Part 5 of the Augustine vs Empire series
By Matthew Ehret
I decided to publish this ongoing overview of world history in the form of serialized installments for two reasons:
- In order to showcase what informs my personal moral philosophy, and also:
- to also demonstrate the pathway towards a healthy strategic outlook needed to do long term battle with those forces now seeking to consolidate a very dark, sulfuric agenda onto humanity.
In the first installment of this series, I introduced the figure of Saint Augustine of Hippo and the world that both shaped him, and which he, in turn, shaped. This involved re-living his own studies of the causes of Rome’s moral failure which he outlined in his City of God.
St Augustine’s City of God and the Arc of Universal History
In the second installment, I reviewed the causes of the Carthaginian wars from the vantage point of the ancient mystery cults that had formerly run Babylon for over a thousand years, and which were looking for a new host with the dissolution of their Persian marcher lord.
The Origins of the Roman Empire… the Mystery Cults Migrate to a New Host
In the third installment, I introduced the rise of the Christian movement within the failing structures of Rome, which by the time of Jesus’ murder (and the earlier murder of Cicero), had become a consolidated seat of the parasite.
As Rome Goes Dark, Christianity Emerges onto the Stage of History
In the fourth installment, I reviewed the greatest threats to the new Christian movement which took the form of Gnostic sects- engineered and directed by high priests of Isis, Mithra and Cybele. How did Augustine wage a major epistemological battle against these forces (as well as Pelagian, Donatist, and Manichean) insurgencies was explored in some detail.
Simon the Sorcerer and the Birth of Gnosticism
In this fifth installment, I will begin my evaluation of the followers of Augustine’s method, and vision who took up the torch long after the master had died.
Part 5: Augustine’s Followers Preserve the flame
Although St. Augustine never saw the redemption of society in his lifetime, having died in 430 AD amidst a siege held by the Vandals in the former colony of Hippo, the infusion of Augustine’s Platonic Christian outlook in general and specific strategic policies, provided the basis for several major renaissances in the centuries after his death.
It was a young Augustinian monk named Patrick who successfully launched a major transformation of Ireland into a Christian nation as outlined in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization and it was another Irish Augustinian missionary named Saint Columba who finally returned to mainland Europe after several generations of war, decay and famine had reduced the continent to squalor.
During that dark period, Rome’s population fell from over 1 million in 410 AD to roughly 20,000–30,000 by 590 AD. Infrastructure such as aqueducts, ports and bridges failed, and cities were abandoned, leading to rural migration and a shift from a money-based to a subsistence economy.
Starting in 565 AD, Ireland’s St. Columba led the largest Christianizing movement far outside the clutches of the Holy See’s control in the form of the Hiberno-Scottish mission which used Scotland as a new springboard for a mass organizing campaign across all Europe.
When St. Columba arrived on the mainland in 590 AD there was very little of substance to be found within the highly fragmented world of Europe divided as it had become under warlording micro empires of Ostragoths, Thuringians, Frankish Merovingians, Visigoths, and Vandals. It was a decaying mess of chaos.
The entire domain of the former Western Roman Empire had been ravaged by territorial warlords fighting for terrain in a similar pattern that was experienced by China during the 480 year dark age that came in the wake of the Han Dynasty’s fall in 200 AD.
Just as the rediscovery and application of Confucian principles animated the Tang Dynasty’s revival of the Silk Road and unification of the divided land in 680 AD, so too did the rediscovery of Plato via the Augustinian Christian movement then spread the seeds for the re-unification of Europe under the Frankish King Pepin the short and his son Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th centuries. These followers of Augustine ended the age of Europe’s warring states and established the Carolingian Empire setting the stage for a beautiful renaissance alliance between the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Confucian civilizations of that age.
Among the most celebrated and widely transcribed books in Charlemagne’s court were Augustine’s City of God and On Christian Teaching which were read to Charlemagne extensively by the grand strategist Alcuin of York. Alcuin had himself been trained at the Augustinian center of Clonmacnois in Central Ireland which incubated hundreds of renaissance thinkers during its 950 years of activity[1].
