Abstract
Rémi Brague's The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea is a weighty book that seeks to examine the "idea of God" across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Beginning with the Greeks and ending with our modern world, Brague sets out to challenge many of modernity's deeply held and often unquestioned assumptions. Brague explains the notion of modernity as "an escape of the political from the domain of theology" (LG, 4). He sees a shift from the sacred to the profane: "in modern societies, law, far from being conceived of in any relation with the divine, is quite simply the rule that the human community gives itself, considering only the ends that it proposes for itself" (LG, 1). The layman has triumphed over the cleric as modernity "flatters itself that it has sent packing everything tainted with heteronomy," or receiving laws from an outside source, rather than what Kant refers to as autonomy—"giving oneself one's law" (LG, viii).
