Kozinski Modernity Apocalypse

Modernity as Apocalypse
Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos

Thaddeus J. Kozinski
Sacred Nihilism
and the
Counterfeits of Logos
v
First published in English by Angelico Press, 2019
Copyright © Thaddeus J. Kozinski 2019
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Cover design: Michael Schrauzer

CONTENTS
Introduction: The End of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I MODERNITY
1 Modernity: Disease and Cure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2 Becoming Children of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
II LOGOS
3 What’s Good? Wherefrom Ought? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4 Plato: Being in Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
5 The Good, the Right, and Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
6 Where Top and Bottom Meet: Public Discourse
Rightly Understood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
III METANOIA
7 An Apology for Uselessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
8 Why the Philosopher and the Catholic University
Need Each Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9 Catholic Education and the Cult of Theistic
Evolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
10 Why Modern, Liberal, Pluralistic, Secularist
Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves . . . . . . . 109
x insights into christian esoterism
IV KEEP YOURSELF FROM IDOLS

11 Sacred Ambivalence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
12 America/Leviathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
13 From Socratic Subverter to Status-Quo
Supporter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
14 When Christians Persecute Their Own . . . . . . . . 153
15 Speaking the Unspeakable: Political Correctness
on the Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
16 The Conspiracy Against Conspiracy . . . . . . . . . . . 169
V APOCALYPSE
17 The Tradition of Nothing Worship . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
18 The Satanic Sacred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
19 Modernity and Apocalypse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
20 Why Mysticism is Not an Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
xi
To Tami, Anatolia, Sophia, and T.J.

xii insights into christian esoterism
The general public is being reduced to a state where people not

only are unable to find about the truth but also become unable to
search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and
trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a
fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.
Josef Pieper
Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And so do not
accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other
becomes a destructive lie.
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Nowadays the devil has made such a mess of everything in the sys-
tem of life on earth that the world will presently become uninhab-
itable for anybody but Saints. The rest will drag their lives out in
despair or fall below the level of man. The antinomies of human
life are too exasperated, the burden of matter too oppressive;
merely to exist, one has to expose oneself to many snares. Chris-
tian heroism will one day become the sole solution for the prob-
lems of life.
Jacques Maritain
The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.

Karl Rahner
Introduction:
The End of Modernity
Modernity’s Soteriology
M
odernity is inadequately characterized as a mere chrono-
logical time-period, on the one hand, or a timeless,
abstract idea, on the other. Perhaps it is better described
as a culturally and historically embodied consciousness or cast of
mind, a “social imaginary.”1 Indeed, modernity functions in prac-
tice and in the souls of many as a full-fledged religious culture: it
possesses a sacred origin (the Renaissance’s rebirth of man and the
Enlightenment’s birth of Reason); a sacred event or set of events
(the Reformation, the Treaty of Westphalia, the Glorious, Ameri-
can, and French Revolutions); sacred texts (Kant’s sapere aude, the
UN Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, the American Constitution); sacred dogmas (the separation
of Church from state and religion from politics, the sanctity of indi-
vidual rights, the political toleration of all beliefs, “the right to
define one’s concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and
of the mystery of human life”2); a perpetual enemy and source of
evil (dogmatism, religious war, intolerance, racism, sexism, hierar-
chy); and lastly, and most importantly, a soteriology. If we define
soteriology as what makes lasting and ultimate peace between com-
peting individuals,3 modernity’s soteriology is many-sided: the
political hegemony of the nation-state with the exclusive right to
employ coercive force, the privatization and liberty of religious
pppp
1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

2. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992).
3. William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark,
2002).
1
belief and practice, inexorable scientific advancement, and com-
mercial prosperity. We late-moderns can add private self-creation,
moralistic therapeutic deism, and a globalistic market and multi-
cultural state eschewing objective moral and spiritual truth to
ensure perpetual peace and stability.
To its devotees, modernity is just the way things really are: a non-
ideological, worldview-neutral account and practice of human
flourishing bereft of the superstitious, irrational, freedom-suppress-
ing and ruler-serving, ancient-medieval theoretical and practical
apparatus of scholasticism, priestcraft, oppression, and feudalism.
But to those more resistant to and skeptical of its soteriology,
modernity is Christendom’s rotting corpse, having been murdered
sometime in the Enlightenment by the sword of de-hellenization,
the poison of nominalization, and the stranglehold of seculariza-
tion. And modernity has divided up the body, giving us Christ with-
out the cross, in its liberal-democratic half, and the cross without
Christ, in its totalitarian half. Modernity is nothing more than a
counterfeit of and parasite on the Mystical Body of Christ.
There are, of course, other “just so” stories in this traditionalist
vein, as well as many non-theological, secularist-friendly, progres-
sivist narratives. Indeed, the narratives of modernity are seemingly
endless and incommensurable, notoriously resistant to definitive
adjudication and harmonious negotiation. What is needed is an
adequate synthesis in which the partial truths of all the myriad sto-
ries and accounts can come together.
The “Immanent Frame” and the “Great Separation”

