JASA December 1982
ROOTS OF WESTERN CULTURE: PAGAN, SECULAR, AND CHRISTIAN OPTIONS, by Herman Dooyeweerd, trans. by John Kraay, ed. by Mark Vander Vennen and Bernard ZyIstra, Wedge Publishing Foundation, Toronto, 1979, xii + 288 pp., $12.95.
Anyone who has encountered the writings of Herman Dooyeweerd knows how impenetrably dense they can be. His monumental A New Critique of Theoretical Thought is painfully abstruse and his North America lectures, In the Twilight of Western Thought, though less weighty, still confront the reader with a net of obscure neologisms. One suspects there are golden insights to be had but is often pressed by time to forego the effort.
Then there is this volume. Here is Dooyeweerd at his most accessible to North American readers. The book consists of fifty-eight articles originally published in the weekly Nieuw Nederland between the years 1945 and 1948. They were intended as a call to the post-war nonacademic Dutch community to begin dialogue on the task of reordering the whole of social life according to biblical directives. A tall order, but Dooyeweerd entered the exchange with a passionate commitment to Christ and cogent intellect.
After an introductory essay calling the public to dialogue, Dooyeweerd launches into what might be called a philosophy of Western civilization from the early Greeks to the twentieth century. It is Dooyeweerd’s conviction that Western culture has been oriented by four basic "ground motives": the Greek form-matter, the Medieval naturegrace, the humanistic nature-freedom, and the biblical creation-fall-redemption. These ground motives have been, in his words, "the deepest driving forces behind the entire cultural and spiritual development of the West" (p. 9). While the biblical ground motive offers an ultimate harmony in the eschaton, the others will necessarily generate "polar tensions." The bulk of the book is thus taken up with illustrations of these tensions in Western history.
Throughout Dooyeweerd develops the social-political and medieval political models and modern brands of absolutism and democracy. His final discussion exposes the nagging dilemmas of sociology’s development as an academic discipline with sidelight observances on the social sciences in general.
One would think the urgent and provincial intent of these essays would constrict their broader utility. They are, however, suprisingly wide in scope and fluid in application. Dooyeweerd’s views are extremely important, not only for discerning the relation between theoretical thought and its social matrix, but for probing the meaning of such abstract realities as "the state," and related matters.
Dooyeweerd claims to be presenting a consistently "biblical" way of looking at such things. All readers will want to pause and reflect at the threshold of such claim: In what way does he mean this to be a "biblical" view? In a textual fashion or by way of principles? Dooyeweerd seems to answer sometimes with the first, other times with the second. Such duplicity, though a barrier to ongoing dialogue, only underscores the complexity and challenge of his task. It is a persistent question to which his followers must still work out a satisfactory answer.
Notwithstanding, this is a valuable book, amply endowed with imaginative insight and charged with spiritual fervor. For anyone with an interest in history, sociology, politics, or philosophy this volume will contribute liberally to your curiosity.
Reviewed by Peter W. Spellman, History Department, Boston College (graduate fellow), Salem, Massachusetts 01970
