Category: History

The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth

Bloomsbury Publications, 2012     Amazon.com

Book Description:

In Search of the City on a Hill challenges the widespread assumption that Americans have always used this potent metaphor to define their national identity. It demonstrates that America’s ‘redeemer myth’ owes more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of the Puritans than to the colonists’ own conceptions of divine election.

It reconstructs the complete story of ‘the city on a hill’ from its Puritan origins to the present day for the first time. From John Winthrop’s 1630 ‘Model of Christian Charity’ and the history books of the nineteenth century to the metaphor’s sudden prominence in the 1960s and Reagan’s skillful incorporation of it into his rhetoric in the 80s, ‘the city on a hill’ has had a complex history: this history reveals much about received notions of American exceptionalism, America’s identity as a Christian nation, and the impact of America’s civil religion.

The conclusion considers the current status of ‘the city on a hill’ and summarizes what this story of national myth eclipsing biblical metaphor teaches us about the evolution of America’s identity.

Reviews:

“A thought provoking analysis of how the biblical metaphor of ‘a city on a hill’ became a national myth. Gamble begins with a careful analysis of John Winthrop’s 1630 lay sermon in the context of its time and traces the ways in which the biblical image was employed by others to define American identity in the two hundred years that intervened between the time when Winthrop delivered his sermon and its recovery in the nineteenth century. The concluding chapters explore how politicians including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, and Sarah Palin have appropriated Winthrop’s name and words to define American exceptionalism, and what this means for America as a nation and for Christians living within the nation.”  Francis J. Bremer, author of John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (2003) and Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, A Puritan in Three Worlds (2012),

“In Search of the City on a Hill is the most important study of the origins and of the evolution of a national myth. For the second time Richard Gamble took it upon himself to reveal and prove the insidious and particularly American historical tendency to employ religion for political purposes – indeed, to subordinate matters of faith to populist publicity, to enhance the latter by the former. This is a lone cry in the midst of a deafening wilderness, but one enriched with a most serious scholarly amassing of historical evidence.”  John Lukacs, author of Five Days in London: May 1940 and A New Republic

“’Civil religion is voracious and will gobble up anything it thinks useful’. That stark observation of Rowland Sherrill has never been more conclusively proven than by Richard M. Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill. His discovery of the recent and artificial provenance of a holy verse in the American Creed proves even more astounding for the evidence that doesn’t exist than for the evidence it unearths. This concise masterpiece of historical detection blew my mind. It will also blow the circuits of misguided conservatives, neoconservatives, and evangelicals who have been duped (or duped others) into an idolatrous interpretation of their nation, their history, themselves.”  Walter A. McDougall, University of Pennsylvania, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian, author of Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era

“Instead of arguing over how best to frame the American mission in terms of the city on a hill, Gamble suggests we ought to ask a different question. We ought to have a debate ‘between exceptionalists of all sorts on one side and skeptics on the other, that is, between those who believe that the United States is somehow exempt from human finitude, the lust for domination, and the limits of resources and power, and those who do not.’ Richard Gamble’s book is an important first step toward that long-overdue debate.”  Thomas E. Woods Jr., The American Conservative

About the Author:

Richard M. Gamble holds the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Chair in History and Political Science at Hillsdale College, Michigan, USA. He taught at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, USA from 1994 to 2006. His previous books include The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation and The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. He also serves as a contributing editor for The American Conservative.

In the French Revolution, J. L. Talmon observed, rationalism itself had been transformed into a passionate faith. [The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1970 (1952), 6.] Already Lamartine noticed that Mirabeau managed to make reason passionate. The social and political consequences of the idea that the voice of the People was really the voice of God now had to be drawn. The Roman-inspired constitutional aspiration were swept aside by the Jacobins with the help of the new, militantly impersonalistic political concept of la volonté générale, as the revived generalistic paradigm of Greek political philosophy combined with the new centralism and nationalism to produce the first Gnostic dictatorship of modernity. The rights of the secular individual – in Robespierre’s rhetoric sometimes under the nominal designation of personality – were proclaimed alongside the rights of the abstract universal Humanity which was somehow embodied in the new republic.

