Given contemporary interest in Islam, compelled by the astounding violence perpetrated in its name, the author considers what two historians of philosophy, Étienne Gilson and Rémi Brague, writing a generation apart, have to say about medieval Arabic philosophy and the relevance of its study to our own day.
This paper is a review of the book: Rémi Brague, Des vérités devenues folles (Paris: Salvator, 2019). The book is a collection of Brague’s lectures that cover virtue and values, anthropology, nature and creation, and the family and culture. The author highlights that Brague (1) calls his readers back to the profound insights of the medieval mind, and (2) helps them see that their noble and urgent task consists in handing on a living tradition to the next generation and beyond.
The author traces the thought of George Santayana, Brad S. Gregory, Pierre Manent, and Rémi Brague, who addressed the transformation of the West into its modern present. They all show that by being cut off from its cultural and political inheritance in modern times, Western Civilization presently finds itself in a burning need of recovering its identity. To save its identity, the West is to challenge the errors of modernity. We used to have the example of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle in the darkest hours of World War II, and the remarkable example of John Paul II who through his leadership of the Solidarity movement inspired hope not only in his own people but also for others in the Soviet bloc at the time. “The cultural task awaiting Europe,” to use a phrase of Rémi Brague, challenging though it may be, may in time find its voice in another Churchill or John Paul II. At present, with no remedy in sight, all we can do is to hope.
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