This is the best new book I have read this year. Kelley is by no means a new author but this is a more sweeping work revealing the author's keen grasp of the philosophy of history and particularly of Western civilization.
             Kelley positions the roots of Western civilization in the Homeric and Platonic world of ancient Greece, but unlike many Christians and previous generations and today will brook no compromise with this "enlightenment paganism" as a valid expression of culture. He shrewdly observes that today's increasing calls for a return to the medieval synthesis of Christian and classical civilization is misdirected: "Should we accept the argument of those who wish to restore the displaced ideals represented by the medieval synthesis of Christianity and Humanism? Can such salvage operations succeed? Is it possible to remake Western civilization on the same basis from which it first sprang up? If so, why should one accept that it will turn out better the second time?" Kelley's answer is unequivocal: "There are but two options available: that which comes from God and His revealed Word, or that which arises from man's sin-darkened imagination" (pp. 16-17).
             Kelley observes Plato's attempt to depersonalize the pagan religion of the Homeric era, replacing the gods of ancient Greece with an abstractionist rationalism whereby the entire universe would be explained by recourse to human reason: "[I]t was more than just a struggle between science and religion. Their [the Greek philosophers'] interest was to shift the locus of ordering power from the gods to the mind of man, so that the mind of man becomes the source of order and is able to govern reality according to the principles innate in the reasoning power of man alone" (p. 56, emphasis in original). For Plato and the other Greek philosophers, the creation of culture was to be exclusively the work of the intellectually gifted, the philosopher-kings especially endowed with rational fa...