Preface

This book presents a concise narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern. My aim has been to provide, within the limits of a single volume, a coherent account of the evolution of the Western mind and its changing conception of reality. Recent advances on several fronts—in philosophy, depth psychology, religious studies, and history of science—have shed new light on this remarkable evolution. The historical account presented here has been greatly influenced and enriched by these advances, and at the end of the narrative I have drawn on them to set forth a new perspective for understanding our culture’s intellectual and spiritual history.

We hear much now about the breakdown of the Western tradition, the decline of liberal education, the dangerous lack of a cultural foundation for grappling with contemporary problems. Partly such concerns reflect insecurity and nostalgia in the face of a radically changing world. Yet they also reflect a genuine need, and it is to that growing number of thoughtful men and women who recognize such a need that this book is addressed. How did the modern world come to its present condition? How did the modern mind arrive at those fundamental ideas and working principles that so profoundly influence the world today? These are pressing questions for our time, and to approach them we must recover our roots—not out of uncritical reverence for the views and values of ages past, but rather to discover and integrate the historical origins of our own era. I believe that only by recalling the deeper sources of our present world and world view can we hope to gain the self-understanding necessary for dealing with our current dilemmas. The West’s cultural and intellectual history can thus serve as a preparatory education for the challenges that face us all. Through this book I have hoped to make an essential part of that history more readily accessible to the general reader.

Yet I also simply wanted to tell a story I thought worth telling. The history of Western culture has long seemed to possess the dynamics, scope, and beauty of a great epic drama: ancient and classical Greece, the Hellenistic era and imperial Rome, Judaism and the rise of Christianity, the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism and onward to our own compelling time. Sweep and grandeur, dramatic conflicts and astonishing resolutions have marked the Western mind’s sustained attempt to comprehend the nature of reality—from Thales and Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle, from Clement and Boethius to Aquinas and Ockham, from Eudoxus and Ptolemy to Copernicus and Newton, from Bacon and Descartes to Kant and Hegel, and from all these to Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and beyond. That long battle of ideas called “the Western tradition” has been a stirring adventure whose sum and consequence we all bear within ourselves. An epic heroism has shone forth in the personal struggles of Socrates, of Paul and Augustine, of Luther and Galileo, and in that larger cultural struggle, borne by these and by many less visible protagonists, which has moved the West on its extraordinary course. There is high tragedy here. And there is something beyond tragedy.

The following account traces the development of the major world views of the West’s mainstream high culture, focusing on the crucial sphere of interaction between philosophy, religion, and science. Perhaps what Virginia Woolf said of great works of literature could be said as well of great world views: “The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults—indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all—but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.” My goal in these pages has been to give voice to each perspective mastered by the Western mind in the course of its evolution, and to take each on its own terms. I have assumed no special priority for any particular conception of reality, including our present one (which is itself multiple and in profound flux). Instead, I have approached each world view in the same spirit that I would approach an exceptional work of art—seeking to understand and appreciate, to experience its human consequences, to let its meaning unfold.

Today the Western mind appears to be undergoing an epochal transformation, of a magnitude perhaps comparable to any in our civilization’s history. I believe we can participate intelligently in that transformation only to the extent to which we are historically informed. Every age must remember its history anew. Each generation must examine and think through again, from its own distinctive vantage point, the ideas that have shaped its understanding of the world. Our task is to do so from the richly complex perspective of the late twentieth century. I hope this book will contribute to that effort.

R. T.