ACBM: Part 1 Chapter 1

This is the proposed text for introducing how we will approach the study of Western Civilization.

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1. Greece, Rome and European Tribes

While we could make the case for suggesting we live in the Post-Modern age at the twilight of Western Civilization, we could equally argue the vast majority of Westerners aren’t actually far beyond what we call Modern in the academic sense, essentially the period of Western history since 1500 AD. In terms of how people think and operate, we are still deeply rooted in the Enlightenment. And while the Western Church was involved, the net result leaves human operations in our current world as overwhelmingly agnostic and secular. The vast majority of Western Christians today think in terms of the Enlightenment and its appeal to reason.

It’s good to go back and read the cream of Enlightenment writers. They claimed to recover and carry on the tradition of the classic brilliance of Greco-Roman Civilization. While other civilizations were studied avidly, it was the classics from Greece and Rome that held center stage.

But every civilization has its unique mythology, the underlying ground of assumptions about reality itself and the meaning of meaning. The underlying frame of reference was some measure of Greco-Roman Civilization mixed with a pervasive European tribal mythology. We could refer to this as mostly German tribal mythology, but that misses the point. Much of what we know about the older nations the Germans overran indicates they held the same basic worldview.

The Enlightenment is a strong mixture of European pagan mythology upon which was rebuilt some elements of the Greco-Roman Civilization. It’s not a question of what the originating thinkers in each stage of history taught, but the effects of what they taught. We read history and literature of the past, not so we can know what it should have been in purity, but to see how human nature in broadly interprets what thinkers promote. That’s what the social sciences seek to show. We pursue Western Civilization’s sense of self-awareness in answering the question, “How did we get here, to this situation?” At every stage of our journey, we need to understand the impact of pervasive philosophical changes on the broader, less educated population and following generations.

Thus, Western Civilization is broadly the result of recovering Greek and Roman ideals, but reinterpreted equally ancient European pagan values.

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What I want from you, dear readers, are some suggestions for reading materials that would highlight this section. I have no quarrel with using things like Wikipedia for a summary of what most people think about this stuff, but I was hoping for something a little different. What is your preferred online or printed references to the subject outlined above?