Recently I looked up the term “airship” to make sure that I was using it correctly and came across the Wikipedia page for Francesco Lana de Terzi, a Jesuit priest who came up with an airship design based on copper spheres evacuated of air in 1670. This concept later came to be known as a vacuum airship, now known to be physically implausible on Earth, but possibly useful on planets with lower air pressure.
Lana de Terzi’s vacuum airship. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Lana de Terzi’s prescience was remarkable, both in his recognition of buoyancy as a mechanism for flight and his consideration of the consequences of such an invention:
…God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against his surprise, as the ships at any time could be maneuvered over its public squares and houses? Fortresses and cities could thus be destroyed, with the certainty that the aerial ship could come to no harm, as iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height.
In this quote, Lana de Terzi predicts the future of warfare with amazing clarity — while also assuming that God would prevent its occurrence. I wonder what he would think if he were brought forward in time to witness the World Wars.
I recently read Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, and while researching a quote from it, I found this page. It has a lot of interesting quotes, but what really caught my interest was this response from the author of the page to a quote criticizing the sedentary lifestyle of Austen’s characters: “It is true that none of them traveled outside of England, but then there were those inconveniences thrown up by the French Army and the Irish patriots.” Until I read this, I hadn’t seriously considered that Austen — and, accordingly, her characters — lived in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, nor could I recall a specific mention of the wars in either of the other Austen novels I’ve read.
(Some spoilers for Persuasion follow.)
Persuasion, as it turns out, is quite explicit in its references to the war with France, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the fact that it was written after the conclusion of the war. One of its primary characters, Captain Wentworth, has this to say on his service in the British Navy:
“I had the good luck, in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted… a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for [my poor old ship] Asp, in half the time; our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition. Four-and-twenty hours more, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers”
Admiral Croft has a comparatively understated view of the dangers of the war, and says this to his seafaring wife in response to Captain Wentworth’s insistence that “women and children have no right to be comfortable on board” a ship:
“Ah! my dear,” said the Admiral, “when he had got a wife, he will sing a different tune. When he is married, if we have the good luck to live to another war, we shall see him do as you and I, and a great many others, have done.”
(Emphasis mine.)
It’s funny that both of these naval officers reference the “good luck” of having to fight a continental power! Captain Wentworth does so with, to borrow a phrase used elsewhere in the novel, a “playful solemnity” that makes it hard to tell how serious he’s being; the Admiral, who is presumably sheltered from unsupported contact with the enemy, appears to be serious.
A darker cast on war appears in the final lines of the novel. Having married a naval officer, Anne Elliot, the protagonist, has to contend with the specter of war:
His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish [the tenderness of her marriage] less, the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.
The only really sincere view of war in the novel remains unspoken.
If you want, you can find out what men have said about Jane Austen here. If you’d rather find out what Jane Austen said about the Napoleonic Wars, you can read Persuasion online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.
I looked up the Bahá’í Faith after reading an irreverent Clickhole article that ranks it as the second best world religion (quote: “Couldn’t quite clinch the number-one spot, but second place is nothing to be ashamed of.”)
Reading about the Bahá’í Faith, I wondered if it was a relative of or derivative of another Iranian religion, Manichaeism — but Manichaeism was founded over a millennium earlier and was extinct by the time the Bahá’í Faith was founded.
The similarities between the two religions are striking. Both were syncretic religions that fused and expanded upon the speech and writings of other major religious leaders, and both specifically cite the Buddha and Jesus Christ as alternate incarnations of the same god. Both were persecuted by their rival (and source) religions — Manichaeism by Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Buddhist, and secular leaders, the Bahá’í Faith by Muslim leaders. And both were founded by Iranian men who were ultimately punished for their dissent from the state religion of the time.
Here’s some background on the two religions:
In Islam, God has 99 names. In the Bahá’í Faith, God has a hundredth, true name — Baha. This is the ‘Greatest Name,’ and is shown here inscribed in a Bahá’í place of worship. Image by Sean M. Scully – own work, Public Domain.
