Chapters in this book

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