Moses Maimonides
Thomas Aquinas
Mondino de Luzzi
Guy de Chauliac
Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Miyamoto Musashi
Louis Pasteur
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
I was the preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. I worked as the Caliphate`s physician and served as a rabbi and philosopher in Spain, Morocco and Egypt. I was also known as Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. My adaptation of Aristotelian thought to Biblical faith deeply impressed later Jewish thinkers.
I was born during the end of the Golden Age of Jewish Culture in Cordoba, Spain, after the first centuries of the Moorish rule. At an early age, I developed an interest in the exact sciences and philosophy. In addition to reading the works of Muslim scholars, I also read those of the Greek philosophers made accessible through Arabic translations. I was not a supporter of mysticism. I voiced opposition to poetry, the best of which I declared as false, since it was founded on pure invention. I was revered for my saintly personality as well as for my writings. I led an unquiet life, and wrote many of my works while traveling or in temporary accommodation. I studied the Torah under my father Maimon, who had in turn studied under Rabbi Joseph ibn Migash, a student of Isaac Alfasi.
I was greatly influenced by Al-Farabi, the renowned Arabian philosopher and jurist born almost 300 years before me. He wrote in the fields of political philosophy, metaphysics, ethics and logic. He was also scientist, cosmologist, mathematician and music scholar. I was also greatly influenced by Avicenna, born in Persia nearly 150 years before me. He was regarded as one of the most significant thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age. Together with the Muslim sage Averroes, I promoted and developed the philosophical tradition of Aristotle. As a result, Averroes and I gained a prominent and controversial influence in the West, where Aristotelian thought had been lost for centuries.
I ended up to be revered for my personality as well as for my writings. I led a busy life, and wrote many of my works while traveling or in temporary accommodation. Although my copious works on Jewish law and ethics were initially met with opposition during my lifetime, after I died, I was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history. Many centuries later, my works and my views were considered a cornerstone of Jewish thought and study.
When the Almohades from Africa conquered Córdoba in 1148, and threatened the Jewish community with the choice of conversion to Islam, death, or exile, my family, along with most other Jews, chose exile. For the next 10 years we moved about in southern Spain, avoiding the conquering Almohades. I was 28 years old, and for the next 2 years, I composed my acclaimed commentary on the Mishnah, or “the study by repetition”. The Mishnah was the first major written redaction of the Jewish oral traditions known as the "Oral Torah". It was also the first major work of Rabbinic literature.
I lived in Fez, Morocco during the early 1160s. This was close to the epicenter of Almohad rule at Marrakesh. I was able to survive there as a Jew by converting to Islam. I reverted back to being a Jew when I arrived in Cairo. Many years later, an Andalusian jurist accused me of this crime of apostasy which was punishable by death. My patron at the Ayyubid court, the vizier al–Qādī al–Fādil, saved me from the charges. When a Muslim convert to Judaism wrote to me with doubts that Islam was idolatrous, I replied that Islam was a pure form of monotheism and consoled him that he was a true son of Abraham. As a young man living in Fez, I wrote a treatise on forced conversion, which another scholar had categorically forbidden, enjoining martyrdom instead. I dismissed this opinion as fallacious and misleading, ordering Jews instead to save their skins by verbally professing the unity of God and Muhammad’s prophecy. Even the Islamic doctrine of “prudent dissimulation” allowed anyone in mortal danger to assume a different faith publicly. I claimed that people used concealment and wore veils and that deep inside the individual lived a private faith, which he treasured with a small circle of secret sharers.
Following this sojourn in Morocco, my family and I briefly lived in the Holy Land, before settling in the old city of Cairo, Egypt where I instructed students from Provence in France bordering Italy, Syria, and Yemen, and attracted visitors from as far away as Baghdad. I shortly thereafter became instrumental in helping rescue Jews taken captive by the Crusaders. I sent 5 letters to the Jewish communities of Lower Egypt requesting them to pool money together to pay the ransom. The money was collected and then given to 2 judges sent to Palestine to negotiate with the Crusaders and the captives were eventually released.
Cairo imposed far less constraint on my life. The philosophical world I inhabited was shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. All faced the same challenge: how to reconcile the revealed scriptures, which claimed that a single deity had created the world, with Aristotle, who argued that the world was eternal. My contribution was to tether that contradiction to the very words of the Hebrew Bible. I discussed how the learned, observant Jew who studied philosophy and was perplexed by the contradictions should deal with passages that offend reason and led to abandonment of faith. Unwilling to accept the notion that religion was irrational, I remained absolutely committed to the proposition that the universe is orderly and governed by laws of a cosmic intelligence. Even if the work in which I expounded those views was accessible only to a privileged few, the problems it addressed were hardly mine alone and they were very similar with the ideas of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd.
I began my political life as a Jew in the entourage of the Shia Fatimid dynasty, but under the patronage of their Sunnī Muslim administrator, who for a time allied himself with the Christian crusaders against the Sunni forces of the Syrian Zengid ruler. Such unpredictable alliances were common. When the Sunnis overthrew the Shia Fatimids and established the Sunni Ayyubid dynasty in 1171 AD, al–Qādī al–Fādil rose to the vizierate. He gathered his protégés in learned dialogue in literary salons. The Sunni poet Ibn Sanā al–Mulk, the Shia jurist Abū 'l–Qāsim alHalabī, and I were included. This, in fact, was my central paradox: the conflicting demands of the worldly and the spiritual.
My skill in practicing medicine landed me in Cairo at the court of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim ruler who ended up conquering Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. As if that did not occupy enough of the time I might have spent on scholarship, I also served as head of the Jewish community of Cairo, the largest and most important congregation of its day, renowned for its high proportion of long–distance traders, religious specialists, government bureaucrats, and other members of the literate elite. I traded in precious and semiprecious stones, gold, spices, pharmaceuticals, perfumes, paper, and books. I held to the unpopular view that scholars should work rather than rely on communal emoluments, declaring, that it is better to strip hides of animal carcasses than to say, ‘I am a great sage, I am a priest, provide me with a living’.
I frequently complained of my lack of time for research. I commuted daily from my residential quarter to the Ayyubid palace in Cairo to attend to the health of the Sultan Saladin and his family, and his high officials. If I managed to return home after midday, I found all the vestibules of my home filled with gentiles, noble and common, judges and magistrates, a mixed multitude, who knew the time of my return, such that I barely managed to eat something light before writing prescriptions all afternoon and evening. The result was that no Jew was able to speak with me or meet with me except on the Sabbath. The yoke of the gentiles was on my neck regarding medical matters, which sapped my strength, and didn't leave me one hour, neither day nor night. But what could I have done, once my reputation reached most countries?
In my medical writings, I described many conditions, including asthma, diabetes, hepatitis, and pneumonia, and I emphasized moderation and a healthy lifestyle. My treatises became influential for generations of physicians. I was knowledgeable about Greek and Arabic medicine, and followed the principles of humorism in the tradition of Galen, a prominent Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire born 1000 years before me. I produced enduring, monumental works of Jewish law and philosophy. I felt squeezed between my worldly and spiritual legacies that I put myself in, but this paradox also animated my philosophical style.
I did not blindly accept authority but used my own observation and experience. I did not seek to explore new ideas but rather chose to interpret works of authorities so that they could become acceptable. In my interactions with patients, I displayed attributes that long after my death were called intercultural awareness and respect for the patient's autonomy.
My family gave their savings to my youngest brother David, a merchant, in the hopes of expanding their wealth. I directed him to procure goods only from Sudan, but after a long arduous trip through the desert, David did not like the goods offered there so he sailed to India in search for wealth. He drowned along the way, losing all the money he took with him and leaving me with his daughter and his widow. On the day I received that terrible news I fell ill and remained in bed for about a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever, and depression, and was almost given up. My brother's death caused me to become sick with grief for the next 8 years. I was 33 when I recovered and appointed the religious leader of the Egyptian Jewish community. I was appointed because of the leadership I displayed during the ransoming of the Crusader captives.
My wife and I had one child, Avraham, who was, as an adult, recognized as a great scholar. When he was 18 years old, he succeeded me as Nagid, the religious leader of the Jewish community, and as the court physician. Throughout his career he defended my writings against all critics. The office of Nagid was held by my family for 4 successive generations.
I was one of the most influential figures in medieval Jewish philosophy. Radical Jewish scholars in the centuries that followed became to be characterized as "Maimonideans" or "anti-Maimonideans." Moderate scholars were eclectics who cherry picked the most favorable aspects and ignored the least favorable from various philosophies. They largely accepted my Aristotelian world-view, but rejected those elements of it which they considered to contradict the religious tradition.
Concerning astrology, I believed that man should believe only what can be supported either by rational proof, by the evidence of the senses, or by trustworthy authority. Having studied astrology, I came to the conclusion that it does not deserve to be described as a science. The supposition that the fate of a man could be dependent upon the constellations was ridiculous in my mind. I argued that such a theory would rob life of purpose, and would make man a slave of destiny.
In my "Guide for the Perplexed", a philosophical work harmonizing and differentiating Aristotle's philosophy and Jewish theology, I explicitly drew a distinction between "true beliefs," which were beliefs about God that produced intellectual perfection, and "necessary beliefs," which were conducive to improving social order. As an example, I used the notion that God becomes "angry" with people who do wrong. In my view, God does not actually become angry with people, as God has no human passions; but it is important for people to believe God does, so that they desist from sinning.
I distinguished 2 kinds of intelligence in man, one material in the sense of being dependent on and influenced by the body and the other immaterial that is independent of the bodily organism. The immaterial intelligence was acquired as the result of the efforts of the soul to attain a correct knowledge of the absolute, pure intelligence of God. I claimed that the knowledge of God was a form of knowledge, which developed in us the immaterial intelligence, and thus conferred on man an immaterial, spiritual nature. This conferred on the soul a perfection in which human happiness consisted and endowed the soul with immortality. One who attained a correct knowledge of God had reached a condition of existence, which rendered him immune from all the accidents of fortune, from all the allurements of sin, and even from death itself.
In my "The Treatise on Resurrection", I referred to those who believed that the world to come involved physically resurrected bodies as being utter fools, and their beliefs as being just as foolish as believing that the creator God is corporeal. At the same time I believed that resurrection was a fundamental truth of Judaism. While those 2 positions could be seen as contradiction, I resolved them with a then unique solution. I claimed that resurrection was not permanent. In my view, God never violated the laws of nature. Rather, divine interaction was by way of angels, whom I regarded to be metaphors for the laws of nature - the principles by which the physical universe operated. Thus, if a unique event actually occurred, even if it was perceived as a miracle, it was not a violation of the world's order. In this view, any dead who were resurrected had to eventually die again.
I composed works of Jewish scholarship, rabbinic law, philosophy, and medical texts. Most of my works were written in Judeo-Arabic. However, the Mishneh Torah was written in Hebrew. I wrote 10 medical works in Arabic. Among the more famous are:
- “Extracts from Galen”, also known as “The Art of Cure” which was an extract of Galen's extensive writings.
- Treatise on hemorrhoids which discussed also digestion and food.
- Treatise on cohabitation which contained recipes as aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs.
- Treatise on asthma which discussed climates and diets and their effect on asthma and emphasized the need for clean air.
- Treatise on poisons and their antidotes which was an early toxicology textbook that remained popular for centuries.
- Regimen of health was a discourse on healthy living and the mind-body connection.
- Discourse on fits which advocated healthy living and the avoidance of overabundance.
