Rémi Brague’s Critique of Modernity’s Low-Rent Logos

In Curing Mad Truths, French philosopher Rémi Brague argues that the modern world is dying because it cannot answer the question of why it should live. To answer that question will require humility, according to Brague, because it is medieval truths about God, man, reason, and nature that are necessary for renewal.

To put it mildly, such a dialogue between our rationalist age and an age commonly thought to be one of blind faith is difficult to launch. Brague opens with G.K. Chesterton’s infamous statement that the modern world is “full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Chesterton meant that the virtues “have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other.” Brague’s book focuses on the why and what of that madness. Such madness occurs from the modern conceit that reason contains the full content of truth, with no consideration of God. As Brague terms it, “The modern world plumes itself with its being utterly rational.”

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