Book Review: Philip Rieff, “Sacred Order”
7th April 2007
This is one of the best books I’ve read in over 40 years of being a Common Reader. My enthusiasm for it doubtless colors my review, but even with my cheerleading, there still must be a lot of there, there.
If you have not read widely and thought a lot about that reading, you probably will not enjoy or appreciate this book. And, chances are, that if you are a widely read person, you still probably wouldn’t like this book. Philip Rieff draws upon a lifetime of reading and reflection from sources as diverse as the Bible, Freud, Nietzsche, Joyce, postmodernists, and images from art (Michaelangelo to Duchamp) and film (Kind Hearts and Coronets to Zelig) and develops three cultures (fate, faith, and fiction) as means of understanding life and text. As someone who lived through the postmodern temper tantrum at the university, I am amazed at Rieff’s accomplishment. His work takes the wild, destructive postmodern methods and puts them in a small bottle for anyone’s consideration.
I further suspect that you would like this book the stronger your faith in God. And that is a very weird outcome for a literary approach. Thomas Aquinas would probably like this book. So would Plato. Derrida, Foucault, and the postmoderns would not. Let me put this another way. Rieff’s approach allows a well educated reader to also be faithful to God. Postmoderns think that this is impossible.
At the end: God was never dead.
Philip Rieff is amazing and this is a great book.