- Glossary of drug names which represented a pharmacopeia with 405 paragraphs with the names of drugs in Arabic, Greek, Syrian, Persian, Berber, and Spanish.
One of the central tenets of my philosophy was that it was impossible for the truths arrived at by human intellect to contradict those revealed by God. I held to a theology in which only negative statements toward a description of God may be considered correct. Many of my works were highly controversial and found to be too radical, misunderstood, banned, and even burned.
I died in Egypt when I was 69 years old. Some believed that I was a descendant of King David and took my body to Tiberias and buried me on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus preached his sermon on the mount.
I exerted an important influence on the Scholastic philosophers, especially Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
I my next life I was born to become Italian Dominican friar. I was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist. My influence on Western thought was considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed my ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory. Unlike many currents in the Church of the time, I embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle, whom I called "the Philosopher", and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity. My commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle form an important part of my body of work. Furthermore, I was distinguished for my Eucharistic hymns, which formed a part of the Church's liturgy. I was honored as a saint and regarded as the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. I was considered one of the Catholic Church's greatest theologians and philosophers.
I was considered a theologian and a Scholastic philosopher, but I never considered myself a philosopher. I criticized philosophers, whom I saw as pagans, for always falling short of the true and proper wisdom to be found in Christian revelation. I did however have respect for Aristotle, so much so that I often cited Aristotle simply as "the Philosopher." Much of my work bears upon philosophical topics, and in this sense may be characterized as philosophical. My philosophical thought exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Catholic Church, extending to Western philosophy in general.
I was born in Sicily. My father, a serving knight, was a man of means. My mother belonged to very distinguished noble family. My brother was abbot of one of the first Benedictine monasteries run by a Catholic order of independent monastic communities that observed the Rule of Saint Benedict who lived 700 years before I was born. When I was 5 years old, I began my early education at my brother's abbey but after the military conflict between the Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX spilled into the abbey 9 years later, my mother enrolled me in the university that was recently established by Frederick in Naples. It was here that I was introduced to Aristotle, Averroes and Maimonides, all of whom ended up influencing my theological philosophy.
It was also during my study at Naples that I came under the influence of a Dominican preacher in Naples, who was part of the active effort by the Dominican order to recruit devout followers. The Dominican order, known as the Order of Preachers was formed by Saint Dominic de Guzman in France 9 years before I was born. Members of the order included friars, nuns, active sisters, and secular lay people. The order was founded to preach the Gospel and to oppose heresy. The teaching activity of the order and its scholastic organization placed the preachers in the forefront of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The order is famed for its intellectual tradition, having produced many leading theologians and philosophers, as well as its involvement in the Inquisitions which were just starting and which lasted for 600 years.
I was held prisoner for about one year by my family in our family castles. My house arrest was an attempt to prevent me from joining the Dominican order. I passed my time tutoring my sisters and communicating with members of the Dominican Order. Family members became desperate to dissuade me, but I stubbornly remained determined to join the Dominicans. At one point, my brothers resorted to the measure of hiring 2 prostitutes to seduce me but I drove them away wielding a fire iron. Later that night, 2 angels appeared as I slept and strengthened my determination to remain celibate.
I was 19 years old when my mother, realizing that all of her attempts to dissuade me had failed, sought to save the family's dignity, by arranging for me to escape at night through my window. In her mind, a secret escape from detention was less damaging than an open surrender to the Dominicans. I was sent first to Naples and then to Rome to meet the Master General of the Dominican Order. One year later, I was sent to study at the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Paris.
When I was 40 years old, the newly elected Pope Clement IV summoned me to Rome to serve as papal theologian. This same year I was ordered by the Dominicans to teach at a Roman convent where I taught the full range of philosophical subjects.
My introduction of arguments and concepts from the pagan Aristotle and Muslim Averroes was controversial within the Catholic Church of my day. In response to these perceived evils, I wrote 2 works, one of them being “On the Unity of Intellect, against the Averroists” in which I blasted Averroism as incompatible with Christian doctrine. I dealt with controversial Averroist and Aristotelian beginninglessness of the world. I was deeply disturbed by the spread of Averroism and was angered when I discovered that Averroistic interpretations of Aristotle were being taught to Parisian students.
In 1272, when I was 47, I took leave from the University of Paris when the Dominicans from my home province called upon me to establish a school wherever I liked and staff it as I pleased. I chose to establish the institution in Naples, and moved there to take my post as regent master. I took my time at Naples to work on papers and gave lectures on various topics.
Economy and Politics
I claimed that greed was a sin against God. I contemplated on the economy of Supply and Demand arguing that it was immoral for sellers to raise their prices simply because buyers were in pressing need for a product. My theory of political order became highly influential. I saw man as a social being that lived in a community and interacted with its other members that led to the division of labor.
I thought that monarchy was the best form of government, because a monarch did not have to form compromises with other persons. I claimed that oligarchy where the power rests with a small number of elites degenerated more easily into tyranny than monarchy. To prevent a king from becoming a tyrant, his political powers had to be curbed. Unless an agreement of all persons involved was able to be reached, a tyrant had to be tolerated; otherwise the political situation could deteriorate into anarchy, which would be even worse than tyranny.
The kings were God's representatives in their territories. But the church, represented by the popes, was above the kings in matters of doctrine and morality. As a consequence, the kings and other worldly rulers were obliged to adapt their laws to the Catholic Church’s doctrines and ethics. For example, the worldly authorities had to execute persons whom the church had sentenced to death for heresy and they had to fight and subdue groups of heretics such as the Albigenses and Waldensians to restore the unity of the church.
Following Aristotle beliefs, I justified slavery, on the grounds of natural law. I maintained that a human had an immaterial soul which continued after bodily death. The soul existed separately from the body, and continued after death, in many of the human capacities such as rational thinking.
Faith and Reason
I believed that human beings have the natural capacity to know many things without special divine revelation, even though such revelation occurs from time to time, especially in regard to such truths as pertain to faith. This is the light that is given to man by God according to man's nature. I viewed theology as a science, the raw material data of which consisted of written scripture and the tradition of the Catholic Church. These sources of data were produced by the self-revelation of God to individuals and groups of people throughout history.
Faith and reason, while distinct but related, were the 2 primary tools for processing the data of theology. Both were necessary to obtain true knowledge of God. I blended Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine by suggesting that rational thinking and the study of nature, like revelation, were valid ways to understand truths pertaining to God. I claimed that God revealed himself through nature, so to study nature was to study God. The ultimate goals of theology, in my opinion, were to use reason to grasp the truth about God and to experience salvation through that truth.
I believed that truth was known through faith in the form of super-natural revelation and reason in the form of natural revelation. I claimed that even though one was able to deduce the existence of God and his attributes such as unity, truth, goodness, power, and knowledge through reason, certain specifics could be known only through the special revelation of God through Jesus Christ. Major theological components of Christianity, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and charity were revealed in the teachings of the Church and the Scriptures and could not be deduced any other way.
I claimed that revealed knowledge did not negate the truth and did not negate the completeness of human science as human, but further established them. First, it granted that the same things could be treated from 2 different perspectives without one canceling the other; thus there could be 2 sciences of God. Second, it provided the basis for the 2 sciences. One functioned through the power of the light of natural reason. The other functioned through the light of divine revelation. Sacred doctrine was a fundamentally different kind of thing from theology, which was part of philosophy.
Faith and reason complemented rather than contradicted each other, each giving different views of the same truth. As a Catholic I believed that God was the maker of heaven and earth, of all that was visible and invisible. Like Aristotle, I posited that life could form from non-living material or plant life. Additionally I theorized that various mutated species emerged at the dawn of Creation. I reasoned that those species were generated through mutations in animal sperm, and argued that they were not unintended by nature. Rather, such species were simply not intended for perpetual existence.
Peace and War
Augustine of Hippo centuries before agreed strongly with the conventional wisdom of his time, that Christians should be pacifists philosophically, but that they should use defense as a means of preserving peace in the long run. For example, he routinely argued that pacifism did not prevent the defense of innocents. In essence, the pursuit of peace might require fighting to preserve it in the long-term. Such a war must not be preemptive, but defensive, to restore peace.
Centuries later, I used the authority of Augustine's arguments in an attempt to define the conditions that justified war.
- War had to occur for a good and just purpose rather than the pursuit of wealth or power.
- Just war had to be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state.
- Peace had to be a central motive even in the midst of violence.
Given that war was one of the worst evils suffered by mankind, I reasoned that it ought to be resorted to only when it was necessary to prevent an even greater evil. A diplomatic agreement was preferable, even for the more powerful party, before a war was started. I claimed that wars were justified in self-defense, as long as there was a reasonable possibility of success. If failure was a foregone conclusion, then it was just a wasteful spilling of blood.
War was also justified against a tyrant who was about to attack or to punish a guilty enemy. More violence than was strictly necessary to combat an evil was unjust. If the people opposed a war, then it was illegitimate. The people had a right to depose a government that was waging, or was about to wage, an unjust war. Once war had begun, there remained moral limits to action. For example, one was not allowed to attack innocents or to kill hostages. The belligerents had to exhaust all options for dialogue and negotiation before undertaking a war. War was only legitimate as a last resort. Under this doctrine, expansionist wars, wars of pillage, wars to convert infidels or pagans, and wars for glory were all inherently unjust.
Existence of God
I believed that the existence of God was self-evident in itself, but not to us and that the existence of God could be demonstrated with the following 5 arguments.
- Motion: Some things undoubtedly move, though cannot cause their own motion. Since, as there can be no infinite chain of causes of motion, there must be a First Mover not moved by anything else, and this is what everyone understands by God.
- Causation: As in the case of motion, nothing can cause itself, and an infinite chain of causation is impossible, so there must be a First Cause, called God.
- Existence of necessary and the unnecessary: Our experience includes things certainly existing but apparently unnecessary. Not everything can be unnecessary, for then once there was nothing and there would still be nothing. Therefore, we are compelled to suppose something that exists necessarily, having this necessity only from itself; in fact itself the cause for other things to exist.
- Gradation: If we can notice a gradation in things in the sense that some things are more hot, good, etc., there must be a superlative that is the truest and noblest thing, and so most fully existing. This then, we call God.
- Ordered tendencies of nature: A direction of actions to an end is noticed in all bodies following natural laws. Anything without awareness tends to a goal under the guidance of one who is aware. This we call God.
Concerning the nature of God, I felt the best approach was to consider what God was not. God was not complex, imperfect, finite, changeable or divisible. This led me to propose 5 statements about the divine qualities:
- God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
- God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God's complete actuality.
- God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number.
- God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God's essence and character.
- God is one, without diversification within God's self. The unity of God is such that God's essence is the same as God's existence.
I argued that God, while perfectly united, also was perfectly described by 3 interrelated Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father generated the Son by the relation of self-awareness. This eternal generation then produced an eternal Spirit who enjoyed the divine nature as the Love of God, the Love of the Father for the Son. I claimed that Christ had a real body of the same nature of ours, a true rational soul, and, together with these, a perfect Deity.
Human existence
I identified the goal of human existence as union and eternal fellowship with God. This goal was achieved when a person experienced perfect, unending happiness by seeing the essence of God. The vision occurred after death as a gift from God to those who in life experienced salvation and redemption through Christ. The goal of union with God had implications for the individual's life on earth. An individual's “will” had to be ordered toward right things, such as charity, peace, and holiness. I saw this orientation as also the way to happiness. Indeed, I ordered my treatment of the moral life around the idea of happiness. Those who truly sought to understand and see God necessarily had to love what God loved. Such love required morality and bore fruit in everyday human choices.
