Defenestration of Prague
Three men thrown from a window start a war
The window is on the third floor of Prague Castle. The three men thrown out of it — two Catholic governors and their secretary — fall approximately sixty feet into the moat.
They survive. The Catholic interpretation is miraculous intervention: angels caught them. The Protestant interpretation is mundane: they landed in a dung heap. Both sides are right about the facts and wrong to make them the point.
The point is that men were thrown out of windows over religion. The point is that a dispute about who had the right to build Protestant churches in a Catholic-majority region — a dispute about a piece of paper, about whose interpretation of a previous agreement was correct — escalated to physical violence within one meeting.
And the physical violence escalated to thirty years of continental war.
The speed of the escalation is the lesson. A theological dispute becomes a legal dispute becomes a confrontational meeting becomes men thrown out of windows becomes a declaration of rebellion becomes imperial intervention becomes thirty years of war.
At each step someone could have stopped it. At each step someone chose not to.
The men in the dung heap survived. The three hundred thousand who died in the war that followed did not.
The small act of contempt — throwing a man out of a window rather than continuing to argue — set off a chain of consequences that none of the participants could have imagined or intended.
Small acts of contempt always cost more than they appear to.
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”
— Paul, Romans 13:1
“Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who be are ordained by God.”
The Thirty Years War begins with men thrown out of windows.
Not with armies. Not with declarations of war. With the decision to express contempt physically rather than to continue a difficult conversation.
Every great catastrophe has a small beginning — a moment when someone chose contempt over engagement, dismissal over dialogue, the thrown man over the continued argument.
The men in the dung heap survived. The war they triggered did not spare so many.
What contempt are you nursing toward someone you disagree with? And what chain of consequences might expressing it set in motion that you cannot see from here?