Rémi Brague, born September 8, 1947 in Paris, is one of the greatest living Catholic philosophers in France. A Hellenist by training, he learned Hebrew and Arabic to read medieval Jewish and Muslim thinkers in the original texts, becoming one of the rare minds capable of holding together, in a single inquiry, Greek philosophy, the three monotheisms, and the genesis of Western modernity[1].
His work revolves around a single question, developed in three major books: what does man need to be fully human? In a trilogy that has become a classic — The Wisdom of the World (1999), The Law of God (2005), The Kingdom of Man (2015) — he shows how the West first sought its measure in the order of the cosmos, then in the law of God, before claiming, in the modern era, to give itself its own law — and why this last project, that of the “kingdom of man,” is doomed to failure[2].
He is also responsible for the most famous thesis on European identity: in Europe, the Roman Way (1992), he defines Europe not by what it invented, but by its “Romanity” — its capacity to know itself as second, heir to a Greek and a Hebrew it did not produce, and to transmit something greater than itself[3].
A committed Catholic, on October 20, 2012, he became the first philosopher and the first Frenchman to receive the Ratzinger Prize, often called the “Nobel of theology,” awarded at the Vatican by Benedict XVI himself[4]. A member of the Institut de France, honored in 2009 with the Grand Prize in Philosophy from the Académie française, he occupies a unique place: that of a rigorous philosopher, recognized by the secular university, who has never hidden that his faith illuminates his reason without stifling it.
A Philosopher in Three Languages and Three Traditions
Rémi Brague is not a “thinker of a single idea.” He is first and foremost a historian of philosophy in the strictest sense: someone who reads texts in their original language, traces back to the sources, and refuses secondhand summaries. It is this patient scholarly work that gives his major syntheses their authority.
From rue d'Ulm to the Sorbonne
Entering the École normale supérieure on rue d'Ulm in 1967, Brague passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1971[5]. He first taught at the secondary level — at the technical high school of Perreux-sur-Marne (1972-1976) — then joined the CNRS, where he was a research attaché (1976-1980) then research fellow (1980-1988)[6]. He defended a first thesis in 1976, devoted to Plato, then a State thesis in 1986 on Aristotle and the notion of “world”[7].
His proper university career was late and rapid: professor at the University of Burgundy (Dijon) from 1988 to 1990, he then joined Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he taught medieval Arabic philosophy and philosophy of religions from 1990 to 2012[8].
Greek, Hebrew, Arabic: the choice of a comparatist
Brague’s uniqueness lies in his languages. Trained in Greek and Latin, he also learned medieval Hebrew at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) and classical Arabic at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO)[9]. This is not an ornament: it is a method. To understand how Greek philosophy was received, transformed, and transmitted by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, one must read Maimonides in Hebrew, Averroes and Avicenna in Arabic, the Church Fathers in Greek.
His early work focused on the Greeks. He first approached the dialogues of Plato, then reread Aristotle in light of Heidegger’s question of the “world” — from which came Aristotle and the Question of the World (1988)[10]. From this Greek matrix later emerged the first part of his trilogy, The Wisdom of the World.
Paris and Munich: the Romano Guardini Chair
From 2002 to 2012, alongside his position at the Sorbonne, Brague held the prestigious Romano Guardini Chair of philosophy of religions and Catholic worldview at the University of Munich (LMU)[11]. This position, created in memory of the great Italo-German theologian Romano Guardini, is symbolic: it makes Brague one of the living bridges between French philosophy and German-language Catholic thought — the very tradition from which Joseph Ratzinger emerged.
Brague modestly defines himself as a simple historian of philosophy[12].
This modest methodological stance — calling himself a simple historian of philosophy — conceals a rare ambition: to reconstruct how the West has thought, in turn, its place in the world, its relation to God, and its own dignity.
Europe, the Roman Way: the Thesis of Secondarity
Published in 1992, Europe, the Roman Way is the book that made Brague famous beyond the circle of specialists. He poses an apparently simple question: what makes Europe? His answer, against the current, does not seek European identity in an origin—Greek, Christian, Celtic—but in a way of relating to what precedes it[13].
What is "Romanity"?
The model of Europe, says Brague, is neither Athens nor Jerusalem: it is Rome. Not Rome as an empire or power, but Rome as a cultural attitude. The cultivated Roman knew he came after the Greeks, that he owed them his philosophy, rhetoric, and arts—and he accepted this without jealousy. This awareness of being second, Brague calls "secondarity," and he makes it the heart of European identity[14].
