... with its readers. The eschatological meaning must be linked to its contemporary message. It flows out of the historical meaning, for behind the struggle between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire were aligned the heavenly and the infernal powers. The struggle between pagan Rome and Christianity was really a struggle between Satan and God, a rehearsal for that final great conflict between... always conceived in the context of the seer's actual situation. Thus Daniel sees the coming end in terms of the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes and St. John sees it in terms of the Roman Empire of his time. Jesus, it seems certain, saw it -in terms of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, which he foresaw. In each case the actual human situation is seen as a sign of the ultimate fulfilment... Daniel intended to tell his followers that in the wake of the capture by Antiochus Epiphanes of Jerusalem the world's end would come. So also John of Patmos actually meant the conflict of the Roman Empire with Christianity to be the sign of the end of the world. The universal belief of the Apostles that the ultimate fulfilment was extremely near points without a doubt to Jesus' having predicted ...
... went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." Surely, Caesar Augustus could not institute a census for taxable purposes except within his own dominion: the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire and nothing else is signified by "all the world". Places like India are out of the question. The limitation under which the missions of Jesus worked is borne out even by the... Gentiles. As the Bible testifies, he preached to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Romans - all strictly the people of the regions contained within the Roman Empire under Caesar Augustus's successors Tiberius and Nero whose reigns covered Paul's ministry. No matter how much to the Page 94 non-jews Christianity or, as Mr. Vedanthan would ...
... This is exactly what happened to the Holy Roman Empire. The force of Nationalism had been awakened in Europe and the constituent elements of the Empire were clamouring for independence and second, the Great Powers in Europe having no need for this empire were waiting for its dissolution. One may therefore, conclude that when an empire, like the Holy Roman Empire, a non-national empire, is broken to pieces... force imposed on their constituent elements or else to a political convenience felt or acquiesced in by the constituents and favoured by the world outside. The Austrian empire or the Holy Roman Empire that was on its last legs before the First World War, was long the standing example of such an empire; it was a political convenience favoured by the world outside, acquiesced in by some of its ...
... the apparatus of the Roman Empire, which itself had absorbed the civilisation of the Greeks. Thus Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity became the pillars upon which Europe was built. All four elements have remained active through the ages and are still directly influential in what is now called Western civilisation. The Teutonic Lapse History tells us how the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth... by the loss of its vitality.” 16 The effects of this invasion Sri Aurobindo called “the Teutonic lapse”. It happened much more gradually than is usually supposed, and many structures of the Roman Empire survived or were revived in due course. Most of these structures or institutions actually belonged to the Catholic Church which before long felt impelled to convert the heathen Teutons. The methods... them in the upward spiral of the evolution of mankind. This is how the European Middle Ages came into existence. Their closed universe was geographically based on the western half of the former Roman Empire, which they tried to revive in one form or another; their world view was a grandiose though rather heterogeneous architecture of a Christianity hardly recognisable from the Gospels, parts of the ...
... of the Roman Empire, Sri Aurobindo finds that the individual freedom is greatly subordinated to the needs of the forces of centralisation which tend towards uniformity rather than towards freedom and diversity. Considering, however, that there is today a turn towards the formation of the larger human aggregate encompassing the whole world, Sri Aurobindo analyses the example of the Roman Empire from the... remarks, the organisation was great and admirable, but the individual dwindled and life lost its colour, richness, variety, freedom, and victorious impulse towards creation. Eventually, therefore, the Roman Empire declined and failed; the huge mechanism of centralisation and union brought about smallness and feebleness of the individual; mechanisation prevailed and the Empire lost even its conservative vitality ...
