Four Cultures of the West (review)

This book is as much about the present as the past. In it Father O'Malley characterizes four cultural configurations, styles, or rhetorics which historically developed side-by-side and continue to jostle and intermingle with each other to the present. He traces each configuration to its ancient origins, shows how each took on a Christian form, and fitfully shows how each persists in secular dress to the present. The "four cultures of the West" are prophetic culture, the culture of Jeremiah, calling to radical transformation; the academic culture of Aristotle and Aquinas, calling to understanding; the humanistic culture of Cicero and Erasmus; and the culture of art, of Phidias, Michelangelo, and ritual performance. Originating in a series of lectures given at the University of Notre Dame, for the most part these lightly-footnoted essays are addressed to the general public.

The introduction, "Athens and Jerusalem," sketches the four cultures and develops the interpretive categories used throughout: it is especially impressionistic and inconclusive and seems to me the weakest chapter in the book. The argument is not that all great historical figures easily may be placed in one of the four cultures—Ignatius of Loyola, O'Malley writes, can not; nor that clear lines can be drawn between the cultures. O'Malley holds that the cultures are in some ways incommensurable: each (p. 25) "must distort the other into its own image and likeness." He emphasizes that how something is said, its style, has historically often been as important as what is said. Naturally he gives special attention to the sixteenth century, in which his ground-breaking specialized work has centered.

According to O'Malley, the genius of prophetic culture is to insist on the incomprehensibility and transcendence of God. We immediately see in such a definition the limitations of his approach, for arguably the Hebrew prophets emphasized God's judgment on the times at least as much as that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and it was the academic culture of the West that most explored "negative theology." O'Malley is well aware of the dangers in setting up four non-exhaustive cultural configurations, but still the historian will frequently wince at such statements as (p. 6) "Freedom is one of . . . [the prophetic culture's] favorite words." This elides the radical change over time of the meaning of "freedom." Arguably, much closer to the heart of the prophetic message was "judgment" or "justice." In sum, O'Malley's typology at least as often gets in the way of understanding as fostering it, and perhaps is best seen as simply a teaching device. The text is full of "yes, but" statements. We are told that (p. 11) "Augustine repudiated 'the Platonists.'" Yes, but.

There are perspectives which take getting used to. The humanistic culture which Father O'Malley has spent his whole life studying, to our great benefit, is described as (p. 14) "reaching a new climax in the twelfth century with St. Bernard and his Cistercian colleagues." Certainly one can place Bernard as stylist in a (very flexibly defined) humanist camp, but this ignores Bernard's "prophetic" hostility to much that was "humanistic" in the twelfth century, especially the literature of the cathedral schools (on many subjects, O'Malley's bibliography is not very current), or the Romanesque sculpture the Cistercians so consciously avoided. O'Malley is perfectly aware of this side of Bernard, which he refers to later, but it is as if the idea that there are "four cultures" is in charge of the book, separating into cultures which existed united in individuals.

Chapter One, "Prophecy and Reform," takes up the first tradition stating (p. 37), "This is the culture of contempt of the world." One can see the problems coming. Do Amos, Gregory VII (well-treated), Luther, or Martin Luther King, Jr., express contempt for the world, contempt for what the world has become, or hope for a more just world? Chapter two is on "The...