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor tells us:
We have undergone a change in our condition, involving both an
alteration of the structures we live within, and our way of imaging
these structures. This is something we all share, regardless of our
differences in outlook. But this cannot be captured in terms of a
decline and marginalization of religion. What we share is what I
have been calling “the immanent frame”; the different structures
we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so on, constitute
2
Introduction: The End of Modernity
such a frame in that they are part of a “natural,” or “this worldly”
order which can be understood in its own terms, without refer-
ence to the “supernatural” or “transcendent.”4
Mark Lilla, in The Stillborn God, describes this change in our condi-
tion as
the liberation, isolation, and clarification of distinctively political
questions, apart from speculations about the divine nexus. . . .
Politics became, intellectually speaking, its own realm deserving
independent investigation and serving the limited aim of provid-
ing the peace and plenty necessary for human dignity. That was
the Great Separation.5
Understanding the genealogy of modernity is not of merely aca-
demic interest, for it is, as suggested above and demonstrated below
in the chapters that follow, not just a chronological period or set of
ideas—it is an ineluctable existential reality. And if, as Taylor claims,
the world we live in now is literally God-less, what does that entail
for the billions of religious believers?
In the remainder of this introduction and in several chapters in
this volume, I wish to pursue the following questions: where did
this “immanent frame” and “great separation” come from, and what
caused it? When did our condition supposedly “definitely and irre-
versibly change,” and is this truly the case? How would one know? Is
this change unprecedented, and if so, why? And most importantly,
should we be celebrating or repudiating our new situation, or
should we be dispassionately neutral? Even with Charles Taylor’s
exhaustively detailed and magisterial book treating these questions,
A Secular Age, the questions remain. Indeed, if anything, Taylor has
rendered them more pressing and complex.
In his excellent revisionist intellectual history, The Theological
Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has made a persuasive case
that the origins of modernity are primarily theological:
4. Taylor, A Secular Age, 594.

5. From Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God, quoted in Charles Taylor, “Why We Need
a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” in Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, Charles
Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), 51.
3
Modernity is better understood as an attempt to find a new meta-
physical/theological answer to the question of the nature and rela-
tion of God, man, and the natural world that arose in the late
medieval world as a result of a titanic struggle between contradic-
tory elements within Christianity itself. Modernity, as we under-
stand and experience it, came to be as a series of attempts to
constitute a new and coherent metaphysics/theology.6
According to Gillespie, Erasmus, Petrarch, and Luther, on the one
hand, and Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, on the other, were work-
ing within a nominalist theology bequeathed to them from four-
teenth-century Franciscans, a theology not always explicit and
consciously understood or referred to by these thinkers, but work-
ing in and through their minds nevertheless. This theology cleaved
nature from grace, God’s will from His nature, faith from reason,
particulars from universals, history from rationality. These Renais-
sance and early Enlightenment thinkers inherited and radicalized
an already latently desacralized notion of the world and man, and
they attempted to carve out an autonomous sphere for nature, will,
knowledge, morality, and political life within a now (to use Max
Weber’s term) disenchanted cosmos, including the new conception
of man as imago voluntatis, in the image and likeness of the new vol-
untaristically-conceived God with and against whom they were now
engaged. This God was becoming more and more inscrutable and,
indeed, arbitrary. For Luther, God was still bound by his “ordained
will,” discovered now only in Sacred Scripture, through the lens of
his and all later Protestants’ idiosyncratic, personal interpretation.
According to Gillespie, we moderns have never transcended our
nominalist, voluntarist, and desacralized origins.
Inescapable Modernity
The main point of Gillespie’s compelling revisionist intellectual his-
tory is the ostensible inescapability of modernity. For Taylor, it is
6. Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2008), xii.
4
the inescapability of the immanent frame, the buffered self, and the
“spins” through which moderns interpret the world. For Gillespie,
there is an intellectual impregnability to the inner structure of
nominalist metaphysics, ethics, and theology, with even moder-
nity’s most radical critics caught up and complicit in what they
attempt to escape and critique. One sees this especially in Nietzsche
and Marx, both of whom rail against bourgeois moral conscious-
ness and material worldliness but end up promoting a more radical
version of them. Within the ambit of nominalist metaphysics,
which nowadays all but a minority of radically orthodox and paleo-
conservatives accept as normative and inevitable, there seems to be
no resolution of the crisis of modernity, a crisis brought to a head in
the thoroughly unexpected and seemingly impossible contempo-
rary resurgence of primitive, sacrificial violence.7
Voluntarism, nominalism, disenchantment, and desacralization:
these were the background theological assumptions of the Enlight-
enment, but they are now, it seems, foregrounded social, cultural,
and political dogmas. The Regensburg Address of Pope Benedict
XVI, with his account of the three waves of dehellenization, is a key
text for grasping this development. Dehellenized reason closed to
intelligible, noetic being, a voluntarist God beyond good and evil,
and a non-participatory cosmos mechanically construed—all
undergirded by the replacement of analogy with univocity—are the
metaphysical, epistemological, and theological roots of modernity.
As the pope suggests, these roots have nourished a misshapen cul-
tural tree, nay, a forest; and it cannot be simply cut down and
replanted. It the forest we call home, and there seems nowhere else
to go.
Nonetheless, all these conceptions and relationships and genealo-
gies are being negotiated and renegotiated, challenged and reconfig-
ured, in our post-secular, post-disenchanted, intellectual, spiritual,
and cultural climate. Jürgen Habermas talking to Benedict XVI, and
not at him, a conversation published as The Dialectics of Seculariza-
tion,8 is one of many examples of such non-polemical and fruitful
negotiation. But where is this unstable yet pregnant dialectic going?
7. See chapters 18 and 19 below.
5
Will it be transcended, replaced, or further developed, and in which
direction? Will we see a return to traditional ideas and practices, but
now more highly developed and nuanced, in a new synthesis of faith
and reason, a new Christendom incomparably richer than the old
one exemplified by St Thomas in theory and medieval Christendom
in practice? Or, will we see only an exacerbation of the fissiparous
and centrifugal tendencies of a nihilistic, nominalist modernity, a
further rejection of tradition and the philosophia perennis, devolving
into a truly apocalyptic, nightmarish, post-human world? Or will it
be both of these scenarios at the same time?9 As I see it, the question
comes down to this: can men live together in peace and flourish
under a purely human canopy in which the eschaton has been thor-
oughly immanentized? Thomas Molnar puts the question this way:
Must the political order be derived from a cosmic model (or, at
any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or are
there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity,
through the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least
a myth, powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these
questions is no, we must ask: can a community exist without the
sacred component by the mere power of “rational” decisions and
“intellectual” discourse?10
The Dialectic of Modernity

