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Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization

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Brague's luminous imagination and lucid style (in French) are difficult to match. The book is chock full of original ideas, everyone who reads it will find his mind stimulated; but Brague has also written an indispensable work, a work which fills a gap in western historiography: it nudges our Protestant, Anglo-American, German-dominated historical tradition into coming to grips with an important and neglected strand of Western culture: the Mediterranean-Catholic contribution which has been out of the mainstream of historical thinking at least since the late 16th century, and triumphantly so since the late 18th century. Whoever is up for an exciting journey of rediscovery, and a more complete and more accurate diagnosis of our contemporary Western world and its future will find this mercifully brief and elegant book indispensable.

A very simple thesis, with a lot of rich detail accompanying it.

The Latin West has always thought itself secondary in culture, and doubly so: The Romans thought that for culture, you had to go someplace else, namely Greece. And the Christian West, that for religion, you had to go someplace else, namely to the Bible, most of which is from Hebrew sources.

The result was a graced secondarity, not a graceless inferiority or an other-ignoring superiority. This is the root of the West's perpetual interest in, and value of, other cultures

The pivotal crisis was in the second century, when the Church decided, against Marcion, to keep the inherited Hebrew scripture in its entirely.

The Greek East viewed the Greek literature as its patrimony, and took it for granted. Islam translated what it wanted and ignored the rest, content with its own superiority.