Скачать или смотреть UUFR The Church and The Crown with Tom Parrish

Civilizations may be most easily described by cultural attributes, but of all the objective elements that define a civilization, religion may be the most important. Samuel Huntington, the Harvard historian, however, breaks Christianity into two Civilizations: The West and the Orthodox.

So, is it religion in this case, or is it institutions? In the case of the West, it is the complex dependency, enmity, conflict, and cooperation between the Church and the Crown that nurtured the ecclesiastical and political institutions, which nurtured the growth of the West. There are, of course, a host of conditions that contributed to the rise of the West, not the least of which is geography.

The success of any culture, however, ultimately rests on the strength, resilience, and adaptability of its institutions: political, economic, and religious. How did the mutual dependency and the competition for primacy of the Catholic Church and the nascent European political order in the 7th through the 9th Centuries lay the institutional foundations for the spectacular rise of the West beginning in the 17th century? And how did that era plant the seeds of conflict between the secular and religious institutions that would define and refine that relationship?

 

Tom Parrish is a retired Marine and an amateur historian and internationalist. He has a BA from Randolph-Macon College and an MA in International Relations from USC. He has studied at the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs and King's College in London, the London School of Economics, and a post-master's study of Public Administration at Virginia Tech. He has a special interest in understanding the reasons for the rise of European global hegemony beginning in the 17th Century.