So, how to respond to our peculiar situation, as tradition-minded
theists? One cannot just discount the social, cultural, political, and
religious fruits that have come through our humanist forebears.
One can and must regret the evil of the breakup of Christendom
8. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On

Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).
9. For an incomparable argument for this, see Glenn Olsen, The Turn to Tran-
scendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Catholic University of
America Press, 2010); cf. Thaddeus Kozinski, “The Turn to Transcendence,” The
Imaginative Conservative, May 26, 2018, available at https://theimaginativeconser-
vative.org/2018/05/turn-to-transcendence-glenn-w-olsen-thaddeus-kozinski.html.
10. Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 1988), 137.
6
and the great evils the ensued in its wake,11 but one must accept and
appreciate the good that broke free, as it were, as well:12 the
immense progress of the sciences and medicine (though these have
been thoroughly corrupted by money and politics), the aspiration
to universal human rights (though incoherently and hypocritically
applied), the concern for and vindication of victims (though not
without further scapegoating), the historical consciousness of the
evil of ritual scapegoating to maintain political order (though it
happens now more than ever, under the surface),13 the affirmation
of the great good of ordinary, non-clerical life (though new and
oppressive hierarchies have arisen), the emergence of a large, politi-
cally and economically active middle-class (though it is constantly
besieged), the heightened consciousness of the dignity of the human
person (though helpless babies and the dying are murdered), and,
as José Casanova has presented it,14 the structural differentiation of
spheres of human activity rightly given relative autonomy from the
ecclesial, religious, and sacred, such as politics, science, and eco-
nomics (though the autonomy has become absolute).
It is plausible to maintain that these aspirations and values and
institutions, though replete with incoherence and hypocrisy, did
develop, and relatively quickly, within the modern period. Yet were
these developments worth the price—the genocidal atheistic totali-
tarianism and fascism of the twentieth century, and the godless, sci-
entistic dictatorship and psychopathic new world order of the
twenty-first? I do think Taylor radically undervalues the blessings
and merits of the Christendom model, both historically and ideally,
for he underestimates the evil that partial goods and half-values,
however universally and sincerely pursued and held, can wreak, and
have wreaked, on a society not unified, grounded, and integrated in
and through the moral and spiritual authority of the philosophia
11. The best recent book on this is Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012).
12. On this, see Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999).
13. See Part V of this book.
14. See his Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1994).
7
perennis and the Catholic Church. And Taylor is wrong, along with
Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray and neoconservative
Christianity, to renounce the project of creating a new Christendom
based firmly upon Sacred Tradition, employing its metaphysics and
political theology, and incarnating it in politics, economics, and
culture.15
Nevertheless, one point here is well taken. In the words of Mar-
itain, there has been a certain maturation of the political order, and
it does look like the Gospel seed has come to a greater fruition now
in certain temporal areas—though there is room for much more
growth, and there have been many misshapen and misbegotten
stalks, as well as abortive fruits. This maturation, and the awesome
responsibility that it demands, is the true message of Gaudium et
Spes when interpreted correctly according to the hermeneutic of
continuity; not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX,
but as its dialectical complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can
interpret the prior Leonine social teaching and theology as a whole-
sale rejection of modernity, but neither can he reject or dismiss the
prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken.
Yet we must not celebrate modernity unequivocally. Exclusive
humanism, that is, the faith of atheism plus good works, certainly
gets things right in terms of demanding the dignity of human free-
dom and personhood, and in being on the side of victims—things
that paganism got really wrong. But these good affirmations of
humanism have come at too steep a price. We celebrate freedom
and the dignity of persons as never before, but we as a society do
not really know what these things are, as witnessed by the condon-
ing of abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage, legally enforced
political correctness and hate crimes, the normalization of torture,
eroticized and violent mass consumer culture, unmanned drone
attacks on civilian “enemies,” and the seeming inability of Western
nations to cease scapegoating, genocide, and war. That is why Tay-
15. I try to show that confessional politics, whatever the confession, is not just a
historical feature of the pre-modern world, but of any world, in my book The Polit-
ical Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
8
lor, as well as Habermas, insists that for the genuine goods of
modernity to endure—healthy secularity, non-exclusive humanism,
just democracy, authentically human human rights, non-Jacobin
equality—modernity must recognize its theological roots, or at
least not be ungrateful or in denial of them, as were the leaders of
the European Union in their refusal explicitly and officially to rec-
ognize Europe’s Christian genealogy and historical character. Tho-
mas Molnar has written:
We are thus approaching societies without the sacred and without
power. To use the words of Gauchet again, the political enterprise
is no longer justified in calling itself the concretization of the heav-
enly law. Political power is subverted in its symbolic foundation
and sacred identity. Its roots, hence its mediating legitimacy, have
been removed by a quiet revolution. Liberal democracy has
proved to be a passage from society founded on the sacred to soci-
ety founded on nothing but itself.16
The jury is still out on whether or not theoretically and practi-
cally political power can be authorized and exercised in a purely
immanent and secular mode, and whether or not the foundation
for political authority has actually been transferred from the tradi-
tional sacred to the modern profane. As Remi Brague warns, “Such
a contract, precisely because it has no external point of reference,
cannot possibly decide whether the very existence on this earth of
the species homo sapiens is a good thing or not.”17 Such ambivalence
about human existence itself is intolerable, of course, but is it the
price we must pay for desacralization? The vast majority of political
theorists and actors for over four hundred years have been telling us
that the Great Separation has occurred and is irreversible, with even
many Christian thinkers in agreement. Yet it is not clear that Chris-
tians can make complete peace with a thoroughly desacralized
political order, though the Catholic Church has come a long way
toward rapprochement from the time of Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos
and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.
16. Molnar, Twin Powers, 116.

