 Welcome to Tan Academy's World History. I'm Chris Kona, and I'll be your guide as we make this tour throughout world history. As we always begin everything, we'll open with the prayer, and this one is the St. Thomas Aquinas Student Prayer. Let us begin. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. O creator ineffable, who of the riches of thy wisdom didst appoint three hierarchies of angels and didst set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who didst apportion the elements of the world most wisely. Do thou, who art in truth, the fountain of light and wisdom, deigned to shed upon the darkness of my understanding, the rays of thine infinite brightness, and remove far from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, namely sin and ignorance. Do thou, who give its speech to the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue and pour into my lips the grace of thy benediction. Give me keenness of apprehension, capacity for remembering, method in ease and learning, insight and interpretation, and copious eloquence and speech. Instruct my beginning, direct my progress, and set thy seal upon the finished work. Thou, who art true God and true man, who liveth and reigneth, world without end, amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Again, welcome to lesson one of Dan Academy's World History Course. As we go through history, we want to understand that this will be a unique course in that. It will be Christ-centric, because as you go out, along through life, you'll notice that there are many, many different ways to look at history, to interpret history, and believe it or not, there are many, many different ways for people to write history. A funny example of this is Winston Churchill after World War II was asked, Mr. Churchill, how do you think history will actually remember you? And Mr. Churchill said, history will remember me well because I intend to write it myself, and write it he did, this wonderful six-volume set of Churchill's history of the Second World War. But you could imagine that as good a source of history that is, the interpretation of it could be subject to various kinds of arguments, and it could just maybe. I'm not trying to cast a slur on Winston Churchill, but it could be slightly biased. Again, there's other types of history. The great work Gibbons, The Client of Fall, the Roman Empire. Hilar Bellah called this, wig history. From a Catholic perspective, as good a source of information this is, the interpretation he gives to history is one that is borderline anti-Catholic. Therefore, we should read it, we should understand it, but we should also know that it's not Catholic history. Us, as Catholics, are going to be very, very focused on understanding history appropriately and understanding it from the right sources. So on that note, our primary history books will be Christ the King, Lord of History from Tan Books, Wonderful History Court. And as you go through this, you will see it is Christ-centric, but we'll also need some other resources to include the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism in many cases helps us look at certain situations and understand it better from a Catholic perspective. One of the best examples would be war. History is going to be replete with war, and sometimes we know that war is very, very bad, but is it possible, is it even conceivable that sometimes a war could be good? And we will find, and I will argue that, yes, there are cases in history where war as horrible as it could be is necessary and literally a good, something called a just war. Then of course, the last critical text for this course will be the Dewey Reams Catholic Bible. I recommend that many folks have N-A-B-R-E et cetera at home, but the primary biblical source for this course will be the great, great Dewey Reams Bible. So on that note, we understand that history needs to be understood in a certain perspective so that we make the right judgments about what it means because as this slide tends to indicate, what can go wrong if you study history and learn the wrong things from it? Well, one thing that could go wrong with history is to read it and misunderstand what it's trying to tell you, and this comes from this old rabbinical saying is, truth is literally remembering the past. As Catholics, we know that we love truth, we know that God is all truth and that to not remember truth, to not remember the past is literally to turn away from God. So truth is mentally as close as we can get to God to understanding God. Another factor to consider is that if you can't remember what happened in history, as the saying goes, you're doomed to actually repeat it again. History can teach us how to avoid a great, many awful, awful things and we'll show many, many examples of that as we go through our tour of world history. And then as the great Saint Jerome said, ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ. In the same light, ignorance of human history is literally not understanding God as fully as we could. These are critical things to understand and critical reasons why we will look at history through a certain lens, through a very Christian church-centered lens. So history begins arguably with the first two people, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As the catechism tells us, the first man was not only created good, but was also established in friendship with his Creator. The church teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original state of holiness and justice. This grace of original holiness was to share in divine life. This is the beginning of history. Adam and Eve are created by God enjoying close concert with God. They're in divine union with God in the Garden of Eden. They are meant to stay that way and to live that way forever. So something happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve succumbed to their pride and chose out of free will to turn away from God. This moment marks the beginning, if you will, of human history because Adam and Eve are no longer in divine union with God. They are now cast out of the Garden of Eden. In fact, God puts an angel with a flaming sword to guard the entrance of the Garden of Eden so that Adam and Eve can never go back in. At this point, history truly starts. So the account of the Fallen Genesis affirms that this event actually took place and it is the beginning of the history of mankind. And so starts our real study of history. So the consequences of Adam and Eve's Fall are manyfold, but primarily the ones we're gonna look at are the loss of holiness and harmony with God resulting in all the problems we see in the world today and we'll explain a great deal of human history as we go forward. In Genesis, God curses the serpent and he puts enmity between the serpent and primarily Eve. And of course, later on in human history, we'll see where that becomes very prophetic and very impactful and we'll see the impact that that will have on history. For Eve, God said, I will multiply thy sorrows and in sorrow shall thou bring forth children and you shall be under your husband's power. You can imagine Eve in the original state got along well with God and her husband tended not to be abusive. They were in a perfect state of communion with God at the time, but now Eve is going to suffer under her husband and even suffer pain during childbirth all because of original sin. Now for Adam, curse it is the earth in thy