Reviews Of Books -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 07:1 (Nov 1944)
Article: Reviews Of Books
Author: Anonymous


Reviews Of Books

Gwilym O. Griffith: Interpreters of Man. A Review of Secular and Religious Thought from Hegel to Barth. London and Redhill: Lutterworth Press. 1943. 242. 15/-.

With eighteen thinkers (complete with biographies) wedged in 226 war-economy pages, Mr. Griffith has at least achieved a packaging triumph. And only in occasional spots does one notice dehydration. On the whole, this stimulating book is engagingly written in a style both clever and clear. The thinkers analysed are chosen from the period Griffith calls the final phase of the Renaissance, beginning about the time of Hegel and extending to Barth, and the evident aim of the author is to present a tract which will prepare the educated layman for the dawn of the new day in theology and thought of which Karl Barth is the morning star.

The Renaissance, Griffith rightly contends, was humanistic rather than Christian, and the period that followed was characterized by a reassertion of belief in the natural man — his “competence, resourcefulness, and sufficiency” in every realm, religious as well as secular. But even in Goethe, in many ways the embodiment of Renaissance man on the Olympian pinnacle, there may be detected signs of a “falling-off in humanistic élan” (p. 4). From this period onward Griffith sees the creativeness of the Renaissance ideal as exhausted. The eighteen thinkers are introduced as exhibits demonstrating this thesis, either as they seek in vain to rehabilitate man in the old ideal of self-sufficiency, or as they become prophets of despair or doom.

The selection of sample thinkers is Griffith’s own, and somewhat surprising. Along with such standard figures as Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Ritschl, Schweitzer, Berdyaev, and Barth, we find Mazzini, Rathenau, Pareto, and even H. G. Wells. Griffith does discover in these second-rate thinkers valuable symbols of their worlds (and certainly no reader could wish the chapter on Mazzini deleted), but a more significant selection of pivotal men would have added both depth and usefulness to the book.

Yet in a work not intended as a theological text, we might forgive — even welcome — the choice of some inviting by-paths, were it not for a

resulting superficiality in the whole treatment of the question. It is not merely that the brief essays tend to be inadequate (the one on Kierkegaard, for example, only displays a surface acquaintance with the first books to be translated into English, not including the basic Concluding Unscientific Postscript1 ), but the basic problems of the thesis as a whole are not sufficiently faced. Griffith does prod...

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