What Is Liberalism?
By D.C. Schindler|August 11th, 2023|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Culture, Liberalism, Politics
While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”?
Essential questions are “untimely” by their very nature. Plato presented Socrates as a “gadfly,” not because he had an annoying personality or a perverse tendency to pester people who just wanted to get on with their business, but because he insisted always and everywhere on raising the question that made him famous, “What is x?” a question that interrupts business by its very nature.[1] The practical order of business is concerned with means and ends, and works within the horizon of value: is this or that sufficiently good or bad to warrant some decision, some action, in its regard? The “what is” question breaks through the “value-horizon”; it requires one to suspend the calls to make a decision, not just until one can get clarification about the matter to be decided, thus forcing the issue back within the practical horizon, but in a certain sense indefinitely.[2] Even if this question turns out, as it inevitably does, to be necessary for the proper judgment of value, it cannot but prove to be a constant “stumbling block” for the practical order.[3]
The question “What is liberalism?” is an essential question, and therefore an untimely one. In the present moment, the question of the “value” of liberalism—that is, modern political philosophy founded on “natural rights” and some version of the “social contract” theory—has emerged with an urgency it may never have had before. While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself.[4] Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Can we not entertain the notion that there were good features in some of the older political forms that liberalism replaced? In Catholic circles above all, there is a rising enthusiasm for “integralism,” the cooperation between throne and altar, that would not have been conceivable even five years ago.[5] The recent debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French over whether we ought to refuse the terms of play liberalism sets or work with liberalism to guide it from within, was a sign of this bold, new time. [6] But however urgent these questions may be, they are not first order questions, and so cannot be the questions with which we ought to begin. The new openness to a radical questioning of liberalism needs to be led beyond itself to the most radical question, the question that essentially precedes all the others, the question that is necessary now precisely because it is untimely, unconcerned with any particular moment or impending judgment: What is liberalism?
There is a certain inexhaustibility to this question, an irreducible multiplicity of ways to approach an answer to it. On the one hand, liberalism is a political phenomenon, and so the most obvious way to approach it is politically, whether from the perspective of the historico-political circumstances that brought it about or from the perspective of political theory—its particular interpretation of human nature, human existence, and the good that defines political community, over against other interpretations. But all such interpretations, and indeed all such historical events, inevitably have a latent metaphysical and theological “core.” While liberalism is indeed a political phenomenon in one respect and a political philosophy in another, in both respects it represents a judgment regarding ultimate questions, not only the serious existential question of the meaning of human life, but also those regarding the nature of reality and of God.
The aim of the following reflections is to articulate what those fundamental judgments are; to try to answer the question “What is liberalism?” from the metaphysical and theological perspective; to get at the deep root of this political reality. A couple of disclaimers are necessary at the outset. First, our endeavor will necessarily be incomplete insofar as the metaphysical and theological realities we will be discussing will only be “touched on” in relation to our guiding question, when they would demand far more development and unfolding considered in themselves. Second, we do not at all mean to suggest that the metaphysical and theological dimensions we hope to identify suffice on their own to account for liberalism. The question can and ought to be answered from a political perspective in all of the senses mentioned above. If we attempt to dig out liberalism’s metaphysical and theological roots it is because this dimension is so often neglected, and because times of crisis such as the one in which we live demand a deep diagnosis. Kierkegaard worried that his age was going to swallow itself up in reflection[7]; our age is closer to settling the planet Mars than it has ever come to the experience of reflection. We have not pondered sufficiently the significance of the fact that our public discourse, our collective deliberation of the res publica, takes place most commonly now via an activity called “tweeting.” Nietzsche’s “Last Man” turns out to have been the “Last But One.”[8] There has never been a better time for untimely questions.
We take our bearings from an observation that Pierre Manent makes in an astonishing paragraph that occurs in the opening pages of his book, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, which is worth quoting in its entirety:
It is widely believed that the originality of European political history stems from Christianity, and that the development of modern politics can be described as a process of “secularization.” What are liberty and equality, after all, if not “biblical values” shaping civic life? The thesis was born and acquired its credence just after the French Revolution. It had the merit of reconciling proponents and opponents of the “new freedom”: there were those who thought that the hour of human maturity had arrived and those who remained attached to the old religion. The former saw in Christianity the first expression of human liberty and equality, hidden under the veils of grace or hampered by the swaddling clothes of alienation. The latter celebrated modern freedom as the last conquest of the Gospel. We must remember, however, that this reconciliation (which in France took more than a century to be achieved) came about just after the Christian religion had been totally stripped of all political power for the first time, power that it would never regain. Perhaps the lassitude of battle had weakened the conquerors as much as the conquered. In any case, the principles of the new politics—the rights of man and citizen, freedom of conscience, sovereignty of the people—had been forged during the two previous centuries in a bitter fight against Christianity, and particularly against the Catholic Church. The decisive question then is the following: must the Enlightenment’s war against Christianity be seen as the expression of an immense misunderstanding, for which we must seek to grasp the “historical reasons”? Or does this period give us the meaning of the modern political venture, and thus of liberalism, much more clearly than the subsequent period of reconciliation?[9]
It is a matter of straightforward historical fact that what defines liberalism in its origins is a rejection of Christianity, specifically in the form of the Catholic Church, at least in its actual historical condition in the Middle Ages.[10] The basic question is whether this rejection actually served to bring out the deepest truths of the Gospel regarding individual freedom and dignity, which coincides with a recognition that Christianity was never meant to be a political entity,[11] or whether this rejection of the Church is a repudiation of Christianity simply, a repudiation one might go on either to celebrate or to lament.[12] Significantly—and we will be exploring the reasons for it below—Manent observes that both the “weepers” and the “cheerers” (to use Cyril O’Regan’s terms[13]) of radical modern freedom are able to find common ground regarding the beneficial reality of liberalism precisely after Christianity has confessed its impotence regarding the political order and surrendered any positive claim in its regard.
It should be clear, once it is put in these terms, that the question Manent poses is ultimately a theological one. In order to decide whether the exclusion of the Church from the political order per se, which is institutionalized in liberalism, reaches into the heart of Christianity, we cannot avoid asking: What is the nature of the Church in relation to the Gospel and Christian faith, on the one hand, and in relation to the world and the political order, on the other? More profoundly still, what is the relation between the Church and the Trinitarian God who reveals himself in history, not by sending a message through a prophet, but in the flesh, in the incarnate Son, who is inseparably but unconfusedly both God and man at once? It is impossible to answer Manent’s question without explicitly making, or implicitly presupposing, a judgment regarding these fundamental theological matters.[14] Manent himself never engages with the issue at this level, and so never ventures an answer to the question he poses here.[15] He contents himself instead with making clear some of the stakes and the implications of liberalism, which are deeper and broader than people generally realize.
