After going 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA and 268 strikeouts at age 20, Dwight Gooden never came close to matching that phenomenal season. After having history's best selling live album at age 25, can anyone remember a single song from Peter Frampton which is NOT from 1975's "Frampton Comes Alive"? After birthing "Citizen Kane" at age 25, Orson Welles is best remembered by some for "serving no wine before its time" (After having "The Sixth Sense" at age 29, some say that films such as "Signs" and "The Lady in the Water" point to a similar pattern of youthful masterpiece followed by mediocrity in M. Night Shyamalan's work.).
After writing "Witness to Hope" at age 48, is George Weigel subject to the anti-climactic pattern of Gooden, Frampton, and Welles? As JP II's biography is one of my all time favorite books, I would be especially vulnerable to viewing anything else by Weigel with particularly critical eyes. Yet, "The Cube and the Cathedral" does NOT disappoint!
Weigel reminds us that "the deepest currents of history are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic" (p. 30). He vividly describes a prevalent prejudice, which "stresses the Enlightenment roots of the democratic project to the virtual exclusion of democracy's historic cultural roots in the Christian soil of pre-Enlightenment Europe" (p. 76).
While Weigel strikes me as insufficiently critical of current American foreign policy, he does not soft peddle Christendom's sins: "That the Church did not always behave according to these convictions is obvious from history, especially European history" (p. 112). At the dawn of the new millennium, he reminds us how Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger led the Church in recommitting "to live out the truth it professed about the freedom of the human person to seek the truth and adhere to it" (pp. 113, 114).
It could be argued that Weigel pays insufficient attention to Europe's non-Christian roots. Yet, it should be remembered that he is primarily aiming to counter efforts to erase Christianity's contributions from contemporary European consciousness. "It takes a deliberate act of willfulness - an act of Christophobia, to borrow from Joseph Weiler - to dismiss the notion that this rich civilizational soil contains the nutrients that nourished the democratic possibility in Europe and throughout the Western world" (p. 105).
Since La Grande Arche de La Defense and the Cathedral of Notre Dame are such important symbols in this book, the jacket would benefit from much clearer (and larger!) photographic images. Appendices providing additional background on these symbols would also be helpful.
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