Described as an explosion of divine wisdom, the Revolution was immediately seized upon and further theorized by the politically powerless German romantics and idealists. [The reactionary side of romanticism is not seldom a superficial, aesthetic phenomenon, under the surface of which hide the same radical ideas. When it is real, what we find is often the use of some of the new intellectual resources in the defence of pre-revolutionary social and political formations which were already characterized by the relapse from differentiation. A more balanced, selective, non-revolutionary use of romantic ideas is found in Burke and similar thinkers.] Kant wrote a treatise on eternal peace which was followed by the outbreak of the most extensive wars in history. If the people were only released, some Germans proclaimed, a magnificent, spontaneous, peaceful harmony of individually different nations would arise, like a wonderful symphony. This vision, however, already swerved significantly from the French form of universalism. Crushed by Napoleon, yet incapable of rejecting the Revolution, the Germans devised their own popular, pantheistic nationalism as an ideology of resistance.

Pantheism thus provided the metaphysics of the revolution. The People was the real divinity which advanced irrepressibly while the empty abstractions of the Supreme Being or Reason were formally worshipped. In the absence of the differentiational framework – the transcendent sphere of values, the ontic logos, and the objective moral order – the asserted freedom was of the distinctly modern kind: the freedom of mere self-assertion, either as guided by self-protection and rational calculation of the maximization of pleasure, or in the form of the new emotional expressionism of the romantics. It was no more qualified than the simultaneously asserted equality: both were normless, tending towards abstract absoluteness and limitlessness and thus the illusory. They corresponded to a universe in which All is God. And if All is God, God cannot be the Father, and if there is no father, the assertion of general human brotherhood is meaningless. German idealism, at one early stage, conceptualized it all in the form of a Transcendental Jacobinism.

Romanticism was the cultural expression of the state of affairs after the divine explosion, where differentiation and structured order were theoretically and practically rejected on all levels. Drawing on the accumulated legacy of the esoteric tradition, the romantics further transformed nature/God into an evolving, holistic, and vitalistic process in which the individual was to be merged through intuition and feeling. Everything was included in the becoming in which nature/God strove to realize all its potentials, in nature, history, and art, and in which it became conscious in Man. Nature was visible spirit and spirit invisible nature. Illustrating the continuity of rationalism and romanticism, Carlyle proclaimed that the Enlightenment philosophers were right in asserting that the supernatural was not distinct from the natural; but this, he held, meant that the natural must be elevated to the supernatural and not, as they had thought, the reverse. [See Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (1977), 274-6.] But if they were not distinct, the meaning of this position was hardly clear. If All is God, there is no difference between high and low, up and down. The position that All is God, that God alone exists, turned out to be difficult to distinguish from the position that Nothing is God, that Man alone exists.

The new totality was without any structure, any hierarchy. It was without rules, auto-evolved, no longer created and ordered according to an ontic logos. The endeavour to preserve the traditional distinctions of morality, society, art and religion were powerless against the underlying blurring momentum of the pantheistic revolution.

Mendelssohn sought to show that pantheism, rightly conceived, was congruent with religion and morality. Throughout the ages, similar strategies could seem to have been devised by monists. Christian mystics had claimed to uphold the Trinitarian theism of orthodoxy, Sufi mystics had defended Allah and his law, and advaita vedantists retained on one level the ishvara, the personal deity. But that was before the pantheistic revolution of modernity. In the context of the latter, the elevation of a wholly ineffable, impersonal oneness to the highest, ultimate or only true reality assumed new meanings and had different consequences. Its often neglected metaphysical diffculties were reproduced on all levels of the respective philosophical systems. The efforts to preserve, under this condition of the relegation of the distinct focus of the personal aspect of the transcendent Godhead to a lower level in the hierarchy of being, the structured order of the still lower, phenomenal levels of reality all seemed somehow sooner or later to fail. As the transcendence of the unity was lost in the ever-growing metaphysical confusion, phenomenal reality dissolved into chaotic formlessness, increasingly exposed to the manipulations of arbitrary human will.

