Arminius, Herman the German, Us and Now. 8 September 2025

As we commemorate a world changing even that happened on 11 September 2001, we might learn something from a world changing even that happened on 8-11 September 9AD.  And you gotta wonder why no-one ever said there's an inherent contradiction between being so big on the Romans as I am (the Republic, not the Empire nor the Church) and having an image of the Hermann Heights Monument in New Ulm MN, which is a copy of the Hermannsdenkmal in Germany, as a cover photo on my former blog as I did.  Well actually it's no wonder, which we'll explain later.  The wonder is, this monument commemorates one of the most decisive events in world history that changed all subsequent history to the present, but now, hardly anyone knows about it, and there's reasons for that.

Huh?  What does that even mean?  OK let's start with Who's Hermann. 

Who's Hermann?,

Hermann is a name given, possibly first by Martin Luther, to a guy named Arminius. Great, who's Arminius?  Arminius is the Latin name of a hostage from a Germanic tribe called the Cherusci, who lived right around present-day Hannover.  Hermann was the son of the tribal chief Segimerus (in Latin, in German it's Segimer).  He was taken hostage, raised in Rome, given military training, made a Roman citizen, and made a member of the ordo equester, the order of knights.  This is not knights in the European mediaeval sense, but a property-based class below the patricians.  Patricians are so-named as the descendants of the patres, the founding fathers and families of Rome.  The ordo equester was originally based on the ability to provide men and horses for military service, so that's how horses come in, and also where we get the word equestrian.  In Arminius' time the ordo equester was just below the ordo senatorius, the order of Senators and their families.  Arminius was about eighteen when Jesus was born in another part of the Roman Empire.

Arminius turned against Rome and united various Germanic tribes against Roman direct rule, and sometime in September 9 A.D. inflicted arguably the worst defeat ever suffered by Rome in its entire history.  In German this is called die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald. Holy crap, what's a schlacht, what's a wald, and what's this Teutoburger thing, some kind of hamburger at Five Guys?  OK, die Schlacht is a battle, der Wald is a forest or woods, and Teutoburger is the name of the forest.  However, the German name only dates from 1875, centuries after it happened, and the reasons for that reflect not so much the ancient battle but its continuing influence even up to the present time.  Yet that influence, though there, is hardly known now, and there's reasons for that.  Which is why I'm posting about it.  Here's the deal.

Why the Battle Was a Big Deal Then.

The Latin name for this event comes from when it happened.  It's called clades variana, the Varian Disaster, after Publius Quinctilius Varus, the losing general.  Arminius lured his former ally into a trap, and defeated three Roman legions (Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX) plus six cohorts of associated non-citizen auxiliary troops and three squadrons of non-citizen cavalry (alae), with a total Roman loss of somewhere between 15 to 20K men.  It was so bad that as it was ending Varus, following custom, committed suicide by falling on his sword, as did a number of his sub-commanders.  The rest were killed, including his second in command, the Legate Numonius Vala, who tried to run away. The others were either killed in action, or, Tacitus records, later cooked alive in native German religious rituals, and many captured soldiers were made slaves.  Arminius had Varus' head cut off and sent it to another German king, Maroboduus of the Marcomanni, to propose an alliance, but that king stayed out of it and sent the severed head to Rome for disposition.  Topping it all off, in what the Romans considered a great shame and humiliation, each legion had its aquila, eagle standard, captured.

No Roman account tries to minimise the extent of the loss.  Bear in mind that in 9 AD the Roman Empire was just 36 years old, under its first emperor, Caesar Augustus, and eager to establish itself over the former Roman Republic, for which some still held sympathy, so it was not in any mood to sustain catastrophic defeats.  Suetonius records in The Lives of the Caesars, sometimes called The Twelve Caesars, original Latin title De vita caesarum (On the Life of the Caesars), that Caesar Augustus was so upset at the magnitude of the loss that he repeatedly banged his head on the wall shouting Quintilius Varus gimme back the legions (well, he actually said Quintili Vare legiones redde, I translated).

OK so where did this happen exactly?  The precise location of the battle was not known for centuries and is still not settled, and, the whole engagement happened in several places over several days, but in general it was just south and east of Hannover, Arminius' tribe's area, which is east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, or Rhein and Donau in German; or Rhenus and Danubius in Latin.  In present-day Germany, it's in the states of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia), and Niedersachsen (Neddersassen in the local dialect), Lower Saxony, both created 23 August 1946 by the British military administration of their occupation zone following World War Two.

After the clades variana, from 14 - 16 AD under Tiberius, who succeeded his stepdad Augustus as Emperor, Roman forces under the command of Tiberius' nephew Germanicus inflicted some severe but local losses on the Germans, including recovery of two of the three lost eagle standards.  That's how Germanicus got the name by which he is known; it's a victory title (that's called an agnomen btw) conferred by Rome.  With this, Arminius and his Germanic allies were defeated and honour recovered, but that didn't restore things, and the ongoing effects have a lot to do with what happened next.  Which is, Tiberius ordered operations to cease; he was satisfied with the result and thought that anything to be gained from further expansion frankly was just not worth what it would take to gain it.  That changed everything.  Details in the next section.

After their impressive victory, the unruly Germans descended into internecine war.  Tacitus records that a plot to poison Arminius by Germanic rivals was proposed to Tiberius but he rejected it, saying Rome does not avenge itself by secret plots but by open arms.  And guess what, in 21 AD, just 12 years after the battle, Arminius was killed by rivals in his own tribe who thought him too powerful. The Romans continued to hold him in high regard and respect, as Tacitus and others record, as one who had the skill to beat them even at the height of their power.  Typically Roman.

