Posted on 10/18/2003 1:02:52 PM PDT by nwrep
THE GREAT HERESIES
by Hilaire Belloc
Chapter Four
The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed
It might have appeared to any man watching affairs in the earlier years of the seventh century_say from 600 to 630_that only one great main assault having been made against the Church, Arianism and its derivatives, that assault having been repelled and the Faith having won its victory, it was now secure for an indefinite time.
Christendom would have to fight for its life, of course, against outward unchristian things, that is, against Paganism. The nature worshippers of the high Persian civilization to the east would attack us in arms and try to overwhelm us. The savage paganism of barbaric tribes, Scandinavian, German, Slav and Mongol, in the north and centre of Europe would also attack Christendom and try to destroy it. The populations subject to Byzantium would continue to parade heretical views as a label for their grievances. But the main effort of heresy, at least, had failed_so it seemed. Its object, the undoing of a united Catholic civilization, had been missed. The rise of no major heresy need henceforth be feared, still less the consequent disruption of Christendom.
By A.D. 630 all Gaul had long been Catholic. The last of the Arian generals and their garrisons in Italy and Spain had become orthodox. The Arian generals and garrisons of Northern Africa had been conquered by the orthodox armies of the Emperor.
It was just at this moment, a moment of apparently universal and permanent Catholicism, that there fell an unexpected blow of overwhelming magnitude and force. Islam arose_quite suddenly. It came out of the desert and overwhelmed half our civilization.
Islam_the teaching of Mohammed_conquered immediately in arms. Mohammed's Arabian converts charged into Syria and won there two great battles, the first upon the Yarmuk to the east of Palestine in the highlands above the Jordan, the second in Mesopotamia. They went on to overrun Egypt; they pushed further and further into the heart of our Christian civilization with all its grandeur of Rome. They established themselves all over Northern Africa; they raided into Asia Minor, though they did not establish themselves there as yet. They could even occasionally threaten Constantinople itself. At last, a long lifetime after their first victories in Syria, they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Western Europe and began to flood Spain. They even got as far as the very heart of Northern France, between Poitiers and Tours, less than a hundred years after their first victories in Syria_in A.D. 732.
They were ultimately thrust back to the Pyrenees, but they continued to hold all Spain except the mountainous north-western corner. They held all Roman Africa, including Egypt, and all Syria. They dominated the whole Mediterranean west and east: held its islands, raided and left armed settlements even on the shores of Gaul and Italy. They spread mightily throughout Hither Asia, overwhelming the Persian realm. They were an increasing menace to Constantinople. Within a hundred years, a main part of the Roman world had fallen under the power of this new and strange force from the Desert.
Such a revolution had never been. No earlier attack had been so sudden, so violent or so permanently successful. Within a score of years from the first assault in 634 the Christian Levant had gone: Syria, the cradle of the Faith, and Egypt with Alexandria, the mighty Christian See. Within a lifetime half the wealth and nearly half the territory of the Christian Roman Empire was in the hands of Mohammedan masters and officials, and the mass of the population was becoming affected more and more by this new thing.
Mohammedan government and influence had taken the place of Christian government and influence, and were on the way to making the bulk of the Mediterranean on the east and the south Mohammedan.
We are about to follow the fortunes of this extraordinary thing which still calls itself Islam, that is, "The Acceptation" of the morals and simple doctrines which Mohammed had preached.
I shall later describe the historical origin of the thing, giving the dates of its progress and the stages of its original success. I shall describe the consolidation of it, its increasing power and the threat which it remained to our civilization. It very nearly destroyed us. It kept up the battle against Christendom actively for a thousand years, and the story is by no means over; the power of Islam may at any moment re-arise.
(Excerpt) Read more at ewtn.com ...
The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines the very structure of our society is dissolving.Like Adolf Hitler did, he ascribes communism to Jews as though it were something in their blood that would bring on conspiratorial evils to Christendom:
In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.And an early enemy of Jewish settlement in their old homelands:
There has been bloodshed under the French mandate more than once and it will be renewed[2]; while under the English mandate the forcing of an alien Jewish colony upon Palestine has raised the animosity of the native Arab population to white heat. Meanwhile a ubiquitous underground Bolshevist propaganda is working throughout Syria and North Africa continually, against the domination of Europeans over the original Mohammedan population.
I'm not sure it's all that useful. To me it seems more like an argument that some forms of tyranny need to be continued because there's an outside threat. And there were people who knew better about the Jews in the 1930s. I don't claim to understand anti-semitism, but I think it's a confluence of misunderstanding Christianity's origins in Judaism, raw xenophobia, and simple scapegoatism. It never had any merit. FDR should never have turned away the St. Louis, and it's an embarassing mark on our history that he did.
By the way, the Japanese were preaching anti-semitism (i.e. blaming "the international Jew") before and during WWII, as well.
In any case, the Belloc clearly doesn't get why the west has been so successful: it's because we've abandoned irrationalism. He blames our supposedly impending downfall (in 1939 this would have been easy) on the abandonment of tradition. This is a very anti-American, anti-modern, and superstitious. How familiar, as we hear that sort of thing today.
The west will survive the current Islamic threat without this guy's alarmist advice.
You read wrong. Or were informed wrong.
Mohammed was an Arab from Mecca....worshipping a tribal moon god name allah.
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Just for the record, when Christ was walking around, Romans were bent on world domination. Many Jews viewed Herod's rule as perverse Roman imposition... But Jesus wasted little breath on such politics. Paul, too, didn't waste a single epistle on sundry politics. So, yes, I do wish to see attempts to recast the Gospel into a Steven Seagal script as a perversion of Christ. But, hey, that's me... |
This is inaccurate.
If you go here Islam and Mohammed you can read a bit about "allah's" place in Mohammed's arabic tribe.....allah was a moon god. Given the history of moon god's in that region, that puts him in league with that pantheistic groupings of god names that come from that region.....ba'al, ashtoreth, molech, in particular were associated with heavenly bodies that were worshippped.
And since you read non-muslim material and used it in your proclamations, why not read something else.
Unless, of course, you feel like 'fessing up that you didn't really read anything about mohammed being a jew.....that you...uh...made it up misunderstood and misstated.
You can load other pages in the background while reading your current page. Saves me a lot of time, and I've got a hot Net connection.
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