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As cultural conflicts roil the world, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” has lately taken hold, with commentators from both East and West weighing the religious and political disparities that affect global unity. For all its present currency and urgency, the idea is nothing new.  In various contexts V. S. Soloviev (1853–1900), the most distinguished representative of nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophy, anticipated our current global dilemma by more than a hundred years. These essays, presented together for the first time in English, consider from a number of perspectives how a future clash of cultures between East and West threatens human progress toward the harmonic unity that, for Soloviev, represented the ultimate human telos.

The six essays comprising this book span Soloviev’s publishing career, beginning with “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism,” written at the age of twenty, and ending with “Muhammad, His Life and Religious Teaching,” which appeared four years before Soloviev’s death at forty-seven.  Throughout, Soloviev grapples with commonalities and differences apparent in the moral frameworks of civilizations since antiquity; and in religious and cultural practices, from Europe through the Middle East to Asia.   His probing of the sources of religious morality and political authority in human history reinvigorated Russian intellectual interest in the East/West question in his time and still resonates powerfully in our own.

The extraordinary adaptability and durability of Greek culture in times of momentous change is revealed in this book, as G. W. Bowersock seeks to interpret Hellenism in a predominantly Christian world. In this effort he sheds new light on a late paganism that has often been seen as moribund and shows it to have been unexpectedly vigorous. Hellenism, comprising the language, thought, mythology, and images of the Greeks, contributed fundamentally to the evolution of early Christianity. It had spread across the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean for many centuries before Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the Byzantine government. But Hellenism served no less to disseminate and strengthen paganism--a role that has hitherto been little appreciated or studied. The local traditions of Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Near East survived in most cases by sharing common forms of expression with the Christians. Hellenism clearly allowed late pagans of widely differing traditions to communicate with each other. At the same time it gave to both Christianity and Islam a pagan context that enjoyed much greater public recognition then than now. And so the author shows that Hellenism illuminates the wholeness of the late antique world in the East, the interaction of its paganism and its Christianity. Dionysus and Christ flourished together. ". . . Bowersock has given us a new unifying perspective for the turbulent religious history of four centuries--the idea of a common cultural medium within (and against) which differing religious traditions evolved and inter-penetrated." --New York Times Book Review ". . . a formidable achievement . . . [an] elegant and powerfully original book." --Times Literary Supplement G. W. Bowersock is Professor of Ancient History in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.