pope didn't want to do.

[Austin]

Right. They were like, we're Rome now and we're committed to carrying it on that way. Basically you never want to be the battleground in between two different groups that aren't you. Because if you're getting invaded at some point you can cut it off and like you just lose. Right. But if you two other people are fighting at your house, there's no level of destruction that relates to a demand for them to stop fighting. Yeah, they'll just stomp all over it. So it's interesting that it's, it is interesting that when the Franks, okay, went over to Catholicism that made them more aligned with Italy than the Byzantines, which was kind of a more connected cultural sphere and obviously a longer term part of the Roman Empire.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, I was thinking about that. I don't have a good answer. Chris Dawson thinks it's a historical chance. I don't know, it could be that, I mean the western and the eastern Roman empires were divided beforehand. So there was this long standing Idea that the west and the east are different countries.

[Austin]

I'm sure there's a lesson in it.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

Even if it could have gone a.

[Whatifalth]

Different way, I mean, what. The empire for centuries was divided between Latin and Greek speakers. And the Franks, so the Gauls, they were Latin speakers speakers, they spoke a bastardized version of Latin that became French. And so you see this period that Tom Holland calls the Forge of Christendom, where with this West European circle that the Catholic Church survived in over the Dark Ages, you saw this period, get this era, this area get absolutely hammered by Viking, Hungarian and Arab raids. And this was in the sort of shards that came out of Charlemagne's Carolingian Renaissance where he unified most of Western Europe. And there was a brief period of intellectual and artistic and cultural breakthroughs that set the foundations for the later breakthroughs in the High Middle Ages. But this period was, it was very formative for Western Europe. And Western Europe used this basically one period of humiliations to get their shit together. So there has never been an existential threat on Western Europe really ever since where France formed to fight the Vikings as a unified country, England did, Scotland did, Germany to fight the Hungarians, Spain and Portugal to fight the Arabs. And so Western Europe came out of this tumultuous period stronger and then the next thousand years of development came out of it. But with Italy, this was the worst period in papal history ever. And Paul Collins has an interesting book called the Birth of the west that covers this, where you know, when you have TV shows that go on way too long, there's like several seasons that are the bootlegged, crappy version that don't even make sense with the rest of the canon. And there's the Malaysian spin off show and you're like, why is this even canon for the Catholic Church? Their bad sequel was the 9th century where with the fall of the central Frankish government and Italy was a mess of small city states where North Italy was all a forest which separated the middle from France. The papacy became controlled by local Italian mafia families. And yes, the Mafia did exist 1200 years ago, where like in Romeo and Juliet, these Italian families would fight over cities and the papacy went back and forth between several of these mafia families where you had these utter degenerates who were popes who would like, who would, who'd like just murder their opponents and then do weird sexual things. And then someone people would just put their relatives in the papa as pope because no one cared. Because the papacy across Western Europe, the Catholic Church across West Europe was self governing. The the priests in France did not listen to what the Pope said, where the Pope became a totally disrespected figure. And there was a point where the Pope was a mummified corpse, because for one of these mafia families, their claim to Pope had died, but they had won the civil war, so they put his mummified corpse on the throne. I am not making this up. This happened, right? And what happened after this is that across the 11th century, it was this Renaissance in Western Europe, which I think actually had greater historic importance and was of greater depth than the Italian renaissance of the 15th century. Because the High Middle Ages is the start of Western Europe's trajectory of dominance. And across Europe, the French pulled their country, the French sort of pulled their stuff together. The Germans did. Did the English, the Spanish and the Pope pulled his crap together. Where you had several incredibly capable popes, like, I think they had multiple Gregory's, who got the papacy to have control over Western Europe, where the Catholics in France started following the Pope. Again, same thing as Spain. Spain had their own distinct church. And the Norman Conquest of England was the thing that brought the English Church under direct papal governance, which is why the Pope backed William the Conqueror. But you see this total shifting in the papacy's position where by the end of the 11th century, the Papacy was the most respected organization in Western Europe. They basically had control over the Mayans and the thoughts of what the average West European thought. They had intellectual and cultural and architectural, A technological revolution. But this set up three distinct trajectories. The first being the Crusades, the second being the conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor. And the third being the exploding effect of the growth in science and learning. And I will go to the bathroom before I analyze each of them.

[Austin]

Perfect.

[Whatifalth]

Hi. So we're in the High Middle Ages, which was a new era of Christendom, where the Catholic Church took over practically all of Western Europe, where the Spanish reconquered their country from the Muslims. The pressure on the east meant that Poland and Hungary, and they include the neighboring countries too, as well as Scandinavia and later the Baltics converted to Catholicism, while Russia and most of the Balkans went for Eastern Orthodoxy. And so they grabbed up all of Eastern Europe. And Christianity was a cohesive worldview where it so permeated the identity of most people in Western Europe that their first idea is that we are Christendom. They didn't call themselves Europe because that was their core identity. And it was impossible to live in Medieval Europe without being influenced by Christianity, where, for example, their concept of science or ethics or a variety of topics only existed through a Christian social frame. This is one of the things Chris Dawson is very good at explaining. Where as an example, the reason cities developed distinct legal identities in medieval Europe was to develop ways to hold the population of non rural areas responsible to Christian morality. Because in the countryside you had parishes and so you had religious authority divested amongst distinct subpopulations. Where with the higher density of cities you develop the republican institutions to maintain the moral code and the traditions with higher population densities, which you end up doing with doing through sort of voting or mutual association. Where the city identities came from the need to have a sort of spiritual identity for a high population density place. In the same way that universities and later science came from Catholic institutions where the university was a comparable self regulating thing. And if you throw a dart at any given thing in medieval Europe, and medieval Europe is the foundations of again our economic system. They had the stock market, they had science. Parliament is a medieval institution. The modern Western governments are medieval institutions. All of these things were based either one or two steps from the Catholic Church because the entire society was Christian.