The third and last eagle standard (aquila) was recovered in 41 AD by forces under the command of Publius Gabinius, by which time Claudius, Germanicus' brother, was emperor.  Yes, the Claudius of the famous historical novel "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves.

Why the Battle Was a Big Deal Later. 

So how did Rome's decision to never again attempt direct rule of Germania, though it may make treaties and arrangements with client kings, shape the course of all subsequent European history and American too?  How does that happen?  And how does it happen that hardly anyone will hear of it in general education?  Here's the deal on that.  

The impressive stand against Rome forever determined the culture of subsequent Europe.  Rome's decision that further expansion was just not worth it began a military boundary across continental Europe (which is to say, Europe) that would last 400 years, with the effect that Latin and Germanic cultures remained distinct.  To this day there is a palpable difference in the "feel" of those parts of Europe which were part of the Roman Empire and those that weren't, as those areas which Rome never directly ruled did not absorb Roman culture into their identity.

Had Rome expanded, here's how Europe would have become much different than it is.  Kind of like dominoes.  The rest of Europe would have been under direct Roman rule.  

-  So the German language would have evolved as another Romance language.  

-  Then later on in the Roman Empire, when it replaced traditional Roman religion by creating its state church the Catholic Church in 380 AD, that church, though present because by that time it was the only one, would have been much more secure in its presence with a more unified state and culture behind it, which in turn would not have allowed the conditions in which the Reformation happened.  

-  And thus the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, which devastated all of continental Europe to an extent not surpassed until WWII, and was between the Protestant of various kinds states of northern Europe and the Catholic ones in southern Europe, which they still are, though nominally, even now, would not have happened.  

-  And in turn the colonisation of the Americas would not have seen such intense rivalries to appropriate wealth to pay wartime debt.  Thus the "French and Indian War" that began in 1754 between the French and British over American colonies would not have happened.  

-  Which in turn would not have helped ignite and become part of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, which as Winston Churchill commented was the world's real first world war, as it was fought in Europe, both Americas, Africa, India and the Philippines.  That war did not change the various belligerent states per se (status quo ante bellum, status as before the war) but did produce a massive shift in alliances largely as a result of changes in colonial jurisdictions.  That shift in alliances brought about a complete change of the balance of power in Europe; Britain emerged as the world's superpower, Prussia emerged as the driving German power, a drive for independence emerged in the British American colonies, followed by France's decline and eventual internal revolution, and finally, the Thirty Years' War, fuelled a desire among Germans for a unified state (nothing like modern Germany existed before 1949), all of this evolving from Tiberius' decision in 16 AD not to pursue further expansion into Germania, and none of which would have happened without that decision. 

-   Which takes us back to Arminius.  

Arminius and his victory continued its influence in the Germanic sagas that formed a Germanic sense of identity.  Not in historical record but in literary sagas; Arminius is the basis for the character Sigurd in the Volsunga Saga and the Niebelungenlied.

By Luther's time (1483-1546), about 1500 years after the battle, the Roman Empire was long gone but its state church, the Roman Catholic Church, was not, and it continued as the state church in what understood itself as the restoration of the Roman empire, what is now, but was not then, called the Holy Roman Empire.  At the same time, Europe was experiencing a massive transformation.  The "Black Death", which was called the Great Plague at the time (1346 - 1353), had wiped out roughly half of Europe's and the Middle East's population.  Food prices and land values dropped and the demand for workers rose.  Also, beginning in Florence in the 14th Century (1300s) and extending to Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, all cities within the ancient empire, and eventually to Rome itself, feudal society, which, based on land and class, began giving way to a mercantile society, based on trade, capital, goods and services.  There being no explanation for the plague catastrophe, theories abounded, and there was an awareness of the emergence of a via moderna, a modern way, across the board, in society, theology and philosophy, art, science, everything.  Adding to this transformation was the arrival of scholars with classical Greek texts fleeing the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire to the Muslims on 29 May 1453.

Manuscripts long tucked away in monastic libraries were examined, and among many other discoveries, Tacitus' histories were found and with that recovery of information about Arminius.  Thus Luther found in Arminius a figure for a successful stand against Rome, this time not militarily or politically, but religiously, against the necessity of control by Rome's church of ultimately everything.

Later, Arminius also became an important figure in German opposition to French control, once again of the ability of Germans to stand against great empires, Roman or otherwise.  From 1792 through 1802, the French, who killed their royalty and had a revolution to establish Liberty, Equality, Fraternity but instead got a Reign of Terror then Napoleon, were at war with pretty much everyone else in Europe.  Not to mention within themselves.  Napoleon had ended the 1,000 year run of the "Holy Roman Empire", in which nothing like modern Germany existed, and with his final defeat in 1815, the battle and Hermann became a symbol for a concept of a united German people free of non-German control.

The Congress of Vienna (1815), much like the EU would do after WWII, attempted to establish a balance of power so that Europe would be at peace, but it did not result in a German nation.  The original monument was begun with an idea in 1834, the foundation stone was laid in 1838, the finished base was dedicated in 1841, but the 1848 German revolution did not result in a unified German state either and work (and money) stopped.  Prussia's victory over Austria in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 rekindled the ideal, and the victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) brought even more enthusiasm for the ideal.  The completed monument was dedicated 16 August 1875, with Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first head of the German Empire, the first united German state ever, in attendance.  That's why the German name for Arminius' battle in 9 AD only dates from 1875.