De 1945 à nos jours

Perrin (2000)     Amazon.fr (2004)

Quatrième de couverture:

La France, dit-on, est le pays de la liberté. Dans le domaine des idées, cela reste à démontrer. Car tout se passe comme si un petit milieu détenait les clés de la vérité. Et ceux qui contestent son monopole sont victimes d’une censure insidieuse, qui les réduit au silence. Sur la scène politique, culturelle et médiatique, ce terrorisme intellectuel s’exerce depuis cinquante ans. En 1950, les élites exaltaient le paradis soviétique et chantaient la louange de Staline. En 1960, elles assuraient que la décolonisation suffirait à garantir le bonheur des peuples d’outremer. En 1965, elles s’enflammaient pour Fidel Castro, Hô Chi Minh ou Mao. En mai 1968, elles rêvaient de libérer l’individu de toute contrainte sociale. En 1975, elles saluaient la victoire des communistes en Indochine. En 1981, elles croyaient quitter la nuit pour entrer dans la lumière. En 1985, elles proclamaient que la France devait accueillir les déshérités de la terre entière. Dans les années 1990, l’idéologie libertaire et l’ultralibéralisme se rejoignaient pour affirmer que le temps des nations, des familles et des religions était terminé. Pendant cinquante ans, les esprits réfractaires à ces positions ont été victimes du terrorisme intellectuel, car ils ont été traités de réactionnaires, de fascistes, de capitalistes, d’impérialistes, de colonialistes, de racistes, de xénophobes, d’obscurantistes ou de partisans de l’ordre moral, même quand ils ont eu raison avant tout le monde. Le terrorisme intellectuel est une mécanique totalitaire. Pratiquant l’injure, l’anathème, le mensonge, l’amalgame, le procès d’intention et la chasse aux sorcières, il fait obstacle à tout vrai débat sur les questions essentielles qui engagent l’avenir. Quand on se sera enfin débarrassé de telles méthodes, la France redeviendra le pays de la liberté.

Jean Sévillia, Wikipédia

Not much needs to be said here about the impersonalistic import of classical physics and the conception of science to which it gave rise and which in important respects dominated the West for centuries. In the course of the Enlightenment, classical materialism and atomism, the minor traditions of Greek philosophy which had been rejected by the speculative philosophers of the differentiational shift and which could not enter into the grand synthesis that was Christian theology, were again taken up and deployed in theoretical support of the emerging scientific administration of modernity. With the differentiational tension abolished, the West’s dynamism and creativity was increasingly refocused on the material sphere.

The story of how the West came seriously to adopt as a worldview the mechanistic model of matter in motion, how it built a predominantly materialistic civilization focused on the control and exploitation of nature, and how it proceeded to spread it to the rest of the world, is at least in the perspective of comparative cultural history not only a history of beneficial material and even, indirectly, some cultural and political advancement, but also one of a cultural, moral, and spiritual abnormity. From the model’s beginnings in the early modern period, when Hobbes and others immediately began to apply it to human beings, it has also produced problematic and sometimes tragic results of a scale and a number which alone foreclose any interpretation of Western modernity as simple progress of the values of the person.

Renaissance individualism, even among the learned humanists, had been marred from the beginning by the relativism, egocentrism, vanity, Prometheanism, and sheer vulgarity of the new secularism. When modern individualism was philosophically formulated by Hobbes, it was the grossest doctrine of a living lump of matter, without any distinctly human nature in common with others, causally impelled by the drive for self-preservation and the satisfaction of desires. This is the doctrine which still dominates liberal political philosophy, political economy, and utilitarianism, and which, behind the added facade of Locke’s philosophically largely unsupported moral rhetoric, is the basis of the modern theory of natural rights. The problem of setting only abstractive reason and nature against convention became much more evident in the eighteenth century than among the Greeks. [Again, while they point to the potential dangers in Strauss’s return to the classics, the historicist conservatives also criticize the failure of his American followers properly to distinguish between the classics and the radicals of the Enlightenment. But, as could be gleaned from the previous section, both parties fail to recognize the difference made by Voegelinian experiential transcendence, especially as supplemented by the personalistic dimension.]

Both the concept of reason and the concept of nature were susceptible of continuous reinterpretation. Modern rationalism was in the process of cutting off the upper layers of classical reason which accounted for the differentiational intuition of transcendence, and of reinterpreting nature in accordance with the new science. And in the course of the transition from transcendence to immanence, from theism via deism and pantheism to romanticism, Rousseau only added further new dimensions of the definition of the concept of nature to those of the rationalists. The individual conceived in the terms of any of the versions of modern “nature” was far from the person.

