Preface

A prominent mark of the modern era is its substitution of a cold universe for the ancient and medieval cosmology in which human beings once knew themselves to be ethically and spiritually at home, according to the account given in a powerful new book by French philosopher Rémi Brague.¹ While acknowledging the thesis of the modern "disenchantment of the world" to be familiar, even trite, Brague's account moves beyond the historical changes in the Western understanding of the world to focus upon the ethical and anthropological implications of such concepts: "The modern cosmos is ethically indifferent. The image of the world that emerged from physics after Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton is of a confluence of blind forces, where there is no place for consideration of the Good" (185).

Such ethical indifference stands in stark contrast to the ancient and medieval cosmology in which the human person felt at home. In that cosmology, "to say what man is is to rank him in an order that is spatial, dynamic and axiological. As for simple localization, it is not without meaning for man, and for his very humanity, that he be located on the earth and under the sky" (105). This cosmology placed the human person in a humble position within the cosmos as a whole, but it was a position within a world in which the being of the whole in its ordered perfection and completeness also constituted the good. Such a cosmology therefore had profound ethical implications: "The world, and above all that which is most cosmic in the world—the sky—provided ancient and medieval man with brilliant evidence that good is not only a possibility but a triumphant reality. Cosmology has an ethical dimension" (121).

Brague shows how what he calls the "Abrahamic" tradition developed by Jews, Christians, and Muslims was "superimposed" on a cosmology developed by the Platonic tradition but was also "in excess" of the Platonic tradition and was therefore capable of surviving when the Greek model collapsed. While the Greek model focused on the geometric and musical perfection of the harmonious cosmic whole, the Abrahamic tradition found a different principle of cosmic order: for the multiple components of the cosmic order, "it is their common obedience to a single and sole God that assures the harmony of relationships that they form among them" (176).

The focus of Brague's book is the anthropological and ethical challenges we face in modern thought when this cosmology is no longer part of our thinking: "For us, there is no longer any connection between cosmology and ethics, no longer any relationship between what we know of the structure of the physical universe and the way man thinks about himself and feels what he is and what he ought to be" (216). This situation, the situation of "the lost world," leaves us with fundamental and puzzling questions: "Why is man both ethical and in the world? Ancient thinkers never asked the question. In Antiquity the answer was given from the outset with the ethical nature of the world; the question did not have to be asked" (219). In the modern world, especially in light of the modern project to conquer nature through technology, a question that Brague says emerged implicitly within the thinking of Plotinus also has urgent relevance for us: "What must the world be for wisdom to be possible in it?" (219)

The collapse of the ancient and medieval cosmology brought about by the astronomical revolution eventually had profound religious and theological implications: through the use of metaphors borrowed from the emerging modern views "the proclamation of the 'death of God' occurred with the help of astronomical illustrations" (191). The indifference of nature, the amorality or even apparent immorality of nature, and the notion that the universe displays nothing but the struggle of opposing forces give rise to the theory of a cruel God, or of a God who has abandoned or forgotten the universe, or of a God who left the work of creation incomplete, or of a God in eclipse, or of a silent God—or, again, of the death of God.

At...