"It is not just any civilization that" hands the riches of others on down intact

"It is unheard of in the history of religions that the holy book of a religion contain, at its side, that of an earlier religion.  Moreover, the second book, the New Testament, constitutes something like a commentary on the first.  More exactly, using the technical term of Jewish exegesis, the New Testament is like a pesher of the Old, which is to say an interpretation that applies the text to the present situation and interprets it in function of a key event, here the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus."

     Rémi Brague, "Inclusion and digestion:  two models of cultural appropriation in response to a question of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Tübingen, September 3, 1996)," in Rémi Brague, The legend of the Middle Ages:  philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 155 (145-158).
     According to Brague, digestion (to the point of destruction) is the approach characteristic of Islam, and inclusion, that of Christianity.  If I understand him correctly, the latter is viewed as a strength at the beginning of the essay ("It is not just any civilization that encourages a style of appropriation that permits the transmission of an object of that appropriation to future generations so that they can newly appropriate it themselves" (145)), but a weakness at the end ("European culture suffers from dispepsia", which is to say indigestion; for the European "stomach—precisely because of all the undissolved inclusions within it—has become more like a gizzard. . . . thanks to the model of appropriation that Europe developed with its sources, it can appropriate other cultures without feeling obliged to digest them" (158)).