[Austin]

And so are universities kind of the key factor within the development of cities that creates an institutional organizational alternative to the Catholic Church.

[Whatifalth]

So the thing that created. I'm sorry that I interrupted you before you finished your point. I thought you were saying something else. But universities were originally Catholic institutions and by the time of the 12th century they were secularizing. Where it's really remarkable how rapidly Europe took in the logical tradition from the Byzantines and the Muslims. Where Abelard, who was a Breton guy in the late 11th century, was already making rationalistic criticisms of Christianity during the First Crusade. So the second, the Europeans got this stuff. They started using it intellectually, often against the Catholic Church. And I think it's a great credit to the Catholic Church that in medieval Europe it actually gave plenty of space to disagree with them. Where they had these structures, these are things you can agree on and these are things you can't agree on. And I actually think their structures were fairly reasonable where they allowed political, political discourse up to the point of basically saying we want communism. Where people in the Middle Ages were reading Aristotle write about democracy or Plato's Republic. So people talked about democracy in the Middle Ages, although it wasn't treated as a serious idea. Actually, no, there were plenty of medieval Republics between Novgorod or Venice or Genoa. So they had a fairly big overton window of potential discussion. And for the early Inquisition, which formed as a reaction to the introduction of these external ideas through the Crusades. The way the Inquisition worked is you could at any given point say, I am no longer a heretic. I accept Christ and the Catholic dogma, and they'd be legally obligated to not kill you. So the Inquisition was a structure where they basically wanted you to. To say, I give up, don't kill me at every given step. And so the amount of people the Inquisition killed is actually very small. I think it's in more about the implication. So you also have the Papal Inquisition. You have the Spanish Inquisition. And the Spanish Inquisition was way worse than the Papal Inquisition, where the Pope did not actually approve of the Spanish Inquisition and did not say they should be representative of Catholicism. And so the Papal Inquisition is 13th century onward. And they were worst in sort of like South France, Catalonia, North Italy, where there was the highest concentration of heretics.

[Austin]

To be fair, that they were pretty heretical there.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, the Cathars, I do not think. I do not think Catharism is acceptable. I mean, it's just.

[Austin]

It's interesting that they draw. They have a broad line. Line on interpretation up to the point where it's like clearly to flip. An inversion of the value set. Yeah. At which point you can reasonably. Because, like, you can rationally wiggle yourself out of anything. So you need to create a line that's like common sense based, basically.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, that's what the Catholics did where they said, we are willing to let you argue as long as you're on our side and as long as this is a constructive thing to improve society, where they have pretty broad freedom of expression and they let people like Abelard write things for a lot of these thinkers, like Galileo was funded by the papacy and he was friends with the Pope before there was an internal political calculation shift or Abelard was a monk. And all of these thinkers that you see are heretical. And you read their backstories over the Middle Ages, they all cooperate with the Catholic church for like 10, 10 years until they take one step too far. And then the Catholic Church is like, no, this was not. This was actually a fairly open society. And like, if you look at the Cathars, they believe that God was the devil and vice versa. In Cathar belief, Christ is the servant of the serpent in the garden and the God of the Old Testament is the bad guy who made a cruel, wicked earth.

[Austin]

At that point, I don't care if you're reading the same book, you're inverting the values explicitly within it.

[Whatifalth]

So, yes, I do not accept the option that Satan was the good guy, but There was a sort of. The Papal Inquisition did get. There were points where it did. They nearly turned St. Francis of Assisi into a heretic, which would have really hurt the Catholic Church. Where after the failure of the first few Crusades, which the Catholic Church launched. Watch the external video that we already did on the crusades in history 102. The Crusades brought about doubts about the Catholic ruling dogma because it took so many people from Western Europe to the Holy Land in just a series of different wars. So they saw different cultures that were often more advanced than Christendom. And then on top of it, the Crusaders kept losing and the Catholic Church abused their crusader sort of privilege. Where the first were these huge events where you had the Pope going to Clairvaux in France to get the French people to just get really riled up for the First Crusade. And you had crazy events of the Children's Crusade. But then the Catholic Church started using Crusades against their rivals inside Christendom, using it against pagans. And like a film franchise, it got watered down to the point where for the Catholic Church to launch Crusades rather than in the beginning ramping up Christians, it actively drove down the reputation because they were launching Crusades against the Holy Roman Emperor or the Normans or all these people inside Europe where it was obvious that the Catholic Church was becoming morally corrupt.

[Austin]

Right. Literally becoming a gang.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

Through the mafia roots.

[Whatifalth]

I. I was going to talk about Saint Francis of Assisi. I wanted to say that before.

[Austin]

Yeah. About him. Let's just. This kind of relates. It's like. Kind of like calling one innocent man a heretic is worse than letting 10 heretics go. Like, if you get that wrong just once, it undermines trust in your entire judgment.

[Whatifalth]

I'd be willing to kill 10 heretics for killing one honest man. I think that's okay.

[Austin]

Bismarck.

[Whatifalth]

No, I think that's a reasonable calculation.

[Austin]

Well, let's. Let's look at St. Francis of Assisi and see what the consequences would have been if they got that one wrong.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

So.

[Whatifalth]

St. Francis of Assisi was this Italian, I believe, son of a wealthy merchant in the 13th century century. It's funny, people say Genghis Khan was brutal for his time, but he lived at the exact same time of St. Francis of Assisi. I think they were born and died quite similarly times to each other.

[Austin]

Wow.

