The words covered in this article are obscure and obscurity, propitiate, propitiation and propitious, promulgate and promulgation, edict and decree. Previously done words that will reoccur today are metaphor, veneration, idolatry and proscribe.
“In AD 600, the notion that a band of desert-dwelling Arabs would soon conquer an expanse stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India was [even more] preposterous [than if you were to suggest that by 2050 Hare Krishna would be the state religion of the USA]. Indeed, had the Byzantine army been able to repel the initial onslaught, Islam would probably have remained an obscure cult of which only a handful of [people] were aware.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, Page 267
Obscure
The word obscure functions as both a verb and an adjective. In the above quote, obscure is used as an adjective and means little known, faint or unseen. If you did not know this word when you were reading the quote, you probably guessed its meaning by noticing the context clue that an obscure thing is one of which only some people are aware.
Tomorrow, you will also encounter obscure as a verb, in which case it means to hide, to make unclear, to cover (and therefore, to make unknown to or unseen by most people).
The noun form of this word is obscurity, which means the state of being unknown or unseen. So, what would be the opposite of obscurity? Let’s see.
- If you understand obscurity as the literal state of darkness (if you stand in the dark, no one can see you), then its opposite will be ‘light.’ Two usage examples:
- In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Duncan is murdered in the obscurity of the night. ‘The obscurity of the night’ is the opposite of ‘the light of the day.’
- The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity of the night increased the difficulty of getting over the ground quickly.
- If you understand obscurity as metaphorically being in the dark, then it describes a person or thing that is unseen by and unknown to most people. In this sense, the opposite of obscurity would be ‘fame, prominence, or limelight.’
- It is in this metaphorical sense that Yuval Noah Harari has used the adjective obscure in the quote above. He says that if the Byzantine army had been able to repel the initial onslaught of Islam, it would probably not have become a globally prominent religion.
- Another usage example: Most common people who participate in reality-television shows hope to rise from obscurity to stardom, but few succeed.
- Obscurity can also be understood as one’s mind being metaphorically in the dark. In this sense, we call those words or sentences obscure that do not light up our mind with clearly understood meaning. So, the opposite to this sense will be ‘clarity or understanding.’ Two usage examples:
- We should strive to make our writing easy to understand and free of obscurity.
- “Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Yuval Harari’s quote above mentions the Byzantine army. Let me give you a little context about the Byzantines, because the protagonist of today’s article is a Byzantine emperor named Leo III who ruled from 717 – 741 AD.
The Byzantine empire was named after its capital city, Byzantium (alternatively spelled as Byzantion and pronounced as beez-ant (rhymed with ‘pant’)-ium). The city was called Byzantium in the ancient Greek empire. Then, around 330 AD, it was renamed Constantinople, after the then Roman emperor, Constantine the Great. From the mid-5th century to the early 13th century, Constantinople was the biggest and richest city in Europe. It was conquered by the Ottoman empire in 1453 AD and remained its capital till 1922 AD, when the capital was shifted to Ankara, which has remained the capital of modern-day Turkey. Constantinople was renamed to Istanbul in 1930 AD.
The Byzantine Empire ruled for more than eleven centuries, from 330 AD to 1453 AD, the year in which its capital city Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire. At its peak, in the 6th century, the Byzantine empire covered most of the land around the Mediterranean Sea, including:
- the present-day Italy, Greece, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, and
- parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia.
It was, for many centuries, one of the biggest economic and military powers in Europe. However, internal conflict and constant invasions from outsiders gradually drained the strength of the empire. Among the invaders, the biggest threat was posed by the newly converted Muslims from Arabia.
Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in about 570 AD. Islam is commonly believed to have originated in 610 AD and by the early 630s, the followers of Muhammad had already seized from the Byzantine empire the regions that map to modern-day Syria and Egypt. By the 650s, the Muslim-ruled territories had expanded to modern-day Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Yemen, Eriteria, Sudan, Libya, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Turkey, Egypt and Iran. And they were still hungry for more.
Let us now go to Constantinople in the year 726 AD. This was the year when the Byzantine emperor Leo III became certain that God was angry with him and his people. A huge volcano had recently erupted in the Byzantine seas, causing tsunamis and a great loss of life. However, this disaster was only the latest addition to an ongoing series of bad news. There had been many famines and diseases, and the empire had suffered huge military losses to the Arabian Muslims.
The emperor and most people of his land were devout Christians. What were they doing wrong to deserve God’s punishment, and what were the Muslims doing right to earn His favor, which they undoubtedly had, because how else could they have expanded so impressively within just 150 years of the founding of their religion?
Emperor Leo guessed that the cause must be the widespread icon veneration by the Byzantine Christians. Idolatry is proscribed in Christianity and is thought to be the gravest of all sins. But most of his people venerated icons every day in the happy belief that this was not idolatry. Like Christianity, Islam too proscribed idolatry. Unlike Christianity, however, Islam was a strictly aniconic religion. Muslims did not worship icons and look at how well they were doing. Christians venerated icons and look at what terrible misfortunes were falling upon them one after another.
Leo wondered how he might propitiate God for his people’s disrespect of the ban against idolatry.
Propitiation
To propitiate someone is to calm them down from a state of anger. This word is commonly used in a religious context; it is gods whom we normally propitiate. Outside of a religious context, you propitiate a person who is god-like to you, meaning someone who holds significant power over you. If the person whose anger you are trying to soothe is only an equal, such as a friend, then saying that you are trying to propitiate that person will sound wrong; say instead that you are trying to make peace with them.
Propitiation is the noun form of propitiate. In most tribal religions, natural objects such as trees, stones, rivers etc. are associated with gods and goddesses and rituals of propitiation are made around these objects. Examples of such rituals are making harvest sacrifices to a holy river or bowing before a holy tree every morning.
Propitious is a related word. You know now that when you propitiate a powerful entity, you hope to make them see you with favor (again). Propitious means favorable. For example, in India, many people consult priests when fixing the date and time for marriage or other ceremonies, because they want to undertake important ventures only at propitious times, when the stars are most favorably aligned.
- Propitious = favorable
- Propitiate = make favorable
As we have seen, the Byzantine emperor Leo III worried that the recent volcanic eruption was a sign of God’s wrath. To propitiate God, he decided to cleanse Byzantine Christianity from the sinful practice of icon veneration. So, he promulgated an edict against image worship and ordered that all icons in his empire of Jesus Christ and the Christian saints should be smashed.
Promulgate
The word promulgate means to make a formal announcement that puts a law or a court order etc. into operation.
Imagine how grossly unfair it would feel to be arrested or fined today for violating a law that was quietly put into operation by the government yesterday, without any media attention at all, and that, therefore, you did not even know to exist. A fair system of justice is one in which people are aware of the laws that they are supposed to follow. Therefore, promulgation of laws is a basic principle of the rule of law and has been followed since the ancient times. For example, the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi had promulgated his code of laws on pillars throughout his kingdom, in the script that the common people used, so that anyone could go to such a pillar and read what the law said about a particular topic.
Edict and Decree
The nouns edict and decree are synonyms. They both mean: an order that is issued by an authority and that has the force of law.
The word decree can also be used as a verb, in which case it means to issue an order that has the force of law.
Usage examples:
- Emperor Leo issued an edict to smash all images of Christ and the saints in the Byzantine empire.
- Emperor Leo decreed that all images of Christ and the saints in the Byzantine empire should be smashed.
What was the impact of this decree on the icon loving Byzantine people? You’ll learn tomorrow.