THEOLOGY: HELEN COONEYreviews The Good Book: A Secular BibleBy AC Grayling Bloomsbury, 599pp. £25

THE TITLE of this book is arresting and provocative. Add the fact that its author is AC Grayling, a great populariser of difficult philosophy, whose books attract many thousands of readers and near-ecstatic reviews, and the result is a volume (actually, at 500-plus pages, a veritable tome) that will tantalise and intrigue – and sell? – in large measure.

The first question that confronts a reviewer is how seriously to take it. Is The Good Bookno more than a spectacularly elaborate jeu d'esprit, created by an academic renowned for his wit no less than his erudition, whose publication coincides with the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, thereby providing a timely parody of sacred scripture? Or is it in fact a serious attempt to create a truly authentic and relevant alternative bible for the ever-increasing number of secularists in western society?

The fact that this secular bible imitates the original in numerous ways is revealing. The first book of the volume is called “Genesis”. Moreover, every single one of its 500-plus pages is set out in a form unique, until now, to the Bible – that is, chapter and verse. Finally, Grayling “quietly slips in” a secular version of both the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer in the closing pages of his final book, “The Good”. By such means does he assert the “high seriousness” of his intention, and that his secular scripture is the equal (at least!) of that which it mimics, in authority, wisdom and truth.

Christians through the ages have used the term the Good Book to refer, with affectionate familiarity, to the Bible. It is, for them, a sacred book that contains the word of God. But Grayling's choice of the term as his title is no gratuitous jibe against the Christian religion. Rather, the title encapsulates precisely the ethos and purpose of thisbook: the quest for knowledge of the good, together with the encouragement to live a good life. The materials from which Grayling's work has been created, however, have been drawn from an extraordinarily broad and deep pool of non-religious literature, ranging across 2,500 years and referencing more than 1,000 texts.

Grayling has said that he sought here to distil his knowledge of this breathtakingly broad and deep pool of non-religious writings in order to present their essence as a gift to "the common reader". The Good Bookthus comprises an astonishing synthesis of a multitude of disparate texts, which have been syncretised and woven together in almost seamless fashion, and in a way that demonstrates the capaciousness of Grayling's intellect and the depth of his knowledge and understanding.

Yet while the absence of discernible seams at the points where disparate texts have been yoked together makes for a smooth, serene and triumphantly syncretic text, it also results in a rather bland, even monotonous style. The author’s grand aspiration to timelessness has led him to obliterate any and all distinctions between, for example, the works of ancient Greek and Enlightenment philosophers.

The sense of a pervasive flattening or homogenisation is particularly strong in "Songs", which imitates the biblical Psalms. While individual songs have been taken from a diversity of poets, including Goethe and Catullus, the identity of their original authors is concealed. Worse, their poetry is redacted in an entirely uniform style whose very inoffensiveness is insulting to the poets and the reader. The author has admitted that "the book of songs is the result of heavy rewriting by me". Yet the surprisingly heavy hand of Grayling as redactor and maker is felt in almost every part of The Good Book.

Worse still, even if one accepts that Grayling’s work is philosophical rather than poetic (he says himself that his primary goal is to write lucidly), the fact remains that there is no detectable structural principle behind its 14 separate books. I can find no reason whatever for the inclusion of a lengthy book of “Histories”, for example. At times this good book seems less like a magnum opus than an eccentric florilegium, the pitfalls of which are every philosopher’s nightmare: redundancy and arbirtrariness.

One is bound to ask how on earth a volume that represents a gathering together of a lifetime's learning by a philosopher of immense distinction can be seen to fail in this way. Grayling says his primary goal is that this book has as its "unifying theme . . . the considered and well-lived life". He is equally emphatic, however, that "there is scarcely anything in the Bible which does not have its parallel in The Good Book". It may be that the author's near fixation on a comprehensive imitation of the Bible, even for the purpose of refutation, led him to become distracted from his primary humanist purpose and is responsible for the unexpected shortcomings of his book.

Finally, one must acknowledge that Grayling's claims of universality for The Good Bookare belied by the fact that it is very culturally specific. More to the point, one ought to ask whether it was wise of him to use as his exemplar, and to imitate with such determination, a book that he believes to be false and even invidious. Anti-Christian polemic makes only a brief appearance, in the epistle that prefaces The Good Book, but such polemic is central to Grayling's identity as humanist, atheist and secularist, and to a goodly number of his other books.

How could any philosopher not understand that a “self-standing humanist bible” is a contradiction in terms? To attempt such a thing is a regrettable act of folly on the part of Grayling, a distinguished lover of wisdom. But then even Homer nods.

Helen Cooney is a research associate of the school of English at Trinity College Dublin