Book Review: The Impulse of Po
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 th
This epistemological dualism eventually undercut Christianity altogether, in the Italian Renaissance and, especially, the European Enlightenment (p. In what is surely one of the most valuable features of the book, Kelley outlines the provenance of ecclesiocentrism, the notion that the institutional church should govern and dominate all of life. The only place God retained in the thought of modern scientific man, and this lasted until the rise of evolution in the nineteenth century, was the hypothetical place He was thought to occupy in the necessary order of cause and effect. While the Enlightenment exalted reason, Romanticism exalted intuition, feelings, emotions, the mystical, the bizarre, the monstrous, and even the occultic. For if nature were effectively reduced to a methodical, mechanized system whose structure was immediately grasped by human reason, and if man himself participates in this nature as an agent in reordering this vast machine for human purposes, how can the human mind itself be anything other than part of this machine? Late eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism constituted a reaction against the Enlightenment's rationalistic mechanization f life. Like the Enlightenment, Romanticism had its own form of elitism, but the Romantic elite was the truly romantic individual, the man of great mystical insight, emotion, and passion. While, the author asserts, modern science and all of its benefits would have been impossible apart from Christian presuppositions, the early modern scientists quickly abandoned any genuinely Biblical approach to their discipline:Everything that could not be objectively measured or numbered was viewed as an intrusion from an alien sphere. In other words, the Roman church retained the part of the Old Testament that was designed to be abandoned, and abandoned that part which was designed to be retained (pp. 286)Kelley correctly contends that one factor contributing to the rise of Romanticism was the medieval "pietism" which shifted attention from the victorious redemptive work of Christ to the emotions of His suffering (p. God and His Word were remote and proximate, while the church was near and immediate. Kelley moves on to discuss "The Grand Synthesis" of the medieval world: pagan classicism and historic Christianity. Augustine, while recognizing many flaws of the patristic monastic order and, certainly, the pagan heresies from which it sprang, did not break decisively with this monastic ideal and thus bequeathed to the later Middle Ages, along with his sound, Biblical theology, a certain measure of monastic paganism. Furthermore, the author observes the irony of much of the Latin church in its treatment of the Old Testament: it retained or perpetuated the structure of the Aaronic and Levitical priesthood, which were designed to be replaced by the universal priesthood of the New Testament era, while the church abandoned the moral and judicial dimensions of the Mosaic law which were never set aside by the New Testament.
Common topics in this essay:
Enlightenment Romanticism,
Indeed Enlightenment,
Christianity Humanism,
God God,
Alister McGrath,
Forms Ideas,
Protestant Reformation,
European Enlightenment,
Romanticism Kelley,
Christianity Aristotelian,
western civilization,
ancient pagan,
european enlightenment,
monastic ideal,
enlightenment romanticism,
pagan greek,
medieval ecclesiocentrism,
human reason,
renaissance enlightenment romanticism,
institutional church,
medieval life,
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Acceptance Essays
