Search results for ""Author Remi Brague""

Book SynopsisIn 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 creationincluding human beingsas 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 toTrade Review“Rémi Brague is a most singular polyglot and polymath, not to mention one of Europe’s wisest and wittiest Christian intellectuals. Curing Mad Truths is an impressive collection of his addresses to English-speaking audiences. As with all of Brague’s work, the volume uniquely combines cleverness and profound insight.” —Douglas Kries, Gonzaga University "With his distinctive combination of philological, philosophical, and historical erudition that ranges from the ancient world to our present moment, Rémi Brague poses more to ponder in each of these essays—about God and the good, creation and culture, virtues and values, modernity and meaning—than most writers manage to convey in a book. At issue, ultimately, is whether human beings have the will and wherewithal to go on living in a humane manner. Curing Mad Truths is a gem, and the stakes couldn’t be higher." —Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame “Brague's Curing Mad Truths is a radical assault on many of the things taken for granted in modern liberal societies… 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 by an important scholar, and it deserves wide attention.” —Faith and Theology"Brague argues that the modern world is dying because it cannot answer the question of why it should live. To answer that question will require humility, according to Brague, because it is medieval truths about God, man, reason, and nature that are necessary for renewal." —The Catholic World Report"Rémi Brague argues that the modern project has failed, and that the source of the failure is a kind of heresy. To be sure, he does not himself use that word. But it is an apt label for what he describes. Modernity, on Brague’s account, is defined by several ideas it borrowed from Christianity, while at the same time it rejects the larger conceptual context that made those ideas intelligible." —Catholic Herald"Remi Brague this month releases a new book arguing for a reevaluation of medieval thought. . . . It’s Brague’s first book in English. . . . Curing Mad Truths will be of interest to a learned audience of philosophers, historians, and medievalists." —Law and Religion Forum“The brevity of this anthology... does not prevent the careful reader from gazing beyond its idealism. Like many thinkers, Brague may be less useful in directing us away from our predicament to our fulfillment. But he does restore a wise insight into a conservative approach... which treasures aesthetic and nourishing measures to bring back to life deadened sensibilities of billions who seek, deep down, lasting meaning.” —Spectrum Culture Magazine"While he argues convincingly for the superiority of abandoned ways of thinking, Brague is not a ‘restorationist’ seeking to return us to an idealized past, his concern is to point out the weaknesses in the conversations we are having and so to improve them and our chances of a better future. He is a delightful, witty, interlocutor. He makes his vast learning accessible and relevant, providing a master-class in critical thinking all can attend." —Irish Catholic"Culture and politics are different, but they are not separate. They influence one another in unpredictable ways. Rémi Brague has given us a most insightful analysis of one half, perhaps more than a half, of the pairing that encompasses our human experience." —Society“Should humanity survive and adapt itself to the modern project? More specifically, now that humanity has commodified its existence (being) . . . is its existence better than its nonexistence? . . . These are the questions at the center of . . . Rémi Brague‘s . . . short collection of essays consisting primarily of unpublished lectures given in Europe and North America.” —The Review of Politics“Brague proposes that the medieval Christian view demonstrates the good of man’s existence by reorienting him to God and Creation.” —Catholic Social Science Review“This intriguing cultural critique will prove useful to anyone exploring how the modern world came to be and how a disciple of a more classical tradition might respond to the decadence of society in the modern period.” —Homiletic and Pastoral Review"Curing Mad Truths, a short collection of essays and lectures, is Rémi Brague’s plea for ‘some sort of return to the Middle Ages’...in the teeth of the ideology of Modernity which, he posits, threatens human flourishing and even survival.... Although many will reject his assessment, few philosophers are better placed to handle these matters than Brague, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, a noted multi-disciplinary intellectual." —The New Bioethics"Curing Mad Truths might, from the title, look like just one more expression of Catholic nostalgia for a bygone age that the secular world has dismissed as the Dark Ages. But Brague has in mind quite specific and sophisticated points of medieval wisdom that need to be recovered, even as he would want to reform or reject other parts of that heritage." —The Catholic Thing