Meanwhile, the secularization of the Renaissance, the Reformation, hosts of new ideologues, and the new technological resources together made possible the consolidation of the position of the territorial monarchs, who set about neutralizing the independent aristocracy, centralizing power, and re-divinizing both the state and themselves, to some extent after the pattern of the early pantheism of the cosmological civilizations, the pull of which was still strongly felt. Because of the still historically influential concrete social and cultural results of differentiation in the intervening classical and Christian civilization, they could never completely succeed, but in addition to the intellectual developments of the new pantheism, the new political form of absolutism ensured that the process of modernization often continued to proceed in a manner intrinsically inimical to the values of the person.

Although Rousseau remains the paradigmatic thinker of romanticism, adding the sentimental variation of modernity to its uncompromising rationalization, [After almost ninety years, Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism is still the unsurpassed analysis of this phase of Western intellectual history, the objections even of critics like A. O. Lovejoy and I. Berlin tending to fall by the wayside. The latest edition (1991) contains a lengthy introduction by Ryn.] others before him had contributed powerfully to the development of this unavoidable complement. In the worldview of monistic mysticism and metaphysics, nature devolved from the absolute and perfect impersonal oneness, and it increasingly came to be thought that for this reason it could not contain evil in any sense except that of privation. On this view, no expansive desires and rational and emotional exploits could really be evil. The providential plan according to which man moved towards the secular kingdom of perfection was apprehended not only by the sinless certainty of unaided reason, but by the sinless certainty of the innocent heart.

Like the universe of immanentistic Hermeticism, man is good, and the Man Machine of Enlightenment materialism could not satisfy romantic man’s emotional side. Committed to his secularism, romantic man could not return to the differentiated reality of true personal identity. Despite his rejection of the rationalist materialism, atomism, and utilitarianism as well as the formalist conventions of the culture of the Enlightenment, he had to move forward, inevitably carrying with him most of the deeper legacy of the modern impersonalistic development. Instead of reversing its trend, he added to it supplementary dimensions.

In Rousseau we stand not only before the paradigmatic addition of the general romantic complement, but also before the equally paradigmatic prefiguration of its more specific dialectic of narcissistic individualism and egotism, on the one hand, and its longing for absorption in a larger whole, on the other. And the larger whole is both the womb of the good nature which is one with the cloudy haziness that is now the divine, as confessed by the Savoyard vicar in Émile, and the whole of the nation, of la volonté générale: rejecting the disruptiveness of Christianity, Rousseau praises the cohesive power of pagan civil religion as perceived through his distinctly new sensibility.

From Burke to Eliot

Regnery Gateway, Seventh Revised Edition 1986 (1953; original subtitle: From Burke to Santayana)

Amazon.com, 2001 printing     Amazon.com, 2008 ed.

Back Cover:

One of the most widely reviewed and discussed books of our era, The Conservative Mind is an essay in the history of ideas that has produced great political consequences. For this study often is said to have worked a revival of conservative thought and policy in the United States.

“Kirk tells his story of the conservative stream with the warmth that belongs to it,” Time wrote of the first edition of this book, published thirty-three years ago. “Even Americans who do not agree may feel the warmth – and feel, perhaps, the wonder of conservative intuition and prophecy, speaking resonantly across the disappointing decades.”

Historian, critic, educational writer, political thinker, and master of the mystical tale, Dr. Kirk writes in his new Foreword about the early reception of this powerful study: “The dangerous thing about this particular book was its relative lucidity; conceivably some readers might understand it; and at that prospect there shivered the people whom Gordon Chalmers, in those years, called the ‘disintegrated liberals.'”

Commencing with Edmund Burke and John Adams, this is a history and a criticism of conservative thought and policy in America and Britain, down to the present hour. It has to do with statesmen, poets, judges, theologians, journalists, novelists, philosophers, all in the setting of their times. “Aphorisms burst like bombs from Kirk’s pen,” wrote a socialist reviewer of the book.

