A Pious Man Mistranslates a Word and Splits Europe

INTERVIEW: Joseph P Farrell, PhD, Author of God, History, and Dialectic, Sits Down with Kelly Em

Aurelius Augustinus was a Christian bishop, born in Algeria in the year 354. By all accounts, he was a devoted Christian servant and a busy man. He was known for his pragmatism and was highly educated.

If you look up Augustinus in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it describes him as :

“one of the Latin Fathers of the Church and perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Augustine’s adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching created a theological system of great power and lasting influence.”

According to Dr. Farrell’s research, Augustinus did not have the time to fully investigate the Classical Greek words he was using in his writings.

Classical Greek is perhaps the most subtle European language ever devised. A few people who thought in Classical Greek were tabloid scribblers like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Plotinus. The early Gospels were also written in Greek, which was the most prominent intellectual language in the ancient Mediterranean and widely spoken even in Jesus’ day.

If you want to understand what the word was, and why it split Europe, you will need to head up to LuLu.com and purchase the four volume set of Dr. Farrell’s masterwork, God, History, and Dialectic, a detailed study of the role that theology played in the political development of Western Europe, and by extension, how it lost contact with the original understanding of Christianity, still practiced in East Europe and North Asia. In an age of attention deficit, it takes determination to read, but the rewards are endless. You’ll finally understand what factors created the West and why it is circling the bowl. There is no study like it.

Or you can choose the Cliff Notes version here on The Common Surface. If you are the type who likes to listen, here is a link to my recent, long-form interview with Dr. Farrell, where we DEEP dive into the history starting near the end of the Roman Empire. It’s really mindblowing information. No longer will your cultural circumstances puzzle you.

People in the West have no idea how different the “original” Christianity is to the “Western Christianity” practiced today. They look somewhat similar, but at their foundational assumptions, definitions, and cosmology, they are almost unrelated at the level of meaning. And as a result, people in the West do not have any sense of Eastern Christian belief structures, the culturo-behavioral results of that, nor any way of understanding what Orthodox societies want.

In my own view, it is easier for a Westerner to understand Chinese Dao than it is for them to understand the Orthodox viewpoint. This has dire political consequences, as Dr. Farrell lays out in this interview.

The study also makes it clear why the West is descending into nihilism, decay, and abandonment, and how it lost sight of its reasons to be.