[Whatifalth]

And St. Francis of Assisi was just known to be a wonderful man. He founded the Franciscan order who sort of tried to return to living in poverty. And they were part of the tradition of friars which were big in the high Middle Ages of wandering mendicants who were priests who lived in poverty among the people. And so the Franciscans became the most powerful tool against the heretics because they were widely respected across Western Europe for being genuine holy men. But they put pressure on the Catholic Church. And Umberto Eco has a really interesting book on this topic where the Dominicans, another monastic order, were quite wealthy. And the plot of the story is that the Franciscans trying to argue that to be a Christian you had to be in poverty. And then the Dominicans were saying the opposite. That's the plot of the book. And so the Franciscans were nearly made heretics even though they followed Catholic doctrine because they put pressure on the pre established institutions. And keep in mind the Catholic Church was the biggest landowner in Europe. They had like a quarter of France and Germany. They had a strip of central territory in Italy that they controlled called the Papal States. And this was part of a broader push of monasticism where you had these distinct sects that had monks. And monks are a group spiritual practice where rather than being a priest and being in a town and being responsible for the town, the monks live together communally to try to follow God. And these were actually huge for the commercialization of Europe because the monks would move out into the wilderness, they'd clear out some forest, and they were incredibly productive. And so they were also very important in the foundation of Europe's banking, where the Catholic Church was against usury in the Middle Ages, but they used various loopholes to get around it in actuality. So you did have debt in medieval Europe, but you look at the Benedictines, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Cluniacs, and these all had their own separate distinct so spin on Christianity. And the monastic orders were really the variable that kept Catholicism energetic in the high Middle Ages. Without the monastic orders, you would have removed the majority of Catholicism's creative ability and they had a degree of unity across Europe. Where for example, a blind monk from Scotland could walk around an abbey, which is a form of like monastery in Scandinavia, without. Without any help, because it exactly corresponded to his abbey in Scotland.

[Austin]

It's part of the reason why having the. A shared, a very broad shared value landscape over a fractured decentralized polity is just such a hack that enabled Europe to develop so well. Because that way you can travel right without an empire, you know, making the roads like there's two ways to. There's two ways for free trade, like shared value, landscape or empire. And the first of those two is just Hyper powered. And it sounds like that, that's almost like the, the mini Catholic version of the Reformation, like the Catholic Reformation.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, they have a lot of these. We're gonna go through several more moral revolutions.

[Austin]

This is giving me a more nuanced view of the Catholic Church in opposition to the, the Protestant.

[Whatifalth]

And it's gonna get more, it's gonna get more nuanced.

[Austin]

Nice.

[Whatifalth]

So the, the Catholic Church had a lot of power at the start of the 14th century because they had a multi century battle with the Holy Roman Emperor, who for frame of reference, owned a territory like 20 times the size of the Papal States. The Holy Roman Emperor had Germany, most of the neighboring countries, like Benelux, south parts of France, Switzerland, like half of Italy, at certain points, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, whatever. And he fought the Pope because both of them were competing over Italy. And there was a point when the whole Roman Emperor had both north and south Italy. So the Papal States was sandwiched between. And then there were other points where the Holy Roman Emperor actually helped out the Pope initially in the 10th century to fight off bandits around Paris and to help liberate him from the Byzantine Emperor. But then they started competing too much over the wealthy city states of north Italy. And this was a complex conflict where I think both sides could have won. There were times where the Holy Roman Emperor nearly beat the Pope. There were other times where the Holy Roman Emperor had to prostrate himself before the Pope at Canossa in the winter snow because the Pope beat him. And it really shows how powerful the papacy was that the whole Roman Emperor who owned this enormous territory could lose out to the Pope because the Pope had such spiritual power over the people of Western Europe. And the deciding variable was that the Pope was able to use the German nobility, given Germany was a highly decentralized country, to backstab the Emperor. Put in a candidate for the Emperor who would not keep Germany unified so that the institution of the Holy Roman Emperor survived. But at the same time, the Empire became hopelessly divided among a sub variety of states.

[Austin]

Right. It's not like the Pope could necessarily always kill you with his army, but they provided certain. Working with them provided benefits that often made the difference between you upholding your regime not only against them, but against internal or whatever forces operated. So even if the Pope couldn't beat you in the army, he could still make you dependent on him.

[Whatifalth]

Yes. Also, this conflict was implicit for the rise of secularism versus religiosity, where the concept of the religious versus the secular is unique to Western civilization because Other societies just have in India or ancient Greece, the religion is the culture. And Catholicism is interesting for building its worldview off dogma. And what this did over time is it killed the mystic because in other religions you build sort of the neurological wiring of the religion around ceremony in Eastern Orthodoxy or among which descendant of Muhammad you choose in Islam. But creating a worldview based off dogma and Catholicism both helped select for the West's ideological sort of autism. It split up the secular institutions from the religious institutions. And the west is so dependent on Christian assumptions you wouldn't even believe it. The idea of equality stems from Christianity. The idea of a rationally consistent universe we got from Christianity. Tom Holland has a great book on this called Dominion. And I already made a video on Christianity's cultural effects on history in the main channel. But the idea of like the West's autistic, rich sort of logical philosophic system is because the Catholic Church's power was based on passages in the Bible, so you had to assume those to be fundamentally true for a worldview, so you can add them together to make a logical system. Alternately, the. The idea of it killed the mystic because when the religion is dependent on dogma, having direct relationship with God is too dangerous. And you saw this occur for both Protestants and Catholics over time. And there's a theory as well that the Eucharist was a psychedelic. And there's a significant amount of evidence for this. It's especially true in the early church. There's a Brian Mooreshku who's got an interesting book on the topic, and there's another one about it being like magic mushrooms. That was written in the 80s, but we have records from the 12th century of them making the Eucharist wine in northern France. And they mixed ergot in. And ergot is a sort of like a form of wheat rot into the wine to create sort of shamacallit again, the spiritual unity of the Eucharist. And then in the High Middle Ages, you have towns breaking into dance on Sunday, an ecstatic sort of group events, just mass dancing, mass hallucinations. And that makes significantly more sense if they were all sort of tripping together where peasants in the Middle Ages were terrified to take the Eucharist because the magic of the church was so powerful and the Church forced them to take the Eucharist at least once a year for their own good. And. And we haven't confirmed the theory yet about the High Middle Ages. It's more probable about the early Church. But it does fit with the evidence I've seen, especially if you look at medieval art, which has a lot of like psychedelic elements.