Heresy
I belonged to the Dominican Order which began as an order dedicated to the conversion, at first by peaceful means and later by actions that convince. With regard to heretics, 2 points had to be observed: one, on their own side; the other, on the side of the Church.
On their own side there was the sin, whereby they deserved not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death. Wherefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers were forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason was there for heretics, as soon as they were convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death.
On the part of the Church, however, there was mercy, which looked to the conversion of the wanderer, wherefore she condemned not at once, but "after the first and second admonition", as the Apostle directed: after that, if he was yet stubborn, the Church, no longer hoping for his conversion, looked to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivered him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.
Heresy was a capital offense against the secular law of most European countries in the times that I lived and the prisons were usually filled to capacity. Kings and emperors, even those at war with the papacy, listed heresy first among the crimes against the state. Kings claimed power from God according to the Christian faith. In that age of papal claims to universal worldly power, the rulers' power was tangibly and visibly legitimated directly through coronation by the pope.
Simple theft, forgery, fraud, and other such crimes were also capital offenses. My point was that the gravity of this offense, which touched not only the material goods but also the spiritual goods of others, was at least the same as forgery. My suggestion specifically demanded that heretics be handed to a "secular tribunal" rather than to courts run by the church authority. My claim that heretics deserved death was related to my theology, according to which all sinners had no intrinsic right to life. It was clearly stated in the scriptures that the wages of sin was death, but the free gift of God was eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nevertheless, I made it clear that heretics should be executed by the state.
Looking to find a way to reunite the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople and the Catholic Church of Rome, that separated in 1054, in what was called the Great Schism, Pope Gregory X convened the Second Council of Lyon to be held in 1274 and summoned me to attend.
On my way to the Council, riding on a donkey, I struck my head on the branch of a fallen tree and became seriously ill. I was quickly escorted back home to convalesce. After resting for a while, I set out again, but was stopped after falling ill. I was nursed by some monks for several days before I died. I was only 49 years young.
Long after I died, the study of my works was used as a core of the required program of study for those seeking ordination as priests or deacons, as well as for those in religious formation and for other students of the sacred disciplines. 50 years after my death, Pope John XXII, seated in Avignon, pronounced me a saint. About 600 years after that, in 1879, Pope Leo XIII stated that my theology was a definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine. Thus, he directed the clergy to take my teachings as the basis of their theological positions. Leo XIII also decreed that all Catholic seminaries and universities must teach my doctrines, and where I did not speak on a topic, the teachers were urged to teach conclusions that were reconcilable with my thinking. I was declared patron of all Catholic educational establishments.
Mondino de Luzzi (1274–1326)
In my next life I was born in Bologna, Italy and became a physician, anatomist, and professor of surgery. I was often credited as the “restorer of anatomy” because I made contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text.
I made lasting, even if not entirely accurate, contributions to the fields of anatomy and physiology. “Anathomia” the book I wrote that made me famous quickly became a classic text. After my death, I was regarded as a "divine master" to such an extent that anything differing from the descriptions in my book was regarded as anomalous or even monstrous. For 300 years, the statutes of many medical schools required lecturers on anatomy to use “Anathomia” as their textbook.
I was born into the prominent Florentine de Luzzi family. My father and grandfather were both pharmacists in Bologna. My uncle was a professor of Medicine. I studied at the University of Bologna in the College of Medicine and the College of Philosophy and graduated when I was about 18 years old. When I was 32 years old, I was employed as a public lecturer in practical medicine and surgery at the university for 18 years.
Human dissections were carried out by the Greek physicians in the early part of the third century BC. Before and after this time investigators appeared to largely limit themselves to animals. While there was a deep taboo within the Greek culture concerning human dissection, there was a strong push by the government to build Greece into a hub of medical insight. For a time, Roman law forbade dissection and autopsy of the human body, so physicians had to use other cadavers. Galen dissected primates, assuming their anatomy was basically the same as that of humans.
The dissection of human cadavers was a hallmark of the Alexandrian school in Alexandria, Egypt, but declined after the year 200 due to legal and religious bans. Some European countries began legalizing the dissection of executed criminals for educational purposes in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
In 1315, when I was 41 years old, these bans were eventually lifted and formally sanctioned by the Vatican, allowing me to perform the very first public dissection in Bologna in the presence of medical students and other spectators. The subject was a female executed criminal. I was the first to incorporate a systematic study of anatomy and dissection into a medical curriculum.
It was common practice for the professor of anatomy to sit in a large, ornate chair elevated above the dissection proceedings, reading from an anatomical text and providing commentary, while a demonstrator, or surgeon, physically performed the dissection. Additionally, an assistant was present to point out the specific parts of the body that were being examined. My teaching methods were unique because I often performed dissections in person and served the role of demonstrator myself, carefully studying the cadaver and incorporating this personal experience into my text and teaching. My dissection practices were guided by my adherence to a tripartite division of the human body. I theorized that the body was composed of 3 distinct containers:
- skull, which enclosed the “animal members”;
- thorax, which contained "spiritual members" such as the heart and lungs,
- abdomen, which housed "natural members" such as the stomach, intestines and liver.
I utilized the differences between animal, spiritual, and natural members to classify distinct aspects of physiological activity. I also asserted that certain parts of the body were innately superior to others. According to this hierarchical arrangement, the abdomen was dissected first because its organs were the most confused and least noble, followed by the thorax, and finally the head, which contained higher and better organized anatomical structures.
Additionally, I argued that distinct dissection methods should be applied to simple structures such as bones, muscles, nerves, veins, and arteries as compared to more complex composite parts like the eye, ear, liver, and spleen. I also suggested that, when studying the muscles of the limbs, a sun-dried body be used as an alternative to the more laborious practice of dissecting a rapidly decaying cadaver.
My major work, written when I was 42 years old was considered the first example of a modern dissection manual and the first true anatomical text. The earliest edition of the work was printed 150 years after I died when 40 copies were printed. By the 14th century, the practice of anatomy was growing and cadavers were dissected according to the rules outlined in my book that was used as a handbook to guide this process. My book remained the most widely used anatomical text for 250 years because it clearly and concisely provided the important technical indications involved in the dissection process, including the steps involved and the reasoning behind the organization of these procedures. Unlike the other surgeons in my time, I focused specifically on anatomical descriptions rather than engaging in a larger discourse on diseases and surgery in general.
My book “Anathomia” opened with the assertion that human beings were superior to all other creatures because of their intellect, reasoning ability, tool-making abilities, and upright stature; and that because of these noble qualities, man was worthy to be studied. I went on to describe the organs in the order in which they presented themselves during the dissection process. Dissection began with the opening of the abdominal cavity via vertical incision running from the stomach to the pectoral muscles and a horizontal cut above the navel. First, the musculature of the intestinal tract was described in detail, followed by an extensive discussion of the form, function, and position of the stomach.
In my book, I described the stomach as spherical with the stomach wall having an internal lining, which was the seat of sensation, and an external fleshy coat that was involved in digestion. The spleen was thought to secrete black bile into the stomach through imaginary canals. The liver was said to have five lobes, the gallbladder was described as the seat of yellow bile. Though my book only vaguely described the pancreas, the pancreatic duct was discussed in greater detail. I also made new observations regarding the anatomy of the bladder and the enlargement of the uterus during both menstruation and pregnancy.
My description of the human heart, though inaccurate, was fairly detailed. I discussed 3 chambers: the right ventricle, the left ventricle, and a middle ventricle within the septum. The right ventricle was purported to contain a large opening, through which the heart drew blood originating in the liver, as well as the opening of the vena arterialis toward the lung. The left ventricle contained an orifice with 3 valves and the bivalvular opening of the arteria venalis, which allowed the passage of a smoke-like vapor from the lungs.
I described the course of the pulmonary artery from the heart to the lungs and the pulmonary vein from the lungs to the heart. This section of my book also described the pleura covering the lungs and thorax – the cavity containing the heart and lungs. I noted the importance of distinguishing between pulmonary pathologies - including true pleurisy, false pleurisy, and pneumonia.
My descriptions of the larynx housing the vocal chords and epiglottis that prevented food and liquid from entering the trachea going to the lungs were very rudimentary. I described the closure of an incised intestinal wound by having large ants bite on its edges and then cutting off their heads, which was an anticipation of the use of staples in surgery. My book also included a detailed passage on the surgical treatment of a hernia, both with and without castration, as well as a description of a type of cataract surgery.
My treatment of the skull provided only inexact directions for its dissection, suggesting that the cranial cavity was opened infrequently and with little technical skill. Nonetheless, my book contained a description of the cranial nerves derived from Galen's “Uses of the parts of the body of man”. I claimed that the brain was divided into 3 vesicles, with the anterior vesicle serving as the meeting place of the senses, the middle vesicle housing the imagination, and the posterior vesicle containing the memory. Movement of the choroid plexus was said to control mental processes by opening and closing passages between the ventricles. I followed Galen and the Islamic commentators in placing the lens in the center of the eye.
Much of the medical information included in my book was derived from commentaries on Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen written by Islamic scholars. Although I made frequent references to my personal dissection experiences, I nonetheless repeated numerous fallacies reported by these textual authorities. For example, I propagated the incorrect Galenic notion that a miraculous network of blood vessels existed at the base of the human brain when it was in fact present only in ungulates – mammals with hooves. Other errors contained in my book were the result of an attempt to reconcile the teachings of Galen and Aristotle. This is exemplified by my description of the heart. I combined Aristotle's notion of a triventricular heart with Galen's claim that a portion of the blood can flow directly from one side of the heart to the other though a permeable interventricular septum. I also propagated information about the human reproductive system that was not corroborated by anatomical evidence, including the existence of a seven-celled uterus with hornlike appendages.
I died in Bologna when I was 52 years old.
Guy de Chauliac (1300–1368)
In my next life I was born in France and became a physician and surgeon for one more time. I wrote a lengthy and influential treatise on surgery in Latin, titled “Chirurgia Magna”. It was translated into many other languages including Middle English and widely read by physicians in late medieval Europe. I was named "father of Surgery".
I was in born in France, into a family of modest means. I began my study of medicine in Toulouse before going to study in Montpellier, the center for medical knowledge in 14th century Europe. In 1325, when I was 25, I received my Master of Medicine and Surgery degree. Then I went to Bologna to study anatomy where I learned my surgical techniques. My reputation as a physician grew quickly. I was invited to the Papal Court in Avignon, France, to serve as a personal physician to Pope Clement VI. I went on to become personal physician to Pope Innocent VI, and then to Pope Urban V.
When the Black Death arrived in Avignon in 1348, physicians fled the city; however, I stayed treating plague patients and documenting symptoms meticulously. The great death toll in Avignon lasted for 7 months. It was of 2 kinds: the first lasted 2 months; with continuous fever and spitting of blood; and death occurred within 3 days. The second lasted for the whole of the remainder of the time, also with continuous fever, and with ulcers and boils in the extremities, principally under the arm-pits and in the groin; and death took place within 5 days. It was so contagious, especially when there was spitting of blood, that not only through living in the same house but merely through looking, one person caught it from the other. I got infected but survived the disease. Through my observations, I distinguished between the 2 forms of the disease, the Bubonic Plague and the Pneumonic Plague. As a precautionary measure, I advised Pope Clement to keep a fire burning continuously in his chamber and to keep visitors out. The plague was recognized as being contagious although the agent of contagion was unknown. As treatment, I recommended fresh air, bleeding – also known as venesection, and a healthy diet. The outbreak of plague and widespread death was blamed on Jews who were believed to have poisoned wells. I fought against this idea, using science to declare the theory untrue.