Upon this completion a society for the aid of German immigrants began work on a replica, to be located in New Ulm, MN, which as the name indicates, was heavily German and not coincidentally the home of the society's head.  The cornerstone was laid in 1888, and was dedicated in 1897.

Part of the united Germany free of foreign control thing was not just latter-day "Romans" to be free of like the French and Austrians, but the Kulturkampf against the control of the Roman Catholic Church of university and church/state positions.  Thus Catholic Germans were not altogether on board, later joined by others.  On the 1,900th anniversary of the battle in 1909, there was a large event from 14-23 August, and during World War I the monument became a symbol for hoped-for eventual German victory.

After the defeat, in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) it became a meeting place for those hoping for a restoration of the old order, and plain old tourism began as well.  With the Nazis, they used it somewhat, but turned it down as any official symbol, preferring to have their own events and monuments.  Quite in character, as much of the initial support for the Nazis was in the hopes of a successful restored Germany only to find the Nazis had a very different Germany in mind and despised the old order.  After World War II, insofar at it was promoted at all it was purely as a tourist attraction.

On the 2000th anniversary of the battle, 2009, the Germans, who will likely take 1000 years to recover, especially in their own minds, from the taint of the "1000-year Reich" (Tausendjähriges Reich), Hitler's vision of the endurance of his German state, the whole thing was downplayed.  Der Speigel reported that even in the deliberately small scale re-enactments, most of those participating wanted to play Romans, not Germans.  The battle or Hermann is barely mentioned in German schools.  Why?  Association with Hitler in particular and with nationalism in general, which it is feared could lead to someone like Hitler. The reality is, Hitler had little use for Arminius, and Arminius had nothing to do with what others later made of him.

Why the Battle Is a Big Deal Now and Going Forward. 

So we have choices.  As to Arminius himself, there is no contradiction in using the Herman the German monument on the old blog.  Arminius was a Roman.  Meaning, he was a Roman citizen, which takes no regard of ethnicity, race, national origin or anything else.  A citizen is a citizen.  That's where we got the idea.  Moreover, in Roman society he was made an eques, a member of the equites just under the senatorial class, and had a Roman education as well as military training.  Which shows that even successful opposition to Rome is Roman.

As to our choices.  We could continue doing what we are doing, which is either or both of 1) thinking ourselves more advanced and/or intelligent than those who came before us and since they did not experience life as we do now therefore we need not pay them much attention, and 2) suppress anything that does not fit or confirm our narrative or contradicts it, and/or rewrite it so it does.

This will work --  in the same way a self-fulfilling prophecy works.  As we follow part two it confirms part one, and so we fall in line with centuries and millennia who have done the same thing, quite unaware both that they did it and we are doing it, and quite unaware that there is not a modern narrative or meta-thought that one or another ancient Greek did not express and comes to us through the Romans, also quite unaware that we are doing the same thing with new labels and better technology, sure that our new labels and better technology make it something new, and last, quite unaware of what brought us to where we are now thus we misunderstand where we are and misidentify who we are, seeing none of this.  This is the course of most of our present educational, ecclesiastical and societal institutions.

Or, we could give up our box that we don't see is a box because we believe it to be not a box and beyond boxes, and learn from them.  Not to know what happened before one was born is to be forever a child.  Thus said a great figure of the Roman Republic (Cicero). It's a motto of this blog, and for good reason.  Those who would establish the Empire in place of the Republic in 27 BC and were in power in 9 AD had him proscribed (proscriptio) as an enemy of the state and executed him in 43 BC.  They had to.  Just as those who follow either or both of the paths away from the heritage given us by the Roman Republic must either ignore or falsify him and that heritage, our heritage.

Augustine and Happy Birthday, Western Catholic Church. 6 September 2025.

Huh?

Nah, 6 September is not the birthday of the Catholic Church.  What happened on 6 September 394 is the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius I defeated the Western Roman Emperor Eugenius at the conclusion of the two-day Battle of The Frigidus.

Judas H Priest, where and what in the hell is the Frigidus, never heard of it and why should I have heard of it, or care to hear of it?  Because though nobody ever hears about it these days it changed the entire course of history after it, that's why.  Here's the deal.

What's a Frigidus and Why the Battle. 

OK, The Frigidus is a river.  The Latin name means "cold" as its English descendant "frigid" suggests. It is in modern northeastern Italy and Slovenia and is now called the Vipacco in Italian and the Vipava in Slovene, and of course I gotta tell ya it is called the Wipbach in modern German, or, as b and p get sort of interchangeable in German sometimes, the Wippach.

So why was there a battle there and why should I care to know? Goes like this. On 27 February 380, the Eastern Roman Emperor Flavius Theodosius Augustus, and his two Western Roman Emperor counterparts, Flavius Gratianus Augustus (Gratian) and Flavius Valentinianus Augustus (Valentianin II), (the two were senior and junior Augustus, respectively, more or less co-emperors) jointly issued the Edict of Thessalonica.  The edict is also known by its Latin name, Cunctos populos, which means "those people" (plural accusative case).  Latin and other languages typically use the first word or two of a document as its title name.

