Charles Wing-Uexküll

It's always been my favorite holiday... we celebrate with my dad's family (he was the middle child of 9), very large traditional gathering at my cousin's mansion / property out in the sticks.

hayride for the kids, a little bit of fun with some shotguns out back, my aunt's 'green stuff' (pistachio fluff), nearly unlimited deviled eggs...

I also have a treasured photo of my grandfather holding my daughter for the first time at a Thanksgiving celebration.

the best holiday

haha, yes, that was during the series of spaces we did on Dr. Alamariu's _Selective Breeding & The Birth of Philosophy_...

a deranged eastern european peasant called in with a rather promising plan for Africa

this is ‘playing with dolls’

The fantasy that monarchies, already creaking & antiquated in the 19th c, somehow survive WW1 & live on to confront & win against an early 20th c ideology like national socialism

These two ideologies barely touched each other in the real world, separated as they were by a period of parliamentary democracy.

Just a bizarre ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ type reverie, not an actual political opinion that means anything.

seeing news headlines written for boomers is insane sometimes

The historiographical sophistication of Augustine’s _City of God_ (c. 427 AD) was built on an institutional & intellectual foundation two centuries in the making.

In 18.27, Augustine describes how the fall of the Assyrian Empire was followed quickly by the founding of Rome, a second, Western Babylon that embodied humankind’s earthly ambition & lust for domination.

Augustine says that in the period Rome was being founded, from Procas, King of Latium, down to Romulus (roughly the first half of the 8th c BC), a new outpouring of crypto-Messianic Hebrew prophecy, including Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jonah & Joel, emerged. The future Christ was announced at the moment that the city of Rome was being founded, the earthly authority that would crucify him but also bring Christian light to every corner of the known world.

Augustine has taken synchronized strands of Babylonian / Assyrian, Hebrew, & Roman history, looked for coincidences, meaningful conjunctions & transitions, & developed a compelling theological interpretation of collated historical data.

His source for the historical chronology is, naturally, Eusebius’ _Chronicon_ (c. 327 AD), which presents the birth, progress, & ultimate fate of the major empires in parallel columns running down the page.

Eusebius worked out of the Library of Caesarea, an institution likely destroyed during or shortly after the Saracen conquest of 638. This was the most important center of Christian learning in the 3rd & 4th centuries…

It was founded by Origen, who had been supplied with a team of scribes & copyists by a wealthy patron, Ambrose of Alexandria, when Origen moved to Caesarea in 232 or so. Origen’s wealthy student Pamphilus later expanded it with his own funds, & thereafter it was sponsored by the bishops of Caesarea.

Pamphilus trained Eusebius in textual editing, cataloguing, & scholarship at the library, which by that time contained tens of thousands of volumes.

So we see that Augustine’s brilliant, theologically charged metahistorical insights are perhaps the most crystalline, elegant, & abstract layer of a Christian intellectual edifice that was already centuries in the making.