Athens and Jerusalem are not the sum of symbolic ancient cities.
And in truth, they never have been. Even when Tertullian coined
that distinction early in the third century—“What has Athens to
do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church?”—he did so in
the context of Rome: He was the son of a centurion, preaching
and scribbling away in long-before-conquered Carthage. The Roman
Empire was the ground on which he walked, so vast and
omnipresent he could barely notice its existence. The Emporer
Claudius The map remains the same, even for us today. We may
still derive an intellectual and spiritual geography from such
ideas as Athens and Jerusalem, from the contrasts of philosophy
and religion, reason and faith. But we are able to do so only
because they are nodes in the empire of Ancient Rome. The
rivalry of those cities—like single, towering mountains,
glowering at each other across the plain—is visible because the
plain is real: the long Pax Romana that stretches between them.
Somehow, in the political cons