It is not possible in the present context to explore the theological questions just raised in a manner that would do them justice. These are the most essential of essential questions, at the heart of which lies an utterly inexhaustible mystery, so that we can say not only that “the proper measure of listening to such arguments is a whole life,”[16] as Plato says regarding inquiry into the nature of justice, but in fact even more than one’s earthly life, all through eternity.[17] Acknowledging this inadequacy, we will sketch out a basic thesis on these matters insofar as they bear on our leading question. Our presentation will be “elementary,” because what is at stake is the essence of the Church and the basic form of Christianity and of human existence, rather than some esoteric theological theme. The thesis we will propose is the following: at the theological core of liberalism is the most radical rejection of Christianity possible, because it posits and enacts an undoing of the very thing that defines Christianity, that makes Christianity Christian, namely, the incarnation of the Son of God, which is an “extension” of God, so to speak, into time and space, an extension that aims ultimately to embrace the whole of reality: the cosmic liturgy.[18] As a political phenomenon, which is to say as a form of life and a way of organizing human existence, liberalism is the very incarnation of the disincarnation. It is the making real, the institutionalizing, of the “un-Christening” that C.S. Lewis proposes as the defining feature of modernity.[19] We will argue that this undoing of Christianity necessarily coincides with a metaphysical reversal of the classical priority of act over potency, and will suggest that the resultant primacy of potency serves to explain many of the common features of contemporary life that are the sociological expression of liberalism as a political phenomenon and theory.[20]
It has sometimes been said that the Jews invented history.[21] Whereas the pagan world tended to have a “cyclical” sense of time,[22] viewing it, to use Plato’s expression, as a “moving image of eternity,”[23] the Jews saw time as progressively unfolding through a plot, and so exhibiting the structure Aristotle identified as essential to any plot: a beginning (creation), a middle (covenant), and an end (the promised Messiah). These different senses of time correspond to different senses of the nature of God: for Plato, God is the utterly transcendent Good; for the Jews, God is transcendent, but also engages with the particularities of the temporal order: he chooses a particular people for his own (inconceivable for Plato![24]), and initiates a dramatic encounter.[25] What distinguishes Christianity from every other religion is what we will for the moment call the “claim” that the promise made to Israel has been fulfilled, and more than fulfilled: not only has the Messiah come, but the Messiah turns out not to be another, even greater prophet,[26] or an anointed emissary with a particular (theologico-)political mission, namely, to restore the Jews to the Promised Land. Instead, it is God himself who has entered history, and his mission is not only political, but cosmological, and indeed ontological: to enter into the very being of things and to restore order, not just to a particular people, but through a particular people to the whole world in its deepest foundations. Again, this is a fulfillment that is more than a fulfillment: the end is not just to restore the whole of creation, but gratuitously to elevate it to an unheard of glory, namely, bodily participation in the inner life of the Trinity as “adopted sons” of the Father. We might say that Christianity is a transformative synthesis of the Jews (the particular order of history) and the Greeks (the universal order of being), in the surpassing order of grace.[27]
There are two aspects of this relatively simple description that turn out to bear directly on the essential question of liberalism: first, we see that the potential of the promise is actual in the incarnation, and the scope of the incarnation is universal and comprehensive.
Let us unfold these aspects, noting as we do that our presentation will continue to be rather basic: what is at stake here is not some sophisticated inflection of a theological nicety, but the basic truth of Christianity, and indeed the meaning not only of Christianity but of truth simply. Manent caught sight of this implication when he said that, in its attempt to close itself off from the power of one “particular opinion” (namely, Catholic Christianity), liberalism had found itself “obliged to deprive any opinion of power.”[28] But of course to characterize Christianity as a “particular opinion” is already to view it from the “other side,” from the perspective of its having been transformed into something impotent, essentially “subjective,” and along with it the notion of truth in general. Christianly understood (rather than liberally understood), Christianity is not, and cannot be, a true opinion for the perfectly good reason that it cannot be most fundamentally an opinion, in the sense of a subjective judgment that one person or another happens to make. It cannot be simply an opinion because it is not simply a claim that can be formalized as a proposition in a judgment. It is not a bit of intelligible content or, as traditionally put, Christianity is not first of all a “message.” Instead, it is a word that is at the same time a deed. The foundation of Christianity is most basically a person; Christianity has its origin in God’s self-revelation in the man Jesus Christ. It is not just the words that this man has said that are important. As the Orthodox continue to recognize in their esteem for the feast of the Epiphany, the very flesh of the wordless child (in-fans) is the essential revelation of God. Let us be clear about what is being said here: there is not only a place, but an utterly indispensable one, for subjective judgment, for propositions, and for the recognition that the revelation of God is also an intelligible content. The point is simply that these all have their sense-giving foundation in the fact of the incarnation. The idea of Christianity is originally a reality, without ceasing to be idea: the Word made flesh.
To be sure, Jesus pointed beyond himself to the Father; the truth he brings is not simply contained in his particular flesh but is the transcendent truth of God. Nevertheless, his flesh is not a mere means which conveys to an end that is separable from it (“The Father and I are one”). Christ is the Way, but he is also the Truth. When Christ says that there is no way to the Father except through him, this is not simply an opinion that is asserted as true; it is the expression of a certain ontological necessity. The truth of God cannot finally be anything but the innermost essence of God, the being of God, his “inner life.” Because it is “innermost” and precisely because it is “of God,” we cannot gain access to it unless it is given to us—unless he reveals himself, makes what is “interior” manifest. God cannot reveal himself except perfectly. The most perfect self-revelation, which by its nature cannot be anticipated but only recognized as such, turns out to be the entry of the divine nature itself into the concrete, temporal, created order of history. To refer to all of this as a “particular opinion” is not simply to leave all of the intelligible content intact while suspending judgment over whether or not it is true. It would change the nature of the reality, its essential meaning. Christianity, the “fruit” of the incarnation, is not most basically a possibility to which an individual grants actuality through his judgment (if he so chooses). It is most basically an actuality into which one may or may not enter, in part through the individual’s own judgment. Plato made a similar point about the good, which, because it is the most basic truth and the most basic reality that there is, cannot be a “hypothesis” which would then be considered on the basis of something more fundamental.[29] The difference here is that, for Plato, this most fundamental truth transcended the particularities of history, which means it remains in some sense distinct from the actuality of historical existence; for Christians, the good has entered history and permanently transformed its meaning. We will come back to this point.
