In this provocative new book, respected Canadian journalist David Cayley compiles and reflects upon the thoughts of Ivan Illich, one of the 20th century's most visionary cultural critics. Illich believed that the West could only be understood as a corruption of the Christian New Testament. Cayley presents Illich's exploration of this idea, illuminating Illich's thoughts on the criminalization of sin, on how the Church has become a template for the modern nation-state, and how contemporary society has become a congealed and corrupted Christianity. These critiques are as timely and valuable as Illich's prescription for fixing them.

Book description from the first-edition (1963) dust This is a book about one of the most important problems of our time—the problem of How to Make the Best of Both Worlds, the world of science on the one hand and, on the other, the world of total human experience, public and subjective, individual and cultural. This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature."What is the function of literature," Mr. Huxley asks, "what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?"Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of "the Two Cultures." unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples.Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience.

Most of Andre Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit―his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns. Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics. Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Reflections on Literature and Morality , prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.