David Walsh’s The Modern Philosophical Revolution: Rouven J. Steeves

Aware that our chair and at least one or two panelists would provide an overview of not only the manner in which Prof. Walsh (David) unfolds his argument in his newest book but also its place as the final volume in a trilogy, I want to focus on several themes and issues that I think reside at the heart of David’s project and which require our consideration as we contemplate how we shall live in light of the illumination of existence revealed to us in the paradigmatic lives disclosed for us by David. I hope that the issues I raise will spur dialogue and allow me to discover fellow wanderers along the way with whom I can converse about truth and truthfulness as we search for meaning and light and existence in truthfulness. Indeed, it is with existence in truthfulness that I would like to begin.

“Primum vivere, deinde philosophari¹— ‘first live, then philosophize.’” But life is infinitely complex; no finite being can master what itself will always master (has always mastered) man. Therefore, as Fitzgerald once noted: The sign of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Prof. Walsh is such a first-rate mind and a true philosopher—a lover of wisdom who searches after the Beloved in and through life; a Beloved only ever glimpsed, never beheld (except in the only begotten of the Father—more on this shortly).

An illustration of this courageous spirit only found in those who truly love truth and not merely the appearance of it, can be found in footnotes 19 (p. 109) and 20 (p. 128) of Prof. Walsh’s book. In these footnotes, Prof. Walsh begets what would be the greatest horror to an ideologue: he changes his previous verdict in light of illumination received in the course of his own existential wanderings through life and the life of the mind. It is as much to say: I have read Hegel; I had my theories regarding Hegel; I have changed my theories in light of further investigation. This is science and the proper use of the scientific method. Yet, here also is the end of the scientific method, for what is disclosed in David’s further studies is not a system to be analyzed but a life to be lived. And life is not amenable to the sterility of the laboratory. If I may indulge in a Davidic formulation: to remove life from life is to end life. One is left with a corpse, which one can examine and study but not one with whom one can get along.

I am reminded of Zarathustra’s encounter with the tightrope walker at the outset of his own wanderings from the city that he loved, which is called the Colorful Cow, in search of living and true companions who would understand that new dawns will only arise out of the darkest of nights when existence in truthfulness has been disclosed or discovered, or, if necessary, created. Remember that Zarathustra explicitly praises the tightrope walker for having gone “to ground [zu Grunde]”²: “You have made your profession out of danger, in that there is nothing to despise. Now you are undone by your profession: for that I will bury you with my own hands.”³ And though Zarathustra praises him as one who is undone, he is now no more than a corpse in need of burial and Zarathustra realizes he needs “living companions,—not dead companions and corpses.”⁴ In contrast, Zarathustra’s prophecy of the coming Overman will not simply be a “Going-Under-One” [Untergehende] but a “Going-Under-One,” who “blesses himself” in going under and thereby becomes a “Going-Over-One [Hinübergehender].”⁵ His way is his own and he is not easily overcome by the next best jester.

Yet, as Zarathustra bemoans, in language eerily reminiscent of words repeatedly uttered by St. Paul, where can ears be found to hear that the truth he would express is only intimated in what he writes and that the truth itself lies outside, in the world, in life, for him who is willing to suffer unto truth (Aeschylus)? If Paul gives us Christ, we should not forget that Nietzsche gives us anti-Christ—the cross as redemption of burden or a burden in need of overcoming. And what this means can only be ascertained by those who . . . wander.

Is it not strange that as we wander through life—as we wander through Prof. Walsh’s work and follow the wandering way of the deep thoughts of the wanderings of the philosophers therein disclosed—that we discover a certain similarity in the ways traversed? What touchstone of existence do these souls all have in common? We wonder: how does an author communicate the incommunicable? In this sense too, Prof. Walsh’s book is itself (and I do not think he would disagree given his own words) a way pointer to life and to other thinkers who deduced their lessons from life—not merely to study the thinker and his thought but the illumination his works cast into the shadowy highway and byways of this world. And as we wander and wonder, we should give due attention, as Prof. Heilke has noted, to the fact that certain figures loom larger than others. We must give due consideration to Kierkegaard and the truth that the last shall be first.

Contemplating first and last and all in between, we must consider the work of destruction—of the breaking of the heart and mind—required by the vast majority of readers, who think they have understood the system of the Enlightenment and the system of the Enlightenment’s thinkers; who see the system of philosophy best captured in the volumes of Great Books lining a nice alder wood case (and by the way, I recommend a nice alder wood, lovely texture).