... immense flood of barbarian unrest which threatened all the ancient stabilised cultures and finally proved too strong for the highly developed Graeco-Roman civilisation and the vast and powerful Roman empire. That unrest throwing great masses of Teutons, Slavs, Huns and Scythians to west and east and south battered at the gates of India for many centuries, effected certain inroads, but, when it sank... were entirely Indianised, assumed completely the Indian religion, manners, customs, culture and melted into the mass of the Indian peoples. No such phenomenon took place as in the countries of the Roman empire, of barbarian tribes imposing on a superior civilisation their laws, political system, barbaric customs, alien rule. This is the common significant fact of these irruptions and it must have been ...
... t: "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed" (2:1). It is obvious that "all the world" can mean no more than the Roman Empire: Caesar Augustus cannot tax any further world. A more particular illumination on this point can be drawn from the eminent Roman Catholic scholar and priest Raymond E. Brown 3 when he... uttermost part of the earth", amounts to what they knew of the earth's extension and what was within reach of them during their remaining life-span and according to their capacity of movement: again the Roman Empire. Taken thus, the hyperbolic expression loses its extremism and diminishes in no way the nearness of the Second Coming. Actually, Palestine itself cannot be regarded as exclusively Jewish ...
... pursuing in so far as it provides a means and a framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life. 3 Page 492 Let us take the example of the Roman Empire; for it provides a historical illustration of an organisation of unity which transcended the limits of the nation, and its advantages and disadvantages are there perfectly typified. The advantages... machine. The organisation was great and admirable, but the individual dwindled and life lost its colour, richness, variety, freedom and victorious impulse towards creation. Eventually, therefore, the Roman Empire declined and failed; the huge mechanism of centralisation and uniformity brought about the smallness and feebleness of the individual; mechanisation prevailed, and the Empire lost even its great ...
... AD, it had ceased to exist as an independent entity. State of the known world at the time of Jesus Christ The main characteristic of these times is the overwhelming importance of the Roman Empire. It encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean World including Gaul, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. In India, two dynasties were ruling the larger part of the sub-continent: the Kushan... (detail), fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio(1401-1428) A Few dates 27BC-AD Principate of Augustus over the Roman Empire 4BC —Birth of Jesus. AD14-AD37 — Principate of Tiberius. AD26 — After having been a carpenter at Nazareth, Jesus begins his public ...
... and neither ecclesiastical nor secular governments seemed capable of easing their distress. At times the whole structure of European society seemed to be crumbling, as it had at the end of the Roman Empire. Yet the Europe that emerged from this time of troubles went on to conquer the world. The science and technology, the navies and the armies, the governments and the business organizations that were... their destiny, never quite gave up striving for a more orderly and prosperous society. There was confusion and uncertainty, but not the complete disintegration that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Economic weakness and political failure The most obvious cause of the troubles, of the last medieval centuries was economic depression. Given the techniques then prevalent, by 1300 ...
... for her religion, her sciences and her laws than for her riches which nowadays have become the only reason of our travels there." He did not 1 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Page 136 stop with deploring his countrymen's greed but was scathingly scornful. "Want created the first robbers. They invaded India because she was rich, and surely a rich people... ted society. Christian clergy engaged in a systematic destruction of Roman places of worship, of old Druidic holy sites, of Greek temples—any 'pagan' holy site became rubble. "Historians of the Roman Empire have documented the large-scale destruction of 'pagan' temples by Christian clergy from the fourth century onwards." 1 By the end of the fifth century, the famous Greek temple at Eleusis, where ...
... of Judaism with trade, which a few centuries later will become commonplace’. “Still other Jews were much appreciated professional soldiers, fighting or mounting guard on the frontiers of the [Roman] empire. There were also Jewish administrators, sometimes of a very high rank; in the imperial hierarchy there were Jewish knights and senators, Jewish legates and even Jewish praetors. To this one could... may conclude that they did not seem to suffer from a special animosity, and that nothing except their cult made them conspicuous in the mosaic of peoples which constituted the population of the Roman Empire.” 597 The association of the Jews with money seems to have been the result of the Christians associating them with Judas Iscariot and his thirty pieces of silver, condemning them as murderers ...
