-About The Author (Wikipedia)
-Review by Paul Griffiths (First Things)
-Review by Peter Lawler (First Principles)
-davidbhart.blogspot.com
"To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing - or, better, in nothingness as such. Modernity's highest ideal - its special understanding of personal autonomy - requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom. This is our primal ideology. In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is - to be perfectly precise - nihilism." (20-21)
"It is my governing conviction, in all that follows, that much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of a freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic. Even when modern persons turn away from Christian conviction, there are any number of paths which have been irrevocably closed to them - either because they lead toward philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story, or because they lead towards forms of "superstition" that Christianity has rendered utterly incredible to modern minds. A post-Christian unbeliever is still, most definitely, for good or ill, post-Christian. We live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution - social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual - the immensity of which we often barely grasp." (108)
"Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western Civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one - the triumph of Christianity - that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more enabling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West. And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such improbability as to strain the very limits of our understanding of historical causality". (Introduction, XI)
"At a particular moment in history, I believe, something happened to Western humanity that changed it at the deepest levels of consciousness and at the highest levels of culture. It was something of such strange and radiant vastness that it is almost inexplicable that the memory of it should have so largely faded from our minds, to be reduced to a few old habits of thought and desire whose origins we no longer know, or to be displaced altogether by a few recent habits of thought and desire that render us oblivious to what we have forsaken. But perhaps the veil that time draws between us and the distant past in some sense protects us from the burden of too much memory. It often proves debilitating to dwell too entirely in the shadows of vanished epochs, and our capacity to forget is ( as Friedrich Nietzsche noted) very much a part of our capacity to live in the present. That said, every natural strength can become also an innate weakness; to live entirely in the present, without any of the wisdom that a broad perspective upon the past provides, is to live a life of idiocy and vapid distraction and ingratitude. Over time, our capacity to forget can make everything come to seem unexceptionable and predictable, even things that are quite remarkable and implausible. The most important function of historical reflection is to wake us from too complacent a forgetfulness and to recall us to a knowledge of things that should never be lost to memory. And the most important function of Christian history is to remind us not only of how we came to be modern men and women, or of how Western civilization was shaped, but also of something of incalculable wonder and inexpressible beauty, the knowledge of which can still haunt, delight, torment, and transfigure us." (Introduction, XIV)
"In the more classical understanding of the matter, whether pagan or Christian, true freedom was understood as something inseparable from one's nature:to be truly free, that is to say, was to be at liberty to realize one's proper "essence" and so flourish as the kind of being one was. For Plato or Aristotle, or for Christian thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, or Thomas Aquinas, true human freedom is emancipation from whatever constrains us from living the life of rational virtue, or from experiencing the full fruition of our nature; and among the things that constrain us are our own untutored passions, our willful surrender to momentary impulses, or own foolish or wicked choices. In this view of things, we are free when we achieve that end toward which our inmost nature is oriented from the first moment of existence, and whatever separates us from that end - even if it comes from our own wills - is a form of bondage....we are free not merely because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. For to choose poorly, through folly or malice, in a way that thwarts our nature and distorts our proper form, is to enslave ourselves to the transitory, the irrational, the purposeless, the (to be precise) subhuman. To choose well we must ever more clearly see the "sun of the Good" ( to use the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. We see and we act in one unified movement of our nature toward God or the Good, and as we progress we find that to turn away from that light is ever more manifestly a defect of the mind and will, and ever more difficult to do. Hence Augustine defined the highest state of human freedom not as "being able not to sin" (posse non peccare) but as "being unable to sin" (non posse peccare): a condition that reflects the infinite goodness of God, who, because nothing can hinder him in the perfect realization of his own nature, is "incapable" of evil and so is infinitely free." (24-25)
"In truth, if one really wishes to make Alexandria of the first four centuries one's index for understanding the interaction of Christian and pagan culture, and proceeds without excessive prejudice, what one will find is that pagans and Christians alike had their scholars and philosophers, who frequently studied at one anther's feet regardless of religious adherence, that both also had their cruel, superstitious, violent rabble, and that the priest of both traditions were as likely to occupy one class as the other .One will find too that, at the most elevated levels of philosophical discourse, both traditions admitted of debates concerning the degree to which the power of natural reason was sufficient to attain to divine truth, and the degree to which one must rely on divine revelation; and that a tendency toward a "pure" and contemplative monotheism, and a consistent disdain for or indifference toward popular cults, was pronounced among many pagans of a more philosophical cast of mind. And one will find also that, at the lower levels of society, the Christian sand the pagans were distinct tribes that sometimes lived in harmonious - even exogamous - concord and that sometimes went to war with one another. It would have been wonderful, obviously, and a splendid testament to the power of high ideals, if Greek prudence or Christian charity had governed every person of the time and pervaded every stratum of society. It would have been wonderful especially if all the baptized Christians of the age, whose ideals were by far the higher and the nobler, had never yielded to their hatred for the cults of their erstwhile persecutors as fervidly as they sometimes did. But human beings frequently disappoint." (40-41)
"Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith ( all three were believing Christians, of one sort of another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat. (my emphasis)A person of perverse temperament might even be tempted to argue that, had there actually been a great conflagration in Alexandria in which some vast inheritance of Greek scientific texts had been consumed, or if indeed "ancient Greek science" had come to a peremptory halt some time in the fifth century, the cause of science might have been considerably advanced.
