Mark Lilla, _The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West_

NOT SURE WHY Lilla's name does not come up in my reading more often than it does, because he is stone brilliant no matter what he is writing about. Having marched through my share of Foucault, Zizek, and Butler out of sheer duty given the regularity with which their names ring out in the journals, I nonetheless have to say I get more out of Lilla. Not that he is one for radical re-formulations or bouleversements of ruling paradigms or such -- but he has such a grasp of intellectual history, such a deftness in unknotting others' arguments, such a lucid prose style...

...that may be the problem right there. If Lilla wrote in Continental Opaque, he might already be a revered figure. Or it may be his politics -- he's a comet with enough velocity that he has been captured neither in the Allan Bloom/Leo Strauss orbit nor the post-Marxist orbit nor the neo-con orbit nor any other. He doesn't seem to be on anyone's team.

Reading The Stillborn God kept making me think of Edmund Wilson, perhaps not least because it's a chunky but small volume that sits nicely in the hand the way paperbacks of To the Finland Station or Patriotic Gore did, but even more because of his confident intimacy with the ideas of his subjects and his ability to elaborate his book's narrative without ever losing its main thread. And there's the writing. Did I mention the writing? Why are grace and lucidity like Lilla's so obsolete? Why oh why did Adorno ever have to become the model for modern intellectually ambitious prose?

I haven't even brought up the book's subject, I look back and see. Shame on me. Well, Lilla's subject is the separation of church and state in the west, from Hobbes to (roughly) World War II. He seems to have been prompted by a certain vein of western commentary on the Islamic world, to wit, when will these people wise up and realize that modernity is secular? If Lilla is right, the western separation of church and state may be unrepeatable elsewhere. He casts it as an historical anomaly, very much due to peculiar circumstances (the terrifying religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries), not the inevitable consequence of modernization we have taken it to be.

Furthermore, once the west threw religion out the front door, religion found many ways of coming back in through one window or another, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

And after all -- if laws and governments are based on our notions of what is right and just, and if for most people the right and the just are founded on some idea of "what God wants," how do you ever keep religion from mingling in politics?

Not only are we foolish to expect the Islamic world will eventually come to its senses and follow our example, but we are deluded to think we have successfully figured how to effect this separation ourselves.

No good news here, then, but what a great book.