THE AGE OF HUMANISM (1453-1658)

THE AGE OF HUMANISM (1453-1658)This book represents the third volume in my series, An Essay in Universal History. The first volume, The Age of Faith, ended with the Seventh Ecumenical Councils in 787. The second volume, The Age of Papism, ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This third volume ends with the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. It is called The Age of Humanism because, while most men continued to believe in God and Christianity, the focus of their efforts was

This book represents the third volume in my series, An Essay in Universal History. The first volume, The Age of Faith, ended with the Seventh Ecumenical Councils in 787. The second volume, The Age of Papism, ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This third volume ends with the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. It is called The Age of Humanism because, while most men continued to believe in God and Christianity, the focus of their efforts was not God, but man. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought to an end the medieval world, which was mainly characterized, on the one hand, by the Christian Faith in its traditional, Orthodox form, and on the other, by monarchical modes of political government that continued to draw inspiration and legitimacy from the Church. In the modern world that was about to begin, both Christianity and monarchism would be on the retreat Ð although the retreat was accompanied by some notable and prolonged counter-attacks. After 1453, the Orthodox religio-political outlook and civilization that we have called Orthodox Christian Romanity, whose political aspect was Autocracy and its religious aspect - Orthodoxy, largely disappeared from its Mediterranean homeland and as it were bifurcated: while its religious centre remained in Constantinople, in the Ecumenical Patriarchate, its political centre moved north, to Moscow, Òthe Third RomeÓ. In Moscow, in what most Europeans considered to be a barbaric outpost on the edge of civilization, or even beyond its bounds, Orthodox Christian Romanity was preserved. And so the main theme of this third volume in my history is the struggle between Russia and the waves of new ideas that assaulted it from the West Ð Humanism and Rationalism, and Protestantism and Catholicism...