This edict did not, contra the usual summary, make Christianity the official religion.  Christianity was not, contra another summary often heard, some unified happy whole, identified by the word "Christianity", not divided as it is now, whose happiness and unity we should or could recover now.  From the start there were many versions of what "Christianity" is, there was no "traditional" Christianity.  What the Edict did was make one of the versions the state religion.  That version is called "Nicene Christianity", from the Council of Nicaea, called and presided over by Emperor Constantine (the "Great"), though he was not Christian at the time, in 325 AD to define what is now traditional Trinitarian Christianity from the various other contenders for what is Christianity, principally the Arians, but also the Novatians, the Macedonians, the Anomoeans and others.

The Edict made Nicene Christianity the official state religion which was to be universal, or catholic, in the Roman Empire overall, and it required that all subjects of the Empire must hold this faith as delivered to Rome and preserved by then-current Pope Damasus I and then-current Bishop of Alexandria Peter, and it declared that these alone shall be called "Catholic Christians", the universal faith of the Empire, and all others, being truly demented and insane (vero dementes vesanosque, in the words of the edict in case you thought I'm making stuff up) are thus heretics and not even churches, subject to such punishment as God and the Empire should choose to visit upon them (divina primum vindicta, post etiam motus nostri, quem ex caelesti arbitro sumpserimus, ultione plectendos, in the words of the edict in case you thought I'm making this up).

The council didn't settle things.  Constantine himself, not being a member of any version, was tolerant and taken aback by the continuing controversy, wondered if maybe the council got it wrong, and was finally baptised on his deathbed by a "bishop" sympathetic to the Arians (Eusebius of Nicomedia).  His son and successor Constantius II was openly sympathetic to the Arians, and his successor Julian wasn't sympathetic to any version of Christianity and wanted to get back to traditional Graeco-Roman religion, for which he's sometimes called "Julian the Apostate".  Julian's successor Jovian only lasted eight months and though Christian didn't push one version of that over another, and his successor, Valens, was an Arian Christian!

Valens died in the disastrous Battle of Adrianople (in modern northwestern Turkey) against the Goths on 9 August 378, which marked the beginning of the end for the Western empire and also of Arian influence in the Eastern empire.  So when Gratian (remember him above?) asked Theodosius, who was Trinitarian and from Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal) to take over the army in the East, this effectively made him Eastern emperor succeeding Valens, on 19 January 379, and things were anything but settled, politically or religiously.  The year after the edict, 381, Theodosius convened another council, the First Council of Constantinople, to settle things, at least the religious ones.  Notice how it's emperors, not church types, convening church conventions?

So who are Damasus and Peter?  We'll meet Damasus in the post later this month on Jerome, but in this context suffice it to know that he was Bishop of Rome from 1 October 366 to 11 December 384.  OK, nice to know, but why does it matter?  Here's why.  In those days previously, popes were elected locally by the clergy and laity, but now they had to be confirmed by the Emperor.  The Emperor Constantius II had sent the previous pope Liberius into exile for not sharing his sympathetic view of the Arians, and when Liberius died 24 September 366, two different popes were elected in two separate elections.  The deacons of the church and the plebian class (regular people) elected Liberius' deacon Ursinus, but the patricians, the wealthy upper class, elected Damasus.  Mob violence ensued, including deaths and massacres by Damasus' faction of Ursinus' faction, and the city authorities had to restore order.  Which they did, on the side of Damasus, since the patricians had bought Imperial support, and he was confirmed pope 1 October 366, and exonerated of charges of murder.  And also adultery.  His dalliance with wealthy women had earned him the nickname auriscalpius matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.  How's that for "apostolic succession", just what you'd expect from the conservator of the true faith, right?

Peter was Peter II, the 21st patriarch of Alexandria, a student of St Athanasius (we'll meet him again below), a major opponent of Arian Christianity, who had been exiled by the local prefect on orders from Emperor Valens (an Arian) and went to Rome where Damasus supported him until he could return to Alexandria in 373.

Cunctos populos refers to Damasus as pontiff (pontifex) but to Peter as bishop (episcopus).  Why is that significant?  "Pontiff" comes from pontifex, which means bridge builder.  Originally, a pontifex was a high religious official in the Collegium pontificum, which included the Vestal Virgins charged with maintaining the fire in the Temple of Vesta believed to be essential to Rome's survival, and the highest ranking of them was the pontifex maximus.  As the Republic declined this office became more and more political and in the Empire was held by the Emperor.  The last to use it was Gratian, one of the signatories to the Edict, and after he renounced it pontifex became associated with Bishop and pontifex maximus with the Bishop of Rome, and still is to-day.  The use of pontifex in the Edict only wrt to Damasus and Peter as epicopus, since any episcopus is a pontifex, indicates pontifex maximus is intended.

Before we continue this part of the story, we need to stop this part here around 380 to introduce the other part, namely Augustine.  Before that though, four ironies that result from this part.  1) The Council of Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople are often called the first "oecumenical" councils, but the word does not mean what we mean now; it does not mean all the various Christian churches, but rather, drawn from all the Roman Empire.  2) The "Nicene Creed" used in most current Christian churches is not the Nicene Creed, as in the creed from that council, but rather the revision and expansion of that creed at the First Council of Constantinople, and more exactly not even that but liturgical versions of it, not the conciliar statement itself.  3) The liturgical versions changed the statement of the assembled councils, "we believe", to "I believe" reflecting its non-conciliar liturgical use as an individual statement of faith stated collectively, which is why recent attempts to revert liturgically to the conciliar use are invalid.  4) We get the word creed from the incipit (first word) of the Latin liturgical version, credo, I believe.

