Four cities and some forests
There is more to the origins of Western civilisation than Athens and Jerusalem.
Listening to a lecture by a Professor of Divinity on the Western magical tradition — a lecture that is enlightening in unexpected ways — brought home to me how much Western civilisation is founded on four cities:
Athens for history (Herodotus, Thucydides), philosophy (Plato) and systematic study of politics (Aristotle);
Jerusalem for religion (Torah, Gospels);
Alexandria for science (Aristarchus, Hero), counter-culture and occultism (Hermeticism);
Rome for law (Gaius, Ulpian) and engineering (Vitruvius) — both physical and social.
This culminated in the Christian sanctification of the Roman synthesis:
law is human — so not circumscribed by revelation;
single-spouse marriage with mutual consent — so partnership marriages;
no cousin or other consanguineous marriages;
testamentary rights — so individual wills.
Kin-groups that do not control marriage, the transmission of assets or identity cannot persist. This structure broke up kin-groups in the manorial core of Europe. Just as Greek and Roman city-states had previously broken up kin-groups by replacing identity-from-lineage with identity-by-location, as the congregational Christian Church also did.
The combination of:
single-spouse marriage, enabling much better use of the talents of women, particularly elite women;
breaking up kin-groups, forcing development of other social mechanisms for cooperation; with
law being human, so social and political bargains could be entrenched in law,
were the crucial features that enabled Western civilisation to put non-kin cooperation — the Homo sapien advantage — on steroids.
Germanic distinctiveness
The legacies of these four cities were then refracted through Germanic warrior assemblies and oaths of service. Service that could be chosen rather than being dictated by kin-groups — the latter being the pattern in the Celtic fringe.
One can see this tension between Celtic kin-group loyalty and Germanic chosen loyalty in the Arthurian tales, where the Roundtable represented chosen loyalties, which eventually fractures under the pressure of Celtic kinship gone toxic.
The Indo-European legacy is not a distinctive feature of Western civilisation, as it feeds equally into Persian/Iranian and Vedic/Brahmin civilisations.
Emphasising these four cities corrects the Athens-and-Jerusalem pairing that is a cliche of Western historiography. That pairing expresses the idea that the West is founded on the interaction between Greek philosophy and Mosaic monotheism, notably through the syncretising efforts of thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria and Clement of Alexandria.
In terms of the history of ideas, there is much to be said for the Athens-and-Jerusalem pairing. As the basis for understanding the history of Western civilisation, the Athens-and-Jerusalem pairing is, however, hugely misleading.
To see how misleading it is, we merely have to compare the trajectory of Western civilisation with that of Islam.
Islam as a religion is also a Middle Eastern monotheism that, like Christianity, appropriates the Jewish prophetic tradition. Islam as a civilisation also wrestled with Greek philosophy, mathematics and science. Yet the difference in the trajectory of the two civilisations illustrates the importance of institutions.
In particular, it illustrates how crucial in the development of Western civilisation was the Christian sanctification of the Roman (farming) synthesis. Islam’s sanctification of the Arabian pastoral synthesis — polygyny, patrilineal kin-groups, raiding and enslaving non-believing outsiders, law based on revelation and high levels of cousin marriage — led in a very different direction.
The tradition of warrior assemblies — a feature of pastoralist societies — is not absent from Islam. It appears in the notion of the Shura.1 But the operation of such was at best highly attenuated as any decisions could not be entrenched in law. For, apart from narrow elements of government operations covered by Qanun, law in Islam was controlled by the ulama, the Islamic scholars operating a legal system based on revelation.
By contrast, Germanic warrior assemblies within Christian Europe could and did evolve into Parliaments able to entrench their decisions in law, making such bargaining politics worthwhile for the participating parties.
Modern Parliaments may have, across their history, cited the memory well of the Roman Senate and the Athenian assembly. Nevertheless, institutionally, they are clearly a result of the Germanic legacy.
