Customer Reviews

Four Cultures of the West

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What I most enjoyed about this book was that a noted historian stepped out of the usual role of more detailed analysis of a particular period and took the long view about the main streams of culture winding through Western history and Christianity. In this sense it is a risky book. O'Malley pulls it off, showing both his understanding of history and his power of more synthetic reflection. I don't know anything like it. It provides the reader with tools or categories of thought for his or her own reflections on history and culture. It is a book full of examples asking one to find one's own examples and to try out O'Malley's "four cultures" as a way of understanding and interrelating major figures of the past or present. I found it a very helpful review and integration of my own lifelong education in the humanities. I would particularly recommend it for capstone or synthesis courses in university core curricula or honors programs. I keep buying more copies of this book and giving it to people who are most likely to appreciate its utitily in the education in the liberal arts tradition. It is hands down the best book I have read in the past year.

Stephen V. Sundborg, S. J.
President, Seattle University

This is a wonderful book that feels like Vivaldi and reads like a Bach fugue. Full of life, kindness and compassion, this book is an easy read. It is open, inclusive and daring in its scope and purpose: to map out the four dominant motifs or cultures of the West.

These four cultures are more like four distinct personality types. Each culture has its "characters" galore and the author does a good job of letting us experience the different types of character that make up each of them.

By leading us through each culture and showing us how each develops from within, we are able to participate, with the author, in their reconstruction. This gives the reader a hands-on sense of their make up and how they operate.

What this book offers is a visceral feel for each of these cultures in their uniqueness. It is this feeling, and not some abstract attempt at categorization, that teaches us how to pick up these motifs whenever and wherever we may encounter them. It teaches us to how to discriminate these processes through pattern recognition.

This technique makes it easy to understand and feel the real distinction between the academic culture (Culture 2) and the liberal arts culture (Culture 3). I consider this the most important part the book.

The section on Culture three is must reading. It is a simple, clear exposition of the power and responsibility of the liberal arts to build character and train leaders. Surprisingly the traditional home of liberal arts education was not in the universities.

This raises some interesting questions. If the liberal arts do not belong in academia, where do they belong and how does one actually learn to be a liberal artist? What are the traditional functions of the liberal arts and how did they get side tracked as "academic disciplines?"

We tend to assume that a liberal arts education is a college education. This may not be the case and this book will tell you why.

In this sense this book can be used as a guidebook and road map to make sense of our current confusions. Used as a mirror, it points out exactly what is missing in today's colleges and professional development programs. Hence this book is must reading for educators and corporate trainers.

I can not over recommend the importance of this book for anyone interested in understanding the forces at work in today's world. These four cultures are perennial and learning to pick them up in everyday settings can give you a huge edge. Failure to do so is a recipe for frustration and confusion.

Gaining familiarity with these four cultures is probably a good way for "westerners" to develop compassion and deep-seated understanding for non-western cultures. Multi- cultural studies begin at home.

What is your cultural type and what are the "cultural settings" you most often find yourself in (at work, at play, with friends, etc)? This book might help you to find your spiritual home while also helping you to understand why you tend to avoid, resent or dismiss other "cultural types."

These are powerful claims. In my opinion this is a powerful book. It is well worth buying and reading.

This book is a find - it captures something critically important about the modern West and will have you thinking for years to come. In many aspects, it's a very classical and a very Catholic book. Thus the way O'Malley shows how all of that shapes our culture today will come as all the more refreshing and incisive. It is not a long book you will read slowly and once, but a short book that you will first read quickly, and then again and again more carefully.

Anything by O'Malley is excellently researched and presented, and that is evident in this book. He reviews, discusses and integrates the four cultures - the major influences - of western civilazation and describes how they affect everything from education to our western world view. This book is a real gem and is as interesting being read for the fourth time as it was the first time.

As someone who majored in philosophy and theology at Catholic University 4 decades ago, I found reading O'Malley's four cultures a refreshing review of centuries of learning. I can relate to the four cultures O'Malley so clearly explains in an entertaining way. I am especially grateful to O'Malley for writing about much I missed concerning the connection between the ancient, medieval, renaissance and modern world.

If I had the opportunity, I would engage O'Malley on the present dimension of these cultures and the emergence of a new culture or cultures. That would be bold because I have little learning when compared to O'Malley. My question would be, is he too hopeful for the flourishing of Vatican II even with its new form as expressed in its documents? Four decades after Vatican II, the structure and government of the Church has more in common with an authoritarian run country than anything we as Americans see in our democracy. There are no checks or balances in the church. There is very little openness and decisions are in made in secret with hardly any input from the largest body in the Church, the laity. The canon law of the church is still dominated by culture two approaches which only a select few can grasp or participate in.