So, 27 February 380 is the birthday of the "Catholic Church", as distinct from the catholic church.  The Eastern version took hold earlier but it was a little more unsettled in the Western Empire, and it took 14 years for resistance to this in the Western Empire to be crushed militarily.  That's what happened 6 September 394, so, though the Catholic Church has its birthday with the issue of Cuntos populos on 27 February 380, 6 September 394 is a sort of Western birthday, since that is when resistance to it in the Western Empire was crushed by military power from the Eastern Empire.  And it's no co-incidence at all that this was at the hands of Theodosius, who would be the last Emperor both East and West.

And all this fits right in with St Augustine, whose feast is 28 August, who in 380 (Cunctos populos) was a pagan and a professor in Carthage, and in 394 (The Battle of The Frigidus) was about to be named Bishop of Hippo in the new state church.

A Renowned Professor Get Caught Up In This.

Augustine was a Roman citizen, from what are now called Berbers, and was teaching in Carthage in 380, seven years away from being baptised by the state bishop, Ambrose, of the state church in the state's Western capital by then, Milan. Diocletian, the last emperor of an undivided Roman Empire, had made Milan, then called Mediolanum, the Western capitol in 293 and Nicomedia, now Izmit Turkey, the Eastern capitol in 286, and called his new provincial units diocese, after himself. Constantine moved the Eastern capitol to nearby Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey.  You get to name stuff after yourself when you're really powerful.

The Roman Senate, still in Rome, was not shall we say comfortable with this new state religion in the two new capitals of the Empire, and lots of academic disputes and apologetics on both sides went back and forth, but no violence. During this unsettled time Augustine gets appointed to the most prestigious professorship in his world, at the Western capitol Milan in 384, and is all caught up in the swirling controversy between the old religion and classic philosophy and the new state church.

He also gets caught up in his mother Monica's designs for his career. Now with a prestigious academic position, mom says his longstanding relationship with a woman he never names but called "the one", of some 14 years complete with son, called Adeodatus, meaning "given by God", hasta go. So he caves and sends her away, she saying she will never be with another man, he finding a new concubine to tide him over until the proper social marriage his mom, "Saint" Monica, arranges with a then-11 year old girl (yeah, really) can happen.

And about concubines. Ain't what you think. A concubine in ancient Rome was simply a wife that Roman law forbade you to marry due to your or her social class. These marriages denied legality by Imperial law were rather common, and the church didn't come down on them since it wasn't the couple's fault they weren't legally married. Something to keep in mind when "the one" gets called concubine in the modern sense, their relationship gets passed off as merely lustful and their son whom they named Gift of God passed off as "illegitimate".

Take, Read -- This Christian Bestseller!

No wonder the dude was confused! His whole world is swirling in unsettled controversy and mom is running his life like a beauty pageant mom. And then, as he's all upset about his life, he has this really weird experience where he hears a kid's voice saying "Take, read" (the famous tolle, lege). Now what he was told to take and read you won't likely find in your local Christian bookstore, but was among the most widely read books, first in the Imperial Christian state church and then through the Middle Ages. It's a Life of St Anthony of the Desert, written by St Athanasius about 360 in Greek, but best known in a Latin translation, Vita Antonii, made about ten or so years later by Evagrius, who was, or was not, depending on whose side you are, the true "bishop" of Antioch 388-392.

Hoo-boy, old Tony. He was a wealthy Egyptian who became Christian at about age 34, so far so good, sold everything and took up with a local hermit. Tony in NO way was the "Founder of Monasticism", as religious hermits of various religions were common on the outskirts of cities; Philo the Jewish-Egyptian writer mentions them all, sharing the Platonic idea of having to get out of the world to get into an ideal. Pure Platonist Idealism. Sure glad Jesus didn't do that or let his Apostles do it either when they wanted to, but went back to Jerusalem where real life had things for them to do.

But old Tony went the other direction, and left even the outskirts for the desert itself to get away from it all to get into it all. But the crowds followed -- everybody loves an exotic "holy man" -- and Tony took on the more advanced cases of this mania and left the rest to his associates, sort of a Christian Oracle of Delphi, which "guidance" was later variously collected as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Apophthegmata, if you want a word to impress somebody sometime.

The Famous Professor Converts.

Anyhoo, Gus reads this in 386, and on the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptises Gus and his son. The next year, 388, he determines to return home to North Africa. Which he did, but along the way both his mother and his son died, so he arrives alone in the world, and understandably unsure of himself once again. Next he sells the family stuff and gives the money away, except the house which he turns into a sort of lay monastery. I guess that's what you do when you read about dudes in the desert, rather than go through the grief and live on in the world of people. Then he gets ordained presbyter or "priest" in 391 in Hippo, now Annaba, Algeria.

This mostly academic and political controversy, in which Gus' unsettled life had its context, and of which it is typical, changed the next year when Western Emperor Valentinian II was found hanged in his home on 16 May 392. His half brother and co-Emperor Gratian was already dead, killed 25 August 383 in Lyon France by forces of Roman generals who thought he was losing his grip. The official word was Valentinian was a suicide, but his wife and others thought he was done in by his military power behind the throne, a Frank named Arbogastes.  The Imperial Milan court church's bishop, Ambrose, left the question open, suicide being a no-no for a Christian Emperor held up as a hero.

A Digression, but a Damned Important One.

