Customer Reviews

After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

David Walsh's book is far more than a Christian critique of modernity. Through his profound readings of Solzhenitsyn, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Voegelin, he makes a compelling--even thrilling--case that the real "solution" to modernity's systematic impoverishment of our souls' longing for transcendence must come not from the facile rejection of modernity's values but from an immersion and understanding of these values so complete that it bottoms out in despair. Only a purgative suffering of the human and spiritual emptiness of the various ideological solutions can allow us to open our souls to a fresh experience of grace--we must pass through the fire of modern atheism and secular humanism in order to burn free of the unrealities inherent in these systematic rejections of divine order. If the book has a fault, it may be that it is too optimistic about the inevitability of this process unfolding on a large scale; but hope is a forgivable virtue. This is a beautifully written, closely reasoned book capable of changing lives.

After Ideology is a courageous effort to sketch a postmodern path to the recovery of civilization after a bloody century of ideological war. Democracy is not a stone: it won't subsist on its own. When cut of from its spiritual foundations it becomes deformed and sick. We can continue to wallow in ideological exhaustion and nihilism pretending the 20th Century never happened or we can look at the horror from the "inside" through the eyes of Solzhenitsyn, Voegelin, Dostoevsky and Camus and begin to understand that democracy is as much a matter of spirit as of institutional arrangements.

David Walsh is an excellent guide to the thought of these men (particularly Eric Voegelin) and page after page contains arresting observations which will require the serious reader to engage in profound self-examination. We must find a way out of the ideological box if we are to survive in society. We have not done so yet. After Ideology is a good place to start.

David Walsh provides an essential meditation on this rather destructive century. Through his masterful dissection of the life and work of such prescient minds as Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Camus, and Voegelin, Walsh articulates a visionary understanding of the importance -- at the close of this millennium -- of recovering the spiritual foundations of freedom. Walsh offers an excellent diagnosis on the dead end of "modernity" coupled with a prescription for healing the afflictions of the modern soul -- to ascend from the depths. I first read After Ideology back in 1990 under Professor Walsh's tutelage. Though my overall perspective may have changed since then, I still find Walsh's insight as invaluable now as I did as his student.

David Walsh's AFTER IDEOLOGY is a fantastic piece of work. It comes closer to being the book I have been looking for than anything I have yet read. It almost overwhelms me. Unfortunately, he attempts to do the impossible: Present the Answers about man which are available in theology and imperative for true human fulfillment and happiness - in the language of philosophy.
I understand his reasoning - most people have been led by the prevailing mentality or paradigm to think that theology is claptrap. But, there is no way the creature will ever be able to see and understand himself without submitting to the will of his Creator, without at least approximating that old "God's Eye View", which also goes by the name of "objectivity". Self-centeredness (anthropocentrism) looks good, but it goes nowhere. Without theology - the Queen of The Sciences - all we can do is stumble in the dark. Without theology we are "blind".
This will remain true no matter how brilliant the philosophers become. Walsh's book contains just about all the correct theological insights needed to achieve the freedom from ignorance we need, the "truth that makes one free". But, without the hard core theology, especially concerning The Problem - Original Sin - we will continue to spin our wheels. Of course I have not read anything he has written since 1990. I had better get busy.

Clearly written. An asset to all interested in today's morally skewed environment.

In reading Rabbi Arthur Waskow's These Holy Sparks: The Rebirth of the Jewish People, the first thing that struck me, at least 50 pages in, is where is God? Waskow is interested in community involvement, politics, the historical dimensions of the Jewish world, and to a degree, where the individual Jewish person fits into these overarching topics. But not in God.

It almost seems that Waskow is going to write a holy book without even mentioning God, like the Song of Songs or the Book of Esther. It turns out that this is very much in keeping with his position within Judaism. As a reconstructionist rabbi, he views the Jewish community as forming the parameters of the faith, acting as the stand in for God, or as God him/her/it-self acting in the world.

Waskows religious philosophy is thus very empowering. Jewish communities establish their traditions and customs. We are in a new age, where people are mature and make their decisions, not some transcendent God.

The problem is, of course, is a religious community (any community, for that matter) can be a terrible disappointment: The politics, in-fighting, the petty squabbles. To rely on a community and community only for one's notion of God can be a tricky, disappointing thing.

People want and need an entity that is somehow outside the human stream, to anchor and define what it means to be in a community, to be finite, and to be imperfect.