Kirk’s method and style often are called “evocative”; he makes dry bones speak to the living. Declining any political office, Dr. Kirk nevertheless is a mover and a shaker near the end of the twentieth century.

Reviews:

”[It] is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without [Kirk’s] labor.”  William F. Buckley, Jr.

”Kirk is assured a place of prominence in the intellectual histories for helping to define the ethical basis of conservatism. He has tried to pull conservatism away from the utilitarian premises of liberalism, toward which conservatism often veers, toward a philosophy rooted in ethics and culture.”  Wall Street Journal

About the Author:

Russell Kirk (1918-1994), historian of ideas, critic, essayist, editor, and novelist, was the author of thirty-two books. Among them are The Roots of American Order, The Politics of Prudence, Enemies of the Permanent Things, and six works of fiction. He received twelve honorary doctorates from American universities and many awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal.

JOB’s Comment:

The most important book in American conservatism, at least in terms of historical influence.

It is in the new foreword to the seventh revised edition that we find Kirk’s praise for and lengthy quotations from Tage Lindbom:

“The egalitarian dystopias of Jacquetta Hawkes, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell have taken on flesh. The world’s evanescent liberal era, in fulfillment of Santayana’s predictions, is giving up the ghost. The outer order of the state falls into the clutch of merciless ideologues or squalid oligarchs: the inner order of the soul is broken by the ‘reductionism’ of fashionable recent notions and by the triumph of destructive appetites.

But this Foreword is no place for disquisition upon the character of our woes. For an account of what ails mankind today, we can listen to the nobly prophetic voices of our generation: to the Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to the Englishman Malcolm Muggeridge, to eh Swiss Max Picard, to the Frenchman Gustave Thibon, to yet others endowed with the moral imagination and the tragic sense of life. There comes to mind, for eminent instance, the book entitled The Tares and the Good Grain, by the Swedish philosopher Tage Lindbom – once a Marxist, today a subject of the Kingdom of God.

Lindbom tells us movingly that, deserting the Kingdom of God, mankind has descended into its own Kingdom of Man; and that the Kingdom of Man will suffer destruction. Enslaved by our readily-gratified lusts, reduced to fatuity by our own ingenious toys, we ignore the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin upon our wall.

‘It is only since World War II that we have entered the time of the great harvest of the Kingdom of Man,’ Lindbom writes. ‘We have now to deal with a secular generation for which material existence is everything and spiritual life is nothing. It is a generation for whidch all that is symbolic becomes ever more incomprehensible…It is a generation which is in the process of eliminating from its consciousness the notion of the family…

The chaos from which we have for so long been preserved arises as a menace before us. And this menace cannot be turned aside by secular guidance except in a certain manner: by a dictatorship, a technocaratic dictatorship. In reality this dictatorship has already begun to make its entrance step by step.

The exterior chaos and this exterior menace of dictatorship are nevertheless not the essential. They are but the projection of something incomparably more serious and more dangerous – interior chaos, the confusion that reigns in the hearts of men. It is now an affair of a generation which, in its ensemble, is incapable of discerning truth from lies, the true from the false, the good from the bad. The time of harvest is come for the Kingdom of Man.’

Lindbom’s voice echoes that of Edmund Burke, two centuries ago. Those who, impossibly demanding, revolt against law and nature do work their own ruin, Burke cried: “and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.”

Lindbom reciprocated by dedicating The Myth of Democracy (1996) to Kirk’s memory.

Voegelin is controversial to some Christians in that he locates some of the sources of the immanentizing reinterpretations in the New Testament itself, notably in some passages of St Paul and in the Revelation of St John. He points to Augustine as the one who saved the differentiational insights through his rejection of literalistic interpretations and the applications of the Biblical prophecies and visions to the course of worldly history which had been practiced by some of the earlier Fathers: the prophecies and visions must be considered mysteries, man cannot know precisely what they mean, they refer rather to events in relation to transcendence than to worldly history, and knowledge of the future course of the latter is beyond man.