"European culture is characterized by its 'secondarity': it felt itself second in relation to Antiquity, just as Roman culture felt itself second in relation to Greece." — summary of Rémi Brague’s thesis, Europe, the Roman Way[15]
In other words, Europe is not great because it invented everything; it is great because it has stood on the shoulders of giants, and this cultural humility has continually pushed it to return to the sources, to translate, to rediscover—hence its repeated Renaissances[16].
Athens and Jerusalem: a Double Debt
European "Romanity" is doubly second. It is second to Athens in terms of secular culture: European thought, science, and art derive from a Greek heritage received, not produced. And it is second to Jerusalem in the religious realm: Christianity is received as the fulfillment of an older Covenant, that of Israel[17].
This is a deeply Christian intuition: just as the New Testament does not abolish the Old but fulfills it, Europe does not replace its sources, it carries them. It keeps open within itself a reference to an elsewhere that judges and elevates it.
Europe, a Culture of Transmission
From this secondarity flows Europe’s unique vocation: to transmit. The Roman, and after him the European, is first and foremost a passer—a translator, a copyist, an editor of texts that are not his own. The great mistake, for Brague, would be to believe that Europe would save itself by claiming a closed and self-sufficient identity. On the contrary, it would lose itself by cutting the link that connects it to its Greek and Hebrew roots[18].
This diagnosis has a directly spiritual and political significance: a Europe that forgets its debt—notably its debt to Jerusalem and the Gospel—does not become freer; it becomes amnesic, and an amnesic culture is a culture that withers.
The Great Trilogy: the Cosmos, God, and Man
Brague’s masterwork is a trilogy that follows a single question through three fundamental relations of man: his relation to the world, his relation to God, and his relation to himself[19]. Together, these three books narrate the great transition from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to modernity—and pose a formidable question: does modern man, who has cut the moorings from the cosmos and Heaven, still know why it is better that men exist rather than nothing?
The Wisdom of the World: When the Sky Was a Model
In The Wisdom of the World: History of the Human Experience of the Universe (1999), Brague recounts how, for millennia, man took the order of the cosmos as a model for his moral life[20]. The starry sky, regular and harmonious, offered the ancient and medieval man the image of a law to imitate: to be wise was to align one’s life with the beautiful order of the world.
The decisive break of modernity, Brague shows, is the moment when man ceases to contemplate the cosmos as a model to imitate[21]. When modern science reduces the universe to a blind mechanism, without interiority or purpose, the sky has nothing left to teach human conduct. Man finds himself alone, without a measure above him.
The Law of God: A Philosophical History of a Covenant
The Law of God: A Philosophical History of a Covenant (2005)—awarded the Grand Prix of Philosophy by the French Academy—continues the inquiry on the religious level[22]. Brague traces the history of the idea of divine law: what does it mean that God gives a law to men? He compares how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have thought this relationship between God’s will and human conduct.
His thesis is nuanced and honors the Christian position without caricaturing the others. Christianity, he shows, occupies a singular position: it is not primarily a law. Where the Torah and Sharia propose a detailed divine law regulating social life, Christianity distinguishes what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar, entrusting reason with a large part of the organization of the city. This distinction between the spiritual and the temporal—foreign to systems of pure revealed law—is one of the deep roots of Western freedom.
The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project
Thirty years after beginning, Brague closes his trilogy with The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project (2015)[23]. The subject is the great modern project: that of a man who, having renounced the cosmos and God as measures, undertakes to give himself his own law and to become, in Descartes’ words, “master and possessor of nature”[24].
Brague traces its genesis: Francis Bacon and the idea of domination over nature, Descartes and technical mastery, then the radicalization up to Nietzsche, where man himself must be “overcome” because he is no longer up to what he demands of himself[25]. Modernity, says Brague, is defined by a refusal of “context”: the refusal to recognize anything above man—neither the order of the world nor divine command—that could give him his measure[26]. He offers elsewhere a definition of great clarity:
“[The modern project is] the breaking away from nature, from the Creator God, from the past.” — Rémi Brague[27]
This triple breaking away has a paradoxically Christian root, which Brague does not hide: the modern idea of salvation is often only a secularization of Christian hope, where “salvation as the repair of the initial misstep” has given way to “the enterprise of self-salvation by oneself”[28].