The Church authorities are still dominated by an all male celibate clergy; ecumenism since Vatican II has dead or gone backward; the hierarchy still insists that contraception is a sin; the treatment of gays is dismissive as evidenced by the denial of ordination to anyone who admits to being gay; the Eastern Churches in the United States cannot ordain married men to the priesthood while married Lutherans and Episcopal priest converts are welcomed to the fold; the annulment procedure in the church make no sense to most people who consider it nothing more than divorce Catholic style; the fear and repression under which many Catholic theologians work.

O'Malley gives some historic examples of the role of women in culture three but couldn't be said that women in the world today are emerging or have emerged as a really distinct culture five? Couldn't it also be said that the Church is the one institution that refuses to recognize the emergence of this culture.

In conclusion I loved O'Malley's book for its warmth and learning but when he talks about Vatican II's documents and its culture three style, I think he may be making too much of the effectiveness of this style in the past four decades since Vatican II.

I hope I am not being unfair in bringing up questions not dealt with in O'Malley's book. O'Malley himself says that the Church is concerned with everything that affects humanity.
Maybe he can bring his erudition to bear on these questions. I highly recommend this book to new readers.

Fr./Dr. O'Malley's Four Cultures of the West is a gem, a mini-masterpiece. In identifying and describing the development of these four cultures - the prophetic, the academic, the humanistic, and the artistic - he gives us yet another way to decipher both the past and the present. Insights abound, such as that most prophets and prophetic movements tend to look backward toward a better, purer, and more righteous period.

His understanding of the role that the early Jesuit schools played in disseminating humanistic culture is particularly interesting.

Plus, this short and readable book contains many illuminating and enjoyable mini-bios, such as his perceptions on Luther and Erasmus.

Easy to read and thoroughly enjoyable!

I am of the opinion that you can't understand the present without a thorough grounding in the history of Christianity. It may be possible to be a thoroughly non-Christian western intellectual today, but that has only been true for about 20-30 years. Before that, even the anti-Christian writers and thinkers KNEW about Christianity because it was IMPOSSIBLE not to know. As a general rule, political liberals, intellectuals and hipsters spend more time mocking Christianity then understanding it- and that is a shame.

It's one thing to say that the history of Christianity is important to know, it's quite another to find the right books to convey that knowledge. Half a millennium of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants has introduced a ton of partisanship into the subject area. Thus, when I find a good writer on the subject- I stick with him. John O'Malley is one of he good ones, Catholic though he may be. Last year I read his excellent history of the Jesuit Order, The First Jesuits. Four Cultures of the West takes as it's starting point the contrast between "ATHENS AND JERUSALEM" i.e. the respective influences of the Hellenic Philosophers vs. Hebrew Prophets on Western Civilization, itemizing that overlapping influence by describing Four Cultures and talking about their modern descendants.

Culture One is the culture of "Prophecy and Reform"- here he is talking about the culture that gave rise to "JERUSALEM": Hebrew prophets, Christian Saints & Luther and his disciples. This is a culture resistant to compromise and moderation.

Culture Two is the culture of "The Academy and the Professions." This is the culture which arose out of Athens, developed into medieval scholasticism, then into the University. It's hard to ignore the impact of the University on our modern world but less easy to understand the relationship between the University and medieval Scholasticism.

Culture Three is the culture of "Poetry, Rhetoric & The Common Good." This is the culture of what we would call today "The Gentleman"- educated but not scholarly- a culture that includes the Humanists of the Renaissance, the rhetorical orators of Rome and their spiritual descendants. Culture Three developed a strong critique of the Scholasticism of the medieval University that succeeded in transforming that institution into it's modern version.

Culture Four is the culture of "Art and Performance"- this one is pretty self explanatory and probably the most familiar to readers of this blog since it includes popular music/popular culture, novels, etc. Unfortunately, O'Malley's discussion of Culture Four is largely comprised of a recounting of the Iconoclast/Iconophile debate that took place in Southern Europe during the early middle ages, so it actually turns out to be the weakest chapter of the whole book.

Developed out of a lecture series, Four Cultures of the West is very readable- no specialized knowledge required. O'Malley's main point is not to describe each culture as independent from one another, but rather to note how they have influenced one another and how each has influenced the Modern World. Each of the four cultures has maintained relevance from Ancient times to Modern times. O'Malley is not trying to be totally inclusive- he acknowledges that he is omitting other significant cultures, such as the culture of the Germanic tribes on Rome's northern border, and the commercial/business culture that started in the early modern period. Ultimately, O'Malley has a strong thesis, and this book is a good introduction to the subject of Four Cultures of the West.