Disasters are often the works of able men who, seeing a problem more clearly than others, try to solve it dramatically, but with the wrong answers. In the twentieth century, we have seen the damage done by such solutions as World War I and the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations, World War II and its treaties, the United Nations, Korea, Vietnam, Keynesianism, and much more. It is not enough to condemn sins and errors: it is necessary to understand what wrong religious premises went into them.
One of the ablest men of history was Innocent III, who in 1198 became pope. He was faced with a serious problem: Europe was nominally Christian, but in reality had relegated Christian faith to a formal and irrelevant position in political and social life. In Frederick II (1194–1250), the Holy Roman emperor, this indifference to the faith was more openly expressed, because Frederick’s power gave him the freedom to do it. Frederick ruled more like a Muslim sultan than a Germanic king. He kept a harem, guarded by eunuchs, a troupe of Muslim dancing girls, and was generally skeptical about religion. Frederick spoke fluently in German, French, Italian, and Arabic, read both Greek and Latin, and was widely read in ancient and current works of scholarship. He moved with an indifference to moral and religious considerations and held to a humanistic perspective.
