In CERC
Modernity developed
only in the West — in Europe and North America. Nowhere else did science
and democracy arise; nowhere else was slavery outlawed. The question is,
Why? The answer — at least the most important answer to that question —
is Christianity.
The intellectual revolution that took place in
Greece had no impact on most of its neighboring societies — the Persians were
no more interested than were the Egyptians. But Greek philosophy had
profound impact among the Jews. Unlike priests of the religions that
dominated most of the world, from early days Jewish theologians were struck by
the fact that what their scripture said about God was quite compatible with
some aspects of Greek conceptions of a supreme god. In addition, since
they were committed to reasoning about God, the Jews were quick to embrace the
Greek concern for valid reasoning. What emerged was an image of God as
not only eternal and immutable but also as conscious, concerned, and rational.
The early Christians fully accepted this image of God. They also added
and emphasized the proposition that our knowledge of God and of his creation is
progressive. Faith in both reason and progress were essential to
the rise of the West.
Hellenism and Judaism
At present there is bitter and misguided debate
over whether or not Greek thought influenced Jewish theology. On one side
are obvious examples of an extensive intermingling of the two traditions.
On the other side are a host of Jewish scholars who claim that the rabbis who
produced the Talmud had very little knowledge of Greek philosophy and despised
it: "Cursed be the man who would breed swine and cursed be the man
who would teach his son Greek wisdom."
Whatever the Talmudic rabbis did or didn't know
about Greek philosophy seems irrelevant. Their writings did not begin
until the third century AD, and it is certain that in earlier times there was
extensive Hellenic influence on Jewish life and theology. As the
twentieth-century historian Morton Smith put it, "The Hellenization
extended even to the basic structure of Rabbinic thought." It was
this Hellenized Judaism that influenced early Christian theologians; they had
virtually no contact with the Talmudic rabbis, nor any interest in their
teachings.
It is important to realize that as early as 200
BC, most Jews lived not in Palestine but in Roman cities — especially the
cities dominated by Greek culture. These communities are known as the
Jewish Diaspora (literally: dispersion), and they were home to at least six million
Jews, compared with only a million Jews still living in Palestine.
(Several million more Jews lived to the east of Palestine, including a
substantial community in Babylon, but little record of them survives and they
played little or no role in the rise of the West.) The majority of Jews living
in the Hellenized western cities were quite assimilated. Intermarriage
with Gentiles was widespread. Moreover, the Diasporan Jews read, wrote,
spoke, thought, and worshiped in Greek. Of inscriptions found in the Jewish
catacombs in Rome, fewer than 2 percent are in Hebrew or Aramaic, while 74
percent are in Greek and the remainder in Latin. Most of the Diasporan
Jews had Greek names; many of them, Israeli scholar Victor Tcherikover noted,
"did not even hesitate to [adopt] names derived from those of Greek
deities, such as Apollonius." As early as the third century BC the
religious services held in Diasporan synagogues were conducted in Greek, and so
few Diasporan Jews could read Hebrew that it was necessary to translate the
Torah into Greek — the Septuagint.
The Hellenization of the Jews was not limited
to the Diaspora. Beginning with Alexander the Great's conquest of the
Middle East, Palestine came under the control of Ptolemaic (Greek) Egypt.
This soon led to the founding of twenty-nine Greek cities in Palestine — some
of them in Galilee, the two largest of these being Tiberius (on the Sea of
Galilee) and Sepphoris, which was only about four miles from Nazareth. By
early in the second century BC, Jerusalem was so transformed into a Greek city
that it was known as Antioch-at-Jerusalem. According to the eminent
scholar-theologian Sir Henry Chadwick, "Greek influence reached its height
under King Herod (73-04 BC) . . . who built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome
in or near Jerusalem."
