Self and Soul: A Defense of Idealsby Mark EdmundsonHarvard University Press, 2015University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson opens his book Self and Soul with a throat-clearing peroration of such podium-thumping vehemence that its genealogy seems to trace from the prophet Jeremiah by way of Cotton Mather. It's so unabashed in its hoary fist-shaking that at first it seems almost a parody; in its own way it's a glorious performance and deserves quoting in full:

It is no secret: culture in the West has become progressively more practical, materially oriented, and skeptical. When I look out at my students, about to graduate, I see people who are in the process of choosing a way to make money, a way to succeed, a strategy for getting on in life … It's no news: we're more and more a worldly culture, a money-based culture geared to the life of getting and spending, trying and succeeding, and reaching for more and more. We are a pragmatic people. We do not seek perfection in thought or art, war or faith. The profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds. We are anything but idealists. From the halls of academe, where a debunking realism is the order of the day, to the floor of the market, where a debunking realism is also the order of the day, nothing is in worse repute than the ideal. Unfettered capitalism runs amok; Nature is ravaged; the rich gorge; prisons are full to bursting; the poor cry out in their misery and no one seems to hear. Lust of Self rules the day.

If Edmundson is aware of how easily such a cri de coeur, with just a few words changed, could have been written by a university professor in 1915, or 1815, or 1715, he seems unconcerned by that fact. It's possible the very permanence of the inquiry might encourage him about its relevance rather than suggest to him that it might say more about what overworked professors have always thought about their students.Self and Soul's subtitle is “A Defense of Ideals,” and Edmundson pursues his defense through the scriptures of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism (Islam is omitted, mercifully), through the epics of Homer and the writings of Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud and Emerson, always looking for the bright line of humanism and finding it in the strangest places. There's a distinct unevenness about the result, with passages on William Blake, for instance, that are as sharp and thought-provoking as anything written on the man in a decade, but also with passages of textual interpretation that aren't exactly confidence-building, as when Edmundson discusses Yahweh's nature in the Book of Genesis:

In his first manifestation he is a creator God. He is the generous bountiful deity who makes the sun and the stars and the teeming earth. He creates man in his own glorious image, by molding a piece of red clay and sending his generous breath into it. When he finds his first creature to be lonely – despite his own grand eternal isolation, he quickly understands Adam's plight – he creates for him a helper and friend in Eve. Yahweh is the maker of the heavenly garden, the creator of blissful earthly perfection … Yahweh creates, and he creates out of love.

Readers familiar with the relevant passages may puzzle over those elbow-nudging adjectives - “generous,” “bountiful,” “glorious,” “generous” again and so on, none of which are actually in the original, and even indulgent readers might balk at that line about Yahweh creating things out of love (or at that characterization of Adam as “his first creature,” when literally the whole of the animal kingdom preceded him into the sunlight of being). Later on in the book, some readings of Shakespeare are equally shaky.Not that such things check the undeniably headlong readable momentum of the book, far from it. “We are too busy, too preoccupied, too concerned with the desires of Self,” Edmundson writes in a typical passage that will have some of his readers nodding in agreement and others – the majority, one hopes – saying “speak for yourself, bub.” Certainly if “we” really are so hopelessly, vainly distracted, Edmundson has been twice the bigger fool, writing a boot we'll never read in order to tell us so and laying it on thick and heavy:

Stuffed full of pointless information, we can consider ourselves wise. With a sack of minute, ephemeral truths on our backs, we can imagine that we possess the Truth. We feed ourselves incessantly an are still starved – which only makes us more insistent to consume.

There's no questioning how bracing near-polemics like this can be to read, and Self and Soul is a bracing read. John Knox would have loved it.