The Formation of Civilizations Have you ever thought about the fact that modern methods of teaching history have a number of interesting features? Separately studied the history of the "world" and separately - the history of Russia. That is, it turns out, as it were, two separate and almost

Understanding history. A.J. Toynbee

Per. from English. - M.: Progress, 1991.- 736 p.

The collection represents the first attempt at a consistent presentation in Russian of the world-famous theory of historical development by A. J. Toynbee (Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975). The collection is based on a 12-volume work by a famous British scientist. In Soviet historiography, this work was traditionally called "The Study of History".

Volumes I-III were published by Oxford University Press in 1934. The last, XII volume, was released in 1961.

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CONTENT
Introduction 10
RELATIVITY OF HISTORICAL THINKING 10
Notes 16
Comments 16
FIELD OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH 18
Spatial expansion of the field of our research. 26
Field expansion in time. 31
Notes 37
Comments 37
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CIVILIZATIONS A REVIEW OF SOCIETIES OF THE SAME KIND 43
Orthodox Christian Society 43
Iranian and Arab societies 45
Syrian Society 47
Notes 52
Comments 53
Indian Society 61
Ancient Chinese Society 62
Relic societies 63
Minoan Society 64
Notes 68
Comments 68
Sumerian Society 76
Hittite Society 79
Babylon Society 81
Andean Society 83
Yucatan, Mexican and Mayan societies 85
Egyptian Society 86
Notes 87
Comments 87
PRELIMINARY CLASSIFICATION OF COMPANIES OF THIS TYPE 92
Table 1 93
COMPARABILITY OF THIS TYPE 95
The falsity of the concept of "unity of civilization". 96
The philosophical aspect of the time coordinates of societies of this type. 99
The philosophical aspect of the equivalence of societies of this type 100
Comparability of "facts" in the study of civilizations. 101
Notes 103
Comments 103

Part 1. THE PROBLEM OF THE GENESIS OF CIVILIZATIONS 104
Table 2 104
Notes 105
Comments 105
THE NATURE OF THE GENESIS OF CIVILIZATIONS 106
Comments 107
THE REASON FOR THE GENESIS OF CIVILIZATIONS 107
Negative factor 107
Positive factors: race and environment 107
Race 108
"Nordic Man" 109
Race and Civilization 110
Table 3 111
Wednesday 112
Notes 116
Comments 116
CALL AND REPLY 119
Call-and-response action. 119
Challenges and responses in the genesis of civilizations 124
The Genesis of Egyptian Civilization 124
The Genesis of the Sumerian Civilization 125
The Genesis of Chinese Civilization 125
Genesis of the Mayan and Andean civilizations 126
Genesis of the Minoan Civilization 126
CALL-AND-RESPONSE AREA 128
"Full sails", or "Too good ground" 128
Return of nature 129
Central America 130
Ceylon 130
North Arabian Desert 130
Easter Island 131
Notes 133
Comments 133
STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 137
Aegean coasts and their continental hinterlands 137
Attica and Boeotia 138
Aegina and Argos 139
STIMULUS NEW LANDS 140
SPECIAL INCENTIVE FOR OVERSEAS MIGRATION 142
STIMULUS STRIKES 146
PRESSURE STIMULUS 148
Russian Orthodoxy. 148
Notes 150
Comments 150
SIX OUTPOSTS IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN EUROPE 153
Western world against continental European barbarians. 153
Western world against Muscovy. 157
Western World vs. Ottoman Empire 158
Notes 164
Comments 164
Western world against Far Western Christianity 169
Western world vs Scandinavia. 170
Western world against the Syrian world in the Iberian Peninsula 173
STIMULUS INFRINGEMENT 175
The nature of the stimulus 175
Migration 176
Slavery 176
Casta 178
Religious discrimination. 179
Comments 180
GOLDEN MEAN 182
The Law of Compensation. 182
What makes a challenge excessive? 185
Matching three dimensions 189
Comments 189

Part 2. GROWTH OF CIVILIZATIONS 191
THE PROBLEM OF THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATIONS 191
THE NATURE OF THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATIONS 215
THE PROCESS OF THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATIONS 220
GROWTH CRITERION 220
GROWTH ANALYSIS 251
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GROWING CIVILIZATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS 251
CARE-AND-RETURN 260
INTERACTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS IN GROWING CIVILIZATIONS 265
DIFFERENTIATION DURING GROWTH 282
BREAKS OF CIVILIZATIONS 288
IS DETERMINISM CONVINCING? 288

Part 3. DECAY OF CIVILIZATIONS 325
DECAY CRITERION 325
SPLIT-AND-PALINGENESIS MOVEMENT 328
SPLIT IN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 331
INTERNAL PROLETARIAT 333
EXTERNAL PROLETARIAT 339
SCRIPT IN THE SOUL 344
ARCHAISM 393
FUTURISM 404
BREAK WITH REAL 405
REJECTION 413
TRANSFORMATION 417
PALINGENESIS 421
DECAY ANALYSIS 422
RHYTHMS OF DECAY 443

Part 4. UNIVERSAL STATES 451
GOALS OR MEANS? 451
UNIVERSAL STATES AS GOALS 453
MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY 453
UNIVERSAL STATES AS MEANS 465
PRICE OF EUTANASIUS [+1] 465
PROVINCE 470
CAPITALS 473

Part 5. UNIVERSE CHURCHES 478
THE CHURCH AS A "CANCER" 478
CHURCH AS A "PUPPET" 480
THE CHURCH AS THE HIGHEST KIND OF SOCIETY 483
CIVILIZATION AS REGRESS 489
CHALLENGING MILIABILITY ON EARTH 491

INSPIRATION FOR HISTORIANS

VIEW OF THE HISTORIAN

Why do people study history? For the sake of what - if you address the question to a specific person, the author of this book has been writing it for thirty years? Are people born historians or become them? Everyone will give their own answer to this question, because everyone relies on their own personal experience. The author of this work, for example, came to the conclusion that the historian, like everyone who is lucky enough to find the goal of life, goes to this goal, trusting the call of the Lord to feel and find after Him (Acts 7, 27).

If this answer satisfies the discerning reader, perhaps it will shed some light on the next question we have posed. Asking ourselves why we study History, let us first try to define: what is meant by History? Still relying only on personal experience, the author will try to present his own view on the subject. Perhaps his view of History will seem inaccurate or even incorrect to someone, but the author dares to assure the reader that through comprehension of reality he is trying to comprehend God, who reveals Himself through the movements of souls sincerely seeking Him. Since "no one has ever seen God" (John 1, 18), and our clearest views are only "refracted rays" of Him, the view of the historian is nothing more than one of the many multitudes of existing opinions that different souls with different gifts and talents have. different levels of comprehension of His "high works". In addition to historians, there are astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, poets, mystics, prophets, administrators, judges, sailors, fishermen, hunters, shepherds, farmers, artisans, engineers, doctors on Earth ... The list is, in fact, endless, because human callings are numerous and varied. The presence of the Lord in each of them is implicit and incomplete. And among all these countless human destinies and views, the historian's point of view is one of the possible experiences, but, like others, it complements the understanding of what God does for man. History allows us to see the divine creative force in motion, and our human experience captures this motion in six dimensions. The historical view of the world reveals to us the physical cosmos, moving in a circle in the four-dimensional Space-Time, and Life on our planet, evolving in the five-dimensional frame of Space-Time-Life. And the human soul, ascending into the sixth dimension through the gift of the Spirit, rushes through the fatal acquisition of spiritual freedom in the direction of the Creator or away from Him.

Susceptibility. If we are not mistaken in considering History as a view of divine creation in motion from a divine source to a divine goal, we should not be surprised that in the minds of sentient beings, History awakens as mere evidence that they are alive. But since Time is an eternally seething stream, now speeding up, now slowing down its run, we will not be at all surprised to find that a person's internal susceptibility to the impressions of History always remains approximately at the same level. Fluctuations in this susceptibility depend, as a rule, only on specific historical circumstances.

For example, we have repeatedly seen that the vividness of historical impressions is proportional to their strength and pain. Let us take a generation whose childhood coincided with the transition of the new Western society to the newest, that is, at the end of the 19th century. A man who lived through the Civil War as a child in the southern states of America undoubtedly possessed a deeper historical consciousness than his contemporary who spent his childhood in the North. For the same reason, the Frenchman, who grew up during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, who survived all the ups and downs of 1870-1871, was endowed with a much sharper historical consciousness than any of his contemporaries in Switzerland, Belgium or England.

However, history can also influence the human imagination through the ages, evoking the memory of a bygone past. History affects receptive souls with its monuments and memorials, the names of streets and squares, architecture, changes in fashion, political events, traditional holidays, ceremonies and parades, liturgies.

The conservatism of ecclesiastical institutions, designed to clothe the higher religions in harmonious forms, undoubtedly made them the most powerful emitters of impressions, repositories of the spirit of historical events and historical characters. The main problem faced by all soteriological religions is the problem of enlightening the masses. And this problem was successfully solved through the teaching of history and the transmission of the moral law in a visual form. Even in the mosque, where the use of fine arts for enlightenment was limited by the faithfulness of the prophet Muhammad to the second commandment of Moses, architectural lines skillfully influenced the religious feeling of believers. In the Christian church - until it turned into a prayer house of one of the Western Christian sects, where the second commandment is observed with Muslim rigor - the prophets, apostles and martyrs were placed around the image of the Lord fully armed with their traditional attributes: with a cross, a sword, a wheel or a book and a pen in hand.

