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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What experience does Boorstin say Dante described in the Divine Comedy?
(a) Doubt and rediscovery of faith.
(b) The rites of passage.
(c) Birth into religion.
(d) Exile from life to death.

2. In what does Boorstin say Pantagruel luxuriates?
(a) Devotion.
(b) Vulgarity.
(c) Divine sensualism.
(d) Sadism.

3. What did St. Augustine give men in City of God?
(a) An end to their sufferings.
(b) A direction toward God.
(c) Cycles to develop through.
(d) An explanation of where evil came from.

4. What was depicted in the first images?
(a) Animals.
(b) The landscape.
(c) Men.
(d) Abstract symbols.

5. What does Boorstin say Moses introduced into Western culture?
(a) The idea of human sacrifice.
(b) The idea of original sin.
(c) The idea of a single omnipotent creator.
(d) The notion of eternal reoccurrence.

6. What does Boorstin say man seeks in making art?
(a) Fame.
(b) Gain.
(c) Rebellion against God.
(d) Immortality.

7. What becomes harder to understand in a culture that believes in one god in Boorstin's account?
(a) The origins of the universe.
(b) The existence of evil.
(c) Death.
(d) The nature of physical matter.

8. Of what is The Odyssey a parable according to Boorstin?
(a) The mystery of warfare.
(b) The mystery of language.
(c) The mystery of creation.
(d) The mystery of death.

9. What fear did St. Ambrose's creation allay?
(a) Of unsuitable music entering the church.
(b) Of buildings that rendered prayer impossible.
(c) Of drabness in church literature.
(d) Of unseemly literature entering the church canon.

10. What does Boorstin say Christianity got people to see?
(a) Heaven.
(b) The future.
(c) The nature of divinity.
(d) Time as cyclical.

11. What does The Consolation of Philosophy explain?
(a) How to live in a world without God.
(b) How to reinvent yourself as a religious person.
(c) How to see God's will in events.
(d) How to distinguish God's way of knowing from Man's.

12. Who are the devas?
(a) Syrian warriors.
(b) Mesopotamian scribes.
(c) Buddhist monks.
(d) Hindu gods.

13. With what does Boorstin say men had to struggle in order to believe in the power of human creativity?
(a) Greek grammar.
(b) The charm of Greek philosophy.
(c) The awe of Hebraic religion.
(d) The logic of Greek mathematicians.

14. What else did Thespis invent?
(a) The dramatic mask.
(b) The monologue.
(c) The cult of Apollo.
(d) The dithyramb.

15. What did Greeks discover through drama according to Boorstin?
(a) The laws of fate.
(b) Heroes of myth.
(c) The laws of the state.
(d) Themselves.

Short Answer Questions

1. To what use did Romans put sculpture according to Boorstin?

2. What does Boorstin say is the paradoxical nature of Moses' God?

3. What does Paul Valery say the artist's business is in the epigraph to Book 1?

4. What was Boccaccio's inspiration for the Decameron?

5. What does Thoreau say, in the epigraph to Part 7, it takes to speak the truth?

(see the answer keys)

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