The first question of abstract reflection that arouses controversy is the problem of Becoming. Being persists while beings constantly change; they are born and they pass away. How can Being change and yet be eternal? The author looks at man’s need to create a god, and he examines how different societies have used religion and how the Greco-Roman and Christian heritage of Western Europe forged today’s culture. Some historians see great events as shaped by great personalities. Others see people dwarfed by massive, impersonal forces of economics or class.
Claudiu A. Secara sees both explanations dwarfed by the power of the collective idea. In the panoply of man’s teachers, Jesus legacy came to effect unparalleled influence. Examining why that should be so, Secara notes that historically Jesus emerged from the confluence of the Greek sense of individuality and Judaism’s philosophical religion and impressed his countrymen with his teaching of dialectical thinking.
They were expecting a political Messiah but were confronted with Jesus’s own anti-Christ spirit (anti-Messianic stand) — ancient thinking of what modern-day philosophy has more elaborately defined as Western dialectical materialism.
No less prophetic, Duns Scotus, one of England’s early Scholastics, was the father of his nation through the Laws and the Commandments he gave them. His sojourns in Oxford and Paris were his Egyptian wandering; Northumberland was his Mount Sinai while his new nation was Britannia.
The story of Duns Scotus’s individuality and the ensuing chapter in English history — the industrial revolution— is the exemplary history that lies at the origins of our Western civilization.