It is easy to see that in those days when living civilizations were preserved under the auspices of a living higher religion in their traditional form, visiting a church (mosque, synagogue, Hindu or Buddhist temple) automatically introduced the believer to history. Education was as effective as it was informal, reaching out to the widest sections of the population who did not have the opportunity to attend school. Christ and his apostles, saints and martyrs, patriarchs and prophets, the biblical perspective of history from creation through the fall and redemption to the Last Judgment - all this was perceived as a true reality, more important for Christian souls than local secular history courses.

Referring frankly to my personal experience, I confess that the longer I live, the more deeply I feel how happy I am that I was born in that era of Western civilization, when it was the norm to take children to church every Sunday, that I received a classical education, studying Latin and Greek at school and university. In my childhood days, Latin and Greek had not yet been forced out of the educational system by Western vernacular languages ​​and literatures, medieval and modern Western history and natural science.

The automatic stimulus of the social environment in which a person is born and grows up is the earliest and most powerful source of inspiration for would-be historians. However, this is not enough for two reasons.

First, even in third-generation civilizations that grew out of chrysalis-churches, the informal teaching of history through the institution of the Church never permeated society to its depths, since the vast majority of the population of any society are peasants. Thus, by 1952, the peasantry constituted three-quarters of all living humanity today. And to the peasantry, as you know, history always appears as a meaningless fairy tale, despite all its instructiveness and thoroughness. The peasantry, captured by the whirlwind of history, drawn into civilization in order to materially provide for a privileged minority, remains to this day the most unfortunate brother of those primitive societies that civilizations simply have not had time to absorb. In the peasant mind, the government has always been the same inevitable and ruthless scourge as, for example, war, plague or famine.

The only passage of history in which the peasantry could feel any interest is the prehistoric era, when pre-human became man - a phenomenon in its historical significance more outstanding than the rise of civilizations. However, this historical event, brought to the light of God by Western archaeologists, anthropologists and psychologists not so long ago, died out in the memory of the people many centuries ago, and the practically primitive subsoil of living civilizations still remains absolutely devoid of any historical consciousness. In fact, for three-quarters of the population of our planet even now, that is, in 1952, history does not exist. And this happened not because the majority demonstrates less susceptibility to enlightenment, but because the majority still lives not according to the laws of History, but in the rhythms of Nature.

However, even for a minority whose social environment is geared towards the study of History, this predisposition to the radiation of the historical social environment is not in itself sufficient to induce a child to become a historian. Passive receptivity, without which he would never have embarked on the true path, is also not enough to reach the intended harbor - for this, inspiration and the desire to raise his own sails are necessary.

Curiosity. The mind of a would-be historian is like a jet-powered airplane. After receiving the first impulse to study History, when it becomes aware of its existence through exposure to the historically set social environment, the mind develops its own next impulse, turning receptivity into curiosity. This transition from the passive to the active phase forces the student of History to take the initiative into his own hands and proceed further at his own risk and fear, charting a course into the unknown heavenly realms.

Without creative awakening and curiosity, even the most famous, impressive and majestic monuments of History will not produce the proper impact on the imagination, for the eyes turned to them will be blind (Isaiah 42, 20; Jer. 5, 21; Ezek. 12, 12; Matt. 13:14: Mark 4:12; Luke 13:10; John 12:40; Acts 28:26; Rom 1:1:8). This truth was confirmed by the Western travel philosopher Volney, who visited the Islamic world in 1783-1785. And in 1798, a whole group of scientists took advantage of Napoleon's invitation to accompany the expeditionary force in Africa. Unlike these fearless men of science, neither Napoleon himself nor his army were drawn to Egypt by the call of History. The driving forces of the invaders were barbaric restlessness and ambition. However, Napoleon was aware that he had touched a string, the sound of which could touch even the ignorant heart of the most rude soldier. Therefore, before the decisive battle, he considered it necessary to address the army with the following words: "Soldiers, for forty centuries look at you," referring to the pyramids that opened their eyes during their march to Cairo. You can be sure that Murat Bey, the commander of the Mamluk armed forces, did not even think to cheer up his inquisitive comrades with a similar reminder.

French scholars who visited Egypt with Napoleon's troops discovered a new dimension of history that was supposed to satisfy Western curiosity. The scientific interest of that era focused primarily on the classical languages ​​and literature of the Hellenic civilization. 1798 brought an unexpected victory. The origins of their own cultural heritage were discovered. After the secondary assimilation of the Latin and Greek classics from a new angle, Western scholars began to master the Arabic and Persian classics of the Islamic society, the Chinese classics of the Far Eastern society, the Sanskrit classics of the Hindu society, and, not satisfied with the study of the Hebrew originals of the Bible, which the Christian church shared with the Jewish diaspora, Western scientists by that time had also mastered the ancient Iranian language of the writings of Parsi Zoroastrianism. Thus, being the owners of all the riches of the past, which were preserved in the cultural heritage of living civilizations, Western scientists began to dig up hidden riches that had been underground for thousands of years, devoted to complete oblivion.

This was a powerful intellectual breakthrough, for long ago the unbroken chain of tradition was broken, and there was no one who could initiate the new convert into its secrets. Without outside help, scientists had to decipher forgotten scripts and discover the structure, vocabulary and meaning of dead languages, dead in the literal sense of the word, in contrast to Latin and Sanskrit, which are called dead, because they have gone out of speech use, but nevertheless continue to be used in the liturgy. and classical literature. The comprehension of ancient Egyptian civilization by Western scholars, which began in 1798, was thus a much more significant achievement in the development of modern Western historical interest than the Italian renaissance of Latin and Greek literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At least eleven civilizations are known today - the ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Minoan, Hittite, and Indian and Shang cultures in the Old World, and the Mayan, Yucatan, Mexican, and Andean civilizations in the New World. During the lifetime of my generation, four remarkable discoveries were made: the Indian culture, the Shang culture, the Hittite and Minoan civilizations. And it must be admitted that this has significantly advanced our knowledge and understanding of history.

Of course, this is not the pinnacle and not the limit of the achievements of Western intellectual pioneers. Their success could not but infect with curiosity those non-Western peoples who, a century and a half ago, in the days of Volnay and Napoleon, lived and worked under the shadow of the monuments of the Past, paying no attention to them. In 1952, Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, and Turkish philologists, historians, and archaeologists worked hand in hand with Western enthusiasts in fields already "ready for harvest" (John 4:35: Matt. 9:37-38; Luke 10:2 ). The amazing successes and achievements of scientists not only did not close them in their environment, but, arousing interest in science, more and more expanded the circle of non-professional amateurs.

The popularity of archeology these days has become so wide that even newspapermen do not pass by its discoveries, giving readers detailed information from the excavation sites. The discovery on November 4, 1922 of the tomb of Tutankhamen (1362-1352 BC) made almost the same sensation in England as the birth of a bear cub in the zoological garden by a polar she-bear in 1950. Nowadays, when Greek classes are relegated to the background by the official school , England remains the only country where there is an increase in the number of children who want to learn Greek and Latin, and the general interest in classical history and literature is stimulated by an ever-increasing number of translations, the quality of which is also steadily increasing.

In the mind of the author, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) has always been a heroic example of the response of invincible curiosity to the challenge of soul-tormenting circumstances. It began from that memorable day at Winchester, when the author, as a boy, listened to a lecture by his teacher, M. J. Randall, who, speaking of the Iliad, also dwelled on the outstanding events of this romantic life. Born a year before Schliemann's death, the author of these lines could not, therefore, be acquainted with this hero of History, but he had the good fortune to personally know two of his younger contemporaries.

HW Bailey (b. 1899), world-renowned philologist, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge in 1952, spent his childhood on a farm in Western Australia. It is hard to imagine a less suitable environment for a future scholar of Oriental languages. The severity of the virgin, recently developed lands did not favor fairy tales and legends. And the boy took the book as a heavenly gift. A seven-volume encyclopedia and four textbooks in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish appeared on a Western Australian farm. Later, the boy became interested in Arabic and Persian, but Persian took over and then turned into an interest in Sanskrit.

This was the first spark that ignited Bailey's curiosity. In 1943, a modest scientist told me how the family looked at him good-naturedly and at the same time with some surprise when, at noon, after field work, he crammed Eastern grammar in the hayloft. Having reached university age, the young scientist realized that he was at a certain limit and it was hardly possible to continue studying oriental languages ​​\u200b\u200bon his own, relying only on books. What was his next step? Oriental languages ​​were not taught at the University of Western Australia at that time. It remained to go to Western Europe or North America. Bailey decided to improve his Latin and Greek, for which he entered the local university, where he received a scholarship, and soon the opportunity to go to Oxford for an in-depth study of Oriental languages.

However, even in Cambridge there was no department that could assist in the study of Khotanese, a language related to Persian and Sanskrit. This language was discovered by Western scholars while Bailey was studying the Avesta in a hayloft in Western Australia. But it was this language that became the field of activity in which Bailey later demonstrated his brilliant abilities as a researcher and scientist.

