A book review that reaffirms the truth of Christianity’s humanity and the falsity of liberalism’s purposeless, mechanical secularity, in which the only aim of human life is hedonistic sensuality and “security” in the clutches of Big Brother.
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The following book review appears on the Intellectual Conservative website.
Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life
reviewed by Bob Cheeks
05 August 2005
Professor Vigen Guroian’s book Rallying the Really Human Things is a powerful and provocative defense of traditional Christian humanism in its conflict with secularism.
HUMAN KIND CANNOT BEAR VERY MUCH REALITY
-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The thesis of Professor Guroian’s book, then, is to illustrate that secular humanists, in their efforts to secure “human rights” based essentially on reason and sentiment, have failed. And, this failure is predicated on their rejection of a transcendent God who has graciously provided a religious and moral imagination “that must be brought into play,” if the term “human rights” is going to have an inherent worth.
To help define his position within the vibrant fabric of Orthodox Christianity, the author explains that his “guiding vision” is the “interrelated themes of Christian humanism and the moral imagination.” He has chosen the work of G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk to exemplify a “profound tradition of Christian humanism….that unmasks the metaphysical and moral bankruptcy of a secular humanism riddled with relativism and lurching toward nihilism.”
His thesis expands into the work and intellect of T. S. Eliot, where he explores the devolution of the moral imagination into what he describes as the “diabolical imagination.” Here he offers that Dostoevsky “draws dangerously near to giving the diabolical imagination full reign in his characters, as for example in Ivan Karamozov or Stavrogin in The Possessed.” Guroian’s diabolical imagination is best described as the force that has blinded man to “sin,” eviscerated our conscience, and left us alone and mad.
The author provides a resonating and contextualized examination of the effects of modernity, what he refers to as the Age of Discussion, upon our culture: the slaughter of the innocents, gay marriage, the Christian family, the meaning of the good child, contemporary sexuality on campus (for those readers with children in college), a delightful essay on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and a provocative essay about the decline in reading among our capitalist leadership.
Here, in the final essay of the penultimate section, the professor suggests Lord Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln, A Biography. I would rather he’d have recommended Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, for a more accurate description of the sixteenth president.
The golden nugget found in Guroian’s book is his singular treatment of the concept of “human rights” debated between (Orthodox) Christianity and liberal secularists. His argument is succinct, articulate, and courageous. The good professor writes, “I am not sure the liberal theory of human rights has much staying power outside a certain historic political societies in which a deeply embedded tradition of democratic constitutionalism and the rule of law already exist.”
The professor has, of course, made an erudite observation and he follows it with a question that deserves a book of its own, “Could it be that liberal Protestantism’s spirit of benevolence and its faith in reason and democratic progress has migrated out of ecclesial quarters and found a new home in the international human rights movement?” The connection, for those familiar with the work of Richard Gamble (The War For Righteousness), is fairly obvious.
“Historic Christianity,” Guroian writes, “lent to a culture its profound convictions about human dignity and individual and social freedom. Such convictions were and are rooted in the Incarnation and a belief in a triune God.” But, these attributes were borrowed by what the professor believes was essentially a secular and atheistic agenda, the international human rights movement. “The denial of God,” Guroian writes, “permits the affirmation of humanity.”
Ah, there’s the rub; deny God, eradicate the moral underpinnings of society, then expect the unwashed to be led by those progressivists we have come to despise. But, Guroian rallies on Solzhenitsyn, “Freedom is self-restriction,” the sage of the Russias writes, “Restriction of the self for the sake of others.”
Professor Guroian’s book Rallying the Really Human Things, is both a powerful and provocative defense of traditional Christian humanism in its conflict with secularism. He has defined the new age of sentiments and found it inadequate and wanting, he has placed progressive Protestantism in its proper historical context, and he has explained “diabolical imagination” as the Devil’s handout.
His perspective is uniquely Orthodox and in his writings he brings a profound knowledge seasoned with just a touch of spiritual paprika, but just enough to bring out the flavor.
Rallying the Really Human Things is available on Amazon.com.
Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
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