Owlseyes ’s Reviews > From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present > Status Update

When the miner's son from Saxony, Luther, Lhuder, Lutter, or Lotharius
as he was variously known, posted his 95 propositions on the door of All
Saints' church at Wittenberg on October 31,1517, the last thing he wanted to do was to break up his church, the Catholic (= "universal"), and divide his
world into warring camps.

One must speak of the West as being torn apart in the 16C because Europe would be inexact. Europe is the peninsula that juts out from the great mass of Asia without a break and is ridiculously called a continent. (...) For the West, in this clearly defined sense, it would be convenient to say "the Occident."

PART I
From Luther's Ninety-five Theses to Boyle's "Invisible College". The West Torn Apart

T H E MODERN ERA BEGINS, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, (...)

If this periodizing had to be justified, it could be said that the first period— 1500-1660—was dominated by the issue of what to believe in religion; the second—1661-1789—by what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government; the third—1790-1920—by what means to achieve social and economic equality. The rest is the mixed consequence of all these efforts. What then marks a new age?

Granted for the sake of argument that "our culture" may be ending, why the slice of 500 years? What makes it a unity?

The recital is studded with pen portraits—some of the presumably well-known, but more often of others too often overlooked. We meet of course Luther and Leonardo, Rabelais and Rubens, but also Marguerite of Navarre, Marie de Gournay, Christina of Sweden, and their peers down the ages.

(...) But why should the story come to an end? 🤔🤔

Culture—what a word! (...)

This universal independence, achieved after many battles, is a distinctive feature of the West.

(...) parallel theme is PRIMITIVISM. The longing to shuffle off the complex arrangements of an advanced culture recurs again and again. It is a main motive of the Protestant Reformation, it reappears as the cult of the Noble Savage, long before Rousseau, its supposed inventor.

Prologue

LOOKING AT the phrase "our past" or "our culture" the reader is entitled to ask: "Who is we?"
(...) This passion to break away explains also why many feel that the West has to be denounced.
(...)The West has been an endless series of opposites— in religion, politics, art, morals, and manners, most of them persistent beyond their time of first conflict.