Curing Mad Truths
by Rémi Brague
University of Notre Dame press, 133pp, £25/$29
Rémi Brague argues that the modern project has failed, and that the source of the failure is a kind of heresy. To be sure, he does not himself use that word. But it is an apt label for what he describes. Modernity, on Brague’s account, is defined by several ideas it borrowed from Christianity, while at the same time it rejects the larger conceptual context that made those ideas intelligible.
For example, progress is essentially the idea of divine providence with God subtracted from it. But without God, the belief that man is destined to advance, morally or otherwise, is groundless.
Modern Europeans and Americans are constantly confessing guilt – especially that of their ancestors – and seeking mercy and forgiveness. Yet they deny the divine judge who alone can give them absolution. Modern science presupposes that the universe exhibits a rational order that can be uncovered by the human mind. But it also represents the mind as entirely the product of forces that favour, not rationality per se, but only whatever is conducive to survival.