My treatise on surgery, “Chirurgia Magna” contained 7 volumes and covered anatomy, bloodletting, cauterization, drugs, anesthetics, wounds, fractures, ulcers, special diseases, and antidotes. Among my treatments, I described the use of bandages and I also believed pus from an infection was beneficial to the healing process. I described surgical techniques such as intubation, tracheotomy, and suturing. I quoted frequently from other medical works, written by contemporaries or those written by earlier physicians and anatomists, as I sought to describe the history of medicine. I claimed that surgery began with Hippocrates and Galen from Greece.
It was developed in the Arab world by Haly Abbas, the Persian physician and psychologist, by Albucasis, the Arab Muslim physician and surgeon, by Al-Razi, the Persian physician, philosopher, chemist and alchemist who invented the distillation of alcohol and its use in medicine, and by Avicenna, the Persian who is regarded as one of the most significant thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age. All 4 lived about 300 years before I was born.
Through my position as papal physician, I had access to Galen's texts, recently translated from the original Greek versions, which were more accurate than the Latin translations. The work became popular and was translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, and Provençal. It was reworked multiple times, including removing references to Islamic scientists, to the point that the work was no longer recognizable as Galen's. I also wrote an essay on astrology, on different types of hernias; and on treatments for cataracts. Galen's influence on me was clearly seen in my belief that surgeons should have a thorough understanding of anatomy. I wrote, "A surgeon who does not know his anatomy is like a blind man carving a log".
I died in Avignon when I was 68 years old.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)
In my next life I was born in Spain in a Basque noble family and became a knight, later a hermit and ended up to become a priest when I was 46 years old. I founded the Society of Jesus also known as the Jesuits. I emerged as a religious leader during the Counter-Reformation. My devotion to the Catholic Church was characterized by absolute obedience to the Pope.
The youngest and the last of 13 children, my mother died soon after my birth. I was brought up by the local blacksmith's wife. I later became a page in the service of a relative who was the treasurer of the kingdom of Castile. As a young aristocrat I had a love of martial exercises and a vainglorious desire for fame. At this period I framed my life around the stories of the adventures of the knights of Camelot, and Roland. Roland was slain by the Basques, just like me.
I joined the army when I was 17 years old. I was vain, strutting about with my cape slinging open to reveal my tight-fitting pants and boots and with my sword and dagger at my waist. I was a fancy dresser, an expert dancer, a womanizer, sensitive to insult, and a rough punkish swordsman who used my privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with my priest brother at carnival time. Upon encountering a Moor who denied the divinity of Jesus, I challenged him to a duel to the death and killed him. He was not the first nor the last person I killed in a duel.
When I was 18 years old, I took up arms for the Duke of Nájera. My diplomacy and leadership qualities made me a noble gentleman servant of the court. This made me very useful to the Duke. Under the Duke's leadership, I participated in many battles without injury.
When I was 30 years old, a cannonball wounded my right leg and fractured the left. I underwent a spiritual conversion while in recovery and was inspired to abandon my previous military life and devote myself to labor for God, following the example of spiritual leaders such as Francis of Assisi.
During this time I read a book “The Life of Christ” that ended up influencing my entire life. The author of the book proposed to the reader that he place himself at the scene of the Gospel story and visualize the crib at the Nativity. I ended up using this Simple Contemplation as the basis of the method that I used in my Spiritual Exercises which became very famous and which helped me become very famous. It was a simple 200-page set of meditations, prayers, and various other mental exercises designed to be carried out over a period of 1 month. It was published in 1548 when I was already 57.
During my period of convalescence, I also read religious texts on the life of Jesus and on the lives of the saints. I became fired with an ambition to lead a life of self-denying labor and to emulate the heroic deeds of Francis of Assisi and other great monastics. I resolved to devote myself to the conversion of non-Christians in the Holy Land. Upon my recovery, I visited the Benedictine monastery where after an overnight vigil; I hung my sword and dagger before an image of the Virgin. I then traveled on foot to Catalonia where I did chores at a local hospital in exchange for lodging. For several months I spent much of my time praying in a cave nearby where I practiced rigorous asceticism, abstaining from worldly pleasures for the purpose of pursuing spiritual goals.
I also began experiencing a series of visions in full daylight while in hospital. These repetitive visions appeared as a form in the air near me and this form gave me much consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful. It had the shape of a serpent and had many things that shone like eyes, but were not eyes. I received much delight and consolation from gazing upon this object, but when the object vanished I became disconsolate. After experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus at a shrine a year later, I began praying for 7 hours a day, often in a nearby cave.
When I was 32 years old, I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land on a path of self-denial and sacrifice. I remained there only 3 weeks as I was not permitted to stay longer. 12 years later, standing before the Pope with my companions, I again proposed sending my companions as emissaries to Jerusalem.
A year later I returned to Barcelona to attend a free public grammar school to prepare myself for entrance to a university. I then went to the University of Madrid where I met some women called before the Inquisition. Although the illuminati of Spain were linked in their zeal and spirituality to the Franciscan reforms, the administrators of the Inquisition had mounting suspicions. These female Franciscan disciples were so zealous that one of them fell senseless, another rolled about on the ground, and the third had convulsions and was shuddering and sweating in anguish. This suspicious activity had taken place while I was preaching without a degree in theology. Because of my "street-corner preaching” were identified with the activities of the illuminati, I was naturally singled out for inspection as one of these visionaries. Fortunately I was later released.
After these adventurous activities, I studied in the University of Paris, where I remained for over 7 years. This was during a period of anti-Protestant turmoil which forced John Calvin to flee France. When I was 43 years old, I graduated with a master's degree. While at the University of Paris, I roomed with Peter Faber, a young man from Savoy in the south of France, and Francis Xavier, a nobleman from the eastern end of the Basque country. We made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. We met one morning in a chapel in Loyola and took upon ourselves the solemn vows of our lifelong work. Only I was a priest. I was the main founder and first Superior General of our group which we called “the Society of Jesus”. It was to be a religious organization of the Catholic Church. Our members were to be known as Jesuits, and served the Pope as missionaries. The Society of Jesus was approved by Pope Paul III. I wrote the Jesuit Constitutions, adopted 2 years before I died. It defined a monarchical organization and stressed absolute self-abnegation and obedience to pope and superiors.
I died at the age of 65 from the Roman Fever, a severe case of malaria that recurred in Rome at different points in history.
53 years after I died, I was beatified by Pope Paul V as a confirmation that I was in heaven. 3 years after that, I was canonized and made into a saint by Pope Gregory XV. 300 years after that, I was declared patron of all spiritual retreats by Pope Pius XI. In addition I became the patron saint of soldiers. I am remembered as a talented spiritual director who was vigorous in opposing the Protestant Reformation and just as vigorous in promoting the following Counter-Reformation. I had a global impact, having been the influence behind numerous Jesuit schools and educational institutions worldwide. Although I became a saint after I died, many of my followers were more like devils while they were alive.
In 1254, Pope Alexander IV established the Office of the Inquisition. The first inquisitors were Dominican priests. Shortly after Pope Paul III sanctioned the Society of Jesus, the Pope gave free reign to the Jesuits to run the Office of Inquisition and inquisitors were granted exceptional powers in carrying out their mandate to root out of all “heretics”. Heretics were either Christians who were caught practicing their rituals not condoned by the church or converted Christians who were suspected of practicing their original religion undercover. As the armed militia of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits invaded foreign lands and burnt all the sacred books of the natives and replaced them by bibles.
The Jesuits were mandated to defeat Protestantism. To achieve this monumental task, they employed ever-adapting methods of pseudo-education, social programs, infiltration, and all wickedness that could possibly be conceived including burning Protestants alive. It did not take long for the 18th Century Catholic nations to get tired of the meddling of the Jesuits into their national affairs. They were so infuriated against the Jesuits that they demanded the Roman Catholic Church abolish them once and for all. Sufficient political pressure was brought to bear on Pope Clement XIII. However, he passed away before he could do anything about it. Many considered his death a case of poisoning, and suspected the Jesuits were responsible.
The Jesuits were not expelled from many nations because of their educational or charity work. The Jesuits became to be known for their deception, spying, infiltration, assassination, and revolution. They worked deep into the political field and plotted through politics throughout the world countries. They came in like lambs and ruled like wolves. When they were expelled like dogs, they returned like eagles. Jesuits eventually became to be the banksters of the Vatican Bank. Pope Francis, a Jesuit was elected in 2013 to be Pope, Bishop of Rome – the very first Jesuit Pope.
Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645)
I was born in Japan and became an expert Japanese swordsman and ronin, a samurai without a master. I became renowned through stories of my excellent and unique double bladed swordsmanship and undefeated record in my 60 duels. I was the founder of the style of swordsmanship where 2 swords are used as if they were one. In my final years, I wrote “The Book of Five Rings”, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that has continued to be studied many hundreds of years after I died.
My father was an accomplished martial artist and master of the sword and the specialized non-bladed weapon called the jutte, the only weapon allowed to be brought into the palace our supreme commander - the Shogun. The jutte was often used in battle paired with a sword. The jutte would neutralize the weapon of the enemy while the sword struck and cut. I became an expert in throwing weapons. I frequently threw my short sword at my opponent. My grand-father was the son of a vassal. My father trained me to use a sword and a jutte. This training did not last for a very long time, as when I was 5 years old, my father was ordered to kill one of his students. The family of that student was displeased, and so my father was forced to move away. Both my father and my uncle educated me in Buddhism and basic skills such as writing and reading. When I was 8 years old, my father died and my uncle took me in and raised me in a temple.
I had a very bad case of eczema in my infancy, and this adversely affected my appearance. I never took a bath because I did not want to be surprised unarmed. I have trained in the way of strategy since my youth, and at the age 13, I fought a duel for the first time and won. I left my home and my village when I was 15. I spent my time traveling and engaging in duels. When I was 16 years old, I defeated a very powerful sword fighter.
A war began between 2 clans and I participated in the attempt to take a castle by assault. When I was 21, I fought duels with several adepts of the sword from famous schools and I never lost. I went to live in Kyoto, the Imperial capital. There I began a series of duels against the Yoshioka School, the foremost of the 8 major schools of martial arts in Kyoto. I used the element of surprise by never arriving to my fights on time. I challenged Yoshioka Seijūrō, master of the Yoshioka School, to a duel. He accepted. I arrived late and that greatly irritated Seijūrō. We faced off, and I struck a single blow that struck Seijūrō on the left shoulder, knocking him out, and crippling his left arm.
He passed on the headship of the school to his equally accomplished brother, Yoshioka Denshichirō, who promptly challenged me for revenge. Denshichirō wielded a staff reinforced with a ball-and-chain attached. I arrived late a second time. I disarmed Denshichirō and defeated him. This second victory outraged the Yoshioka family, whose head was now the 12-year-old Yoshioka Matashichiro. They assembled a force of archers, musketeers and swordsmen, and challenged me to another duel.
For that duel I arrived a few hours early, hid and surprised my opponent by attacking him without warning. I killed Matashichiro, and escaped while being attacked by dozens of my victim's supporters. To escape and fight off my opponents I was forced to draw my second sword and defend myself with a sword in each hand. This was the beginning of my niten'ichi sword style. With the death of Matashichiro, this branch of the Yoshioka School was destroyed. After I left Kyoto, I traveled to a monastery to duel with and learn from the monks there who were widely known as experts with lance weapons. There I settled down and taught the head monk's brother.
