Some used the label ‘European Culture,’ but upon consideration, it is clear that major elements of this culture have their origin in the ancient Near East.
A third name for this collection of achievements is the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition,’ yet this name fails to indicate the contributions of pagan and pre-Christian elements from Greece, Rome, and the Fertile Crescent.
By any name, however, it is clear that Chaucer and Goethe are somehow bound to Plato and Aristotle — across centuries and hundreds of miles. It is clear that Newton and Leibniz are of the same fabric as Cicero and Tacitus.
Sophocles and Thucydides lead to Beethoven and Mozart. Livy and Terence lead to Albrecht Dürer and Caspar David Friedrich.
As historians Uwe Oster, Paul Widergren, and Carol Gratton write:
Let’s begin our journey through time in ancient Greece, the cradle of European civilization. This is also where the continent got its name. The story goes that Zeus, the king of the gods, once had his eye on the beautiful princess Europa. He changed himself into a bull to make it easier to get close to her, seduced her on the beach, and then spirited her away to Crete. The name of the continent was already connected to this tale as far back as the days of antiquity.
‘Europe’ is a name for a continent, a landmass. But it is also a name for a dynamic outpouring of mathematics, philosophy, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, physics, chemistry, poetry, and a dozen other disciplines and professions.
Europe is a whole: one cannot treat the parts of Europe in isolation. One must know the ancient Greeks to understand Hegel and Nietzsche. One must know Rome in order to understand Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Keats, Shelley, and Byron.
This is seen in the fervor with which the universities of Japan and China have embraced the study of European literature, art, and history. It may well be that, in some respects, the rest of the world has a better grasp of the West than the West does, a more profound understanding of Europe than Europe does, and a deeper appreciation of the Judeo-Christian tradition than Jews or Christians do.
