Overview

In their trenchant panoramic overview – ranging from antiquity to the present-day – John and Anna Rist write with authority and ennui about nothing less than the loss of the foundational culture of the West. The authors characterize this culture as the 'original tradition', viewing its erosion as one which has led to anxiety about the entire value of Western thought. The causes of the disintegration are discussed with an intensity rare in academe. Critics of modernity ordinarily concentrate on the Enlightenment and the book certainly offers deep analysis of Enlightenment thought. But it goes further. Thus the cruelty of modern totalitarianism is now depicted as in the spirit of the French Revolution and its implacable hostility to a vanished primordial heritage, while scientism, bureaucracy and consumerism appear as the only rivals to a threatening nihilism. The book argues that Western thought has created a set of conflicting moral and spiritual customs: to the detriment of coherence, in individual minds as in society and culture.

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9781009218375

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Anna Rist is a writer, and former lecturer in Classics at St Michael's College, Toronto. She has published two books of English verse translations of the ancient Greek poets Theocritus and Herodas, an account of life in rural Tuscany (We Etruscans), a novel (The Chain) and a book of poems (Festival and Ferial). She is working on a second novel, a second book of poems, and a five-act play on Catholic Shakespeare. John Rist is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Aquinas Medallist of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. The author of 18 books and of more than 100 articles, he has taught at the universities of Toronto and Aberdeen, the Catholic University of America, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Istituto Patristico Augustinianum in Rome. His most recent book is What is a Person? (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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