I almost gave this book 4 stars not because there are flaws in the material itself, but because it was so good I was disappointed that a publisher would hold it back from the even-higher greatness it might otherwise have. What am I referring to? "Islam-and-the-West." Islam is a hot topic these days - even Oxford University, as I understand it, recently constructed a building dedicated to Islamic studies on their campus. Michael Allen Gillespie (henceforth MAG - my apologies to the author) clearly did not set out to write a book about Islam, but it would seem that the publisher forced him to force his magnificent work into the mould of their Procrustean interests. The book is not really about Islam at all, but about Modernity's true genetics - not the history that Modernity tells to itself about how it was borne by affirming science and democracy in the face of the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church. The first chapter, originally an article, and a concentrated blast of what is to follow through the rest of the book, has nothing at all to do with Islam or the "clash of civilizations," but has rather to do with where Western Europe came from and how that has led us to where we are politically, theologically, philosophically, culturally. It's brilliant. Unfortunately, the book was forcibly given a preface and an epilogue about Islam, and the end of the last chapter was brutally disfigured to conform to this publisher-imposed agenda. (I don't _know_ this for a fact, of course, just as I don't know for sure that matter exists, but both seem self-evident, and to deny either would be laughable unless there's a really good argument backing one up.)



MAG locates tensions within the Latin Western theological tradition, beginning properly with the Nominalist Revolution in Philosophy (but going back to St. Augustine), as the true inauguration of Modernist metaphysics, politics, religious philosophy, anthropology, science, etc. He's not arguing that an academic storm in the ivory towers of the time crept into politics, etc. He shows how these philosophical currents were wrapped up in the historical events of the times, and masterfully traces the personalities involved. He shows how the Nominalist Revolution unleashed a view of nature with no universals and radically individual bodies, with the resulting problems for politics (there is no human nature, only the nature of each individual body) and theology (if the Nominalist god differs from the Scholastic vision of the Godhead in that he is raw will unconstrained by external or internal features, then he is unreliable and potentially a deceiver, and his will is not subject to a Good that is even internal to himself) and our knowledge of nature.



He shows how the Renaissance Humanists (he spends a lot of time on Petrarch) attempted to deal with this situation, and how they attempted to retrieve elements of antiquity to respond to it. He shows how the Erasmus/Luther debate reiterated some of the Humanistic retrievals of antiquity, showing the fault lines between Freedom and Necessity that had been concealed until the Nominalist Revolution. He shows how the debate between Hobbes and Descartes reiterates the Luther/Erasmus debate, but largely conceals the theology underpinning both sides. His chapters on these figures are simply amazing, and reveal that he is very much aware of how these thinkers lie at the root of the serious philosophical and cultural problems that beset us presently in our late-modern situation - his chapters reveal to the trained reader that these figures lie at the root of problems he doesn't even address directly in this book. That's how good MAG's writing is. MAG tries at the end of the book, at the end of a lamentably over-brief chapter, to trace the way that these themes run into Kant and out into Hegel and out again into the twilight of 20th-century atrocities.



My biggest issue with this book is that MAG is so capable of carrying the book to its natural conclusion, but neglects too because of what seems to be an artificially imposed _telos_, the comparison of what lies under the hood of Western-European-derived civilization with what lies under the hood of Islamic civilization. This imposition is so vestigial that its artificial quality is self-evident. It's given the most cursory treatment at the expense of the book's natural ending - where we are presently and where we're going. In part, MAG supplies this by name-dropping in the endnotes (which really should have been footnotes). MAG is clearly aware of the vision of various 20th-century figures and how they attempt to resolve these tensions. Unfortunately, they are lumped together as a movement such as Romanticism, and the movement is given a page or so at best. I can't believe that MAG doesn't see a way forward, but whether he does or not, and whatever that way might be in his view, he never wraps up the last chapter by saying. He exhorts us to self-awareness as a culture, and then segues into his publisher-imposed Epilogue about Islam.



That's a formal criticism, I suppose. My material criticisms of this book are very few. (1) My biggest one has to do with the way he presents a certain vision of man's fallenness as normative orthodoxy for Christianity. I'm an Orthodox Christian, and so MAG regularly ruffles my feathers by stating, as universally normative, doctrines of the fall and depravity that are _not_ normative in Orthodoxy (unless I missed a memo), but which do seem to have become normative in the Western Latin Church (unless I've received an erroneous memo). The view of man's condition that one generally finds in the fathers that I've read is a very grave one, but not without hope, and certainly it does not have the pessimistic tone MAG seems to suggest is normative Christian teaching. So I'm curious about where he gets that. (2) He doesn't seem to be aware of what "image of God" meant to the biblical writers. It means literally to be a living cult-statue of the Living God, as opposed to the dead cult-statues of dead gods - a fact that would seem very relevant to the concerns of this book. Cult-statues are means of a god's presence. (3) He says that Christianity did not have a developed concept of the will in the period of late antiquity, but yet the witness of St. Maximus the Confessor, who writes a great deal about both (a) the union of the divine and human wills in Christ and (b) the different kinds of will in an individual human being (with an eye to the ascetical and soteriological implications of this), would seem to show him mistaken. (4) His take on the Church's view of history and freedom as mostly passive seems to follow from this, a "man as sinful viator waiting patiently for the eschaton" view, which strikes me as very misinformed, though a competent reader will likely comment on that soon. Don't let this criticism dissuade you or make you think less of the book (or the author), though. It's amazing.



Again and again, I can't recommend this book highly enough. MAG has easily written a book for everyone's top ten list. I'm now off to his _Nihilism_Before_Nietzsche_, to Descartes' _Meditations_, and to Blumenberg's _The_Legitimacy_Of_The_Modern_Age_.