After all, no pagan theorist ever put forward a critique of the principles of ancient Greek natural philosophy as thorough or as ingenious as that of the sixth0century Christian John Philoponus. He not only argued against the immutability of the stars, but (even more outrageously) denied that the terrestrial and celestial regions possessed distinct natures. That the heavens above the moon are eternal, that their substance is the incorruptible "quintessence" ether, that the stars possess spiritual intelligence, and that all the celestial bodies belong to a divine realm immune to the decay, imperfection, and transience of the world here below - all of this was part of the firm and unalterable reality to which practically every Greek scientist, philosopher, and educated layman devoutly adhered. In fact, even as late as 1572, when Tycho observed a nova in the constellation of Cassiopeia, the realization that the heaven of the fixed stars could suffer change was a severe probation of the settled convictions of most educated men. Philoponus, however, argued that one could deduce from certain variances among the known stars themselves that they are mutable objects, composed not of imperishable ether and divine intellect but of corruptible matter, and that they once came into existence and one day will perish like other material objects; the sun, he said, consists of fire, of the same basic substance as earthly fire; and he argued that the appearance of changelessness in the heavens is the effect merely of the immense temporal and spatial intervals of cosmic movement. For him - being a Christian - the entire universe was the creature of God, and the terrestrial and celestial realms alike were part of one natural order governed by the same rational laws. And so it was no great trial of faith ( as it would have been for a pagan philosopher) to deny the divinity of the night sky: which is to say, Philoponous was able to cast off metaphysical dogma and apply himself to a rigorous reconsideration of the science of his time not despite but because of his Christianity and his consequent impatience for any "superstitious" confusion between material objects and gods. (my emphasis added) He also hypothesized that the space above the atmosphere might be a vacuum. He argued, against Aristotle, that light moves, and that the eye receives it simply according to the rule of optical geometry. And, most important perhaps, he rejected the Aristotelian dynamic theory of motion and proposed in its place a theory of kinetic impetus.
