Rémi Brague, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age

I imagine that many readers are familiar already with the French historian and philosopher Rémi Brague. My first encounter with him is via his latest book, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for a Modern Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). It's a stitched-together collection of nine papers that Brague has given to English-speaking audiences in recent years. But that's not to say this little book doesn't put forward a coherent argument.

Brague is a conservative in the deepest sense of the word. He is concerned with the conservation of humanity itself, which he takes to be under assault in the modern West. Exhibiting his wit (not to mention his obsession with etymologies and his mastery of the English language) he commits a "deliberate spoonerism" and argues that the civilization-saving conservatism we need is essentially a commitment to conversation--conversation both with the human past and with nature itself.

Modernity is, according to Brague, a type of barbarism, defined as a "refusal to communicate". Modernity refuses to communicate with the past or with nature by way of its mythical conception of self-determination, which denies continuity with what came before and which promises a future of humanly achieved progress. The driver of this barbarism is modernity's methodological atheism which, while it allows for the description and even exploitation of the world, can offer no compelling reason why it is good for human beings to exist and to keep existing. Thus, the assertion of human autonomy inevitably results in a type of deep existential malaise. Reason itself must be seen as a product of irrational forces. Rather than grounds for meaningful action, there are merely deterministic causes.

The central move to treat modernity's condition must be a recovery of the notion of the Good in the Platonic rather than Aristotelian sense. If we are to have a reason to live, we must understand the Good not merely as something we do, but rather as the necessary ontological ground of all that exists. Brague argues that the necessity of the Good is implied in the modern (Kantian) concept of ethics as rational action (ie, action rooted in the Being of the subject), and evil as an irrational perversion of this freedom. This is a roundabout confirmation of, not only the Platonic vision, but the biblical creation story, both of which state that the Good is given to us with Being and must therefore be received as gift.

Recovering the necessity of the Good requires a return to a cosmological view of nature--the belief that the universe not only can be described in its present state or understood in terms of the mechanisms of how it came to be what it is, but rather that it is inherently meaningful and intelligible. The cosmos must be seen in terms of logos--communicating goodness to us. Humanity is not a stranger to this good nature (or "creation"), but rather at home in it, part of it. Within this good creation human freedom must be conceived as the freedom to manifest what we are as given by, in, and with nature, and not in some sort of rebellion against it. Freedom is responsive human communication with the goodness of nature. Culture is the byproduct of this communication, a cultic overflowing of praise to God (whether we realize it or not). This means, Brague says, that Christianity, if it is the true religion, is not itself a culture. Instead, it exists as a conserving conversation with every culture.

The necessity of the Good, and the attendant recovery of premodern notions of nature, freedom, and culture, Brague contends, should lead to a reintegration of both the ancient pagan virtues and the biblical commandments. Virtues are habits that allow us to "do good", to act in accordance with the nature of things. The biblical commandments of the God who says of creation "it is good" are never antithetical to this, but rather must always be species of the mandate to "Be what you are!' This rediscovery and reintegration of virtues and commandments can only take place in the family. The modern state and the modern market militate against the family. The former consistently reduces people to atomistic individuals, whereas the latter trains them as individuals who think of everything as a commodity. But the family is essential for society. The biological bond between parents and children, and the unconditional love that go with it, communicate the givenness and goodness of one's being. The family, or those things founded on the notion of family (like monarchies or the church), are the only institutions that can care about "the very long run". Only they can have a deep sense of responsibility to, and gratitude for, the past, and an existential concern for the future.

Brague's Curing Mad Truths is a radical assault on many of the things taken for granted in modern liberal societies. Nevertheless, as a "conservative" (read: conserving through conversating) project, it does not advocate some impossible return to the past. It calls us to reconnect the branches of truth upon which modernity sits to the metaphysical trunk from which they have been severed. It's a provocative, convincing, and accessible little book (only 115pp., notes and index excluded) by an important scholar, and it deserves wide attention.

Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan: Political Theologies

Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 796 pp. (review copy courtesy of Fordham)

This vast and energetic collection brings together over 30 essays on the relation between religion and public life in an age of globalisation. The essays are written by some of the world’s foremost political and philosophical theorists – Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe, to name a few – and together they constitute a landmark engagement with the problem of “political theology.”

The current interest in political theology is perhaps best understood against the backdrop of Carl Schmitt’s famous remark that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.” Schmitt’s point was historical and descriptive rather than normative: theology reappears in the sphere of secularised politics (in concepts such as sovereignty, intervention, state of exception, decision), but theology reappears here precisely as that which has become obsolete by passing over into the political.

While some writers in this collection follow such a descriptive understanding of an implicit political theology (a notable example is Bruce Lincoln’s entertaining analysis of “Bush’s God Talk”), others seek to develop a normative understanding of the precise relation between religion and the political. In the fascinating exchange between Habermas and Benedict XVI, for instance (recently re-published as a separate volume), we witness a debate over the question whether the modern democratic state is dependent on “autochthonous conceptual or religious traditions” or “collectively binding ethical traditions.” And, if so, is the state able to “renew the normative preconditions of its existence out of its own resources” (p. 251)?

While, in spite of their differences, both Benedict and Habermas are concerned to articulate the pluralistic unity of reason, Chantal Mouffe inserts the religion–politics relation into her “agonistic” model of radical democracy. Mouffe raises the pointed question whether Habermas’ (and, we might add, Benedict’s) vision of “a final resolution of conflicts” through free dialogue is not in fact a vision of the end of democracy, since the expectation here is for “a reconciled society, where pluralism would have been superseded” (p. 320). Through a creative modification of Schmitt’s friend/enemy conception of politics, Mouffe argues that the task of democratic politics is to establish “the us/them distinction” in such a way that the opponent is seen not as “an enemy to be destroyed” but as “an adversary whose existence is legitimate” (p. 323). In a word, the fundamental political relation is not antagonistic but agonistic – it is not warfare, but struggle.

On this basis, Mouffe argues (contra John Rawls) that “comprehensive doctrines” – with all the particularistic passion and commitment that these entail – should not be excluded from the public sphere. While Rawlsian and Habermasian models of deliberative democracy seek to relegate divisive religious issues to the private sphere so that a rational consensus can be established in the public sphere, Mouffe rightly sees that the fundamental church/state separation (which simply designates the state’s monopoly on coercive violence) is not equivalent to the religion/politics distinction, much less to the private/public distinction. Indeed, Mouffe’s model of agonistic democracy suggests that there is an important place for “religious forms of intervention within the context of agonistic debate” (p. 326).

I’ve focused here on Mouffe’s richly suggestive proposal because I find it more convincing and more interesting than some of the rationalist or rights-based conceptions of democracy which are developed elsewhere in the volume. But that is no criticism of this book: on the contrary, the great strength of this collection is its remarkable range of diverse and divergent proposals – a diversity which nevertheless coheres around an intensive concentration on the question of the contemporary reappearance of religion in the political sphere.

The fundamental question which is pursued throughout the whole collection is – as Hent de Vries notes at the close of his lengthy introduction – the ways in which “the legacies of ‘religion’ disarticulate and reconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century” (p. 88). This is indeed a compelling question. And this splendid volume will be essential reading for anyone who wants to explore the whole terrain of contemporary “political theologies” through which this question is addressed.

Note: If you’re interested in Chantal Mouffe, you might also like to check out Richard’s helpful reviews of some of Mouffe’s major works.

An important new blog

This new blog looks like an important one to keep an eye on: The Immanent Frame, a blog on secularism, religion and the public sphere. It has opened with a series of posts on Charles Taylor’s major new work, A Secular Age (including a post by Taylor himself). And their next major series of posts will be on Mark Lilla’s book, The Stillborn God. (Hopefully there’ll be reviews of both these books here at F&T as well.)