But this project fails, and Brague points to the moment when it turns against itself. The man who emancipates himself from all higher measure ends up no longer being able to justify his own existence:
“On the other hand, he seems incapable of explaining why it is a good thing that there are men to enjoy the goods thus placed at their disposal.” — Rémi Brague, The Kingdom of Man[29]
This is the heart of the diagnosis: by making himself God, man saws off the branch on which he sits. A “humanism” without any foundation above man becomes, at its limit, a humanism of the non-man — capable of proclaiming human dignity while reducing man to a manipulable material[30].
Thinking Religions: The God of Christians and the Others
Around the trilogy, Brague has devoted several essays to the religious fact and the relationships between the monotheisms. Far from relativism that puts everything on the same level, he practices a precise comparison, attentive to real differences.
The God of Christians and One or Two Others
The title of Du Dieu des chrétiens et d'un ou deux autres (2008) already states his purpose[31]. Against the lazy formula of the “three monotheisms” or the “three religions of the Book,” Brague shows that the supposedly common word “monotheism” hides decisive differences: the unity of God is not understood in the same way in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The God of Christians — Trinity, Incarnation, God who becomes man and suffers — is not interchangeable with other conceptions of divinity. It is not a question of despising other traditions, but of taking seriously what each truly says about God, rather than dissolving everything into a vague abstract monotheism[32].
The very relationship of each tradition to its holy book differs. The argument of Du Dieu des chrétiens may be summarized as follows: Israel receives its book at the end of a history, Christianity tells its history in a book, and Islam derives its history from a book[33].
On Islam and Revealed Law
A professional Arabist, Brague knows Islam from inside its texts. In On Islam (2023) as well as in The Law of God, he analyzes the structure of a religion of revealed law, where the will of God is expressed in a law that embraces all life and demands total subordination[34]. His method is that of the historian and philosopher: to honestly describe what the Muslim tradition affirms about itself, without complacency or caricature, in order to better measure the difference with the Christian articulation of faith and reason.
He warns against a common misunderstanding: believing that identical words cover identical concepts. A Christian reader spontaneously projects onto the Quranic vocabulary the meaning it has in the Bible, leading to misunderstandings:
“The Quranic Ibrahim is not the Abraham of Genesis.” — Rémi Brague, regarding On Islam[35]
Christianity, Reason, and Modernity
A thread runs through all this work: Christianity is not the enemy of reason, it is an ally. Where others oppose faith to intelligence, Brague argues that Christian faith, by distinguishing God and the world, by refusing to deify nature as well as man, has freed the space where science and political freedom could be born.
This is also the meaning of his essay Moderately Modern (2014): to be modern with measure, to keep the gains of modernity without embracing its excess or denying its own sources. Brague willingly shows himself “anti-modernist” — not out of nostalgia, but out of refusal of the cult of the new for the new:
“I do not much like the cult of the modern for the modern, the ‘all new, all beautiful.’” — Rémi Brague[36]
His critique targets less technical or social progress — which the Middle Ages and Antiquity already knew — than the anthropological deficit of modernity: an era that no longer quite knows how to say what man is, nor why it is good to give him descendants[37].
Anchors in the Sky: Can the Human Be Founded Without God?
In Anchors in the Sky. The Metaphysical Infrastructure (2011), based on lectures given in 2009, Brague tightens his argument into a burning question: can modern societies endure having cut all reference to an absolute?[38] The image of the title is telling: our human lives depend on anchors which, paradoxically, are not fixed in the ground but in the sky — that is, in an order of values, truth, and good that does not come from us.
Metaphysics, says Brague, is not a structure built “in the clouds”: it is the very infrastructure of human life. For modern man, having taken his destiny into his own hands, can now freely decide to be or not to be — to perpetuate himself or to vanish. Then arises the question of human legitimacy: to affirm that being is better than nothingness, that life deserves to be transmitted, is not a scientific fact, it is a metaphysical decision[39]. After the century of the True (the 19th) and that of the Good (the 20th), ours could be the one where the most radical question is replayed, that of Being.
Modern culture, in other words, still lives on a metaphysical capital it has ceased to renew: it still believes in the dignity of the person and the duty to transmit life, but it has demolished the foundations that made these convictions rational. This is where the philosopher’s voice meets that of the believer: without “anchors in the sky,” humanism empties itself of its substance. The question is not to impose religion, but to honestly recognize under what conditions the human remains thinkable.