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Book SynopsisArmas de destrucción masiva, polución, extinción demográfica: todo lo que amenaza al hombre en tanto que especie viva ya no genera duda. Pero hay factores que provienen del hombre mismo que socaban su propia humanidad. Estos factores son más difíciles de entender. El objetivo de Rémi Brague, en este sentido, es descubrirlos a través de un análisis radical de la idea de humanismo. La cuestión es saber cómo podemos promover el valor del hombre y de lo que es humano, luchando contra todas las figuras de lo inhumano. Es preciso, a partir de ahora, saber qué es necesario realmente para promover un cierto humanismo. Es el propio humanismo sobre el que se sostiene el mal. Rémi Brague advierte señales de este fenómeno reciente en tres grandes autores del siglo XX: el poeta ruso Alexander Blok y los filósofos Michel Foucault y Hans Blumenberg. No podemos engañarnos con ilusiones. Es fácil predicar un humanismo reducido a reglas de convivencia, pero cómo cimentarlo? El pensamiento moderno anda c

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Book SynopsisAddresses the break in the alliance between law and divinity - when modern societies, far from connecting the tow, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. This work explores what this disconnection means for the contemporary world.Trade Review"Brague's sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today's religious struggles ought to take up." - Adam Kirsch, New York Sun "Scholars and students of contemporary world events, to the extent that these may be viewed as a clash of rival fundamentalisms, will have much to gain from Brague's study. Ideally, in that case, the book seems to be both an obvious primer and launching pad for further scholarship." - Times Higher Education Supplement"

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Book SynopsisThrough an interview and sixteen essays, this title explores key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. It focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another.Trade Review"This truly is an informative, engaging, and very readable book that will be very useful to anyone with an intellectual interest in things medieval." (Choice) "Highly recommended to scholars of the Middle Ages as well as those in philosophy and religion more generally. They will all be enlightened by careful reading of this book." (Library Journal)"

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Book SynopsisThe Legitimacy of the Human presents itself as a satellite work to a more voluminous effort by Rémi Brague, The Kingdom of Man. The larger book argues the thesis of the increasingly visible failure of the modern project, founded upon a view of man as thoroughly emancipated and autonomous, his own sovereign and the world’s. This is most visible in our technological powers and predicaments, with their ever-growing capacity to destroy or fundamentally transform our humanity, but understandings of freedom and equality unable to justify themselves before the bar of reason, but willfully asserting themselves, complement the picture. If modernity’s precious gains are to be preserved, and with them their beneficiaries, modern human beings, then the founding thoughts of the modern world need to be revisited and revised, often in terms of a creative reengagement with premodern ones. A new, truly humanistic, culture needs to be sought. The Legitimacy of the Human drives home that basic argument, surveying contemporary challenges to the very existence of humanity, then interrogating modern thought and philosophy for reasons it might have for the continuation of the human adventure. Brague finds the self-proclaimed advocates of the modern strikingly silent or even negative about the proposition. To be sure, in many instances modern philosophy has helped humanity organize itself better in terms of justice, peaceful coexistence, and prosperity. But on the basic question whether it is good that humans exist, it is strangely tongue-tied. Other authorities must be consulted, other sources drawn from, to credibly answer that fundamental existential question. The last two chapters of the book hearken to the answer of the biblical God, as expressed in Genesis 1 and recapitulated by the Word Incarnate of the Gospels.

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsTranslator’s IntroductionAuthor’s ForewordChapter I: Disposing of three triosI. Three monotheisms? 1. Monotheism is not essentially religious 2. There are not only three monotheisms 3. Do monotheism and polytheism simply oppose one another? 4. The real question 5. Islamic monotheism 6. A mutual recognition of the monotheisms?II. Three religions of Abraham?Common personages 1. The same Abraham? 2. Three religions of Abraham, or only one?III. Three religions of the book? 1. A deceptive expression 2. Three very different books 3. Three relations to the book 4. The idea of revelationIV. Three religions? 1. How do the three religions distinguish themselves from one another? 2. Three books?ConclusionChapter 2: To know GodI. To know 1. What does “to know” mean? 2. To know the singular 3. Self-knowledge, personal knowledge, knowledge of God 4. To look in the right placeII. A particular object 1. “Open your eye, the good one!” 2. Faith and knowledge 3. To know a paradoxical object 4. Faith, will, loveChapter 3: The one GodI. Oneness 1. The dangers of monotheism 2. The rediscovery of polytheism 3. The dogma of the Trinity and political theologyII. Unity 1. “Monotheism”: a vague concept 2. Uniqueness and unity 3. The concrete problemIII. Union: the human model 1. The bond of charity 2. Love and identity 3. To accept the other as otherIV. Union: the Trinitarian model 1. Relation 2. To give rise to the otherConclusion: United to the one God?Chapter 4: God the Father 1. Sexuality and the image of God 2. Masculinity and virility 3. Creation and paternity 4. Uncoupling paternity and virilityConclusionChapter 5: A God who has said everythingI. Nothing more to say 1. Power, or the word 2. A stingy grace? 3. The definitive religion 4. A God reduced to silence 5. The discourse of the God who is muteII. The silence of the flesh 1. Who wants more, really wants less 2. Without return 3. The incarnate Word 4. The TrinityIII. After Everything 1. What to do when everything is said? 2. The word now belongs to us 3. A general ruleConclusionChapter 6: A God who asks nothing of usI. I know what to do 1. The amplitude of the normative 2. What does God ask? 3. The end of the LawII. God’s expectation 1. The vegetal model 2. The Old Testament 3. The New TestamentIII. Responding to the expectation 1. To eat 2. Faith 3. Pride and humility 4. SacrificeConclusion: The “meaning of life”Chapter 7: A God who forgives sinsI. A few clarifications 1. Sin and pleasure 2. Offending God? 3. Sin presupposes forgivenessII. My sin 1. Where is evil? 2. “For every sin, mercy” 3. RemissionConclusionIndex

