Christian Culture and the Western Literary Tradition

Author: Liu Jianjun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: "Christian Culture and the Western Literary Tradition" primarily discusses the influence of Christian culture on the thinking patterns of Western writers and the inseparable connection between Western literature and Christian culture. It covers the unique characteristics of Christian culture, its evolutionary process, and its modes of thinking. On this basis, the book analyzes the historical evolution and fundamental characteristics of the spirit of Western literature. The core argument of the book is that human society has experienced four cultural developmental stages: kinship-based, faith-based, rational-based, and human rights-based. The emergence of Christian culture replaced the kinship-based system with a faith-based one. Under the influence of society and culture itself, this faith-based approach further developed into the rational-based system of modern times and, today, the nascent human rights-based system. Western literature, constrained by this, reflects in its cultural spirit the transformation of humans from natural beings to social beings and, ultimately, to the culturally defined human of today, making Western literature a distinctive spiritual cultural phenomenon.