What's a Frank? Not a hot dog, that comes from Frankfurter, and originally meant Frankfurter Würstchen, which means "little sausages from Frankfurt" served on a bun. They originated in the 13th Century and became the peoples' food for coronations of the Holy Roman Emperor starting with Maximilian II, a Habsburg and nephew of Emperor Karl V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, on 25 July 1564. About 1800 or so, a butcher named Johann Georg Lahner from Coburg, Bavaria, introduced the Frankfurter Würstchen to Vienna. Now Vienna had its own sausages, which were a mixture of pork and beef called Wiener, from Wien, which is "Vienna" in German. Lahner modified his product by mixing the original pork with beef like the Viennese and calling the result simply a Frankfurter. German immigrants brought the product to the US at Coney Island, and at St Louis where the German American owner, Chris von der Ahe, of the St Louis Brown Stockings, now the Cardinals, started selling them at baseball games.  So there -- the inter-relation of hot dogs, Lutheranism, St Louis and the Cards! Toldya it was important! The name got shortened to "Frank", they're hot, and the "dog" thing came from rumours that the makers actually used dog meat. Myself, I like kosher beef hot dogs, not at all the original!

Oh yeah, almost forgot, what's a Frank?  The name comes from the Roman name gens Francorum for these Germanic barbarians who threw their axes (the franks), whose own ethnic history says they were Trojans under Priam who ended up on the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine, after the fall of Troy in Homeric times.  Which is exactly the ethnic history Augustus tried to blend into Roman understanding at the beginning of the Empire by having Virgil write the Aeneid!

Back To the Story.

On 22 August 392, Arbogastes, who being a Frank and not Roman could not be Emperor, names a Roman Christian named Eugenius the Western Emperor. Eugenius though Christian was sympathetic to traditional Roman religion and started replacing Western officials sympathetic to the Eastern Empire. The Eastern Empire put off recognition of the new Western regime, and finally in January of 392 Theodosius declared his two-year-old son Honorius as Western Emperor and begins preparing an invasion of the Western Empire, which began in May 394 and concluded in the victory at The Frigidus 6 September 394. Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

The new Imperial state Catholic Church was on a real roll.  It had destroyed the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390, the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, the year Augustine was ordained a priest in the official church, then had ended the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 and the Olympic Games after the ones in 393.  Then later in the same year, 394, as the Battle of the Frigidus, it puts out the fire considered essential to Rome's survival at the Temple of Vesta, and disbands the women who were personally selected by the pontifex maximus, when that meant the head of the traditional Roman religion rather than the head of the new state Catholic religion.

The next year, 395, Augustine becomes religious head, which is called bishop, of the Roman Imperial administrative unit called a diocese, in Hippo. Guess Gus knew on which side his bread is buttered.

It All Comes To-gether, It All Falls Apart.

The Battle of The Frigidus effectively ended any Western resistance to the new state church. But those old Roman families knew a thing or two about survival and before long they were papal families, eventually supplying Pope Gregory, made Pope 3 September 590, who ruled the state church like a real Roman indeed. This enormous civil war though left the Western Empire greatly weakened, and it collapsed a thousand years before the Eastern Empire did, with the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410. So Augustine, by then 56 and still Bishop of Hippo, writes more Platonism to assure the shocked Romans that though the joint was a mess it was not the fault of the new state Roman Imperial religion having replaced the traditional Roman religion thirty years before and its subsequent eradication of it, the real and ideal City of God was the real winner.

Well, back here in reality the "City of God", Rome, was first sacked by the Gauls in 387 BC, and after the 410 sack by the Visigoths, got sacked again by the Vandals in 455, but Gus died at 75 on 28 August 430 so he missed it. And Rome would be sacked again by the Ostrogoths in 546, and again by the Arabs in 846, and again by the Normans in 1084, and last by soldiers of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but not on his orders, in 1527.  And you know what Gus, the ascendancy of the new state religion DID have a lot to do with the Fall of Rome.  How so?  Because the new state religion the Catholic Church was as false to the catholic church of Christ as the Roman Empire had been false to the Roman Republic.  The civic side of this transition is covered in our post for 21 April, the Founding of the City.

Anyway, that's the famous book The City of God, which is actually only the first part of its title, which is On The City Of God Against The Pagans (OK it's De civitate Dei contra Paganos, I translated). "Pagan" is another term reinvented by the new church. It once meant someone from the country, or a civilian, but with the Imperial Catholic Church firmly in the cities, and their faithful thinking they were a church militant, soldiers of Christ, which, the state military having kicked the crap out of the former religion for the state church, I guess kind of fits, and "pagan" came to mean someone adhering to the old religion which hung on more in the countryside rather than just someone from the sticks.

For all his Platonic faults and his immersion in social-political turmoil and change of his time, Augustine was aware that six twenty-four hour periods is not even the "literal" reading of Genesis.  More on that in a later post this month.  Busy month, September.

The Aftermath.

That Platonic idealism guided and fuelled the West as it struggled through centuries of chaos and tried to reinvent its former glory with the Holy Roman Empire, which, as has been famously remarked, was not holy, not Roman, and not much of an empire. Hell, it was Frankish, the new Romans! Old Arbogastes would have liked that! And it by God had the Roman state Catholic Church with popes and bishops and diocese and all the Platonism reinvented as Christianity you can shake a stick at, complete with justification as the City of God.

Which wholesale hijacking of the catholic church as the Catholic Church, one might say its Babylonian Captivity, lasted for a thousand years. Then a poor guy in a screwed up world with a screwed up life, and a barbarian to boot, a German named Martin Luther from outside the old Roman boundaries, seeks solace in a religious order modelling itself after Augustine's Platonic idealism turned into Christian monastic asceticism, and discovers none of this crap is gonna save you but simply faith in the Son sent by God to be the sacrifice which takes away our sins, just like Scripture, which is supposed to be the church's book, says.

