Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> To discuss religion in a series called ‘Ancients and Moderns’ might at first appear to be a straightforward task: today’s religions are ancient phenomena. If ?moderns’ is a self-description of the Western world Europe and the Americas the dominating religions in this part of the world stem from the ‘ancients? ? whereby the ‘ancients’ are taken to mean the cultures of the Mediterranean world of Greco-Roman times. This holds true for Judaism which is present in many cities around the Mediterranean most promi- nently in Palestine and Egypt. It certainly holds true for Christianity in its Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek Orthodox) varieties. And it also holds true for Islam a religion developed in criticism of ancient polytheisms as well as regional Jewish and Christian thinking. Certainly the spread of Arabic Islam brought an end to many political structures and cultural traits of the ancient world as Henri Pirenne formulated nearly a century ago. At the same time however the Islamic Empire flourished in assimilating classical material into its intellectual culture. But even if we drop any Eurocentric approach major religious traditions are classified with ancient Hinduism Buddhism or Confucianism taking pride of place. ?Ancient here is more than a synonym of ‘oldPhilosophers such as Karl Jaspers along with historians and sociologists have pointed to the temporal coin- cidence of major ‘breakthroughs’ in the human grasp of society driven by the discovery of the transcendent and the resulting possibilities to think about alternatives in ordering one’s world.