In these highly Hellenized social settings it
was inevitable that Greek philosophy would influence religious
perspectives. As Chadwick put it: "As early as Philo, we see
that the current intellectual coin of the more literate classes of society is
this blend of Stoic ethics with Platonic metaphysics and some Aristotelian
logic. Like the form of Greek spoken in the hellenistic world . . . Philo
simply takes it for granted." Thus, the most revered and influential
Jewish leader and writer of the era, Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-AD 50),
attempted to interpret the law "through the mirror of Greek
philosophy," and he described God in ways that Plato would have found
familiar: "the perfectly pure unsullied Mind of the universe,
transcending virtue, transcending knowledge, transcending good itself and the
beautiful itself." According to scholar Erwin R. Goodenough, Philo
"read Plato in terms of Moses, and Moses in terms of Plato, to the point
he was convinced that each said essentially the same things."
But Philo was wrong. Although it is true
that the Jewish conception of God is consistent with some aspects of the
supreme God proposed by Plato, Aristotle, and the other Greek philosophers, the
Jewish God is different in important ways. Like Plato and Aristotle's
God, Yahweh is believed to be perfect, eternal, and immutable. But
he is no remote ideal. He is the loving Creator who is intensely
conscious of humankind. He sees and hears; he communicates; he intervenes.
And it was the fully developed Jewish conception of God, not the remote and
inert God of the Greeks or even the God of Philo, that shaped Christian
theology and underlay the rise of the West.
Early Christianity and Greek Philosophy
From the start, the early Christian fathers
were familiar with Greek philosophy — Paul correctly quoted the Stoic Greek
poet Aratus (ca. 315-240 BC) in his impromptu sermon to local philosophers on
Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:28). In fact, some early and influential
Christian theologians had been trained as philosophers before they converted to
Christianity. And as their conversions testified, the many points of
agreement between the philosophers and Christian theology were widely
acknowledged. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215), who probably was
born in Athens and who studied with several philosophical masters before
converting, wrote:
Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was
necessary to the Greeks for righteousness . . . being a kind of preparatory
training. . . . Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and
primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a
schoolmaster to bring "the Hellenic mind," as the law, the Hebrews,
"to Christ." Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving
the way for him who is perfected in Christ.
Perhaps no early church father held Greek
philosophy in higher regard than did Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165). Justin
was born into a Greek-speaking pagan family in Samaria, was formally trained in
philosophy, and continued to wear his philosopher's cloak even after his
conversion to Christianity in about 130. Eventually he opened a school in
Rome where two future church fathers, Irenaeus and Tatian, may have been his
students. Justin was given the surname "Martyr" for having been
flogged and beheaded during an outbreak of anti-Christian persecution during
the reign of Marcus Aurelius.
Justin held that "the gospel and the best
elements in Plato and the Stoics are almost identical ways of apprehending the
same truth." One reason for this close correspondence, according to
Justin, was that the Greeks depended immensely on Moses — a view ratified by
Philo as well as by Neoplatonist contemporaries of Justin, including Plotinus,
who asked, "What is Plato, but Moses in Attic Greek?" In this sense,
Justin identified the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers as
"Christians before Christ." Of course, he and other early
Christian thinkers were wrong about the early Greeks having learned from Moses,
as Saint Augustine wryly admitted in his City of God. But that
doesn't alter the fact of extensive similarities between Christianity and
Platonism.
Justin gave a second reason for the great
similarity between Christian theology and Greek philosophy: both rested
on the divine gift of reason, which, he said, "has sown the seeds of truth
in all men as beings created in God's image." And since God's
greatest gift to humanity was the power to reason, Christian revelation must be
entirely compatible with "the highest Reason." Consequently,
Justin viewed Jesus as a philosopher as well as the son of God, as the
personification of "right reason."
To Justin, then, Plato was correct when he
conceived of God as outside the universe, timeless, and immutable, and when he
said that humans possessed free will. But Justin, Clement, and other
early Christian writers also pointed out many shortcomings in Greek
philosophy. For example, they denied Greek claims that God was remote and
impersonal, that souls took up life in a new body, and that lesser gods
existed. And where Greek philosophy and Christianity disagreed, according
to Justin, the latter was authoritative, for philosophy was merely human,
whereas Christianity was divine — revelation was the ultimate basis of truth.
