Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue 1
Introduction 19
Part 1 Gratitude
1 The Good of Gratitude: Dependence, Acceptance and Being at Home in the World 49
2 A World of Rights: The Expulsion of Love and Gratitude from Public Life 68
3 "Endless Gratitude So Burdensome" Christian Theology and Western Civilization 88
Part 2 Pride
4 Greatness of Soul: Aristotle's Philosophy of Pride 115
5 Givers and Takers: The Good of Self Sufficiency 130
6 The Eternal and Divine: What Everything Desires 142
7 The Best Life of All: Politics and Contemplation 160
8 Friendship: Gratitude and Human Fulfillment 179
9 The First Cosmopolitan: Plato's Discovery of an Invisible Self 193
10 Preparatio Evangelica: Stoicism on the Way to Christian Thought 208
Part 3 Salvation
11 Creation: Making, Begetting and Creating 229
12 Will: Human Freedom and the Problem of Evil 240
13 Grace: Divine Omnipotence and the Augustinian Dilemma 256
14 "Not a Sparrow Falls": The Abolition of the Distinction between Form and Matter 272
15 The Contingency of the World: That Whose Essence Is to Exist 293
16 The Pagan Temptation: Aquinas and the Aristotelian Revival 309
17 God Unchained: Ockham's Defense of Divine Freedom 336
18 Theology of the Cross: The Lutheran Reformation 363
19 The Hatred of Man: Augustine Redux 378
20 The Absolute Spontaneity of Freedom: Kant's Christian Metaphysics 394
21 Our Better Selves: The Morality of Autonomy 417
22 God Becomes a Postulate: Reason, Freedom and Kant's Defense of Divine Grace 434
23 Reaction: Joseph de Maistre's Revolt against Pride 469
24 "Fantastic and Satanic": The Illiberal Theology of Donoso Cortes and Carl Schmitt 488
25 The Oblivion of Being: Martin Heidegger's Reconstruction of Western Philosophy 513
26 The Disenchantment of the World: Max Weber and the Problem of Nihilism 549
Part 4 Joy
27 The Worm in the Blood: Spinoza's Conception of Science 589
28 The God of Sufficient Reason: Physics after Spinoza 620
29 "Endless Forms Most Beautiful": Darwin's Divine Biology 661
30 The Navel of the Dream: Freud and the Science of the Mind 702
31 "Man Is a God to Man": The Modern Research Ideal 755
32 The World as an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Art, Truth and Morality in Nietzsche's Philosophy 779
33 The Spider in the Moonlight: Nietzsche's Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art 811
34 "The Gift of Transmigration": The Theology of the Modern Novel 861
35 Genius and Sublimity: Painting since the Renaissance 926
36 Theological, Not Political: John Rawls' Christian Defense of Liberal Democracy 993
37 Democratic Vistas: Walt Whitman and the Divinity of Diversity 1024
Epilogue: "Downward to Darkness, on Extended Wings" 1067
Notes 1077
Index 1131