As incarnate, the truth of God in Christ was not only an idea to consider, but at the same time a reality to follow. Christ did of course proclaim the Good News, but this was not the delivery of a “detachable” message. Christ is the Good News in person, which is why his proclamation of the gospel was at the same time a gathering of people to himself and a sending of them out (apo-stellō)—according to the degrees of intimacy with which they were brought in, to be sure, but with the final aim of reaching “to the ends of the earth.” This brings to light the meaning and mission of the Church. The most essential description of the Church is that it is the extension of the incarnation into space and time, beyond the particular existence of the man Jesus Christ.[30] This description brings to light the priority of actuality. The Church is not in the first place a group of individuals who decide to come together because they share the same belief—i.e., because they accept the same “particular opinion” as true. Instead, the Church is a reality that coincides in some sense with the faith. The Church’s traditional self-understanding is illuminating here: the Fathers called the Church “she,” recognizing the Church as Christ’s body, which St. Paul identified with his Bride.[31] The Church has her own reality from the antecedently given reality of the Eucharist, Christ’s body in truth,[32] from which she grows just as the body grows from the head, according to the ancient anthropology. This organic metaphor of growth is not accidental, but is itself a witness to the bodily character of the truth here at issue. While the Church has her measure in the authority of Scripture, it has also been recognized that, in another respect, the Church precedes Scripture. This is not simply a historical fact, namely, that the books of the New Testament were composed inside of ecclesial communities that were already in existence, communities that ultimately determined the canon of Scripture, but more basically a metaphysical and theological fact: just as the flesh of the Word precedes his actual speech, so the continuation of the incarnation in the flesh of the Church, the actual body of Christ, precedes the words recounting that reality.[33]
Now, the reality of the Church as an extension of the incarnation explains the nature of its presence in the world. Just as Christ assumed the whole of human nature in his incarnation, it is the very essence of the Church to assume the whole of human history and indeed, as the Fathers recognized, the whole of space and time[34] into the reality of Christ.[35] This is one of the points at which genuine controversy begins. The incarnation does not transform human nature into the divine nature, so that only God is left. Instead, the mystery of this absolutely central truth of Christianity is that the perfect union of God and man does not absorb human nature, but “sets it free.” Similarly, the Church’s mission in the world is not to absorb the world into God, but to transform it in its proper truth as a fruit of its unity with God in Christ. However the precise details of this mystery are interpreted, the basic point for us is that the Church was never meant to be one institution among others, lying next to the world, with all of its mundane business, occupying itself only with the “business” of the next world. There is a Christological heresy embedded in such a conception. The Church is meant to penetrate the world, every ontological inch of it, in order to give it the form of Christ—a form that liberates the world’s own unique reality, its nature that remains abidingly distinct from the grace that it is gratuitously given. One might raise a certain question, from this perspective, regarding the Constantinian moment in the Church’s history. But however one interprets the details of that particular union of the Church with the political order of Rome,[36] this moment gives expression to a fundamental truth of the Church, which is to say a fundamental truth of Christianity: for all of its autonomy, all of its immanent integrity and proper powers, the political order, as the organization of human life in the world, is not a self-enclosed sphere juxtaposed to the reciprocally self-enclosed sphere of the Church; it is not a place outside of the Church and her mission, to which the Church is essentially indifferent and only “episodically” concerned, whenever activity in this otherwise separate space happens to transgress into some explicitly religious or moral matter. The Church bears on the very form of existence in the world, communicating its own form to the world in an analogous way.[37]
It is in relation to this point that we ought to understand the reality of liberalism. As a political form liberalism could only have arisen inside of Christian Europe. This is not because the notion of individual human dignity, which lies at the foundation of liberalism, happens to be a Christian-inspired ideal. To interpret the matter in this way is, as Manent shows, to take one’s bearings from a late period in the history of liberalism, when a reconciliation was possible precisely because Christianity no longer held any significance in the political sphere as such. Rather, liberalism represents a transformation of human nature from the ground up; it is an extraction of human nature, root and branch, from the actual tradition in which it is embedded, so as to enable a truly radical re-interpretation of every dimension of human existence. Such a comprehensive re-interpretation is possible only in reaction to a comprehensive claim on human nature, which is just what Christianity makes by virtue of its universal ontological and historical scope, its mission into the depths of being and through the whole of human culture, all the way up to the world’s eschatological destiny. To say it again, the very essence of liberalism is the rejection, not of “Christian faith,” but specifically of the Catholic Church, insofar as the Catholic Church is the actual presence of Christianity in history, or in other words insofar as it is the faith as having come to bear on concrete human existence, embodied in the world.[38]
This rejection is simultaneous with, and made possible by, a radical re-interpretation of human nature—and this re-interpretation is necessarily “double-sided.” It cannot be a reinterpretation of nature without at the same time being a reinterpretation of grace. Manent is illuminating on one side of this phenomenon, but misses its connection with the other. Let us briefly follow his account. The first efforts, he says, to separate the natural political order from the governance of the Church took place, revealingly, in Italy (in Dante and Marcelius of Padua) in the early 14th Century, and were made possible because of the discovery of Aristotle in the previous century, which was effectively the introduction into the Christian tradition of a source external to that tradition.[39] But this effort was bound to fail, Manent observes, because Aristotle articulated a sense of nature that was essentially hierarchical, and therefore “vulnerable” to the Church’s own claim to be the “highest” good. A more decisive break was needed, which came in the form of Machiavelli, who celebrated the effective power of evil in the political sphere, and so “violently” detached that sphere from the moral order that is inseparable from the Church. But finally, and we might say definitively, there was a re-conception of political order on the basis of a totally non-Aristotelian conception of nature in the “founding fathers” of liberalism: Hobbes and Locke—and, later and with a different inflection, Rousseau.[40] The conceptual, if not also real, foundation of the “social contract” theory that constitutes liberalism in its difference from preceding political forms is a “state of nature,” which has been “shorn” of all human cultural “accretions,” including not only the Christian claim conveyed by the actual tradition, but even an openness to that claim that might be implied by an Aristotelian sense of hierarchy. There is a decisive implication here: in order to “slough off” the Christian claim,[41] it is necessary to neutralize history, tradition, and culture tout court, because the actual culture of Europe cannot be separated from the Church. This fact in itself bears witness to the fundamentally “penetrative” nature of Christianity, or, to use the theological term, its “incarnational” character.
Liberalism proceeds by positing an abstract nature, emptied of the actual substantial content that would immediately—or better: already antecedently—root nature in a concrete web of relations, and so anchor it in various natural hierarchies that co-determine the actuality of what it is, which is then established as the very principle of political order. Thus, instead of the concretely real, in its givenness[42] acting as the basic point of reference for all subsequent determinations, it is something essentially unreal, the unreality of which is precisely what allows it to serve the function it is meant to perform, that sets the basic horizon, and so casts a particular light on everything else. As the Greeks understood, the archē is the archōn: the originating principle is, as principle, never left behind but continues to govern the order it inaugurates and makes possible, “coloring” all the things that follow from it. We will come back to this point towards the end.
It is not possible to reconceive nature, in the manner described, without at the same time reconceiving the very things being sloughed off: culture, history, and tradition. Indeed, such re-conceptions require a standpoint to pivot from, one which is sufficiently deep to be able to bear on everything else. More fundamental than the re-conception of nature is thus the re-conception of the Church’s mission to redeem nature by penetrating into it, taking it up and both healing and transforming it. But this mission cannot be reconceived without a re-conception of Christianity simply, and this cannot occur ultimately without a reinterpretation of the nature of Christ and indeed the nature of God.[43] The classical philosophical tradition understood that, ontologically speaking, it is impossible for what is lower “to have power over” what is higher.[44] What this principle means in the present context is that the re-conception necessarily begins from above: it is in every case a re-conception of the higher principle that makes possible the re-conception of the lower principle, insofar as it—to use phenomenological terminology—sets the horizon within which the lower order realities are able to show themselves in a new way.[45] This implies that the rejection of the Church that constitutes the reality of liberalism cannot occur without first having been made theoretically possible, ultimately in a reconceiving of the nature of God. The political need presupposes a metaphysical/theological “event,” namely, a shift in the most basic horizon of understanding.[46]
So, how do we characterize this shift in understanding? It must first be said that the most ultimate nature will no doubt always elude a definitive formulation; there is an essential mystery here. But this does not prevent us from recognizing certain indications of changes that preceded and made possible the emergence of liberalism. Here, we will mention first a properly theological shift and second an ecclesiological one, both of which took place most evidently in the late middle ages.[47] At the theological level, we can identify a profound change in the nature of God, which comes to expression in a new conception of divine power: first, a clear distinction was made between God’s “potentia ordinata,” his “ordained power,” which is God’s power conceived as instantiated, or as actualized in a particular way,[48] and God’s “potentia absoluta,” which is his “absolute power,” or his power conceived as prior to any particular instantiation, waiting, so to speak, to express itself in one way or another. According to W.J. Courtenay, a great historian of this distinction, the older tradition took for granted the reality of God as he is and as he has in fact and in reality revealed himself to be (potentia ordinata), and viewed the potentia absoluta as an abstraction, a possibility posited as a speculative thought experiment, but no more. What occurred in the late medieval intellectual movement known as nominalism was a radical shift in perspective: the potentia absoluta was conceived, no longer as an abstraction that exists only in speculation rather than in existence, but as the actual reality of God, his innermost essence, which implies an essential contingency in the God who creates the world and reveals himself in history. He has in fact revealed himself in this particular way, namely, supremely in the incarnation of Christ, but he could have revealed himself in an infinite number of ways, or even not at all.[49] This amounts to saying that the actual revelation we have received is not decisive; it does not in fact disclose anything essential about God. It is thus evacuated of any ontological density at a single blow. Significantly, the nominalist distinction has its early roots in Anselm’s “apologetic” project, Cur Deus Homo, which sought to argue for the incarnation on the basis of a more fundamental conception of God in abstraction from the actual order of history,[50] a method that implies a shifting of ground.[51] Anselm undertook this project in order to respond to the claims of Judaism and Islam, which were beginning to be conceived no longer as part of a single, actual historical “narrative,” but as essentially discontinuous rival religious traditions. Adjudicating between rival traditions would seem to require the forging of a putatively neutral standpoint—God considered absolutely rather than according to the actuality of a particular tradition.