Bailey's experience to some extent echoes the experience of another modern researcher, a specialist in the modern history of the Far East, F. S. Jones. As a graduate student, Jones accidentally discovered in the university library a collection of books on the history of the Far East, once donated to the university by F. W. Dickens, an Englishman who served in 1866-1870. military doctor in China and Japan, and later taught Japanese studies at the university. The dust that covered the books told the young scholar that he was the first to take an interest in them; and this pile of books, abandoned by everyone, had a decisive influence on the intellectual searches of the young man. Without abandoning his full-time academic work, Jones has been systematically involved in the Far East ever since. This became the subject of his personal interest. With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to China and spent about two years there - from the autumn of 1935 to the summer of 1937, studying Chinese at the College of Chinese Studies in Beijing and even traveling around the country, despite the fact that in China at that time there were big riots. At the end of 1937 he entered the Far East Department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, from where he returned to his alma mater in Bristol. I worked with him for fourteen years and never noticed that he lost interest in his favorite subject even for a while.

I must say that my soul was once scorched by the same fire. I shall never forget that memorable winter morning in early 1898, when four identically bound volumes appeared on the bookshelf in my parents' London apartment. It was Fisher Unwin's "History of Nations" series. I had a completely favorable environment for my consciousness to wake up at the turn of nine or ten years and call me to become a historian. My mother was a historian. I well remember how she wrote in 1898 "Unfictional Tales from Scottish History", and I remember the delight that seized me when I picked up a book with bright pictures. My mother wrote this book to pay off a debt to the nanny who looked after me when I was four or five years old. And although I was sorry to leave the nanny, I was rewarded by the fact that I began to spend more time with my mother. Every night when my mother put me to bed, she would tell me the history of England before the Battle of Waterloo. I was very receptive to my native history, but that memorable morning had a decisive influence on my further intellectual development. For the discovery of the radiance of the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian luminaries took me out of the state of Yin and brought me into the dynamics of Yang, awakening an unquenchable curiosity. And this has been going on for over fifty-four years.

The schooner went out into the open ocean (as a child, I somehow ran away to the seashore, but the nanny caught up with me and brought me back home; now there was no nanny to return me from the undertaken intellectual journey to the Ocean of History). At school my curiosity was fueled by the experience of Herodotus, who went to the Achaemenid Empire, and I began to study the varieties of Christianity in Georgia and Abyssinia. The university opened up to me a new world of the Far East and the Great Eurasian Steppe. When I passed my final exams, my curiosity drew me into the theater of colorful Hellenic history - I became a member of the British Archaeological School in Rome and Athens. There I made the discovery of the then still living Ottoman world. This gave me a place in the Turkish section of the foreign section of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Between the first and second world wars, my curiosity led me to an intensive study of international relations. It broadened my horizons. But to add another dimension to my intellectual universe, I took a dive into the abyss of the Unconscious with C. G. Jung. After the Second World War, the same irrepressible curiosity drew me into the field of economics. I began to study production cycles, hoping that this would allow me to better understand the relationship between Law and Freedom in History. And on September 15, 1952, having crossed into the second half of the sixty-fourth year of my life, I felt how the approaching Time was pushing me even more insistently on the path in search of new worlds.

At this age, I was inspired by the example of the historian, banker and statesman Georg Groth (1794-1871), who, two years before completing the last and final volume of his twelve-volume history of Greece, was carried away by a new work. As a result of this hobby, three volumes about Plato appeared. No sooner had the last of them come out than the author set about Aristotle. However, he could not respond to the challenge of Time with a new edition - Death stopped the race.

With all my heart devoted to the example of Georg Groth, I tried to keep up with Lord Bryce (1838-1922), who, before he had finished one book, was already planning the next. His last feat - the study of "Modern Democracies" - he accomplished when he was already over eighty. He intended to write more about Justinian I and his wife Theodora, when death interrupted his plans.

Inspired by the examples of Bryce and Groth, having crossed the threshold of the twelfth part of my work out of thirteen planned in December 1950, I began to ponder the "Religion of the Historian" and "History of Hellenic Civilization", which I began in 1914, but stopped because of the first world war.

In 1952, my curiosity led me to switch from studying Arabic and Turkish to studying New Persian. I was quite able to combine the study of three languages ​​in 1924, when I had to participate in the publication of the Chronicle of International Relations. By 1927 are the first systematic notes for this Study, which I began to write regularly in 1930. Five years in my time at Winchester (1902-1907) gave me sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to be fluent in the ancient classics. However, the dream never left me to navigate the Islamic classics as freely. I took the first steps towards this in 1915 at the London School of Oriental Studies, but in 1924 I had to stop my studies in Turkish and Arabic. By 1952, the desire, relegated to the background in 1924, had grown into an urgent need. I literally burned with shame when I remembered that my favorite hero Heinrich Schliemann learned thirteen languages ​​on his own.

In 1952, I was also seized by a passionate desire to travel to the most remarkable historical places that I had never seen or that had once bewitched me.

Every time I think about my Herodotus ambitions, I am reminded of an anecdote told by Lord Bryce. Lord Bryce, an inveterate traveler who had already traveled half the world by that time, felt somehow slightly unwell. This led him to think that further travel might be in question. Then he and Lady Bryce decided to choose the most severe region for their next trip, in order to test their physical condition. Their choice fell on Siberia. Having successfully overcome the Siberian expanses, they decided that they were quite capable of the rest of the world. Lord Bryce's example inspired me the more the nearer I approached the end of the Insight into History. And now, in the middle of the sixty-fourth year of my life, I thank God for the curiosity that He endowed me with fifty-four years ago and which has never left me since.

A wandering light of omniscience. Without inspiration, which is spurred on by curiosity, no one can become a historian, because without it it is impossible to break the state of Yin, the state of infantile receptivity, it is impossible to make your mind rush about in search of the solution to the mystery of the universe. It is impossible to become a historian without curiosity, just as it is impossible to remain one if you have lost this quality. However, curiosity is a necessary thing, but clearly not enough. And if curiosity is Pegasus, then, once riding it, the historian must constantly remember the bridle and not allow his winged horse to gallop, as they say, wherever his eyes look.

A scientist who allows his curiosity to develop uncontrollably runs the risk of losing his creative potential. This is especially dangerous for a Western scientist, who, due to the tradition of education that has developed in the West, is often inclined to consider the goal of education not a conscious and full-blooded life, but an exam. The institution of examination, which has shaped learned minds during the last eight centuries of Western history, was introduced into Western universities by the fathers of the early Middle Ages. The educational system was formed on the basis of theology. And the myth of the Last Judgment was part of the heritage received by the Christian church from the cult of Osiris, as well as through Zoroastrianism. But if the Egyptian fathers of the cult of Osiris considered the Last Judgment as an ethical test, symbolically represented by the scales of Osiris, on the bowls of which lay the good and bad deeds of the departed soul, the Christian church, impregnated, in addition, with Hellenistic philosophy, supplemented the question of Osiris "Bad or good?" Aristotelian intellectual task: "True or false?"

When the abomination of intellectualism took over Western secular education, as well as Western Christian theology, the fear of failing the exam was based not on the fact that something illegal in the worldly life of the student would be publicly revealed, and not on the fact that he would be deprived of his degree, which was under the jurisdiction of the university. but on the fact that those who fail the exam will be doomed to eternal torment in hell, because the medieval, and even the early new Western, Christian faith provided for mandatory punishment for unorthodox views. As the flow of information at the disposal of the Western examiner for his incessant intellectual war with the student grows exponentially, examinations in the West have become a nightmare that can be compared to the nightmare of medieval interrogations of the Inquisition. However, the worst examination that awaits us is the posthumous examination; for even an excellent student who has commendably passed all the trials that his alma mater brought down on him, goes into life not in order to apply his knowledge in practical matters, but in order to continue to accumulate it and eventually take it to the grave.

The agonizing pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp of omniscience contains a double moral flaw.

Ignoring the truth that the only legitimate goal of any knowledge is its practical use within the framework of the life allotted to a person, the sinner scientist partially renounces his sociality. By refusing to recognize that immutable law that the human soul cannot achieve perfection in this World, a person loses humility. Moreover, this sin is not only more serious, it is also more insidious, because here the intellectual hybrid of the scientist is hidden under the mask of false humility. The scientist is subconsciously cunning, claiming that he cannot publish, write, or say anything about what he is not fully convinced of until he knows everything thoroughly. This professional conscientiousness is nothing more than a camouflage of the three deadly sins - satanic pride, irresponsibility and criminal laziness.

This humble man is actually overcome with pride, as he aspires to a deliberately unattainable intellectual level. Omniscience is the lot of Almighty God, and Man should be content with relative, partial knowledge.

The intellectual error present in the pursuit of omniscience is like a moral error raised to a power; and the beginning of evils here is the wrongful identification of plurality with infinity. True, the human soul is characterized by the need to seek harmony between itself and Infinity. However, omniscience, as Faust discovered with his perspicacious mind, cannot be achieved through the consistent addition of knowledge to knowledge, art to art, science to science, forming a bad infinity.

Since the time of Dante, Western scientists have puzzled over the insoluble problem, applying to it the formula: "Know more and more about less and less"; but this path turned out to be more fruitless even than the method of Goethe's Faust, not to mention the fact that the practical significance of scientific research was lost. As the scientist reduces the sector of his vision in the hope of getting to the bottom of the essence, science as a whole is divided into countless segments, each of which does not become less complex than the whole from the procedure performed. But even if attempts to delve into these infinitesimal quantities were less chimerical than attempts to grasp and cognize the whole, the ultimate goal of all these academic exercises would still remain unattained: since, as we have repeatedly noted in our study, the human mind is not given to compete with the eternal divine understanding of the infinite.

