“The person is the pivot around whom everything revolves,” David Walsh tells us toward the beginning of this rich, fascinating, and ardently moral book. “There is nothing higher in the universe” (p. ix). It is this supreme priority of the person, for Walsh, that forms the core of our normative vocabulary. It is what we attempt to express via “dignity” and “inviolability” in ethics and defend via “rights” and “freedom” in politics. It is what the Hebrew Bible means in describing human beings as created in the divine image. All of these formulations, Walsh suggests, gesture toward the truth. Yet they always—indeed inevitably—fall short. For the ultimate source of the human being’s priority, in his view, can only be found in Christianity: “Through Christ the invitation to participate in the transcendent Being of God is extended to every human being. From this we derive a sense of the unique unfathomability of every single one” (p. 34).

One of Hegel’s key concepts is the “cunning of reason”: the process by which human beings participate unwittingly in a grand teleological unfolding of freedom. Spirit (Geist, Hegel’s God) works through humanity, in history, to reveal itself. We might think of Walsh’s argument—though he does not refer to it in precisely these terms—as a kind of cunning of revelation (pp. 125, 193). We, too, are working out the disclosing of the deity in the world. We, too, are doing its bidding involuntarily. Except, according to Walsh, what works through us is not reason but the “unfolding of revelation”: we realize elements of Christianity that, for Walsh, have already been given to the world by Jesus (p. 271).

These elements pop up in places both expected and surprising—Walsh calls them “discoveries”—and are organized in the book into “political,” “philosophical,” and “historical” sections. Thus, in politics, we find that liberalism is actually grounded not in rights (Locke), utility (Mill), justice (Rawls), or the rejection of cruelty (Shklar), but in the idea of the person as having an “inexhaustible” value (p. 37), a concept that, in the author’s view, is fundamentally indebted to Christianity (pp. 34–38, 49–51). The idea that elements of liberalism have been secularized from theology is not new, though Walsh surprisingly does not cite Carl Schmitt (Political Theology, 1922; see also Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 1986). What he adds is a normative claim: there is a gap between liberal practice, in which the person is in fact accorded moral priority, and liberal philosophy, where the foundations supporting that priority are but dimly understood. What follows is that liberalism should find its “way home to some broader religious intuitions” (p. 39). It should not only acknowledge its (Christian) theological roots, but also openly and enthusiastically embrace them. The most significant developments in modern philosophy likewise, according to Walsh, are vessels for Christian revelation—whatever their creator’s intentions. Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida are all read against the grain to show how their actual effect is to ripen elements of Christianity. This constitutes “the great achievement of modern philosophy”: it completes Jesus’s revelation in terms that revelation itself did not or could not achieve (p. 191).

For whom is this book written? It seems that The Priority of the Person has two distinct, though potentially overlapping, audiences. The first is made up of those who would appreciate Walsh’s novel readings. Members of such a group would find much to learn from his remarkable erudition and sensitive hermeneutics, with his chapters on Rawls’s religion and “The Turn toward Existence” standing out. Yet the book’s core message would appeal only to an audience that shares Walsh’s theological assumptions. Again and again, he makes claims that his coreligionists might affirm but come across as dogmatic to the uninitiated. For example, “Without the Christian illumination of the transcendent worth of each human being, it would be impossible to conceive the inexhaustible dignity of each individual” (p. 37). Is this true? Similar phrasings appear frequently throughout the text, but they are always asserted, never proven. A different book might have sought to render Christianity’s insights into a discourse from which not only Christians might learn. Instead, Walsh assumes that history (and liberalism and philosophy) does that for him via the cunning of revelation. Consequently, key features of the book will fail to move both the “religiously unmusical,” to borrow Weber’s phrase, and those whose ears are tuned to different theological strains, including Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others.

