21st Century Progressivism

Tag: Nicaea

  • The Turn of the English Wheel

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    I. The Indomitable Spirit and the Modern Enclosure

    There is a spirit in this world that is untouched by the world’s empires, armies, police, and dictators. It’s part of our inheritance as humans. This spirit is evident in indigenous kin-based societies, however the rest of us might find it difficult to understand. We are so removed from this way of seeing that the attempt to access it almost feels like a fetish—something that requires an expensive weekend retreat or hours of meditation.

    The world around us, on the other hand, constantly impresses us with its power and permanence. But the powerful face presented by the world’s systems is a pretense; these systems are fundamentally fragile and temporary, whereas the spirit is indominable.

    The nature of this spirit can be glimpsed today in the darkest of times. In the eyes of the casual observer, the machine wins when it erases a community or a religious movement. But the spirit signals its continuing presence in subtle ways. When its manifestation is completely unexpected, that’s when we see its true nature.

    II. The Constantinian Takeover

    In the previous article, we saw the machine’s trail of destruction, largely focused on the kinship baseline. But we haven’t yet discussed what the Roman Empire did to the foundational kinship baseline of Western culture: the early Christian movement.

    Before the year 325 CE, the original Jesus movement operated as a radical, anti-imperial, and horizontal kinship baseline. Believers lived in fluid, decentralized household networks (ecclesia) that shared resources locally according to real human need. They flatly refused to offer sacrifices to Caesar or validate the state’s commercial registries.

    The catastrophic pivot occurred under Emperor Constantine. Facing an empire collapsing from internal civil wars and economic stagnation, Constantine realized he could not defeat the kinship network—so he pulled off the ultimate hostile corporate takeover.

    Nicaea: the Corporate Coup

    By summoning the bishops to the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, he brought the movement under the direct auspices of the imperial state. The machine stripped the faith of its counter-cultural, property-transcending baseline and flipped its architecture upside down. Bishops were put into Roman senatorial robes, given judicial state power, and paid directly out of the imperial treasury.

    To complicate matters, during this time the Jesus movement was dealing with an internal disagreement about a key doctrine. Its leaders were divided over the nature of Jesus. Because the Church had become part of the Empire, its inability to agree on this important doctrine threatened the peace of the Empire itself. At the Council of Nicaea, it was decided that Arian Christianity and its defenders must either conform to the ‘orthodox’ definition of the faith or get out. Unfortunately for Constantine that did not solve the problem. Worse, it divided the basis of the religion by setting members against one another.

    Worse yet, the act of submitting Church doctrine for the emperor’s approval legitimized the Empire’s control over the Church. We saw a similar effect when the Hasmonean Brothers invited Emperor Pompey to intervene in a dynastic dispute.

    When Constantine saw that his edicts had not brought peace to the Empire, he reversed the decision of the Council. Immediately, the ‘orthodox’ defenders of the Council of Nicaea became the persecuted faction. During this upheaval in the Church, the Christian people tried to stand firm. Many of them were slaughtered.

    The Games Empires Play

    This is how the Empire turned the Jesus movement into a tamed cadre of lawyers, scribes and clerks to keep its business running smoothly. But that still wasn’t enough for Constantine. He determined that for the Church to serve as a standardized controller, its Jewish contingent had to go. He first decreed that the Church must alter its calendar to ensure that it never shared Passover with the Jews.

    The remaining bishops, who now wore senatorial robes, meekly updated the legal manuals. They criminalized intermarriage, outlawed Sabbath observance, and converted the Jewish people into a legally restricted, perpetual underclass within the imperial registry. The emperor understood the world the way empires always do; people who carry an ancient, unwritten oral tradition are inherently dangerous to a top-down paper empire.

    Eventually, instead of being the protector of the kinship baseline, the Church became its committed enemy. The machine won.

    But did it really? Did the Empire succeed in destroying the kinship baseline of the Church? The attempt to answer that question will bring us closer to understanding the nature of this baseline.

    III: The Survival of Judaism and the Breakout of the Rosh 

    Following the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman legions, the Jewish nation was scattered into exile, stripped of its physical temple, its land, and its geographic borders. The machine assumed it would disintegrate; it completely misunderstood the Jewish people.
    Instead of panicking or building a top-down political platform to fight Rome, the common Jewish people and their rabbis activated the Oral Tradition (Torah she-ba’al peh). This was the ultimate survival strategy. They turned the home kitchen table into a portable sanctuary of relational memory. This created an invisible, horizontal web of face-to-face trust that kept the family network completely un-enclosed by the state’s mind-control registries.
    [IMPERIAL TEMPLE DESTROYED]──>[THE EXILE INTO THE VOID]──>[THE PORTABLE ORAL SANCTUARY]
    It can be argued that the Rosh did not abandon the Christians either.
    [THE 7th-CENTURY CROSSING] ──> [THE REAL ESTATE LAND-SPECULATOR ENTERPRISE]

    V. The Pristine Baseline: Folcland vs. Bookland

    The bishops introduced the written alphabet and the Latin charter to trick the individualistic Anglo-Saxons into signing away their ancestral Folkland (Folcland). As emissaries of the Church, their job was to construct the very first rigid, top-down real-estate cages on the island (Bookland).  Fortunately for the people, they imposed this system on the Anglo-Saxon version of a kinship baseline.