In this book, David Walsh diagnoses the crisis of modernity through four figures, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Voegelin and Solzhenitsyn. In this book, Walsh argues that these four figures confronted the abyss of modernity and through their spiritual struggles ascended into the truth. What is most interesting about this book is Walsh's contention that both communism and modern liberal democracy are in fact spiritual blood brothers - both were/are involved in a revolt against the Christian God and both constitute a deformation of the Christian belief that humanity can be divinised through grace. The ideology of both is that man should divinise himself (through a kind of seizing of naturalised grace) and that man's nature can be moulded to suit his own ends. Walsh diagnosis a kind of Gnostic strain but he also notes importantly that it is only in the context of Christianity that these ideologies could arise. They both involve man seizing the divine substance for himself and seeking to grasp at the eschaton so that fulfilment occurs within history. "When the divine substance is progressively drawn into humanity, the process of secularisation has begun" and "The long titanic struggle of the modern world may be seen as an attempt to achieve the self-divinisation of our nature without going through Christ", Nietzsche describing it as the "process by which humanity extends grace to itself". Walsh traces the current crisis to the Renaissance emphasising the autonomy of man and the failure to take man's propensity to evil seriously.

Walsh considers that it is precisely Christianity's failure to articulate how the in-between time (which we are in now - between creation and the eschaton) should be lived that has opened up the way for ideologies to move into this territory. "We begin to see, therefore, how the transcendent finality of Christianity was gradually redirected towards an inner worldly perfection" and "The roots of the contemporary upheaval reach into the very nature of Christianity itself" and "What is the purpose in creating a world that is doomed in advance to annihilation" and "The problem may be defined as "an inclination to abolish the tension between the eschatological telos of reality and the mystery of the transfiguration that is actually going on within historical reality".

Writing in 1990 (when this book was written) Walsh perceived that liberal democracy was nearing exhaustion and he hoped that the concept of transcendent dimension of man (which the four figures identified and emphasised) would be admitted back into public discourse. Walsh notes that "The advent of Christianity has meant that within the societies penetrated by it, human beings have definitely discovered their movement towards the eschatological transfiguration" but now such societies wish not to repent and convert but have the transfiguration for themselves without Christ. As
John Paul II noted: "The crises of European man are the crises of Christian man".

He did note the possibility that further radicalisation would take place. Arguably, this is precisely what has happened with the transcendent dimension being pushed out of the public square and emphasis being placed more and more on funding more "rights". If anything, the relativisation of values has increased in pace with increasing intolerance of religious belief. This is because: "The presence of a divine creator jeopardises the whole project of human self-salvation through revolutionary action" and "Men and women of faith have always been anathema to the founders and dispensers of ideology; they call into question the premise of human omnipotence on which the messianic project is based".

But, what is the foundation of liberal democracy's moral order where the foundation of rights is to be found in "private will" - all moral principles are essentially privatised and treated as merely subjective. This is the problem - it is wholly an anthropocentric moral order and "without the transcendent foundation of grace, the collapse of autonomous morality is assured" - "moral goodness cannot be sustained unless it is anchored in the mysterium tremendum of God". And, in a curious way, the current disorder has "no other source than the expectations generated by the epiphany of Christ...When the longing is not fulfilled in God, then it does not simply cease to exist. Its goal is pursued through the demonic energy of will." Camus notes: "The secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life". It now only loves "will".

So what is the answer? For Walsh, it is for man to return to the recognition that "man is an abyss so profound as to be hidden to him in whom it is". (Augustine) i.e. man must return to transcendence and follow the pull from above.

I was intrigued that it was Heraclitus who first identified the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

In conclusion this is an excellent book that wonderfully articulates the deformation of Christianity that is involved in modern ideologies including the ideology underpinning liberal democracy. The key question is when will liberal democracies become exhausted (as happened with communism) and return to their roots? Would that I had a crystal ball!

If this book as interested readers out there, well I would also recommend "The closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom and De Lubac's book on atheistic humanism.

By the way, I came across this book through the recommendation of James V Schall, political philosopher at Georgetown - thanks again, Fr Schall!

Walsh's use of communism and individualism (or atheism) as analogous to governments that are not of Christ is typical of those "filled with the Spirit" yet woefully lacking in insight. His reference of Dosoevsky to Voegelin is slanted in order to employ the emotional effect necessary in which to further the cause of the "Christian" Coalition. To say that we need a Christian government, is, by itself, fine. But in who's idea? Shall we say we hate the sins of others and love sinners to the point of burning their works? Walsh's book is a bit scary and way out in left (or extreme right) field.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison must be spinning in their graves. This book seeks to undo everything they worked to achieve for us. Tolerance is tossed, in favor of a very narrow pseudo-Christian ideology of buttinsky selfishness.