SCULLY: Mulder, if you had to do without a cell phone for two minutes, you’d lapse into catatonic schizophrenia.

A little later in the episode….

MULDER: Hmm? Well, aside from the need for corrective lenses and a tendency to be abducted by extraterrestrials involved in an international governmental conspiracy, the Mulder family passes genetic muster.

Whew!! I never thought two words would bring, shall I say, “slightly heated” comments on Gideon’s blog and mine, while basically everything else I posted that night would be ignored.

I’m not taking sides with either the Papist Christians or the Orthodox Christians. I’m neither. In this awful story, both sides were “nominally Christian.”

What the Venetians, Normans, and Germans did to Byzantium was evil, there is absolutely no doubt about it. They committed countless atrocities and blasphemies to satisfy their own greed, all in the name of God. Pope Innocent denounced them vehemently.

In the eyes of the whole world you have abandoned yourselves to debauchery, adultery and prostitution. You have not only violated married women and widows, but even women and virgins whose lives were dedicated to Christ. You have … despoiled the very sanctuaries of God’s Church. You have broken into holy places, stolen the sacred objects of altars…. It is hardly surprising that [the Greek Church] sees in all Latins no more than treachery and the works of the Devil, and regards all of them as curs.

But the Byzantines were by no means innocent and righteous victims. According to Bradford, Nicetas Choniates, author of one of the most well-known eyewitness accounts of the sack of Byzantium, wrote a fair account.

His work is, in a sense, a cry of pain and shame — pain at the destruction of the city and the Empire, and shame at the way in which the later emperors and their courtiers conducted themselves. Sir Edwin Pears described him as “imbued with a religious spirit — religious in the sense that he believes that God rules the world and will punish national immorality.”

… Much though [Nicetas] may loathe the Latins who sacked and conquered his city, he is at pains to point out that it was the corruption of the Byzantines themselves that led to their downfall.

As we look at history, God often uses a more evil country to punish a less evil one. Judgement starts at the house of God. I don’t know enough about the Byzantines to say whether it was more or less corrupt than its attackers, though I hope I will be learning more Byzantine history soon.

To put it simply, if I were to explain the story of the Fourth Crusade to my darling three-year-old and four-year-old students, I would say, “The Crusaders were bad. The Byzantines were bad. God used the Crusaders to punish the Byzantines. Then He punished the Crusaders, too.” (Many of the leaders of the Crusade died violent deaths.)

And at the risk of inflaming even more people, may now I suggest that

(1) a defective view on worship and
(2) a lack of understanding about the covenant

were factors which contributed to the weakness of the Byzantine church and the subsequent weakness of the Roman church?

One of the main causes of the rift between Eastern Europe and Western Europe can be found in the Story of the Fourth Crusade, a book I read trembling with excitement … and nausea. For various reasons, among which I would include guilt and a reluctance to acknowledge how much Western Europe owes to Eastern Europe, the history of the Byzantine Empire has been ignored in the West. The Fourth Crusade (one of those crusades which wasn’t a crusade at all) ended up not with the recovery of the Holy Land from the infidels, but the destruction of a Christian (nominally Christian anyway) empire that had buffered Western Europe from barbarians in the East for centuries. More about that on a different day.

Bradford became a favourite of mine after I read his biography of Hannibal a few years ago. Here’s all the info I’ve been able to glean about him from the internet and my book covers.

Ernle Bradford was born in Norfolk, England on January 11, 1922, and was educated at Uppingham School (wherever and whatever that is). He joined the Navy in 1940, at age 18, and served in the Mediterranean Theatre till the end of WWII aboard minesweepers (not the game, the ship). After the war he was founder Editor of the Antique Dealer and Collector’s Guide, a broadcaster for the BBC, and was a leading authority on jewelry and silver. He was also an expert yachtsman, crossed the Atlantic several times, and sailed all around the Mediterranean and Aegean while doing historical research for his many books. He moved to Malta in 1967 and lived there with his wife and son until his death in 1986.

Books by Ernle Bradford …

… That I Own

Hannibal
The Shield and the Sword: The Knights of St. John
Christopher Columbus
Drake
Siege: Malta 1940-1943
The Great Betrayal: The Story of the Fourth Crusade, Constantinople, 1204
The Sultan’s Admiral: Barbarossa
The Great Siege
Cleopatra

… That I’m Going To Own

Thermopylae: The Battle for the West
The Mighty Hood
Nelson: The Essential Hero
The Wind Off The Island
Gibraltar: The History Of A Fortress
A Wind From The North: The Life Of Henry The Navigator
Julius Caesar: The Pursuit Of Power
The Sword and the Scimitar: The Saga of the Crusades
Ulysses Found
Paul the Traveler

Do you know anyone who speaks like this? I don’t, but I wish I did.

MULDER: Scully, some of the things that we investigate are so intangible but this creature it exists within the specific earthly confines of this lake, and I want to find it.

A little later in the episode….

SCULLY: No, how much you’re like Ahab. You’re so consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or mysteries, everything takes on a warped significance to fit your megalomaniacal cosmology.

Now, I have to go read Moby Dick.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked with quite a few Americans and Europeans who are completely fluent in Japanese. I’ve had similar conversations with many of them and the following is the sort of thing I’ve heard more than once.

- I speak Japanese fluently and I have a lot of Japanese friends, but no matter how friendly they are, they still treat me as an outsider, as someone who will go away, as if it’s not worth the time and effort to invest in building a friendship that will only be temporary. They never let me into the inside circle.

When I’m on the train and reading something in English, people keep their distance, very slight, but I can feel them holding back. If I’m reading something in Japanese, then it seems they feel more free to jostle as if I were another Japanese.

In stores, if I speak in English or in broken Japanese (on purpose), then people often can’t understand what I’m saying and get all into a fluster, but when my hand motions finally communicate, they are extra friendly and helpful. But if I speak in fluent Japanese, then their attitude is different and depending on what I’m asking for, they can be outright unfriendly.

The same goes for every place I’ve worked. When I first start working and most of the people don’t know I speak Japanese, then people stare a little longer and they are more interested and curious. When they find out I speak Japanese, I suddenly lose the “special foreigner” status.

In various ways, bilingual foreigners are worse off than foreigners who don’t speak a lick of Japanese. Westerners who don’t speak Japanese are special, rare, exotic (especially if they’re blond) and so forth. If they act differently, they are excused on account of being stupid foreigners. Westerners who do speak Japanese are treated more as Japanese and are often expected then to follow the huge unspoken code of Japanese social politeness. But either way, a foreigner is an outsider and is always treated as such.

Every Westerner I’ve worked with who speaks Japanese fluently has said the same sort of thing. That is why some of them choose not to speak any Japanese at work at all. Quite often, it’s a minus to know Japanese. If it weren’t for my being a Christian and wanting to witness to people, I wouldn’t let on that I speak Japanese. Life would be far easier if I pretend not to understand what is going on around me, keeping my special stupid-foreigner status intact.

I used to feel left out, especially when I was younger, but now I’m thankful for not being an insider. Japanese society is not something I want to be inside of. Knowing the Japanese language enables me to understand the society, but being a foreigner keeps me from being too tightly bound by it. I have more freedom than the Japanese who are part of the social system, more freedom than the foreigners who don’t speak the language and don’t understand what’s going on around them, and more freedom in my heart than those who don’t know the Truth.

Now, how to show people who don’t want to be unplugged….

<chanting>

Jon
Jon
Jon
Jon
Jon
Jon

</chanting>