The ecclesiological “event” that we wish to highlight in this context is the radical “spiritualist” movement, above all among the late medieval Franciscans. There was a division in the early years of the Franciscan order between those who championed a “literal” following of the founder, St. Francis, through the embrace of total poverty—that is, the absolute renunciation of all property in the sense of ownership, which was distinguished from mere use—and those who acknowledged the need for a minimal ownership, at least by the order if not by individuals within the order. It was eventually the latter group that was granted official approval by the Church. The precise details of this conflict are complex, and there are of course many layers to the particular historical factors and events in its unfolding, which we cannot present here.[52] But we may nonetheless identify the logic of the idea promoted by this movement in relation to our overall argument.[53] We have all but lost the capacity to consider property as an essentially theological matter, an intimation of which is grasped by a 20th Century French historian in his discussion of the investiture controversies of the late 11th and early 12th Centuries:
We do not pretend to justify avarice and cupidity; we would simply account for historical facts; and when we see a St. Gregory, a St. Anselm, a St. Thomas of Canterbury, and so many other great men of the same period, struggling for their worldly possessions, which, at the same time, they trampled under foot; choosing to die rather than abandon the perishable goods of the Church, and yet living in extremest poverty; we say with confidence that in this fact a divine idea is contained.[54]
What is this “divine idea”? We propose it is the understanding of the Church as the extension of the incarnation, in the sense we described above. From this perspective, the complete renunciation of property, to the extent that it is made a Christian ideal simply,[55] and even more fundamentally institutionalized as a basic order of Christian existence, not only represents a radical abdication of the dominion enjoined upon man in the moment of creation, but undermines, at a stroke, the ontological depth of the Christian mission to enter the world, and transform it (analogically) into the body of Christ. What we have in the spiritualist absolute renunciation of worldly dominion is a kind of dis-embodying and a de-actualizing of Christianity, which is now recast as a purely eschatological matter, a kind of idyllic re-enactment of the prelapsarian world, which therefore becomes a “new” creation juxtaposed to the “old” one.[56] This movement rejects the actuality or reality of the given created order—an order radically distorted by sin, but one that remains even more radically God’s good creation even in the distortion, and so calls out for a redemption that is simultaneously a restoration—thus implying a substitution. In a word, spiritualism “de-natures” Christianity.
William of Ockham is a fascinating figure in this context, because the two intellectual shifts mentioned, namely, nominalism and spiritualism, happen to converge in him.[57] The history of Christianity is not unfamiliar with radical eschatological movements, absolutizing the “prophetic” dimension of the gospel, the apocalyptic, and so forth.[58] What makes this late medieval moment so portentous is that the apocalyptic spirit acquires what we might call effective political force by virtue of a re-conception of the very nature of God, and so the nature of power. It is not an accident that William of Ockham happens to be one of the earliest “architects” of the “proto-liberal” separation of Church and State in terms of juxtaposed spheres of jurisdiction (and it is curious that Ockham’s name does not appear in Manent’s history).[59]
It is well known that the first Protestant Reformers sought, in reaction to the one-sided spiritualism we have just described, to recall something of the Church’s original mission to bring Christianity back “down to earth,” as it were. Martin Luther—whose intellectual formation occurred in the nominalist school of Gabriel Biel—rejected the unworldliness of the monasteries and wished to recover a kind of spirituality of everyday life. But there is a strange, and indeed tragic, irony in this: Christianity is precisely “brought back down to earth,” as a “pure faith” that has in the meantime been detached from the reality of the world. Separated from the actuality of the tradition and the real magisterium embodied and organically developed in history, the faith is at the same time evacuated of genuinely ontological substance. If it appears to be more easily brought into the matters of everyday existence, it is because this reconfigured faith does not concern so much the objective form of those matters, their essential meanings, as it does the now principally subjective spirit in which they are engaged, and the “superimposed” purpose with which they are carried out.
If this general characterization is true—and it warrants mention again that we are only proposing a thesis and arguing for its implications rather than proving it, which would of course require a much larger study—it allows us to think of the emergence of liberalism in a rather novel way. It is generally believed, from a strictly historico-political point of view, that liberalism arose as a practical solution to a practical problem: the Reformation led to confessional differences, which led in turn to war, and liberalism, which consisted in an essential way in the effort to separate politics from theological matters, imposed itself as a way of establishing peace in the wake of such differences.[60] Our argument suggests that the practical order always expresses a theoretical horizon that precedes and makes the particular order of praxis possible. Liberalism, at its most original core, is founded on a conception of God as “potentia absoluta.” “Potentia” is an essentially ambiguous term. On the one hand, it can be translated as “power” and interpreted along the lines of effective force. On the other hand, it can be translated as “potency,” which means not yet real, not yet actual or effective. If potency is absolutized, it means there is nothing actually effective about the power that is being posited: absolute potency coincides in one respect with absolute impotence. This implies that God becomes most fundamentally a possibility, which may or may not be “brought into” relevance in a situation through an act of will, rather than an actuality: what reality God happens to have in a particular context becomes essentially arbitrary, both in the sense of having no sufficient justifying reasons and in the sense of being a matter of choice. The actuality of human power suddenly acquires a certain supremacy at the very same time it is rendered anchorless, without an internal order. In his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke identifies a kind of “essential” Christianity, which is a generic sense of a benevolent, providential governor, in relation to which confessional differences do not really matter.[61] But confessional differences do not really matter because, in relation to the ultimate potentia absoluta, they have now become essentially arbitrary; we might say that each is equally meaningless. The only way to resolve differences that are totally arbitrary is either through violence, the forceful imposition of one “particular opinion” in such a way that excludes the others, or simply by putting all religious matters out of play in the actual order of human existence, making them most basically a matter of private conviction, enclosed in a sphere now policed in the name of public order. And so we can put the larger point rather provocatively: if liberalism turns out to be the sole “viable” solution to the problem of religious violence, it is only because liberalism—the pure potentializing of God and so the rendering of his actual reality absolutely arbitrary and so a matter of human force—is the deep cause of religious violence.[62] We have been taught to believe that “truth claims” are dangerous. But as a matter of historical fact and demonstrable intrinsic logic, it is only opinions that are violent. Any claim that imposes itself by force by that very fact ceases to be a truth claim and reveals itself to be an opinion.[63]
There would be a great deal to explore here in other contexts, but we have space only to connect this point with a metaphysical observation and then a cultural observation before concluding. As we mentioned at the outset, a basic axiom in classical metaphysics is the priority of actuality over potentiality. This axiom lies at the basis of the Greek interpretation of being, the centrality of substance, the understanding of causality, the priority of form and natural teleology, the fundamental place of reason in the interpretation of human nature, the notion of virtue as intrinsic excellence, and so forth. It is also essentially connected to the classical sense of the hierarchy of being, which interprets lower realities always principally in the light of the higher.[64] What happens, then, when the highest principle of all gets re-interpreted, no longer as pure act, but now more basically as potency—first as potentia absoluta, then as a generic truth expressed incompletely in a variety of traditions, and finally as an “option,” the possible object of “religious preference”? The absolute no longer functions as the ultimate reference point that makes sense of everything else, or rather, because God remains in some sense highest, this revolution in the meaning of God introduces into the cosmic order a fundamental contradiction, which generates an endless, and constantly self-sustaining and indeed self-reinventing, series of dialectics, divisions, and dissemblances.[65] On the one hand, the lower appears as more real than the higher, and so, rather than the lower receiving its most basic meaning from the higher, the higher gets interpreted as a function of the lower: God gets reconceived as a function of religion, religion as a function of human culture,[66] culture as social construct, society as psychology, psychology as neuro-biology, neuro-biology as configurations of physical events, physical events as “accidental collocations of atoms,” and so forth.[67] On the other hand, and at the same time, the higher remains higher, and so the potentialization remains fundamental, and communicates itself, so to speak, all the way down. The lower realities, in relation to which the higher are interpreted, cannot be interpreted themselves as actual realities, but become potencies that have to receive their own actual reality from what lies below them, and so on ad infinitum. It becomes arbitrary where one starts and stops, in both senses of “arbitrary”: there is no intrinsic reason and what one takes as the starting point can only be posited, which is to say can only be a sort of fiction given effective significance by fiat. Here we see why the “nature” that constitutes the “state of nature,” which has been excised from the culture and tradition that would inevitably have bound it to the Church and which is then used as the pivot to re-interpret the political order, necessarily has no actual content, but can be understood as populated by purely abstract (and so equal) quantities of power, whether that power is understood most basically as violent force (Hobbes) or, in appearance at least, as peaceful co-existence (Locke). The key is the complete absence of actual substance. As content-less potencies (“rights holders,” politically speaking, rather than beings with actual natures) these units will bear the ambiguity that is inextricable from potentia abstracted from concrete actuality: they will be essentially impotent and will have a real presence only through self-assertion, if (unlike the unborn, for example) they can manage to summon such force.