I traveled extensively all over Japan in a warrior pilgrimage during which I honed my skills with duels. I often used bokkens as my weapons during duels. Bokkens were wooden swords used for training. I did not want to kill my opponents, but I did not care which weapon my foes used. Such was my self confidence in my mastery.
I fought and killed a practitioner named Shishido Baiken who used a weapon that consists of a sickle with a metal chain having a heavy iron weight at the end. I also defeated Muso Gonnosuke who found an influential staff-wielding school where he developed a stick-fighting technique to counter swords. He was almost able to beat me with it. I fought over 60 duels and was never defeated.
When I turned 27, I began practicing zazen, a discipline to attain insight into the nature of existence. I met Hosokawa Tadaoki; a powerful lord, and became his teacher. One year later, I fought a duel with Sasaki Kojirō, who was known as "The Demon of the Western Provinces" and who wielded a nodachi, a sword nearly a meter long. I came late and unkempt to the appointed place. The duel was short. I killed my opponent with my wooden bokken. My late arrival was controversial. Sasaki's outraged supporters thought it was dishonorable and disrespectful, while my supporters thought it was a fair way to unnerve my opponent. I actually timed the hour of his arrival to match the turning of the tide which carried me to the island and allowed me to carve my weapon out of the boat`s oar. I waited for the sun to get in the right position and after I dodged a blow, Sasaki was blinded by the sun. After his victory, I immediately jumped back in my boat and my flight from Sasaki's vengeful allies was helped by the turning of the tide. I established a fencing school that same year.
When I was 31, I participated in the war between Tokugawa and Toyotomi. The war had broken out because Tokugawa saw the Toyotomi family as a threat to his rule of Japan. During this time, I also taught martial arts specializing in instruction in the art of shuriken-throwing, a traditional concealed weapon that was generally used for throwing, and sometimes stabbing or slashing. They were sharpened hand-held blades made from a variety of everyday items, such as needles, nails and knives, as well as coins, washers, and other flat plates of metal. They were commonly called ninja stars. It was there that I adopted a son.
When I was 35, I defeated Miyake Gunbei and three other adepts in front of the lord of Himeji. He hired me to lay out the organization of the town of Himeji. Around this time, I developed a number of disciples for my book called “Writings on the Sword Technique of the Enmei-ryū” I called my school Enmei-ryū or “circle light school”. The name of the school was derived from the idea of holding the 2 swords up in the light so as to form a circle. The school's central idea was given as training to use the twin swords of the Samurai as effectively as a combination of sword and jutte.
One year later, my adoptive son became a vassal to the Himeji Domain. I then embarked on a new series of travels, winding up in Edo where I became friends with the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan, who was one of the Shogun's advisers. I applied to become a sword master to the Shogun, but as he already had 2 sword masters - one who was also his political advisor, and the other who was the head of the Shogunate's secret police, my application was denied. I left Edo, adopted a second son, and the two of us traveled to Osaka. In 1626, my first adoptive son committed seppuku also known as harakin, a form of an honor ritual suicide by disembowelment, because of the death of his lord. I unsuccessfully attempted to become a vassal to the lord of Owari.
When I was 43, I began to travel again. 7 years later, I settled in Kokura with my son Iori, and later entered the service of the feudal lord daimyo Ogasawara Tadazane taking a major role in the Shimabara Rebellion. I got injured by a thrown rock while scouting in the front line. I stayed with Hosokawa Tadatoshi, daimyo of Kumamoto Castle, who had moved to Kokura to train and paint. While there I engaged in very few duels. One memorable duel was arranged by Lord Ogasawara, in which I defeated a lance specialist. I spent many years studying Buddhism and swordsmanship. I was an accomplished artist, sculptor, and calligrapher and had architectural skills. I made various Zen brush paintings, calligraphy, and sculpted wood and metal. In my book “The Book of Five Rings” I emphasized that a samurai should understand other professions as well as fighting. In that book, I took a very philosophical approach to looking at the "craft of war": There are 5 ways in which men pass through life: as gentlemen, warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants. Throughout my book, I implied that the way of the Warrior, as well as the meaning of a "true strategist" is that of somebody who has made mastery of many art forms different from that of the sword, such as tea drinking, laboring, writing, and painting. Just like what I practiced throughout my life.
When I was 56, I become the special family servant of the Hosokowa lords of Kumamoto. One year later, I wrote a work called "Thirty-five Instructions on Strategy" for Hosokawa Tadatoshi. This work overlapped and formed the basis for the later “The Book of Five Rings”. This was the same year that my third son, Hirao Yoemon, became Master of Arms for the Owari fief.
I claimed that by reading my writings, one could become a true strategist from the abilities and tactical skills that I learned in my lifetime. I argued that strategy and virtue were something that could be earned by knowing the ways of life. I disagreed that one person could gain strategy by being confined to one particular style learned from an expert. I practice many arts and abilities, all without an expert teaching me.
Throughout my book, I explained the principles of strategy. In the first chapter, I compared my concept of strategy to a foreman carpenter. The foreman carpenter knows his tools and men so well that he is able to guide them; delegating who does what based on their abilities, while also being aware of their morale. The foreman carpenter, if he wants the better finished product, will treat his men in such a way as to receive their best work. This illustration begins many more battle-specific lessons in strategy.
I made particular note of artisans and foremen. In the use of building a house, foremen have to employ strategy based upon the skill and ability of their workers. In comparison to warriors and soldiers, I noted the ways in which the artisans thrive through events; the ruin of houses, the splendor of houses, the style of the house, the tradition and name or origins of a house. These too, were similar to the way warriors and soldiers thrived through events; the rise and fall of prefectures, countries and other such events.
I claimed that you learn 1000 things from one thing. Just as a builder may build a large structure from a small one, so too must a strategist learn to see on the large scale of things. I noted that throughout China and Japan, there were many "sword fencers" who walked around claiming they were strategists, but were in fact, not, which is why I defeated them all.
My metaphor for strategy was that of the “bulb and the flower” which was similar to the later Western philosophy of "the chicken or the egg". The "bulb" was the student and the "flower" was the technique. I noted that most schools were mostly concerned with their techniques and its beauty. In that type of strategy, both those teaching and those learning the way were concerned with coloring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower as opposed to the actual harmony between strategy and skill.
With those who were concerned with becoming masters of strategy, I pointed out that as a carpenter becomes better with his tools and is able to craft things with more expert measure, so too can a warrior or strategist become more skilled in his technique. However, just as a carpenter needs to be able to use his tools according to plans, so too must a strategist be able to adapt his style or technique to the required strategy of the battle he is engaged in. This description also drew parallels between the weapons of a soldier and the tools of a carpenter. I implied the idea of "the right tool for the right job" throughout “The Book of Five Rings”. I also claimed that when a carpenter was skilled enough in aspects of his job, and created them with expert measure, then he was able to become a foreman.
I indicated that when one learned the areas in which their craft required, whether they be carpentry, farming, fine art or battle, and was able to apply them to any given situation, one was experienced enough to show others wisdom, as foreman of craftsmen or as a general of an army. The strategy that I referred to did not exclusively reside within the domain of weaponry and duels, but within the realm of war and battles with many men. Just as 1 man could beat 10, so 100 men could beat 1000 and a 1000 could beat 10,000. In my strategy, one man was the same as 10,000, so that strategy was the complete warrior's craft. I opposed using 2 hands to hold one sword because there was no fluidity in movement with 2 hands. If you held a sword with both hands, it was difficult to wield it freely to left and right, so my method was to carry the sword in one hand. I also disagreed with using a sword with 2 hands on a horse and/or riding on unstable terrain, such as muddy swamps, rice fields, or within crowds of people. By training with 2 long swords, one in each hand, one was able to overcome the cumbersome nature of using a sword in both hands. After using 2 long swords proficiently enough, mastery of a long sword, and a "companion sword", most likely a wakizashi, was much increased. You could win with a long weapon, and yet you could also win with a short weapon. It is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size, that was important.
The strategy of the long sword was different from other strategies in that it was much more straightforward. The strategy of the longsword was mastering gripping the sword. It became a platform for using 2 broadswords or using a companion sword better. I suggested gripping the long sword with a rather floating feeling between the thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack, and with the last 2 fingers tight. It was bad to have play in your hands. However, just because the grip was to be light, it did not mean that the attack or slash from the sword would be weak. If you tried to wield the long sword quickly, you would mistake the way. To wield the long sword well, you had to wield it calmly. If you tried to wield it quickly, like a folding fan or a short sword, you would err by using "short sword chopping". You could not cut down a man with a long sword using this method.
As with most disciplines in martial arts, I noted that the movement of the sword after the cut was made must not be superfluous; instead of quickly returning to a stance or position, one should allow the sword to come to the end of its path from the force used. Thus, the technique became free flowing, not abrupt. I discouraged the use of only one sword for fighting and the use of overlarge swords like nodachis, because they were cumbersome and unwieldy.
I separated my religion from my involvement in swordsmanship. There were many ways: Confucianism, Buddhism, the ways of elegance, rice-planting, or dance. When I applied the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer had need for a teacher in any domain. I proved this by creating recognized masterpieces of calligraphy and classic ink painting. My paintings are characterized by skilled use of ink washes and an economy of brush stroke. I accomplished all this without ever having any formal education in these arts.
I suffered attacks of nerve pains foreshadowing my future ill-health. At the age of 59, I retired to a cave as a hermit to write “The Book of Five Rings” that took me 2 years to write. Before I died I finished my book "The Way of Walking Alone". Sensing my impending death, I bequeathed my worldly possessions and gave my manuscript copy of my book to my closest disciple. I was honored to be able commit seppuku. At the moment of my death, I had myself raised up, my belt tightened and my wakizashi, a side inserted sword, put in it. I seated myself with one knee vertically raised, holding the sword with my left hand and a cane in my right hand. And then I died in my cave. I died in this posture, at the age of 62. The principal vassals of Lord Hosokawa and the other officers gathered, and they painstakingly carried out the ceremony. Then they set up a tomb on Mount Iwato on the order of the lord.
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)
I was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for my discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. I became remembered for my remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, and my discoveries have saved countless lives ever since. I reduced mortality from puerperal fever caused by bacterial infection of the female reproductive tract following childbirth or miscarriage. I created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. My medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. I was best known to the general public for my invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization. I was regarded as one of the 3 main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch.
I became to be regarded as the "father of microbiology". I was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. I performed experiments that showed that without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. I demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks nothing ever developed, and in sterilized but open flasks microorganisms could grow. Although I was not the first to propose the germ theory, I developed it and conducted experiments that clearly indicated its correctness and managed to convince most of Europe that it was true. I became to be regarded as one of the “fathers of germ theory”.
I also made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals. Early in my career, my investigation of tartaric acid resulted in the first resolution of what we now call optical isomers. Tartaric acid is a white crystalline organic acid that occurs naturally in many plants, most notably in grapes. The acid itself is added to foods as an antioxidant and to impart its distinctive sour taste. Although I made groundbreaking experiments, my reputation became associated with various controversies. My notebook revealed that I practiced deception to overcome my rivals.
