Book Review The Impulse Of Po Essay

Book Review: The Impulse Of Po Essay, Research Paper

This is the best new book I have read this year. Kelley is by no means a new author but this is a more sweeping work revealing the author’s keen grasp of the philosophy of history and particularly of Western civilization.

Kelley positions the roots of Western civilization in the Homeric and Platonic world of ancient Greece, but unlike many Christians and previous generations and today will brook no compromise with this “enlightenment paganism” as a valid expression of culture. He shrewdly observes that today’s increasing calls for a return to the medieval synthesis of Christian and classical civilization is misdirected: “Should we accept the argument of those who wish to restore the displaced ideals represented by the medieval synthesis of Christianity and Humanism. Can such salvage operations succeed. Is it possible to remake Western civilization on the same basis from which it first sprang up. If so, why should one accept that it will turn out better the second time.” Kelley’s answer is unequivocal: “There are but two options available: that which comes from God and His revealed Word, or that which arises from man’s sin-darkened imagination” (pp. 16-17).

Kelley observes Plato’s attempt to depersonalize the pagan religion of the Homeric era, replacing the gods of ancient Greece with an abstractionist rationalism whereby the entire universe would be explained by recourse to human reason: “[I]t was more than just a struggle between science and religion. Their [the Greek philosophers'] interest was to shift the locus of ordering power from the gods to the mind of man, so that the mind of man becomes the source of order and is able to govern reality according to the principles innate in the reasoning power of man alone” (p. 56, emphasis in original). For Plato and the other Greek philosophers, the creation of culture was to be exclusively the work of the intellectually gifted, the philosopher-kings especially endowed with rational faculties capable of reshaping all of society and life.

Kelley moves on to discuss “The Grand Synthesis” of the medieval world: pagan classicism and historic Christianity. Like Christopher Dawson, Alister McGrath, and other deeply informed observers of this era, Kelley is aware of the dominating influence of monasticism on it. It was not merely one religio-cultural factor among many, but in many ways was the dominating feature of medieval life. Kelley believes the origins of the monastic ideal in certain aspects of pagan Greek philosophy, and correctly suggests that “Christianity’s eventual triumph over the ancient pagan world was tragically undermined by an opposing development, the incursion into the life of Christianity of a deeply rooted pagan outlook that took hold as monasticism” (p. 83). The Platonic dualism, according to which matter, material substance, and the things of this world were considered vastly inferior to the world of eternal Forms and Ideas, heavily influenced Christian monasticism, as did the Gnostic heresy. Further, monasticism carried on that aspect of the pagan Greek philosophical tradition which divided humanity into the elite and the masses: for Plato and company, the philosopher-kings comprised the elite, while for the monastics, those who separated themselves from the “world” and devoted themselves exclusively to a pious devotion to God constituted, in fact, the Christian elite. Kelley notes, moreover, how the ancient Greek notion of man’s coming to the fullest measure of his humanity in civic or political association was perpetuated in the monastic ideal of the Christian elite communing together in the monastery (p. 87). Even St. Augustine, while recognizing many flaws of the patristic monastic order and, certainly, the pagan heresies from which it sprang, did not break decisively with this monastic ideal and thus bequeathed to the later Middle Ages, along with his sound, Biblical theology, a certain measure of monastic paganism. Kelley is surely correct, therefore, in labeling monasticism “a false Christianity” given virtually free reign until the Protestant Reformation (pp. 82-83).

In what is surely one of the most valuable features of the book, Kelley outlines the provenance of ecclesiocentrism, the notion that the institutional church should govern and dominate all of life. Like others before him, he recognizes that the idea of the church in the West was patterned largely after imperial Rome and that, therefore, its origin is not Biblical but pagan (p. 116). In addition, however, Kelley discloses that this imperial institutionalization of the church is essentially an ideology of power. The architects of patristic and medieval ecclesiocentrism were interested in employing the church as an instrument in giving meaning to life. Not so much God and the Bible, but the institutional church itself, furnished life’s meaning. God and His Word were remote and proximate, while the church was near and immediate. Kelley declares that to use the language of church-state conflict to describe the great medieval clash of religious powers is anachronistic:

The dichotomy of church and state belongs to a later period of history. It is out of place in the medieval view of things. Instead the dispute was over which side, clerical or laical, of the Ecclesia Universalis [church universal] had been granted the Divine right legally, morally, even polit