Writing a Christian book for Christian readers is certainly not a problem; yet even for those who share Walsh’s theology, his secularization narrative occasionally suffers from a lack of clarity. In describing how Christianity relates to the priority of the person, for instance, Walsh alternately uses the language of “migrated,” “secularized,” “derives from,” “residue,” and “resonances.” He also asserts that human dignity “depends” on Christianity or “cannot exist without” its “fund of spiritual capital” (p. 38). Consequently, it is sometimes hard to tell exactly what Walsh is arguing. One might claim that the normative priority of the person is derived, as a matter of intellectual genealogy, from Christianity. Or, one might argue that such priority is sustained in some way by Christianity. Moreover, it is perfectly possible to make the first claim without committing to the second—to argue, as Hans Blumenberg, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Rosen, and others have, that the priority of the person has its historical origins in theology but can now sustain itself on its own. Alternatively, one might make the second claim without the first, suggesting that, regardless of dignity’s origins, the only thing that can keep it going is Christianity. Walsh does not always do enough to clearly articulate which of these arguments, or which combination, is his own and why.

One of the distinguishing virtues of this book is its moral orientation. Walsh is absolutely right that a robust ethics is indispensable for sustaining liberalism in its fullest sense—not merely as an institutional arrangement but as a set of norms, practices, virtues, and habits. And he should be applauded for insisting, against critics on the Left and Right alike, that liberal democracy, despite its aporias, deserves to be preserved. Yet unlike Habermas, who attempts to fill liberalism’s gaps by doubling down on moral rationalism, Walsh turns to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical phenomenology. This is a perceptive and creative move. And for those of us sympathetic to Levinasian ethics, it is an exciting one.

It also strains aspects of Walsh’s argument. One of Levinas’s core ideas is that “ethics is prior to ontology”: our personhood—the “I”—is not simply given but instead comes to be through the tangible motions of ethical life (pp. 87, 169). Yet these Levinasian themes sit uneasily with Walsh’s assertions about revelation, God, and theology. Walsh describes his religious assertions as “discoveries,” and discovery would indeed be the right idiom if Walsh were Levinas’s Abrahamic self, setting off for an unknown land. The problem is that Walsh already knows his (Christian) destinations in advance: “the transcendent horizon cannot be shaken because it is the one we live within” (p. 191); “it is not our minds which arrive at truth and goodness but truth and goodness that enable the arrival” (p. 208); “the person is God-like without being God” (p. 209); and so on.

So which is it? Do we have to work outward from ethical life to glean truths about the world and ourselves? Or are there certain truths about the world and ourselves that are assumed, on the basis of historical revelation, to structure ethical life? There is a normative tension between Walsh’s desire to ground the priority of the person in a Christian genealogy of the soul and his desire to ground it in a Levinasian philosophical anthropology. Indeed for Levinas it is an essentially Jewish insight that ethical action should precede ethical intellectualization. And although Levinas’s language can be abstruse, nothing in his philosophy involves mysticism. Quite the opposite: the kind of “union with God beyond all worldly associations” (p. 4) that, for Walsh, is at the core of our personhood, sounds suspiciously like the “numinous” that Levinas rejects as nonsensical, dangerous, and potentially immoral (e.g., Totality and Infinity, 1961).

Walsh criticizes contemporary liberalism for the “incoherence” of its “self-understanding.” He implies that a return to properly Christian grounding would serve as a corrective. Yet is uncertainty about foundations any less coherent than Walsh’s theological alternative? Does holding truths to be “self-evident” make any less sense than the mysticism of hypostatic union? It may indeed be, as Levinas suggests, that there is a kind of kernel of the nonrational buried in our deepest attachments. It may even be that this kernel is modeled on the religious encounter—a “revelation of the other” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961). But even if liberalism may exceed the bounds of rationality on some level, that does not mean that we should seek to give rationality anything less than its full due. Our ethics today plainly needs more reason, not less. So does our politics. And among the great contributions of Walsh’s book is to show how Christianity not only can but also must find its way home to liberalism, not the reverse.