17. Remi Brague, “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible,” The Intercollegiate
Review (Spring 2006), 11.
9
The question remains as to the limits the retention of an inte-
grally Catholic worldview places on full reconciliation with secular
modernity and liberal democracy. According to St Thomas, men
cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice,
the precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God,
and its divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church.
With regard to a non-sacral foundation for political order, the
Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only true doctrine is
that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end both
because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual
and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly
and positively bound to tend to it.”18 And even Dignitatis Humanae
insists that it “leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine
about the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion
and the one Church of Christ” (Sec. 1). As Pope St John Paul II often
reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which
man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own
nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral val-
ues and goods most perfective of himself and the political order.
The two extremes to avoid, then, are a complete rejection of “the
secular,” on the one hand, and a belief in its complete self-suffi-
ciency, on the other. Where to find the balance? Reading Catholic
Social Teaching, from Leo XIII to Pope Francis and through the lens
of the hermeneutic of continuity, can provide much light. In so
doing, one can see how unchanging Catholic principles—such as
the social reign of Christ the King, the rights of God in both the reli-
gious and temporal orders, the error of the divorce (though not the
distinction)—between Church and state, the inadequacy of the
anti-Aristotelian, social contractarian, Lockean/Rousseauian foun-
dation for political authority, and the moral obligation, objectively
speaking, of every political community to recognize in some capac-
ity the True Religion—are not at all rejected by later teachings. The
right of the human person to religious freedom and the necessity of
a healthy political secularity do not contradict the right of the
18. Joseph R. May, The State and the Law of Christ (Rome: Ponta Grossa, 1958),
51.
10
Church to certain social and political privileges, and the coopera-
tion of Church and state for the good of both the political and eccle-
sial communities. Those who aver that the more recent teachings
are obvious repudiations of a theocratic, paternalist, antimodern,
and fanatical past are blinded by their spun-modernity, enslaved to
the spirit of the age from which, as Chesterton insisted, the Church
alone can save us. All the Church’s teachings, even when they evince
prima facie tension, are coordinated and resolved in a delicate syn-
thesis by the Magisterium to preclude both the imbalanced, tout
court rejection of modernity and the blind adulation of it.
But how to apply these teachings effectively, here and now? Can
we aspire to something more than private practice? Should we not
be engaging in Christian action directed toward the long-term goal
of not merely a justly-managed pluralism wherein Christians can
carve out a modest space for their own exercise of religious free-
dom, but a truly new Christendom where Christ reigns as King over
all? Can we have a genuinely Christian, confessional political order
that respects religious freedom and freedom of conscience within
the centrally administered, gargantuan, liberal democratic nation-
state without recourse to some level of cultural and even political
secession of like-minded believers? Can we transform our ever-
expanding Leviathan into a truly federated and decentralized polity,
or is it simply, as the Pledge of Allegiance insists, indivisible? Are we
caught in an inescapable tyranny of pluralism? Can such tyranny be
peacefully subverted?
From Faith to Dialectic to Aporia

