The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity

Christopher S. Celenza is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and a Professor of History and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. A former Director of the American Academy in Rome, he has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a scholar whose wide interests and expertise span Renaissance thought, classical tradition, and intellectual history. His many books include Machiavelli: A Portrait (Harvard University Press, 2015), The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

• 1. Introduction: Philosophy, Wisdom, Traditions; 2. Plato: Philosophy, Conversation, and the Nature of Reality; 3. Plato: Wisdom is about Examples; 4. Aristotle: From Observation to Ethics; 5. The Shape of the Good Life: Virtue, Friendship, and Contemplation in Aristotle; 6. Strands in the Fabric: Judaism, Hellenistic Thought, Rome; 7. Christianity; 8. The Death of Christ; 9. Vessel of Election, Light of the Gentiles; 10. Augustine, Platonism, and Conversion; 11. Augustine, the “City of God”, and History; 12. Endings and New Beginnings: Gregory the Great and Beyond; Epilogue.

'Christopher Celenza's latest book, by his own account, is 'attuned to the porous boundaries between philosophy, literature, and religion, and attentive to the lived dimensions of thought.' That is to say, it is humanist – focused on the human person in a sense that is at once perennial and urgently necessary in the here and now. Its two chapters on Augustine convey the thought of that figure so dear to the new Pope with clarity, vitality, and gusto.' Paul Elie, Georgetown University, author of The Last Supper