Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture.

This book takes its place in the impressive body of works that in one way or another treat the modern world as an event, whose origin, nature, possible end, and present significance are examined. Some of the best known authors of this genre are Lyotard, Derrida, Richard Rorty, Alasdair Maclntyre, Charles Taylor, and Leszek Kolakowski.

Dupre's work is broader in scope and richer in sources than even the wide-ranging works of these authors, partly because Dupre is primarily concerned with the spiritual inspiration of Western civilization. Like Christopher Dawson and Simone Weil, Dupre describes our civilization, s loss of spiritual inspiration and hints at ways it may be restored. Accordingly, he considers ancient, medieval, and modern contributions, both secular and sacred, to our understanding of nature, the self, and the divine in order to trace the changes in our understanding of these concepts, their previous interrelations, and their present isolation from each other. The resulting portrayal is of a harmful fragmentation.

Unlike, say, Taylor, who in his Sources of the Self, considers matters only from the point of view of their impact on our understanding of the self, or Rorty, who deals with nothing prior to the modern period, Dupre is concerned with our entire civilization, how the event of modernity came about, and its significance for us. As he puts it, "Modernity is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent sources, and its human interpreter. . .rendering all rival views of the real obsolete...forcing its theoretical and practical principles on all but the most isolated civilizations."

Dupre believes that the present deconstructionist reading of the modern world is incorrect. The modern world has not come to an end, pace the acolytes of the so-called masters of suspicion, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Rather, there is a need to return to an earlier phase of modern civilization which Dupre indentifies as the period of the classical Humanists and the Refommation, and to once again seek to reintegrate the three main components of Western civilization--God, nature, and the self--which became fragmented during the passage to the modernity of the late seventeenth century. The modem world, in its early phase, sought and failed to reintegrate them, except briefly during the Baroque period in the early seventeenth century.

In presenting this thesis, Dupre sheds light on many subjects. For example, he explains how academic theology ceased to affect and guide our civilization when it became isolated into a separate and narrow science, largely because of the separation of nature and grace begun by the nominalists. Likewise, he explains the present-day claim that all meaning and value come from the human subject, as the result of the loss of God. When God is removed, not only is human significance changed, but so too is nature's. In the realignment that results, human beings replace God as the sources of meaning and significance, and then of course we find that any alleged meaning in nature is humanly imposed. He believes that the stress on human creativity in the Renaissance, although it remained within a religious framework, released a vital force which encouraged this progressive removal of God as the source of meaning and value. The source of fragmentation was not the link of being with logos in ancient Greek philosophy, as Derrida maintains, but a progressively impoverished interpretation of logos as residing exclusively in the human subject and depriving all other being of its inherent meaning. Dupre, therefore, points out that "the current battle against foundationalism signals a belated awakening from the Cartesian dream, yet combatants all too often remain within the intra-mental premises that started the dream and are thus forced to adopt a skeptical attitude with respect to the epistemological enterprise in its entirety." Rather than being postmodern, by retaining the intramental premises of Cartesianism they remain fixed in an early phase of the modern period. Finally, Dupre's account of the progressive isolation of nature and grace, and the treatment of spiritual theology, which are rarely, if ever, mentioned in philosophical studies, greatly illumine the passage to modernity.

Clearly, Dupre has written an important book. His historical approach is more than an historical account of the breakdown of an earlier organic connection between the divine, nature, and humanity. It is an extended philosophical argument against those who have dismissed in principle all attempts to achieve a new synthesis by showing the source of their resistance to be an assumption that the present fragmentation is normative, rather than a phase in a continuing historical development of Western civilization. But Dupre does not himself make any attempt at a synthesis, nor does he consider any contemporary efforts to do so, even though he mentions with praise the work of Whitehead. It would not have been amiss were he to have cast at least a glance at twentieth-century efforts, such as the works of Simone Weil, which are very fresh, deep, and suggestive. At any rate, the door should now be more open than ever for such creative, synthetic efforts at a religious reading of nature, history, and the self with Dupre's impressive philosophical-historical argument added to related ones by Kolakowski, Taylor, and MacIntyre.