>>Auerbach's central thesis, that the Western tradition is an amalgam of a classic, Greco-Roman desire for clarity and a Judaeo-Christian focus on moral struggle in the face of the unknowable strikes me as a theme that might become an interesting thread.
My undergraduate adviser, a Harvard guy, was always trying to push this book on me. I didn't attempt it until I was in my early twenties. (The Greek in the text was off-putting to a teenager.)
Auerbach's central thesis is similar to Harold Bloom's thesis in _Genius_ and _The Western Canon_, although in the first book Bloom arranges his genii in a kabbalistic format. I agree with Bloom's contention in the latter work, that there is a literary "school of resentment," which views all works written before 1950 as symptoms of a disease, and all works written after 1950 (especially those written by "marginalized-group" writers, regardless of innate quality) as the cure for the disease.
Back to the thesis. One can see the tension between clarity and moral struggle meeting in the Hellenistic Period, especially in Philo, who tries to reconcile midrash and metaphor. It seems almost commonsense that the top-down cosmology of the ancient Near East would clash with the democratic universe of the Greeks. Even today, you have to wonder why fundamentalist Christians believe the US democratic republican form of government is best for people, while also believing the universe is a monarchy.
Not adding much here I'm afraid, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
