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The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project
Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this eagerly awaited English translation of Le Règne de l’homme, the last volume of Rémi Brague's trilogy on the philosophical development of anthropology in the West, Brague argues that, with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future. As scientific advances drained the cosmos of literal mystery, humanity increasingly devalued the theophilosophical mystery of being in favor of omniscience over one’s own existence. Brague narrates the intellectual disappearance of the natural order, replaced by a universal chaos upon which only humanity can impose order; he cites the vivid histories of the nation-state, economic evolution into capitalism, and technology as the tools of this new dominion, taken up voluntarily by humans for their own ends rather than accepted from the deity for a divine purpose.
Brague’s tour de force begins with the ancient and medieval confidence in humanity as the superior creation of Nature or of God, epitomized in the biblical wish of the Creator for humans to exert stewardship over the earth. He sees the Enlightenment as a transition period, taking as a given that humankind should be masters of the world but rejecting the imposition of that duty by a deity. Before the Enlightenment, who the creator was and whom the creator dominated were clear. With the advance of modernity and banishment of the Creator, who was to be dominated? Today, Brague argues, “our humanism . . . is an anti-antihumanism, rather than a direct affirmation of the goodness of the human.” He ends with a sobering question: does humankind still have the will to survive in an era of intellectual self-destruction? The Kingdom of Man will appeal to all readers interested in the history of ideas, but will be especially important to political philosophers, historical anthropologists, and theologians.
Brague’s tour de force begins with the ancient and medieval confidence in humanity as the superior creation of Nature or of God, epitomized in the biblical wish of the Creator for humans to exert stewardship over the earth. He sees the Enlightenment as a transition period, taking as a given that humankind should be masters of the world but rejecting the imposition of that duty by a deity. Before the Enlightenment, who the creator was and whom the creator dominated were clear. With the advance of modernity and banishment of the Creator, who was to be dominated? Today, Brague argues, “our humanism . . . is an anti-antihumanism, rather than a direct affirmation of the goodness of the human.” He ends with a sobering question: does humankind still have the will to survive in an era of intellectual self-destruction? The Kingdom of Man will appeal to all readers interested in the history of ideas, but will be especially important to political philosophers, historical anthropologists, and theologians.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published February 26, 2015
About the author
Rémi Brague
99 books58 followersFrench historian of philosophy, specializing in the Arabic, Jewish, and Christian thought of the Middle Ages. He is professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Romano Guardini chair of philosophy (emeritus) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Brague is the recipient of numerous awards, including honors by both the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 2009, he received both the Josef Pieper Prize and the Grand prix de philosophie de l'Académie française, and he was awarded the 2012 Ratzinger Prize for Theology alongside Brian E. Daley. In 2013, he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'honneur.
Brague is the recipient of numerous awards, including honors by both the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 2009, he received both the Josef Pieper Prize and the Grand prix de philosophie de l'Académie française, and he was awarded the 2012 Ratzinger Prize for Theology alongside Brian E. Daley. In 2013, he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'honneur.
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September 5, 2020
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.
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.
November 2, 2020
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5fz...
This book blew me away, and is the type of apologetic (I hesitate to even use that word, because many current apologetics are squarely "modern" in the way that Brague believes is profoundly anti-Christian) for Christianity that I love, one that is deeply rooted in historical philosophy and metaphysics. Along that way, Brague puts forward a deep critique of modernity-Enlightenment in its vision for human capacity for domination and the redefinition of nature as a cosmos in need of conquest and ordering. Ultimately, I found it convincing.
One caveat for the potential reader: Brague is incredibly well-read, and though he is able to distill major philosophical streams into short paragraphs, his writing (or perhaps it is the translation?) is very, very dense! Though this is relatively short for the scope of the argument (about 200 pages) it is far from an easy read. If one is willing to do a bit of work, however, it is well worth it! This is a text that I'll be repeatedly going back to, not only for its helpful summaries of major historical themes, but simply to digest what Brague is arguing. It's an incredibly important perspective for our own time.
This book blew me away, and is the type of apologetic (I hesitate to even use that word, because many current apologetics are squarely "modern" in the way that Brague believes is profoundly anti-Christian) for Christianity that I love, one that is deeply rooted in historical philosophy and metaphysics. Along that way, Brague puts forward a deep critique of modernity-Enlightenment in its vision for human capacity for domination and the redefinition of nature as a cosmos in need of conquest and ordering. Ultimately, I found it convincing.
One caveat for the potential reader: Brague is incredibly well-read, and though he is able to distill major philosophical streams into short paragraphs, his writing (or perhaps it is the translation?) is very, very dense! Though this is relatively short for the scope of the argument (about 200 pages) it is far from an easy read. If one is willing to do a bit of work, however, it is well worth it! This is a text that I'll be repeatedly going back to, not only for its helpful summaries of major historical themes, but simply to digest what Brague is arguing. It's an incredibly important perspective for our own time.
May 27, 2019
Very good, with some minor qualifications. Review forthcoming in The European Legacy.
August 3, 2020
So wordy and dense
This is a wordy and dense book. Over one third of the entire text is footnotes. Having said this, it is also a brilliant analysis of the modern project, and its failure to live up to its hope and promise. Definitely good scholarship, but few will read it all the way through.
This is a wordy and dense book. Over one third of the entire text is footnotes. Having said this, it is also a brilliant analysis of the modern project, and its failure to live up to its hope and promise. Definitely good scholarship, but few will read it all the way through.
March 31, 2022
This book was extremely informative. The bibliography alone is outstanding. I love the dedication and though process, the constant comparison between ideologies and time periods, the arguments and counter arguments- it is a brilliant read! I had troubles with grasping some parts, but I have myself to blame for that- the philosophical depths were a bit too deep for me at this point.
March 29, 2020
An intellectual cultural history tour that winds up with and explains the present day culture of death. An excellent complement to Taylor's Secular Age. Does not shy from judicious, far from overbearing, historical assessments.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews