After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann

A contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, but living in northern Germany, theologian, writer, poet, philosopher, and prophet, Johan Georg Hamann penetrated to the Godless heart of the Enlightenment, anticipating where it would finally lead European culture as witnessed in the moral collapse of Modernity. We can thank Dr. Betz who teaches at Notre Dame, for distilling the meanings and powerful message of Hamann for our time. Hamann wrote precisely for his time and place and as such is and was difficult to penetrate, even in his own time, without the intelligence of a Goethe, but Dr. Betz brings Hamann to earth for mere mortal moderns, looking for the deep answers of Hamann for our time which boil down to an existential Christian-theocentric understanding of human anthropology without which we fall into nihilism, gnosticism, human self-worship and idolatry with crushing, often violent, consequences. The reader will not find a better path into the heart of Hamann's message.

This book is the present standard in Hamann scholarship (and I believe will remain so for quite some time). Bayer’s book (which is quite good itself) doesn’t even come close.

superb!

This is a brilliant work of scholarship- a first class account of Hamann, a long neglected thinker of the first rank, whose doctrines should be of great interest to philosophers, theologians, intellectual historians and, indeed, to all those who are concerned about religion. Professor Betz obviously has the great knowledge, application, tenacity and capacity for sheer hard work which producing such a learned and well written study entails. Those who may have relied on Isaiah Berlin's book on Hamann can now donate it to the charity shop.Dr Tony Atcherley