work. In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread. The primary curse for man is that he will now have to get up Monday morning at eight o'clock and go to work and through his sweat, his toil and his suffering, he will work just to get a baloney sandwich. This is the flat out impact of original sin is that you cannot just walk out to the garden, eat a nice piece of fruit and then go put your feet up and take a nap. Man is now cursed to get up and work. Later on the work of the holy family, Joseph and Jesus will rebaptize work so that it is a much more great and grand thing, but originally the actual curse was that you will have to work in toil in the fields just to produce your daily bread. And the last of the curses is that man will return to the ground. Adam and Eve will die. And if you look at this from a certain perspective, this is history. This curse of death as it were is the story that we're gonna be reading over the next 26 lessons. That is history. People are born, people do things and in the end they die. They can die happily at a retirement home or they can die on a battlefield or they can die through industrial accidents or they can die from plagues or they can die from barbarian invaders but this is so critical to the Catholic understanding of human history is encapsulated right here in two and a half pages of Genesis. To understand this is to really understand what history is and what we should expect to see and how to understand it because four pages into the book of Genesis, what do we have in our story of human history? Can you imagine what happens next? Adam and Eve are cast out. The curses are applied but they do manage to go on, have children and then the first significant event after that is a murder and not just any murder. This is historically it tells so much about how the depravity that humans have fallen, that what it means to be separated from God will produce things such as a brother killing his brother over a bowl of porridge, over jealousy, over the way God may favor one over the other or the way that was perceived but the first thing that happens in Genesis is Cain kills his brother Abel and off we go to the races in human history. If you study this picture carefully you can see where the first fruits are here. Cain of course was more of a shepherd, Abel was more of a farmer. There's many, many interpretations of why God was trying to say, am I favoring the advance of human history so that farming will be the future versus am I saying we should walk away and leave shepherds and we should leave a certain lifestyle and move on because historically Abel is the one who goes forward and really kind of sets the tone for human history in that we have moved away from shepherds, nomadic lifestyles and now we are firmly, all of humanity practically, firmly rooted in a culture where we are rooted, we are not wandering nomads like we were thousands of years ago, we are now more like Cain than we are like Abel. And of course to understand the arc of human history from Cain's slaying Abel we are going to know that eventually we get to something called the final judgment in that sense that we know where we are in history but we do not know when this comes. In fact, the disciples did ask Christ when will this event happen? And he replied, not even I know that only the father in heaven knows that. And of course history is replete with folks who are always trying to guess when this event's going to happen. It's a funny thing to study is the history of the people who always get this prediction wrong. This is the classic, the end of the world's coming, let's prepare. And I think what this definitely should tell us is that it's a fool's hour and to try and predict when this event is going to happen exactly. It's more fruitful and productive is to understand history as it is and to live and thrive in the world we do have and not spend all day trying to predict the end of the world, fruitless exercise. So history begins, murder begins, crime begins and now we're trying to look more critically at what happens next. We don't have a definitive timeline from when Cain's slay Abel to say the beginning of Egyptian culture to try and understand this before the written word was there is very difficult. We do have incredible amounts of archeological evidence that helps us understand this timeline better. But again, it is not true history yet in that it's the written word does not exist. So we can roughly say that sometime after Cain and Abel roughly about 3000 BC, something happens called the Bronze Age somewhere in the Middle East, man figures out a way to actually combine metals in heat and produce a superior metal. And this superior metal is going to lead to incredible weapons developments, incredible utensils and kitchens and people are gonna be able to cook food more thoroughly, die of disease less. So the Bronze Age itself leads to an incredible improvement in the human condition and that it is how we know we archeologists can go to sites around the world, uncover some dirt and radio date, carbon 14 date, the age of that carbon in the Bronze and say this happened in 2500 BC. There was a man sitting here with a fire and we know precisely, if you will, how it happened and where it happened and when it happened. Slowly though, things continue along and early writing begins to appear. As Chesterton, the great English author said that early writing was arguably more of an accounting system than it was love poetry. You can imagine that as cultures begin to build, kings, guys in charge of a region are now saying, you must pay me two sheep so that I can feed the army and keep everyone protected. Well, this accounting needed to be kept concisely and that Chesterton's point is that original writing was basically the king saying, Joe owes me two sheep. Sam just paid me a bushel of wheat. So literally the beginning of language is, hate to say it, an accounting system for governments keeps track of who paid what and who owes what. But from that, that system of keeping track of what happened in the past, again, back to our point, what is truth? Truth is just remembering the past. The early writing was literally trying to remember the past and that's how basically written language first appeared. Slowly over time, these smaller communities in various places, some just go along as they were, very small groups, no real impact on history. And that brings us to the great river cultures which we'll study in depth in the next lesson. But it also brings us to the point where these great cultures can begin to create religions, a way to recognize the obvious fact that God exists, that God is there, and that we are desperately want to try and understand him such that the early pagan cultures were not so much evil or rejecting God, but they are the first examples of man in his infant cultures trying to better understand God. And of course, divine revelation will show us later that what they were groping for, what they always wanted to do was to see Christ that came more clearly. And that's where this course will take us. So in the next lesson, we'll be looking at these great river cultures in addition to looking at the beginning of Judeo-Christian thought. We will be looking at Abraham, Moses, and King David in much, much greater detail to understand the roots of our Catholic faith. Again, thank you very much for joining us. I look forward to seeing you in lesson two.