A Catholic Intellectual: Faith, Ratzinger, the Church
Rémi Brague has never made his faith a secret or an argument. Rather, he has kept it in its proper place: that of a light which does not dictate the demonstration but allows one to see more clearly. His recognition by the Church crowned a career first esteemed by the most secular University.
The Ratzinger Prize (2012)
On October 20, 2012, at the Vatican, Benedict XVI personally awarded the Ratzinger Prize to Rémi Brague and the American Jesuit theologian Brian E. Daley[40]. Established by the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI, this prize—sometimes called the “Nobel of theology”—honored for the first time a philosopher, and for the first time a Frenchman[41].
Before the Fathers gathered for the Synod, the pope praised the laureates for their “scientific work,” their “precious service of teaching,” and their “qualified contribution to the presence of the Church in today’s world”[42]. He immediately gave the deeper reason: the world needs men
“... men whose intelligence is enlightened by the light of God, so that they may speak also to the mind and heart of others.” — Benedict XVI, Ratzinger Prize Award Speech, Vatican, October 20, 2012[43]
The choice was consistent: between Brague and Joseph Ratzinger, the intellectual kinship is profound. Both hold that Christian faith and Greek reason form a fruitful alliance, that Europe was built on this encounter, and that the contemporary crisis stems from a reason that has amputated its own openness to truth.
A Discreet and Reasoned Faith
For Brague, faith is not imposed on philosophy: it inhabits its questioning. That is why his books can be read and discussed by nonbelievers without ever being propaganda, while carrying, for the believing reader, an evident spiritual charge. His approach is that of Étienne Gilson or Jacques Maritain: to show that Catholic truth, far from shrinking the intellect, expands it.
He does not limit himself to writing: he engages in the public and media arena to defend the faith and remind Europe of its debt to Christianity, to the point that he has been hailed as one of the great contemporary witnesses of Christian thought[44]. His kinship with Joseph Ratzinger is not only one of esteem: it is that of two minds convinced that the future of the West depends on the reconciliation of faith and reason.
Distinctions and Recognition
The Ratzinger Prize did not come alone. In 2009, Brague received the Grand Prize of Philosophy from the French Academy for his entire body of work, as well as the Josef Pieper Prize in Germany[45]. That same year, on December 7, 2009, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, in the Philosophy section (chair 7, vacated by the Germanist Jean-Marie Zemb)[46]; he is also a member of the Catholic Academy of France. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honor (2013), then promoted to officer of the National Order of Merit (2022), and received several honorary doctorates, notably from the John Paul II University of Krakow (2018) and the CEU San Pablo University of Madrid (2020)[47].
The table below summarizes the main recognitions he has received.
| Year | Distinction | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Grand Prize of Philosophy | French Academy |
| 2009 | Josef Pieper Prize | Josef Pieper Foundation (Germany) |
| 2009 | Election (chair 7, Philosophy section) | Academy of Moral and Political Sciences |
| 2012 | Ratzinger Prize | Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI |
| 2013 | Knight of the Legion of Honor | French Republic |
| 2022 | Officer of the National Order of Merit | French Republic |
Reception, Critiques, and Legacy
Brague’s work is distributed worldwide: his major books are translated into English, German, Italian, Spanish, and many other languages, and Europe, the Roman Way as well as the trilogy have become references in reflection on Western identity and modernity.
For the Catholic reader, Brague offers a precious model—that of an intellectual who renounces nothing of academic rigor, but who shows, book after book, that faith and reason are not rivals. At a time when the West questions its roots, he reminds us that cutting the “anchors in the sky” does not liberate man: it leaves him adrift.
For Further Reading
Selected Works by Rémi Brague
- Aristotle and the Question of the World, PUF, 1988.
- Europe, the Roman Way, Criterion, 1992 (reissued by Gallimard, “Folio essais”).
- The Wisdom of the World: History of the Human Experience of the Universe, Fayard, 1999.
- Through the Middle Ages: Medieval Philosophies in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Éd. de la Transparence, 2006.
- The Law of God: A Philosophical History of a Covenant, Gallimard, 2005.
- On the God of the Christians and One or Two Others, Flammarion, 2008.
- Anchors in the Sky: The Metaphysical Infrastructure, Seuil, 2011.