[Austin]

I mean that, I never thought about that with the, the dancing fit thing, but that makes a lot of sense. I mean there's another element where you can have just non drug induced hysterias or like giggle fits, you know, in a group that make your stomach hurt. Like why is this happening? It doesn't fit with a, you know, purely rational construct to, to do a super long dance mania. But so does this, and the way you mentioned dogma, does that relate to how I talk about like relating, tying a specific theological conclusion to politics versus like discernment? Is that the, the layer where they're running into the dogma?

[Whatifalth]

So a belief structure that's had a lot of impact on the world is that Neoplatonic philosophy thinks that the world has to be measured, reasonable, where there has to be correspondence between the different areas of the great chain of being. And so this idea has sort of indirectly, through Catholicism, had a significant impact on Western history, where the idea that if I write a logical series of arguments, if it's logically true, there's a correspondence in the outside world. The outside world can just say fuck you and do whatever it wants. And your argument could be logically correct, correct on paper, but it doesn't actually correspond to the outside world. Does that make sense?

[Austin]

Right, right, yeah, perfect. That makes sense. Like you're trying to basically figure everything all out at once internally, rather than interacting over a period of time through discernment and connection to a spiritual alignment. And that kind of relates maybe to the autistic part of it. And so I'm trying to think of like, how do you bring the mystic element back into that? Or, or does the mystic element relate to what I'm saying about discernment in any way?

[Whatifalth]

I just made an enormous video on the main channel about this and if we talk about this, we'll talk about it for like half an hour and then we won't have time for modernity.

[Austin]

Right.

[Whatifalth]

So the Catholic Church became sort of quite arrogant in the 14th century due to their victory over the Emperor. And so their next target was the King of France, who is the king of about one third of the people in Western Europe. The most powerful king after the Holy Roman Emperor lost unified control. And then the King of France has murdered the Pope and then installed the French Pope, which was not in the phone book of options, but.

[Austin]

You can just do things.

[Whatifalth]

The Pope had lost enough respect over the previous century that it was doable. In early 14th century. And he staffed the, he staffed the cardinals. And it's interesting that the Catholics have sort of protean form of democracy that the cardinals vote on the Pope with a bunch of Frenchmen. As you had a French pope and surprisingly for I believe, decades, you had this French pope that ruled all of Catholicism. And then the English and the Italians thought, wait, why are we following a pope who is in Avignon where they moved the papacy to France rather than Italy? Or for the English, how come our rival is the Pope, the French get to pull this crap on us and we still listen to the same pope. And so this followed a period called the Babylonian California captivity over the 14th century, which was another low point of Catholicism, where the Catholic Church, partly due to the Black Death, which disproportionately killed priests, which also was a huge loss in faith in Christianity that priests died disproportionately. They lost a lot of their best talent, so they had to lower standards. And so, for example, monks marrying, that was acceptable until the 11th century. Then the crack down on it again. But then from the Black Death, monks started marrying again. Monks were frequently wealthy, they'd go to brothels. The Catholic Church actually sponsored brothels in this time period. And so the Catholic Church became morally degenerate and then it split up into the Avignon based pope and then the Rome based pope. And so this was the papacy's equivalent of sort of crashing out where Western Europe was Catholic, but it was these different varieties of Catholic and they kept fighting each other for most of the century, but in the process the Catholic Church lost a lot of its legitimacy and they eventually reunified on a Roman pope at the end of the century, which allowed the Catholic Church the ability to pull itself back together. But then the next two phases are sort of in port important where the Catholic Church, after the European crisis of the 14th century, which was brutal, was able to reset in the 15th century when Rome had, when Europe had half the population and things were way more peaceful and productive. And the issue though was that this was in the context of the Italian Renaissance, which was an era of cynicism and degeneracy, but aesthetic perfection, where the papacy was one of the biggest drivers of the Renaissance, where I mean they funded the art, they funded the research into paganism, the Catholic Church was super into hermeticism and Platonism in this time period. And they funded the beautiful St. Peter's Basilica and the. And friggin David reaching out to God. And I shouldn't have said friggin there. That was disrespectful. But so it was this wonderful period of art where the papacy became an additional node of the Renaissance besides Florence and Milan. But at the same time, you saw a lot of things like the Borgias, who are this originally Spanish family who seized control of the papacy and they murdered their rivals. They engaged in enormous corruption. They would have illegitimate children. And so this fed into the Reformation, where, although it was a cultural golden age, the Germans, who were ostensibly better Christians, looked at the papacy and thought, wait, you guys are utter degenerates. Why are we listening to you? So Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses onto a door in Wittenberg as a reaction to the Renaissance. And this was a huge turning point in Catholic history between both the Protestants taking Germanic Europe away from the Catholic Church, creating this primordial split inside Christendom that has not been healed till the rise of Communism. And then you see Catholic Europe pull back from the degeneracy and the aesthetic beauty and creativity of the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation's emphasis on conservatism and moral purity and authoritarianism.

[Austin]

Right. It's kind of like society outgrew their heroes. Is at the same time that Germany, you said, was flourishing in the Renaissance and the valley, and they were, you know, actually becoming better Christians. Then it became more apparent how corrupt the popes were being. Also. They were trending in that direction. Just kind of an interesting parallel.