Indeed, can Prof. Walsh’s work be saved from the fate of systemization to which Plato has been exposed now for several thousand years—Eureka! I have captured the thinker in his system. I have a little something worth not much of anything and am on my way to creating another more or less brilliant error in the history of philosophy. I have said what others thought could not be said⁶ and yet I sound like a clanging cymbal. I have neglected love and the truth that love like life “exceeds reflection on it.”⁷ Here lies the rub—restated: how can one reflect on the ineffable without distorting the ineffable in the very act—word and deed—of reflection. This indeed brings me to my next concern.

Prof. Walsh states in the section on Hegel (but reflective of one of the themes coursing throughout the work): “When the existential mode has been recognized as the most embracing horizon available to us, the partitioning of theoretical analysis has become obsolete.”⁸ There is a tension, implicit throughout, explicit at times, in Walsh’s work that carries a certain Voegelinian resonance regarding the distorting effects of dogma as a systemization which detracts from life. In Voegelin’s words: “Since there is no doctrine to be taught but only the story to be told of God’s pull becoming effective in the world through Christ, the Saving Tale that answers the question of life and death can be reduced to the brief statement:

And this is life eternal

To know you, the only true God,

and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.⁹

And yet there is also a critique of this existential position. A critique powerfully (arguably too forcefully) expressed by Frederick Wilhelmsen when he formulated his now well known charge: “To speak, as [Voegelin] does, of the ‘fallacy . . . entertained by doctrinaire theologians, metaphysicians, and ideologists’ indicates a kind of precious washing of the hands by a latter-day Pilate who is too pure to enter the Golgotha of history. . . . But, Dr. Voegelin, ‘if He is not risen’—in the words of St. Paul—then I for one don’t give a damn about St. Paul’s experience of Him. . . . Professor Voegelin’s understanding of the structure of history fails.”¹⁰

In a similar, less caustic, vein, I am reminded of Dorothy Sayer’s words in a work entitled, Creed or Chaos: “If Christian ministers really believe it [Christian dogma] is only an intellectual game for theologians and has no bearing upon human life, it is no wonder that their congregations are ignorant, bored, and bewildered.”¹¹ “But if Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name is it relevant?—since religious dogma is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the nature of life and the universe. . . . Between Humanism and Christianity and between Paganism and Theism there is no distinction whatever except a distinction of dogma.”¹² This dogma is the Dogma, which is Christ —a drama whose “plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ?”¹³

Voegelin, no less than Walsh, argues (and argues in a manner strikingly similar to Sayer’s critique of the modern church), “In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately becomes the God known through his presence in Christ. This drama, though it has been alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers, is far from alive in the Christianity of churches today.”¹⁴ In a similar vein to the primacy and centrality of existence, C.S. Lewis argues in a very Voegelinian vein, “The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.”¹⁵ And yet, though “myth transcends thought,” Lewis continues, so “incarnation transcends myth.”¹⁶ Lewis concludes, “To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myth.”¹⁷

Walsh no less than Voegelin would assuredly agree with the centrality of myth but would arguably reject the reality of the incarnation as fact. As Voegelin intones: “Existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.”¹⁸ And Walsh: “Beyond responsibility for conceptual clarity we must find room for responsibility that carries the full weight of existence.”¹⁹

The question is not analytical precision (clarity), and specifically clarity regarding the facts, versus existence —but what truths can be deduced from myth and the mysterious by those truthful souls rightly attuned to existence? “The civilized homo politicus does not need to be a philosopher, but he must have common sense,” argues Voegelin.²⁰ What is more, this “Common sense is a civilizational habit that presupposes noetic experience, without the man of this habit himself possessing differentiated knowledge of noesis.”²¹

Now the noetically attuned philosopher is a man of extraordinary sense, whose extraordinary life and study of life informs, through dealers in second hand ideas (Hayek), the homo politicus. We need philosophers, which is to say, as Walsh argues page after page, individuals who are rightly attuned to existence and attempt to express their light not in terms of closed systems but in terms of illuminating facets of a system that we can never entirely comprehend, because it is life itself. And yet, what of the homo politicus—the man of common sense, whose existence might be forever in need of rails²² and guides even as he desires to exist in truthfulness? Is not dogma in some sense meant to buttress Little Faith ? ²³ What is our responsibility to those lost in the wastelands?