The radical re-conception of reality that occurs by virtue of the potentializing of the highest principle, which has been severed from the actuality of history, cannot help but find eventual expression in every dimension of the culture, though precisely because it is such a profound shift the concrete implications may begin to unfold only centuries later. There is no space to explore any particular aspect of this at any length, but there is some value in a wide overview, a sketch in the broadest of strokes, to suggest both that apparently disparate phenomena may turn out to have a deep connection with each other, and also that they are ultimately unified by a shared principle that is both metaphysical and theological. The priority of act, among other things, implies at the cultural level a sense of form that is naturally “noble,” since it is that to which existence aspires, in which it finds rest and by which it orients itself in its essential activities. By contrast, the primacy of potency implies a tendency to internal collapse and fragmentation, and so generally requires an extrinsic impress of, if not order then at least restraint and regulation. Along these lines, we will here simply list, without any particular order or claim to be exhaustive, and without any elaboration, twenty-five features of contemporary life that we take to be evident to anyone who cares to look around thoughtfully, all of which, we suggest, are a cultural expression of the priority of potency over act.
There is a basic restlessness, a radical “mobility,” because there is no “anchor” in reality that would present a place of contemplative rest;
Instead of real flourishing as the perfection of one’s actual nature, there is a more negative preoccupation above all with safety;
Participation, or membership in a reality larger than oneself, is regularly trumped, not so much by the reality of the individual as by the activity of self-assertion;
An essentially abstract sense of equality is taken to be a, perhaps the, governing ideal of social existence;
Intrinsic meanings and values, which have their roots in actual realities and demand for their recognition the categories of goodness, truth, and beauty, are relentlessly functionalized, identified with what they achieve or produce, and measured by consequences;
There is an all-encompassing drag toward materialism, both in the moral/existential sense of the reduction of goodness to economic value and in the properly metaphysical sense of a tendency to interpret “spiritual” realities exhaustively in terms of their material components;
A sense of transcendence, in all of its manifestations, is either lost altogether, or it is moralized or sentimentalized;
Cultural forms, and the taste and manners that accompany them, are minimized, held in contempt, or enacted only ironically;
The capacity to understand and recognize genuine authority, and the capacity to hold and exercise it (these capacities cannot be separated from each other) disappear, and so authority is generally reduced to power;
Political discourse, cut off from reference to the reality of intrinsic meaning that would give it substance and enable genuine deliberation, tends in a formalistic and functional way to the opposition of simple polarities;
The profound principle of unity that allows the cultivation of beauty is excluded, and so art tends to fragment into the sentimental (art as kitsch or mere ornament) and the “edgy” (art as political statement);
Technology increasingly saturates the culture, penetrating into the most intimate (social relations) and the most significant (work, both manual and intellectual) dimensions of human existence, so that, even when the excitement and curiosity fades and concern begins to set in, the culture can find no substantial resources for resistance;
Absent the intrinsic organizing principle of form, there is a tendency toward sprawl in public building and social organization;
Architectural style tends to fragment into either pure utility (whether that be measured by economic efficiency or ecological sensitivity) or the purely aesthetic, that is, the intrusion of features that are not only useless but inconvenient and intended only to produce a psychological effect;
One witnesses a relentless, collusive effort to deny the essential meanings of things, rooted in the actual givenness of nature; an effort that is forced to go to extremes of absurdity and self-parody;
Detached from its roots in the real, language tends to inflate, or to settle into the formulations of (technologically mediated) hip expressions or phrases and words “of the day,” accompanied by a tendency toward hyper-rhetoricization in speech, both public and private;
The actuality of human judgment cedes its place increasingly to process, technique, and automation;
The “peace” of order is generally imposed, enforced, and repaired through the essentially coercive means of political action, police and military force, and lawyers;
Education ceases to be a formation of the person, through his introduction into the tradition, which he is meant to display and pass on in turn, and becomes instead a training, the provision of the information and skills need for individual success;
The organization of human affairs, institutions, and collective endeavors, tends to take the form of bureaucracy and formalized “management,” whenever it cannot simply be replaced by computer or machine;
Philosophy is dethroned by science (and engineering) as the paradigm of human reason;
There is a reduction of wisdom traditions to a culture of “scientifically-trained and certified experts”;
Natural bonds, or those rooted in nature, are reinterpreted as far as possible from the ground up in terms of contracts (deliberately) entered into by (abstractly) “free” agents;
Political authority is reduced to “the state,” which is either relied on in a disordered way (the “nanny state”), insofar as the bureaucratic structures replace the role of “natural” human institutions, or it is rejected as an artificial intrusion into one’s affairs (libertarianism);
And finally tradition, rather than unifying a people, becomes a principle of diversity (“cultures and traditions”), and is thereby reduced to a superficial overlay—the seasoning one uses in cooking, the style of dress, taste in music, and so forth.
