Passion of the Western Mind
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“THE BEST HISTORY OF WESTERN THOUGHT I HAVE READ.… MASTERFUL.”
Robert A. McDermott
Chairman, Philosophy Department
Baruch College, City University of New York
“An extraordinary work of scholarship. It not only places the history of Western thought in perspective, but derives new insights concerning the evolution of our thinking and the future of the whole human enterprise.”
John E. Mack
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Prince of Our
Disorder and The Alchemy of Survival
“This is the most creative and comprehensive treatment of the history of Western thought I know.… The book is a real masterpiece.”
Stanislav Grof
Professor of Psychology
California Institute of Integral Studies
Author of Realms of the Human Unconscious
and Beyond the Brain
“I revelled in the intellectual pleasure and stimulation it gave me from beginning to end. And when I got to the end, I wanted to read it all over again.… I have added it to a small set of books—about ten, and including my dictionary, the Bible, etc.—which sit in my ‘permanent collection’ on my desk.… A perfect book, without flaw. No accolade would be excessive.”
Kenneth Ring
Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut
Author of The Omega Project
“AN INTELLECTUAL TOUR DE FORCE
that presents a brilliant overview of the development of the Western world view in accessible form. The summary of the postmodern mind alone is worth the price of the book.”
Stanley Krippner
Professor of Psychology
Saybrook Institute
“A work of high adventure and intellectual daring.”
Gary Lachman
Bodhi Tree Review
“The Passion of the Western Mind is a masterful chronicle of the roots and major flowerings of the Western search for understanding, from the pre-Socratic Greeks to the present day. It is also a powerful, multi-layered synthesis that precisely integrates the philosophic, spiritual, and scientific dimensions of that search, and prophesies its coming transformation.… A great work of art, an original illumination.”
Harrison Sheppard
The Hellenic Journal
“[Tarnas] has succeeded in weighing thousands of facts and welding them together into a breathtaking intellectual synthesis, presented in accomplished prose.”
Georg Feuerstein, Spectrum Review
“A sweeping intellectual overview of the emergence and evolution of human thought from the earliest times down to the present day.… With this volume Richard Tarnas goes a long way toward establishing himself as a modern day Encyclopaedist.”
The New England Review of Books
“SUCCEEDS SPECTACULARLY … AN EXCITING READ, A PAGE-BURNER.”
Robert Craft
The Quest
“Exceptionally well-organized … extremely well-written.… Above all, it is replete with insights that ‘go off’ like wonderful little firecrackers throughout the text.… Its radically interdisciplinary nature explicitly calls into question the division of knowledge into ‘fields,’ which is, to be sure, a large part of the point of the tale and its significance: not trees, but the whole jungle in compelling articulation.… [The book includes] the most concise and compelling account of early Christian history that I have ever read.”
David L. Miller
Professor of Religion, Syracuse University
author of The New Polytheism
“Richard Tarnas possesses a fascinating lucidity, and in The Passion of the Western Mind moves with ease among complex matters without sacrificing a bit of their complexity.”
Jeffrey Hart
National Review
“An important new interpretation for the comprehension of history, culture, and humanity itself.… Uncompromising clarity, breadth, and simplicity.”
Kevan Prosnick
The Inner Door
“Truly on the cutting edge of thinking.”
Harvard Center for Psychological Studies
in the Nuclear Age
“AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE,
this challenging synthesis throws a sharp light on ideas central to the modern outlook.”
Publishers Weekly
“Brilliantly conveys the drama of conflicting questions about mind and matter, faith and reason, cosmology and science, freedom and determinism.… An essential guidebook to the permanent wisdom of past philosophers.”
Joseph F. Keppler
The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer
“No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey. Its scholarship is impeccable.”
Huston Smith, Professor of Religious Studies
University of California, Berkeley, author of
The World’s Religions and Beyond the Postmodern Mind
“A measure of his success is that even those parts of the story which are familiar, are heard now with a renewed and deepened sense of their character, complexity, and paradox.”
Eugene Fontinell
Cross Currents
“Richard Tarnas speaks to our condition as humans alive at the end of the 20th century.… Tarnas has accumulated a staggering amount of data, yet he spares us the confusion this knowledge could create in our minds. How does he manage this? He tells us not primarily about the things his mind has grasped, but rather about the things that have grasped his mind. Thus, his account grasps the reader’s mind, too.”
David Steindl-Rast
coauthor of Belonging to the Universe
“A GREAT BOOK …
A passionate book about history, the ecstasy of thought, and thought’s relationship to the mystery of life. Its brilliance, craftsmanship, and courageousness should not be missed.”
Walter R. Christie
Chrysalis
“It is difficult to overpraise what Tarnas has accomplished.… He has produced a much needed contemporary ‘guide for the perplexed,’ a comprehensive yet readily accessible map of the potentially bewildering territory of Western intellectual history.”
Sean M. Kelly
The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal
“A compelling narrative history of the evolving Western world view—the Western mind and spirit—as seen through the pivotal interaction between philosophy, religion, and science.… [Written] with the insight of a psychologist and the artistry of a novelist.”
Keith Thompson
Utne Reader
“Tarnas is one of those rare but valuable people who match a deep and lasting vision with impeccable scholarship, balance, and the sheer effort required to create something of world-changing quality.”
Renn Butler
Common Ground
“As close to perfect as any human project has a right to be.”