It would seem that the “marketplace of ideas” approach to obtain
autonomy for tradition-constituted communities is being program-
matically sabotaged from the top down by ideology and the ruling
class’s jealousy to preserve its hegemony. As Alasdair MacIntyre
puts it: “Liberalism is often successful in preempting the debate . . .
so that [objections to it] appear to have become debates within
liberalism. . . . There is little place in such political systems for the
criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in ques-
11
tion.”19 Thus, we would first need a nationwide ideological repud-
iation of centrally managed and controlled “pluralistic” secular lib-
eralism as the inescapable political reality. But with the way political
conversation is set up nowadays, culturally, legally, and juridically
—that is, staged, controlled, policed, constrained, and shut down
when necessary—any discourse whose outcome poses a threat to
the status quo is doomed to failure, or made to fail.
Hence the vital need to secure political autonomy for those com-
munities that already repudiate the status quo. But how does one
obtain that? The real problem is psychological and spiritual. Too
many Christians have been mentally colonized by the Lockean
political paradigm, where “every Church is orthodox to itself,”
where religion is defined as private, divorced from politics. If Mac-
Intyre is right, the precondition for getting out of the liberal cave, as
it were, is robust and prolonged participation in tradition-consti-
tuted communities that are already out of it, so as to be inculcated
in the habits of thought and practice of a truly supra-and-anti-lib-
eral politics. For MacIntyre, we can achieve such communities right
now, on a small scale, and many have already done so, but somehow
this is to be enacted in and through communities without any legal
and political teeth, or even any desire of obtaining them. This seems
impossible, for such communities are just not genuine political
communities, that is, not perfect societies in the Aristotelian sense,
and hence too weak to do the job of virtue inculcation and orienta-
tion of souls to the transcendent. They must fall prey to the insidi-
ous individualism of modernity.
I have not yet encountered convincing and satisfying answers to
these questions and their derivative and underlying questions posed
throughout this book. MacIntyre, perhaps, comes closest in terms
of a philosophical account, but his project is not powerful enough,
and I think the reason it ultimately fails is its neglect to incorporate
the power and authority of political theology and the reality of the
spiritual—and political—authority of the Catholic Church. One
needs more than philosophy to defeat the theological heresy and
19. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 392.
12
idolatrous church of secularist liberalism. William Cavanaugh rec-
ognizes this need, but his is a notion of political authority and state
that borders on the anarchist.20 Cavanaugh seems to repudiate the
normative Leonine/Thomistic understanding of the state as pos-
sessing intrinsic moral authority and the obligation to offer God
worship, that is, the infallibly taught political ideal of the Catholic
confessional state. For Cavanaugh, the state appears to be a neces-
sary evil at best, an intrinsic evil at worst, and it is not clear that he
means only the post-Westphalian nation-state. All states, even the
best of them, seem for him to be intrinsically evil to some extent.
His model conceives of the state as inexorably beholden to the City
of Man. However, the work of René Girard on scapegoating, treated
below in chapter 19, makes Cavanaugh’s dire conclusion seem ines-
capable, at least in terms of how the modern state has behaved and
behaves.
So, after all this, what is Modernity? Apophaticism is probably
the best we’ll do. Modernity is not the progressive divinization of
man and marginalization of God, socially, economically, politically,
culturally, anthropologically, leading in postmodernity and beyond
to the final rejection of His public reign on earth. But it may very
well be that Enlightened humanism is to be succeeded by transhu-
manism, warned about by C.S. Lewis in his (hopefully non-pro-
phetic) That Hideous Strength, in which an elite of the powerful few
control and enslave the world’s population via genetic engineering,
mind control, and technological wizardry—to which we could add,
based upon our experience since Lewis’s time, a culture of super-
eroticism and suicide, sex and death. Modernity, on the other hand,
by God’s grace, may be the site of a new synthesis, the transcending
of stale and dichotomous categories of thought and practice in
which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of
God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity
and flourishing of man in economic, political, moral, and spiritual
freedom. It does seem that man has been given the freedom and
power to determine the answers to these questions in practice as
20. See especially his Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Mean-
ing of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).
13
never before. Perhaps that freedom is the essence of our present age.
In 1969, theologian Joseph Ratzinger wrote about the future. His
sobering remarks leave room for hope, but only of the supernatural
kind:
The church will become small and will have to start afresh more
or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit
many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of
her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social priv-
ileges. . . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger
demands on the initiative of her individual members. . . . It will be
hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and
clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her
poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. . . . The
process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false
progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution—when a
bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and
even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means
certain. . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power
will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in
a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If
they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole
horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of
believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope
that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been
searching in secret. . . . And so it seems certain to me that the
Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely
begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am
equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church
of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith.
She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent
that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming
and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope
beyond death.21
This book is the outcome of my sundry attempts over the past
decade to grapple with the question of modernity in the areas of
21. Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009),
116–17.
14
philosophy, theology, spirituality, psychology, education, and poli-
tics. I hope they shed some light within this cave we live in, a cave
into which God Himself descended and out of which He ascended,
gifting all men with the power to do so, but only if we allow our-
selves to be united to Him. Karl Rahner’s prophecy that “the devout
Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experi-
enced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all,”22 and
Romano Guardini’s bracing depiction of the future, ring all the
more true:
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the
face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love
that flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage
of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was
made known in Christ. . . . Perhaps love will achieve an intimacy
and harmony never known to this day.23
The vanquishing of these unprecedented evils will come, I believe,
from nothing other than the power of God, who is now flooding the
world with graces unprecedented—witness St Faustina, Luisa Pic-
carreta, and Elizabeth Kindelmann24—enabling a level of mystical
union with God greater than ever before. Come, Divine Will! Holy
Mary, Mother of God, flood humanity with the blessings of thy
Flame of Love!
22. Karl Rahner, “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” in Theological Investi-
gations VII, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 15, as quoted
in Harvey D. Egan, Soundings in the Christian Mystical Tradition (Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, 2010), 338.
23. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (Delaware: ISI Books,
1992), 10.
24. The “Flame of Love” is, according to Elizabeth Kindelmann, “the greatest
Grace given to mankind since the Incarnation” (http://www.flameoflove.us/brief-
history-overview-flame-love-movement-immaculate-heart-mary/).
15
I
Modernity
1
Modernity:
Disease and Cure
n contemporary Western nations, individuals and groups live
I in distinct social networks, engage in myriad cultural practices,