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Book SynopsisRemi Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western society has rejected traditional theophilosphical ideas in favor of human authority and autonomy, ultimately causing the erasure of divinely ordered humanity.Trade Review"Amid the continuing stream of books about modernity, Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man stands alone. His treatment of the modern age is at once complex and unified, rooted in stunning erudition and an ability to construct a compelling narrative. Completing a trilogy that includes previous books on antiquity and the middle ages, Brague provides an account of the sources—textual, political, economic, and ecclesial—of our current world for which there is no substitute and no current competitor." —Thomas S. Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture, Baylor University "No one ranges over the history of ideas like Rémi Brague. The Kingdom of Man is not just an index of Brague's astonishing learning but a pulsing inquiry into the dreams of our modern imagination. Those dreams, contends Brague, re-worked reality itself and proposed a human innocence that is proving far from benign." —Graham James McAleer, Loyola University Maryland“. . . it was a delight to turn to Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project. This is a genuine academic work by a scholar of remarkable erudition.” —Public Discourse"Concise, clear, and compelling, The Kingdom of Man provides an account of the genesis and failure of the modern project. Although a familiar story, Brague presents it with erudition and detail that is enriching rather than overwhelming and helps us understand who we are today." —Law and Liberty"[Rémi Brague] is aiming at something more difficult than a history of ideas. The goal is to lay bare the internal logic of modern hubris, to disinter link by link from the debris of history the chain of ideas that took us from early modern theistic humanism, through atheistic humanism, to today's regnant antihumanism, which expresses itself in art as ugliness and distortion of the human form, and in social science as the program of abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide—from early modern utopian dreams to current dystopian nightmares. . . . The book is nothing like a jeremiad . . . Brague is trying to do what a philosopher at the peak of his illustrious career should do, disclose to his reader the underlying logic of the age; not offer answers, but equip the reader to find them. In this he succeeds." —Touchstone"The story may be familiar in broad outline—the death of God entails the death of man—but it has never been portrayed with both such a thorough command of the broad strokes (for example, masterful compact discussions of canonical thinkers from Francis Bacon to Heidegger) and at the same time a simply amazing wealth of detail, fine brush strokes of testimony from lesser known or practically unknown authors and artists that add vivid cultural flesh to the big story. In the end, the portrait of secular humanism’s collapse upon itself is stark, more than sobering, but informed by an understated but bright hope that humanity’s goodness has 'anchors in the heavens.'" —Ralph Hancock, Brigham Young University"Rémi Brague provides in this book a longue-durée historical and philosophical explanation for anyone who has ever wondered about our civilization’s willing spiral into self-destruction. Brague shows that the will to modernity is the will to take control of human nature, isolate it from any cosmological or theological context, and render the truth about it provisional, subject to endless experiment and modification. This is a timely and important book." —James Hankins, Harvard University"With The Kingdom of Man, Brague completes a trilogy in which he presents a panoramic view of theological and philosophic thought, ‘ancient and modern,’ primarily but not exclusively ‘Western.’ Most such efforts are cringeworthy exercises, superficial and canting, but Brague has read not only widely but with care, profiting from work done by Strauss and his students while maintaining an independent view. . . . A summary of Brague’s argument shows why his book provokes and stimulates." —Interpretation"The Kingdom of Man deserves an audience as wide as the author’s great erudition, for Brague tells this familiar-enough story of decline in new ways culminating in a clear critique." —Journal of Church and State“The thousands of slight turns of thought over the centuries leading up to our own... are the subject of Brague’s exposition. The author is, himself, a Catholic who is more of a lamenter than a champion of this story, but his tone throughout is uniformly calm and professorial. His criticism of modern developments, primarily implied or insinuated, is under the surface of the placid text.” —Reading Religion"Reading his book is a unique experience for anyone interested in the history of ideas — like taking a transatlantic Concorde flight over the entirety of the course of Western history." —Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction Part One: Preparation 1. The Best Of The Living Things 2. Domination 3. Three Incomplete Prefigurations 4. Metaphorical Dominations 5. The New Lord Of Creation 6. Attempts And Temptations Part Two: Deployment 7. The Formation Of The Modern Project 8. The Beginnings Of The Realization 9. The Master Is There 10. Moral Dominion 11. The Duty To Reign 12. The Iron Rod 13. The New Meaning Of Humanism 14. The Sole Lord Part Three: Failure 15. Kingdom or Waste Land? 16. Man, Humiliated 17. The Subjugated Subject 18. Man Remade 19. Man Surpassed and ... Replaced 20. Checkmate? 21. Lights Out Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWhen the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Rémi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christ

