Rossi, Philip J.

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteTheology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of6-1-2005Review of "The Enlightenment and the IntellectualCulture of Modernity," by Louis DupréPhilip J. RossiMarquette University, philip.rossi@marquette.eduPublished version. Theological Studies, Vol. 66, No. 2 ( June 2005): 485-487. Permalink. © 2005Theological Studies, Inc. Used with permission.BOOK REVIEWS 485 weighs the impact of the inclusive language controversy on these processes. Leadership that shaped the Baptist Hymnal was guided by a principle of "infradenominational inclusivity," attempting to model the unity of the Church and accessibility of the hymnal in the midst of growing diversity. The UCC hymnal committee, however, saw their hymnal as a vehicle for changing denominational thinking. This was achieved by pursuing an ag-gressive policy of inclusivity—for example, rejecting "Lord" as an unac-ceptable gender-based metaphor for God and Jesus (197), a position chal-lenged and ultimately overturned by the General Synod of 1993. This balanced, well-written chapter serves M.'s interests and provides an en-lightened look at religious culture through a broad musical lens. In his conclusions M. attempts a thoughtful analysis of this very diverse material by considering the case studies in part 2 as "a set of unlikely pairings" (324). Thus he considers the music of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir together with that of John Michael Talbot, whom he considers "the most popular Catholic sacred-music artist in America" (240). Both, accord-ing to M., illustrate the power of media exposure and the performance of popular music repertory to generate financial and cultural support for what he calls "experimental religious communities" (325). Descriptively rich, the volume is not as successful analytically. Noting the essential role of "language" when defining sacred song (6), for example, M. devotes a chapter to new age instrumental artists who prize tone over text (168) without apparent contradiction. While convinced of the centrality of ritual for defining sacred song (7), M.'s ritual theory is unfortunately an-chored in the 1969 work of Victor Turner without any nod to the raft of scholarship that has followed and often critiqued Turner. Even M.'s tax-onomy is illusive—for example, there is no clear distinction between "sa-cred" and "religious" which often appear as synonyms. There are numer-ous factual errors, for example, confusing thurifer for aspergil (48), main-taining that Francis's rule of 1223 included a provision for the Third Order (60), asserting that Pythagoras named a mode after the Lesbian people of ancient Greece (176), confusing Richard Gelineau for Joseph Gelineau (246), misquoting the dates of Vatican II (1961-1964 rather than 1962-1965) (249). M.'s book is a treasure of case studies, wonderfully suited for considering sacred music in the United States (not "America"), and useful for ponder-ing what such music contributes to understanding U.S. culture. The nature and role of sacred music in this culture, however, needs further exploration, a clearer taxonomy, and more rigorous analysis. Chicago Theological Union EDWARD FOLEY, O.F.M. CAP. THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF MODERNITY. By Louis Dupre. New Haven: Yale University, 2004. Pp. xiv + 397. $45. Dupre's magisterial Passage to Modernity (1993) examined the humanist, scientific, philosophical, and theological thinkers of the mid-15th to the 486 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES mid-17th centuries, figures who set the stage for the culture of modernity, as they dealt with emerging fissures in an inherited intellectual and imagi-native unity among humanity, the cosmos, and God. In this new work, D. treats the Enlightenment as "the second wave of modernity" (3), placing it within a chronological frame from the Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution. As in the previous study, he carefully differentiates the thought of each figure under consideration as a vector within the broad trajectory of the intellectual features typically identified as "modern." This approach allows him to locate cross- and countercurrents that make the Enlightenment considerably more variegated than often presented by its more vociferous contemporary critics. While D. offers his own pointed criticisms both of particular positions historically espoused in the name of enlightenment and of aspects of contemporary culture shaped by appro-priations (and misappropriations) of the intellectual and social heritage of the Enlightenment, he also affirms its significant accomplishments: "an expressive conception of art, a nonauthoritarian view of morality, political theories that build freedom and democracy within the very structures of society" (338). He judges its "painful" critique of religion as both "neces-sary and overdue," concluding that "[i]n the end religion benefited from it. It forced the religious community to seek the proper domain of religion in symbols of transcendence rather than in science, and compelled it to begin a search for the kind of spiritual depth needed to live in accordance with this insight" (339). Central to D.'s interpretation is an account of the transformation ef-fected in "the principle of rationality that lies at the core of the Enlight-enment project" (16) and the attendant dialectical struggle over the nature of reason that constituted "the crisis of the Enlightenment" (12-17). Rea-son was no longer construed on the Greek model of "an ordering principle inherent in reality" but as a power that "submitted all reality to the struc-tures of the mind" (16). In consequence the subject became "the sole source of meaning" (17) and reason was instrumentalized. In D.'s account, moreover, resistance to this transformation by figures such as Herder, Shaftsbury, Rousseau, and Fenelon is not considered a "counter-Enlightenment" but a countercurrent internal to the overall direction of the Enlightenment. This view intersects with D.'s analyses in Passage to Modernity of earlier shifts that took place in the construal of humanity's relationships to God, the cosmos, and culture. Even though D. finds "no direct causal succession [that] links the humanism of the fifteenth century with the Enlightenment" (xi), he considers that first wave of modernity to be part of a "search [that the Enlightenment concluded] for a new cultural synthesis begun at the end of the Middle Ages when the traditional cos-mological, anthropological, and theological one had disintegrated" (1). D. devotes individual chapters to key elements that entered into the synthesis the Enlightenment sought to construct. These include a cosmos that science conceived as "self-empowered" (43); concepts of self fissured between "the self as subject of meaning and the self as substantial reality" (75), neither of which was able "to preserve genuine otherness" (76); an BOOK REVIEWS 487 understanding of art which, as expression displaced imitation as the central model, "played an essential part in moving aesthetic theory in a symbolic direction" (111); and a tension between the universal and the particular that played itself out in the moral realm "by redefining the very notion of ethics" (145), in political thought by "granting the idea of individual free-dom a primary position in its theories" (185), and in historical writing by an ideal of a universal history of humanity that sat uneasily with a recognition of the irreducible particularity of nations and cultures. The final three chapters deal with religion—an allocation of space that both reflects D.'s judgment that "[t]he impact of the Enlightenment was undoubtedly felt most deeply in the area of religion, either as loss or as liberation" (229) and allows him to articulate the complexity of various ways Enlightenment thinkers critically and constructively engaged religion. These chapters offer much of substance for theological consideration of religious subjectivity, symbol, analogy, and the relation of religion and culture. The topical organization D. employs to cover Enlightenment thought sometimes results in obscuring the connections that link each element to his larger interpretive theses about the intellectual dynamics of this "sec-ond wave of modernity" and his affirmation that "the Enlightenment, though flawed and one-sided, accomplished an indispensable task in the development of Western thought" (338). There are a few misprints (116, 150, 275), and Samuel Richardson is once misidentified as Herbert Rich-ardson (57). Though this work lacks the extraordinary intellectual crispness of Passage to Modernity, it is not an unworthy sequel. Marquette University, Milwaukee PHILIP J. Rossi, S.J. 

Review of  The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Culture of Modernity,  by Louis Dupré

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&amp;context=theo_fac

Review of The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Culture of Modernity, by Louis Dupré

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

epublications@Marquette