Deane Juhan
Author of Job’s Body
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1991 by Richard Tarnas
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This edition published by a
rrangement with Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90050
eISBN: 978-0-307-80452-5
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
I. The Greek World View
The Archetypal Forms
Ideas and Gods
The Evolution of the Greek Mind from Homer to Plato
The Mythic Vision
The Birth of Philosophy
The Greek Enlightenment
Socrates
The Platonic Hero
The Philosopher’s Quest and the Universal Mind
The Problem of the Planets
Aristotle and the Greek Balance
The Dual Legacy
II. The Transformation of the Classical Era
Crosscurrents of the Hellenistic Matrix
The Decline and Preservation of the Greek Mind
Astronomy
Astrology
Neoplatonism
Rome
The Emergence of Christianity
III. The Christian World View
Judaic Monotheism and the Divinization of History
Classical Elements and the Platonic Inheritance
The Conversion of the Pagan Mind
Contraries Within the Christian Vision
Exultant Christianity
Dualistic Christianity
Further Contraries and the Augustinian Legacy
Matter and Spirit
Augustine
Law and Grace
Athens and Jerusalem
The Holy Spirit and Its Vicissitudes
Rome and Catholicism
The Virgin Mary and the Mother Church
A Summing Up
IV. The Transformation of the Medieval Era
The Scholastic Awakening
The Quest of Thomas Aquinas
Further Developments in the High Middle Ages
The Rising Tide of Secular Thought
Astronomy and Dante
The Secularization of the Church and the Rise of Lay Mysticism
Critical Scholasticism and Ockham’s Razor
The Rebirth of Classical Humanism
Petrarch
The Return of Plato
At the Threshold
V. The Modern World View
The Renaissance
The Reformation
The Scientific Revolution
Copernicus
The Religious Reaction
Kepler
Galileo
The Forging of Newtonian Cosmology
The Philosophical Revolution
Bacon
Descartes
Foundations of the Modern World View
Ancients and Moderns
The Triumph of Secularism
Science and Religion: The Early Concord
Compromise and Conflict
Philosophy, Politics, Psychology
The Modern Character
Hidden Continuities
VI. The Transformation of the Modern Era
The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through Freud
The Self-Critique of the Modern Mind
From Locke to Hume
Kant
The Decline of Metaphysics
The Crisis of Modern Science
Romanticism and Its Fate
The Two Cultures
The Divided World View
Attempted Syntheses: From Goethe and Hegel to Jung
Existentialism and Nihilism
The Postmodern Mind
At the Millennium
VII. Epilogue
The Post-Copernican Double Bind
Knowledge and the Unconscious
The Evolution of World Views
Bringing It All Back Home
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Preface
This book presents a concise narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern. My aim has been to provide, within the limits of a single volume, a coherent account of the evolution of the Western mind and its changing conception of reality. Recent advances on several fronts—in philosophy, depth psychology, religious studies, and history of science—have shed new light on this remarkable evolution. The historical account presented here has been greatly influenced and enriched by these advances, and at the end of the narrative I have drawn on them to set forth a new perspective for understanding our culture’s intellectual and spiritual history.
We hear much now about the breakdown of the Western tradition, the decline of liberal education, the dangerous lack of a cultural foundation for grappling with contemporary problems. Partly such concerns reflect insecurity and nostalgia in the face of a radically changing world. Yet they also reflect a genuine need, and it is to that growing number of thoughtful men and women who recognize such a need that this book is addressed. How did the modern world come to its present condition? How did the modern mind arrive at those fundamental ideas and working principles that so profoundly influence the world today? These are pressing questions for our time, and to approach them we must recover our roots—not out of uncritical reverence for the views and values of ages past, but rather to discover and integrate the historical origins of our own era. I believe that only by recalling the deeper sources of our present world and world view can we hope to gain the self-understanding necessary for dealing with our current dilemmas. The West’s cultural and intellectual history can thus serve as a preparatory education for the challenges that face us all. Through this book I have hoped to make an essential part of that history more readily accessible to the general reader.
Yet I also simply wanted to tell a story I thought worth telling. The history of Western culture has long seemed to possess the dynamics, scope, and beauty of a great epic drama: ancient and classical Greece, the Hellenistic era and imperial Rome, Judaism and the rise of Christianity, the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism and onward to our own compelling time. Sweep and grandeur, dramatic conflicts and astonishing resolutions have marked the Western mind’s sustained attempt to comprehend the nature of reality—from Thales and Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle, from Clement and Boethius to Aquinas and Ockham, from Eudoxus and Ptolemy to Copernicus and Newton, from Bacon and Descartes to Kant and Hegel, and from all these to Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and beyond. That long battle of ideas called “the Western tradition” has been a stirring adventure whose sum and consequence we all bear within ourselves. An epic heroism has shone forth in the personal struggles of Socrates, of Paul and Augustine, of Luther and Galileo, and in that larger cultural struggle, borne by these and by many less visible protagonists, which has moved the West on its extraordinary course. There is high tragedy here. And there is something beyond tragedy.
The following account traces the development of the major world views of the West’s mainstream high culture, focusing on the crucial sphere of interaction between philosophy, religion, and science. Perhaps what Virginia Woolf said of great works of literature could be said as well of great world views: “The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults—indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all—but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.” My goal in these pages has been to give voice to each perspective mastered by the Western mind in the course of its evolution, and to take each on its own terms. I have assumed no special priority for any particular conception of reality, including our present one (which is itself multiple and in profound flux). Instead, I have approached each wor
ld view in the same spirit that I would approach an exceptional work of art—seeking to understand and appreciate, to experience its human consequences, to let its meaning unfold.
Today the Western mind appears to be undergoing an epochal transformation, of a magnitude perhaps comparable to any in our civilization’s history. I believe we can participate intelligently in that transformation only to the extent to which we are historically informed. Every age must remember its history anew. Each generation must examine and think through again, from its own distinctive vantage point, the ideas that have shaped its understanding of the world. Our task is to do so from the richly complex perspective of the late twentieth century. I hope this book will contribute to that effort.