... the rest of the organisation, the district, the provincial town, the village to a dull, petty and somnolent life in strange contrast with the vital intensity of the urbs or metropolis. The Roman Empire is the historic example of an organisation of unity which transcended the limits of the nation, and its advantages and disadvantages are there perfectly typified. The advantages are admirable o... and untouched, the structure has become rotten and begins to crack and dissolve at the first shock from outside. Such organisations, such periods are immensely useful for conservation, even as the Roman Empire served to consolidate the gains of the rich centuries that preceded it. But they arrest life and growth. We see, then, what is likely to happen if there were a social, administrative and political ...
... lies to the north of Tibet and east of China. By the end of the second century BC the larger part of this route ran along the Old Silk Roads down which Chinese silk passed to the frontiers of the Roman Empire in Syria. It takes great determination to travel along these roads. Peter Fleming, the great English travel writer of the 1930s, brother of Ian Fleming, Page 638 struggled against... s established in southern India by the Romans during the first century AD, and then by early Christians; and the opening of the Silk Roads, which stretched from the Mediterranean borders of the Roman Empire to Central China as early as the beginning of the first century BC, more than 14 centuries before Marco Polo travelled along them on his journeys of discovery. Moreover, Renaissance Europe ...
... the war especially, seems almost to be the same as that at the break up and disintegration of the Roman Empire. There is the same tendency to plunge the world into barbarism again. Disciple : Is there no chance ? Sri Aurobindo : There is always a chance. At the time of the Roman Empire also there was a chance, but it did not materialise. Disciple : Can one say there is more chance ...
... excavations of a hill called Arikamedu, south of Pondicherry, have yielded Greek and Roman coins and imported Mediterranean pottery, reminiscent of a trade very much to the detriment of the Roman empire. Such was the eagerness of Roman ladies to possess the colourful silks and fine muslins of India that Rome lost all its gold reserves in this exchange, but it benefited the kings of the Coromandel... bulldozers, is moving in to build the City of a New Dawn." The above extracts show how important were Pondicherry and its suburbs both culturally and commercially in the good old days of the Roman Empire and - who knows? - even before that. Let us hope some day a more authentic light will be shed on the history of the Aryan, the Indus-Valley and the Dravidian cultures. And at no distant date the ...
... eleven boats to Australia in 1787. Needless to say that these discoveries and colonizations by the Westerners did not come in a day. The build-up had taken centuries. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of Christianity a pall of darkness had fallen on Europe. For example, when Charlemagne (768-814) perhaps one of the most important rulers of the whole medieval period, needed men... of parchment by paper, followed by the invention of printing with movable type. Charlemagne had conducted dozens of ruthless military campaigns to impose Christianity and establish his Holy Roman Empire. In 789, he issued an edict to churches and monasteries in his realm to establish primary schools. Many cathedral schools were indeed started, but they were devoted mainly to the training of priests ...
... finality until the intermediate nation-unit had been fully and healthily developed. The creation of the national aggregate was therefore reserved for the millennium that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire; and in order to solve this problem left to it, the world during that period had to recoil from many and indeed most of the gains which had been achieved for mankind by the Page 362 ...
... in the loose but living unity of mediaeval Christendom. Page 316 The example of Rome has haunted the political imagination of Europe ever since. Not only has it been behind the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and Napoleon's gigantic attempt and the German dream of a world-empire governed by Teutonic efficiency and Teutonic culture, but all the imperial nations, including France and England ...
... premature and, if satisfied, will surely end in a check to human progress, a comfortably Page 299 organised stagnancy such as overtook the Graeco-Roman world after the establishment of the Roman Empire. The call of the State to the individual to immolate himself on its altar and to give up his free activities into an organised collective activity is therefore something quite different from ...
... the aggressive tribe disappeared, for example, the Persian tribe, first into the empire and then into the nationality of the Persian people, or as the city state also disappeared, first into the Roman Empire and then both tribe and city state without hope of revival into the nations which arose by fusion out of the irruption of the German tribes into the declining Latin unity. Page 524 In ...