- What Is Proper to Man: On a Threatened Legitimacy, Flammarion, 2013.
- Moderately Modern, Flammarion, 2014.
- The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project, Gallimard, 2015.
- On Religion, Flammarion, 2018.
- On Islam, Gallimard, 2023.
Related Ignispedia Articles
- Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) — historian of Thomism and medieval philosophy.
- Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — another great master of the Thomist revival.
- Jean-Luc Marion (born 1946) — contemporary Catholic phenomenologist.
- Benedict XVI (1927-2022) — the pope-theologian, founder of the Ratzinger Prize.
- Charles Péguy (1873-1914) — prophetic critic of modernity.
Notes and References
Encyclopædia Universalis, entry “Rémi Brague (1947–)”, online: https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/remi-brague/. The entry presents him as a historian of philosophy starting from the Greek tradition (Plato read with Leo Strauss, Aristotle reread through Heidegger’s question of the “world”), master of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic languages, and highlights the thesis of The Wisdom of the World according to which modern man “has ceased to contemplate the cosmos as a model to imitate.”
1 7 9 12 21Rémi Brague, The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project, Paris, Gallimard, 2015: the third volume, along with The Wisdom of the World (1999) and The Law of God (2005), of a trilogy on man’s relationship to the cosmos, to God, and to himself.
2 19 23 25Rémi Brague, Europe, the Roman Way, Paris, Criterion, 1992 (reissued Gallimard, “Folio essais”). Thesis: European identity is defined by its “Romanity,” that is, by a culture of transmission that knows itself as secondary in relation to its Greek (Athens) and Hebraic-Christian (Jerusalem) sources.
3 13 18“Presentation of the 2012 Ratzinger Prize to Rémi Brague and Fr. Daley,” ZENIT (French edition), October 21, 2012, online: https://fr.zenit.org/2012/10/21/remise-du-prix-ratzinger-2012-a-remi-brague-et-au-p-dailey/. The award ceremony, presided over by Benedict XVI at the Vatican on October 20, 2012, in the presence of the Synod Fathers, praised the laureates for their “scientific work,” their “precious teaching service,” and their “qualified contribution to the Church’s presence in today’s world.”
4 40 42Académie des sciences morales et politiques, biographical notice on Rémi Brague, online: https://academiesciencesmoralesetpolitiques.fr/membres-titulaires/section-i-philosophie-2/remi-brague/. Student at ENS (rue d’Ulm) in 1967, agrégé in philosophy in 1971; first thesis 1976, state thesis 1986; studied medieval Hebrew at EPHE and classical Arabic at INALCO. Career: lycée du Perreux-sur-Marne (1972–1976), CNRS (1976–1988), University of Burgundy (1988–1990), Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1990–2012), Romano Guardini Chair in Munich (2002–2012). Elected December 7, 2009, to the Philosophy section, chair no. 7; officer of the National Order of Merit in 2022.
5 6 8 11 46 47Rémi Brague, Aristotle and the Question of the World: Essay on the Cosmological and Anthropological Context of Ontology, Paris, PUF, 1988: based on his state thesis, the work rereads Aristotle from the question of the “world” (kosmos), the matrix of his later reflection on the human experience of the universe.
10On the concept of “secondarity” and “Romanity” in Europe, the Roman Way: European culture felt itself secondary to Antiquity, just as Roman culture felt secondary to Greece, and the New Testament secondary to the Old. This feeling of cultural inferiority—being “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”—explains the European taste for returning to sources and the repetition of Renaissances. See analyses of Brague’s thesis, notably the review of Europe, the Roman Way on Persée (https://www.persee.fr/doc/phlou_0035-3841_1993_num_91_91_6812) and Encyclopædia Universalis.
14 15 16 17Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: History of the Human Experience of the Universe, Paris, Fayard, 1999: history of the idea that man once took the order of the cosmos as a model for his moral conduct, and of the modern rupture that deprives the heavens of any normative value. English translation: The Wisdom of the World, University of Chicago Press, 2003.
20Rémi Brague, The Law of God: A Philosophical History of a Covenant, Paris, Gallimard, 2005: philosophical history of the idea of divine law in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Grand Prize in Philosophy from the French Academy. English translation: The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, University of Chicago Press, 2007.
