Springs of Western Civilization

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This book is a comparative exploration of the Hebraic and classical traditions that form our Western Heritage and constitute the general ethos of today's globalized society. James Arieti seeks to determine what can be learned about the differences in those traditions before they bonded into the compound of a single culture. It locates the catalyst for the bonding in two related circumstances: the adoption by the biblical world of an eclectic melange of Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism, which, in the two or three centuries on each side of the Common Era, produced consensus models both of God and of an honorable, caring, warmhearted human being, and the failure to understand Plato's playful, metaphorical compositional technique and so construing the dialogues with extreme literalness. Among the most powerful effects of this mistaken reading of Plato were the belief in a mystical leap into the world of the divine and the attribution to Scripture of a timeless, eternal authority. Among the effects of the mingling of biblical and philosophical values was a re-direction of literature from focusing on the heroes of epic and tragedy to the beneficent, compassionate characters that we recognize as menschen. The book analyzes a variety of topics embodied in narratives in Biblical and classical literature in an effort to tease out the original unalloyed perspectives. The resulting contrasts provide insights into each separate spring of the two cultures as well as into the blend we call Western Culture.