learn in diverse educational institutions, and communicate in
idiosyncratic imaginative and conceptual idioms. Yet they are
neighbors. Many of the people we see and interact with every day
live within virtually airtight intellectual, moral, and spiritual uni-
verses radically divergent from ours, holding beliefs utterly incom-
patible and irreconcilable with our own. One unfortunate ideo-
logical upshot of this strange situation is an a priori public incredu-
lousness regarding anyone “having the whole truth.” It is no wonder
that the Roman Catholic Church, whose Founder identified the
whole truth with His very Person, is at best tolerated in Western
society, and really only when lost in translation, as one denomina-
tion among others, juxtaposed with other equally “true” belief
expressions in a multicultural, pluralistic boutique. Indeed, any
dogmatic belief system in its raw, untranslated form is portrayed in
the culture as a dangerous and inhuman cult, an intolerable oppo-
nent of the indisputable reign of freedom and pluralism.
The existence of a pluralism of incompatible “truths” is not a
good thing, for Truth is one, and error about first principles and
ultimate ends is the result of sin, not, as the late John Rawls put it,
“the free exercise of reason.” Radical religious pluralism, in short,
must be seen as a grave defect of human existence, a spiritual, intel-
lectual, moral, social, and political disorder. Pace the Enlighten-
ment, perpetual and increasing religious pluralism is not the ideal
for politics, nor the “best we can hope for this side of paradise,” and
19
“the most prudent accommodation to the real world.” The Church’s
perennial political ideal of the reign of Christ the King simply does
not permit such resignation to sin, error, and worldliness.
Yet because this tragic pluralism has been mysteriously permitted
by God, I think it could be an occasion for what Peter Leithart has
called “deep comedy.”1 Perhaps our pluralistic milieu can provide
Catholics and other men of good will open to the transcendent with
a unique opportunity for an unprecedented encounter with the liv-
ing God beyond all systems, paradigms, and concepts—including
religious ones. As John Paul II wrote in 1999, “If by modernity we
mean a convergence of conditions that permit a human being to
express better his or her own maturity, spiritual, moral, and cul-
tural, then the Church saw itself as the ‘soul’ of modernity.”2 Indeed,
pluralism itself can be, if interpreted and utilized correctly, a potent
catalyst for the New Evangelization. Modernity, as I shall try to
show, is both the cause and the cure of its own existential disease,
one that can best be described as a descent into partial thinking. But
it is also precisely the deep pluralism of modernity that enables man
to overcome it, if only he desires to do so.
Feeling the Pull

To borrow from the thesis of Charles Taylor’s masterpiece A Secular
Age, along with the peculiar “consciousness shift” that constitutes
the essence of modernity comes a heightened capacity intimately to
feel the pull of other worldviews and belief systems, especially those
we might otherwise deem unworthy of our interest. Modern secular
pluralism, though essentially defective, provides an unprecedented
opportunity for persons to experience the other, and from the inside,
that is, not just as an abstract possibility of thought and practice, as
was possible in all ages, but intimately and existentially, as a living,
1. Peter Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Culture
(Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2006).
2. Cited in Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict
XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 152.
20
Modernity: Disease and Cure
breathing, concrete, coherent (or perhaps not so coherent, as in the
case of the tradition of liberalism) historical tradition. Alasdair
MacIntyre describes this immersion in other traditions as akin to
learning a second conceptual and imaginative language, and he
judges it indispensable for the authentic understanding and prac-
tice of one’s own tradition. Moreover, without such exotic immer-
sions, we can lose the capacity to recognize and correct the defects
in our own tradition, rendering us ineffective as participants in its
further development.
By encountering the partial truths in other traditions, we are
more able to recognize partial truths as partial, both in other tradi-
tions and in our own, including the partial way in which we finite
and flawed humans inevitably appropriate and understand those
non-partial truths contained within our own tradition. The tradi-
tion of which we are a member may indeed be the true tradition,
providing the most intimate access to and limpid mediation of the
deepest realities, yet reality is perceived and grasped by me in a
partial and incomplete manner at best, and in a tendentious and
distorted way at worst. I am not Tradition. Encountering reality
through the lens of other perennial traditions can serve to expose
that false dichotomy in our minds that leads us to interpret other
views as nothing more than full-fledged errors and our own personal
lenses as nothing less than the whole truth. Our particular tradition
of rationality—say, Thomism—may, in an objective sense, contain
the most truth and best method of knowing, inquiring about, and
recognizing truth, but as finite, fallible, sinful creatures, our subjec-
tive grasp of it is inevitably partial.
Our modern, secular, godless culture, of course, due to its narcis-
sistic ethos,3 can cause us to lose the capacity to feel the pull of just
those parts of the truth we need to see and accept in order to attain
wholeness. The modern tendency to liquidate the other, in Josef
3. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of

