Eminent English historian of ideas Johnson (The Birth of the Modern, 1991, etc.) draws on his years of research and his classic Roman Catholicism to offer a worldview that is as personal as it is intellectually provocative. An ability to handle colossal themes with well-informed and penetrating analysis has long been a hallmark of Johnson's writing. Here he develops some of the key ideas of his Modern Times (e.g., that Marxism and Nazism led to unprecedented human misery through their moral relativism) in a synthesis that takes up the perennial questions of conscience, the existence of God in the face of a frequently evil world, and the challenge of death. Johnson has much to say about the failure of post-Enlightenment substitutes for religion, such as rationalism and social utopianism. In a chapter on the value of artists he makes a spirited defense of spending vast sums of money to build cathedrals, which he sees as both pleasing to God and vital expressions of the human spirit. There are chapters on environmental issues, inclusive language (which he uses), and the relations between Catholics and Jews. He concludes with open-ended explorations of the traditional Four Last Things of Catholic theology: death, judgment, hell (with the emphasis on purgatory), and heaven. An appendix contains a set of his private prayers. Johnson writes superb English and he mingles his arguments with telling and often amusing anecdotes. Although it is tempting to label Johnson a conservative—he is a friend of Margaret Thatcher's and a staunch admirer of Pope John Paul II—his forthright views constantly surprise and his positions are often reminiscent of his 18th-century namesake and hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Nuanced and always informative, Johnson is guaranteed to stimulate even when he does not convince.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017344-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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