[Whatifalth]

Keep in mind that Italy was wealth was the wealthiest place on Earth, and Germany was wealthy, but Italy was wealthier. And Italians were also quite sort of connected to either pagan traditions through the classics or through Muslims or Jews. So for the Italians, they had a concept going back centuries that Christianity was just one way of life, where the University of Bologna in the 14th century was staffed by atheists. So atheism was not an uncommon philosophic principle in medieval Italy. And then you had figures like Machiavelli, who was a total sort of cynic. And then you had Frederick II in the 13th century, who had a sort of philosopher's religion. He was the Holy Roman Emperor who was based out of Sicily. And then the Germans didn't have any of those concepts. And so with both of those trends, the Protestant Reformation rippled out pretty quickly, and the Catholic Church lost the Germans, who were always sort of like the most driven and skilled and intrepid people in Europe. So Germany itself was split in half where the Austria and Czechia and those places went Protestant first, but then the Habersburg Holy Roman Emperors, whose titles of royalty were dependent on Catholicism, in a weird irony that they also fought the Pope, but they were dependent on the Pope. They kept. They pulled Austria and Czechia back into the Catholic fold. And the north in the east of Germany stayed, went Protestant and the south in the east went Catholic. The Dutch cultural area was split between Belgium that became Catholic and the Netherlands that became Protestant. And then England and Scotland and Wales went Protestant and Ireland stayed Catholic. And so Ireland became the sole outcrop of Catholicism in sort of northwest Europe. And what the Protestant Reformation did is it firstly intertwined the Catholic Church with Latin culture, where beforehand the Catholic Church was this trans European identity. And then with the Protestant Reformation, when you think of Catholic Europe, you think of Latin Europe. And so there's this correlation causation issue of was Latin Europe's decay after this point dependent on it being Catholic or was that a side effect? And the other variable was the Counter Reformation, which was heavily Spanish, being another confounding variable, where the Spanish developed a form of Christianity significantly more hardcore than what the, than what the rest of Europe had. And they did so through fighting the Muslims for centuries. And the Spanish did an enormous good for Catholicism as a religion through conquering their enormous empire, where as of now, it wouldn't surprise me if a majority of town Catholics in the world reside in Latin America, where the Spanish spread that religion to a huge area stretching from Patagonia to California. And they did so by crushing the local native religious beliefs, which couldn't really adapt to the modern world. And there's a whole story there about how the Catholic monastic orders were the biggest force that brought civilization to the New World. And especially true in California or Texas or Venezuela or Paraguay, where you had a Catholic communist state in Paraguay run by the Jesuits, where the Jesuits were Latin America's elite educational class. And the Catholic Church provided almost all of the religious institutions for Latin America, or, sorry, all of the educational and cultural institutions, but the Catholic Church inside, sorry, the Spanish empire in Europe pushed the Inquisition, which crushed Spain's creativity, where it didn't kill that many people, but the Spanish Inquisition destroyed sort of free thinking and it promoted conformity and genuine racism, where even after they converted the Muslims, the Jews to Christianity, the they would say, but your blood is impure, so you're not really a Spaniard. And so you have these two trends where the Spanish became puppet masters directly or indirectly for Italy. So the Pope was dependent on the Spanish. And then the French stayed Catholic. They had an extensive civil war. The Protestants nearly won, which sort of kept France in This geopolitical torturous position for the 16th century, where the Catholics eventually won, but France was big enough and the Pope himself was dependent enough on the Spanish that the Pope, the French had their own version of Catholicism where they follow all the rites in the theology. They just didn't listen to the Pope's orders. And then at the same time, the Spanish and the rest of the Catholic world in general, through the Counter Reformation, saw a decrease in creativity that was correlated with the rise of authoritarianism, where both the Spanish and the French, or Latin Europe in general, saw the rise of authoritarian, socially constrictive regimes that cracked down on creativity, that filled the economy with monopolies, that did a variety of things. That meant Northwest Europe was able to totally surpass Mediterranean Europe over the early modern period, where at the start of the early modern period, Mediterranean Europe was wealthier and by the end, Northwest Europe would totally dominate them. And it's one of those things where Catholicism did play a role in that, where it became more socially conservative. It shut itself off from science in the 17th century, and beforehand, the Catholic Church were the developers of science and its biggest funders. But Galileo was a turning point where the Church positioned itself against science, although they funded his research earlier. And they couldn't pull themselves out of that framing until the 20th century, where the Catholic Church set itself in opposition to modernity as a deliberate strategy. And it's unclear if that's a correlation or causation thing.

[Austin]

I mean, they might have been also influenced to do that to further distinguish themselves from the Reformation being forced to make an oppositional bet. And it's a shame because obviously science is very connected to the Christian tradition and also Catholic tradition. So when they have this pivot and they're teaching people that, you know, this science and discovery and exploration is bad, then you trigger these atheistic revolutions in France, because this thing that's actually good and connected to Christian principles is being described as Christian by Christians, as non Christians.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

So if you believe that false framing, then the clue conclusion is you drop Christianity. But that's. That's not even the case.

[Whatifalth]

Yes. And this is why I say it's unclear if that's the Catholic Church or the society it's in fault, because in France, for example, the Catholic Church did a pretty good job where they supported freedom, they invested in education, they worked with a lot of the scientists. Descartes was basically, he was very. He was working with the Catholic Church, but the government kept France a Catholic theocracy, which of course the Catholic Church was Not mad about until the time of the French Revolution where France was the most educated country in the world. Where in the modern world Catholicism hit an issue where after the initial burst of creativity with the Counter Reformation with figures like Ignatius Loyola, who built the Jesuits as both a sort of mystic and high achieving Catholic monastic organization. And then you stuff like talking to the Chinese emperor or that there was art in music and culture which all stemmed from the Counter Reformation which became the Baroque and culminating Louis XIV's court. So Catholic Europe made its own culture, but that culture sort of fossilized. And you look at the Protestants who are consistently able to make new branches and new ideas and jump on technology more easily. So that in France atheism became the dominant philosophy in the 18th century because there was a profound resentment at these hyper intellectual people basically legally not being allowed to be Protestants or to have religious free thinking. So you had this hyper advanced secular intellectual tradition which developed in France due to the strong centralized government first. And then you also had the Catholic Church which stayed utterly rigid. And this was an issue across Mediterranean Europe, which was why atheism in France and in Spain occurred over a century on a wide scale before it did in Germany or Britain. Protestant countries.

