Architecture and Western Civilization

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
John U. Nef
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
European History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western European ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
The Mind

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

scholarly journals Fire in the mind: changing understandings of fire in Western civilization

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1696) ◽  
pp. 20150166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Pyne
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

For most of human history, fire has been a pervasive presence in human life, and so also in human thought. This essay examines the ways in which fire has functioned intellectually in Western civilization as mythology, as religion, as natural philosophy and as modern science. The great phase change occurred with the development of industrial combustion; fire faded from quotidian life, which also removed it from the world of informing ideas. Beginning with the discovery of oxygen, fire as an organizing concept fragmented into various subdisciplines of natural science and forestry. The Anthropocene, however, may revive the intellectual role of fire as an informing idea or at least a narrative conceit. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.

On the Way of Democracy’s Development: FRG and «Europe of Citizens»

2011 ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
A. Sindeev
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Western European ◽  
Main Components ◽  
The Way

At a first glance, the article is treating a private issue, namely that of the feasibility of the concept of a “Europe of citizens” in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, while discussing it we have to analyze at least three fundamental issues. 1). What is the West German democracy? 2). How democracy and Western/European integration are interlinked? 3). To what extent the concept of a “Europe of citizens” is able to lead both integration and democracy from the currently difficult situation in which are these two main components of the contemporary Western civilization?

Augustine's Use of Scripture

1945 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 188-200
Author(s):  
Mervin Monroe Deems
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
European History ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Western European

Augustine lived at a critical moment in western European history. On the last day of the year 406, many Vandals, Alani, Suevi crossed the Rhine and, having defeated the Franks, settled for a time in Gaul and finally reached the Pyrenees. Four years later Rome itself fell to Alaric and his Visigoths. In addition to these outward catastrophes, the church's inner life suffered from the assaults of heretic and schismatic. Arianism persisted in Gaul, Montanism and Manichaeism were rife in North Africa. Puritanic Donatism laid claim to being genuine Christianity, a claim which the doughty Bishop of Hippo could not countenance.

A ‘Polis’ in Jerusalem: The Jewish State

1997 ◽  
pp. 432-448
Author(s):  
Yaacov Shavit
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter turns to politics. Here, the return of the Jews to history was also their return to the realm of politics and statesmanship, whether as participants in European politics in various countries or as a new emerging political entity in Palestine from 1882. The idea of a Jewish state could be nourished by the memories of Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty in biblical and post-biblical times, or by the messianic prophecies, but no one seriously thought of a revival of a Jewish kingdom. Thus it was the European political experience which was the political school of the Zionist movement. When Jews of the late nineteenth century lost faith in absolute enlightened monarchies (or after monarchies gave way to other types of government), the liberal-democratic paradigm of state that they adopted was closer to the political heritage of classical antiquity than to the Jewish political heritage. In that they followed the course taken by Western civilization.

What Made Pompeius Fight in 49 B.c.?

1959 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. G. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World Order ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
European History ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Old World ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

Muslim institutions of learning in eleventh-century Baghdad

1961 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Makdisi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
East Side ◽  
Exact Location ◽  
Muslim Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Middle Ages

The history of Baghdad in the second half of the eleventh century is dominated by the name of the great Saljūqid minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, a name linked to an extensive network of institutions founded by him throughout the lands of the eastern caliphate: the Niẓāmīya colleges. Most widely known among them was the college in Baghdad, founded in 457/1065 and inaugurated in 459/1067. The renown of the Niẓāmīya of Baghdad, both in medieval oriental sources as well as in studies undertaken by modern Oriental and Western scholars, is such that it is the first institution likely to come to the mind of a person familiar with the period's history. Whenever historians have put their efforts into the field of Muslim education in the Middle Ages, whether in a general or specialized way, they have seldom failed to mention the fame of the college. Efforts have been made to establish the list of its professors and the most famous among its students; approximations have been made as to the date of its disappearance; investigations have been pursued to determine its exact location on Baghdad's east side; causes of its decline have been proposed; a whole treatise and other learned articles have been devoted to the history of this college alone.

The Problem of Papal Power in the Ecclesiology of St. Bernard

1974 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
J. W. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Inherent Ambiguity

Born in 1090, dying in 1153, Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux lived through the aftermath of that great ideological upheaval which is generally (though rather misleadingly) known as the ‘Investiture Contest’. As he played a leading part in the religious life and ecclesiastical politics of his age it is not surprising that his massive output of sermons, treatises and letters should have given rise to an even more massive output of historiographical comment and interpretation. It is equally understandable that modern Bernardine studies should have tended to concentrate on the question of Bernard's attitude to the basic ideas of the eleventh-century reform movement—and, in particular, to the expression which was given to these by Gregory VII during his stormy pontificate. Yet, as Dr Kennan has recently pointed out, so far from providing a clear answer to this question these studies confront us with a ‘bewildering garden … from which a student can pluck an interpretation of Bernard's … theory as Gregorian, anti-Gregorian,…proto-protestant or any one of a variety of other hues’. Can order be brought into this chaos, or do these various interpretations reflect an inherent ambiguity in Bernard's own thought?

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