Under Charlemagne, an age of internal improvements were launched the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Alexander the Great.
Besides the canals, roads, schools and new cities, we also see a mass education of children, social welfare reforms, economic reforms and perhaps most importantly, peace treaties and commercial ties with the Abbasid Dynasty of Haroun al Rashid.. It was this northern kingdom that served as a key strategic gateway of the Steppes Silk Road between China and Europe.
The Carolingian Renaissance
Without going into the details of Pepin and Charlemagne’s bold reforms centering on infrastructure (vast roads, bridges over the Rhine, canals, cathedrals and schools), their Irish monastery movement, and financial reforms which saw private financiers lose control as Charlemagne’s government took control of coinage and credit.
Under Alcuin’s leadership, a Christianized version of the seven liberal arts was instituted which guided educational reforms. Those liberal arts revolved around the trivium – Grammar, Dialectic (Logic), and Rhetoric, and quadrivium – Mathematics, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy
Vast expansion of learning to children, and high rewards on classical scholars was standardized.
Historian Dušan Nikolić writes:
“Every diocese and monastery was expected to have its schools establish a curriculum in the Liberal Arts for the children of freemen and nobility alike. A more modest, rudimentary learning program existed for the lower clergy. They were supposed to be able to teach the Symbol, say Mass, give pre-baptismal instruction, and know and teach the Lord’s Prayer.”[2]
Between 550 and 750 AD, only 265 books had been preserved in Western Europe implying a true dark age of cultural rot and collective memory loss. However, by the end of the 9th century, over 7000 Carolingian manuscripts have been preserved due to the care given to Charlemagne’s policy of finding all valuable writings, and transcribing, translating important ancient Greek and Roman works and promoting libraries stretching all across the Carolingian realm.
Nikolić writes:
“The Palace School of Charlemagne and Charles the Bald were the most well-known Carolingian manuscript decoration centers. Other great book illumination centers were in Soissons, Rheims, Metz, Lorsch, and St. Gallen. Within a relatively short time, heavily influenced by the art forms of the Mediterranean cultures, Carolingian renovatio favored a shift to Classical styles. These styles promoted more anthropomorphic, representational, narrative, and message-oriented religious and political art as part of Christianization.”
Additionally, a new architectural revolution also occurred with the a new Carolingian style which fused Roman architectural aesthetics, early Christian designs and Byzantine designs. This new revolution in architecture also blended harmonics with room design in the basilicas and cathedrals while setting the stage for the later ‘Gothic’ movement of the medieval age.
One emblematic cathedral that showcased the Carolingian architecture is the Palatine Chapel in Aachen built between 792-804 AD (see two images below). Throughout the interior of the chapel, arabesque and Celtic motifs were also visible.
Vast cathedral building projects also accompanied the construction of new cities, and beautification programs.
The Abbasid Renaissance
Augustine’s philosophy found parallels in the Islamic philosophy of renaissance polymath Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (870-951).
Al-Farabi was a distinguished astronomer, musician, poet, metaphysician, and advisor to several Muslim courts in the Abassid and Hamdanid Dynasty. Following the methods of Plato, al Farabi authored his own City of God in the form of the treatise Opinions of the People of the Ideal City (or On the Virtuous State) where he laid out what attributes a harmonious society would require if that society would be able to achieve the greatest amount of happiness for each member and peace, prosperity and welfare for the general whole.
It is also worth noting that the Abbasid Dynasty was known rightfully as the “Islamic Golden Age” which ushered in a parallel bureaucratic, monetary, and educational reform under the Confucian principle of the Mandate of Heaven (i.e.: A leader’s right to rule was valid only through his obedience to the laws of nature and the common good).
This was an anti-oligarchical concept of governance shared by Charlemagne and Caliph al Rashid. Under the humanist leadership of Caliph Al Mahdi, his son Harun Al Rashid and grandson al Mamun, networks of humanist education centers were created called “Houses of Wisdom” which brought Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars together to translate ancient works of Greek and Latin, study astronomy, literature, medicine and engineering. Paper mills were established in 832 AD in Samarkand, Cairo, Damas and Baghdad applying Chinese technology to broaden humanity’s access to knowledge.
