With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today by Thomas A. Carlson

Abstract

Reviewed by: With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today by Thomas A. Carlson Douglas E. Christie, PhD (bio) With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today. By Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 256 pp. $30.00 pbk. In Book IV of the Confessions, Augustine describes an experience of loss that undid him completely: a dear childhood friend fell gravely ill, lay unconscious and close to death for a long time, then unexpectedly recovered. But not long afterwards the fever returned, and he died. Augustine says: "Grief darkened my heart. Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My hometown became a torture to me; my father's house a strange world of unhappiness; all that I had shared with him was without him transformed into a cruel torment. . . I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity." The power of death; the debilitating force of grief; and the question of whether love for someone destined to die can be trusted. Whether it will endure. The "lesson" of Book IV, situated within Augustine's sustained reflection on the nature of love and our capacity to know love, is that such love cannot be trusted and will not last: "the reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die. . . for wherever the human soul turns itself other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows." Everything less than God will, because of its impermanence and mutability, ultimately disappoint us. Only God is unchanging; only God, or that which is experienced in and through God, is ultimately worthy of our love. This Augustinian insight and its long afterlife figure centrally in Thomas A. Carlson's With the World at Heart, both as a question and as a foil. Like many readers of the Confessions before him, Carlson takes seriously Augustine's profound struggle with death and his effort to identify a love (and a way of loving) that will not ultimately fail us. But he also questions whether Augustine's radically transcendent understanding of love, and his insistence on the [End Page 338] circumscribed, limited, and ultimately unsatisfying character of love constrained by time and mortality can still serve us in the present moment. He examines whether the idea of "loving a person sure to die as if he would never die" is as illusory and ill-conceived as Augustine ultimately makes it out to be. And he considers whether there is a way of understanding love, including love bound to time and mortality, that can help us rethink our own deepest commitments in a secular age. This is an ambitious and even audacious book that aims to extend and deepen the arguments the author has pursued in two earlier books, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999), and The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (2008), both of which draw upon pre-modern theological-mystical traditions and post-modern philosophy to reimagine the meaning of transcendence in the present moment. In the present work, Carlson examines the question of love—its very possibility, its extent, its durability—in light of ancient spiritual texts (principally Augustine's Confessions) and a formidable array of modern and postmodern writers. Beginning with a searching reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Carlson proceeds to investigate (often in dialogue with Augustine) the meaning and possibility of love—a transcendent reality nested within and shaped by the ordinary, concrete, mutable character of mortal existence—in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Robert Pogue Harrison, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Charles Taylor's The Secular Age also casts a long shadow over this work, especially given Carlson's intense interest in reimagining the secular. He acknowledges the importance of Taylor's work but resists Taylor's narrower and more pessimistic reading of the secular. Instead, he argues for a more generous and open understanding of how the ostensibly post-religious or non-religious currents...