... diminution of variety and even the very satisfaction of social and economic well-being might well hasten. Disruption of unity would then be necessary to restore humanity to life. Again, while the Roman Empire appealed only to the idea of Roman unity, an artificial and accidental principle, this WorldState would appeal to the idea of human unity, a real and vital principle. But if the idea of unity can ...
... World-State. In all probability the results would be, with all allowance for the great difference between then and now, very much the same in essence as those which we observe in the ancient Roman Empire. On the credit side, we should have first one enormous gain, the assured peace of the world. It might not be absolutely secure against internal shocks and disturbances but, supposing certain outstanding ...
... rampant in politics & in commerce taint, as it must eventually do, the deeper heart of society, may lead to an orgy of the vital & sensational impulses such as has not been since the worst days of the Roman Empire. THE STUDENT But Lecky has proved that the moral improvement of Europe was due entirely to the rise of rationalism. THE GURU My son, there is one great capacity of the learned & cultured ...
... the real thing you sought to do in the glamour of wealth, in the attraction of wealth and in the desire to keep it safe. In other subject countries also, there was material development; under the Roman Empire there was material development, there was industrial progress, but industrial progress and material development did not bring life to the nation. When the hour of trial came, it was found that these ...
... 1097 This emergence and domination of the bourgeois was a rapid transformation, not unparalleled in history, for something of the same kind seems to have happened in the provinces of the Roman Empire under the Caesars, but astonishing in a people whose past history & temperament had been so supremely unPhilistine. That a society which had only a few decades ago prostrated itself before the naked ...
... please tell me what exactly Augustus Caesar stood for in the history of Europe and how Leonardo's work was connected with his?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe—he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly ...
... progress, the whiplash which prevents a nation to fall asleep by forcing the mediocre mass of its citizens, satisfied with themselves, to wake up from their apathy. The day humanity would become a big Roman empire, living in peace and not having any enemies at its borders anymore, would be the day when its morals and its intellect would run the greatest danger.” In conclusion, these are the words of an ...
... inflated proportions. Thanks to the statesmanship of Bismarck they had finally succeeded, in 1871, to build a German nation, which they considered to be the Second Reich. (The First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, had ended in 1806.) But the more the Germans became convinced of their exceptional qualities as a nation, and more particularly as a race, the more they felt inclined to look ...
... , and biology.” 6 Out of the originally quite diverse Christian movement grew a structured and authoritarian Catholic Church which became, from about 400 CE, the official religion of the Roman Empire. This organization, because of its hierarchical structure and its faith, survived the collapse of the Empire and became the dominant institution in the Middle Ages. Its holy book, the Bible , was ...
... Jews did their usual subversive work in trying to overthrow the throne of the pharaoh. There is the assertion that it was the Christians, followers of Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, who undermined the Roman Empire and caused its downfall. (To Hitler – as to Wagner, Chamberlain, Rosenberg and most of the Nazis – Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan and an anti-Semite.) There is the fundamental Jewishness of the ...
... scientific discoveries, and so has Johannes Kepler. ‘Over the last 25 or so years there has been an occult boom, a “magical explosion”, of a sort not experienced since the later years of the Roman Empire,’ write Francis King and Isabel Sutherland in The Rebirth of Magic, published in 1982. 5 The works of the occult ‘masters’ of the last one hundred years and even of the Renaissance and the ...
... Roman persecution has been considerably exaggerated. This persecution was not on the ground of any doctrine special to Christianity. There was quite a clutch of religio-philosophical sects in the Roman empire, including the Jews who lived side by side with the followers of Jesus at Rome. The Christians were in bad odour because they refused to make a god of the Roman emperor. They were considered dangerous ...
... spiritual planes. Mysticism was no part of what he had to manifest." (16.7.1937) To the question about Augustus, Sri Aurobindo gave the answer: "Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly ...