22René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), sixth part: science must make us “masters and possessors of nature.” Brague takes this formula as one of the birth acts of the “modern project” he analyzes in The Kingdom of Man.
24Review of The Kingdom of Man on Actu-Philosophia, online: https://www.actu-philosophia.com/remi-brague-le-regne-de-l-homme/. Modernity is defined there as “refusal of context,” that is, refusal to consider man’s “beside” (order of the world or divine command); the genesis of the project is dated to the late Renaissance, notably with Francis Bacon.
26 30Rémi Brague, interview “I hardly like the cult of the modern for the modern,” PhiLitt, April 1, 2015: https://philitt.fr/2015/04/01/entretien-avec-remi-brague-je-naime-guere-le-culte-du-moderne-pour-le-moderne/. Quotes: “I hardly like the cult of the modern for the modern, the ‘all new, all beautiful’”; definition of the modern project as “the uprooting from nature, from the Creator God, from the past”; on the secularization of Christian hope: “salvation as repair of the initial misstep gave way to the enterprise of salvation of self by self.”
27 28 36Rémi Brague, The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project, Paris, Gallimard, 2015, p. 267 (conclusion of the book). The sentence is quoted by Thibaut Gress’s review on Actu-Philosophia (https://www.actu-philosophia.com/remi-brague-le-regne-de-l-homme/), whose note 29 refers to this page: the modern project, capable of producing the material, cultural, and moral goods it promises, “seems incapable of explaining why it is a good thing that there are men to enjoy the goods thus placed at their disposal.”
29Rémi Brague, On the God of the Christians and One or Two Others, Paris, Flammarion, 2008: essay comparing, without relativism, the Christian conception of God (Trinitarian and incarnate) with Jewish and Muslim conceptions, against the idea of an undifferentiated “same God” of the “three religions of the Book.”
31 32 33Rémi Brague, On Islam, Paris, Gallimard, 2023: analysis, by an Arabist, of Islam as a religion of revealed law; the work continues the analyses of The Law of God.
34Rémi Brague, interview “The misunderstood Islamic logic,” La Nef, September 18, 2023, about Sur l'islam: https://lanef.net/2023/09/18/la-logique-islamique-incomprise/. Brague warns there that the same words do not cover the same concepts from one tradition to another — “the Quranic Ibrahim is not the Abraham of Genesis” — and that Christians often give Islamic words the meaning they have in Christianity, leading to misunderstandings.
35Rémi Brague, Moderately Modern, Paris, Flammarion, 2014: collection of essays advocating for a “measured” modernity that retains the achievements of the modern age without embracing its excess or denying its own sources.
37Rémi Brague, Anchors in the Sky: The Metaphysical Infrastructure, Paris, Seuil, 2011 (based on lectures given in 2009): essay arguing that metaphysics is the “infrastructure” of human life, and that modern societies live on a metaphysical capital (dignity of the person, value of truth, duty to transmit life) they have ceased to ground; affirming that “being is better than nothing” is presented as a metaphysical decision rather than a scientific fact. See notices and reviews of the book (Babelio: https://www.babelio.com/livres/Brague-Les-ancres-dans-le-ciel--Linfrastructure-metaphy/503029).
38 39“The 2012 Ratzinger Prize awarded to Rémi Brague”, Catholic Church in France, online: https://eglise.catholique.fr/actualites/359857-le-prix-ratzinger-2012-decerne-a-remi-brague/. The Ratzinger Prize, established by the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI and sometimes called the “Nobel of theology,” rewards for the first time a philosopher and a Frenchman.
41Benedict XVI, “Presentation of the 2012 Ratzinger Prize,” address, Clementine Hall, October 20, 2012, official French text: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/fr/speeches/2012/october/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20121020_premio-ratzinger.html. Passage quoted: “men whose intelligence is enlightened by the light of God, so that they may speak also to the mind and heart of others.”
43On Rémi Brague’s public engagement as a Catholic intellectual defending the faith, see Gérard Leclerc, “Rémi Brague, a Catholic intellectual,” France Catholique: https://www.france-catholique.fr/Remi-Brague-un-intellectuel-catholique.html.
44Wikipedia (English), “Rémi Brague,” online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9mi_Brague. Awards received: Josef Pieper Prize (2009), Grand Prize of Philosophy of the French Academy (2009), Ratzinger Prize (2012, shared with Brian E. Daley), Knight of the Legion of Honor (2013).
45