Three Cities, One Sign: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome at the Birth of Western Civilization

Two recent articles have staked out the field. “What Do Conservatives Mean by ‘Western Civilization?’” by James Diddams begins with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the same phrase with entirely different meanings. In his response to Diddams, John W. Burge sees Western civilization as an unbroken tradition of Logos (reason) and the Great Conversation, with modern radicalism from both the left and right as the source of discontinuity. Whether Diddams and Burge realize it or not, this argument is only another echo of a far older fracture. I want to say just one thing: stop. Both are correct—as Scripture makes clear.

First, on both being right. The late Pope Benedict XVI, in an address to the Bundestag, argued that Europe must trace its identity back to the traditions of, and encounter among three cities: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Whatever one’s confessional or political commitments, the importance of these three cities is beyond serious dispute. The debate within Western civilization concerns only how they are to be understood and weighted against one another, but not that they constitute the soul of the West. After all, the question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” was first posed by Tertullian around 200 AD—a man who happened to be the son of a Roman centurion.

Yes, the West today cannot agree on what the West is. But this is nothing new. Even within Christendom itself, the disagreement is as old as Christianity—to say nothing of the many writers outside the Christian tradition. The argument has always been there, and never resolved itself by persuasion. In a certain sense, this very argument is an essential feature of the Western tradition. “Western civilization” as such has always been defined differently by different people, each gathering a community of assent and calling it consensus.

But constant reference to intellectual tensions between contrasting views within a broader conversation does make for any kind of meaningful or coherent standard. Instead, for Christians, Scripture must be the standard. So let us look at what Scripture says about these three cities—or more precisely, what kind of people it places in them.

Begin with Rome. The most famous Roman in Scripture is arguably Pilate, Roman governor of Judea under Emperor Tiberius, usually dated to A.D. 26–36. Power is in his hands, yet his most memorable act is washing his hands, as though moral responsibility for those in power could be dissolved by soap and water. As Rome’s representative, he tries to maintain order, pacify the crowd, and put “Truth” on trial. Then, sensing that something has gone wrong, he washes his hands in an attempt to absolve himself.

Here’s the logic of empire: Truth is simply something that must submit to imperial interrogation and judgment. For this Rome, law and order matters more than truth. When necessary, truth can be sacrificed for order—and one can simply wash one’s hands. A perfect escape.

But Rome also gives us the centurion of Matthew 8, who, standing before someone of vastly different station, says: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof” (Matt. 8:8). He will not place Truth beneath a Roman ceiling. By the custom of the time, entering under a roof meant entering a jurisdiction. So “I am not worthy” is more than courtesy—it is a soldier’s instinctive awe. He recognizes an order higher than Rome, one that cannot be contained under the empire’s eaves and does not even require physical contact to act. For Western civilization, the question is not whether Rome exists. The question is where its roof, its jurisdiction, begins and ends.

Jerusalem is harder. Rome at least knows it is an empire. Jerusalem believes it is the bearer of God on earth. Here comes Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest. He buys off a traitor. He sends out subordinates armed with swords and clubs. He acts as both accuser and judge, dragging the so-called criminal before a higher official from a foreign land. His very successor does the same: delivering a man named Paul into Roman hands. Yes, this is the high priest of Jerusalem. Yes, he is considering a sacrifice—whether to sacrifice one man or an entire nation—but his real concern is which option yields the greater advantage. When he finally asks his question, he is not seeking an answer. He is seeking a confession.

Then, of course, there is Nicodemus. At first, he conceals his identity, coming quietly under cover of night to seek the truth. After Truth is crucified, he could stay hidden—but he steps into the light. For him, having found the truth, no loss of standing in the Sanhedrin is too great a price.

This is the other Jerusalem. This Jerusalem has its limits. It possesses the truth, but not by itself the means to carry that truth to the nations. For that, it needs Rome. The Gospel leaves Jerusalem and travels along roads Jerusalem does not build, under a peace Jerusalem cannot enforce.

Years later, the scene shifts to Athens. The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers want only whatever novelty might serve as conversation. While the Socratic method, handed down from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, remained alive and well, it lacked orientation toward the highest good. Instead of faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum), Greek philosophy lacked the divine revelation needed to reach the moral and metaphysical heights of Christian theology. But Dionysius, one of the guardians of Paideia (the Athenian tradition of civic and cultural formation), chooses to join the early Church and believe. While Nicodemus still has the testimony of the Old Testament, Dionysius confronts a truth entirely outside his Athenian frame of reference. Yet without Athens, that truth might never acquire the conceptual language through which it can be articulated beyond Jerusalem.

Augustine (City of God, XV.1) observed that earthly cities are a mingled mass—the City of God and the City of Man woven together. Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens are no exceptions. The governor and the centurion, the high priest and the member of the Sanhedrin, the philosophers and the guardian of culture: each stands as a representative of his city. This is unlikely to be accidental.

We have considered the problem of the three cities, and yet the question remains: why no fourth city, no fifth? Why not Assyria, Babylon, Persia, or Egypt? Rome occupied Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, but so did Babylon. Greek empire and culture reshaped vast numbers of Jews, but so did Egypt.

Yet at the birth of Christianity, only the languages of these three cities are written on the same sign. Perhaps that is why the Gospel bothers to mention the three languages at all: “It was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek” (John 19:20).

Christianity was the first to place these three cities within the same story about history and truth.

If Western civilization has a birth certificate, it is that sign nailed to the cross. And it is precisely at this moment, within the boundaries of that very sign, that the fracture between the City of God and the City of Man is already clearly visible.