The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project by Rémi Brague
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The New Holy Roman Empire

Remi Brague is an eminent French historian of ideas who, judging by the number of recent and pending translations, has become popular, perhaps even fashionable, in the Anglo-Saxon world. His academic oeuvre is metaphysics, those ideas which underlie what we think we know about the world but which we don’t usually think about at all. Like many Christians (and, historically, many French), Brague believes he knows how to have these ideas better than ignorant unbelievers. What he provides is a metaphysics for a New Holy Roman Empire.

Brague’s central theme is that metaphysics took a wrong turn just at the time when the world became ‘modern’, somewhere around the turn of the 16th century. He believes that the term modern is appropriate not because of the well-documented changes which took place - in the technologies of transportation, in the consequent achievements in ‘discovery’, and in the fragmentation of pan-European religious culture - but because these changes are manifestations of a new ideal, a ‘project,’ which came to be called the Enlightenment.

The metaphysics of the Enlightenment are ideas of which Brague does not approve. He perceives several critical inversions are ultimately detrimental to human welfare. The first of these is the idea that mankind is the master not the product of nature. The second is that there is nothing outside or superior to mankind - not God, gods, Nature, or any other higher power - to whom mankind is accountable for the exercise of this mastery.

Brague’s lament is that this purported project of the conquest of nature has replaced three essential principles of historical European culture: messianism, divinisation, and asceticism. The loss of the first apparently makes us too ambitious, over-achievers trying to get somewhere to which we have already arrived. Without an experience of already being redeemed, we are, he claims, merciless on ourselves. The loss of the idea of divinisation makes us subject to an intellectual hubris that deludes us into believing that we create our own purposes. The simultaneous loss of asceticism has resulted in the neglect of the development of the ‘inner man’ in favour of the conquest of external nature.

Brague assembles a formidable argument to establish his conclusions. He is informative, meticulous, and ingenious. But there can be little doubt that his conclusions were arrived at long before his argument, or even before his historical research. Whether by conviction or culture, Brague is a Christian. In fact he appears to be a kind of Christian typified by someone like G.K. Chesterton, a lover of the Medieval aesthetic and political order based on religion. His audience is not composed of secular historians who enquire about connections among events and people, but believers who want arguments to support their beliefs.

The arguments that Brague provides to the faithful are not of the old-fashioned sort for the reasonableness of their faith. He is not concerned with the epistemology of religious faith. Rather, his subject is a sort of pragmatic ontology - what is ‘better’ to believe about the world and our place in it. His arguments, therefore, are those which point to the lack of ontological reason among the rest of us. According to Brague, we think incorrectly. What he means by this is that we will ultimately find that the way we think is bad for us because... well, because the way we think has moved us away from the Medieval culture he admires so much.

So Brague’s criterion of ‘the good’ is at least questionable. But his presumptions about the way ‘we’ think (imaginatively, he complains, rather than reasonably) appear positively deranged. Mastery of nature and progress in that direction might have been a common intellectual conceit of the 19th century but Darwin and the Holocaust tempered that enthusiasm some time ago. Mastery and Progress are themes long past their argumentative sell-by dates. In any case, it doesn’t appear that Brague recognises the contradiction in his own position in trying to prove a deterioration in thought, that is to say, inverse Progress. On the whole I prefer Ursula la Guin’s rather less didactic principle that “truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Despite spending some time in the United States, it may be that Brague didn’t get out from the ivied walls of academe all that much. I make that hypothesis on the basis of his assertion that messianism and asceticism are in cultural decline. How else to account for his apparent ignorance of the religious and self-help gurus who constitute a large and growing industry in America. In this, he may be simply extrapolating inappropriately from French culture. I suggest spending a bit more time in California to sharpen his perceptions of contemporary quasi-monastic movements (or Utah for a solid dose of Mormon divinisation).

Then there’s this business about authority which is purportedly superior to the judgment of mankind, the putative Law of Nature or its divine equivalent. What Brague is referring to here, of course, is ethics not physics. Brague is using code for something called Natural Law, a perennial Christian theme which has been used to justify a vast variety of crimes from slavery to the Holocaust. Natural Law is a dangerous metaphysical fiction, but a useful one for establishing the key elements of Medieval European society - strict hierarchy, absolute personal power, the dominance of religiously interpreted legality, etc.

Brague claims that modern thinking has eliminated the metaphysical context necessary for effective and productive thought. As far as I can tell, the context he has in mind is that of the metaphysics of the Catholic Church, originally formulated by Aristotle in the 3rd century BCE, dogmatically adapted by Aquinas in the 13th century, and most recently re-interpreted by the French theologian Henri du Lubac in the 1940’s. So a rather long pedigree. But it is interesting to note that this metaphysics is not all that stable. Du Lubac was considered as effectively heretical until the Second Vatican Council endorsed his thinking. Aquinas was also suspect among his peers during his lifetime. Aristotle hasn’t really been 0f practical scientific interest since... well, considerably prior to the advent of Enlightenment (See for further discussion of the defects of Thomism: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ha...)

Brague’s dream of a solid metaphysical foundation, therefore, is as elusive as that of the Enlightenment or the New Holy Roman Empire. But this defect is unlikely to bother his readers much. Evangelicals of all sorts will love him (despite his Romish pretensions) because he seems to get one over on those they are trying to oppress. Certain European politicians will love him because he provides encouragement for French/German hegemony. Given the state of the world, it might just work out for them. But the rest of us might remain a little wary of anyone claiming to know the right way to order our thoughts. Their collective track record is appalling.

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