It turns out, this act, started a cynic on a new crusade, and history was forever altered in the process. For this was no ordinary bureaucrat, it was a roman citizen, educated in the Greek tradition. He immediatly set out to bridge a union between the two worlds. What followed, were the Epistles of Paul.

 

  At this time in the early church, the great debate, was problematic. It was the question, could gentiles be members of the new sect? Or should it remain a Jewish faith? 

 

  Paul now entered into the debate, armed with Plato. If truth can only be discovered by inner contemplation, then being Jewish or Gentile did not matter, If the body is part of the percieved universe, and not the absolute idea. Then salvation could not be achieved by acts, or by the traditional faith a person was born into, rather it was achieved by faith alone.

 

  His arguement prevailed, and the neo-platonist movement was born.

 

  At this time, Rome was the greatest empire the world had ever seen. They controlled the trade routes that Alexander the Great had fought to obtain so many years before. However, they were also a brutal society, their greatest entertainment, the spectacle of death in the gladiator pits.

 

  The games began with a sort of national anthem, in which the people would bow down and pray to Caesar. The new christian sect, however refused, saying they would only pray to the one true God. This was an act of treason, however, it was appealing to the hearts of the age.

 

  Rome suddenly had a problem at hand, which they solved in traditional Roman manner. They fed the Christians to the lions. And then they fed more christians to the lions, till the lions were full, and still these christians kept multiplying. the city burned, and the christians flourished, until at last under Constantine, Rome surrendered to the movement and became a Christian state.

 

  Soon after this, the empire divided into the Eastern Empire under the rule of Constantinople, and the Western Empire under Rome. The church divided as well, into the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church.

 

  The division was not a good thing for Rome, the Eastern Empire controlled the trade routes. Cut off from the Silk Road, the Roman Empire soon collapsed, and the dark ages were at hand.

 

  In 480 AD, St. Benedict began the monastic movement, a stoic tradition, that accepted poverty and the denial of the flesh as virtuous. This tradition, like Diogenes, the infamous Greek stoic, preserved knowledge through the dark times that passed, painstakingly scribing text after text, one volume at a time. As such they became the educated people of the day.

 

  In the meanwhile, 622 Muhammad begins the Hijra to Medina. This led to the writing of the Koran, as Mohammed founded the Islamic faith. After his death, his followers continued to expand through the military conquest of Byznatine, capturing the cities of Damascus and Jerusalem. Their conquest continued till halted in 732 at the battle of tours.

 

  In the west, a fuedal society had formed, and it was a society that embraced Neo-Platonism. Truth can only be maintained by faith alone, So there is no reason to question why, this is the occupation of the church. And God has revealed to us, that Kings rule because they have been chosen by God to rule. A peasant must serve thier King faithfully, because this is the will of God, were it otherwise, then why were you born a peasant and not a king? It is the will of God, and you must accept this by faith alone, for it is faith alone that is our salvation.

 

  The status quo reamained as such for centuries, backed by the writing of Augustine, a neo-platonist from the 5th century, who in "the City of God" argued that history was an ongoing conflict between the the city of man, (those who had strayed from God), and the city of God, that found its heart in the church.

 

  Augustine suggested that the great concern for the Church should be the Heavenly city of Jerusalem. In 1095, Pope Urban II pursued this vision, calling for the first Crusade at The Council of Clermont.

 

Soon after Jerusalem was captured.

 

  These Holy wars continued till 1270. (Jerusalem was recaptured By Saladin in 1187)

 

  During this struggle, another conflict began far away, in China. The Mongols, under Ghengis Khan, founded themselves as the greatest military force of the age. In the years to follow, they captured most of China, sections of India, and into Persia. In the Turkish Huns, they found a tremendous ally, horsemen like themselves, they swept the bandits from the silk road. Trade once more flourished.

 

   In 1295 Marco Polo returned from his travels in Asia. The book he published, was to be one of the most impacting books in the course of history. He told the world of the great civilization of the Khan, and China. People began to dream, and they began to question once more.

 

  One of the big questions they faced was the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. The system placed Earth at the center of the universe, which the sun orbited each day. This led to several complications that needed resolving. Each planet required an elaborate orbiting system for the planets to be consistent to where they could be seen. And accuracy was important for such things as navigation. To solve these complications, the charts were constantly being updated, until some 50 or more orbits had been interspliced, and it still wasn't quite right.

 

  People began to ask, was it absolutely essential for the mind of God to be so complicated?

 

  The world was ready for a new idea, and they found it in the writings of a young monk, William of Ockham.

 

  He wrote what is the relationship between the individual and the universal? Every universal is an individual thing, and made universal only by the signification of many things.

 

  The universal is in two things: natural and conventional. The first is predictable, as smoke signifies fire. The latter is universal by convention, as the spoken word. It is not universal by nature, only by agreement.

 

The one does not include a greater plurality to things than does the other.

 

  In essence, he had found an arguement to neo-platonism. Words are agreed upon, this does not make them greater than the percievable universe. As such, inner contemplation does not have the authority to contradict what our senses tell us to be true.

 

  He followed this with what has been called Ockham's Razor.

 

  If there are two plausible explanations to an event, the simplist explanation, with the least amount of unproven assumptions is to be preferred.

 

  Armed with this new idea, a new age was on the horizon.