One problem early Christian writers identified
was that none of the numerous divinities in the Greek pantheon was adequate to
serve as a conscious creator of a lawful universe, not even Zeus. Like
humans, the Greek gods were subject to the inexorable workings of the natural
cycles of all things. Some Greek scholars, including Aristotle, did posit
a god of infinite scope having charge of the universe, but they conceived of
this god as essentially an impersonal essence, much like the Chinese Tao.
Such a god lent a certain spiritual aura to a cyclical universe and its ideal,
abstract properties, but being an essence, "God" did nothing
and never had.
Even when Plato posited a demiurge — an
inferior god who served as creator of the world, the supreme God being too
remote and spiritual for such an enterprise — this creator paled in contrast
with an omnipotent God who made the universe out of nothing. Moreover,
for Plato the universe had been created in accord not with firm operating
principles but with ideals. These primarily consisted of ideal
shapes. Thus the universe must be a sphere because that is the
symmetrical and perfect shape, and heavenly bodies must rotate in a circle
because that is the motion that is most perfect. As a priori assumptions,
Platonic idealism long impeded discovery: many centuries later,
Copernicus's unshakable belief in ideal shapes prevented him from entertaining
the thought that planetary orbits might be elliptical, not circular.
A second problem in Greek philosophy, according
to early Christian writers, related to the Greek conception of the universe as
not only eternal and uncreated but also locked into endless cycles of progress
and decay. In On the Heavens, Aristotle noted that "the same
ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again," and in his
Politics he pointed out that everything has "been invented several times
over in the course of ages, or rather times without number." Since
he was living in a Golden Age, he concluded, the levels of technology of his
time were at the maximum attainable level, precluding further progress.
As for inventions, so too for individuals — the same persons would be born
again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along.
According to Chrysippus in his now-lost On the Cosmos, the Stoics taught
that the "difference between former and actual existences of the same
people will be only extrinsic and accidental; such differences do not produce
another man as contrasted with his counterpart from a previous
world-age." As for the universe itself, Parmenides held that all
perceptions of change are illusions, for the universe is in a static state of
perfection, "uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable,
and without end." Other influential Greeks, such as the Ionians,
taught that although the universe is infinite and eternal, it also is subject
to endless cycles of succession. Although Plato saw things a bit
differently, he too firmly believed in cycles, that eternal laws caused each
Golden Age to be followed by chaos and collapse.
Finally, the early Christians saw that the
Greeks insisted on turning the cosmos, and inanimate objects more generally,
into living things. Plato taught that the demiurge had created the
cosmos as "a single visible living creature." Hence the world
had a soul, and although "solitary," it was "able by reason of
its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend
but sufficient to itself." The problem with transforming inanimate
objects into living creatures capable of aims, emotions, and desires was that
it short-circuited the search for physical theories. The causes of the
motion of objects, for example, were ascribed to motives, not to natural
forces. According to Aristotle, celestial bodies moved in circles because
of their affection for this action, and objects fell to the ground
"because of their innate love for the centre of the world."
For these reasons, the early Christian fathers
did not fully embrace Greek philosophy. They were content to demonstrate
where it supported Christian doctrines and, where there was disagreement, to
show how much more rational and satisfying were the Christian views. Thus
the primary effect of Greek philosophy on Christianity had far less to do with
doctrines per se than with the commitment of even the earliest Christian
theologians to reason and logic.
The Rational Creator of the Cosmos
Justin Martyr was not alone in stressing the
authority of reason. That has been the most fundamental assumption of
influential Christian theologians from earliest times. From the very
start the church fathers were forced to reason out the implications of Jesus's
teachings, which Jesus did not leave as written scripture. The precedent
for a theology of deduction and inference began with Paul: "For our
knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect."
As Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 225) put it,
"Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the
Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which he
has not willed should be handled and understood by reason." This was
echoed in The Recognitions, which tradition attributed to Clement of
Rome: "Do not think that we say that these things are only to be
received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For
indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason,
since assuredly truth cannot be without reason."
