Christmas being a season of dispensations great and small, I am granting to myself one of the latter category by reviewing here a book published nearly four years ago, which at the time regrettably evaded my attention. Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture: An Essay in the Interpretation of Western History (Mercer University Press, Macon, Ga.; $23.95), by Willis B. Glover, is a learned and stylishly executed historical tour de force that turns on their heads a great many modernist assumptions concerning the pattern and progress of Western history in the past millennium. It is still in print, and is readily available from the publisher, as I learned from a telephone conversation last week.
According to the conventional (secular) interpretation, Western culture, having got off to a promising start among the Greeks and Romans of pagan antiquity, hit a bump in the road (the Rock of St. Peter) that blocked its progress for a thousand years or so until, in the late Middle Ages, a growing party of enlightened souls discovered the means of levering it out of the way. That obstacle of dark superstition and wizardry having been removed, Western man found himself moving forward again with the speed of an Olympic torchbearer. The Renaissance rediscovered classicism and, using it as the basis for its own brand of humanism, effected the first stage in the emancipation of modern man: a process finally achieved in the full-blown secularization of the Enlightenment, whose accomplishments Western civilization has been exploring, refining, and developing for the past two centuries. According to this view, Western history has been a kind of Shavian evolution, starting with Methuselah for its raw material and completing its work with its finished masterpiece, Norman Lear. Freed forever from the Biblical values and traditions of the Bad Old Days, modern man is at liberty to develop his own potential unencumbered by any standard of value higher than himself.
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