Yet there can of course be no doubt about the novelty of the early modern immanentizers’ interpretive ingenuity. Francis Bacon and the British radical Puritans and their European advisors set about fulfilling the prophecies through scientific discovery, technical inventions, social engineering, and military conquest. The new elements were so prominent that the description of the new heavens and the new earth with the help of the Biblical texts was soon no longer credible. In the course of secularization, the apocalyptic disruptivity of divine intervention and the establishment of the Kingdom of God was replaced by a peaceful and gradual providential guidance of the individual, not to salvation through Christ but, through the use of the new worldly instruments, towards the realization of a secular, materialistic kingdom of human happiness defined in terms of sensual pleasure. Calculating, unaided human reason on the one hand, and increasingly sentimental human emotion on the other, could reach predictive knowledge of the providential plan, of God’s will.

The role of the esoteric tradition in the rise of modern science has become a commonplace in the history of science; during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment it was to a considerable extent magic modes of thought, not least their impetus towards exploitative power and control, that came to dominate Western culture through official, political sanction and institutional embodiment. But other aspects of the influence of esotericism on Western modernity have only recently been better understood. The precise connections between the various strands of modern thought and the underlying, impersonalistic, pantheistic revolution have become much more easily visible.

It has become clearer, for instance, how in decisive respects the radical Enlightenment started already in the seventeenth century, mainly inspired by Spinoza. [See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (2001).] With a better understanding of Spinoza’s esoteric connection, it has become possible to some extent to see him, like Hegel, as a link between Western esotericism and a secular modernity characterized by closed immanentism and moral relativism. In the emergence of the radical Enlightenment, the proclamations of atheism both alternate with and are prepared by a process of ingenious hermeneutic compromise, ambiguity, and dissimulation. Before the triumph of Newtonianism, Hobbes was forced to devote much of his Leviathan to scriptural exegesis, thus becoming a pioneer of the characteristic strategic devices of liberal Christian scriptural interpretation. And also more generally, the rejection of the differentiational framework took place through reinterpretation and not through a clean break with the concepts of the past. Yet the rejection was none the less radical for being gradual and deceptively roundabout in its method. [This account of early modern developments is found also, with more references to and discussion of recent scholarship of the esoteric tradition in modernity, in my ‘Idealism and the Pantheistic Revolution: The “Big Picture” and Why it is Needed’, in James Connelly and Stamatoula Panagakou, eds, Anglo-American Idealism: Thinkers and Ideas (2010).]

From the perspective of personality and differentiation, Spinoza, who carried on Hobbes’ project not least with regard to the understanding of scripture, must certainy be seen as a key thinker of modernity, since in him so many of the decisive early modern developments converged and culminated, and since his influence was quite as strong on the romantic wing of modernity as on the subsequent development of the rationalism which he himself represented. He is one of the prime releasers of the metaxical tension, one of the master closers of the differentiational gap. With the new, fashionable esprit de géométrie that his wild forerunners had lacked, Spinoza sought to show that God and nature are identical and spirit and matter strictly nothing but two aspects of the same thing. This was the consummate pantheistic synthesis of the Gnostic and Hermetic currents with Descartes’ rationalism and Hobbes’ irrational-mechanistic anthropology and reinterpretive scriptural exegesis.

Essäer om europeisk identitet

Nya Doxa, 2007

Baksida:

Vad är Europa? Var går dess gränser? Frågorna har stark dagspolitisk aktualitet när frågor om EU:s utvidgning står på dagordningen. Men de öppnar också historiska och idéhistoriska perspektiv.

I fem essäer skriver idéhistorikerna Gunnar Broberg, Jonas Hansson, Sten Högnäs, Rebecka Lettevall och Svante Nordin om olika aspekter på Europas identitet. Det kan handla om kartbilden under olika tider. Hur och var har man utmärkt världsdelens gränser på kartblad och jordglober? Det kan vara fråga om språket. Vilka språk är egentligen “europeiska” och hur har språkvetenskapen i det förflutna sett på den frågan? Det gäller Europa som den “historiska” världsdelen i motsats till de övriga “ohistoriska”. Eller rör det sig om de fruktansvärda barbarer – Xerxes, Attila och Djingis Khan – som satt skräck i européerna och utmanat deras civilisation. Mot gränsbevakaren står samtidigt idealet om kosmopoliten, världsmannen som är hemma överallt men ändå innerst inne europé.