I was born in France. My father was a poor tanner. When I was 9 years old, I entered primary school. I was an average student in my early years, and not particularly academic, as my interests were fishing and sketching. When I was 16 years old, I left for Paris but one year later I became homesick and returned to go to college. After I got my Bachelor of Arts degree, I was appointed teaching assistant and studied science and mathematics. After failing my exams a few times, I persevered and at age 23, I managed to pass and get my Bachelor of Science degree, despite my poor grades in chemistry. One year later I was appointed professor of physics and started my research in crystallography. When I was 25 years old, I submitted 2 theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics. One year after that I became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where I met and courted the daughter of the university's rector. When I was 27 years old, I married her and we ended up having 5 children. Three of them got typhoid and did not survive to adulthood. Their deaths became my motivation for my research into infectious diseases and trying to find a cure for them.
When I was 35 years old, I moved to Paris as the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure where I took control one year later and stayed in control for the next 9 years. I introduced a series of reforms to improve the standard of scientific work there. The examinations became more rigid, which led to better results, greater competition, and increased prestige. Many of my rules were rigid and authoritarian, which led to 2 serious student revolts. During the revolt called "the bean revolt" I decreed that a mutton stew, which students had refused to eat, would be served and eaten every Monday. On another occasion I threatened to expel any student caught smoking. 73 of the 80 students in the school resigned. When I was 40 years old, I was appointed professor of geology, physics, and chemistry and kept those positions for the next 5 years.
Chirality
In my early work as a chemist, I examined the chemical, optical and crystallographic properties of a group of compounds known as tartrates, salts or esters of the tartaric acid. I resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid. A solution of this compound derived from living things specifically wine lees - deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate to the bottom of a vat of wine after fermentation and aging – rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it. The mystery was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.
I was able to show that the optical rotation was related to the shape of the crystals and that the asymmetric internal arrangement of the molecules of the compound was responsible for twisting the light. The tartrates made naturally inside living cells by life were different than the tartrates made inside test-tubes in laboratories. Inside cells the tartrate molecules all had the same structure and were superimposable over each other. The tartrates synthesized in laboratories however were isometric molecules that were non-superimposable mirror images of each other, like human hands were. They came in 2 forms, right handed and left handed molecules. This was the first time anyone had demonstrated molecular chirality - the left/right hand geometric property of some molecules and ions. I provided also the first explanation of isomerism - molecules with the same molecular formulas but with different chemical structures due to the different arrangements of their atoms. I separated the left handed and right handed crystal shapes from each other to form 2 piles of crystals. In solution one form rotated light to the left, the other to the right, while an equal mixture of the two forms canceled each other's effect and, did not rotate the polarization of light. Many regarded this discovery my most profound and most original contributions to science and my greatest scientific discovery, even more profound than my discoveries on fermentation.
Fermentation and Pasturization
I demonstrated that fermentation is caused by the growth of micro-organisms, and the emergent growth of bacteria in nutrient broths is due not to spontaneous generation, but rather to biogenesis which claimed that all life came from life and only life. This all started when the father of one of my students, a local wine manufacturer, asked my advice on the problems of making beetroot alcohol and its souring after long storage. I claimed that just as there is an alcoholic ferment, beer yeast, which is found where sugar is decomposed into alcohol and carbonic acid, so also there is a particular ferment I called lactic yeast, which were actually lactic acid bacteria. They were always present when sugar became lactic acid. I presented my experiment on sour milk. I demonstrated that yeast was responsible for fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar, and that air or oxygen was not required. I also demonstrated that fermentation could also produce lactic acid due to bacterial contamination, which makes wines sour and turns their alcohol into vinegar acid.
My research showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk. With this established, I invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to a temperature between 60 and 100 °C. This killed most bacteria and molds already present within them. When I was 43 years old, I patented this process, to fight the "diseases" of wine. The method became known as pasteurization, and was soon applied to beer and milk. Beverage contamination led me to the idea that micro-organisms infecting animals and humans cause disease. I proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery. Lister's work in turn inspired Joseph Lawrence to develop his own alcohol-based antiseptic, which he named Listerine, in tribute to Lister. When a great numbers of silkworms were mysteriously dying, I worked several years proving that these diseases were caused by a microbe attacking silkworm eggs, and that eliminating the microbe in silkworm nurseries would eradicate the disease. Following my fermentation experiments, I demonstrated that the skin of grapes was the natural source of yeasts, and that sterilized grapes and grape juice never fermented.
Vaccination
My later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens I was trying to infect with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, I discovered I could no longer infect them, even with fresh bacteria; the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease. I later applied this immunization method to anthrax and infected the cattle to build up their immunity. I obtained a patent for making anthrax vaccine by exposing the anthrax bacilli to oxygen to weaken it. This aroused interest in combating other diseases.
The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new. This had been known for a long time for smallpox. Inoculation with smallpox was known to result in far less scarring, and greatly reduced mortality, in comparison with the naturally acquired disease. Edward Jenner had discovered vaccination using cowpox to give cross-immunity to smallpox in 1796. This had generally replaced the use of actual smallpox material in inoculation. The difference between Jenner`s smallpox vaccination and my anthrax or chicken cholera vaccination was that the weakened form of the latter 2 disease organisms had been "generated artificially", so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found. This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases, and I gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of "vaccines", in honor of Jenner's discovery.
I produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue. The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of mine who had been working with a killed vaccine produced by drying the spinal cords of infected rabbits. The vaccine had been tested in 50 dogs before I first used it on a 9-year old boy who was badly mauled by a rabid dog. This was done at some personal risk, since I was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy. After consulting with colleagues, I decided to go ahead with the treatment. 3 months later I examined the boy and found that he was in good health. I was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued. The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. Legal risk was not the only kind I undertook. I was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once drew a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog with the glass tube held between my lips.
Because of my study in germs, I encouraged doctors to sanitize their hands and equipment before surgery. Prior to this, few doctors or their assistants practiced these procedures. I became a French national hero at age 55. I discreetly told my family never to reveal my laboratory notebooks to anyone. My family obeyed and all my documents were held and inherited in secrecy.
I was frequently stricken by strokes since I was 46 years old. When I was 72 years old, I suffered a stroke that severely impaired my health. Failing to fully recover, I died a year later near Paris.
50 years after I died, my grandson and last surviving male descendant donated my papers to the French national library. 50 years after that, in celebration of the 100 anniversary of my death, a historian of science published an analysis of my private notebooks and discovered that I had given several misleading accounts and played deceptions in my most important discoveries. It was seen that in spite of my genius, I was sometimes unfair, combative, arrogant, jealous, inflexible and even dogmatic.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–1967)
I was commonly known as Che. I was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. I was a major figure of the Cuban Revolution. My stylized visage became a ubiquitous counter-cultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.
As a young medical student, I traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease I witnessed. My burgeoning desire to help overturn what I saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted my involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under its President whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified my political ideology. Later, in Mexico City, I met Raul and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Batista.
I soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious 2-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
I was born in Argentina, the eldest of 5 children in an aristocratic Argentine family. I developed an affinity for the poor. Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, I was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy. Despite suffering crippling bouts of acute asthma that were to afflict me throughout my life, I excelled as an athlete. During adolescence and throughout my life, I was passionate about poetry. Our home contained more than 3,000 books, which allowed me to be an enthusiastic reader. My favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology.
In 1948, when I was 21, I entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. My hunger to explore the world led me to intersperse my collegiate pursuits with 2 long introspective journeys that would fundamentally change the way I viewed myself and the contemporary economic conditions in Latin America. The first expedition was a 4,500km solo trip through the rural provinces of northern Argentina on a bicycle on which I installed a small engine. This was followed in the following year by a 9-month, 8,000km continental motorcycle trek through most of South America.
In Chile, I found myself enraged by the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda's copper mine and moved by my overnight encounter in the Atacama Desert with a persecuted communist couple who did not even own a blanket. Additionally, on the way to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, I was struck by the crushing poverty of the remote rural areas, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords. Later on my journey, I was especially impressed by the camaraderie among those living in a leper colony.
The journey took me through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Florida for 20 days before returning home to Buenos Aires. By the end of the trip, I came to view Latin America not as collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. My conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common Latino heritage was a theme that recurred prominently during my later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, I completed my studies and received my medical degree. I came in close contact with poverty, hunger and disease which convinced me that in order to help these people, I needed to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the political arena of armed struggle.
Soon after I got my degree, I set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. I travelled thru the dominion of the United Fruit Company; a journey which convinced me that Company's capitalist system was a terrible one and I swore on an image of the then recently deceased Joseph Stalin, not to rest until these "octopuses have been vanquished". Later that month, I arrived in Guatemala where the President headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the unjust system. To accomplish this, the President had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the government had already taken more than 225,000 acres of uncultivated land. Pleased with the road the nation was heading down, I decided to settle down in Guatemala so as to perfect myself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary.
In Guatemala City, I sought out a Peruvian economist who was well-connected politically as a member of the left-leaning American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. She introduced me to a number of high-level officials in the government. I then established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. During this period, I acquired my famous nickname, due to my frequent use of the Argentine diminutive interjection “che”, a vocative casual speech filler used to call attention or ascertain comprehension, similarly to both “bro” and the Canadian phrase "eh".
In 1954, a shipment of Skoda infantry and light artillery weapons was dispatched from Communist Czechoslovakia for the Government and arrived in Puerto Barrios. As a result, the United States government responded by saturating Guatemala with anti-government propaganda through radio and dropped leaflets, and began bombing raids using unmarked airplanes. The United States also sponsored a force of several hundred Guatemalan refugees and mercenaries to help remove the government. Eventually, CIA led forces established a military junta which rounded up hundreds of suspected communists and executed hundreds of prisoners crushed the previously flourishing labor unions and restoring all of United Fruits previous land holdings.
I joined an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth but frustrated with the group's inaction, I soon returned to medical duties. Following the coup, I again volunteered to fight but my repeated calls to resist were noted by supporters of the coup and I was marked for murder. I sought protection inside the Argentine consulate, where I remained until I received a safe-conduct pass some weeks later and made my way to Mexico.
My conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened. When I arrived in Mexico City, I worked in the allergy section of the General Hospital. In addition I gave lectures on medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and worked as a news photographer for Latina News Agency. I considered going to work as a doctor in Africa and I continued to be deeply troubled by the poverty around me. During this time I renewed my friendship with Cuban exiles whom I had met in Guatemala.
One year later I was introduced to Raúl Castro who subsequently introduced me to his older brother Fidel, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Batista. During a long conversation with Fidel on the night of our first meeting, I concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which I had been searching and before daybreak I had signed up as a member of the July 26 Movement. Despite our contrasting personalities, from this point on I and Fidel began to foster a revolutionary friendship that would change the world, as a result of our coinciding commitment to anti-imperialism.
I considered Batista a U.S. puppet whose strings needed cutting. Although I planned to be the group's combat medic, I participated in the military training with the members of the Movement. The key portion of training involved learning hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. I and the others underwent arduous 15-hour marches over mountains, across rivers, and through the dense undergrowth, learning and perfecting the procedures of ambush and quick retreat. At the end of the course, I was called the best guerrilla of them all by our instructor. I then married in Mexico before embarking on my plan to assist in the liberation of Cuba.
The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via an old, leaky cabin cruiser. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture. Only 22 found each other afterwards. During this initial bloody confrontation I laid down my medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade. During my time living hidden among the poor subsistence farmers of the mountains, I discovered that there were no schools, no electricity, minimal access to healthcare, and more than 40% of the adults were illiterate. As the war continued, I became an integral part of the rebel army and convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience.