Diminishing Expectations, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1991) and The Minimal Self:
Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984). Also, Neil Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York:
Penguin, 1985).
21
Pieper’s phrase, is far from being a sign of loyalty and devotion to
one’s truth. Rather, it indicates a totalitarian solipsism of the self, an
intellectual enslavement through a self-inflicted, epistemological
seclusion that automatically translates any genuine experience of
the other into the same. When this occurs, any part of the truth rec-
ognized and possessed loses its healing property, becoming deadly
to the soul. Instead of being seen as the wonderful part of truth that
it is, in the poisoned soul it is rendered a full-fledged error, and we
are blind to what could render us whole again. In other words,
truth, when encountered partially but interpreted totalistically,
becomes a lie.
However, if the diseased mind could learn to see the parts as
parts, and not simply as hateful errors to condemn and fear and
from which to escape at all costs, he could recognize the prison into
which his mind has fallen. As Plato’s cave suggests, liberation from
our intellectual and spiritual prisons can only occur through the
dawning upon our souls of the light of the whole, the Good, which
is both that by which all true knowledge occurs and the knowable
par excellence.4 And for our non-angelic, discursive, and fallen intel-
lects, this can occur only through a persistent and often excruciat-
ing dialectical comparison of whole and part, a dynamic exemp-
lified by Plato in his dialogues and brought to near perfection by St
Thomas in his Summa Theologiae. It is a kind of ongoing intellec-
tual crucifixion. Might modernity, for all its tragic evils, serve as our
conceptual Calvary, bringing about a deeply comedic intellectual
and spiritual resurrection?
None of this is meant to suggest that there are not full-fledged,
pernicious errors and evils in the modern world, as distinct from
merely partial truths—indeed, there are more and worse ones than
ever before. St Pius X deemed modernism the “synthesis of all here-
sies.” Nor am I suggesting that Catholicism is not the whole truth of
Revelation, objectively speaking. But, again, often what we perceive
to be absolute error is only a partial truth distorted into error by its
being removed from the whole; and often what we perceive to be
the whole truth is only an exaggeration of a partial truth. We must
4. See chapter 4.
22
consider whether the partial truths we tend to reject as unworthy of
our consideration might be precisely those we need to embrace for
the completion and correction of our thinking. In short, strategic
and prudent intellectual immersions in our pluralistic milieu,
always preceded and followed, of course, by extensive and intensive
periods of nursing at the bosom of Holy Mother Church in study
and contemplation, is, I think, a necessary regimen: 1) to enable us
to recognize the partialness of our own and others’ appropriation of
the truth; 2) to transcend whatever in modernity that holds us back
from self-knowledge, wisdom, and union with God; and 3) to help
end the reign of relativistic pluralism and bring about a new Chris-
tendom.
But why risk plunging ourselves into pluralism? Why play around
with alien traditions that we know to be fundamentally false? Again,
it is the Church alone who sees and possesses the whole truth (at
least implicitly and latently; the expression and recognition of the
whole truth by the Magisterium is time-bound and discursive,
being historically mediated and occasioned, as Cardinal Newman
has taught us). But we, the Church’s members, are always, subjec-
tively speaking, approaching this whole truth, and if we forget this,
we fall into idolatry. What we think to be the whole truth is often
only our own partial appropriation of it, and, even worse, a part
pretending to be the whole. This idolatry is the spiritual disease of
modernity, and the practice of Catholicism, including above all
daily silent contemplation, is the cure of all spiritual maladies.
However, the occasion for the remedy to be applied is to be found,
paradoxically, within—indeed, through—modernity itself.
Catholics in a pluralistic society are uniquely positioned to
accomplish the “whole and part” dialectical exercise, for we possess
both the whole by grace and through the Church, and the parts
through the charity and humility that prompt us to vulnerable and
humble dialectical encounters with our neighbors’ and our own
partial-truth fragments. Fragmentary, partial knowledge, unrecog-
nized as fragmentary and partial and substituting for comprehen-
sive holistic knowledge, is the intellectual condition of our fallen
nature, and modernity serves to exacerbate it. But with the intrinsic
help of grace, the extrinsic help of the Magisterium, and our coop-
23
eration through courageous intellectual analysis, imaginative im-
mersions in the other, and generous dialogue coupled with imagina-
tive, intellectual, and silent contemplation,5 we can ascend, at least
partially, to the whole that awaits us personally and fully in the
Beatific Vision.
I would like now to offer three examples that illustrate the disease
of partial thinking: the fall of Lucifer, the sin of Adam and Eve, and
Saul the Pharisee’s rejection of Christ. I shall try to show how a par-
tial yet subjectively significant truth, when eclipsing a truth of
momentous and fundamental import, becomes a full-fledged error,
that is, how complementary partial truths, when pitted against each
other as contradictions, become illusory, self-sufficient whole-
truths. When this occurs, even the partial truths are lost, and a
totalitarianism of the psyche ensues. The only cure for this is a radi-
cal, vulnerable openness to the other, through relentless Socratic
questioning and existential wonder.6
Lucifer’s “Truth”
Did “partial thinking” cause Lucifer to fall from heaven? An angel,
that is, an intuitive, non-discursive intellectual being, can never
grasp truth in the partial way humans do; yet perhaps there is
something analogous to partial thinking even in the angelic intel-
lect. What “thoughts” preceded the complete perversion of Lucifer’s
will? As St Thomas teaches in his treatise on the angels, an angel
receives knowledge of the supernatural order through the media-
tion of angelic intellects higher than itself. Thus, an angel in the
choir of powers could not receive knowledge of God’s plan for the
5. On how to practice silent contemplation, I have found the writings and talks
of Father John Main to be of incomparable clarity and profundity, as well as practi-
cality. See, among many others, his Word into Silence: A Manual for Christian Medi-
tation (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006), and the talks grouped at YouTube under
the heading “Set your Mind on the Kingdom by John Main 1926–1982.”
6. For a profound and exhaustive account of the problem with dualistic think-
ing by a thinker deeply learned in both Western and Eastern thought, see Raimon
Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being (New York: Orbis, 2013).
24
salvation of man through the intellect of an angel in the choir of,
say, the archangels, but only from principalities, cherubim, seraphim,
etc. Lucifer knew that spirit is superior to matter, and God’s plan, as
it might be supposed, was to reveal and effect the salvation of men
through the lowly intellect of a human being, uniting not only spirit
and matter, but divinity and matter. “Now, since the purpose of cre-
ation is to give glory to the Supreme Being, and since I am second
only to God,” Lucifer might have considered, “then how could He
be justified in his plan to unite divinity with anything less than my
angelic nature? Could it be that a human woman could possibly
mediate the divine? Moreover, am I absolutely certain that this
being calling himself God actually is what he claims to be? After all,
I did not actually witness my own creation.”
For humans to engage in such critical analysis of and a priori
skepticism towards supernatural matters is not necessarily mali-
cious, for, as Pope Benedict XVI made clear in his Regensburg
Address, it is incumbent on man to bring all truth claims to the bar
of reason, even claims supposed to be from God Himself. Truth can
never contradict truth. However, for an unfallen angel, things are
not so simple. For Lucifer to have “reasoned” this way (whatever
that would mean for a non-discursive intellect) would have been
unspeakably malicious and perverse. And this is not because his
logic may have been flawed, for angelic logic is always valid, if not
always sound; but because to doubt God in an unfallen angelic state,
no matter the pretext, is to have entered deliberately and irrevers-
ibly into an abyss of unreality. I suggest that Lucifer’s very hesitation
to submit, metaphorically speaking, was at the basis of his “cre-
ation” of evil and error, the origin of hell. Prudent deliberation and
speculation about the proper course of action to take in any given
situation is, for us fallen men, an indispensable means to virtue.
However, for an unfallen angelic intellect, any hesitation or doubt
regarding the will of God must constitute the gravest of sins, a vio-
lent ripping of one’s being away from the loving bosom of reality,
the rejection of the whole and one’s part in the whole for the virtual
nothingness of the isolated part.
It is true that once we humans begin to think about the mere
possibility of not submitting to God’s plans, the reasons justifying
25
such a possibility can begin to look quite reasonable. Perhaps some
such apparently reasonable justification is the “partial truth” that
Lucifer embraced, so to speak, but the price paid for it was the loss
of the overwhelmingly more fundamental truth of the perfect good-
ness and infinite love of God. The origin of such angelic questioning,
however subtle, forceful, and coherent it may have seemed to Luci-
fer, is not mere intellectual error, but willful malice, the sin of disbe-
lief, which, as Josef Pieper maintains, is the rejection of God’s
revelation with full knowledge of it as the revelation of God.7 It was,
for Lucifer, it seems, the rejection of the revelation of the identity of
God as Love. Such disbelief, by the highest and thus most loving—
at least potentially—of God’s creatures, would be an unthinkable
act if it were not revealed to us by the Church.
The Fall into Fragmentation

