Faithful to a Special Vocation: The Case of Rémi Brague

I am intrigued by Catholics living out their vocations. When I come across someone who is, I pay attention. I do so to see God at work and to glean lessons and encouragement for myself. The last means that I have a special interest in Catholic scholars and thinkers. Someone of my experience who has been remarkably faithful to his intellectual vocation is the French Catholic scholar and philosopher, Rémi Brague (b. 1947). And a very special vocation it is. Over time he discovered that he was called to recall Europeans to themselves and to help save Europe from self-destruction. In what follows, I will recount a few revealing instances of his fidelity, then sketch the path and strategy he has pursued in fulfilling his vocation. I will end with a brief reflection on the gap between fidelity and worldly success.

Two Determinative Moments

Brague began his academic career as a scholar of ancient philosophy. His first three books were on classical philosophical texts and topics: Plato’s dialogue, the Meno; time in Plato and Aristotle; and the concept of the world (the kosmos) in Aristotle’s philosophy. But classical philosophy did not end in the ancient period; it engaged and was engaged in various ways by the three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In order to study closely this multifaceted encounter, Brague took it upon himself to learn Hebrew and Arabic. Knowing the classical languages and the modern languages of scholarship was not enough.

In being faithful and learning the semitic languages, he was amply rewarded: he acquired direct access to seminal texts and authors (Maimonides, Alfarabi, Averroes) and to scholarship in those languages, and he came even closer to the heart of Europe, understood as a dialogue between philosophical reason and revealed religion, and a trilogue among the religions and their philosophically adept adherents. In due time, he also found that he could make good use of his old and new learning for an even grander public purpose. This moment brought his vocation into full focus.

What is Europe?

It was 1989-91: with the collapse of Soviet Communism, an old order had crumbled and a new one was aborning. Certain basic questions occupied publics, politicians and academics alike. What was democracy? What was the status of the nation-state in a Europe where the former Warsaw Pact countries relished their new independence, while Western democracies were busy “pooling sovereignties” and constructing a new European Community? The last raised a third set of questions: What indeed was Europe? On what bases should a newly undivided Europe come together? What was Europe’s core identity?

Along with a number of Catholic thinkers (including then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger), Brague entered the public lists. In 1992 he published that rarity, a scholarly-popularly accessible book, Europe, la voie romaine, “Europe, the Roman way”. (In English: Eccentric Culture). In it, he set about defining Europe as a culture. Here was the contribution that he could make to scholarship and to the public life of Europe: a philosophical anamnesis that would recall Europe to Europeans, so that they could deliberate about the future en connaissance de cause.

Two strata and what he called two forms of “eccentricity” – openness to and appropriation of extraneous models of human excellence – formed the basis of European culture. The first stratum was imperial Rome, the second, the barbarian tribes that succeeded it. After conquering Greece and Judea, imperial Rome had eventually come to adopt them as models. Horace famously memorialized the first when he wrote that “captive Greece led captive captor Rome,” while Acts 1, 8 intimated the providential itinerary of Sts. Peter and Paul and the eventual “conquest” of pagan Rome by Christianity. Centuries later, the pater Europae, Charlemagne, the Frankish chieftain become Holy Roman Emperor, likewise opened himself and his kingdom to classical learning and the Christian faith. Europe thus formed itself as a double debtor and a distinctive combination of rule and discipleship.

The book also contained cautionary notes, as Brague detected worrisome developments on the contemporary scene. He coined a striking phrase, “cultural Marcionism,” to designate an ensemble of efforts to sever the continuity of European culture and history in modern times. Marcion, the second-century heretic who denied the intrinsic relationship between the two testaments of the Bible, had modern-day analogues who worked to rend the fabric of European culture in the name of the wholly emancipated modern individual.

In a postscript to a 1998 reedition of the book, he updated his depiction of the contemporary scene, while also providing a statement of the fears and concerns about cultural decline that had originally motivated his study. Alas, the past six years had provided more evidence that contemporary Europe – especially many of its cultural and political leaders – continued to repudiate their European patrimony. New efforts would have to be made to convince his contemporaries of the wrong-headedness of the current course.

On the God of Christians

In 2008 he went to the heart of things and published a medium sized book On the God of Christians (and on one or two others). (In English translation from St. Augustine Press in 2013). In an analytically rigorous but also quite affecting way, he reminded his readers of the uniqueness of the Christian conception of God, the heart of the cult that had formed European culture. To make the distinctiveness even more apparent, he contrasted it with Islam’s understanding of the One God. The Christian conception of divine Unity was, and indeed had to be, quite different from Islam’s, because it coexisted with two other affirmations of the divine: Trinity and Incarnation, both vehemently denied by Islam. In Christianity, divine Unity coexisted with infinite fecundity and condescension. Islam, on the other hand, emphasized divine Transcendence, Power and Will. The purported “One God” of the two religions was more a myth or a wish than a sustainable proposition. Here too, great learning was put at the service of that paradox, countercultural cultural retrieval.