From the point of view of the historian, the verdict on the idea of ​​encyclopedism was passed by History itself. This false ideal was the last intellectual error that the old civilization rejected, and the first to be rejected by the new, as soon as the time came to part with childish amusements (1 Cor. 13, 11).

There was an episode in the life of the author of these lines that to some extent illustrates what was said above. In December 1906, when I was eighteen years old, I found myself in the company of two eminent scientists. These were P. Toynbee, the author of the Dictionary of Proper Names and Noteworthy Places in the Works of Dante, and E. Toynbee, publisher of Horace Walpole's letters. In addition, they were my uncles and aunts. During their visit, which was extremely pleasant and interesting for me, I did not notice how I revealed all my various historical interests, from the Assyrians to the Fourth Crusade. However, I was somewhat discouraged by the parting advice that, out of kindness, my uncle gave his impressionable nephew before leaving. "Your Aunt Nellie and I," the Dante specialist said, "have come to the conclusion that you're spreading yourself too thin. We would advise you to pick one and focus on that subject." And now, in 1952, the author of these lines still keeps in his soul the memory of how everything in him opposed this advice and he firmly decided not to follow it. It so happened that later, when the aunt died prematurely, without finishing the publication of Walpole's letters, the uncle himself violated his intellectual principles, sacrificing them on the altar of love for his wife. After her death, he continued her work, and it must be said that his unprofessional literary work did not go unnoticed. After the letters were published in The Times, they were widely quoted. Meanwhile, his nephew, despite the good decision not to follow the wrong advice, almost reached an intellectual impasse, from which the Dante specialist successfully emerged thanks to a tragic event in his own family.

Eleven years of my youth, from the autumn of 1900 to the summer of 1911, I spent in an incessant race, now preparing for exams, now passing them. The overall demoralizing effect of these labors was that I slowly but surely forgot my original decision never to become a specialist. In 1911, as a graduate student in my last year of study, I suddenly discovered with surprise that the vice of narrow specialization that struck me had also embraced my older friend G. L. Cheezman, who had once inspired me with his example and aroused my interest in the late Roman Empire.

With the memory of Cheeseman's former intellectual predilections, I made my way to New College, where he worked as an assistant in Roman history. This trip was preceded by a meeting with Dr. Bussel, a very talented scholar who had the idea to stir up a wave of interest in the history of Byzantium at Oxford. When parting, we decided to expand the circle of adherents of this idea. I had no doubt that Dr. Bussel's proposal would find enthusiastic support at New College. To my surprise and disappointment, this idea provoked the sharpest protest, as if Mephistopheles appeared to them in my person, tempting them to destroy the established monastic order. Assistant Cheeseman explained to me in a popular way that it was his duty to master as thoroughly as possible the subject that the college had entrusted him to teach. Expanding the boundaries of scientific activity is completely beyond his power. In a word, Byzantium was definitely not interested in him.

In the summer of 1911 the author of these lines was appointed assistant in Greek and Roman history at Balliol. Having passed the last academic exam, he considered himself enlightened enough to never take exams again. And he adheres to this rule since then strictly.

In the same year, 1911, I decided to use the rather long leave due to me after passing the exams to study the sources of Roman history. I interrupted my studies only for trips to Paris, Rome and Athens, and in 1912 I returned to Oxford as a member of the college council. Having appreciated all the charm of distant wanderings, I began to devote a minimum of time to museums and libraries. A dormant passion for contact with nature woke up in me, which I tried to satisfy by traveling on foot whenever possible. Fortunately, I was smart enough to understand that the landscape of the Hellenic world is worth seeing with my own eyes, for it is a picture that has no equal.

However, life invaded the academic world of the scholarly wanderer and presented tasks of a completely different kind. On the evening of November 8, 1911, returning to Rome from an expedition to the Etruscan burial grounds in Cerveteri and Corneto, the young discoverer of antiquities unexpectedly noticed that his neighbors in the car, the Neapolitans, looked very unfriendly at the soldiers who filled the car. It was a kind of echo of the hostilities that unfolded in Tripolitania on November 18, 1911. I had to transfer from an Italian ship to a Greek one. I had to sail to Patras, and the Italian ship did not dare to approach the hostile Turkish coast. After spending the next eight months in the Greek villages, I heard plenty of talk in local cafes about "Sir Edward Grey's foreign policy." The question was discussed with might and main, when will the war start - this spring or next? Shepherds and tillers, merchants and artisans, it seemed that everyone, including small children, had their own view on this problem. And only the author of these lines reveled in the landscapes of continental Greece and Crete, where medieval French castles and later Venetian fortresses competed in mystery with Hellenic temples and Minoan palaces.

Twice during this reckless journey the Oxford lecturer was arrested as a Turkish spy. The first time, on the evening of November 16, 1911, he was detained by an Italian carabinieri, and the second - on July 21, 1912 - was stopped by a Greek military patrol.

At the end of my journey, I ended up in a hospital with dysentery after drinking from a stream of crystal clear water at first glance. There I again turned to the reading which I had interrupted the previous autumn. During my illness, I studied Strabo's "Geography" and proceeded to the "Description of Hellas" by Pausanias. When already at Oxford I was tormenting Pausanias, I was seized by a sudden attack of aching melancholy from the realization of the exorbitant price that one inevitably has to pay for one's desire to know the infinite.

The scientist who aspires to intellectual omniscience meets the same fate as the soul who aspires to spiritual perfection. Each new step into the unknown, instead of clearing the path and bringing it closer to the goal, further obscures and removes the ideal. Just as the one striving for holiness becomes more and more convinced of his own sinfulness as he gains spiritual insight, so the one striving for omniscience sees his own ignorance more and more clearly with the accumulation of knowledge. In both cases, the gap between the goal and the person walking towards it becomes wider. This pursuit is inevitably doomed to failure, because the finite human nature is lost before the incommensurable infinity of God, and in return only moral regression remains - from fatigue through disappointment to cynicism.

Having experienced the agony of this hopeless pursuit of a ghost, the author of these lines was freed from the horror of an imaginary posthumous examiner with the help of one remarkable event in his life, an event that had nothing to do with wars, or even with rumors of wars (Matt. 24, 6; Mark 13:7; Luke 21:9).

In the summer of 1911, during an intense study of original sources on the history of the Hellenic world of the 4th century. BC. the author more than once resorted to the method of comparing the same facts given in different presentations. Information about the organization and size of the Lacedaemonian army, cited by Xenophon, came into conflict with what settled in the author's head during his preparation for the exams, when he studied this period according to Thucydides. In addition, the dates given by Xenophon also disagreed with the evidence of Thucydides. In short, reading the sources gave rise to a number of questions that could only be resolved as a result of careful empirical analysis.

Subsequently, when the author was in Greece a few months later, theoretical research, fertilized by the beauties of the landscapes of Lacedaemon, gave a new idea of ​​​​the city-states of the 4th century. BC. and their dominions. Field and book work activated my mind to such an extent that in 1913 there was an urgent need to generalize the collected material. In the same year I wrote down and published the article "The Development of Sparta". I couldn't waste any more time reading aimlessly. The First World War interrupted my studies of the history of the Hellenic world, and the inflation that had begun required more and more funds to maintain the family budget. And I got into journalism.

In 1952, thirty-seven years after such a sharp turn in his intellectual activity, the author can state that the chosen path was not erroneous. Since then, I have trained myself to write, not to read, and this has become a system. I still consider reading and travel essential preparatory steps for creativity. However, over time, I learned to work in such a way that writing, traveling and reading became, as it were, independent processes from each other. In order to write, I no longer needed special training.

Since 1916, I began to collect a bibliographic card index of historical research, and I put the broadest meaning into the term "history". However, I have always been careful to limit this area of ​​intellectual activity to certain limits, trying to avoid the claims of completeness that many professionals have, for the failures of potentially creative minds have taught me that too pedantic collection of cards, names, titles, and books themselves, leads to sterilization. Thus, trying not to lose my curiosity, at the same time I kept it within certain limits. Curiosity is given to a person like a string to a bow: the bow can shoot only when the string is stretched. In the same way, curiosity keeps the human mind in working condition. For the price of creativity is constant tension.

The author made his intellectual turn by completing a course of classical Western education based on an examination system. A truth was revealed to him, which, perhaps, mistaking it for a truism, was overlooked by many prominent thinkers. The truth, quite obvious and at the same time stubbornly neglected by scientists, is that Life is Action. Life, when it does not turn into action, is doomed to failure. This is true both for the prophet, poet, scientist, and for the "mere mortal" in the common use of this expression.

Why is the understanding of the depth of Action, of its absolute necessity, less widespread among scientists than among "practical people"? Why is fear of action aa?a considered a distinctive professional trait of a scientist?

Plato considered the only possible way for the philosopher "intense intellectual communication." And Elijah, having heard a quiet voice that reached him after lightning, earthquake and storm, was absolutely sure that this is the direct presence of spiritual power, which is the source of all action in the Universe (1 Kings 19, 11-13). The "great and mighty wind" that "moved mountains and shattered stones before the Lord" came and went before their Maker and Creator to make Elijah's prophetic intuition manifest. Elijah, who was waiting for the Lord, had to show that physical strength is only one of the manifestations of God, and not Almighty God Himself. Or I knew, as Laozi knew, that the stillness of the Source of Life (wuwei) is, in fact, the fullness of activity, which seems to be non-action only to the uninitiated.