De fem essäerna bjuder in till en resa i tid och rum. Men resan ringar in ett revir och en föreställningsvärld. Den följer Europas gränser.

De fem essäerna:

Sten Högnäs

Ett indoeuropeiskt Europa? Språk och nationaliteter och gränser

Jonas Hansson

Den historiska världsdelen: Hegel, européerna och världshistorien

Svante Nordin

“Hannibal ante portas!” Barbarhot mot Västerlandet från Xerxes till Usama bin Ladin

Rebecka Lettevall

Kosmopolitens gränser

Gunnar Broberg

Den vandrande gränsen: Var slutar Europa?

JOBs kommentar:

Man har valt att varken ange någon redaktör eller samtliga medverkande författare på titelsida och omslag. Författarna är eller var alla knutna till avdelningen för idé- och lärdomshistoria i Lund, men stöd för projektet erhölls också från universitetets Centrum för Europaforskning.

Pantheism and monism run through Western modernity largely merged with the apophaticism and the concomitant immanent rationalism which entered major currents such as Arianism and Socinianism. The tendency to onesidedly apophatic, negative theology – which has, it should be pointed out, been interpreted as simply a misunderstanding of the positive and concrete experience of the prophets and the saints [See C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947 (1998), 93.] – had already long exercised an important influence.

Long before the Pseudo-Dionysius, what he called apophatic theology had lurked in the background of the work of the Alexandrian Fathers, which in other respects preserved to some extent the traditions of the differentiated high culture of Hellenism. There arose through the influence of the Alexandrian school and of Neo-Platonism a kind of theological rationalism in which the transcendence of God was conceived in a way which tended to reduce it to meaninglessness. The analysis of this kind of rationalism and its modern ramifications has been pointed to by Robert Pattison as the central, unifying, and distinctive theme of the work of John Henry Newman [Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (1991).] – but the significance of the analysis for the thematic of personhood must also be brought out.

For Arius, God, the ultimate reality, was strictly ineffable, and human reason and human concepts could reach and express only the verities of what, through an adaptation of Neo-Platonism, was considered a merely created mundus intelligibilis, and a created Christ. Reason and its concepts were thus separated and abstracted from the concrete, differentiational experience of transcendence. The Arian position implied a new kind of insistence, against the background of impersonalistic radical monism, that language could not in any way express ultimate reality and divine truth. No statements about transcenence could be valid. From this kind of rationalism, relativistic and sceptical conclusions must sooner or later inevitably follow. A God about whom nothing meaningful can be said fades into the background.

Already in Arius, worship of created beings became permissible, reasonable, logical. If Christ is not divine, we might as well worship other elevated humans, our own highest selves, or nature. Once again, All becomes God. If God is asserted merely as exclusively unspeakable and unfathomable, the assertion might not amount to much. Human reason is granted free play on all levels below the one it cannot reach anyway, that of strict divine transcendence – and it is free to exploit them. Only the immanent sphere is accessible. The authority of language tends to be lost as it is separated from the divine Word and is increasingly perceived to be purely conventional.

Against this development stood not only the original Platonic higher, experienced intuition of transcendence and the prophets’ communion with God; there stood against it also the Christian dogma of the Incarnation, as the personal manifestation of the transcendent Godhead, of the divine Word, in the immanent sphere. Since Christ was considered to be consubstantial with the Father, the Church asserted that we can know God and speak truthfully about him. Beyond the idealistic and deistic abstractions, divine transcendence can be expressed by human language. Dogma is such an expression, a living manifestation of the power of the transcendent yet incarnated God. And this God was personal. Christian dogma went even further beyond the bare rational truths of God than the revelation of the prophets; it added with the Incarnation a sharper focus on the personal nature of transcendence.

Yet as a whole, it was difficult to present even by means of non-literal interpretation a picture of these new teachings of Christian orthodoxy – creation, the view of man, sacred history, the atonement, soteriology, eschatology – that could be accepted as coherent in terms of philosophy in the Greek tradition. [I have discussed this difficulty elsewhere.] And the rising orthodoxy which asserted these things was intolerant and narrow. When even the Alexandrian school was repressed and forced underground, the philosophical legacy could not be upheld. Alexandrianism tended instead to merge with the wilder forms of Gnosticism which the Neo-Platonists too had once fought. In the course of the development of medieval heterodoxy, the Alexandrian worldview was increasingly distorted by its ever more radical heirs. Voegelin makes reference to Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), which shows in detail how the repressed currents emerged as radical sectarian movements at the time of the Reformation.