I know from previous correspondence with Prof. Walsh that he is not unmindful of these concerns. Indeed, he has written his trilogy precisely with man in mind. His charge is to the metaphysician, philosopher, and the political thinker who are concerned not merely about institutions but the men who live, work, and have their being in them. To these men of contemplation and action he proclaims the need to think deeply and darkly. In the darkness light will be found and the luminosity of existence will radiate as a guide: practical reason . . . rightly understood, which is to say lived.²⁴ And yet we contemplate, because this too is human —maybe all too human, for as the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds, “The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son [my colleagues], beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”²⁵ (David: you could have saved yourself much time.)

And yet in contemplating Prof. Walsh’s book, I am struck that it is.

In contemplating Prof. Walsh’s book, I am struck by what I think might best be captured (with apologizes to Flannery O’Conner) by the words, “God haunted.”  “Causality may govern everything under the sun, but it cannot govern the mind by which it is grasped. Only that which determines itself can apprehend the process of causal determination. . . . Neither mind nor matter is ultimate, for both are made possible by that which is other and for which they are modes of disclosure.”²⁶ Is the ultimate other—the immanent and transcendent Spirit—not Being that once was and yet remains, and, even if untitled, is “I am”?

It is interesting to note that each of the thinkers chronicled in Prof. Walsh’s book are themselves immersed in a Judeo-Christian worldview. They do not fundamentally challenge the presuppositions of the world into which they are born. As I was reading Prof. Walsh’s book and reflecting on the existential struggles of the thinkers he recounts, I wondered what a Hindi Schelling would look like (I guess some would say not much different . . . but . . .)? An Islamic Hegel? A Jewish Nietzsche? What I mean by “challenge” is not the agonic struggle central to life (which is so central to Nietzsche’s thought) but the fact that the agonic struggle involves God, and if I may be more poignant, Christ. And while the poignant vehemence of Nietzsche is arguably of a heighted, even unique, quality, the Christ-figure haunts the minds and the hearts of the thinker’s chronicles in a way reminiscent of the haunting effect of Holbein’s painting of the dead and buried Christ in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.²⁷

Whatever its “orthodoxy,” as Oakeshott makes clear in his discussion of Hobbes as a thinker who works within the framework of the Christian myth —the “myth which Hobbes inherited”— the underlying tension is that it partakes of the myth, never escapes that myth.²⁸ Indeed, as Prof. Walsh argues, reality is that myth, or at least Plato’s Khora, as he insightfully discusses in his section on Derrida: “The name for what cannot be named, what every name fails to name.”²⁹ It is the unnamable, which itself is critical to our existence and which must be critical to our contemplations as we stop here and there to reflect on where we have been, on where we are, and on where we might go; should go; will go?

In our God haunted existence in which the symbol of Christ seems unavoidable, we begin to reconsider the meaning of freedom and necessity, good and evil. Of the former, Prof. Walsh has much to say, though I find that the words with which he closes his section on Schelling best express what lies beyond our shroud of ignorance: “Our independence is a dependent independence.”³⁰ And yet, I wonder, should not this be the juncture where the philosopher begins to contemplate the way of the theologian and the theologian the way of the philosopher? I wonder what fruit would arise from the luminosity of existence confronting the thought (and life) of Luther or Calvin or Watson or Machen or Suarez or Balthasar or Ratzinger. I am convinced all the more of the need for precisely this dialogue after reading Prof. Walsh’s book, for true philosophy and true theology seemingly traverse similar ways—and yet not all seeming is truthful. It is precisely the contemplation of the similarity in difference (différance), which potentially offers a measure of illumination as we contemplate where dependence begins and independence ends.

Leaving behind the contemplation of where dependence begins and independence ends, we are reminded that beyond all contemplation we confront the existential choice between good and evil. Prof. Walsh understands the importance—indeed the centrality of this choice. It resides at the heart of what it means to be human and the decision is far from equivocal. As Prof. Walsh notes in the section on Schelling: “It is in relation to the confrontation of good and evil in the heart of man that the deepest mystery is revealed.”³¹ The mystery entails the discovery that freedom is not merely (if at all) the capacity to merely choose, but to choose the good. Evil is the “turn away from goodness as such. Then alone is the higher ideal of spirit, the ideal of love, called forth in response to the need that has been posed. Prior to that, not only would love not be noticed, but it would not be ‘revealed’ in the sense of apprehended within the spiritual movement.”³²

Further, “The whole process moves toward a great crisis in which the unreality of evil is confronted by the true reality of love.”³³ The similarity to the climax of the theological argument in Romans is striking—the law arouses sin and illuminates the need for love.³⁴ In the words of Prof. Walsh: “We are not just free to take up the side of the good; rather, we find ourselves compelled to follow its movement as a reality.”³⁵ In the words of Schelling, cited thereafter: “By the very meaning of the word, religiosity allows no choice between alternatives, no aequilibrium arbitrarii (the bane of all morality) but only the highest commitment to the right, without any choice (392).”³⁶ We must choose; this is life.