The Chinese Renaissance
In China, the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) distinguished itself early on as an ecumenical safe haven for all cultures and saw influxes of Muslims, Jews and large groups of Nestorian Christians who all made China their home.
During the 300 years of Tang Rule, the arts rose to new heights, and the poet-statesman became an actualized ideal as the greatest poets and painters (such as Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu) played major roles as political figures. Torture and death penalties were nearly done away with and public schools were built at record numbers. Unfortunately, wars with Arabs, Turks, and Tibetans did occur over the years and many internal struggles occurred from within weakening the Dynasty.
As Europe decayed into superstition and Crusader wars with the Muslim world, the Tang Dynasty’s Silk Road fell into chaos. With no viable trading partners abroad, China’s Song Dynasty focused on securing its culture and economy internally weathering the storm for generations until a more propitious opportunity would emerge centuries later.
This Confucian-Christian-Muslim-Jewish alliance set an example which the oligarchy has been desperate to scrub from humanity’s collective memory for 1300 years.
Peter Abelard
Despite sinking into the hell of inter-civilizational warfare, sparks of life could still be found among various heirs of Plato and St. Augustine during the medieval period.
The great polymath Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is one noteworthy representative of the Augustine tradition who not only fought to expand learning through the Benedictine abbeys, but also fought to resist the degenerate plans for war advocated by his nemesis Bernard de Clairvaux. Clairvaux was a leading strategist for the Crusades and architect of the Charter for the new order of the Knights Templar which played the role of storm troopers killing for Christ in the new age of war.
Peter Abelard
In his intervention onto Crusader bigotry, Abelard wrote a Platonic dialogue named ‘A Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian’ where one of the interlocutors of the dialogue chastises anyone who believes in faith devoid of earned knowledge saying:
“If faith, in effect, precludes all rational dialogue, if it have no merit but at such a price, such that the object of faith escape all critical judgment, and all that is preached we must accept immediately, whatever the errors such preaching spreads, in that case it serves nothing to be a believer; for, where reason may in no manner agree, neither may reason refute. Were an idolater to come to say to us of a rock, of a chunk of wood, or never-mind-what creature: ‘Here is the true God, the creator of Heaven and earth!’ Were he to come to preach to us never-mind-what obvious abomination, who, then will be able to refute it, if all rational discussion is excluded from the domain of faith?”
Sadly, Abelard’s efforts at stopping the madness of the Crusades and sophistry of Clairvaux were defeated when Clairvaux managed to install one of his own Cistercian disciples into the Papacy.
This coup in the Vatican led by Clairvaux ensured not only that Clairvaux’s demands for a new Crusade would receive papal support, but also that Clairvaux’s Templars would be granted sovereign powers to act with impunity outside of all law. This also ensured that Peter Abelard’s voice would be muted, his right to teach and to write would be banned, along with his works which were deemed heretical, and his schools would be shut down.
Dante Alighieri
By the early 14th century, the Augustinian current within Christianity again found its champion in the form of Dante Alighieri who did much to revive St. Augustine’s thesis in his De Monarchia published in 1312 AD.
“All men on whom the Higher Nature has stamped the love of truth should especially concern themselves in laboring for posterity, in order that future generations may be enriched by their efforts, as they themselves were made rich by the efforts of generations past. For that man who is imbued with public teachings, but cares not to contribute something to the public good, is far in arrears of his duty, let him be assured; he is, indeed, not “a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” but rather a destructive whirlpool, always engulfing, and never giving back what it has devoured. Often meditating with myself upon these things, lest I should some day be found guilty of the charge of the buried talent, I desire for the public weal, not only to burgeon, but to bear fruit, and to establish truths unattempted by others.”
Dante’s program for total civilizational reform was premised upon Augustinian principles of teaching, creating a unified language for Italy, which up until that moment was a nation separated by hundreds of various dialects devoid of a national identity. Dante also outlined a program for philosophical growth premised on the outline of exiting Plato’s allegorical cave, with his three stages of human awareness outlined in his Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.
