The wisdom of the world : the human experience of the universe in Western thought

When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life.

How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Remi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history.

Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe; various rituals and sacrifices were conducted to renew the world.

But for the Greeks, Romans and mediaeval Arabs and Europeans, the universe existed quite apart from human action and possessed, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not.

Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that the questions of how the world worked and the meaning of life were closely intertwined; an understanding of cosmology was seen as crucial for making sense of human ethics.

Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality.

Encyclopaedic yet intimate "The Wisdom of the World" offers the best sort of history: broad, learned and completely compelling.

Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.