Perhaps in spite of appearances, this list of features is not meant to be a moralistic “rant” or a romantic lament about “how bad things have gotten,” with the implied pathetically impotent wish that we could return to “the old ways.”[68] In the first place, history is real and will remain real, so that any attempt at recovering old forms will always turn out to reinvent them in some respect, to embody them in a new way, from within the embracing horizon of the contemporary age—in a word, “there is no going back.” Ironically, the desire simply to reproduce old forms, as if these were detachable items that could be chosen as alternatives to what is otherwise given, is itself, and in spite of itself, an expression of liberalism.[69] In the second place, according to the classical Christian vision of the world, nothing can exist without being ultimately good, true, and beautiful, which means that the movement of history will always be in some respect a propagation of goodness. Thus, a full characterization of contemporary existence would have to include, alongside the list presented above, a recognition of the affronts to human dignity or unnecessary inconveniences to human flourishing in pre-modern institutions and practices, and a serious notice of all that is good in contemporary life—things such as the extension of opportunity to previously neglected groups, a new sensitivity to personal dignity, the discovery of genuine selfhood and individual uniqueness beyond absorption into group identity, and even such things as a new appreciation and cultivation of local communities, natural food production, homeschooling movements, and the like. Who could fail to see the benefit to humanity of the proliferation of craft breweries? The decisive question is how we interpret the relation between the good features and the problematic ones listed above. To answer simply that there are some good things in liberalism that have to be balanced against the various bad things is to misunderstand what liberalism is in truth. Again, without being able to provide an argument for, and defense of, the thesis, in the light of the foregoing discussion, we propose that there is literally nothing good about liberalism per se—there is nothing good about it because, first of all and according to its essence, it is as total a rejection of Christianity as is possible, and, moreover, by its nature it is parasitical, something unreal in itself in the strict metaphysical sense of being privative, insofar as it is founded in a potency that asserts itself over actuality: it is not a reality, as we have seen, but a negation of reality, or perhaps a contrived conspiracy to negate reality. To put this in an extreme formulation, understanding evil in the ontological sense of the privation of goodness, we could say that liberalism is evil as a political form. To put it thus is not to exaggerate the problem of liberalism and the threat it poses; quite to the contrary, this formulation actually trivializes, or at least relativizes it, and in any event allows us to keep things in perspective. As a political form of evil, liberalism only ever exists as a perversion of what is antecedently real, of what is genuinely good, true, and beautiful in itself.[70] The genuinely good things of modern existence, which have emerged inside of the horizon of liberalism and in some sense only there, may be seen from this perspective as the irrepressible fruitfulness of nature, the ever-surprising inventiveness of human culture and freedom, the deeply creative resource of tradition, which is able to turn even the radical negativity of liberalism to its own use, to achieve something humanly beneficial and even glorious. Can we say that these benefits are the fruits of liberalism? Yes, but only in the sense that, for example, the most precious treasures of Christian dogma are the “fruits” of heresy, in response to which they first emerged, fruits that may never have existed otherwise.
If it is true, what would such a judgment imply for how we ought to live in the world we now occupy and respond to the reality of liberalism, which has established its place in the modern West over the course of five hundred years and increasingly around the globe? It is a profound and delicate question that cannot be answered very satisfactorily by some general principle, because, by its nature, it requires prudential insight proper to always unique circumstances. But a final point ought to be said in conclusion: the question of what are we to do ought not be our first question. The most radical response to liberalism, the most decisive step outside the horizon it sets, comes not in the form of some political program, whether it be one of subversive cooperation or radical resistance, but in the act of understanding. To understand, not as a means of figuring out the most effective plan of action, but simply as a reality already good, true, and beautiful in itself and not in need of a practical consequence to justify itself, is in the end to recollect and honor the priority of actuality over potency that we have argued is the essence of liberalism to deny. To direct one’s principal energies to an understanding of liberalism in its original core is already in some sense to reconnect with the tradition that precedes liberalism and so is not itself measured by it. We have sought, on the one hand, to present the deep theological and metaphysical origins of liberalism that bear in an abiding way on its essence, and on the other hand, to suggest that this endeavor is not a matter of mere history or of merely “academic” interest because the original essence of liberalism actually comes to expression in the very concrete realities that constitute our daily experience. The most important thing, however, is not to provide a characterization that allows for a proper assessment, however important that may be; it is to pose the essentially “untimely” question in a serious way. A liberal can debate the question whether liberalism is good, bad, or indifferent; a liberal can discuss the best way to engage with liberalism, whether to play within the rules it sets and attempt to transform it from within, or simply to blow the whole thing up. But a liberal cannot ask the question, “What is liberalism?” with a desire to get to the deepest heart of the matter. Only asking this essential question allows us to put liberalism in its place.
Republished with gracious permission from New Polity.
Notes:
[1] Socrates compares himself to a gadfly in Apology, 30e; in the Meno, the image used is the torpedo fish, which paralyzes its prey (Meno, 80a-d). The “what is x” question that he poses frustrates his listeners’ desire to pursue a set course of action (see the ending of the Euthyphro for a particularly striking instance: 15b-16a). Plato contrasts business with philosophy in the Phaedrus, 227a-c; cf., Theaetetus, 172c-e.
[2] This is not to say that the decision ought never to be made, but rather that a decision is also a kind of interruption, this time of the contemplative order. Human existence is dramatic at its core.
[3] See Plato, Republic, 354a-c.
[4] The very existence of this magazine is a sign of the changing of the times in this respect.
[5] See for example the gathering of authors at the websites The Josias and Sancruensis.
[6] For a general sense of the dispute, one might consult the article in First Things, 5/29/19, by Sohrab Ahmari entitled “Against David French-ism,” and David French’s “What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong,” in the National Review, 5/30/2019.
[7] Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (New York: Torchbook, 1962), 33-35, et passim. Kierkegaard also had a marvelous premonition regarding the invention of the cell phone: “Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube which, say, could be heard over the whole land… I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used”: Journals and Papers, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 150-51. Is there a connection between liberalism and the cell phone, liberalism and Twitter? Of course there is, even more basic than the connection between liberalism and the newspaper, which Tocqueville brought to light (Democracy in America [Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1969], 517) because of the essentially technological form. We will try to bring it to the surface at the end of the essay.
[8] “‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ —thus asks the Last Man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the Last Man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink… One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion. One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ — say the Last Men, and they blink.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1982), 129-30.
[9] Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), xvii.
[10] Manent goes on to lay out the “story” of this rejection from the perspective of intellectual history, treating in succession the main protagonists of the story, the principal theorists of liberalism. As we have suggested, one could also delve more directly into the historical events, beginning perhaps with the investiture controversies of the 11th and 12th centuries, and so on. All of these perspectives are necessary for the “whole picture.”
[11] This is a position one tends to find among Protestants, but also (curiously) has Orthodox (see for example David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009] and Catholic versions (for example in the John Courtney Murray-inspired Catholic neo-conservatives, who accept the basic liberal order and argue for Christian influence through the form of civil society; a classic text, though written before the author became Catholic, is Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Modern World [New York: HarperCollins, 1987]).
[12] A recent example of one who celebrates liberalism’s overthrow of Christianity, see Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York: Norton, 2014); an example of one who also sees liberalism as an overthrow of Christianity, but laments it, is Christopher A. Ferrara, Liberty, the God that Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myth of the Secular State from Locke to Obama (Tacoma, Wash.: Angelico Press, 2012).
[13] See Cyril O’Regan, “The Gift of Modernity,” in Church Life Journal, March 20, 2018.
[14] In the debate that my father, David L. Schindler, engaged with the Catholic neo-conservatives, Neuhas, Novak, and Weigel, in the late 80’s and ‘90’s, the “Neo-Cons” always insisted that no discussion of theological matters was necessary since, as Catholics, they could presume general agreement. The controversial point was the interpretation of economics or politics. Schindler insisted, by contrast, that the disagreements on these matters inevitably end up turning on more fundamental theological positions. Economic and political judgments can never avoid bearing theological and metaphysical presuppositions.
[15] The best critique of Manent’s theological presuppositions is no doubt John Milbank’s essay, “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority,” New Blackfriars 85:996 (March 2004): 212-38. Milbank accuses Manent of ultimately conceding liberalism as the basic framework, though it is not in the end entirely clear whether Manent articulates his full views on the matter in his History of Liberalism, which is the principal target of Milbank’s criticism.
[16] Plato, Rep., 450b.
[17] Aquinas states that, in the eschatological vision of God, “the divine substance is always viewed with wonder by any created intellect, since no created intellect comprehends it”: Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.62.9. This wonder will presumably “endure” eternally.