Three Books in a Row

Certain churchmen took note of Brague’s efforts. In 2012, he was awarded the Ratzinger Prize for signal contributions to Catholic intellectual life. Well deserved, it was encouragement to continue the work with redoubled energy. 2013 saw him publish On the Legitimacy of the Human (St. Augustine Press, 2017) and 2014, Moderately Modern (St. Augustine Press, 2018), both books being what he called “satellites” of a major work that appeared the next year, The Kingdom of Man: On the Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). As satellites, they developed themes from the major work and addressed particular contemporary issues raised by it, such as the demographic crisis and general cultural malaise of Europe. On the thought that present maladies indicated an earlier wrong turn, he prescribed strong countercultural medicine to these material and spiritual maladies. In Moderately Modern, it was a certain “return” to core elements of the Middle Ages, while in The Legitimacy of the Human he went farther and made an argument and plea – a plaidoyer – for his fellow Europeans to return to the great Source of life and creativity, the creator God of Genesis 1.

To make the proposal intelligible and attractive, he provided a remarkable exegesis of that founding chapter. In it, he argued two points: 1) that the presentation of God-and-world in it in no way challenged contemporary scientific discoveries or speculation. It spoke to different purposes and in a different idiom. Similarly, he argued 2) that the teaching of the text about human being, rather than being antithetical to human freedom and creativity, as many contemporaries believed, on the contrary affirmed and empowered them. Explicitly said to resemble his Source and Model, Elohim’s human “image and likeness” was created to be free, mysterious, and co-creative; in short, a person. In this rather personal exegesis, concerns of modern readers about the consonance of a number of their chief “values” and Biblical faith were directly addressed and allayed.

The Kingdom of Man itself was the completion of a major trilogy on the core periods and ideas of Western civilization begun in 1999 with The Wisdom of the World (University of Chicago Press) and followed in 2005 by The Law of God (University of Chicago Press). The Kingdom of Man laid out the antecedents, conceptualization, and historical itinerary of what he called “the modern project.” Whereas the two previous historical periods had offered man a superior Instance (the cosmos, the Creator) after which to model himself as microcosm or imago Dei, in radical modernity Man was elevated above these instances and assigned the project of self-creation. What Henri de Lubac had earlier called “atheistic humanism,” Brague styled “exclusive humanism,” because it excluded any Instance above the human.

Thus, one book of enormous erudition recovered the root cause, while the two smaller “satellites” laid out its works and the dire straits into which it had led its adherents. Holding a mirror up to Cause-and-effects, Brague invited his readers to revisit the decisive juncture in European history of the modern project, as well as to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the merits and relevance of the premodern Instances and inheritances. Then, to undertake en pleine connaissance de cause a course correction and to open a new chapter in the Western and European adventure. He acknowledged that this would require synthesizing periods in ways that the premodern could not envisage and the modern had spurned.

This accordingly called for the exercise of a virtue foundational to European humanity, what Gabriel Marcel had paradoxically styled “creative fidelity.” But the promise held out was that in this way – and only in this way – European history and European humanity could be made whole – sane and healthy – after the rupture of the modern project.

A Complex Rhetoric

Having sketched in broad outlines Brague’s “European apologetics,” I would like to highlight a few of its characteristic features. They both illustrate and reenforce his general teaching about Europe. One is Brague’s attention to language. In speaking, as both Aristotle and Genesis affirm, man fulfills his nature and engages in one of his most distinctive works, dialogue with himself, his fellows, and his God. Western humanity reveals its mind and bares its soul in its distinctive discourse.

There is hardly any important Western philosophical, theological, or political term that has not received Brague’s expert discussion. Etymologies in particular are privileged passages to founding experiences and conceptualizations, then to complex cultural developments (including departures and repudiations). Almost every Braguean treatment of a subject begins with its etymology, thus enlarging the horizon of the discussion and connecting the reader to a cultural whole in its inner articulations.

Language is more than etymologies, of course, and Brague can “sing both high and low” (Shakespeare) when it comes to language. I’ve not encountered a scholar who loves puns and wordplay as much as he does. In this way too, he expresses characteristics of Western culture and the human types it formed: the free but disciplined play of the intellect and the tongue, the delight in language in all its possibilities, and an acknowledgement of the comic dimensions of life and thought.

