These three stages in Nemo’s morphogenesis are uncontroversial and highlight the synthesis between the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian strata that underlie Western culture. The third stage, however, brings with it a significant revaluation of the late Middle Ages and the contribution of the Scholastics, in contrast to the traditional cultural history provided in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century—illustrated, for example, by the work of Jacob Burkhart, who preferred to emphasize the revolutionary role of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the advent of modern liberal, individualistic culture.
Following the work of Harold J. Berman on the history of law, Nemo holds that the Gregorian Reform and the broader “Papal Revolution” of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries are the locus of the real synthesis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The result is a new weltanschauung in which Greek science and Roman law are thereafter put to work within History. Thus, during this period, the Catholic Church replaces the Augustinian theology of original sin with Anselm’s doctrine of free will and later introduces the doctrine of the purgatory.
These theological innovations emphasize that each individual human being’s efforts matter in the “economics of his salvation” and therefore stimulate him to play an active, as opposed to a contemplative, role in the world. This stage in the morphogenesis of Western culture, which is also characterized by the recovery of ancient philosophy, marks the separation with the Eastern (largely Orthodox) Christian area. In fact, the expression Western culture originally denoted this distinction between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity.
Until the Papal Revolution, cultural evolution was largely symmetric in the Christian East and West. (The schism between the Church of Rome and the Eastern churches took place in 1054, and the division was cemented only after the Latin crusaders’ conquest of Constantinople in the thirteenth century.)
The Eastern, or Orthodox, culture also rested on the same three strata—Greek, Roman, and JudeoChristian—although even before the official separation, the Eastern and Western churches embraced different mixtures of or placed different emphases on these strata. What differentiates Eastern Christianity from Western Christianity in Nemo’s view is its undervaluation of men’s temporal action and its lack of emphasis on human reason and progress.
To illustrate the difference between western Europe (and its extra-European cultural colonies) and eastern Europe, he singles out a famous passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which the Great Inquisitor (a metaphor for the Catholic Church) condemns to death Jesus Christ, who happens to be on a second coming to the earth, because his religious pathos threatens to disturb the peaceful and happy existence to which the people have become accustomed since his first coming.
In the parable, Jesus Christ embodies what Dostoyevsky considers to be the heroic and authentic faith of the Christian Orthodox, but for Nemo it simply proves the Orient’s deep-seated skepticism and contempt of reason and its over-valuation of the transcendent.
The last stage in the morphogenesis of Western culture, according to Nemo, is the creation and promotion of modern liberal democracy, beginning with the English Revolution in the seventeenth century and developed further by the American Revolution and the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and by the Italian Risorgimento and similar events all over Europe and elsewhere in the nineteenth century.
