Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from
Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and
Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that
are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.
What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its
culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture.
This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure
of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or
national tradition. The author's interest is especially, with
regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the
dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the
West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European
culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls "Roman".
Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and
less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire.
Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history
or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman
attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to
borrow from what went before it.
Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great
traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and
Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek
tradition on the other. Nowhere does the author find this Roman
character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly
Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.
At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the
sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the
fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in
it notonly a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a
future in (re)proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a
model relationship of what is proper to it.
An international bestseller (translated from the original French
edition of Europe, La Voie Romaine), this work has been or is
presently being translated into thirteen languages.
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