Curing Mad Truths

Rémi Brague

Description

In his first book composed in English, Rémi Brague maintains that there is a fundamental problem with modernity: we no longer consider the created world and humanity as intrinsically valuable. Curing Mad Truths, based on a number of Brague's lectures to English-speaking audiences, explores the idea that humanity must return to the Middle Ages. Not the Middle Ages of purported backwardness and barbarism, but rather a Middle Ages that understood creation—including human beings—as the product of an intelligent and benevolent God. The positive developments that have come about due to the modern project, be they health, knowledge, freedom, or peace, are not grounded in a rational project because human existence itself is no longer the good that it once was. Brague turns to our intellectual forebears of the medieval world to present a reasoned argument as to why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

Curing Mad Truths will be of interest to a learned audience of philosophers, historians, and medievalists.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophie médiévale, scolastique
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Political
• Modern
• Medieval
• Religious
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Edad Media
• Modern history
• Politics
• Modernism
• Middle Ages
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268105716
• Langue: English

Extrait

Curing Mad Truths
CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD
O. Carter Snead, series editor
The purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “Catholic” in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
RÉMI BRAGUE
Curing Mad Truths
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Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2019 Rémi Brague
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brague, Rémi, 1947- author.
Title: Curing mad truths : medieval wisdom for the modern age / Rémi Brague.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] |
Series: Catholic ideas for a secular world | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011964 (print) | LCCN 2019014704 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105723 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105716 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105693 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Theological anthropology—Christianity. | Humanity. | Civilization, Medieval. | Philosophy, Medieval.
Classification: LCC BT701.3 (ebook) | LCC BT701.3.B73 2019 (print) | DDC 190—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011964
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE The Failure of the Modern Project
TWO Atheism at the End of the Tether
THREE The Necessity of Goodness
FOUR Nature
FIVE Freedom and Creation
SIX Culture as a By-Product
SEVEN Values or Virtues?
EIGHT The Family
NINE Civilization as Conservation and Conversation
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Material in this book has been featured in a variety of prior publications or presented as lectures that are heretofore unpublished:
Introduction. Unpublished.
Ch. 1 . Deneke Lecture given in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, February 25, 2011, reprinted from The Modern Turn , edited by M. Rohlf (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 291–305.
Ch. 2 . Lecture given at New York University, New York, November 1, 2014, previously published in German in Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 41 (2012): 279–88; in French in Revue Catholique Internationale Communio 37 (2012): 95–105.
Ch. 3 . Lecture given at New York University, New York, November 1, 2014, and at the Lumen Christi Institute, Chicago, November 5, 2014; summary in The European Conservative 12 (Summer/Fall 2015): 39–42.
Ch. 4 . Lecture given in Boston on October 11, 2015, first published in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 89 (2015): 35–43.
Ch. 5 . Lecture given at the University of Notre Dame, November 19, 2015; unpublished.
Ch. 6 . First Lorenzo Albacete Lecture, given at the Crossroads Institute, New York, October 22, 2016, in Cooperatores Veritatis: Scritti in onore del Papa emerito Benedetto XVI per il 90° compleanno , edited by Pierluca Azzaro and Federico Lombardi (Vatican City: Libreria editrice vaticana, 2017), 297–317.
Ch. 7 . Speech given at the congress of the ALLEA [European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities], Vienna, April 18, 2016; unpublished.
Ch. 8 . Lecture given at the IESE Business School, Barcelona, October 16, 2009, and at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, October, 21, 2011; unpublished.
Ch. 9 . Lecture given at the congress of the Vanenburg Society [now called the Center for European Renewal], Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 3, 2014; at the Lumen Christi Institute, Chicago, October 14, 2014; and at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, November 19, 2014; unpublished.
Introduction
The many-faceted English novelist, essayist, and wit G. K. Chesterton (d. 1936) characterized the world we are living in, namely “the modern world,” with a phrase that became famous, not to say hackneyed, in some circles. According to him, the modern world is “full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” 1 Let me take my bearings from this characterization.
This quip is often misquoted under a generalized form as dealing not with “virtues” but with “ideas” or “truths.” The formula is not to be taken without caution, however, for the authentic wording turns out to need correcting, whereas the latter, more general form, is, in the last analysis, the deeper and truer one. Chesterton gives the cause of the going-mad of the virtues immediately afterward: “They have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” But he doesn’t tell us what madness is—the reason being that he gave us a very sensible answer a little earlier in the same book: “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” 2 The modern world plumes itself with its being utterly rational. It might be the case that it has painted itself into the same corner as the poor fellow that Chesterton described. Not by extolling reason, but by doing that against other dimensions of human experience, thereby depriving it of the context that makes it meaningful. More on that later on.
Now, I should like to ask a question: Does it make sense to speak of “Christian virtues,” virtues that we can responsibly call by the adjective “Christian,” that is, virtues that are supposed to be specifically Christian and not to be found elsewhere? I would answer, No.
Twenty years later, Chesterton implicitly qualified his overhasty phrase and penned a far more felicitous formula:
The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movement, is living on Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including of course many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallised in Christendom. But it is not really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or medieval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands. 3
According to Chesterton, and in the wake of earlier authors such as A. J. Balfour or Charles Péguy, the modern world is basically parasitic, preying on premodern ideas. 4 One will pay attention to the important rider according to which the medieval heritage included “of course many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallised in Christendom.” The lackadaisical “of course” is far from being evident or, at least, from being commonly admitted, for many people insist on the radical break between the “pagan” and the Christian eras. The shift from the ancient world and worldview to what followed it, a period usually called the “Middle Ages,” can be painted in different shades, including the modern representation of a clean slate enabling a new departure from scratch.
Be that as it may, the basic thesis still holds good—namely, that the modern world doesn’t leave the capital it is living on unscathed, but corrupts it. For it gives each of the elements it borrows from the earlier worlds a particular twist in order to make it subservient to its own aims.

Three Ideas Gone Mad
Let me now give some examples of premodern ideas that were taken up by modern thought but made to run amuck. Three of them quickly sprang to my mind, but there may be some more:
(a) The idea of creation by a rational God underlies the assumption that the material universe can be understood by human beings . But modern thought does away with the reference to a Creator and severs the link between the reason supposedly present in the things and the reason that governs or at least should govern our doings. This tearing asunder the fabric of rationality produces what I would call, if I were allowed to indulge in punning, a low-cost logos . It fosters a renewal of a kind of Gnostic sensibility. We are strangers in this world; our reason is not the same as the reason that pervades the material universe. Human reason should have as its main goal the preservation of its concrete basis in human life. Hence, it should assume that the existence of mankind is a good thing, that its coming-into-being through the intermediary agency of evolutionary processes, from Darwin’s “warm little pond” or even from the Big Bang up to now, has to be condoned.
(b) The idea of providence was received by modern thought but “secularized” and warped. 5 The man in the Clapham omnibus keeps believing in progress and, although he has to admit its failures, gets surprised and indignant when things go awry. We more or less believe that we can do what we like, follow just any whim, and mankind will find a way to escape the dire long-term consequences of the policies we follow. We let the coming generation bungee-jump, and we hope that somebody will faste