I set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, and organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write. Moreover, I established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information. I was promoted by Fidel Castro to commander of a second army column.
As second in command, I was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and I was known to send squads to track those seeking to defect. As a result, I became feared for my brutality and ruthlessness. During the guerrilla campaign, I was also responsible for the sometimes summary execution of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies. Although I maintained a demanding and harsh disposition, I also viewed my role of commander as one of a teacher, entertaining my men during breaks between engagements with readings. I further ensured that my rebel fighters made daily time to teach the uneducated campesinos with who they lived and fought to read and write. I referred to this effort as the battle against ignorance. I was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. Castro remarked that I took too many risks, even having a tendency toward foolhardiness. My behavior in combat even brought admiration from the enemy.
I was instrumental in creating the clandestine radio station which broadcast news to the Cuban people and provided communication between the growing numbers of rebel columns across the island. I had apparently been inspired to create the station by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied radio in Guatemala. To quell the rebellion, Cuban government troops began executing rebel prisoners on the spot, and regularly rounded up, tortured, and shot civilians as a tactic of intimidation. The continued atrocities carried out by Batista's forces led the United States to announce it would stop selling arms to the Cuban government. During this time I became an expert at leading hit-and-run tactics against Batista's army, and then fading back into the countryside before the army could counterattack.
As the war extended, I led a new column of fighters dispatched westward for the final push towards Havana. Traveling by foot, I embarked on a difficult 7-week march only traveling at night to avoid ambush, and often not eating for several days. My task was to cut the island in half by taking Las Villas province. In a matter of days I executed a series of brilliant tactical victories that gave me control of all but the province's capital city of Santa Clara. I then directed my suicide squad in the attack on Santa Clara, which became the final decisive military victory of the revolution. In the 6 weeks leading up to the Battle of Santa Clara there were times when my men were completely surrounded, outgunned, and overrun. My eventual victory despite being outnumbered 10 to 1 was regarded as a remarkable tour de force in modern warfare.
Radio Rebelde broadcast the first reports that my column had taken Santa Clara on New Year's Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the heavily controlled national news media, which had at one stage reported my death during the fighting. Upon learning that his generals were negotiating a separate peace with me, Batista boarded a plane in Havana and fled for the Dominican Republic, along with an amassed fortune of more than $300,000,000. The following day, I entered Havana to take final control of the capital. Fidel Castro took 6 more days to arrive, as he stopped to rally support in several large cities on his way to rolling victoriously into Havana. The final death toll from the 2 years of revolutionary fighting was 2,000 people.
I went to live at a summer villa to recover from a violent asthma attack. While there I started a group that debated and formed the new plans for Cuba's social, political, and economic development. In addition, I began to write my book “Guerrilla Warfare”. The revolutionary government proclaimed me a Cuban citizen by birth in recognition of my role in the triumph. When my wife arrived in Cuba, I told her that I was involved with another woman, and we agreed on a divorce. I remarried a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July movement with whom I had been living the past 2 years.
The first major political crisis arose over what to do with the captured Batista officials who had been responsible for the worst of the repression. During the rebellion against Batista's dictatorship, the general command of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, introduced into the territories under its control the 19th century penal law. This law included the death penalty for serious crimes, whether perpetrated by the Batista regime or by supporters of the revolution. The revolutionary government extended its application to the whole of the republic and to those it considered war criminals, captured and tried after the revolution. According to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, this latter extension was supported by the majority of the population, and followed the same procedure as those in the Nuremberg trials held by the Allies after WWII.
To implement a portion of this plan, Castro named me commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a 5-month tenure. I was charged with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting revolutionary justice against those considered to be traitors, informants or war criminals. I reviewed the appeals of those convicted during the revolutionary tribunal process. The tribunals were conducted by 2 or 3 army officers, an assessor, and a respected local citizen. On some occasions the penalty delivered by the tribunal was death by firing squad. It was argued that the death penalty was justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands. The Cuban public was in a lynching mood. With thousands of Cubans estimated to have been killed at the hands of Batista's collaborators, and many of the war criminals sentenced to death accused of torture and physical atrocities, the newly empowered government carried out executions. Several hundred people were executed nationwide during this time. I had become a hardened man, who had no qualms about the death penalty or summary and collective trials. I felt that the only way to defend the revolution was to execute its enemies and I was not swayed by humanitarian or political arguments.
Along with ensuring revolutionary justice, the other key early platform of mine was establishing agrarian land reform. Almost immediately after the success of the revolution, I made one of my most significant speeches where I talked about the social ideas of the rebel army. During this speech, I declared that the main concern of the new Cuban government was the social justice that land redistribution brings about. A few months later, my Agrarian Reform Law went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to 400 hectares or about a parcel of land 1.5km wide x 1km long. 1 hectare is about the size of half a football field, or a parcel about 80m long x 20m wide. Any holdings over these limits were expropriated by the government and either redistributed to peasants in 500m x 200m parcels or held as state run communes. The law also stipulated that sugar plantations could not be owned by foreigners.
Castro sent me out on a 3-month worldwide tour. Sending me away from Havana allowed Castro to appear to be distancing himself from me and my Marxist sympathies, which troubled both the United States and some of Castro's July 26 Movement members. While in Jakarta, I visited Indonesian president Sukarno to discuss the recent revolution in Indonesia and to establish trade relations between our 2 nations. We quickly bonded, as Sukarno was attracted to my energy and my relaxed informal approach. Moreover we shared revolutionary leftist aspirations against western imperialism. I next spent 12 days in Japan participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During the visit, I refused to visit and lay a wreath at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating soldiers lost during WWII, remarking that the Japanese imperialists had killed millions of Asians. In its place, I stated that I would instead visit Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb 14 years earlier.
Upon my return to Cuba, it was evident that Castro now had more political power. The government had begun land seizures included in the agrarian reform law, but was hedging on compensation offers to landowners, instead offering low interest bonds. At this point the affected wealthy cattlemen mounted a campaign against the land redistribution and denounced the "Communist encroachment". During this time the Dominican Republic dictator was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean" which was training in his country. This multi-national force, composed mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and right-wing mercenaries plotting to topple Castro's new regime.
Such threats were heightened when, in 1960, 2 massive explosions ripped through a French freighter docked in Havana Harbor. The blasts killed at least 76 people and injured several hundred. I personally provided first aid to some of the victims. Fidel Castro immediately accused the CIA of "an act of terrorism". It was at the memorial service that the famous photograph of me called “Guerrillero Heroico” was taken. These perceived threats prompted Castro to further eliminate "counter-revolutionaries", and to utilize me to drastically increase the speed of land reform. To implement this plan, a new government agency, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), was established to administer the new Agrarian Reform law. INRA quickly became the most important governing body in the nation, with me serving as its head in my capacity as minister of industries. Under my command, INRA established its own 100,000 person militia, used first to help the government seize control of the expropriated land and supervise its distribution, and later to set up cooperative farms. The land confiscated included about 200,000 hectares owned by United States corporations. Months later, as retaliation, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sharply reduced imports of Cuba's main cash crop, sugar.
Along with land reform, one of the primary areas that I stressed needed national improvement was in the area of literacy. Before 1959, the official literacy rate for Cuba was around 75%, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factors. As a result, the Cuban government mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades", who were then sent out into the countryside to construct schools, train new educators, and teach the predominantly illiterate peasants to read and write. Unlike many of my later economic initiatives, this campaign was a remarkable success. By the completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, over 700,00 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96%. Accompanying literacy, I was also concerned with establishing universal access to higher education. To accomplish this, the new regime introduced affirmative action to the universities. While announcing this new commitment, I told the gathered faculty and students that the days when education was a privilege of the white middle class had ended.
I stated that the merit of Marx was that he suddenly produced a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interpreted history, understood its dynamic and predicted the future. He expressed a revolutionary concept that the world must be transformed. Man ceased to be the slave and tool of his environment and converted himself into the architect of his own destiny. When enacting and advocating Cuban policy, I cited the political philosopher Karl Marx as my ideological inspiration. In defending my political stance, I confidently remarked that there were truths so evident, so much a part of people's knowledge, that it was useless to discuss them. One ought to be Marxist with the same naturalness with which one is 'Newtonian' in physics or “Pasteurian” in biology. According to me the practical revolutionaries of the Cuban Revolution had the goal of simply fulfilling laws foreseen by Marx, the scientist. I professed that the laws of Marxism were present in the events of the Cuban Revolution, independently of what its leaders professed or fully knew of those laws from a theoretical point of view. I stated that man truly achieved his full human condition when he produced without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.
At this stage, I was appointed Finance Minister, as well as President of the National Bank. Combined with my existing position as Minister of Industries, I reached the zenith of my power, as the "virtual czar" of the Cuban economy. As a consequence of my position at the head of the central bank, it was now my duty to sign the Cuban currency, which per custom would bear my signature. Instead of using my full name, I signed the bills solely "Che". It was through this symbolic act, which horrified many in the Cuban financial sector, that I signaled my distaste for money and the class distinctions it brought about. A longtime friend of mine later remarked that the day I signed “Che” on the bills, I literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money was sacred.
In an effort to eliminate social inequalities, I and Cuba's new leadership had moved to swiftly transform the political and economic base of the country through nationalizing factories, banks, and businesses, while attempting to ensure affordable housing, healthcare, and employment for all Cubans. In order for a genuine transformation of consciousness to take root, I believed that such structural changes would have to be accompanied by a conversion in people's social relations and values. Believing that the attitudes in Cuba towards race, women, individualism, and manual labor were the product of the island's outdated past, I urged all individuals to view each other as equals and take on the values of what I termed the "New Man". I hoped "new man" would ultimately be selfless and cooperative, obedient and hard-working, gender-blind, incorruptible, non-materialistic, and anti-imperialist. To accomplish this, I emphasized the tenets of Marxism–Leninism, and wanted to use the state to emphasize qualities such as egalitarianism and self-sacrifice.
At the same time, unity, equality, and freedom became the new maxims. My first desired economic goal of new man, which coincided with my aversion for concentration of wealth and economic inequality, was to see a nationwide elimination of material incentives in favor of moral ones. I viewed capitalism as a contest among wolves where one can only win at the cost of others. I stressed that a socialist economy in itself was not worth the effort, sacrifice, and risks of war and destruction if it ended up encouraging greed and individual ambition at the expense of collective spirit. A primary goal of mine thus became to reform individual consciousness and values to produce better workers and citizens. In his view, Cuba's new man would be able to overcome the egotism and selfishness that I loathed and discerned was uniquely characteristic of individuals in capitalist societies.
To promote this concept, the government also created a series of party-dominated institutions and mechanisms on all levels of society, which included organizations such as labor groups, youth leagues, women's groups, community centers, and houses of culture to promote state-sponsored art, music, and literature. In congruence with this, all educational, mass media, and artistic community based facilities were nationalized and utilized to instill the government's official socialist ideology. In describing this new method of development, I stated that there was a great difference between free-enterprise development and revolutionary development. In one of them, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few, the friends of the government, the best wheeler-dealers. In the other, wealth was the people's patrimony.
I believed that an integral part of fostering a sense of unity between the individual and the masses was volunteer work and will. To display this, I led by example, working endlessly at my ministry job, in construction, and even cutting sugar cane on my day off. I was known for working 36 hours at a stretch, calling meetings after midnight, and eating on the run. Such behavior was emblematic of my new program of moral incentives, where each worker was now required to meet a quota and produce a certain quantity of goods. As a replacement for the pay increases abolished by me, workers who exceeded their quota only received a certificate of commendation, while workers who failed to meet their quotas were given a pay cut. I unapologetically defended my personal philosophy towards motivation and work, stating that this was not a matter of how many pounds of meat one might be able to eat, or how many times a year someone could go to the beach, or how many ornaments from abroad one might be able to buy with their current salary. What really mattered was that the individual felt more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility.