    Before the missionaries arrived, the Anglo-Saxons operated under Folcland (Folkland). Law was not a written statutory code locked in a book, and land was not an abstract commercial asset to be bought, sold, or audited by a bureaucrat.

    [THE UNWRITTEN FOLCLAND] ──> [THE CONSTANTINIAN VIRUS] ──> [THE BOOKLAND EXCLOSURE]

    • The Unwritten Shield: Land belonged to the collective kinship network. Oral custom and the collective memory of the elders governed it, and they distributed it at open-air regional assemblies called Folk Moots.
    • Restorative Justice: If a crime occurred, it was settled face-to-face via the Wergild (the blood-price)—a material restitution paid directly between family networks to restore horizontal balance to the community, rather than to enrich a state treasury. They made up some of their rules as they went along because their law was a living, breathing human relationship, not a cold contract.

    VI. The Constantinian Virus Arrives (597 CE)

    Unfortunately, Anglo-Saxon society was already becoming more rigid, due to the anxiety of their king. When the Roman missionary Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent, he found KingÆthelberht panicking over rival kingdoms and looking for a way to centralize his royal authority. The Church offered him the ultimate imperial solution: the written word.

    However, I will argue that the Anglo-Saxon customs and Folcland laws were still fresh enough to actively influence the local bishops. That is one way explain what happened. Surprisingly, a beautiful, counterintuitive human process occurred over the next several centuries.

    VII. The Local Conversion: The Folk Trained the Bishop

    When the Roman Church landed in 597 CE, the bishops brought the written Latin charter (Bookland) to freeze and enclose the landscape. But the machine faced an immediate structural problem: the bishops couldn’t farm the land themselves. They had to rely entirely on the local, generationally settled Anglo-Saxon families to cultivate the valleys.
    Because the unwritten memory of folcland—with its face-to-face Folk Moots, open shared pastures, and kinship mutual aid—was still vibrant and fresh in the blood of the people, that horizontal culture infected the local church from the bottom up.

    VIII. The Great Convergence: Folcland Meets the Rosh

    The reason that beautiful, humane monastic cushion suddenly revealed itself within English history is because the fresh, organic baseline of Anglo-Saxon Folcland collided and fused with the buried, un-killable Christian heritage of the Jewish Rosh.
    They were speaking the exact same structural language. The Rosh provided the profound spiritual fuel of unconditional grace and mutual horizontal accountability, while the Anglo-Saxon Folcland provided the immediate, practical legal custom of shared common pastures and restorative justice. When the machine looked down, it thought it had successfully scrubbed the island clean.
    JEWISH ROSH FUEL] ──> [THE ENGLISH FOLCLAND CUSTOM] ──> [THE UNRESOLVED SANCTUARY]
    But beneath the surface, the ancient Jewish heritage and the fresh English folk-law had locked arms in secret. They preserved a world of fixed custom, open fields, and human dignity. This would successfully keep the cold, predatory daggers of commercial real estate at bay for nearly a thousand years. It fixed rents to low, unwritten oral custom, protected the shared common pastures from private speculation. And it legally bound the abbeys to administer poor-relief and hospitals.
    The spirit of the Rosh remained even after the Church was shorn of its Jewish kin.
     [BURIED JEWISH ROSH] ──> [THE ENGLISH FOLCLAND] ──> [THE HUMANE MONASTIC CUSHION]
    The beauty of this development is even more striking compared to the fate of these human communities in the time of Henry VIII. In 1536, he unleashed his predatory lawyers and auditors to forcefully dissolve the monasteries. This resulted in violently stripping away that relational human cushion. Henry sold a quarter of the English landscape directly over to commercial Gentry speculators to initiate mass Enclosure.

    X. What is the Nature of the Rosh?

    The rabbis teach this concept. They say the Rosh is not a text-based statutory code to be policed by an institutional manager. It is a living, vertical connection to the Source that activates a horizontal reality immediately face-to-face. 
    The machine can never completely sterilize the horizontal kinship baseline. It is deep and wide and old as the hills, and it bursts forth in the most unexpected, counterintuitive holdouts across human history. We will soon see that this way of thinking also lived among the Celtic Clans of Scotland.