Prologue --

Introduction --

Part One: Gratitude. The good of gratitude : dependence, acceptance and being at home in the world ; A world of rights : the expulsion of love and gratitude from public life ; "Endless gratitude so burdensome" : Christian theology and Western civilization --

Part Two: Pride. Greatness of soul : Aristotle's philosophy of pride ; Givers and takers : the good of self-sufficiency ; The eternal and divine : what everything desires ; The best life of all : politics and contemplation ; Friendship : Gratitude and human fulfillment ; The first cosmopolitan : Plato's discovery of an invisible self ; Preparatio evangelica : Stoicism on the way to Christian thought --

Part Three: Salvation. Creation : making, begetting and creating ; Will : human freedom and the problem of evil ; Grace : divine omnipotence and the Augustinian dilemma ; "Not a sparrow falls" : the abolition of the distinction between form and matter ; The contingency of the world : that whose essence is to exist ; The Pagan temptation : Aquinas and the Aristotelian revival ; God unchained : Ockham's defense of divine freedom ; Theology of the cross : the Lutheran reformation ; The hatred of man : Augustine redux ; The absolute spontaneity of freedom : Kant's Christian metaphysics ; Our better selves : the morality of autonomy ; God becomes a postulate : Reason, freedom and Kant's defense of divine grace ; Reaction : Joseph de Maistre's revolt against pride ; "Fantastic and satanic" : the illiberal theology of Donoso Cortes and Carl Schmitt ; The oblivion of being : Martin Heidegger's reconstruction of Western philosophy ; The disenchantment of the world : Max Weber and the problem of nihilism --

Part four: Joy. The worm in the blood : Spinoza's conception of science ; The god of sufficient reason : physics after Spinoza ; "Endless forms most beautiful" : Darwin's divine biology ; The navel of the dream : Freud and the science of the mind ; "Man is a god to man" : the modern research ideal ; The world as an aesthetic phenomenon : art, truth and morality in Nietzsche's philosophy ; The spider in the moonlight : Nietzsche's interpretation of the will to power as art ; "The gift of transmigration" : the theology of the modern novel ; Genius and sublimity : painting since the Renaissance ; Theological, not political : John Raul's Christian defense of liberal democracy ; Democratic vistas : Walt Whitman and the divinity of diversity --

Epilogue : "Downward to darkness, on extended wings".