Athens and Jerusalem

A clarifying thought from current reading:

Prior to the Modern Liberal era, the unrivaled success of Western Civilisation was due to the healthy balance that was struck between the scientific and the extra-scientific, between craft and art, between the tangible and the imagination, or, in my favourite locution, between Athens and Jerusalem. (Evan Sayet, The Kindergarden of Eden)

If the Enlightenment was all about 'pure reason', scientific method and a return to first principles, there was disinterest or outright hostility to the extra-scientific, to questions of morality, to squishy stuff with grey or fuzzy areas that could not be measured or quantified in a laboratory or anatomy room. The Enlightenment ejected Jerusalem and elevated Athens, substituting the previous inbalance of the 'Dark Age' in which the superstitions, irrationalities, brutalities and myth-mongering of a time saw the burning of the works of Arab scholars and the suppression of the works of Aristotle, as Jerusalem sought to overwhelm Athens.

But with Rousseau the balance swung back again, as he damned the Enlightenment for seeking a version of human progress devoid of 'community, virtue, compassion, feeling, enthusiasm, the beautiful and the sublime' (Allan Bloom). Voltaire, writing to Rousseau after reading The Social Contract, thanked him:

Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost the habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.

Rousseau's Jerusalem decries all reason, learning and maturity, opting instead for a romantic primitive infantilism where the only measure of goodness and rightness is what feels true and nice.

Jerusalem without Athens brings the Inquisition.
Athens without Jerusalem brings the Holocaust.