Prophets, poets, and scientists are the chosen vessels called by the Creator to perform human action of an ethereal kind, which is perhaps more like God's own action than any of the actions performed by Human Nature. In this, as in any other, form of encounter between the divine and the created, there is a price of privilege; for the truth that Life is Action is just as difficult for one to whom a higher spiritual calling has been opened, as it is obvious for a person of action who is on a spiritually lower level. Elijah himself was called by the Word of the Lord so that the criminal act of inviting death at the moment of despair that comes when faith is lost (1 Kings 19:1-18) would not be accomplished. But this sin, which is the bitter experience of poets, prophets and scientists, is not typical of businessmen or military men. An example of this is the fight between Hector and Ajax.

It is clear to Hector and Ajax without words that their lives depend entirely on each other's actions. In contrast, a prophet, poet, or scholar is like an archer shooting an arrow at a target so far away that it is impossible to see it.

"Release your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again" (Eccl. II, 1). Hector or Ajax does not think about the goal, because it is nearby. However, the archer who does not see his goal, or the thinker who does not know the consequences of his abstract thoughts, is doomed to painful hesitation.

Thus, beyond the "practical" action within the framework of Space and Time, there is a spiritual action, which appears to be much more god-like in two respects. Agamemnon, who lived a short and dull life, owes his literary immortality to the poet, who died in complete obscurity. Homer's poems continue to touch the hearts of people and excite their imagination, many centuries after the ephemeral Mycenaean Empire collapsed, without having a tangible impact on all subsequent political life; and how many strong and courageous people who lived before Agamemnon turned out to be completely forgotten only because a poet who would immortalize them in his creations did not fall to their time.

However, precisely because the spiritual activity of Human Nature has the divine ability to produce actions over thousands of miles and years, the souls called by God to such spiritual actions tend to procrastinate and hesitate, wasting life time and not seeing the cardinal differences between action and inactivity. . Precisely because the archer's target is out of sight, the archer can put his bow aside without firing an arrow, while a warrior cannot throw his sword away in the course of a duel.

Man does not know Eternity - the Divine Eternal Now - in the final earthly life. Eternity is hardly accessible even to the Collective Humanity, persistently collecting and accumulating from century to century the fruits of the labors and achievements of Science and Technology; for even this human coral-reef would never have existed if each of the innumerable organisms that compose it did not perform its separate individual action within its own short terrestrial path and narrow field of action. In this respect, the collective fruits of Science and Technology do not differ significantly from the gifts of Poetry and Prophecy. Like the latter, they owe their existence to the individual creative acts of individual souls, illumined with meaning and grace, which the Creator sent down to them.

The scientist, as well as the manual worker, is given only one life, and this life, for various reasons, can be very short. At any moment, a person must be ready for death, because no one knows whether it will come in a year, in a month, next week, or maybe even today. When making plans for the future, a person must constantly remember the transience of life. One cannot count on a miracle that will help to accomplish the impossible by pushing the boundaries of Life or Intelligence. It should always be remembered that one of the fundamental laws of Human Nature is the law according to which any undertaking that goes beyond the capabilities of a mortal turns out to be ephemeral. Indeed, the intellectual who is able to draw lessons from his own experience will find that even the most grandiose work of art ever created by the human soul has not completely swallowed up the entire life of the creator.

The limitations that are imposed on the creative possibilities of a person by changes in his destiny, and the short duration of life itself, are only external and negative. The rhythm of the artist's work corresponds to his mental chronometer, the two hands of which are the Intellect and the Subconscious Spring of Spiritual Creativity. Listening to the rhythm of merciless Time, the man of action challenges Death itself.

critical reactions. In examining the inspirations of historians, we have found that the one who is destined to become a historian passes from a passive perception of the reality around him to an active desire to know the facts of history. Moreover, we have found that it is impossible to become a historian, just as impossible to remain one, unless the mental mill is set in motion by a powerful stream of curiosity. We also noticed that if the future historian does not restrain his irrepressible curiosity, he sets off in pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp of omniscience, and this is a false path that leads nowhere.

What is the correct approach? A person who is called to be a historian must learn to curb his curiosity. His interest in facts is manifested and satisfied not for the sake of this interest itself, but ultimately for the sake of creativity. The historian must be inspired by the desire not only to know the facts, but to comprehend their meaning. The highest meaning of the creative search is the search for God acting in history, and the first blind step on this pilgrimage path is the desire to understand how the facts of History are interconnected. The first mental movement of the historian who investigates the relationship between facts is a critical reaction to apparent contradictions, and the second is a creative response to challenging phenomena.

In studying the awakening of the critical faculty in the historian's mind, the author is forced to turn to his own experience, for he does not have any other first-hand evidence.

So, in March 1897, not quite eight years old, he, being at a party, loudly expressed his distrust when he heard one of the adults praise the charms of the transatlantic voyage that had just been completed. This statement clearly contradicted what the boy heard from his great-uncle Harry, who was, undoubtedly, a more significant authority, given that he was not just a passenger, but the captain of the ship. The child had heard plenty of the old man's stories about moldy ship biscuits eaten away by the weevil, about open warfare with ship rats, and how corned beef steaks and pudding were only good for rat bait. Therefore, the story of very good food seemed to the boy an obvious exaggeration on the part of the passenger. True, Captain Toynbee retired in 1866, and he sailed on ships of a completely different class. Therefore, after explanations given not without humor to a critically minded child, the distrust that flashed in the child’s mind dissipated and for the first time the child felt that human relations do not stand still and this movement can be so fast that dramatic changes can occur within one human life. .

The next contradiction, which arose in the childish mind of the author, occurred when he took his first steps in the knowledge of history. It happened at the end of the ninth year of his life. Having read by that time four volumes of the "History of Nations" by Z. A. Ragozina, which described the history of how the Iranian-speaking peoples came to the forefront of world history in the period between the fall of the Assyrian Empire and the clash of the Achaemenid Empire with the Hellenes, he delved with interest into the previous and subsequent chapters of Iranian history. Aunt Elsie Marshall had just given her nephew a copy of Benjamin called Persia for his birthday. Reading eagerly into this new book, he found that he was moving along paths completely unknown to him. Even now, fifty-three years later, the author of these lines clearly remembers how shocked he was that the facts of Iranian history as presented by Ragozina and Benjamin turned out to be completely incompatible. This first intellectual shock somewhat debunked in the eyes of the young historian the previously indisputable authorities who so easily discredited themselves by contradicting each other. This sad discovery became for him the painful beginning of historical wisdom, for he realized that one should never blindly trust "authority" as if he were the infallible oracle of the gospel truth.

A year or so later, I suffered another shock when I came across a map that hung in the largest classroom at Waton Court Preparatory School, near Canterbury, where I was sent at the age of eleven. From the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, I had by then well learned that humanity is a single family, and history is a single sequence of events. However, quite unexpectedly, the map displayed in the classroom presented me with a problem that I had not thought about before.

Looking at the map, I was first of all struck by the accuracy of the date: 4004 BC, which was listed as the year of Creation (this date of Creation was, of course, the product of Archbishop Usher). Peering into this huge map, which ended at some event of the 19th century, I noted for myself among the many different colors representing the histories of various peoples and states, one fairly wide area, which was called "China". From whom did the Chinese originate - from Shem, Ham or Japhet? For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask this question before. However, now that there was a map in front of my eyes, I suddenly wanted to trace how China is connected with the three sons of Noah, and try to link the Chinese with Adam and Eve. This process seemed pretty simple at first. However, the hairs on the young explorer's head stood on end when his gaze, which had begun its journey across the map from a three thousand year old Chinese dragon, suddenly stopped, not finding any connection with Japhet, Ham or Shem. It turned out that four hundred million Chinese people were born spontaneously, literally from nowhere.

And then it became clear to the young researcher that either the cartographers had committed criminal negligence, or the fact was that it was simply impossible to trace the result of the fertility of Noah and his sons (Gen. 9, 1 and 7) in all the diversity of mankind that populated the Earth. This astonishing discovery led the future historian to question for the first time whether the family tree is the true diagram that accurately reflects the history of the progressive division of the human family.

As this doubt grew stronger, the author began to try alternative classification systems that could embrace all living and extinct branches of humanity and at the same time establish the degree of difference and common ground between them. Did the key to this historical riddle lie in physical nature? Or was it to be found in the language? Ever since the author of these lines was shocked by the absurdities of the school map, his mind has worked tirelessly on these questions, discarding one argument after another. And it must be said that it took ten or twelve years to come to the conclusion that the linguistic and racial approaches to the problem are as unsatisfactory as the genealogical approach, rejected in youth. Returning again and again to the problem that puzzled him in his youth, the author drew various schemes three times, trying to find the right path. The result of these works was the present study, in which the author, as it seems to him, comes to a positive solution to the problem. His final conclusion is that what is most essential in human relations is not Race or Language, but secular and religious Culture.

I recall another vivid contradiction that struck my mind in my youth. This was during the First World War. I once wandered around the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. My gaze fell on the bust of a girl, made of majolica in a modern Western style. I was not surprised that the sculpture was from Italy, but it was a complete surprise that this work, so modern, turned out to be made in the 14th century. Before me was material evidence that Italy of the XIV century. in some ways has already reached the level of the modern era, while Western Christianity as a whole, with the exception, perhaps. Flanders, did not show such success until the end of the 15th century, and perhaps even until the beginning of the 16th century. Thus, Italy, as it were, overtook the rest of Western Christianity by about two centuries. This example shows that within the same society different "sectors" are quite possible, historically having different rates of development. Chronologically being contemporaries, in fact, people can belong to different cultural eras.

