Russell Shorto Quote
In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.
In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.
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About Russell Shorto
In November 2017, he published Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, which tells the story of the American Revolution through the eyes of six Americans from vastly different walks of life. His most recent work is his 2021 memoir Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob, which covers Shorto's own family history and his ancestors involvement in the American Mafia in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
In 2022, Shorto founded the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society, with a mission to promote awareness of New York's Dutch origins.