[Austin]

There's a lot of irony to this because the Catholics attempt, they had this fear the Protestant volatility would and loss of control would lead to a rise of atheism.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

And so their response was to double down in a way that actually made them more atheistic. But they may have still been highlighting some correct problems in Protestantism because it eventually went in that direction where like what was it the quest for discovery ended up undermining itself or, or whatever into subjectivity. Yeah. And so no, I'm not just trying to say like Catholics or Protestants were wrong, but maybe there's something they were both write about that can be like integrated by each one respectively in their own ways.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. The both of them charted to over rely on basically the rules of religion to fight the other. Because the Catholics and the Protestants, I don't think I emphasized this enough. They went through centuries of brutal wars with the Other. We glossed over the, the rest of Reformation, but that was a real nightmare. Culminating in the 30 years war that waged for of course 30 years and killing a third of Germany and Central Europe's population. And there's an interesting book by Alec Reere called Doubt and it's a history of atheism and he's a historian of Protestantism over the last, over the modern period. And the thesis he came to as the starting point was the Catholics and the Protestants were arguing over what points in the other's theology was wrong. So that because Christianity was not a totalitarian civilization, it permeated the society, but it wasn't enforced. So a lot of the people in this. It wasn't enforced on like a daily sort of Maoist level where lots of people were culturally Christian and they didn't actually care or they doubted and they saw the Protestants and Catholics go after each other and they thought, well, wait, both of you are fake. But also in the process, both of them had to crack down in the subjective and the mystic elements and became more socially conservative, like more dower artistically, more sexually crude. Removing a lot of the. Like a. They. The Catholics removed a bunch of feast and celebration days because they were trying to be more serious, like the Protestants sense.

[Austin]

I was going to say removing the fun.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, yeah.

[Austin]

That's literally feasts. Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

And so you removed a lot of the fun and then you also removed the personal, spiritual, religious element of it that was stronger earlier on and that still does exist in Catholicism. But the religions as presented in Western civilization are just lists of rules. There's not a. There's nothing. Modern Christianity doesn't leave a lot of space for God.

[Austin]

Right. So this is kind of what you're talking about with dogma and how it's basically defined as trying to connect certain theological principles to definite interpretations. And they're basically trying to you like writing different codes and formulas to prove why the other one is like objectively correct and use the theology as a bludgeon. Right. Which then just makes everybody else, after all the fighting be. Lose their interest in the whole religion because they see what you're doing is. It's not like it's not truth oriented. It's trying to trap people under logic. Well, if then. Then this. All right, well, answer. Answer for yourself then if this is the case. And that's really kind of sad because at that point it's not really about God at all anymore.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, that's why the Enlightenment happened, because the way you described it exactly. That's just exactly what went down where they started doing these autistic battles over sort of like exact passages in the Bible and the medieval worldview because it was so. Because Catholicism is so much dominance, it allowed a lot of religious creativity or mysticism. And as an example of this, both the Catholics and the Protestants got rid. They suppressed hermeticism in the 17th century, which we talked about in other videos. And it was part of this Thing called the Tarnas calls this the Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes axis in the mid to late 17th century. And the best encapsulation of this is so in the medieval worldview, and this is true for most societies in history. Your relationship with the world is by nature religious, because the religious frame permeates your entire existence, because it's from your perspective as a human to find meaning. What Descartes did was he split the mind from the body, where religion is purely subjective in your mind, it does not have to make sense to the exterior world. And then science is just what you can measure. It doesn't interface with human intuition or moral values or God. So the irony is that Descartes, we think he was probably funded by the Papal Inquisition to crush sort of religious dissent in France. And then what he did is in sort of the trinity of religion, science and mysticism. Science is a testing method for how reality works through empirical data. Religion is a system on how to live as a human in the world. And then mysticism is your perceptual frame for your environment and how to do consciousness evolution. So Descartes shot the mysticism, which was the personal connection to God, and the consciousness evolution, which then split off religion from personal experience and then it split science off from values. So you end up with a highly fossilized religion that doesn't leave a lot of place for God. And I want to say, I'm sure your church is lovely, I'm sure your church is the exception, but most Western churches today are highly doctrinaire and sort of stuck centuries ago. And then you have the science, which is totally divorced from humanity, and it becomes this sort of soulless Frankenstein, which just exists to push money and power. And once you pulled that plug, Catholicism and Protestantism could grow in numbers, but they couldn't revive that sort of lost spiritual sense because Christianity had lost the intellectual classes. So as more geniuses and intellectual breakthroughs occurred, they happened outside of religion, because religion created a frame which cut itself off from the world. And so the Enlightenment was, let's take the joy we used to derive from religion into understanding the physical, material world. Let's take the sense of creativity a mystic would used to have for finding God, then apply it to discovering material reality. And we should no longer try to transcend as people. The only way to transcend is material progress through our tools.

[Austin]

So they decided to, basically, they use the opportunity of the church opening up to have a relationship with the book instead of with God.

[Whatifalth]

Yes.

[Austin]

Or instead of with both. That's really Interesting. And it's weird because the, the Protestant, the Catholics original formation we talked about in the beginning of this video was how do we enable people to have a relationship with God so they can self grow so that everything else follows from there. Like it's, it's directly tied to self growth. Right. And then that broke down in the Catholic tradition. The Protestants got around the way in which that broke down without taking this important element with them.

