I think it's an apt metaphor from our Western perspective looking back through time. A stream runs into another stream to make a river, etc. But there is always danger in quoting out of context. Here's the rest of that paragraph:President Camacho wrote:"We have reached the Meeting of the Waters, the point at which the two great rivers of our cultural patrimony—the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian—flow into each other to become the mighty torrent of Western civilization."
This isn't right. The sentence makes it seem like their was a mutual and voluntary blending when there really wasn't.
I'm thinking of Wright's line that a successful conqueror is a theologically-flexible conqueror. And, the Romans, at least were that. Thanks, DWill, for that word, "snycretism." That enables me to look it up in the index of Wright's book:We have reached the Meeting of the Waters, the point at which the two great rivers of our cultural patrimony—the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian—flow into each other to become the mighty torrent of Western civilization. It is an irony of our cultural history that the plodding Romans became the channel through which all the delicacies and distinctions of Greek culture flowed into the West. It is no less ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream. But such and so are the case.
"The melding of religious concepts or beliefs—"syncretism"—is a common way to forge cultural unity in the wake of conquest, and often, as here, what gets melded is the gods themselves. (TEOG, pg. 85).
A good example of syncretism, of course, is how the Romans absorbed the Greek pantheon, some of their gods' names being grafted onto their more multi-dimensional Greek counterparts.
Cahill argues that Christian monasticism was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans and, later, the Platonists, who lived in communities, renouncing the normal life. And before that, the Pythagoreans and Platonists were influenced by the Indian Budhists and their predecessors. So Cahill is no Christian apologist; he takes a scholarly and historical approach, while his writing is accessible to the layperson.
In this last section, Cahill takes a broad overview, a step back to see the meeting of the waters. He discusses the mystery religions and then the arrival of the Romans, who he doesn't discuss in a very flattering way. But he makes it very clear that the Greeks are one of the largest tributaries.
"Many aspects of this immense confluence are dealt with in earlier books in this series. The seminal Jewish contributions to our common Western history—without which nothing else could have happened—is the subject of Vol. II, The Gifts of the Jews. The contribution of early Christianity and its dependence on ancient Judaism are the subjects of Vol. III, Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Nor have the Romans been neglected. Even if they don't have a volume of their own, they are the subject of the first two chapters of the introductory Vol. I, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and they form an important strand throughout Desire of the Everlasting Hills.
. . .
I've gone ahead and ordered How the Irish Saved Civilization from abebooks. It sounds quite good as well.