Prof. Walsh is at great pains to illuminate the point that philosophy and theology are in their truest, deepest formulations existential —I have come to give you life abundantly. Life in accordance with freedom drawn and drawing itself to the good and in the process discovering the Good is salvation itself.³⁷ We seemingly find ourselves again in the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, in the house of the dead confronted with the choice every soul that lives for a day must make. Indeed have we ever left the existential reality that constitutes the tenth book? Has then, as others have already intimated, the modern turn to existential philosophy simply reminded us of what always was, and is, and will always be?

What is more —and far more problematic— have not the thinkers recounted either become fathers of systems, declared so by their followers; or hijacked by one of Kierkegaard’s system builders;³⁸ or has a particular thinker himself so disdained systems that he has become the father of the children of chaos wandering forlorn in the ruins of modernity, seen as a postmodern prophet without vision? In other words, have those souls illuminated by Prof. Walsh shown man the path unto life any more than Christ and his apostles?

Or are we to face the truth that no matter how clearly the proclamation, no matter how profound the insight, no matter how involved and careful the argument (or how esoteric and brief the aphorism), the illumination of the way unto life will only ever guide those who have been given eyes to see? And if given eyes, how can they ever communicate to the blind? Either they will be cynically mocked and laughed at —like Zarathustra by the citizens of the Colorful Cow who desire the spectacle of the tightrope walker falling to his demis— or they will be murdered, as was Socrates, by those who are captivated by the flickering images of the cave, who see gods in shadows. Or, as in the case of Christ, they will be both mocked and murdered.

What does this mean for the proclamation to “come and reason together,” not merely in an age distrustful of reason but even in ages when reason is upheld as the standard? If, as Voegelin painfully understood, disorder ever knocketh on the door of order, and if, as Prof. Walsh argues, the best philosophy is one that proclaims existence —which is to say it proclaims little and lives more in accordance with its own discovery and revelation— then are we not better off writing less and living more, mindful that the best sermon is a life lived and not a life proclaimed? In the section on Schelling, Prof. Walsh notes, “We must be prepared to enter into the struggle between good and evil if we are to understand them and, in particular, how they are resolved in God.”³⁹

In Schelling’s struggle with the “problem of evil,” Walsh notes the “speculative solution is no longer pursued as an end in itself but solely as an integral moment of the existential response.”⁴⁰ And yet, a bit further on, “How will evil be defeated and why has defeat not so far occurred? Schelling’s answer is that there is no answer except for the recognition that ‘God is a life, not a mere being’ (403).”⁴¹ Are we any further along the path of illumination provided by such orthodoxy as expressed by Paul in Romans  Ch 9?

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? ⁴²

Arguably the modern philosophical revolution partakes of true revolution (And I think this is an important sense of the word Prof. Walsh would have the reader understand). Arguably the luminosity of existence has always been there . . . for him who has eyes to see. Seeing what Prof. Walsh has illuminated, the question remains of choosing, and I believe that in and through all, we can do so a bit more intelligently having wandered with Prof. Walsh.        

Notes

1. Yvacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life, ed. S. Konovalov, trans. Norman Cameron (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), 112. Nietzsche in Leipzig to Franziska Nietzsche in Naumburg, 31 January 1866. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Briefe, September 1864 – April 1869, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 8 vols., vol. 2, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 493, p. 109.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols., vol. 4, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), “Preface,” 6, p. 22.

3. Ibid. Zarathustra does not end up burying him. He places him in the hollow of a tree and goes on in search of living companions. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Preface,” 8-9, p. 25. He follows the wisdom of the Crucified: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:60. Nietzsche-Zarathustra searches for his work—“My work!” Even his disciples and children will prove to be only means to this end.

4. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Preface,” 9, p. 25.

