Matthew’s Reviews > The Impulse of Power: Formative Ideals of Western Civilization > Status Update

"In Syria Monasticism produced the concept of the holy man, a man to be reckoned with, a man capable of bringing upon the surrounding communities, and on the great cities, blessings or curses. Superstition and divination continued to be practiced in the name of Christianity."

"Philosophy (science), in Pythagoras’s view, is the means to the divinization
of man. When the soul, through much labor, has at last gazed upon the harmony and order of the divine cosmos, it will itself become harmonious and ordered, a belief that will re-emerge at the outset of the modern world with the Renaissance."