These thoughts, inspired by Italian sculpture of the 14th century, did not leave the author for a long time and visited him again, confirming their truth when, thirty years later, at the end of the Second World War, he again visited this museum to see the exposition of works of art from the English Chapel King Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. This time I was even more struck by the cultural gulf that separated medieval western England from the rebellious heirs of Hellas. This chain of observations, which confirmed the existence of a cultural discrepancy between Northern and Central Italy in the late Middle Ages, prompted the author to comprehend the special historical role of the creative minority.

A correct comprehension of History can also be facilitated by a critical look at contradictions that are not proven, but are suspected. And now, in September 1952, the author of these lines has not forgotten that March day, 1899, when his mother read aloud to him the book "Chaldeans" by Z. A. Ragozina. Assyriologists and Egyptologists of the last century were strongly impressed by the real duration of human history compared to the relative brevity of the biblical chronological version, so the antiquity of the "Chaldean" (that is, Sumerian) civilization was the main theme of Ragozin's work. The talented writer justified her thesis with two chronological statements of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669-626 BC) and the Neo-Babylonian emperor Nabonidus (556-539 BC), which were open by that time, without asking questions whether the advisers of these sovereigns had reliable information and whether you can rely on their data. Ashurbanipal's document stated that the statue of the goddess Nana (that is, Inanna - the original Sumerian name of the goddess, whose Akkadian name was Ishtar), which Ashurbanipal returned to Uruk (Erek) from Susa in 635 BC, 1635 years stayed in Elamite captivity. Ragozina comes to a simple conclusion: "If we add 645 to 1635, we get 2280 - an indisputable date": and although she also insists on the date of 3750 BC. as in the time of the prosperity of the king of Akkad, Naramsin, confirming it with the assertion of Nabonidus that Naramsin ruled 3200 years before him, she insures here the "possibility of a mistake by the engraver" who compiled the inscription, but does not take into account the possibility that the emperor-archaeologist himself could name this date at random .

Ragozina's categorical statement that Nabonidus and Ashurbaiipal knew what they were talking about, of course, could not be taken critically by a diligently attentive child, but he was immediately interested in how these Assyrian and Babylonian "years" correlate with the years by which we now measure our lives. Perhaps this question arose in his mind due to some echo of the fundamentalist disputes that took place in Western Christianity in the 19th century. . In these disputes, an attempt was made to save biblical chronology by the assumption that the years of life, generously given in the hundreds to the forefathers in the Bible, should be read not as "years", but as "months". Perhaps, if I had grown up in the countryside, the thought would never have occurred to me that a certain arbitrariness in various variants of counting the year is permissible, since for the farmer the length of the year is not set by human will, but by the seasonal cycle. However, the child grew up in the city and was deaf to the rhythms of Nature, impassively performing her cycle in the endless alternation of spring flowering and autumn withering. In its urbanized world, "years" were perceived simply as segments of Time, just as artificially and arbitrarily allocated by people, as well as everything that people could invent, create or agree on, based on their will and at will.

However, before laughing at my childish ignorance, I discovered that the question was much smarter than it might have seemed. The calendar of Babylonian origin, accessible to the mind of an English boy of the early 20th century, was built on the solar cycle. Over the centuries, this calendar has been corrected several times in order to more accurately combine with the solar cycle. At the same time, the lunar cycle remained unchanged, only the length of the months was arbitrarily changed in order to fit the months into the framework of a single year. An English boy discovered that the method of calendaring used by Christians was not accepted throughout the world. Muslims, for example, used a calendar that was based not on the solar but on the lunar cycle, so the nominal "year" of the lunar months, ignoring the seasonal alternation and starting the Muslim era from the Hijra, allows itself to seem to slide on the dial of the Christian-Babylonian sundial.

However, until 1950, when the author of these lines began to take notes on chronology, he could not fully understand for himself the significance that the Islamic lunar calendar has for the correct solution of the question of the length of the Sumerian year, a question that first agitated him more than fifty solar years ago. And then one day in the autumn of 1950 of the solar year, I came across Poebel's articles about the recent finds of Assyrian king lists in Khorsabad. I must say that I was amazed at the inventiveness of contemporary Assyrologists. Then I read a work by Sidney Smith in which he criticized Pöbel's reconstruction of Assyrian chronology, and was quite surprised to find that a well-known modern archaeologist was essentially repeating the question that a child once puzzled his mother: how can one be sure that " years," with which the Assyrian chronologists measured time, marking a series of events, were really solar years, and not some other?

The highly hypothetical correspondence that Pöbel used as a matter of course in his reconstruction of the Assyrian chronology by studying the newly discovered king list in combination with other documents has been convincingly challenged by an eminent opponent. In Assyria, according to Sidney Smith, the Babylonian solar calendar, which approximated the true solar year, was not adopted for official use until the reign of Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 BC). "For a long time," writes Smith, "this calendar was considered equivalent to the Julian... But the Assyrian calendar originally used has significant deviations from the Babylonian, and an accurate translation of the Assyrian years into Julian is simply impossible." Sidney Smith believes that the calendar, which was abolished in Assyria in 1114 B.C. in favor of the Babylonian solar calendar of that time, was lunar, that is, it had the same basis as the calendar that 1736 years later was still in use in a remote and backward Arabian oasis and which then, by chance, preserved in its desert citadel, became the official calendar a new universal church founded by a prophet from Mecca.

Creative answers. If the observation or even the unconfirmed conjecture that historical facts contradict each other can inspire the human mind to intellectual efforts in an attempt to solve the question that has arisen and establish the truth, then all the more can we expect that the mind, prompted to action by intuition that has grasped the connection between historical facts, will come to a certain positive decision.

A traditional historical riddle capable of awakening the imagination and thought of a historian is the presence of identical cultural elements at widely spaced points in Space and Time. It can be the same clothes, and the same words, and even the same hairstyles. Similarity, often approaching identity, can hardly be a coincidence. Rather, it depends on an unbroken chain of historical tradition and geographical diffusion, which is quite amenable to reconstruction and decipherment.

How, for example, did it happen that on a bronze medal made in 1439 by the Italian master Vittoro Pisano (Pisanello) for the Eastern Roman emperor John VII Palaiologos (1425-1448), and on a fresco painted on the western wall of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo where somewhere between 1452 and 1466. Piero della Francesco, on which the same John VII is represented in the image of Constantine the Great, this last representative of the Byzantine imperial throne is depicted in a hairstyle that, like two drops of water, reproduces the double ancient Egyptian crown, which has become one of the symbols the power of the pharaoh after the unification in 3100 BC. Upper and Lower Egypt? How this complex headdress, which is very strange for anyone who is not familiar with this episode of Egyptian history, appeared four and a half millennia later, and not on the banks of the Nile, where it was invented, but on the banks of the Bosphorus, and even a thousand years after How did the last remnants of the living Egyptian tradition disappear? The historian in search of an answer to this question will no doubt recall that the pre-Christian Roman emperors claimed the right to be considered the legitimate successors of the Egyptian pharaohs. However, it would be too fanciful to suggest that the Roman incarnations of the Egyptian pharaohs were indeed decorated with ancient Egyptian paraphernalia, including the symbolic double crown, and that, despite the subsequent disappearance of Egyptian culture and the conquest of Egypt itself and the Roman Empire by Muslim hordes, these ancient Egyptian regalia were transferred from the Old Rome to the New, where they were preserved as signs of the Eastern Roman ghost until the arrival of the last of the Palaiologos, who revived them in their hair, perhaps without realizing either their origin or their meaning.

It is also interesting to see how the historical clothes of the Scythians and Dacians reappear in the mythical clothes of the gnomes, the heroes of Western folklore. The gnomes themselves, of course, appeared as a subconscious reaction of the psyche to the challenge of a new experience in mining metal ores from the bowels of the Earth, an experience that required reflection and internal acceptance, because this occupation was not quite natural for a person. The costume in which human fantasy dressed the gnomes, settling them in a magical land, certainly had to correspond to some real costume of a living people, whom the pioneers of medieval Western Christianity met in their advance to the east. If you speculate about the possible habitat of this forgotten tribe, whose clothes turned out to be immortalized in the outfits of immortal gnomes, the imagination draws a horde of nomadic shepherds who, having violated the boundaries of their traditional pastures, entered the Dniester valley and the forests of Galicia. Further, it is easy to imagine how these pastoralists, finding themselves in an unaccustomed physical environment, were forced to change both their lifestyle and occupation, turning to the extraction of ore. The historical prototypes of fictional dwarfs thus lived somewhere in the Carpathian region and represented a mining community whose nomadic origin was betrayed by the traditional clothes of their distant ancestors. Aggressive Germanic tribes came here in search of minerals and it was in this form that they found the former nomads who became miners.

The desire to find the roots of connections between historical facts, of course, is also caused by facts of a different kind. In the field of language, for example, the question arises why in the lexicon of the English middle class of the late 19th century. the name of the Sumerian goddess appears - Inanna. The story of the transfer of Inanna from the Sumerian pantheon to English use is remarkable in that this name has survived, despite the vast Space and Time, although it has lost the first sound. In Victorian life, when a nurse meant more to a child than even his own mother, it was quite natural that the child named the most powerful female figure of his miniature home world after the unforgettable mother goddess.