... break down. For if it breaks down, it will have to be replaced by another world-body. And if that body is constituted as one world-state on the principles of uniformity on the model of the ancient Roman empire, it will be a curse. The best thing would be to preserve the UNO and amend its Constitution so that the power of veto is eliminated and all nations come to enjoy not only theoretical but effective ...
... only mention a few outstanding examples, but your own study of history should help to fill in the details and to find many other instances. From 400 CE on, the barbarians overran most of the Roman Empire. Their cultures, including their religions, disintegrated upon impact with what was left of Greco-Roman civilization. Thus, Christianity did not really find itself in head-to-head competition with ...
... far as it provides a means and framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life. Looking at the past examples of large aggregates such as we find under the Roman Empire and others, we are likely to conclude that if there were to come about today a social, administrative and political unification of humanity, the organisation would be so massive and tremendous ...
... anything about the general plan of work; he had to carry out only the part assigned to him. At the Rungpore Library I came across another book, namely, Gibbon's famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . I ran through the lengthy volumes from end to end with tremendous enthusiasm and added a great deal to my learning and knowledge. I had a hope that the book might throw some light as to how to ...
... anything about the general plan of work; he had to carry out only the part assigned to him. At the Rungpore Library I came across another book, namely, Gibbon's famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I ran through the lengthy volumes from end to end with tremendous enthusiasm and added a great deal to my learning and knowledge. I had a hope that the book might throw some light as to how ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 The Immortal Nation GIBBON'S Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must have been the original source of the inspiration that moved later on Spengler and Toynbee and others to posit a life-line for nations and races and mark its various stages of growth and evolution. The general theory put in a nutshell would ...
... their resources: there was also an attempt at quasi-assimilation, an imposition of the culture of a dominant race and, in general, a System of absorption wholesale or as complete as possible. The Roman Empire was the classical example of this kind of endeavour and the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and culture in a vast framework of political and administrative unity was the nearest approach ...
... the end the vitality of the organism: the centre, sucking in all nourishment from the outlying members suffers from oedema and the whole eventually decays and disintegrates. That is the lesson the Roman Empire teaches us. Page —85 The autocratic empire is dead and gone: we need not fear its shadow or ghostly regeneration. But the ideal which inspired it in secret and justified its advent ...
... the others but that collective, communal force and organisation is lacking in us. Otherwise, just imagine, how immensely developed the Vijayanagar empire was. It was more powerful than even the Roman empire in valour and wealth. It was unequalled in its wealth and prosperity. The Vijayanagar kingdom had so much wealth that along the roads as they sell mounds of peanuts today they used to sell mounds ...
... Will the religious and scientific Middle Ages be followed only by the Age of the Brute? Let us not delude ourselves; we are not at the end of a “civilization,” the way we were at the end of the Roman Empire. We are at the end of the Human Empire. But has the human ever been? Or is it yet to be? Man lacks the key to his evolutionary, physical secret that would deliver him forever from both his ...
... takes cognisance of the fact that the Empire has since become a "free commonwealth". History has seen the rise and fall of empires, but no single formula will fit all of them. The example of the Roman Empire imposing its culture on the conquered people hasn't been always repeated - or to the same extent - by later empires. In the movement and clash of peoples and cultures, history has witnessed all ...
... belligerently into it, and later became imperial powers. The Danes also were a part of that power game, and got a few toeholds in India. If we look back, we find that after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, Muslim merchants had monopolized in a couple of centuries all trade between the East and the West. But canons placed aboard ships enabled European vessels to dominate foreign ...
... formidable, even with his naked hands, than the prison and the gibbet, the armed men and the murderous cannon. He knows that in the fight with brute force the spirit, the idea is bound to conquer. The Roman Empire is no more, but the Christianity which it thought to crush, possesses half the globe, covering "regions Caesar never knew". The Jew, whom the whole world persecuted, survived by the strength of ...
