This is an imaginative, at times brilliant book of vision and ambition, a rare example of sociological wrestling with the theological implications of culture. Carroll's earlier work Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture(1977) marked him out as ‘bright’. The Wreck well vindicates this reputation. In Australia, the book has aroused considerable critical response. Originally published in 1993, this new edition with an ending reflection on 9/11 fits in well with recent English works, notably from Bauman, Gray and Eagleton, that fret over the endemic fracturing of culture and the consequences of its de‐spiritualisation. Not quite as Manichean in tendency as some other treatments, Carroll nevertheless offers a scathing treatment of the belief in humanism that has so dominated the past 500 years of European culture. To read Carroll is to make a stunning contrast with the assumptions of culture in Gaudium et Spes on its 40th anniversary.
For Carroll, humanism dies because it cannot cope with the metaphysical challenge of death. Treating the soul of the West and the failure of its spiritual history since the Renaissance, he taunts humanism with the failure to ‘find a credible alternative to Christ crucified’(p. 6). Its cadaverous effect is expressed in a narrative that deals with the displacement of the I. Carroll provides an astute account of the shifting sands the I is placed on to fulfil the promise of humanism. Unfixity of stance is what emerges in a movement from the hope and promise of self‐realisation, to self‐definition by reason, to its fracture in nihilism. God is dead and the I is god but now sadly worships alone, empty and devoid of moral purpose. Pride, rancour and mockery are the outcome of the promise of self‐realisation promised by humanism and the villains of the piece are Marx, Nietzsche and – unexpectedly – Darwin. Part Four, on the death throes of humanism, involves two odd chapters on Henry James and John Ford. The ending reflection on 9/11 rather mechanically turns back on the themes of the book as if to say ‘told you so’.
In some respects, Carroll's tract is not new: the fault lines of the Renaissance were well scrutinised in Blumberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern. Here the theological stance is Protestant – theologians who appear often are Calvin and Luther, but the theologian Carroll should have invoked is Nicholas of Cusa; Calvin and Luther simply amplify the traits of culture Carroll so deplores, taking sociology into the cul‐de‐sac that Weber in melancholy mode so assiduously marked. The theological agenda that wiggles in and out of the text suggests that it is not just another Jeremiad on the state of culture. Unapologetically, Carroll repeatedly makes a theological stance, almost in imitation of Luther and this lends a puzzle as to where his sociological analysis will take him next.
The origins of the book are difficult to trace as the study has no footnotes. Instead of offering a hedgehopping history of culture over the past 500 years, Carroll exercises a brilliant strategy of concentrating on some masterpieces of high culture ‘that rattle their times’(p. 9). There are no genuflections to multi‐culturalism here. What lifts the book is Carroll's clear, stinging prose where much is conveyed with great economy. This is the believer's revenge on cultural despisers.
In the second chapter sparks begin to fly as Carroll finds in Holbein's The Ambassadors and Hamlet a common concern with the skull. Death stalks both thus disclosing something corpse‐like in the formulation of humanism in the Renaissance period. The actors stand uneasily before death. Perhaps the most moving section of the book is Carroll's inspection of Poussin's The Plague of Ashdod. In the painting, a small boy points innocently towards the chaos others fear to enter. He represents ‘the grace of the “I am” expressed through vocation – the sacred work of the person's central life activity’(p. 86). Here a struggling Calvinist vision of alternative culture emerges from a rather muddled and arbitrary dismissal of Catholicism.
Carroll is also highly persuasive in his treatment of Velazquez's Las Meninas where the artist takes on the power to re‐arrange the portrayal of the royal household in a god‐like manner, exercised without regal redress. Here the artist realises a gift of humanism: ‘I can become what I will’(p. 98). Likewise, dilemmas of faith and the self are well illustrated in the same chapter where Carroll focuses on Rembrandt's The Sacrifice of Isaac. In these paintings, the I is released to stand alone. This allows Carroll to insert in theological notions of fate and freewill. These are Protestant dilemmas expressed in faith and reason, resolved only through grace. As these dilemmas become loosened from their Protestant moorings, the I increasingly seeks to stand alone to forge its own destiny. As reason is enthroned as sovereign in the Enlightenment, the fearsome God of Protestantism fades into insignificance. But the I bound to the claims of reason falls into the terrible tyranny of unfettered calculation. Carroll turns the ‘I think therefore I am’ of Descartes into the destruction wrought by Nietzsche and Marx, where rancour leads to nihilism and the adage becomes ‘I think therefore I am not’.
In the end, Carroll retreats back to the terrain of the faith, to the interior castle of Protestant conscience, where what is beyond reason is to be found and where choice is to be made between the death of death or the skull (p. 260). There is no sense of going out to build a new Jerusalem, for the weakness of the book is that it proffers a theology that demands a retreat from the cultural. Ironically, the best part of the book involves Protestant eyes gazing at Catholic paintings; yet their theological context is arbitrarily ejected from the account. Not unexpectedly, the end is dark. There is to be no compromise with the world, only the word is to count. Carroll seems to have gone no further than the ending of Weber's famous essay on ‘Science as a Vocation’. So the book peters out leaving one to wonder if Carroll might stumble over the rock of Peter and see the light.