[18] Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the expression to sum up the vision of Maximus the Confessor, but it might be used as a summary of the Patristic understanding of the telos of Christianity simply: Cosmic Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003). The word “liturgy” comes from the two Greek words, “leitos” and “ergos,” and means a public work, enacted in common.
[19] See his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 1954. In a way that aligns with the argument that we will be making here, Lewis insists it is false to think “that Europe can come out of Christianity ‘by the same door as in she went’ and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.” As for the argument we will set out here, we do not claim it is the deepest possible analysis of the conceptual shift at the heart of the origin of modernity. Ferdinand Ulrich traces out an even more profound one, for example, in the metaphysical interpretation of the inner life of the Trinity: see Homo Abyssus: The Drama of the Question of Being (Washington, D.C.: Humanum Academic Press, 2017), 56-60.
[20] This is laid out far more extensively in my book Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), part 2, especially chapter 5, 193-275.
[21] See Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 115; 126-27.
[22] Obviously this is an oversimplification, but there is an essential point here: it has to be cyclical because of their understanding of the nature of truth. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 110.
[23] Plato, Timaeus, 37d.
[24] And also for Hegel, who could not reconcile the particularity of the Old Testament God with his sense of the Absolute. It is interesting to consider, from this perspective, the place of Spinoza in the origins of liberal thought: a Jew who undoes the very thing that makes Judaism unique, namely, the will of God, which has selected from out of the world, so to speak, the “chosen people.” Spinoza is one of the first to introduce a radically post-Judeo-Christian sense of God into the principal intellectual stream of the West. On this point, see Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (New York: Norton, 2006), and Stephen Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
[25] For a comprehensive interpretation of the relation between Israel and God as a drama, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 6: The Old Covenant (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).
[26] See Hebrews 1:1-2.
[27] This is all a bit simply put: the particular order of the Jews also manifests a movement toward the universal, and the universal order of the Greeks is also particular, but our claim would be that this openness of each to the other receives a particularly clear grounding in Christian revelation.
[28] Manent, xviii.
[29] Plato, Republic, 511b. The absolute first principle cannot be a hypothesis, but by its nature cannot but be the actual beginning, on the basis of which real argument is made.
[30] Hence, the traditionally-recognized role of the Spirit in the life of the Church, who “universalizes” the particularity of Christ’s mission by transcending that particularity in a certain respect, but only ever as the Spirit of Christ: see John 16:12-14.
[31] See Ratzinger, “The Origin and the Essence of the Church,” in Called to Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 13-45; see also Henri de Lubac, “The Church and Our Lady,” in The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 315-80.
[32] See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
[33] The reality is of course more complicated and paradoxical in the sense that the Church begins in one respect with the institution of the Eucharist, which is both a verbal and “physical” event, but also the outpouring of blood and water, at the moment in which Mary and John are given to each other through Christ’s words. Even the early Church communities were founded by the words of Christ, which were eventually recorded in the book, and in any event the flesh of the infant Christ is still the flesh of the Word, eternally spoken by the Father. The point is that these dimensions—the “verbal” and the “fleshly”—can never simply be separated.
[34] See Colossians 1:20.
[35] Charles Péguy understood this perhaps better than anyone in the modern era. See, for example, his two essays, Memories of Youth and Clio I, published in the English volume entitled Temporal and Eternal (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), and The Portal of the Mystery of Hope (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
[36] The name Constantine is associated with the establishment of the Church as a political entity, with temporal powers and concerns, although the historical facts are complex. Constantine did oversee the granting of “religious tolerance” to Christianity in the Edict of Milan (313) but the document known as the “Donation of Constantine,” which was used as a claim of temporal power for the pope in the middle ages was likely forged in the 8th Century. In any event, we do not mean to enter into any debate about the nature of the Church’s political power or how this is associated with Constantine, or actually spelled out in many different ways over the course of the middle ages, but simply to record the fact that the incarnation eventually implies an intrinsic interest in the “secular” order.
[37] In a classic study, Ernst H. Kantorowicz showed that the medieval conception of political authority was explicitly an analogous repetition of the central Christological mysteries within the political sphere: see The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). For a contemporary recollection of the medieval political form outside the lens of liberal assumptions, see Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic Press, 2017).
[38] This is why the “iconoclast” controversies are so important: while they may seem to be efforts to preserve the sanctity of God and things divine, the gesture effectively separates what is now interpreted in a dualistic sense as “secular” from the claim of God’s self-revelation. Smashing images of the divine is in this sense a radically self-protective gesture.
[39] Manent, 10-11.
[40] It bears reflecting on the extent to which liberalism is only made possible after the scientific revolution, and how the roots of this revolution were in turn planted in the late 13th century when Aristotelian naturalism was condemned by the Church. Hobbes and Locke were, if not actual scientists, nevertheless serious dabblers in science. Rousseau was not so much a scientist himself, but he certainly embraced a new naturalism that was almost entirely untouched by the scholastic-Aristotelian tradition.
[41] It is crucial to see that we are not claiming this was the actual intentions of any particular “social contract” theorist (though we are not denying it either); we are instead claiming that this is the best description of what is actually occurring (or at least is better than any merely historical attempt to discern actual subjective intentions, the so-called mens auctoris) because it is a description that proceeds from what is most fundamental.
[42] Which, importantly, is more than the empirically factual. This is why someone like David Hume does not offer a genuine alternative. Hume also rejects substance (and, not incidentally, Christianity), even if he is more sympathetic to things like custom and tradition. Those who appeal to Hume in order to defend the significance of tradition must be aware, “beware,” of the fact that his “tradition” is not at all the traditional one. It should be noted that in this essay we do not intend to defend “conservatism,” as the movement that originated in the middle of the twentieth century but drew on figures from the Restoration period, to the extent that this movement is itself a modern phenomenon.
[43] From what standpoint does one reconceive the nature of God? Perhaps the nature of being simply? Or does the understanding of being depend on the understanding of God? There is clearly a profound mystery here, which we cannot explore in the present context. What accounts for the change at the deepest possible level? Is it the result of an act of will or a shift in interpretation? It seems it would have to be simultaneously and inseparably a matter of intellect and will, of understanding and disposition, each implicating the other. Ferdinand Ulrich attempts to bring this fundamental disposition to light (without trying to give a causal explanation of it) in his account of man’s relation to being and God in Homo Abyssus.
[44] See Plato, Protagoras, 352b-357e. This is the principle behind Plato’s notorious identification of incontinence with ignorance, which is largely misunderstood. For a more substantial exposition of this point and a partial defense, see Freedom from Reality, 300-08.
[45] One of the most profound and powerful thinkers who understood this basic idea in the modern world is Heidegger: see, e.g., his essay, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 271-305. This insight lies at the root of his conception of the “being of beings.” What we are proposing here, however, is quite the opposite of what Heidegger proposes in the end, because he remains resolutely within the Greek horizon, and has absolutely no place for the Christian transformation (arguably appropriating the Christian form without acknowledgment that he is doing so) into the Greek horizon.
[46] This can be and in fact almost inevitably is beyond explicit intention or articulation of understanding; but the point necessarily remains. Ironically, the view that practical decisions have priority presupposes the very re-conception of history and culture and the nature of human action, and thus the metaphysical/theological shift that enables it: the understanding changes, one rejects the reality that the change enables one to reconceive, and then one ends by thinking the whole was the function of a decision, a principally historical event in the order of action, more basic than any “ideas.” It is the primacy of a particular idea that allowed the primacy of ideas to be rejected.