5. Ibid., “Of the Giving Virtue,” I.22.3, p. 102.

6. David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 449ff.

7. Ibid., 452.

8. Ibid., 86.

9. Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” 190; Biblical passages are from John 17:3. Cf. Ibid., 79.It is interesting to remember that in The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason, Prof. Walsh, drawing on the work of Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, reasserts the need for canons and dogmas to be understood not so much as “controlling devises by which institutions consolidate their power” but their far more significant “role in preventing the substance of transcendent experience from draining away in a profusion of different directions. . . . Dogmas arise out of the devotional life of the Christian community, but they also play a role in preserving that life against confusion and distortion.” The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999) 50-51 and fn. 12, p. 66.

10. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen quoted in Sandoz, Voegelinian Revolution, 16.

11. Dorothy Sayers, “Creed or Chaos,” in Creed or Chaos (Manchester, OH: Sophia Institute Press, 1974), 35.

12. Ibid.

13. Dorothy Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged is the Official Creed of Christendom,” in Creed or Chaos (Manchester, OH: Sophia Institute Press, 1974), 3.

14. Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 199.

15. C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in Undeceptions, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 41; published in America under the title, God in the Dock.

16. Ibid., 41.

17. Ibid., 42; cf. also his essay, “Religion Without Dogma?” in the same work, 99-114.

18. Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” 176.

19. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, footnote 20, 110.

20. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 3, Anamnesis, ed. Dante Germino, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 411.

21. Ibid.

22. Zarathustra: “I am a rail by the river—grab me, who can grab me—your crutch, however, I am not.” Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Of The Pale Criminal,” I.6, p. 47. Cf. Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Klaus Stichweh, 9th ed. (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), 211.

23. I am reminded of the story of this character in John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which is to Come (Edinburgh, England: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1977).

24. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, 465.

25. Eccl. 12:11-12 (here and throughout all Biblical passages are from the English Standard Version, ESV).

26. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, 138.

27. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin exclaims, “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” To which the demonic Rogozhin replies, “Lose it he does.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 218. The painting in question is Christ’s Body in the Tomb (1521) by Hans Holbein the Younger, which enchanted and horrified Dostoevsky when he saw it in the Basel museum in 1867. Dostoevsky is said to have uttered the very words he has Myshkin pronounce. A short while after this encounter with Rogozhin, Myshkin observes to himself, “He [Rogozhin] say he ‘likes looking at that painting’; he doesn’t like it, it means he feels a need. Rogozhin is not only a passionate soul; he’s a fighter after all: he wants to recover his lost faith by force. He needs it now to the point of torment . . .Yes! To believe in something! To believe in somebody!” Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 230-31. Here is a poignant articulation of the struggle of existence otherwise not readily glimpsed. The reader has been prepared to glimpse that which cannot be grasped by following the Idiot in his wanderings through St. Petersburg.

28. As Oakeshott argues:

“We are apt to think of a civilization as something solid and external, but at bottom it is a collective dream. . . . The gift of the greatest literature—of poetry—is a gift of imagination. . . . We become aware that the myth (which is the substance of the dream) has acquired a new quality. . . . [In] the myth which Hobbes inherited . . . sin was Pride, the perverse exaltation of the creature, by which man became a god to himself. . . . Divine grace set a limit to human self-destruction, and promised a restoration of the shattered order, an ultimate salvation. This . . . is the myth that gave coherence to the dream. . . . To those brought up in the older myth, this [Leviathan] will appear an unduly disenchanted interpretation of the mystery of human life. But there can be no mistaking its character. It is myth, not science. . . . If we look closely at Leviathan, we may find in it the emphasis, perhaps the overemphasis, of one passage in the inherited myth, rather than the private dream of an eccentric or the malicious invention of an outcast. . . . It recalls man to his littleness, his imperfection, his mortality, while at the same time recognizing his importance to himself.”

Michael Oakeshott, “Leviathan: a Myth,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1975), 159-163.

29. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, 381-82.

30. Ibid., 173.

31. Ibid., 147.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 148.

34. See Rom. 7 and 8.

35. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, 149.

36. Ibid.

37. Cf. John 10:7 and John 17:1.

38. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 19, Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 43-44.

39. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, 151.

40. Ibid., 150.

41. Ibid., 153.

42. Rom. 9:14-24.

An excerpt of the book is here and other reviews of book are as follows: reviews of book are as follows: James V. Schall, Brendan Purcell, Thomas Heilke, Glenn Hughes, and Henrik Syse.

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