And so begins the disentanglement of the catholic church from the Catholic Church of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires. They tried like hell to make the catholic church, the pillar and ground of truth, the bride of Christ, into the Whore of Babylon. The vestiges of Theodosius' state Imperial Catholic Church continue in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. That's bad enough, but after the Lutheran reformation began, opposite but equally false reactions to the Babylonian Captivity arose, and several "second" or "another" reformations (Nadere Reformatie), took the "Reformation" well beyond anything about the Lutheran Reformation, and continue on in later church bodies.  On top of which, some Lutheran churches became as obscenely an extension of the state as the "Catholic Church" had been. 

The guideline of the Lutheran reformation was, if it contradicts Scripture it must go but what doesn't is retained, since the power of the Gospel and Word and Sacrament is such that not even the Roman Empire could entirely keep it out. The Babylonian Captivity was a captivity, not an extinction.  But with these later guys the guideline became, if it ain't in Scripture it goes -- depending on whose version of what is in Scripture one buys -- thus losing his Divine Service of his body and blood for our salvation, and in some cases even Baptism as well.

And lately all of these anachronisms, the state churches that survived their original states, seem intoxicated with a Rousseau-like Romantic fiction, which is some sort of resurrection of an imagined pure church of the Apostles and Church Fathers, rediscovered by their scholarship of course, a noble church, sort of an ecclesiastical version of Rousseau's "noble savage".  It was precisely this against which Pope Pius XII warned in 1947 in Mediator Dei, which he called an exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism and has since been called liturgical archaeology.  And it must be said some of these anachronisms have the word "Lutheran" in their names. Thus the equal but opposite errors of the old state church and of the later Reformers, equally condemned in the Lutheran Confessions, continue as well.

Conclusion.

But while all of this rages about us, and even infects the Lutheran Reformation, thanks be to God for the Lutheran Reformation and its confession of the true teaching of Scripture, the book that is the church's own measure and norm, while yet retaining what does not contradict it.  Even if that is found in a minority of churches with "Lutheran" in their names. 

A Season, Two Names, Two Starts and What Happened to the High Holydays and Sukkoth? 2025.

OK what's up with this?  Whyrya posting about Fall and Jewish stuff, arnchu supposed to post Lutheran stuff?  Here's why.  Past Elder, my original blog, started 22 February 2007 and its Blogoral Cycle (a joke on the term "sanctoral calendar" from the church calendar) takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has NOTHING.  Yet this is precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!

Not to mention (I like to say that before I mention something) that in the world this season has two names and two official start times, and some unofficial start times too, and the church calendar has nothing special.

So what's up with that? Here's the 2025 version of my post about it.

I. About Fall.

The official start of Fall happens on 23 or 24 September.  Huh?

Well actually, that's just one of the official starts of Fall. Holy crap, what's up with that -- two official starts?  And we said there's unofficial ones too? And to a season with two names! What's up with THAT?  And that's before we even get to this post's actual What's Up With That?  Here's the deal.

A. About the Two Starts.

The first thing is, there's two Falls, the astronomical one and the meteorological one.  We just went over the astronomical one.  Astronomical Fall is determined by the relative amount of light and dark in a day, in turn determined by the relative position of the Earth and the Sun. Just like the word Man, which can mean either all human beings or just the male ones, the word Day is used sometimes for the whole 24 hour period or just the light part of it.

Astronomical Fall starts on the day, as in 24 hour period, with equal amounts of light and dark in it.  They're not exactly equal but pretty damn close.  That day is called the autumnal equinox, equal night in Latin.  The day when they are exactly equal is called the equilux, equal light in Latin. It happens a couple days later.  Howzat?  Because the equinox is not determined by a single point but the top of a sphere, the sun.

Fall goes to the day with the least amount of day light in it, called the winter solstice ("sun stand still", solstitium, sol or sun and sistere or to stand still in Latin). And some think Latin is not still with us! But we all note these daylight changes do not align exactly with the air temperature changes. That is because of the thermal latency of land and sea.

Judas H Priest, what is thermal latency? How many what's up with thats can we have in one post? Don't freak. "Thermal latency" are simply more Latin derived words for the phenomenon that while as the earth rotates toward and then away from the sun, thereby giving more and then less heat, it takes both land and water a while to warm up or cool off.

Meteorological Fall is determined by the changes in air temperature. Huh, if it's meteorology why ain't it about meteors? Holy crap another What's Up With That! Now ain't you glad you read my blog so you can know all this stuff? Meteorology comes from the Greek meteoros or "up in the sky",  and -ology or the study of something. Matter of fact, although weather forecasters take flak for having the only job where you get paid to be wrong, meteorology was started by Aristotle in a book by that name he wrote in 350 BC in which, with no modern instruments whatever but just being a keen observer and smarter than all hell, he described what is now called the hydrologic cycle.

Don't freak, more Greek derived words, here meaning water cycle, in which water is not just distinct from land but interacts with land in changing cycles in various forms; liquid, otherwise known as rain, vapour, otherwise known as fog, and solid, otherwise known as ice. Think that's just some musty ancient stuff, who cares? Think again, because our planet, though we call it Earth, is actually mostly water, and a planet with a lot of water over long periods of time loses hydrogen, which is part of water (H2O, remember?), which in turn leads to what is called the "greenhouse effect", which leads to more hydrogen loss, which leads to more greenhouse effect, and that is an entirely natural cycle.  Climate is going to change.  But, that change can be accelerated by what Man's activities put in the air.  Now, while we don't know exactly how these two affect each other, and while various points on the political spectrum act as if we do, they DO interact, and everybody is concerned as hell about that now or damned well ought to be.