Orthodox civilisation did not go down the same path, as the highly bureaucratised Dominate had well and truly killed off the tradition of self-governing assemblies. Even when such assemblies did reappear, notably in the Republic of Novgorod, the Tartar-derived autocracy of Muscovy brutally killed such off.
The West has produced two rich legal traditions. One is Roman law, which experienced a late medieval revival that kept building.
The other great legal tradition is common law. Common law is a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman law. Just as English is a creole language that is a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon, Danish-Norse and Norman-French. Common law is very much part of Germanic distinctiveness moulding the evolution of Western civilisation.
About Alexandria
The association of Alexandria with counter-culture occultism is well-established. Alexandria was an intellectual centre for the development of Jewish and Christian thought. But Alexandria was also, as Lucio Russo sets out, the pre-eminent centre for Hellenistic science.
People associate Aristotle with science, but he is far more an example of an observant philosopher than any sort of scientist. Indeed, much of the work of the later Scientific Revolution required undoing the legacy of Aristotle.
Hellenistic science was a scholarly network relying on transmission via hand-written manuscripts. It required competitive jurisdictions for its robust development.
The Roman conquests disrupted those fragile scholarly networks and created a unitary jurisdiction based on mass slavery that was not good for scientific enquiry or technological innovation. The Hellenistic scientific revolution had come to an end centuries before the martyrdom of Hypatia.
How can Alexandria be the pre-eminent city of science and also of occultism? Because both are about seeking knowledge, but also because Egyptian occultism was very much about a unified view of the cosmos. Egyptian magic was not in opposition to Egyptian religion, but part and parcel of it.
There is a history of figures important in the development of science (e.g. Paracelsus) also being interested in the occult. For the epitome of this, we need look no further than Sir Isaac Newton, scientist and alchemist. Alchemy led into modern chemistry, with a range of prominent figures in the development of science being interested in alchemy.
There are also various streams of politico-cultural occultism. The Hermetic influence on Hegel is a very prominent example. There is the interweaving of occultism with early feminist thought.
There are multiple offshoots from Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. Such as Annie Besant who was an influential Fabian; Rudolf Steiner, founder of the network of Steiner schools; and Alice Bailey “the mother of the New Age” whose books are published by the Lucius Trust.
Alice Bailey influenced prominent UN official Robert Muller, who helped found the Common Core Curriculum. She also influenced John Fetzer, whose Fetzer Institute was central to the development and promotion of Social and Emotional Learning.
The persistent focus on education is not surprising. Occultism is about special knowledge. It also tends to be somewhat grandiose in its pretensions, so the globalism is also not surprising.
Occultism creates binding common beliefs in opposition to conventional Christian heritage. The most infamous spin-off from Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society was Aryan volkisch esotericism that fed, via the Thule Society and related connections, into Nazism.
Four cities and some forests
The mixed legacies of Athens and Jerusalem were not enough to create Western civilisation. The equally mixed blessings of Rome and Alexandria were crucial in its creation and evolution. Beyond the legacies of remarkable—and remarkably distinctive—cities, there was the key contribution of the various Germanic peoples. From this mix came a civilisation that put the Homo sapien advantage of non-kin cooperation on steroids, and so came to dominate the globe.
References
Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.
David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, Faber & Faber, 2018.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, New York University Press, 1993.
Ahmad Ibn Naqid al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Sacred Islamic Law, trans. & ed. Sheik Nu Ha Mim Keller. http://dailyrollcall.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/the-reliance-of-the-traveller.pdf.
Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn, (trans. Silvio Levy), Springer, [1996] 2004.
Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34.
Rachel Wilson, Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation, Independently published, 2021.
This is an excellent post, Lorenzo, thoroughly enjoyed it.
Two comments: first, as a Christian, I tend to look at the influence of Athens and Rome and Alexandria as “providential”. Maybe it really was the “fullness of time”.
Second, do you know the books by Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West and Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective?
Both wonderful.
Thanks for your work.