Hence the immensely influential Saint Augustine
(354-430) merely expressed the prevailing wisdom when he held that reason was
indispensable to faith: "Heaven forbid that God should hate in us
that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should
believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even
believe if we did not possess rational souls." Augustine added that
although it was necessary "for faith to precede reason in certain matters
of great moment that cannot yet be grasped, surely the very small portion of
reason that persuades us of this must precede faith."
Augustine devoted all of book 8 in his City
of God to explicating and assessing the bonds between Greek philosophy and
Christianity, placing the primary emphasis on reason as a basis of truth.
He noted that Plato "perfected philosophy" by using reason to prove
the existence of God and to deduce many of his aspects from the many
observations of order in the universe — such as the predictable movements of
the heavenly bodies, the succession of the seasons, and the rise and fall of
the tides.
But Augustine recognized something else
inherent in Plato's commitment to reason: Socrates had surpassed his
predecessors, Plato had advanced knowledge beyond Socrates, and Christianity
was far advanced beyond all the Greeks — clearly philosophy was progressive.
Indeed, some Greek philosophers were inclined to think that history was itself
a progressive phenomenon. Augustine shared that view, stressing that the
general trajectory of history is progressive as knowledge accumulates and
technology improves. Scholars have identified this belief as the idea
of progress.
By this I do not mean that human progress is inevitable,
as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) may have believed, but merely that, at least
in the West, there has been a progressive trend, especially in the sphere of
technology, and in the widespread agreement that things can be and ought to be
made better. Because humans lead their lives "under the spell of
ideas," the idea of progress has marked the path to modernity.
Faith in Progress
A remarkable amount of nonsense has been taught
about the idea of progress. The prolific Cambridge professor J. B. Bury's
1920 book The Idea of Progress dominated opinion for several generations
with the message that belief in progress is a recent development, having
originated during the eighteenth-century era sometimes called the
Enlightenment. This claim is as mistaken as the notion that science
developed despite the barriers religion erected. The truth is that
science arose only because the doctrine of the rational creator of a rational
universe made scientific inquiry plausible. Similarly, the idea of
progress was inherent in Jewish conceptions of history and was central to
Christian thought from very early days.
The Jews believed that history was progressing
toward a golden Messianic Age, when, in the words of the distinguished
historian Marjorie Reeves, "a Holy People was expected to reign in
Palestine in an era of peace, justice, and plenty, in which the earth would
flower in unheard of abundance. . . . The Messianic age is conceived as within
history, not beyond it." Early Christianity fully incorporated
Jewish millenarianism and hence a progressive view of history. There was
another aspect to Christian faith in progress as well: almost without
exception, Christian theologians have assumed that the application of reason
can yield an increasingly more accurate understanding of God's will.
Augustine noted that there were "certain
matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp"
— but "one day," he added, "we shall be able to do
so." Progress in general was inevitable as well, he supposed.
Augustine wrote: "Has not the genius of man invented and applied countless
astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of
exuberant invention, so that this vigour of mind . . . betokens an
inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such
arts. What wonderful — one might say stupefying — advances has human
industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and
navigation!" He likewise celebrated the "skill [that] has been
attained in measures and numbers! With what sagacity have the movements and
connections of the stars been discovered!" Augustine concluded that all of
these advances resulted from the "unspeakable boon" that God
conferred on his creation — a "rational nature."
Many other Christian thinkers echoed
Augustine's optimism about progress. In the thirteenth century Gilbert de
Tournai wrote, "Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what
is already known. . . . Those things that have been written before us are not
laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally
possessed." In 1306 Fra Giordano preached in Florence:
"Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding
them. Every day one could discover a new art." But the most
notable statement came from Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) in the Summa
Theologica, which stands as a monument to the theology of reason and set
the standard for all subsequent Christian theologians. Because humans
could not see into the very essence of things, Aquinas argued, they must reason
their way to knowledge, step by step — using the tools of philosophy, especially
the principles of logic, to construct theology.