Sound musty now? Old Ari was sharp as a tack, wish we had more like him now with modern instruments. Which is why, besides Blogoral Calendars and stuff like that, this blog goes on about musty ancient stuff -- because it helps us understand where in the hell we are right now and what "where we are right now" even is.

So, meteorological seasons are determined by average air temperatures, which lag behind the astronomical events of solstices and equinoxes that determine astronomical seasons, due to thermal water latency. Fall in this definition is from 1 September to 30 November. Well, in the northern hemisphere that is. Our planet being a sphere, when one side rotates toward the sun the other rotates away, so Fall in the southern hemisphere happens when our Spring does, and vice versa.

There's your two official starts, but in the US there's two unofficial starts also.  One of them is Labor Day, which became a federal holiday in 1894 and happens on the first Monday in September.  The other is set by your local school board, who as any kid or parent knows, is God, and determines when Summer ends by when school starts. When I grew up school started after Labor Day, the unofficial start of Fall, and after 1 September, the official start of meteorological Fall.  Now it starts in August sometime when you oughta still be swimming in the city pool and stuff like that, probably because they don't want any lawsuits so they have room for "snow days" in the Winter.  When I grew up a snow day meant you got up earlier, shovelled the crap outta the way and went about your business, leaving early because you drive slower, or should.

B. About the Two Names.

Oh yeah, about the two names for the same season thing, so we can clear up all the What's Up With Thats before we get on to the main What's Up With That. Guess what? More Latin. The original name was the Latin autumnus, and the modern languages derived from Latin, like French, all have similar words for it. But English isn't totally Latin derived, the Latin and Greek stuff is an overlay from the French-speaking Normans and their conquest of England in 1066 onto basically a form of German.  In German itself autumn is Der Herbst, which means harvest, and that is what the season was called in English too, Harvest.  It wasn't until the 1500s, when people were tending to live more in towns than in the country, that "harvest" in English became more the activity of harvesting and the season when it happens began to be called Autumn and Fall.

OK we saw the derivation of "autumn" from autumnus but where did this fall thing come from? Because the leaves are falling, and the amount of daylight is falling, and the year is drawing to its close. In the 1600s English colonisation of the Americas was in full swing, and both terms came over, but back in Mother England by the 1700s "fall" fell to "autumn" in usage, and that is why now Autumn is used in both places but Fall in mostly heard in the US.

Sukkoth is the easy part of this Fall stuff. It begins at sunset, the start of the Biblical day, on 15 Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. Expressing this date in the secular calendar, it will be somewhere from late September to mid October.  Ironically, the secular Gregorian calendar is religious in origin, being commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct the drift of the Julian calendar so Easter would happen about when the first one did.  More about calendars in the next post, on Michaelmas.  Remember the Jewish calendar is a lunar one so things move when expressed in our calendar, and, the "day" starts at sundown.  In 2020 Sukkoth started sunset of 2 October.  It was sunset of 23 September in 2018, 4 October in 2017, 16 October in 2016, 27 September in 2015, 8 October in 2014, 18 September in 2013, 30 September in 2012, of 12 October in 2011, and of 22 September in 2010. The date being fixed in the Jewish calendar it will move in the Gregorian one.

God's pretty straight up about what he wants. Speaking of which, let's see what the real God, not the school board, wants regarding observances through the year and what all this stuff in Fall is.

II. Here's What God Wants For A Festival Calendar.

In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.

And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe.  These are the Ten Days of Repentance, from Rosh Hashanah, the so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses.  Then comes Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days.  Then comes the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors resumes (huh, what's up with that; hang on, we'll get to it below, or as we say, vide infra, Latin for "see below", a term once common in the scholarly apparatus -- you know, footnotes and stuff -- of scholarly works and which I for sure would use if I ever resume writing like a PhD).  We're not done yet; then comes Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again, and dancing that often goes on for hours.  LOTS of stuff in the Fall.  Or Autumn.

In some of the other posts, we saw the first festival, Passover, transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Then we saw with the second festival God himself counts the commanded Omer and transforms the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.

Then, for the third festival, what -- the whole thing seems to, uh, fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? And where's the dancing?

Nowhere.

The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all?

No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.

But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?

III. Here's The Christian Sukkoth.

Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgrimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening, as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.

Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.

While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgiving at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, which happen in Fall, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.

Before the Conclusion, a word or two on Eastern Orthodox observance, in which some consider the feast of the Transfiguration takes the place of Sukkot, fruits are blessed to commemorate Peter's suggestion to build three booths, one for Christ, Moses and Elijah each.  Well, in the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration Jesus turns down Peter's suggestion.  No booths.  Instead we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.

Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August, not at all the time of Sukkoth. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.

We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle.

In our times however, 6 August has found two significances that relate to the Transfiguration, one of which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.

6 August is the anniversary of the World Wide Web, when in 1991 the first server with the first browser and the first website went online, at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research; the acronym is from the name in French, it's in suburban Geneva), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (an Englishman!) making his ideas proposed 12 March 1989 a reality.  A reality which allows us to not build booths but go into the Jerusalem, so to speak, of life as never before.

6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.

IV. Conclusion.

At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!