... an idea which will not bear examination. Such elements of unity are very helpful to the growth of a nationality, but they are not essential and will not even of themselves assure its growth. The Roman Empire though it created a common language, a common religion and life, and did its best to crush out racial diversities under the heavy weight of its uniform system failed to make one great nation. ...
... enjoyed as we are now enjoying all the comforts of a peaceful reign. Their lives and properties were all secure as ours are, but in spite of all this, it was said that the people under the sway of the Roman Empire came to grief with its downfall, and were harassed by savage people. The reason is, they had no Swaraj. After a lapse of centuries they stood on their own legs and established for themselves Swaraj ...
... e the Gospels getting written in the same language. They were written from thirty-five to fifty or sixty years after Jesus' death and at that time and even before it the general language of the Roman Empire was Greek. If the Gospels were meant to be widely read, Greek was the right tongue to be written in. Their composition in Greek does not at all "point to the suspicion that they might have been ...
... assiduous artist, but his was a labour on a demiurge scale, organising words coming from the sempiternal planes. In range too Aeneid, though embodying the greatness and glory of Rome and the Roman empire controlling "the Nations far and wide" and imposing "the rule of peace on vanquished foes"; figuring Dido as one of the most living warm-blooded women in poetry; rising in thought sublimity and ...
... offer; Achilles will join the fray, reduce the city to rack and ruin; Aeneas, the man of destiny, will set sail from Troy to found Latium and the Latin race and thus lay the foundations of the Roman Empire and the modem European civilisation. All this chain of events will be touched off by this charioteer. And this is how Sri Aurobindo presents it: Even as fleets on a chariot divine through ...
... Chamberlain “the dominant principle of history. He saw the German race as the only one capable of creating culture and rising up, since the third century, from the ‘chaos of peoples’ caused by the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. To this race belonged the future if it could free oneself from the anti-Germanic elements, in the first place from the Jews. Of all Germanic peoples it was specifically ...
... It’s not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theatre at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.” 916 But the ...
... neighbouring France, especially when France became the culturally dominant nation in Europe whose language replaced Latin as the European lingua franca . Napoleon conquered and abolished the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806. The shock of his presence and drastic reforms was, as we have seen, the direct incentive to Germany’s revival. Hitler, if he meant anything at all, had to avenge ...
... [Hitler] will destroy it. That is the sign of the Asura. History is repeating itself. The Graeco-Roman civilization was destroyed by Germany,’ 55 at the time of the Germanic invasions into the Roman Empire. True, Hitler did not give the order to destroy Paris as long as he had it in his grip, but he did so the moment he saw that it was going to escape him. Collins and Lapierre, in their bestseller ...
... inspiration for centuries. Another easily accessible provision of anti-religious ammunition is the history of Christianity. As soon as Catholicism was recognized as the official church of the Roman Empire, around the year 400, hordes of ‘monks’ went on the rampage, murdering ‘heathens’ and destroying the buildings of the existing religions and cults. There has been the Crusades, the Inquisition (still ...
... that all occurrences of a given name in the Page 109 New Testament referred to a single individual, but when we remember that Mark (Marcus) was the commonest Latin name in the Roman Empire* and that the early Church must have contained innumerable Marks, we realize how precarious any assumption of identity is in this case. In favour of identifying the Evangelist with the Mark of 1 ...
... tell me what exactly Augustus Caesar stood for in the history of Europe and how Leonardo's work was connected with his? "Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilization to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly ...
... Diederich’s initiative strongly influenced “the turn northwards” of the German mind, away from the Orient but still more away from southern Europe, more specifically from Rome, symbol of the ancient Roman empire and its culture, and of the Catholic Church. “Thule is not the past: Thule is the eternal German soul”, proclaimed a prospectus of Diederich’s collection. 65 “In the Thule Society it was like ...