For Augustine, Aquinas, and the others, such
views reflected the fundamental Christian premise that God's revelations are
always limited to the capacity of humans at that time to comprehend.
In the fourth century Saint John Chrysostom stated that even the seraphim do
not see God as he is. Instead, they see "a condescension
accommodated to their nature. What is this condescension? It is when God
appears and makes himself known, not as he is, but in the way one incapable of
beholding him is able to look upon him. In this way God reveals himself
proportionately to the weakness of those who behold him."
In addition, with all these thinkers we see the
Christian belief in man's rational nature — what Augustine called that
"unspeakable boon" — and also in God himself as the epitome of
reason.48 Had they seen God as an inexplicable essence, as had the Greek
philosophers, the very idea of rational theology — and, more broadly, of
progress itself — would have been unthinkable.
The twentieth-century classical scholar Moses
I. Finley was quite aware that the European embrace of progress was
"unique in human history." But he seems not to have realized
that the idea of progress is profoundly Christian. The philosopher John
Macmurray put it best when he said, "That we think of progress at all
shows the extent of the influence of Christianity upon us."
The West and the Rest
To this discussion a qualification must be
added: faith in progress was fundamental to western
Christianity. As for Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine East, it
prohibited both clocks and pipe organs from its churches.
Nor was it only the Orthodox Church that did
not embrace the idea of progress. By looking at other major traditions
from the East, we can appreciate the uniqueness of the Western approach.
Consider life under Islam, which arose as a
religion and cultural force several centuries after Christianity did. In
1485 Bayezid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of Islam, outlawed the
printing press. That ban remained in effect throughout the Muslim world
for at least the next three centuries.
The sultan's action represented far more than
the power of tyrants. It reflected Muslim commitment to the idea of
decline in contrast to the idea of progress. In addition to the
Qur'an, Muslims give great authority to a collection of writings known as
Hadith. These consist of sayings attributed to Muhammad and accounts of
his actions. In the first Hadith Muhammad is quoted as saying:
"Time has come full circle back to where it was on the day when first the
heavens and earth were created." The second Hadith quotes the
prophet thus: "The best generation is my generation, then the ones
who follow and then those who follow them." The Palestinian
historian Tarif Khalidi interpreted these passages — which were "both
frequently cited and commented upon" by Muslim scholars — to "suggest
a universe running down, an imminent end to man and all his works."
They also imply the superior virtue of the past. In this context,
prohibiting the printing press was not surprising, for books written by hand —
the standard from the past — would seem inherently better.
Even more important, Islam holds that the
universe is inherently irrational — that there is no cause and effect — because
everything happens as the direct result of Allah's will at that particular
time. Anything is possible. Attempts at science, then, are not only
foolish but also blasphemous, in that they imply limits to Allah's power and
authority. Therefore, Muslim scholars study law (what does Allah
require?), not science.
But what of the "Golden Era" of
Muslim science and learning that flourished while Europe languished in the
"Dark Ages"? Chapter 4 makes it clear that the "Dark Ages"
are a myth. The "Golden Era" of Islamic science and learning is
too. Some Muslim-occupied societies gave the appearance of sophistication
only because of the culture sustained by their subject peoples — Jews and
various brands of Christianity (see chapter 14).
Islam's conception of the universe and its
resulting opposition to reason, science, and philosophical inquiry have had a
profound impact down to the present day. Muslim societies today are
manifestly backward in comparison with those of the West. As Robert
Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, "The Arab
world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; . . .
scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world; . . . Spain
translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the
past thousand years; . . . some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to
believe man has been to the moon; and . . . some Muslim media present natural
disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God's direct retribution."
It is also useful to look at China. Many
historians claim that, until modern times, almost every significant invention
was first made in China. If so, then it also must be admitted that nearly
every one of these Chinese inventions was either disregarded or very little
exploited; some even were prohibited. As Jean Gimpel, the French
historian of medieval inventions, put it: "it is a feature of
Chinese technology that its great inventions . . . never played a major
evolutionary role in Chinese history.
