Athens and Jerusalem

The West is heir to a dual inheritance: the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. In defining the ‘idea of Europe’, George Steiner writes that it derives from this ‘primordial duality’, from Athens and Jerusalem:

This relationship, at once conflictual and syncretic, has engaged European theological, philosophic and political argument from the Church Fathers to Leon Chestov, from Pascal to Leo Strauss […] To be a European is to attempt to negotiate, morally, intellectually and existentially the rival ideals, claims, praxis of the city of Socrates and of that of Isaiah

From Athens, we have inherited ‘music, mathematics, and metaphysics’, as well as our political systems and our vocabulary — and thus ‘a particular mapping of reality’.

From Jerusalem, we have inherited the concept of mankind in contact with the transcendent, the notion of law as ‘inextricable from moral commandments’, and the sense of history as directed toward some end. As Tom Holland writes in Dominion, ‘The Book of Revelation’, with its vision of the apocalypse, revolutionised the concept of time. From Genesis to Revelation; from Creation to the Day of Judgement, ‘no riddling pronouncement of Apollo [or pagan oracle] had ever served to reconfigure the very concept of time. Yet this, across the Roman world, was what the Old and New Testaments had combined to achieve’.