... the head of his armies and implementing the ideals of the French Revolution, which were the ideals of the Enlightenment. “Napoleon burst upon the Germans like a hurricane. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, replacing hundreds of separate sovereignties with thirty-eight; outraging clergy, he abolished ecclesiastical states, church courts, tithes, monasteries, and convents and seized church property ...
... imposition of a way of life which was foreign to the Germanic nature and soul. Still more so was felt the Christianization which Romanized rulers had imposed on the “pagans” by force; for if the Roman empire had sought to integrate the conquered peoples, the Catholic Church allowed for no compromise, and conversion was often a matter of life and death. (Charlemagne, “slaughterer of the Saxons”, had ...
... his disciples and others. He was certainly quite as much an Avatar as Christ or Chaitanya. Page 501 Augustus Caesar and Leonardo da Vinci Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe—he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly ...
... not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past. Augustus Caesar and Leonardo da Vinci Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe—he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly ...
... attractive innovations of free thought but unable to appreciate its delicate reservations, verge towards that reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilisation and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development ...
... agreed to allow all the rest of its life to be regularised for it for the sake of peace and stability and took refuge for its individual freedom in the spiritual life, as happened once under the Roman Empire. But even that would be only a temporary solution. A federal system also would tend inevitably to establish one general type for human life, institutions and activities; it would allow only a play ...
... their resources: there was also an attempt at quasi-assimilation, an imposition of the culture of a dominant race and, in general, a system of absorption wholesale or as complete as possible. The Roman Empire was the classic example of this kind of endeavour and the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and culture in a vast framework of political and administrative unity was the nearest approach ...
... level____ Are things worse or becoming better? To me the condition of Europe, after the war especially, seems almost to be the same as that at the break-up and disintegration of the Roman Empire. There is the same tendency to plunge the world into barbarism again. * * * June 22, 1926 (A disciple:) Are Indians more spiritual than other people ? No, it ...
... factors or with the general life of the nation to which he belongs. It is not tantamount to saying: "Beethoven could have sprung into existence as easily in Timbuctoo during the time of the Roman Empire as in Germany in the age of Napoleon." No doubt, a nation does feed the secret springs of an individual and the age in which he lives does colour and shape him, but he is not altogether a ...
... France before the restoration of monarchy. On one side humanity is locked together; on the other side the national egos remain. The unity has of course to be a living unity, not like that of the Roman Empire in which the same old organisations and institutions remained. PURANI: Now that the Allies and the Belgians have been forced to pool their economies, they may form such an alliance even after ...
... success. Only after using mustard gas could they get victory. On the other hand, if they joined the Allies, they could confirm their position, though Mussolini would have to give up his idea of a Roman empire. PURANI: Here is a letter from Sundaram on his meeting with H, who tried to explain why he went away from here. He could not understand why the Mother granted an interview to the mill owner ...
... are changing. The British Empire is more loosely formed, its units have more freedom than is the case with other Empires built Page 104 upon the pattern of the extremely centralised Roman Empire. Truly it has the spirit of a commonwealth. The spirit of decentralisation and federation that is increasing today and has seized even old-world Empires – the Dutch, the French, the Russian – has ...
... member organisms forming part of the larger collectivity, viz., colonies and dependencies and subject races, which must in the end bring about a collapse and disruption of the whole structure. The Roman Empire was the typical example of this experiment. Next, there was what can be called the racial line. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but nothing very successful has taken shape. Pan-Slavism ...
... French Revolution, 32, 52, 59, 101, 105,. 126, 149, 155, 207-8 Francis I, 90, 120 GALILEO, 308, 322 Germany, 32, 70, 72, 87-9 Gibbon, 238 -The Decline & Fall of the Roman EmPire, 238 Gide, Andre, 353-4 Gita, the, 27, 57,68, 83, 161, 163,188-9, 276, 280, 328, 340, 363, 369, 371, 381, 394 Goethe, 88, 197 Goncourts, 145 Gondwanaland ...