The motive prompting to connect with each other far apart, but equivalent concepts or ideas, sometimes goes back not to the desire to restore the broken link in the chain, but to the desire to reach its origins. For example, who were the ancestors of the Etruscans? Who is the descendant of the lost ten tribes of Israel? There are almost no peoples that would not be suspected by the Hellenic or modern Western antiquities seeker of being the ancestors of the Etruscans; and even fewer peoples from the Islamic and Christian regions, in which modern scholars would not seek out a relationship with the Lost Ten Tribes.

The fancifulness of such statements should serve as a warning that potentially creative intellectual impulses can give rise to serious errors and misunderstandings; and the prudent mature historian, of course, values ​​his time and energy too much to deal with problems that are obviously insoluble, even if they once captured his imagination, perhaps as a child. However, there are at least two reasons why, in trying to solve these eternal mysteries of History, we see something more than an empty pastime. First of all, they can shed light on general historical questions. Plutarch's questions about the history of clothing reveal the startlingly interesting truth that the conductivity of the social fabric of human life is exceptionally high in two social settings of a special kind: the "universal state" and the nomadic shepherd society. Our reflections on some words of the everyday English vocabulary reveal the truth that the energy radiated by the elements of culture is exceptionally high if these elements go back to the names of deities. Such guiding lights on the landscape of world history justify the intellectual effort expended in investigating connections between facts that at first sight may seem trivial; but the main justification for this childlike intellectual quest lies within itself, for the task set by Virgil to "know the causes of things" never leaves the heart of the true historian.

Arnold Toynbee

Comprehension of history

Introduction

Relativity of historical thinking

In every era and in every society, the study and knowledge of history, like any other social activity, is subject to the prevailing trends of a given time and place. At the moment, two institutions define the life of the Western world: the industrial system of the economy and the equally complex and intricate political system, which we call "democracy", referring to the responsible parliamentary representative government of the sovereign nation-state. These two institutions - economic and political - became dominant in the Western world at the end of the last century and provided, albeit temporary, but still a solution to the main problems of that period. The last century sought and found salvation by bequeathing its findings to us. And the fact that the institutions developed in the last century are preserved to this day speaks primarily of the creative power of our predecessors. We live and reproduce our being in an industrial system and a parliamentary nation-state, and it is only natural that these two institutions have significant power over our imagination and its real fruits.

The humanitarian aspect of the industrial system is directly related to man, the division of labor: its other aspect is addressed to the physical environment of man. The task of the industrial system is to maximize its productive capacity by processing raw materials into certain products by man-made means and involving a large number of people in this mechanically organized labor. This feature of the industrial system was recognized by Western thought in the first half of the last century. Since the development of the industrial system is based on the successes of the physical sciences, it is natural to assume that there was some kind of “pre-established harmony” between industry and science.

If this is so, then one should not be surprised that scientific thinking began to be organized in an industrial way. In any case, this is quite legitimate for science at its early stages - and modern science is very young even in comparison with Western society - since for discursive thinking it is necessary first to accumulate enough empirical data. However, the same method has recently found distribution in many areas of knowledge and outside a purely scientific environment - in thinking that is turned to Life, and not to inanimate nature, and, moreover, even in thinking that studies various forms of human activity. Historical thinking has also been captured by an alien industrial system, and it is in this area where relations between people are studied that the modern Western industrial system shows that it is hardly the regime in which one would like to live and work.

The example of the life and work of Theodor Mommsen is indicative here. The young Mommsen created a voluminous work, which, of course, will forever remain a masterpiece of Western historical literature. His "History of the Roman Republic" was published in 1854-1856. But as soon as the book saw the light, the author began to be ashamed of his work and tried to direct his energy in a completely different direction. Mommsen spent the rest of his life compiling a complete collection of Latin inscriptions and publishing an encyclopedic collection of Roman constitutional law. In this, Mommsen showed himself to be a typical Western historian of his generation, a generation that was ready to transform itself into "intellectual workers" for the sake of the prestige of the industrial system. From the time of Mommsen and Ranke, historians began to spend most of their efforts collecting the raw material of inscriptions, documents, etc., and publishing them in the form of anthologies or private notes for periodicals. When processing the collected materials, scientists often resorted to the division of labor. As a result, extensive studies appeared, which were published in a series of volumes, which is still practiced by the University of Cambridge. Such series are monuments to human industriousness, “factuality” and organizational power of our society. They will take their place along with amazing tunnels, bridges and dams, liners, cruisers and skyscrapers, and their creators will be remembered among the famous engineers of the West. Conquering the realm of historical thought, the industrial system produced outstanding strategists and, having won, obtained considerable trophies. However, a thoughtful observer has the right to doubt the scale of what has been achieved, and the victory itself may seem like a delusion born from a false analogy.

It is not uncommon in our time to encounter history teachers who define their seminars as "laboratories" and, perhaps without realizing it, decisively limit the concept of "original research" to the discovery or verification of some facts not previously established. Moreover, this concept began to spread to reviews of historical articles published in periodicals and collections. There is a clear tendency to underestimate historical works written by one person, and this underestimation is especially noticeable when it comes to works on general history. For example, H. G. Wells' Outline of History was received with undisguised hostility by a number of specialists. They mercilessly criticized all the inaccuracies made by the author, his conscious departure from factology. It is unlikely that they were able to understand that, by recreating the history of mankind in their imagination, H. Wells achieved something inaccessible to them, which they did not even dare to think about. In fact, the significance of G. Wells' book was more or less fully appreciated by the general reading public, but not by a narrow group of specialists of that time.

The industrialization of historical thinking has gone so far that in some of its manifestations it has begun to reach pathological forms of hypertrophy of the industrial spirit. It is widely known that those individuals and collectives whose efforts are entirely focused on the transformation of raw materials into light, heat, motion and various commodities tend to think that the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is an activity that is valuable in itself, no matter how valuable for mankind the results of these processes. For Europeans, this mindset characterizes a certain type of American businessman, but this type is, in fact, the extreme expression of a trend that is inherent in the entire Western world. Modern European historians try not to notice that at present this disease, which is the result of a violation of proportions, is also inherent in their consciousness.

ELECTRONIC TABLE OF CONTENTS

Death is the price paid by life
to increase the complexity of the structure of a living organism.

Arnold Toynbee, ";Life After Death";

A. J. Toynbee

"Comprehension of history";

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Introduction

RELATIVITY OF HISTORICAL THINKING

In every era and in every society, the study and knowledge of history, like any other social activity, is subject to the prevailing trends of a given time and place. At the moment, two institutions define the life of the Western world: the industrial system of the economy and the equally complex and intricate political system, which we call "democracy", referring to the responsible parliamentary representative government of a sovereign nation-state. These two institutions - economic and political - became dominant in the Western world at the end of the last century and provided, albeit temporary, but still a solution to the main problems of that period. The last century sought and found salvation by bequeathing its findings to us. And the fact that the institutions developed in the last century are preserved to this day speaks primarily of the creative power of our predecessors. We live and reproduce our being in an industrial system and a parliamentary nation-state, and it is only natural that these two institutions have significant power over our imagination and its real fruits.

The humanitarian aspect of the industrial system is directly related to man, the division of labor: its other aspect is addressed to the physical environment of man. The task of the industrial system is to maximize its productive capacity by processing raw materials into certain products by man-made means and involving a large number of people in this mechanically organized labor. This feature of the industrial system was recognized by Western thought in the first half of the last century. Since the development of the industrial system is based on the successes of the physical sciences, it is quite natural to assume that there was some ";pre-established harmony" between industry and science; [+1] .

If this is so, then one should not be surprised that scientific thinking began to be organized in an industrial way. In any case, this is quite legitimate for science at its early stages - and modern science is very young even in comparison with Western society - since for discursive thinking it is necessary first to accumulate enough empirical data. However, the same method has recently found distribution in many areas of knowledge and outside a purely scientific environment - in thinking that is turned to Life, and not to inanimate nature, and, moreover, even in thinking that studies various forms of human activity. Historical thinking has also been captured by an alien industrial system, and it is in this area where relations between people are studied that the modern Western industrial system shows that it is hardly the regime in which one would like to live and work.

The example of the life and work of Theodor Mommsen is indicative here. The young Mommsen created a voluminous work, which, of course, will forever remain a masterpiece of Western historical literature. His "History of the Roman Republic"; was published in 1854-1856. But as soon as the book saw the light, the author began to be ashamed of his work and tried to direct his energy in a completely different direction. Mommsen spent the rest of his life compiling a complete collection of Latin inscriptions and publishing an encyclopedic collection of Roman constitutional law. In this, Mommsen showed himself to be a typical Western historian of his generation, a generation that, for the sake of the prestige of the industrial system, was ready to transform itself into "intellectual workers"; From the time of Mommsen and Ranke, historians began to spend most of their efforts collecting the raw material of inscriptions, documents, etc., and publishing them in the form of anthologies or private notes for periodicals. When processing the collected materials, scientists often resorted to the division of labor. As a result, extensive studies appeared, which were published in a series of volumes, which is still practiced by the University of Cambridge. Such series are monuments to human diligence, ";factual"; and organizational power of our society. They will take their place along with amazing tunnels, bridges and dams, liners, cruisers and skyscrapers, and their creators will be remembered among the famous engineers of the West. Conquering the realm of historical thought, the industrial system produced outstanding strategists and, having won, obtained considerable trophies. However, a thoughtful observer has the right to doubt the scale of what has been achieved, and the victory itself may seem like a delusion born from a false analogy.

