Böcker av Remi Brague

Dieses Buch entfaltet das christliche Menschenbild in seinen Umrissen. Die Frage nach dem Menschen verdient es nämlich, wieder neu gestellt zu werden, weil heute der ¿Humanismus¿ von einem zerstörerischen ¿Antihumanismus¿ bedroht ist.Warum besitzt der Mensch eine Würde und mithin Rechte? Die Antwort auf diese Frage fällt sehr unterschiedlich aus. Entsprechend unbestimmt, verschwommen und vieldeutig bleibt das Lippenbekenntnis zu Menschenwürde und Menschenrechten. Wer also ist jenes Lebewesen, das wir ¿Mensch¿ nennen? Jeder Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen ¿Definition¿ führt theoretisch und praktisch zu unmenschlichen Folgen, wie zahllose Beispiele in der Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts auf erschreckende Weise zeigen. Das christliche Menschenbild verzichtet auf eine solche Definition und zeichnet jene Kontur eines Vorbildes, auf die hin der Mensch in Christus seine vollkommene, abgeschlossene Gestalt gefunden hat.Die anthropologischen, sozialen und politischen Folgen eines so geprägten Menschenbildes werden in diesem Buch erörtert: als Plädoyer für die Achtung der Natur des Menschen, die nicht der eigenen Verfügungsgewalt noch der Beherrschung durch Dritte in die Hand gelegt ist.

On the God of the Christians tries to explain how Christians conceive of the God whom they worship. No proof for His existence is offered, but simply a description of the Christian image of God. The first step consists in doing away with some commonly held opinions that put them together with the other "monotheists," "religions of the book," and "religions of Abraham." Christians do believe in one God, but they do not conceive of its being one in the same way as other "monotheists," like the first of them, the pharaoh Akhenaton (18th century before J.C.), like some philosophers, e.g., Aristotle, or like Islam. Christians admit the authority of a Holy Book, but don't consider it as being the peak of God's revelation. For them, revelation culminates in the person, life, and doings of Jesus - including his passion and resurrection. Christians acknowledge the exemplary figure of Abraham, but the stories they tell about him they share with Jews, but not with Muslims, who see in him the first Muslim. The Trinity is not a way to loosen the exclusivity of the only God. It is the very way in which God is one, i.e., in the inner richness and fecundity of love. The God of the Christians is Father, but not male. Human males become fathers through the mediation of a female. God is so radically the Father of everything and, in a very special sense, of the eternal Son, that He is not in need of a partner. His fatherhood can in no way legitimate the superiority of the male over the female sex. The God of the Christians doesn't want us to obey Him in order to enslave us; He expects us to act freely according to what is good for us. Now, the Good is not something that He has in store and bestows on His creatures. The Good is what He is and He is the Good of His creatures. The God of the Christians is merciful, but He takes seriously man's freedom, even when man doesn't accept Him. Hence, He doesn't content Himself with forgiving fromthe outside. He has to contrive a system (technically speaking: salvation history or "economy of salvation") that will enable Man freely to accept His love.

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture. This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national tradition. The author's interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls Roman.Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it.Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. Nowhere does the author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in it notonly a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a future in (re)proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it.An international bestseller (translated from the original French edition of Europe, La Voie Romaine), this work has been or is presently being translated into thirteen languages.

As a cure for modernity's individualism, Remi Brague urges a return to medieval thinking to illustrate why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

"Imagine you suddenly find yourself in the control room of a vast technological apparatus, sometime in the future, where you are told that science has satisfied all the needs of all living humans. Furthermore, you learn, the next generation of the species will not be produced in the usual way, but instead by this machine, provided only that somebody push a little red button. The catch: you have to give a reason for pushing it. You hesitate: what do you say? Our own world is more like this scenario than we at first may be inclined to admit, not least in the fact that, mutatis mutandis, we seem to be struggling to come up with a good answer. The problem, says Raemi Brague, is fundamentally a metaphysical one. Now, mention of 'metaphysics' in decent society these days is likely to elicit a smile or an unimpressed shrug. If there is a shelf with that label on it in your typical bookstore you are as likely to find guides to crystals, chakras, or hemp care there as you are treatises by Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. And, in spite of the ongoing revival of academic interest in metaphysics, it remains a rather specialist domain, a marginal sub-discipline in departments of philosophy, be they analytical or continental in cast. But if you should take it too seriously, you'll lose your bearings in the real world, and you'll go adrift in some ethereal sea of dreams. It is, in a word, irrelevant--right?"--

Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this English translation of Le Regne de l'homme, Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future.

Through an interview and sixteen essays, this title explores key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. It focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another.

Metaphysik ist kein Phantom. Sie bewohnt kein Wolkenschloss, sondern hat ihren Platz mitten im Alltag der Menschen und ist zu einer unverzichtbaren Lebensnotwendigkeit geworden. Denn nachdem der Mensch das Projekt der Moderne in die Tat umgesetzt und sein Geschick selbst in die Hand genommen hat, kann er frei entscheiden, zu sein ¿ oder auch nicht zu sein: Die Entscheidung über Fortbestand oder Auslöschung der Menschheit liegt in seinen Händen. Damit aber stellt sich unausweichlich die Frage nach der Rechtmäßigkeit unseres Daseins. Es genügt nicht, das Leben immer angenehmer zu machen für diejenigen, die schon auf der Welt sind ¿ das zu tun stellt niemand in Abrede. Die Frage heute lautet sehr viel grundsätzlicher: Ist menschliches Leben ein so großes Gut, dass man selbst das Recht hat, andere in dieses Leben zu rufen? Wer behauptet, das Sein sei mehr wert als das Nichts, trifft eine metaphysische Entscheidung.Man braucht eine starke Metaphysik, um die Frage zu beantworten, ob es rechtmäßig ist, dass der Mensch auch zukünftig die Erde bevölkert.Der AutorDr. Rémi Brague ist Professor em. für Philosophie an der Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne und der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Seine Bücher sind in 18 Sprachen übersetzt. Der HerausgeberDr. Christoph Böhr ist ao. Professor am Institut für Philosophie der Hochschule Heiligenkreuz/Wien.