Philoponous's reflections on motion were, in fact, considered by (without having much effect upon) Islamic thinkers such as ibn Bajja (c.1095-1138), and then were passed on to Christian scholastic thought, where they were taken up, defended, or corrected by the likes of Bradwardine, Swineshead, Buridan, and Oresme. Indeed, if one is really passionately attached to the idea of alternating ages of intellectual light and darkness, one might well argue that in the sixth century in Alexandria a scientific revolution in physics and cosmology had begun to stir, taking the form of a skeptical Christian reappraisal of Aristotelian science and of the "divine cosmos" of pagan thought; and when Olympiodorus, the pagan head of the Alexandrian Academy, was succeeded by Christian commentators on Aristotle, this revolution seemed set to continue indefinitely; but then the seventh-century Muslim conquest of Egypt brought an end to the Alexandrian academic tradition and plunged science into six centuries of an Islamo-Hellenistic "dark ages". And one might further argue that this Christian tradition of scientific skepticism began to reemerge in the West only during the later Middle Ages, resumed the inherently "Christian" task of preparing a way for a new paradigm of cosmic reality, and reached its final consummation in the thought of Galileo (a good Catholic), Kepler (whose chief desire as a scientist was to discover how the life of the Trinity was reflected in the beautiful harmonies with which God had marked every level of his creation), and Newton ( an ardent, if radically heretical, Christian). All of this would of course be a gross oversimplification of history, an unjust denigration of Greek and Muslim natural philosophy, and in the final analysis rather silly - but no sillier than historically illiterate blather about the Christian "closing of the Western mind". (69-70)
"...some of the great early theorists of modern scientific method were believers in magic, and consequently were often willing to prescribe the prosecution of those who used it for maleficent ends. Rodney Stark is not overstating his case when he declares, "The first significant objections to the reality of satanic witchcraft came from Spanish inquisitors, not from scientists." One might even argue that an interest in magic (though not of the maleficent variety) was one of the essential ingredients in the evolution of modern scientific thought. Certainly the Renaissance rediscovery of the Corpus hermeticum - the splendid late antiquity anthology of Neoplatonic, Gnostic, alchemical, magical, astrological, and devotional texts - was of immense importance in shaping the ethos of modern science. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who did so much to define the inherent rationality of modern scientific method, and who was so vigorous an advocate of the human "mission" to know and to conquer the material world, was an heir at the very least to the hermetic revival's emphasis upon humanity's godlike prerogatives over the lower orders of material creation, and to the alchemical tradition of wracking elemental nature to force it to yield up its deepest secrets. Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the founders of the Royal Society, perhaps the most accomplished experimental scientist of the seventeenth century and a pioneer in the study of air pressure and vacuums, was a student of alchemy and was firmly convinced of both the reality of witches and the need for their elimination. Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680), also of the Royal Society and chief apologist for its experimental methods, thought the reality of sorcery to be scientifically demonstrable. Even Newton devoted far greater energy to his alchemy than to his physical theories.
In Truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in the claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it evokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural - in the theological sense of "transcendent"- but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modern science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the later into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, "magic" and "science" in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degrees of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to the same continuum." (81-82)
"There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other. In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem - logical or experiential - that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises loose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it. Richard Dawkins is a perfect example; he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence." But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words that he is using. The question of existence does not concern how it is that the present arrangement of the world came about, from causes already internal to the world, but how it is that anything (including any cause) can exist at all. This question Darwin and Wallace never addressed, nor were ever so hopelessly confused as to think they had. It is a question that no theoretical or experimental science could ever answer, for it is qualitatively different from the kind of questions that the physical sciences are competent to address. Even if theoretical physics should one day discover the most basic laws upon which both space and time is woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of terrestrial life, or paleontology an utterly seamless genealogy of every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to a solution of the mystery of existence. No matter how fundamental or simple the level reached by the scientist - protoplasm, amino acids, molecules, subatomic particles, quantum events, unified physical laws, a primordial singularity. mere logical possibilities - existence is something else altogether. Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the universe itself, even if it were somehow "eternal") can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being.
"Many philosophers, admittedly, in both the Continental tradition and the Anglo-American analytic tradition have argued otherwise, seeking to conjure away the question of being, as something lying beyond rational scrutiny, or as an illusion generated by language, or as an improper understanding of what "being" is. But none has ever succeeded at overcoming the perplexity that the enigma of our existence occasions in us, in those moments of wonder that we all from time to time experience and that are (according to Plato and Aristotle) the beginning of all true philosophy.In the terms of Thomas Aquinas, a finite thing's essence (what it is) entirely fails to account for its existence (that it is); and there is a very venerable and coherent Christian tradition of reflection that holds that this failure, when considered with adequate rigor, points toward an infinite and infinitely simple actuality transcendent of all material, composite, or finite causes and contingencies, a "subsistent act of being" (to use one of Aquinas's most entrancing names for God), in whom essence and existence are identical. This, obviously, is not the place to argue such matters: it is enough simply to remark that reason leads different minds to disparate and even contradictory conclusions. One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all that is. One can als, however, and with perhaps better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly inadequate superstition: that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position: and that every "primitive" who looks at the world about him and wonders what god made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such a question as infantile. One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some degree of rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation. Reason is a fickle thing." (103-4)
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