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Book SynopsisModerately Modern wears its thesis on its sleeve. Modern men and women, those thoroughly imbued with modernity’s ideas, hopes, and projects, need to moderate themselves. They need to rein themselves in, they need to think and act beyond their comfort zone. Implicit in this claim, of course, is a slew of topics, claims, and an argument. What is modernity? What’s lacking in it? Where should its adherents look outside and beyond it? What would they find? And what would a conjunction of a chastened modernity and a newly respected outside look like? It would be difficult to find someone more equipped to raise and pursue these questions than Rémi Brague. Le règne de l’homme: l’echec du projet modern (The kingdom of man: the failure of the modern project) already laid out his basic views: modernity is the project of radical anthropocentrism, of man construed as the sovereign of the world and of his very humanity. If the traditional order of the West located man within a wider scheme of God/world/man, with the former two providing models of excellence for the latter, then modern thought reverses the order, expelling God and the divine from public centrality and, by means of technological science, aiming to make man, in Descartes’ famous phrase, “master and possessor of Nature”. The Legitimacy of the Human picks up the theme and surveys the results. Birth dearths, looming ecological disasters, and the threat of destruction on enormous scales testify to something having gone terribly awry. Its concluding chapters advise a reconsideration of the rejected premodern option: the biblical God and his providential care. Moderately Modern brings all of the foregoing together, mixing cultural critique with cultural restoration. It does so in characteristically Braguean ways: attention to the meaning and history of important terms; brilliant aperçus of the contemporary scene; enormous learning worn lightly and brought to bear deftly; a personal tone with intellectual and spiritual gravitas. His theme being the current condition of the West, this son of the West brings to bear all that she has made available to her children to live thoughtful and genuinely human lives. Let us hope that he is not a Cassandra, but more akin to Isaiah, albeit in a philosophical mode.Table of Contents Translator’s Introduction Foreword I Modernity as a Problem Introduction: On Modernitis 1 Can Europe Survive Modernity? 2 From One Transcendental to Another II Sacred Cows or Mad Cows? 3 To Ground Reason 4 Atheism or Superstition? 5 Is Secularization Modern? 6 Democracy and Theocracy 7 Reaction to Progress III Culture 8 Are There Really Two Cultures? 9 Does Culture Support the Idea of Truth? 10 Heirs Without a Will? IV To Temporize 11 From Time to Time 12 How One Writes History 13 The Conditions of a Future 14 Reconstruction 15 An Educational Dream 16 Not to Betray: The Tradition Index

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Book SynopsisThrough an interview and sixteen essays, this title explores key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. It focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another.Trade Review"This truly is an informative, engaging, and very readable book that will be very useful to anyone with an intellectual interest in things medieval." (Choice) "Highly recommended to scholars of the Middle Ages as well as those in philosophy and religion more generally. They will all be enlightened by careful reading of this book." (Library Journal)"

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Book SynopsisThe appearance of Etienne Gilson's Metamorphosis of the City of God, which were originally delivered as lectures at the University of Louvain in the Spring of 1952, coincided with the first steps toward what would become the European Union. The appearance of this English translation coincides with the upheaval of Brexit.

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