Politically, his concepts of the nation state, and Natural Law would be derived from the tradition of Augustine’s City of God and would go on to inspire both the Renaissance of the 15th century and modern nation state.
Ramon Lull’s Revolutionary Art
A brilliant contemporary of Dante Alighieri was found in a Majorcan knight-turned scholar named Ramon Lull (1232-1316 AD).
Lull’s breakthroughs in formulating a new way of thinking which involved a recovery of the Platonic method and was directly situated in the tradition of St. Augustine and Peter Abelard. Lull not only organized a movement of mass education with a focus on shaping philosopher kings, establishing dozens of academies across Europe teaching dozens of languages, and studying the classics, but like Peter Abelard, also clashed with the Templar Crusader order.
In opposition to the brutalist philosophy of “murdering for Jesus” on Crusade, Lull advocated a new type of Crusade based on dialogue, reason and understanding with Islamic states. Lull believed that through the use of divine reason and the Platonic method as demonstrated in his ‘Art of thinking’ that anyone of any faith could become persuaded to accept the truths embedded withing the allegories of Christian doctrine and moral teachings of Jesus.
Pleading with the pope Boniface VIII (1230-1303) to put a stop to new waves of Crusades then preparing to go on a major Crusade in the 1280s, Lull wrote:
“I see many knights going to the Holy Land in the expectation of conquering it by force of arms; But instead of accomplishing their object, they are in the end all swept off themselves. Therefore, it is my belief that the conquest of the Holy Land should be attempted in no other way than as thou, Christ, and thy apostles understood to accomplish it- by love, by prayer, by tears, and the offering up of our own lives”
Unfortunately for Lull, Pope Boniface VIII was himself managed by a full Templar bodyguard, had given over control of Vatican finances to the Templars to manage and was in favor of a new Crusade to capture the fallen Kingdom of Jerusalem. Investigations carried out amidst the battles between Pope Boniface VIII and the French king in 1802-1804[3], it was revealed that the pope was likely a practicing occultist. The claim is validated by the peculiar fact that the Pope’s personal advisor was none other than Arnaud de Vilanova (1240-1311) who was a leading Genoese alchemist and astrologer who promoted the Eschatology of Cistercian oracle Joaquin of Fiore (predicting the End Times and Coming of the Antichrist in 1260).
Despite being totally wrong on his end times prophecies, followers of Fiore continued to use his rigid eschatology to promote wars with Muslims and Jews for centuries.
During his later years, Ramon Lull became an advisor to King Philip le Bel of France who sponsored a new academy for teaching languages in Paris to prepare scholars in the arts, science and high culture to expand Christian influence abroad. Lull also worked with the King’s advisor Guillaume de Nogaret (the keeper of the seals of France) to organize the ultimate arrest and abolishment of the Order of Knights Templar which, by this time, had gained control over the majority of European banking, finance, ports and shipping routes.
Once the leading Templars were arrested, and proof of witchcraft became known (the Templars were in fact practitioners of a Gnostic Joahinite dark religion that was rooted in the teachings of Simon the Magician during the first century), the Council of Vienna was held in 1311 which officially endorsed Lull’s program for new language schools to begin teaching Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Chaldean at Paris, Rome, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca.
The Brethren of Common Life
Years later, in 1380, the education reformer Gerard Groote created a new organization on Platonic educational principles dubbed ‘The Brotherhood of Common Life’ with a mandate of providing mass education with a classical focus to youth across Europe.
Etching of Gerard Groote
Recently, I hosted Alex Getachew who introduced this most potent educational movement which generated a philosophy and curriculum of teaching that was driven by the Platonic-Augustinian ideal of awakening genius from within the souls of youth. As Alex demonstrated in this lecture, the Brethren of Common Life stood in stark contrast to both the Neo-Platonic mysticism and asphyxiating scholasticism which presumed students to be nothing more than blank slates to be written upon by elites.
