| There were important and precious innovations in places like Athens that led, by a circuitous route, to much of what is good in the modern world. For example, there is not what we would call philosophy in the East. There is wisdom literature, but not the very mode of philosophical discourse developed first developed by Socrates and amplified by Plato. Similarly, there is nothing like the growth of a legal system, such as we find in the (Roman) Institutes of Justinian, which serves as the prototype of rational jurisprudence. There is nothing like a durable idea of a universal Deity among the various paganisms, leading to the idea of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, as there was in Prophetic Judaism. My point is that we cannot ignore the matrix out of which developed the idea of human rights, citizenship, parliamentarianism, and so forth, without jeopardizing these things themselves......... |
