TO READ THE PREVIEW SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE PREVIEW SCROLL DOWN
Lothario dei Segni (1160-1216), a theologically trained Italian scholar of royal heritage who later became the most significant pope of the Middle Ages, here presents, relentlessly and passionately, a distinctly platonic work he composed at leisure with the goals illustrating (1) the “miserable entrance” (2) the “guilty progress” and (3) the “damnable exit” upon, through, and from the human condition. This text has never been forgotten and will, no doubt, survive until the End Times that it chillingly describes. (There is a new URL [
https://www.academia.edu/36536128/The_Spirit_of_War] for the fundamental paper, mentioned in the end notes, on the masters of greed, pride, and vanity.)
This translation in vigorous, broad, and systematic strokes shows nonetheless a deeply nuanced understanding of the real life of men and women as it always has been and ever will be until the distinctive Judgment and End for which it is destined. Memorable traces of humor, sangfroid, irony, satire, and pointed rage punctuate the text as summarized here for the modern reader. The writing is a model of organization, wit, and compassion all in one. Readers are advised that a new writing on this page ('The Last Day') repeatedly cites Innocent III and specifically discusses his views on the Last Judgment.
In modern terms, it could be said that the true cause of large-scale non-organic mental distress is the coeval--the neighbor--of the shattered psyche. The sober-minded Hegel (d. 1831) put it another way: THE MAJORITY WILL ALWAYS BE WICKED. Hence, if the majority of all people are behaving either as psychopaths or crypto-psychopaths (willfully immoral rather than congenitally so), then the remaining persons (a plurality) are being subjected not to social inequality (as liberals say) but, rather, to unjust persecution. We are, of course, born unequal with disparate talents and possibilities.
This tends toward being a law-enforcement problem, not a matter of political economy as the deluded materialist and atheist Marx thought, except that the laws are concocted, adjusted, and enforced through MAJORITY RULE (worship of the ballot box), yielding mass futility de jure and in fact---a self-vitiating regime of horror and injustice ("grab-game alley," in Carlyle's trenchant judgment) that leads to forms of mass insanity, neurosis, and epidemics of suicide. This is what Innocent III was describing, which makes him a fairly sane observer of human affairs. (Note: Fair Use and Quotation freely granted to world scholarship.)