... history, since the Iliad and Odyssey provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the classical age and they formed the backbone of humanistic education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. We should also note that Virgil's Aeneid was loosely moulded after the pattern of the Iliad and Odyssey, and thus the Aeneid's influence on Roman and subsequent ...
... acknowledged that such elements of unity are very helpful to the growth of nationality, but they are not essential and will not even of themselves assure its growth. Referring to the example of the Roman Empire, he pointed out that even though it created a common language, a common religion and life, and did its best to crush out racial diversities under the heavy weight of its uniform system, failed to ...
... unrest, which started in the 4th century AD threatened all the ancient stable cultures and finally proved too strong even for the highly developed Greco-Roman civilization and the vast and powerful Roman Empire. It was the same phenomenon that threw great masses of Teutons, Slavs, Huns, and Scythians to the east and south in India; it battered at the gates of India for many centuries, it effected certain ...
... changing. Page 68 The British Empire is more loosely formed, its units have more freedom than is the case with other Empires built upon the pattern of the extremely centralised Roman Empire. Truly it has the spirit of a commonwealth. The spirit of decentralisation and federation that is increasing today and has seized even old-world Empires—the Dutch, the French, the Russian —has come ...
... the end the vitality of the organism: the centre, sucking in all nourishment from the outlying members suffers from oedema and the whole eventually decays and disintegrates. That is the lesson the Roman Empire teaches us. The autocratic empire is dead and gone: we need not fear its shadow or ghostly regeneration. But the ideal which inspired it in secret and justified its advent and reign is a ...
... material prosperity, and when it does, you might lose sight of the real thing you sought to do in the glamour of wealth, in the attraction of wealth and in the desire to keep it safe.... Under the Roman Empire there was material development, 124 there was industrial progress, but industrial progress and material development did not bring life to the Nation. When the hour of trial came, it was found ...
... part of the larger collectivity, viz., colonies and dependencies Page 93 and subject races, which must in the end bring about a collapse and disruption of the whole structure. The Roman Empire was the typical example of this experiment. Next, there was, what can be called, the racial line. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but nothing very successful has taken shape. Pan-Slavism ...
... perils. In ancient times it was solved readily enough in smaller limits by the absolutist and monarchical solution with the rule of a conquering race as the starting-point, as in the Persian and Roman empires. But that resource is no longer as easily open to us in the new conditions of human society, whatever dreams may in the past have entered into the minds of powerful nations or their Czars and Kaisers... eventually for the monarchical idea is that its form may be retained as a convenient symbol for the unity of the heterogeneous empires which would be the largest elements in any unification based upon the present political configuration of the world. But even for these empires the symbol has not proved to be indispensable. France has done without it, Russia has recently dispensed with it. In Austria... Ideal of Human Unity The Ideal of Human Unity - II The Human Cycle Chapter XXIII Forms of Government The idea of a world-union of free nations and empires, loose at first, but growing closer-knit with time and experience, seems at first sight the most practicable form of political unity; it is the only form indeed which would be immediately practicable ...
... degradation and disintegration, with no sufficient means for revival or new creation, of the socio-political life of the people. 57 A rigid political unity - like the unity of the Persian and Roman Empires of old — was never attempted in ancient India; and had it been attempted successfully, it would not have lasted long. The ideal of conquest held up was not "a destructive and predatory invasion... and for that anything comes in handy, - .. .all this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a fit of mental biliousness.... It is a sweet and pleasant thing, cries the Roman poet, to play the fool in place and right season, dulce est desipere in loco. But Mr. Archer's constant departures into irrational extravagance are not by any means in loco. We discover very soon... continuance or the development of its motives. A civilisation in pursuit of this aim may be predominantly material like modern European culture, predominantly mental and intellectual like the old Graeco-Roman or predominantly spiritual like the still persistent culture of India. 3 The present contrast, then, is between the Western science-based materialist civilisation and India's "still persistent" ...
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