The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has an online symposium on the always interesting and provocative Rémi Brague and his book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea . From the first installment :
The Law of God is Brague’s second magisterial work of intellectual history. The first, The Wisdom of the World (2003), investigated the history of cosmology (or more precisely, to use Brague’s neologism, cosmonomy) in the West. The two books form the prongs of a single endeavor, which is no less than “making the project underlying modernity more visible.” The modern project is above all the attempt to realize human autonomy ever more completely, which requires breaking the two principal bonds of heteronomy at the heart of the various forms of the medieval synthesis: the divine law and the normative indications of man’s place in the cosmos. With an uncommon degree of common sense, Brague observes that “if we are to understand modern attacks on divine law (and, by that same token, the essence of the modern project), we need to have a clear grasp of the medieval definition of divine law.” By examining the diverse streams flowing into the medieval inheritance (classical, Biblical, and ancient Near Eastern more broadly), Brague clarifies the principal decisions and tensions within these various syntheses (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) so as to bring into higher relief both what the modern project rejects and “what is dubious in the modern project itself.”
