The final part of his trilogy about the ethical knowledge of human nature, Rémi Brague's The Kingdom of Man examines the modern project of humans liberating themselves from both nature and God. In the first book of his trilogy, The Wisdom of the World (2003), Brague inspected the cosmological basis that had structured human existence; and, in his second work, The Law of God (2007), he explored how the divine revealed itself in history and inscribed itself in people's consciences. In The Kingdom of Man, Brague shows how the modern person has made the human rather than nature the measure of all things and how authority has become self-anointed rather than determined by the divine. Rejecting both nature and God as normative guides, the modern person now self-creates and self-wills ethical knowledge.
Brague believes this project will ultimately fail because what humans need are not projects but tasks. A task is the acceptance of a purpose from an origin over which one has no control but can only be discovered. It requires to ask oneself whether one is capable of this trust and is willing to make the sacrifices to achieve it. Unlike a project, a task demands that the person is alone responsible for what needs to be accomplished: it cannot be outsourced to guarantee its success. Prior to modernity, humans were defined by tasks, either from nature or the divine, whereas today they decide what their projects will be—what will be created and pursued as decided only by themselves, without reliance on a higher or deeper authority.
The Groundwork for the Modern Project
In the first section of the book, entitled “Preparation,” Brague traces how the idea of modernity, the idea that human beings are autonomous and acknowledge no higher authority, existed at the very beginning of recorded history. For example, in ancient Greece and China, human beings were singular and superior among creatures because of their capacity of reason. This idea was also supported in a way by Jews, Christians, and Muslims who assigned a dignity to humans in this life and a perfected one hereafter because only humans were capable of faith in the divine. Humans were the “best of all living creatures” and therefore had a right to dominate nature. But this domination was not exploitative since humans were not the owners of creation. Instead, the task of domination was itself subject to the condition of obedience to the Creator—it makes them stewards rather than masters of the world.
With the rise of monotheist religion, humans moved from a cosmocentric perspective rooted in nature to an anthropocentric one where God provided the ethical tasks to humankind. For Brague, the divine intervention in history culminated in Christ's Incarnation, caused by God's grace and not human action. Thus, a space was created that was reserved only for humans and made obedience to God possible. This solution differed from messianism where humans could achieve an eschatological victory in human history. Although it was suppressed in the medieval world, the idea of messianism would continue to exist and inspire subsequent thinkers in the modern era.
Another idea that later would be adopted by modern thinkers was “the working on oneself.” With a space reserved for humans, one could engage in exercises of self-mastery that demonstrated a mastery over the body as proof of mastery over the soul (e.g., St. Gregory of Nyssa, 335-94). However, this type of mastery was different from modernity's project of self-formation because the task came from divine. But, like messianism, the idea of self-mastery would later be incorporated into the modern project of liberation from both nature and God.
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