In the face of a loss of commercial connections with Western states, I tried to replace them with closer commercial relationships with Eastern Bloc states, visiting a number of Marxist states and signing trade agreements with them. At the end of 1960 I visited Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Hungary and East Germany and signed trade agreement that helped Cuba's economy to a certain degree but also had the disadvantage of a growing economic dependency on the Eastern Bloc.
Whatever the merits or demerits of my economic principles, my programs were unsuccessful. My program of moral incentives for workers caused a rapid drop in productivity and a rapid rise in absenteeism. Decades later, I was accused of being ignorant of the most elementary economic principles. In reference to the collective failings of my vision, I was compared to an early saint taking refuge in the desert as only there could purity of the faith be safeguarded from the corruption of human nature.
In 1961, 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. I did not play a key role in the fighting, as one day before the invasion a warship carrying Marines faked an invasion off the West Coast of Pinar del Río and drew forces I commanded to that region. It was also during this deployment that I suffered a bullet grazing to the cheek when my pistol fell out of its holster and accidentally discharged. However the revolutionaries won because I as the head of the Instruction Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in charge of the militia training program, had done so well in preparing 200,000 men and women for war. During an economic conference of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, I sent a note of "gratitude" to United States President John F. Kennedy. It thanked him for the Bay of Pigs invasion. I wrote that before the invasion, the revolution was shaky. I attacked the United States claim of being a "democracy", stating that such a system was not compatible with financial oligarchy, discrimination against blacks, and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan. I continued, speaking out against the persecution that in my view drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, and sent the Rosenbergs to their deaths against the protests of a shocked world. I ended my remarks by insinuating that the United States was not interested in real reforms, sardonically quipping that U.S. experts never talk about agrarian reform; they prefer a safe subject, like a better water supply. In short, they seem to prepare the revolution of the toilets.
I was practically the architect of the Soviet–Cuban relationship which played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker, I was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. While expounding on the incident later, I reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression" would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims". The missile crisis further convinced me that the world's 2 superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union used Cuba as a pawn in their own global strategies.
In 1964, when I was 36, during my hour-long impassioned address at the UN, I criticized the United Nations' inability to confront the brutal policy of apartheid in South Africa. I then denounced the United States policy towards their black population, stating:
“those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?”
In Algeria, one year later, I made what turned out to be my last public appearance on the international stage when I delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. I specified the moral duty of the socialist countries, accusing them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. I proceeded to outline a number of measures which I said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism. Having criticized the Soviet Union, the primary financial backer of Cuba in such a public manner, I returned to Cuba to a solemn reception by Fidel and Raúl Castro at the Havana airport. As revealed in my last public speech in Algiers, I had come to view the Northern Hemisphere, led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. I strongly supported Communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, and urged the peoples of other developing countries to take up arms and create many Vietnams. My denunciations of the Soviets made me popular among intellectuals and artists of the Western European left who had lost faith in the Soviet Union, while my condemnation of imperialism and call to revolution inspired young radical students in the United States, who were impatient for societal change.
The coincidence of my views with those expounded by the Chinese Communist leadership under Mao Zedong was increasingly problematic for Cuba as the nation's economy became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. Since the early days of the Cuban revolution, I had been considered by many an advocate of Maoist strategy in Latin America and the originator of a plan for the rapid industrialization of Cuba that was often compared to China's "Great Leap Forward".
Castro became weary of my opposition to Soviet conditions and recommendations: measures that Castro saw as necessary, but which I described as corrupt and pre-monopolist. In private, I displayed my growing criticism of the Soviet political economy, believing that the Soviets had forgotten Marx. This led me to denounce a range of Soviet practices including what I saw as their attempt to air-brush the inherent violence of class struggle integral to the transition from capitalism to socialism, their dangerous policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States, their failure to push for a change in consciousness towards the idea of work, and their attempt to liberalize the socialist economy. I wanted the complete elimination of money, interest, commodity production, the market economy, and "mercantile relationships" - all conditions that the Soviets argued would only disappear when world communism was achieved. Disagreeing with this incrementalist approach, I criticized the Soviet Manual of Political Economy, predicting that if USSR would not abolish the law of value as I desired, it would eventually return to capitalism.
2 weeks after my Algiers speech and my return to Cuba, I dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether. My whereabouts were a great mystery in Cuba, as I was generally regarded as second in power to Castro himself. My disappearance was variously attributed to various causes some of which was due to the failure of the Cuban industrialization scheme I had advocated while minister of industries, due to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials disapproving of my pro-Chinese Communist stance on the Sino-Soviet split, and due to the serious differences between myself and the pragmatic Castro regarding Cuba's economic development and ideological line. I reaffirmed my enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but declared my intention to leave Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad. I resigned from all my positions in the Cuban government and communist party, and renounced my honorary Cuban citizenship. I went to Africa to offer my knowledge and experience as a guerrilla fighter to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. I thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and so had enormous revolutionary potential. Egyptian President Nasser, who had fraternal relations with me saw my plan to fight in Congo as unwise and warned that I would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure.
I left Africa rather than fight to the death because the human element failed. The Africans had no will to fight. The leaders were corrupt. In a word ... there was nothing to do. I concluded that it is not possible to liberate a country that does not want to fight for their freedom. Before I returned to Bolivia, I altered my appearance by shaving off my beard and much of my hair, and dying it gray so I would not be recognized. I secretly arrived in La Paz and went to the rural south east region of the country to form my guerrilla army. My first base camp was located in the montane dry forest in a very remote region. Training at the camp in the valley proved to be hazardous, and little was accomplished in way of building a guerrilla army. My guerrilla force, numbering about 50 men and operating as the National Liberation Army of Bolivia was well equipped and scored a number of early successes against Bolivian army regulars in the difficult terrain of the mountainous region during the early months of 1967. As a result of my units' winning several skirmishes against Bolivian troops the Bolivian government began to overestimate the true size of the guerrilla force. But the Bolivian Army managed to eliminate 2 guerrilla groups in a violent battle, reportedly killing one of our leaders.
My plan for fomenting a revolution in Bolivia failed for an array of reasons. I had expected to deal only with the Bolivian military, who were poorly trained and equipped, and was unaware that the United States government had sent a team of the CIA's Special Activities Division commandos and other operatives into Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort. The Bolivian Army was also trained, advised, and supplied by U.S. Army Special Forces, including a recently organized elite battalion of U.S. Rangers trained in jungle warfare that set up camp in La Esperanza, a small settlement close to the location of my guerrillas.
I expected to have assistance and cooperation from the local dissidents that I did not receive, nor did I receive support from Bolivia's Communist Party, oriented toward Moscow rather than Havana. I found them distrustful, disloyal and stupid. I had expected to remain in radio contact with Havana. The 2 shortwave radio transmitters provided to me by Cuba were faulty; thus, we were unable to communicate and be resupplied, leaving us isolated and stranded. In addition, my known preference for confrontation rather than compromise, which had previously surfaced during my guerrilla warfare campaign in Cuba, contributed to my inability to develop successful working relationships with local rebel leaders in Bolivia, just as it had in the Congo. This tendency had existed in Cuba, but had been kept in check by the timely interventions and guidance of Fidel Castro. The end result was that I was unable to attract inhabitants of the local area to join my militia during the 11 months I attempted recruitment. Many of the inhabitants willingly informed the Bolivian authorities and military about the guerrillas and their movements in the area.
An informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of my guerrilla encampment. They encircled the area with 2 battalions numbering 1,800 soldiers and advanced into the ravine triggering a battle where I was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment. I was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village. For the next half day, I refused to be interrogated by Bolivian officers and would only speak to Bolivian soldiers. I was shot through the right calf, my hair was matted with dirt, my clothes were shredded. Despite my haggard appearance, I held my head high, looked everyone straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke. A soldier took pity on me and gave me something to smoke. Later on the night, despite having my hands tied, I kicked a Bolivian army officer against a wall after he tried to snatch my pipe from my mouth as a souvenir while I was still smoking it. In another instance of defiance, I spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral who attempted to question me a few hours before my execution.
The following morning I asked to see the school teacher of the village, a 22-year-old woman. I pointed out to the teacher the poor condition of the schoolhouse, stating that it was anti-pedagogical to expect campesino students to be educated there, while government officials drive Mercedes cars, and told her that that's what we are fighting against. Later that morning the Bolivian President ordered that I be killed. The order was relayed to the unit holding me despite the United States government's desire that I be taken to Panama for further interrogation. The executioner who volunteered to kill me had personally requested to shoot me because 3 of his friends had been killed in an earlier firefight with my band of guerrillas. To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story that the Bolivian government planned to release to the public, my executioner was ordered not to shoot me in the head, but to aim carefully to make it appear that I had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army. The reasons that I was immediately executed were so there would be no possibility for me to escape from prison, and so there would be no drama in regard to a public trial where adverse publicity might happen.
About 30 minutes before I was killed, I was questioned about the whereabouts of other guerrilla fighters who were currently at large, but I remained silent. I was helped to my feet and taken outside the hut and paraded before other Bolivian soldiers where soldiers posed with me for a photo opportunity. A soldier took a photograph of the soldiers standing alongside me. A little later, I was asked by one of the Bolivian soldiers guarding me if I was thinking about my own immortality. "No," I replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." A few minutes later, my executioner entered the hut and I was shot 9 times.
Put on display, as hundreds of local residents filed past the body, my corpse was considered by many to represent a Christ-like visage, with some even surreptitiously clipping locks of my hair as divine relics. Fidel Castro publicly acknowledged that I was dead and proclaimed 3 days of public mourning throughout Cuba. After the public mourning; he addressed a crowd of one million mourners in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución and spoke about my character as a revolutionary. His eulogy to me was:
“If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che ! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in Che's spirit! If we want the model of a man, who does not belong to our times but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, is Che !”.
My paradoxical life is further complicated by my array of seemingly diametrically opposed qualities. A secular humanist and sympathetic practitioner of medicine dedicated to save lives, but who did not hesitate to shoot his enemies. A celebrated internationalist leader who advocated violence to enforce a Utopian philosophy of the collective good. A idealistic intellectual who loved literature but refused to allow dissent. An anti-imperialist Marxist insurgent who was radically willing to forge a poverty-less new world on the apocalyptic ashes of the old one. Fnally, an outspoken anti-capitalist whose image has been commoditized. My history continues to be rewritten and re-imagined.
Various notable individuals have lauded me as a hero. Nelson Mandela referred to me as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom". Jean-Paul Sartre described me as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age". In the black community, Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael eulogized that I was not dead as my ideas continued to live.
I remained both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of my perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives, I have evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements.
A high-contrast monochrome graphic of my face, became a universally merchandised and objectified image, found on an endless array of items, including T-shirts, hats, posters, tattoos, and bikinis, ironically contributing to the consumer culture I despised.
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Dominic de Guzman, Marco Polo, Girolamo Fracastoro, René Laennec, Sigmund Freud, Dr. Joe Ova
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A few short lives of Aphrodite
Dominic de Guzman, Marco Polo, Girolamo Fracastoro, René Laennec, Sigmund Freud, Dr. Joe Ova
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