Nowadays, it is not uncommon to meet history teachers who define their seminars as ";laboratories"; and, perhaps unknowingly, drastically limit the concept of "original research"; discovery or verification of any facts not previously established. Moreover, this concept began to spread to reviews of historical articles published in periodicals and collections. There is a clear tendency to underestimate historical works written by one person, and this underestimation is especially noticeable when it comes to works on general history. For example, ";Outline of history"; HG Wells was received with undisguised hostility by a number of specialists. They mercilessly criticized all the inaccuracies made by the author, his conscious departure from factology. It is unlikely that they were able to understand that, by recreating the history of mankind in their imagination, H. Wells achieved something inaccessible to them, which they did not even dare to think about. In fact, the significance of G. Wells' book was more or less fully appreciated by the general reading public, but not by a narrow group of specialists of that time.

The industrialization of historical thinking has gone so far that in some of its manifestations it has begun to reach pathological forms of hypertrophy of the industrial spirit. It is widely known that those individuals and collectives whose efforts are wholly focused on the transformation of raw materials into light, heat, motion and various commodities tend to think that the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is an activity that is valuable in itself, no matter how valuable for mankind the results of these processes. For Europeans, this mindset characterizes a certain type of American businessman, but this type is, in fact, the extreme expression of a trend that is inherent in the entire Western world. Modern European historians try not to notice that at present this disease, which is the result of a violation of proportions, is also inherent in their consciousness.

This readiness of the potter to become the slave of his clay is such an obvious aberration that, in looking for an appropriate corrective for it, one need not resort to the fashionable comparison of the process of historical research with the processes of industrial production. In the end, in industry, too, the obsession with the raw material base is ineffectual. A successful industrialist is a person who first foresees the economic demand for a particular product or service and, in connection with this, begins to intensively process raw materials using labor power. Moreover, neither raw materials nor labor in themselves are of any interest to him. In other words, he is the master, not the slave, of natural resources; he is the captain of an industrial ship, paving the way for the future.

It is known that treating people or animals as inanimate objects can have disastrous consequences. Why should it not be assumed that such a course of action is no less mistaken in the world of ideas? Why should we think that the scientific method, created for the analysis of inanimate nature, can be transferred to historical thinking, which involves the study of people and their activities? When a professor of history calls his seminar "laboratory", is he not shutting himself off from his natural environment? Both names are metaphors, but each of them is appropriate only in its own field. The historian's seminar is a nursery where the living learn to speak a living word about the living. The physicist's laboratory is - or was so until a certain time - a workshop in which artificial or semi-artificial objects are made from inanimate natural raw materials. No practitioner, however, will agree to organize a nursery on the principles of a factory, as well as a factory on the basis of a nursery. In the world of ideas, scientists must also avoid the misuse of method. We know well enough and we always remember the so-called "pathetic delusion"; [+2] that inspires and gives life to inanimate objects. Now, however, we are more likely to fall prey to the opposite, the "apathetic delusion", according to which living beings are treated as if they were inanimate objects.

If the industrial system were the only institution defining the life of the modern West, the influence of its prestige on Western historical thinking might collapse under its own weight, for its methods can be applied to historical research only in extreme cases of a necessary division of labor. In industry, mankind has recognized the division of labor as the price of the well-being it brings. A similar opinion has spread in the field of natural science. Perhaps one should agree with A. Bergson, who argued that our intellect has the ability to grasp individual manifestations of physical nature in forms suitable for the subsequent implementation of actions. However, even if this is the original structure of the human mind and if other methods of thinking seem unnatural to us, there is still a human ability, which A. Bergson also drew attention to, to look at the world not as an inanimate nature, but as a whole, with a keen sense of the presence or absence of life in it [*1] . This deep urge to embrace and understand the totality of Life is immanent in the thinking of historians, so the division of labor characteristic of the industrial system acted so irritatingly that they would have rebelled against its tyranny, if not for the existence in modern Western life of a second dominant institution, which turned out to be in a state of to combine the integrity of the view of history with the industrialization of historical thinking. Such a second institution turned out to be the ";sovereign state", which in our ";democratic"; century is inspired by the spirit of national unity. And again, we must note that the institution that dominates at a certain time and in a certain society influences the worldview and activities of historians who find themselves under its shadow. The spirit of a nation is the leaven for young wine in the shabby skins of tribalism [+3] . The ideal of modern Western democracy is to imbue practical politics with a Christian sense of universal brotherhood, but in reality politics has proven to be warlike and filled with tribal strife. Modern Western democratic ideal. thus amounts to trying to reconcile two spirits and two forces that are almost in complete opposition to each other.

Industrialism and nationalism (more than industrialism and democracy) are the two forces that actually dominated Western society for a century (until about 1875). The Industrial Revolution and the current form of nationalism then worked together to create "great empires" each claiming universal coverage, becoming, as it were, a cosmos in itself.

Of course, this claim was unjustified. Already the simple fact that the "great powers"; was more than one, testifies to the inability of any of them to become completely universal. However, each great power successfully exerted a permanent influence on the life of society, so that in a sense it could consider itself as the axis around which the whole world revolves: and each great power also hoped to replace the whole world with itself, since it was closed and self-sufficient. These claims extended not only to the field of economics and politics, but also to the field of spiritual culture. This way of thinking, characteristic of the populations of the great powers, gradually spread to representatives of countries of a smaller caliber, and soon all Western nations - from the largest to the smallest - asserted the sovereign right to organize their own lives and be independent from the rest of the world. This demand was put forward so insistently and accepted so widely that the very existence and unity of the Western world was called into question. There was a deep inner need to feel Life as an integrity, opposite to the visible daily variability. This feeling permeated both the small nations and the communities that these nations were part of. Such concentrations of social emotions in national groups became almost universal, and historians were no more immune to them than the rest of the people. Indeed, the spirit of the national appealed to historians with particular force, since it promised in some way to reconcile the industrial division of labor with an internal desire for integrity. To oppose oneself to "universal history", which is created on industrial principles, is an impossible task even for the most gifted, most energetic individual. That is why, in search of a unity of view, the historian came to the rejection of universality, because the narrowing of the scientific research goal inevitably sheds new light on any historical landscape. When, in his search, he regained unity and in this sense achieved a certain universality, the problem of reconciling his intellect with his social feeling could arise, but this internal contradiction was supposed to be removed by the spirit of the national.

In this scheme of reasoning, the nationalist point of view is most attractive to modern Western historians, and it has taken hold of their minds in various ways. They accepted it not only because they were brought up in the spirit of these ideas from childhood. but also because the source material was a kind of stable national given. The richest ";deposits"; which they had to develop were the archives of Western governments open to the public. The inexhaustibility of this specific natural source led to a rare increase in the volume of their production. Thus, the orientation of the activity of historians was partly determined by their professional experience, partly by problems of a psychological nature, and partly by the so-called spirit of the times.

Western society today by no means occupies the dominant position that characterized the situation of the last century, the century that molded the minds of modern historians. Until about 1875, the two then dominant institutions, industrialism and nationalism, worked together to create great powers. After 1875, the reverse process began: the industrial system began to sharply increase its activity, so that the scope of its activities acquired a global character, while the system of nationalism began to penetrate deep into the consciousness of national minorities, prompting them to create their own sovereign nation-states, although those contrary to the projects of their leaders, at times they were not only not able to take shape as great powers, but were also unable to form even small economically, politically and culturally independent states.

World War 1914-1918 brought to the surface a trend that had been latently maturing for at least a century. By 1918, one of the eight great powers that existed in 1914 had completely disappeared from the political map, the other two, crippled, were in a state of prostration, and one of the more or less safely surviving ones began to vigorously rebuild in search of "self-government dominions"; [+4] . The general outcome of these partly revolutionary and partly evolutionary changes is the same. The world stage was taken over by the great powers, each of which was a closed universe. A characteristic feature of the societies of the new century is the interdependence of small states. Some of them (for example, the dominions of the British metropolis) are not completely independent units, others (for example, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary) lack a sea coast, and still others lack a pronounced or truly original national culture. In addition, in this new world, even the great powers began to appear smaller and industrialism, which entered the world stage, began to slow down their economic development. All states are equally beginning to realize that they cannot survive economically on their own, and either sharply protest against military, financial, tariff, migration policies, or turn for help to the technical international organizations that were created around the secretariat of the League of Nations and the International Labor Office in Geneva.

These various tendencies can be summed up in one formula: in our century, the main thing in the consciousness of society is the understanding of oneself as part of a wider universe, while a feature of the social self-consciousness of the last century was the claim to consider oneself, one's society as a closed universe. This change unmistakably marks the end of the tide, which culminated in 1875, and the beginning of the ebb, which will continue for four centuries, if it heralds a repetition of the previous, so-called medieval, phase in Western history, when the consciousness of Western society was under under the auspices of the pope and the Holy Roman Empire, which symbolized something dominant and central, while kingdoms, municipal cities and fiefs, as well as other local institutions. perceived as something subordinate and marginal [+5] . Be that as it may, the tide seems to be ebbing in this direction - it is difficult to be certain here, because too little time has elapsed since the turn was made.

J. Major (1980-1990s) No. 5 Kudryavtsev...