Consider the case of gunpowder. Whether
gunpowder was independently invented in Europe or imported from China is
irrelevant. It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the
thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers
reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artillery and
firearms, whereas the Europeans had an abundance of both. The Chinese
also invented a mechanical clock, but the court Mandarins soon ordered all of
them destroyed. As a result, when Westerners arrived, nobody in China
really knew what time it was.
The reason so many innovations and inventions
were abandoned or even outlawed in China had to do with Confucian opposition to
change on grounds that the past was greatly superior. The twelfth-century
Mandarin Li Yen-chang captured this viewpoint when he said, "If scholars
are made to concentrate their attention solely on the classics and are
prevented from slipping into study of the vulgar practices of later
generations, then the empire will be fortunate indeed!"
Nothing sums up the importance of the idea of
progress better than the story of the great Chinese admiral Zheng He (also
Cheng Ho). In 1405 Zheng He commanded a large Chinese fleet that sailed
across the Indian Ocean and reached the coast of East Africa. His purpose
was to display the power of China and to collect exotica — especially unusual
animals — for the imperial court. The voyage was entirely successful,
making its way to and from Africa without major mishaps and bringing back a
cargo of exotic goods and strange animals, including several giraffes. In
all, Zheng He led seven of these voyages, each of them successfully completed,
the last one in 1433 (during which he may have died and been buried at
sea). It is believed that Zheng He's Chinese fleet included several
hundred ships and that the major ships dwarfed anything being sailed in the
West at this time.
The Chinese flotilla must have awed the
occupants of the Indian and African ports it visited, and had the Chinese been
so inclined, they could easily have imposed their rule over coastal areas all
along their route, just as Westerners were soon to do following Vasco da Gama's
Portuguese expedition that reached India in 1498. Moreover, had Chinese
voyaging continued, they might well have sailed around Africa to Europe or
across the Pacific to the "New World."
But after 1433 the voyages ceased. What
happened?
The death of Zheng He would not have been
enough to halt the voyages completely, given the obvious successes of the
previous expeditions and the opportunities at hand. Instead, a decree
came down from the emperor forbidding the construction of any oceangoing
ships. The emperor also had Zheng He's fleet dragged ashore and stripped
of useful timbers; the remains were allowed to rot. Even the plans for
such ships were destroyed, and the Chinese attempted to erase all records of
Zheng He's voyages. Soon it was a capital offense to build a seagoing
ship (as opposed to junks for sailing along the coast and on the inland
waterways). For good measure, all the exotic animals Zheng He had brought
back to the imperial zoo were killed.
Why? The court Mandarins believed that
there was nothing in the outer world of value to China and that any contacts
were potentially unsettling to the Confucian social order. Progress be
damned.
Contrast this with the medieval West's eager
adoption of technologies that had been invented elsewhere. As Samuel
Lilley wrote in his history of technological progress, "The European
Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from
China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern
civilization."
These counterexamples to the history of the
West expose the weakness of the widely accepted claim that technological
progress is pretty much an inevitable product of the times — that, for example,
when conditions were right the incandescent bulb and the phonograph would have
been invented whether or not Thomas Edison ever existed. Inventions don't
just happen. Someone has to bring them about, and the likelihood
that anyone will attempt to do so is influenced by the extent to which they
believe that inventions are possible — that is, the extent to which the culture
accepts the idea of progress.
Perhaps of even greater significance is that
inventions not only must be made but also must be sufficiently valued to be
used. That is not inevitable either. What if the phonograph had
been outlawed, as the printing press was in the Ottoman Empire? What if
the state had declared a monopoly on the incandescent lightbulb and destroyed
all privately produced bulbs, as the Chinese did with iron production in the
eleventh century?
The Road to Modernity
Throughout the remainder of the book, we shall
see how the Christian conception of God as the rational creator of a
comprehensible universe, who therefore expects that humans will become
increasingly sophisticated and informed, continually prodded the West along the
road to modernity.
