Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (46 page)

I mean here merely to nod in the direction of such controversies, which could easily fill a book I have no wish to write. Though the centuries-long game of philosophical tennis may excite you at first, absorb and draw you into its ups and downs (and its sometimes surprising upsets), its mesmerizing back-and-forths can lull you into a kind of trance and finally threaten to become a serious bore. Let’s just keep at the back of our minds the
poc-poc
of the philosophical tennis ball as it hits the meshed rackets of our sweating champions and turn our attention, rather, to a few of the unsettling events that in the course of the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries signal that we are on the road to the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Thomas Cahill is the author of the bestselling Hinges of History series, published to great acclaim throughout the English-speaking world and in translation in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Born in New York City, Cahill graduated from Fordham University and earned an MFA in film and dramatic literature from Columbia University. A lifelong scholar, he has taught at Queens College, Fordham University, and Seton Hall University and studied scripture at Union Theological Seminary and Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible as a Visiting Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He served as North American education correspondent for
The Times
of London and was for many years a regular contributor to the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
. For six years he was Director of Religious Publishing at Doubleday before retiring to write full-time. In addition to The Hinges of History, Cahill has published
Pope John XXIII
and
Jesus’ Little Instruction Book
, and with his wife, Susan Cahill,
A Literary Guide to Ireland
and
Big City Stories by Modern American Writers
. In 1999 Cahill was awarded an honorary doctorate from Alfred University. He and his wife divide their time between New York City and Rome.

Acclaim for
THOMAS CAHILL’S

Desire of the Everlasting Hills

W
e normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

In this series,
THE HINGES OF HISTORY
, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

—Thomas Cahill

VOLUME I
HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION
THE UNTOLD STORY OF IRELAND’S HEROIC ROLE FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE RISE OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

This introductory volume presents the reader with a new way of looking at history. Its time period—the end of the classical period and the beginning of the medieval period—enables us to look back to our ancient roots and forward to the making of the modern world.

VOLUME II
THE GIFTS OF THE JEWS
HOW A TRIBE OF DESERT NOMADS CHANGED THE WAY EVERYONE THINKS AND FEELS

This is the first of three volumes on the creation of the Western world in ancient times. It is first because its subject matter takes us back to the earliest blossoming of Western sensibility, there being no West before the Jews.

VOLUME III
DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS
THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER JESUS

This volume, which takes as its subject Jesus and the first Christians, comes directly after
The Gifts of the Jews,
because Christianity grows directly out of the unique culture of ancient Judaism.

VOLUME IV
SAILING THE WINE-DARK SEA
WHY THE GREEKS MATTER

The Greek contribution to our Western heritage comes to us largely through the cultural conduit of the Romans (who, though they do not have a volume of their own, are a presence in Volumes I, III, IV, and V). The Greek contribution, older than Christianity, nevertheless continues past the time of Jesus and his early followers and brings us to the medieval period.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
concludes our study of the making of the ancient world.

VOLUME V
MYSTERIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
AND THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN WORLD

The high Middle Ages are the first iteration of the combined sources of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures that make Western civilization singular. In the fruitful interaction of these sources, science and realistic art are rediscovered and feminism makes its first appearance in human history.

VOLUMES VI AND VII

These volumes will continue and conclude our investigation of the making of the modern world and the impact of its cultural innovations on the sensibility of the West.