Little remained of the original logos-theology when in the course of modernity the new, self-appointed pneumatic élites, guided by gnosis regarding the necessary course of history, rose to political power. What was left was immanentistic, secular utopianism. The inner light of gnosis became increasingly democratized, and, variously “enlightened”, not just religious fanatics, eccentric philosophers, and aristocratic esotericists and libertines, but also ordinary men turned – in time, in the name of the whole of the People – against social and ecclesiastical hierarchies, seeking to replace them with new individual and social identities.

Thus continually transforming itself into something ever less divine and ever more human, the light of gnosis entered into the basic formation of the currents that constitute the two mighty wings of modernity, that of rationalism and that of romanticism. Voegelin seeks to show how the closing of the openness of differentiation, in which alone the reality and the values of the person can fully manifest, culminated in the apocalyptic violence of the modern totalitarian revolutions.

Framväxt – Guldålder – Kris

Atlantis, 2008

Baksida:

Svante Nordin berättar om hur de humanistiska vetenskaperna vuxit fram i Sverige och om deras förhållande till humanistiska ideal. Historievetenskap, litteratur och konstvetenskap tas upp liksom exempelvis filosofi, idéhistoria och de olika språkvetenskaperna. Humanioras guldålder under 1900-talets första hälft skildras liksom den kris som inleddes på 1960-talet. I dag framstår humanvetenskaperna som mera ifrågasatta än någonsin. Deras teoretiska och värdemässiga grundvalar är utsatta för en intensiv kritik.

Humaniora i Sverige lyfter upp väsentliga och för de akademiska disciplinernas framtid avgörande frågor och ställer dem på sin spets.

JOBs kommentar:

Jag har diskuterat några även för denna bok relevanta aspekter av Nordins arbete bl.a. i en jämförelsevis utförlig kommentar till hans tidiga bok Historia och vetenskap här.

Torsten Fogelqvist som DN-publicist och folkbildare

Carlssons, 2005

Baksida:

Torsten Fogelqvist (1880-1941) var under decennier en kulturpersonlighet på den offentliga scenen. De flesta läste, lyssnade till och respekterade denna ofta egensinniga och imposanta profil. Men som så många både före och efter honom har Fogelqvist försvunnit i glömskans ständiga flod av passerade tänkare och storheter.

Kulturprosten är en “intellektuell biografi”, skriver idéhistorikern Ingmar Lundkvist inledningsvis. Idéer, debatt och åsiktsformeringar står också i centrum när denne publicist, folkbildare, författare och medlem i Svenska Akademien granskas. Författaren söker i detta välskrivna och stimulerande arbete göra rättvisa åt en “inte helt genomlyst diskussion under de första fyra decennierna av förra seklet, som behandlar bildning och humanism, modernitet och kulturarv, pressens roll samt antinazism. Alla var viktiga delar i Fogelqvists offentliga kommunikation, som här satts i historisk belysning.”

Boken är illustrerad.

Citat från inledningen om den intellektuella biografins genre på skyddsomslagets främre flik:

“Tankar och idéer, vars vägar är osynliga, manifesteras i människans texter eller handlande, man vi kan inte med säkerhet veta i vilka omlopp tankarna gått. I försöken att fånga idéer kan det vara tacksamt att ta sin utgångspunkt i enskilda individer, vilka ofta fungerar som ett slags miljöer i sig.”

Om författaren på skyddsomslagets bakre flik:

Ingmar Lundkvist är idé- och lärdomshistoriker vid Lunds universitet och verksam som lärare i idé- och bildningshistoria vid högskolan i Halmstad.

Han har tidigare medverkat i bl.a. Tvärsnitt, Presshistorisk årsbok, Arbetarhistoria och Årsbok om folkbildning.

Kulturprosten är hans doktorsavhandling i idé- och lärdomshistoria.

Ingmar Lundkvist bor i Varberg.