The Bahá’í Faith is a religion that was founded in 1862 AD the prophet Bahá’u’lláh, an Iranian exile to Iraq. He was a follower of the Báb Faith, an Abrahamic faith based on Islam, who borrowed from the Báb’s teachings and claimed that he was the latest in a line of manifestations of God. He cited Jesus, the Buddha, and Muhammad as his immediate predecessors in the line of divine reincarnation. The Bahá’í Faith’s intimate relationship to the major religions has allowed it to become a significant minority religion in a number of regions worldwide — including South Carolina, where followers of the faith make up the second largest religious group. In 2007, Foreign Policy Magazine listed it as the world’s second fastest growing religion after Islam. Today, it is estimated that there over 7 million followers of the faith worldwide.
A 14th century depiction of Jesus Christ as he was viewed in Chinese Manichaeism. By unknown artist of Yüen dynasty China [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.Manichaeism was a religion founded by the prophet Mani, an Iranian man who lived from 216 AD to 274 AD in Babylon (in modern day Iraq) during its rule by the Sassanid Empire. Mani claimed that his teachings were a completion of the philosophies of Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus Christ, and that he was the latest in a line of reincarnation including the previous prophets. Manichaean tradition also refers to Mani as a reincarnation of the Hindu figure Krishna — in other words, implying that Mani was an avatar for the Hindu god Vishnu as well as the Abrahamic and Zoroastrian conceptions of god. Manichaeism ultimately spread across Eurasia, gaining significant followings from China to the Roman Empire. It was largely wiped out in the West by Christian opposition. In the Roman Empire, the Emperor Theodosius I sentenced all Manichaean monks to death in 382 AD and converted the Empire to Christianity in 391 AD. Mani himself is believed to have been executed by a Zoroastrian emperor. In the East, it was attacked by secular leaders who also opposed Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions, and by the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was extinct.
Why did Iran produce, on two occasions over a millennium apart, religious leaders with such similar revelations? Iran has always been in a unique position in terms of religion. In its ancient imperial periods, Iran was officially Zoroastrian, but it controlled areas with high populations of polytheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and other religions. Greeks, Arabs, Israelites, Hindu Indians, and many other groups coexisted under the Achaemenid and Sassanid Empires. As such, religious tolerance and syncretism were sometimes a necessity for ancient Iranian leaders.
When the Rashidun Caliphate, the first Islamic caliphate, came to prominence and captured Iran, there was resistance from the predominantly Zoroastrian Iranian community — in 644 AD, an Iranian slave assassinated the sitting caliph of the caliphate. Over the following centuries, Iran remained under Islamic control, and it ultimately became one of the leading regions in Islamic theology and philosophy. But it retained elements of Zoroastrianism and independence from the Arabic world. Today, Iranians still celebrate Nowruz, the Zoroastrian new year celebration, and some even speak resentfully of the “Two Centuries of Silence” that followed the Islamic conquest of Iran.
Like Mani, Bahá’u’lláh lived under a theocratic government that nonetheless ruled over people of various religions. By the 19th century, Islam had had extensive cross-cultural exchanges with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, among others. Iran in particular had cultural ties with the Mughal Empire in India, which came into close contact with Buddhism and Hinduism. Bahá’u’lláh and Mani may have attempted, in a similar manner, to unite the ideology of their leaders with their personal ideologies and their respect for the religions of imperial subjects.
Iran has been on both sides of imperial acquisition, and has a rich, complex history of religion as a result. Phenomena like this can be found in many regions of the world: in China, where Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism historically coexisted with folk religions, various Buddhist sects, quasi-religious forms of Confucianism, and even Christian cults arose from the local environment. Along the Swahili Coast, traditional aspects of Bantu religions became associated with Islamic and Christian practices after, respectively, the medieval Indian Ocean trade period and 19th century colonialism. Yet the convergence of religious ideas between Mani and Bahá’u’lláh remains remarkable for the parallel between their reinterpretations of Christian and Buddhist ideology in the context of the ruling religions of their respective times.
Note: I use the phrase ‘the Buddha’ several times here, despite the fact that ‘Buddha’ is often used by Buddhists to refer to various figures who have achieved enlightenment. Both Mani and Bahá’u’lláh borrowed specifically from Gautama Buddha, but may have been influenced by other forms of Buddhism.
