Despite hitting a few bumps, poet James Matthew Wilson's The Vision of the Soul delivers a stirring and timely account and defense of the West's traditional way of understanding the universe and our place in it.
For Wilson, the Western tradition is the Christian Platonist one, in which the two basic facts about existence are that the universe is ordered and that its order is intelligible to the human mind. These two facts are augmented by Christian belief in a personal God who loves us unconditionally and desires that we love him. This tradition, argues Wilson, has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment and the philosophies descended from it. The problem with the Enlightenment is that while it begins as an attempt to understand the universe, it has devolved into a crude materialism that denies objective reality. However, writers such as Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot preserved this culture, despite the dominance of liberalism.
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