[47] Michael Alan Gillespie has laid out the role of the nominalist movement, which he interprets as a specifically theological, or in other words intra-ecclesial, shift rather than the effect of some external cause, in The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). His argument complements the one we are making here. For the role of nominalism in the rise of the new conception of nature in modern science, which we have suggested is essential in the development of liberal political theory, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
[48] “Particular” is not the right word, since it implies the priority of a more universal condition, which is then constrained in one way rather than another that would also have been possible. This is why the very distinction, thus articulated, logically entails the reversal of priority. Indeed, the word “ordinata,” as a past participle, encourages this problematic interpretation, because it implies that the order thus existing was something achieved. Aquinas (ST 1.25.5) uses the word but attempts to avoid the problematic implications by saying that what is ordained has always already (eternally) been preordained by God’s will, which helps mitigate the potential problem (or in other words the problem of potential). Whether this is entirely successful, we will leave for some other occasion to explore.
[49] One can affirm some form of this without simply absolutizing the potentia absoluta, so to speak, as we suggested in the previous footnote that Aquinas attempted to do. It is nevertheless an extremely delicate matter.
[50] See W.J. Courtenay, “Necessity and Freedom in Anselm’s Conception of God,” in Die Wirkungsgeschichte Anselms von Canterbury, Analecta Anselmiana 4.2 (Frankfurt, 1975), 39-64. The point is not to deny apologetics, natural theology, or fundamental theology in principle, which would allow one inside the Christian tradition to debate and discuss with those outside the Christian tradition, but simply to observe that the project of “proving” Christianity on explicitly non-Christian grounds is an extremely delicate matter that has always been approached with great care by the tradition.
[51] “Ground” means most immediately reason (cf., the German word Grund), but also has an ontological sense. What one takes to be the ultimate reference point, basis, or justifying principle of an argument is not a matter of metaphysical indifference. However distinct they may in fact be, logic can never simply be separated from being.
[52] See, e.g., David Burr, Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 2010); Virpi Mäkinen, Property Rights in the Late Medieval Discussion on Franciscan Poverty (Leuven: Peeters, 2001).
[53] John Milbank, “The Franciscan Conundrum,” Communio (2015): 466-92; much of the following discussion of spiritualism is inspired by Milbank’s interpretation.
[54] Abbé Theodore Ratisbonne, St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Oracle of the Twelfth Century, new anniversary edition, (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books and Publishers, 1991), 139. He is discussing the investiture controversy.
[55] Towards the end of his well-appreciated book celebrating the great Italian saint, G.K. Chesterton remarks that Francis was so great a personality there was a natural tendency among his followers to think of him as a founder of a new religion. In contrast to this tendency, the pope’s condemnation of the spiritualist exaggeration, and the subordination of the movement to the institutional Church, was right and fitting: “for the Church could include all that was good in the Franciscans, and the Franciscans could not include all that was good in the Church,” Saint Francis of Assisi (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 142.
[56] In his dissertation, “John XXII, the Franciscans, and the Natural Right to Property” (PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 1987), John Patrick Oakley shows, among other things, that the Franciscans saw themselves as “recreating the state of nature”—which is of course a “proto-liberal” move.
[57] See Jonathan Robinson, “William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights: Sources, Texts, and Contexts” (PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010).
[58] It is well-known that the early church had a tendency to interpret the imminence of the Parousia in temporal terms, which was taken to entail a disregard for worldly affairs, appealing to St. Paul for example (1 Cor 7:29-31).
[59] For an overview of his political thought and a demonstration of its proto-liberal character, see Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham: Personal and Institutional Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). See also John Kilcullen, “The Political Writings” in The Cambridge Companion to William of Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 302-25.
[60] See William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), for a groundbreaking study, complementing the point we are making here, but from a different angle.
[61] In the opening lines of the Letter, Locke makes reference to the “true church,” beyond all “different professions,” the “chief characteristic mark” of which is “toleration”: Letter Concerning Toleration (New York: MacMillan Pub., 1950), 13. But not all religions deserve to be tolerated. According to the editor, Patrick Romanell, it is generally acknowledged that, “despite the fact that [Locke] takes Mohammedans for his illustration [of a group that cannot be tolerated], a glance at the politico-religious situation in seventeenth-century England under the Stuarts would show that he really was referring to the Roman Catholics,” “Introduction,” 10. In a word, any Christianity can be tolerated . . . but the one that actually makes a claim on history and the political order.
[62] This point is put baldly—clearly, there was violence in the conflict between Christians and Muslims, but on this score Pope Benedict’s remarks in the Regensburg address are pertinent (“Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Recollections,” September 12, 2006). In fact, arguments have been made that even nominalism has its source in Islam: see W.J. Courtenay, “The Critique on Natural Causality in the Mutakallimun and Nominalism,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 77-94, but Etienne Gilson observes that the tendency to allow a theological conviction about God’s power to eclipse human reason and the substantial realities of nature belonged to some early Christian thinkers as much as to certain Muslim theologians: see his chapter “Theologism and Philosophy” in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner, 1937), 31-60. Interestingly, it is the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides who first raised the concern about this tendency in both Christians and Muslims.
[63] This point requires greater elaboration and defense than we can give it here. For a more thorough argument, see my chapter “The Truth is Defenseless,” in Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2008), 226-82, in contrast to the sophistic parrying of opinions described in chapter one, “The Logic of Violence,” 41-84. The argument does not exclude all coercion in principle with respect to the truth, but fundamentally relativizes it to a more radical allowance of the truth to manifest itself and for the other to see.
[64] This is why, as we saw in Manent’s account, the initial attempts to separate the natural political order from the order of the Church had to fail to the extent that those attempts remained bound to a classical metaphysics. Only a total reinterpretation of nature suffices.
[65] Elsewhere, we have characterized this as “diabolical,” drawing on the etymological sense of the word: dia-ballein, to cast asunder or to set at odds. See Freedom from Reality, 151-92.
[66] A perfect example of the sociological reduction of religion can be found in an article that just appeared on the BBC News website, “Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the Future of Religion?” 2 August 2019. Robert Spaemann makes the argument that the functional reconceptualization of religion lies at the origin of sociology, and thus of modern thought in general: “The Traditionalist Error: On the Sociologizing of the Idea of God in the Nineteenth Century” and “The End of Modernity?” in The Robert Spaemann Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 37-44, 211-29.
[67] Obviously there are more or less subtle variations, and the different configurations can be drawn in a much more sophisticated way. The point here, however, is not to make an argument about any particular claim, but present a general picture, in which the details would have to be filled out in different contexts.
[68] Mark Lilla presents a rhetorically powerful, but conceptually weak, reaction to reactionary critiques of modernity (in this case he is reviewing Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation), in an essay “Blame It On the Reformation” in New Atlantic, September 14, 2012, in which he mocks such nostalgia.
[69] It is a striking fact that some of the strongest intellectual champions of traditionalism—for example, the new defenders of “integralism” mentioned earlier—have tended to come from the United States, a country uniquely founded on the relativizing of all traditions. On the contradictions inherent in the modern movements of traditionalism, see Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
[70] This view of liberalism is actually implicitly held by those who argue that the machinery of the state in liberalism has always depended on a thriving “civil society,” and was never meant to replace it as an order of existence in itself. There are many versions of this, but it has been a central position in neoconservative thought (a relatively recent, robust argument for this position can be found in Martin Rhonheimer, The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2013). It is not a surprise that there have always been worries, accompanying this position, that the habits and practices of liberalism have a tendency to erode given social structures – see for example Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). Our calling liberalism a political form of evil simply makes both of these points—that liberalism is dependent on a more basic culture founded on a substantial notion of the integral human good, and that it represents a force that tends to be corrosive of society—rather more succinctly.
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