Questão 741193

Questão 43

Text 8 to answer question 43.

1____“The history not only of thought, but of consciousness,

opinion, action too, morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large

degree a history of dominant models. Whenever you look at

4 any particular civilisation, you will find that its most

characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a

particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for

7 these writings – or paint these paintings, or produce these

particular pieces of music – are dominated by. And in order

to identify a civilisation, in order to explain what kind of

10 civilisation it is, in order to understand the world in which

men of this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to

try, so far as possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which

13 the culture obeys. Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy

or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the

philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a

16 geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his

thought operates on lines which are coordinated by the idea

that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine,

19 unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to

deduce certain absolutely infallible conclusions; that it is

possible to attain to this kind of wisdom by a special method

22 which he recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute

knowledge to be obtained in the world, and if only we can

attain to this absolute knowledge, of which geometry,

25 indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, the

most perfect paradigm, we can organize our lives in terms of

this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in

28 a static manner, needing no further change; and then all

suffering, all doubt, all ignorance, all forms of human vice

and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.

31___[…]

“Let us look at another example – a parallel culture,

that of the Bible, that of the Jews at a comparable period.

34 You will find a totally different model dominating, a totally

different set of ideas, which would have been unintelligible

to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and

37 Christianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family

life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of

members of a tribe to one another. Such fundamental

40 relationships – in terms of which nature and life are

explained – as the love of children for their father, the

brotherhood of man, forgiveness, commands issued by a

43 superior to an inferior, the sense of duty, transgression, sin

and therefore the need to atone for it – this whole complex

of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is

46 explained by those who created the Bible, and by those who

were to a large extent influenced by it, would have been

48 totally unintelligible to the Greeks.”

_{From Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1999, pps. 2-3.}

Considering the ideas and the vocabulary of the text, mark the following items as right (C) or wrong (E).

From the information presented in the text, it is correct to infer that, thanks to their grasp of timeless geometrical and mathematical truths, Ancient Greeks generally understood the culture of the Bible.