ALL THINGS SHINING

Two distinguished professors seek mankind’s salvation in the ancient Greek gods.

At first glance, this book would seem to be a rebuttal of the spate of arguments for atheism, and a ringing defense of polytheism, or an academic version of a self-help book, showing how to live a richer, more meaningful life by returning to precepts that preceded individual autonomy. In fact, Dreyfus (Philosophy/Univ. of California, Berkeley; On the Internet, 2001, etc.) and Kelly (Philosophy/Harvard Univ.) audaciously promise “nothing less than a philosophical and literary history of the West” in little more than 200 pages, aimed at the “nonspecialist audience” and “general reader.” The authors successfully leapfrog through literary-philosophical history to suggest how we can reclaim redemptive qualities sacrificed to modernity. “When we develop in ourselves the ability for this kind of wonder and gratitude then we become a standing invitation to the gods,” they write, asserting that one need not believe in those gods to recognize that one’s feelings and fate are often shaped by forces outside the self and that there are limits to individual freedom and responsibility. In response to a metaphysical debate framed by Pulp Fiction, the authors write that “[t]he question that really matters…is not whether God was the causal agent but whether gratitude was an appropriate response.” In other examples, Dreyfus and Kelly explore meaning (or the nihilism of meaninglessness) in the suicide of David Foster Wallace, the throwing problems of former baseball star Chuck Knoblauch and the rejection by Martin Luther of Aristotle. The book’s wide scope is occasionally exasperating in its concision—“But before we move on to Descartes and Kant we will have to make a detour by way of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, who draw on Aristotle rather than Plato to make Christianity intelligible in Greek terms”—but the end result, detours and all, suggests a road map to the divine.