The classical-Christian Western tradition is largely the result of the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem: Greek philosophical-metaphysical thought and Hebrew biblical-religious revelation, later fused and transformed within Christianity.
The underlying ancient matrix can be pictured as:
Mesopotamian + Egyptian + Levantine/Hebrew + Iranian + Greek
with Greece and Israel becoming the two overwhelmingly important streams that later meet in Christianity.
The Greek stream gives the West things like:
- philosophy as disciplined inquiry;
- metaphysics;
- Plato and the Forms;
- Aristotle and systematic philosophy;
- logic;
- ethics and political philosophy;
- mathematical cosmology;
- the philosophical soul;
- the One and the Good;
- Stoicism;
- Platonism and Neoplatonism;
- philosophical mysticism.
The Hebrew stream gives:
- Creation by God;
- covenant;
- sacred history;
- prophecy;
- moral monotheism;
- divine Law;
- the Kingdom;
- Messiah;
- apocalypse;
- sin, repentance and restoration;
- the historical drama of humanity and God.
Then Christianity does something extraordinary:
it identifies the Hebrew God and sacred history with a revelation centered on Christ, while increasingly interpreting that revelation through Greek philosophical categories.
By late antiquity, Christian theology becomes deeply indebted to Greek metaphysics—especially Platonism and later Neoplatonism—and eventually Aristotle as well.
So in a very compressed sense:
Jerusalem gives the Story. Athens gives much of the metaphysical grammar by which the Story is interpreted. Christianity joins them around Christ.
The Roots of Greek and Hebrew Culture
Egypt and Mesopotamia form part of the much older civilizational matrix out of which both Greek and Hebrew traditions developed.
Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations had sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, medicine, kingship, ritual, mythology and cosmology long before classical Greek philosophy. Greek natural philosophy inherited knowledge from those older cultures, even though the Greeks also transformed it in distinctive ways.
Likewise, the Hebrew Bible emerges inside the wider ancient Near Eastern world. Its creation traditions, flood traditions, temple symbolism, kingship, law and wisdom literature have many points of contact with Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite and other neighboring cultures.
But Israel also does something distinctive with that inherited world.
Mesopotamia / Sumer / Babylon Egypt Canaan / Levant Iran / Persia feeding into, interacting with and surrounding: Israel + Greece
Egypt
- an ancient source of sacred kingship;
- temple religion;
- cosmic order;
- priesthood;
- afterlife mysticism;
- symbolic theology;
- sacred writing;
- mathematical and astronomical knowledge;
- and eventually the imagined homeland of Hermetic wisdom.
Greeks had substantial contact with Egypt by the archaic/classical period, and later Alexandria becomes one of the great crossroads of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and other cultures.
After Alexander, especially in places like Alexandria, Greek culture enters intense contact with:
- Egyptian religion;
- Judaism;
- Persian/Iranian ideas;
- mystery traditions;
- various philosophical schools.
That world produces or nurtures:
- Hellenistic Judaism;
- early Christianity;
- Gnostic movements;
- Middle Platonism;
- Neopythagoreanism;
- Hermeticism;
- later Neoplatonism.
The Hermetica themselves are late-antique Greco-Egyptian texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the figure formed by identifying Greek Hermes with Egyptian Thoth.
Rome contributes less of the deepest metaphysical substance, perhaps, but enormously to the civilizational form of the West:
- law;
- political institutions;
- empire;
- citizenship;
- Latin language;
- administration;
- engineering;
- Christian ecclesiastical structure.
So you might say:
Greece gave philosophy. Israel gave revelation. Rome gave institutional and legal form. Christianity synthesized and transmitted them.
And later Germanic/Celtic peoples, Islam, Renaissance humanism, science, Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc. all transform the inheritance further.
Freemasonry
- Solomon's Temple;
- biblical symbolism;
- sacred architecture;
- geometry;
- moral allegory;
- initiatory death and rebirth;
- Hermetic and alchemical imagery in some currents;
- Enlightenment philosophy;
- ancient mystery-school mythology.
Freemasonry became one of the great early-modern institutions that consciously gathered, ritualized and transmitted symbols drawn from the biblical, classical, architectural and esoteric inheritance of the West.
Founding Sages
Hermes - Sacred knowledge, revelation of cosmic order, magic, astrology, alchemy, mediation between heaven and earth.
Pythagoras - Number, harmony, philosophy as way of life, initiatory community, purification, cosmic mathematics.
Plato
Moses - Covenant, Law, revelation, sacred history, divine Name.
Christ - fulfillment, incarnation, forgiveness, return to the Father, restoration of Sonship.
Sketch of the Lineage
PRIMORDIAL ANCIENT WORLD
Mesopotamia / Sumer Egypt Levant Iran ↓
Two major Western streams emerge
ATHENS
Greek philosophy, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, mysteries
JERUSALEM
Hebrew scripture, covenant, prophets, Temple, Messiah
↓
Hellenistic Alembic
Alexandria / eastern Mediterranean
Greek + Egyptian + Jewish + Iranian currents
↓
Hermeticism
Hellenistic Judaism
Gnosticism
Neopythagoreanism
Middle Platonism
early Christianity
↓
CHRISTIAN SYNTHESIS
Christ + Hebrew revelation + Greek metaphysics
↓
Church Fathers
Christian Platonism
Neoplatonism
Monasticism
Mysticism
↓
Medieval synthesis
Scholasticism
Grail / chivalry
Kabbalah
cathedral culture
↓
Renaissance
Plato + Hermetica + Kabbalah + Christianity + alchemy
↓
Rosicrucianism
Freemasonry
Western occult tradition
↓
Romanticism / Blake / occult revival / depth psychology / etc.
↓
THE ROYAL ART
The spiritual-intellectual West is born from the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens, themselves children of the older civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean. Christianity becomes the great historical vessel of that marriage; Hermeticism, Platonism, mysticism, alchemy, Kabbalah and the later initiatory traditions preserve and transform other dimensions of the same wider inheritance.