In his Profession of Faith, Brethren founder Gerard Groote situates his philosophy with Plato, Socrates and St. Augustine directly writing:
“Of all the sciences of the heathen their moral philosophy is the least to be avoided-for this is often of great use and profit both for one’s own study and for teaching others. Wherefore the wiser amongst them, such as Socrates and Plato, turned all philosophy into consideration of moral questions, and if they spoke of deep matters they dealt therewith as in a figure and lightly, dwelling upon their moral aspect (as thou knowest from the blessed Augustine and thine own study) so that some rule for conduct might always be found side by side with knowledge.”
Alumni of the Brotherhood of Common Life such as Thomas a Kempis, and Nicholas of Cusa would go on to become leading political, scientific and artistic forces shaping the renaissance by the early 15th century.
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa
Augustinian Christian leaders around the polymath Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464 AD) organized a unification of the churches during the 1438 Ecumenical Council of Florence. The success of this effort (albeit short-lived) was based upon the principle of the Filioque which Augustine had championed one thousand years earlier. Cusa also had the collected works of Ramon Lull in his library and used Lull’s Ars Magna and Ars Combinotoria method of analysis as the basis for his own Platonic method promoted in his famous ‘De Docta Ignorantia’ published in 1440.
In the De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance), Cusa outlines various proofs for the Trinity’s necessary existence following the same lines of analysis laid out by Augustine and Plato centuries earlier. Cusa wrote:
“Compared to unity in multiplicity, similarity in diversity, and the harmonic order in the universe, God is the first principle, the absolute unity, equality, and connection, and therewith the one and Triune cause from which all multiplicity and diversity creatively derive.”
In his Concordantia Catholica published in 1433, Cusa extensively outlines the basis for a code of law premised upon the general good, and unalienable rights of every citizen. Cusa proclaimed that this was needed since each human has naturally embedded within them, the divine seed of genius. To water this seed, requires a harmonious mixture of love, opportunity, freedom, boundaries, and the activation of Creative Reason via opportunities to make discoveries of universal principles. Cusa writes:
“Until such time as man reaches life in his own humanity, the true cause of every life; in truth, cause of all that is true and acceptable; and in the Good, cause of all that is good and to which it is right to aspire–he will never reach his aim, he will never have peace.”
Augustine took up the challenge of the City of God writing of the type of paradigm which a society fit to survive would need to accept recognizing that the principle of 1) freedom and 2) love of reason were needed IF a society could be said to have use of their free will and walk in Natural Law. Following that logic Cusa wrote in his Concordantia:
“There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men, so that all authority- which comes from God as does man himself- is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of all the subjects… This is that divinely ordained martial state of spiritual union based on a lasting harmony by which a commonwealth is guided in the fullness of peace toward eternal bliss.”
This would lay the seeds for the later Golden Renaissance and creation of the Modern Nation State in the late 15th century.
Those same renaissance forces would also recognize that the ancient evil that was then concentrated in the powerful City-state empire of Venice would need to be destroyed for the human species to properly actualize a culture of beauty and love of wisdom.
This recognition would set the stage for the organization of the League of Cambrei of 1509 which will be unpacked in the next installment.
[1] This center of learning doubled as a Celtic monastery and sort of Platonic academy from the moment it was founded in 544 AD by Saint Ciarán. It served as an incubator of scholars who went on to advise courts and governments across Europe as well as artisans, scientists, and architects who would find patronage by the leadership of Charlemagne’s Carolingian empire.
[2] What was the Carolingian Renaissance? Dušan Nikolić Published in ‘The Collector’ April 6, 2023
[3] due to the Pope’s Edict enforcing Vatican power over the sovereignty of France in defense of the Templars and the Crusades
New Release: The Art of Liberty Spring 2026 Edition: Conquering Tyranny and Defeating Tragedy (in Hardcover and paperback)
Cynthia and I are proud to announce the publication of the second Rising Tide Foundation Anthology ‘The Art of Liberty’ with a theme of ‘Conquering Tyranny and Defeating Tragedy’.
Bio: I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I’ve written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also host of the weekly Breaking Free of Psyops on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).
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