[Whatifalth]

So the Protestants also did have the Descartes issue. It just, they had their own structure to it where Protestantism with the same process, it's just they had different sort of beats in the steps where they had pietism and a lot of it, they had the evangelical spin as well. And then Darwin was the thing that really killed Protestantism, while Catholicism was a century earlier, post Descartes Enlightenment. And so with Catholicism, 19th century Catholicism was highly socially conservative and it had to deal with the Napoleonic wars, where Napoleon was part of the French Revolution, which was atheist, and it persecuted Catholicism in France, the most populous Catholic nation in the world. But then the social order built by the French Revolution was so unstable that Napoleon, who rose to military dictator, he made a deal with the Pope to bring Catholicism back because he thought religion was necessary to social function. But then from that period on, the Catholic Church existed in direct opposition to the innovative sort of cultural sphere with the French Revolution. So you ended up in oppositional relationships where the Catholic Church was seen as reactionary in France or Spain or those countries where the socialists were highly atheist and they were fighting against the reactionary Catholics. And then what happened is that as these societies developed, they developed as overtly secular societies where America doesn't have the concept of secularism that a lot of Catholic countries do. Where in France or Czechia or even Mexico, secularism is seen as a moral good, where in Anglo Saxon countries religion is seen as a moral good, where religion is seen as a social stabilizer and a good trait to have. But in France, for example, if you're religious, it's seen as irrational and gross in many social circles. And this took on as an ideal in Catholic Europe, but not Protestant Europe, because the Catholic Church didn't make a very good job of integrating with modernity for centuries. Right.

[Austin]

And then they, when if Catholic, the Catholic Church positioned itself against modernity and then modernity is really impressive and people are like, wow, well that Catholic stuff must have been wrong. Which is ironic because modernity came out of Christianity. Yeah. Which we kind of covered before. Yeah. So the Catholic Church. Oh, yeah. So this is Kind of funny, because at that point, sure, Napoleon brought the Catholic Church back, but they kind of lost the level of cultural power necessary to do an inquisition. So when the left wing popped up in France again and then continued to grow throughout that century, they couldn't. They didn't have the cultural authority to stop it. And they ended up being forced to kind of follow culture rather than lead it to the point where the Pope today has his hand on, you know, the ice block for global warming.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. They overcorrected in the 20th century where my. My grandpa was a trad Catholic. He was very Catholic, my Irish side of the family, of course. And he thought the 1930s Catholic Church was too progressive. He wanted to turn to return to sort of like the medieval structure of Catholicism. And the 1930s Catholic Church was recognized by every. By most other people as like, profoundly reactionary. Where, like, the normal opinion was the Catholic Church with this hyper reactionary organization. And my grandpa was like, no, it's not nearly reactionary enough. And.

[Austin]

Which is like misinterpreting their original mistake. It's like doubling down on the Spanish and the French's mistake. It's crazy. It's funny.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, yeah.

[Austin]

Because it's. You're going back to a departure point.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, right.

[Austin]

Which is a natural thing. We'll go back to this before it went wrong. But they're taking the wrong lesson out of it.

[Whatifalth]

Yes. And so the Catholic Church went through this flip in the 20th century where they became significantly socialist and leftist. And we're sort of in the culmination of this. You had multiple phases where John Paul, second in the 80s, was Polish, and he was one of the biggest elements pushing against communism. And the Catholic Church was also the greatest rival to the Nazis in Germany, the Protestants tended to go for the Nazis, while the Catholic people pushed back against it the most.

[Austin]

And the Catholics were in the south, like Bavaria, which was kind of more similar to Switzerland, Northern Italy culture. Yeah, those are some overlaps.

[Whatifalth]

I also wanted to mention this too, where when you deal with baroque culture, which was sort of the cultural formation of early modern Catholicism as a holistic whole rather than just the religion, where baroque culture translated into socialism very easily because you had government control over the economy with large monopolies. You had state regulation of the society so that for social stability, where they had a bunch of holidays and they had regulations about what was considered to be good Christian, good Christian sort of protocol for dealing with others. And so Catholicism's regulation of the human condition sort of naturally bleeds into socialism and it also slowed down the Industrial Revolution where there was this switch from socialist regulation, from Catholic regulation to socialist regulation. And Protestantism opened all of this space up for social creativity. And so that's why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Protestant countries where in France for example, which was the wealthiest and most developed country in Europe before the Industrial Revolution due to the rise of socialism and the Lien regime which maintained large government control, France wasn't fully industrialized until like past World War II, while Britain had industrialized fully in the 19th century. And so France, this great country, due to these cultural and political issues, was not able to industrialize on what it should have.

[Austin]

Like Leel and Paris first. And Lille was just in the north, right on the border of like the Dutch.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. And it was, it was sort of spasmodic for the French over the course of the 19th century because they had issues with political stability. And so when you get to the 20th century, you can see why the more so left wing reaction is taking over the Catholic Church because in their grandparents time and all of governance today is based around what made sense in the 1960s. So if you were in the 60s when the Catholic Church switched over from having their rights in Latin to the vernacular languages, you would think, wait, why is this in Latin? No one's speaks Latin. This is ridiculous. This is such an antiquated organization that hasn't kept up with the Protestants. They thought the thing Protestantism did right was being woke and so they sort of imitated that. And so that's why the Catholic Church is the way it is.

[Austin]

They took the opposite lesson that they should have from Protestantism, which was probably the easy choice for them to make because that enabled them to be a follower of culture.

[Whatifalth]

Remember, the way is not right, it is not left, it is forward.

[Austin]

I thought it was the easiest direction. Whatever is easiest. Downhill. Downhill is easiest. That's a, that's a warning.

[Whatifalth]

Also, the major growth to Catholicism in the last 200 years has been inside Africa. I wish I knew more the Catholic conversions in Africa, but I don't. I know you had European Catholic powers in Africa that converted a lot of the locals, but Catholicism in Africa doesn't actually map onto those colonial borders very well. You. I have a religious map of Africa somewhere. And so like half of the DRC is Catholic, half of it's Protestant. Catholicism's gotten a lot of people in.

[Austin]

Africa, but that's why they're fighting.

[Whatifalth]

I don't think they've. I think in a handful of.

[Austin]

I'm just kidding about the Congo. Yeah. Go ahead.

