Modernity on Endless Trial
Allen, Diogenes
BOOKS The sacred necessity his is a collection of twentyfour essays and addresses, ten p u b l i s h e d here in English for the first time, by the eminent Polish philosopher, Leszek...
...Having thrown off the limits imposed by religion in the name of autonomy and utopian hopes of perfectibility, modern society's repeated failures lead to disillusionment...
...Christian Belief in a Postmodern World is Allen's most comprehensive work to date...
...His writing manifests the clarity and disciplined intensity of his favorite poet: the Anglican priest, George Herbert...
...Very much like Bonaventure, Allen's project unites mind and heart, the intellectual and the affective...
...It is from the destructive effect of these two competitive tendencies that the book takes its title: Modernity on Endless Trial...
...One of our limitations is our intellects...
...He seeks to help us become more wise in an age that is increasingly given over to a concern with means, because it has lost faith in its temporal ends...
...He hopes to help us recognize the dependence of the temporal on the eternal...
...Pascal challenging an age of increasingly and harmfully onesided rationalism...
...One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that which is inherent in human history--if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred...
...Diogenes Allen despotism and the destruction of culture...
...So even though he argues that, in spite of many assertions to the contrary, Christianity is intellectually viable (see the essay, "On the So8 March 1991:165 Called Crisis of Christianity"), he looks to those who have faith to reinspire Western culture...
...The three parts of the book are titled: "The Book of Nature," "The Book of Scripture," and "Christianity and Other Faiths...
...Kolakowski believes that central to secular Western culture is the conviction that human beings are to be regarded as ends in themselves, and never as means--that is, each one as an individual, not as a member of a nation, class, race, state, or civilization...
...Allen's is an apologetics in the classical sense of reasoned discourse recommending the truth of the faith...
...I have underlined the classical and, 166: Commonweal...
...Kolakowski is a person who has become wise...
...For the project he has been pursuing over the past twenty years is, in my estimation, a uniquely important one: nothing less than a contemporary restatement of St...
...Allen contends that "the end of the modem world" affords new possibilities for exhibiting the intellectual strength of the Christian faith, thus allowing believers to affirm their faith with "the full wealth of conviction...
...All of them in one way or the other are reflections on the ambiguities of our cultural heritage, the secular humanism of the Enlightenment and Christianity...
...Robert P. I m b e l l i '-"-~ iogenes Allen, Presbyterian _9 minister, professor of phiI~ losophy at Princeton ~ , , A , . Theological Seminary, and author of eleven books, is not well-known to Catholic readers...
...From this dialogue with the philosophical-religious tradition Allen fashions a statement at once rigorous and heartfelt, austere and concrete...
...And his "authorities" are those who have similarly united the speculative and the practical: Plato at the very origin of the West's philosophical tradition...
...Kolakowski is generally far more critical toward secular humanism than toward Christianity...
...Supposedly only eight books have survived the calamity...
...It displays a rich and cumulative argument in an outwardly simple and straightforward guise...
...The restraining and inspiring influence of Christian faith is needed today to restore a tolerable balance between two competitive tendencies in Western culture: the tendency to make claims to final and ultimate truth, and a critical attitude that so undermines all claims to truth that we tend toward skepticism, relativism, and nihilism...
...He very much deserves to be...
...BOOKS The sacred necessity his is a collection of twentyfour essays and addresses, ten p u b l i s h e d here in English for the first time, by the eminent Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who was expelled from the Communist party in 1966, and who now divides his time between All Souls College, Oxford, and the University of Chicago...
...But what is needed is faith, and "to spread faith, faith is needed and not intellectual assertion of the social utility of faith...
...The seeds were sown with the rejection of the sacred and the reality of evil...
...but an apologetics addressed as much to those within as to those outside the household of faith...
...QUEST The Search for Meaning Through Christ Diogenes Allen Walker, $14.95, 119 pp...
...Kolakowski points out that intellectuals can analyze the desperate condition of Western society which is losing confidence in the value of its own heritage...
...faith moves beyond reason, for it requires a willingness to be changed: to consent to God's call to conversion...
...In the essay, "The Revenge of the Sacred in the Secular Culture," he argues that when a culture loses all sense of limits, it is open to every form of intellectual and political totalitarianism...
...I I CONSENTING TO CONVERSION CHRISTIAN B~.~" IN A POSTMODERN WOBLD Diogenes Allen Westminster/John Knox, $15.95, 238 pp...
...Simone Weil and Austin Farrer amidst the upheavals and horrors of our own century...
...Most of the essays are fairly easy to read and sparkle with wit...
...We are restrained from the twin tendencies of our secular culture by religious faith...
...Bonaventure's spiritual classic, The Journey of the Mind to God...
...His enterprise, therefore, might be termed "apologetics...
...The most humorous is a satire titled, "The Emperor Kennedy Legend...
...Although Kolakowski uses Kantian language, he makes it clear that to regard each individual as irreplaceable and unexchangeable has Christianity as its ultimate source...
...He thus seeks to steer a very Catholic course between a fideism that speaks indiscriminately of "the leap of faith," making faith appear willful and arbitrary, and a rationalism that evacuates faith of its distinctive substance...
...The moral evaluations that run through the collection--whether they be on the dilemmas of the Christian legacy, the politics of Western democracy and Marxism, or the pretensions of the social sciences--have as their touchstone the Christian humanistic conviction concerning the dignity of human beings and their limitations...
...Faith is reasonable and is patient of our best intellectuai efforts...
...Although the material in the collection is quite diverse, the essays are deeply connected...
...They can even show the value and need of the Christian religion...
...in fact, it is not too much to say that he gives a kind of apologetic for Christianity...
...He frequently points out that the modern world is deeply indebted to Christianity for many of its greatest achievements...
...It purports to report a meeting of an Academy of Science many centuries after "the Great Calamity" (nuclear war...
...Religion is man's way of accepting life as inevitable defeat...
...The idea that society is in principle "an endlessly flexible thing" sanctions force and violence and finally MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL Leszek Kolakowski University of Chicago, $25.95,261 pp...
...Among them is one titled Creative Gardening...
...As you'can imagine, Kolakowski has great fun presenting the absurdities of Structuralist, Freudian, and Marxist anthropological efforts to explain on the basis of such material the Kennedy era...
...His passion is for both philosophy and spirituality...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