“Modern Man”

But all this is wasted if not effectively delivered to its intended audience. Gaudium et spes spoke of a figure called “modern man.” Brague does too, but with more specificity in the concept. For Brague, he is someone who has been taught, accepted, and internalized the founding myths of Modernity, myths of previous oppression and superstition, myths of emancipation and empowerment. A chasm has been erected between the premodern and the Modern by the latter’s original proponents and widened by their epigones. It is to this complex mentality that he addresses his learned – and sometimes pointed – arguments.

The Biblical God and his medieval followers are prime objects of modern distrust and suspicion. As we saw above, Brague provides Biblical exegesis intended to dispel misconceptions and show remarkable consonances. The same is true with the Middle Ages. The learned Brague has little trouble showing his readership something that they would never think to consider: that many key elements of what they hold dear come to them from the Middle Ages! For example, “the conditions of possibility for secularization were put in place and brought together during the medieval period.” Likewise democracy itself: “Therefore, our democratic ideals of a rule of law or of a moral conscience supposed to function as the final authority in the spirit of each human being, be he citizen, judge, or something else, these ideals have a theological origin.” Even “our concept of a profane culture which distinguishes itself from religion actually had a religious origin.” (All these passages come from Moderately Modern.) With these lessons, the vaunted self-sufficiency of Modernity is taken down several notches. Modern man, it turns out, is a debtor to medieval man; some gratitude is in order.

The Parasite

These are the enticing moves that Brague makes, dispelling misconceptions, pointing out unknown filiations, and unexpected rapprochements. However, there are other, more pointed, arrows in his rhetorical quiver. Following G. K. Chesterton and Charles Péguy, Brague calls modern man a “parasite,” with all that that entails for the host and the parasite itself. More than just a jab or a slur, he explains the appropriateness of the image. To do so takes one into the inner sanctum of Modernity itself, the image of History it created to extol modern man above his predecessors.

Modern man is all about Progress with a big “P.” The past – outdated, superseded, passé – cannot be allowed flow into the present, but must remain where it was, a fixed point from which to measure Progress understood as “not-that” and “farther-and-farther-from-that.” This leads to problems. Brague focuses on two. Without the premodern models of humanity, what will guide Progressive humanity? Man does not live by denial alone. If he does, he is dependent on what he denies, which is not the emancipation promised or intended. But where can new models come from? Modern history has shown two things: soi-disant “nonconformists” quickly form (and are formed) into herds, and grandiose projects of creating a New Man lead to terror, tyranny, and desolation. Self-creation, it turns out, is an oxymoron and a prescription for inhuman monsters of all sorts.

Brague also looks around and surveys the contemporary scene insofar as it has been created by this view. We have already mentioned the two dimensions that arrest his attention: demographics and culture, understood as the cultivation of the human in education, the arts, religion. The demographic plight of Europe is well known, indicating a widespread refusal or inability to answer the basic questions, why continue the human adventure? Is being human good? A survey of modern philosophy (in The Legitimacy of the Human) indicates its inability to answer the questions in the affirmative, which leaves open a return to the God of Genesis 1, who magisterially affirmed the goodness of existence.

As for education, Professor Brague has no difficulty showing the inadequacies of mere technical education, or of any education that claims to impart mere “values,” democratic or other. No, education is formation and absent a definite human form, it is malformation and deformation. Here too, the older models – classical, Christian, medieval, even national – show their relevance to contemporary needs.

Absent these life-giving returns, however, modern man will continue to eat away at cultural capital he did not create, with predictable mortiferous consequences.

In laying out the alternative in this way, Brague in effect says to his fellow Europeans: “Behold, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction” (Deut. 30, 15). Besides being true, the alternative wonderfully concentrates the mind.

A Final Reflection

In the darkness of great obstacles and odds, Mother Theresa reminded us that “God does not require that we be successful, only that we be faithful.” Brague certainly is faithful. But the times are dark and Europe may fall to the unholy alliance of secular elites and the umma (https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/08/19/western-civilization-under-attack-part-one/). However, there is another saying, this one by St. Paul, that may better capture the reality of those like Brague who fight for Europe. “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase (1 Corin. 3, 6). We never work (or fight) alone. Paul had Apollos, Brague had Benedict XVI (and many other Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers). Nor is it just us humans involved in the work. If we are doing the Lord’s work in recalling His prodigal European son, the Lord no doubt will bless those labors, as He sees fit in his infinite goodness and mercy.

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