[Whatifalth]

No, it's, it's a, it's one of those things that could have happened and didn't happen. And so Protestantism in recent times has done a better job of growing across the Third World, where. And that's in a lot of cases been due to American preachers, where American Protestantism is the most active branch of Christianity around the world. Because we have so many churches in America where we don't have separation of church and state, which allows Darwinistic competition for churches. So if you go to a lot of Third World countries or even Europe, they'll say evangelical churches, which are Protestant Americanized churches. And so they've converted a lot of Africa, A majority of South Africa or Zimbabwe's population are from American variants of Protestantism, often Pentecostalists. And so the conversions in Asia were largely towards Protestantism. East Timor is Catholic. Inside Latin America, you've seen a large wave of American style Protestantism, which now makes up like 20% of Brazil's population, a quarter of a lot of Central American countries. It's like a quarter of a lot of Latin American nations. Because Protestantism is more, is not associated with the old regime in Latin America, so it doesn't carry the corruption or any of the connotations. And then in Africa, there's a lot of Catholics, but there's more Protestants. And at the current trajectory, Protestantism is the most rapidly growing sect of Christianity. A majority of Christians will be Protestant by 2050. And for the Catholic viewers watching, that doesn't mean Catholicism is going to die. What it does mean is you guys have to take initiative to fix this because history is being carved through in every moment. And Catholicism's great advantage is its older, more balanced tradition where Protestantism has higher variants, where I think, for example, prosperity gospel, it's an abomination. Like the Bible does not say, say that if you follow God, you will become rich. That is not the point. Or the Protestants have been more sympathetic to totalitarians, or the Protestants endorsed slavery more than the Catholics did at certain points. But the bottoms, if we're going to look at like the last 200 years, Protestantism has sort of like equivalently low bottoms to Catholicism, but it has much higher highs. So if Catholicism is going to survive or win, they have to pull on their deeper, more holistic sort of complex tradition, where if you want to look at the cosmology or the internal structure or their concepts of religion or their mystic traditions, the Catholics beat the Protestants. So that's their main competitive advantage. The Protestants beat the Catholics and their flexibility to context. And like, if I chose to, I could form a sect of Protestantism tomorrow. Because Protestantism is your personal relationship with God. So it has this natural evolutionary capacity. Well, in Catholicism, the centralized papacy has to approve of shifts like how do.

[Austin]

They compete with open source? And maybe, maybe they could take advantage of some of the positive volatility within Protestantism because they're that steady line. Right. You create this volatility that lets you discover some things. They could just jump up there and make their steady line a little higher after incorporating some of the insights from experimentation.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. The fun.

[Austin]

As long as they choose the right ones.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. The way to beat open sources by having good leadership. That would require a highly capable pope, though. The final thing I'll drop is there was a huge loss of the most Catholic places in the mid to late 20th century where, as of now, Catholicism is mostly a third world religion. Where when my father lived in Ireland back in the 20th century, it was practically a Catholic theocracy. And now it's one of the most woke places in Europe. It's crazy that young men would die for the ira and now they won't die to defend Ireland. And that was a very rapid shift in Quebec, one of the most Catholic places on earth, in the 1960s. Over the course of that decade, it became one of the most secular societies in the West. If you look at Italy or Spain, they were quite socially conservative and Catholic in the mid 20th century to become profoundly secular by the late 20th century. So you saw in sort of a lot of the white Catholic countries a loss of faith in Catholicism over the mid to late 20th centuries. And it used to be said that Catholics had a higher birth rate than Protestants and that country, like Italy or Spain, become overpopulated. Now they have lower birth rates than Protestant countries. And it was a scare that when America experienced enormous Catholic migration in late 19th through early 20th centuries from Ireland or Italy or Germany, that Catholics would outbreed Protestants. But pretty soon after, a few decades after, Protestants got higher birth rates than Catholics, because rural people have higher birth rates than urban people, because Catholics in America are concentrated predominantly in the Northeast or with Mexicans in the Southwest, with some Germans in the Midwest. So it shows how much these things move around.

[Austin]

If there was YouTube back in the 1800s, there'd be these videos about how this percent of the population is Protestant. At this birth rate now 20 and 1950, this is what it's going to be. That would be funny to, like, do a parody of that. But of course it's a. There's a big difference between Catholic and Muslim as well.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin]

So Europe has a little bit more of a thing to contend with in that regard.

[Whatifalth]

When I was a child, when I was a child, I had a conversation with my father where he said, if we were in the 1950s and you were to open up, like, a rap video, if it existed back then in this timeline, it would just be a litany of racist comments. And I thought that's so un. Unimaginable that you'd have racist comments online now. That's.

[Austin]

Oh, really?

[Whatifalth]

That's every day on the Internet. And it's crazy how much racism was unimaginable in 2020. And now it's pretty quickly normalized across the Internet. That's a very rapid shift.

[Austin]

And it used to be big on the Internet, like, you could say whatever you wanted. It's just back then, racism was funny, and now it's a little more serious. It was too, after they banned people and then allowed it back. They're like, you know what? Actually, I mean, it.

[Whatifalth]

So was the Internet in, like, 2005 pretty open?

[Austin]

Oh, completely, like, you can say. And gaming chats are like, the definitional example of that, because that's where most people interacted before social media. But even the early years of social media, yeah, you could say whatever you wanted. And the ways millennials use social media is still different than everybody else. Like, people will use it either, like, to. To push out thoughts, or in Asia, they use it a little bit like LinkedIn. Only millennials just, like, say what. Their disappointment with a sports game that they're watching with no reference to who's playing or just had an apple or, like, just random. Write down what you. Your random thought is on the Facebook wall.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, facts.

[Austin]

Cool.

[Whatifalth]

This was a good episode. Next week is the Decline of the Mediterranean.

[Austin]

Oh, very cool. Wait, the Decline of the Mediterranean. Interesting. Not the Mediterranean.

[Whatifalth]

It's from the Roman Empire until the Industrial Revolution. And it's how the Mediterranean went from the most important place in the world.

[Austin]

To a backwater to a club for yachts.

[Whatifalth]

Exactly. Yachet.

[Austin]

Okay, cool. All right, sounds good. See it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Thornberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.