Adam and Eve had not yet obtained the fullness of human happi-
ness or perfection in their short sojourn in paradise; for, like us,
only in heaven would their lives be brought to complete fullness.
Before the fall, all creatures, from the most humble to the most
exalted, were to create their ladder to this eventual fullness, both
through contemplation—the stars, the order of nature, each
other— and by consumption—the bountiful and unimaginably
delicious fruits and vegetables provided by the Lord God for their
sustenance and delight. Yet, they were not permitted to consume or
contemplate every creature (they were forbidden to contemplate
disobedience); the only other rational being they knew, the one who
called himself God, willed it so. It was the first “doctrine of condi-
tional joy,” which Chesterton discusses in his wonderful chapter
from Orthodoxy called “The Ethics of Elfland.”
However, they had now met another rational being who had sug-
gested to them that by not consuming every fruit, they would be
depriving themselves of the fullness of reality; if some creatures
would bring them some fulfillment, then all creatures would bring
7. Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), ch. 1.
26
them all fulfillment. And nothing could possibly justify their miss-
ing out on the very purpose for which they were created. God’s pro-
scription, then, must be interpreted as a prescription, else God
becomes a miser. Moreover, precisely the fruit “forbidden” to them
was necessary for their fulfillment, for it alone could complete their
knowledge of reality, which included, by God’s own description,
good and evil. The fulfillment of souls made to be capax omnium
requires complete, not partial, knowledge. Finally, they perceived
this fruit both immediately and upon reflection as good, for every
existing being is ontologically good, and, since error did not yet
exist in their minds, it would be sinful not to bring this fruit to the
perfection for which it was made by being consumed.
Admittedly, one can see in these arguments a justification for at
least some hesitation on the part of Adam and Eve when confronted
with the command not to eat the forbidden fruit. The essential
problem with these arguments, however, is not the content or struc-
ture of the arguments themselves—some absurdity, incoherence, or
implausibility to be found in them. It is, I think, their partialness.
They are sound and valid arguments as far as they go, but only if
taken completely out of the existential and ontological context to
which they owe their very intelligibility. It is God who has given this
command, after all, and Adam and Eve are His creatures, brought
into being out of the slime. In that context, partial truths in their
argument become lies. By the mere consideration of these partial
truths ripped out of the whole truth, Adam and Eve had already lost
God, the source of all truth. How otherwise could it possibly have
seemed reasonable to them to disobey God in order to obey Him?
To perfect themselves by severing themselves from the only possible
source of perfection?
As the whole truth began to fragment before their eyes, disobey-
ing God, which at first was only a hint of a possibility, now became
a valid consideration, and finally, in their act of eating the fruit, a
categorical imperative. Like Lucifer’s disbelief in the identity of God
and love, Adam and Eve, through an external temptation but still by
an act of their own free will, lost their trust in Him. Immediately,
their integral perception of the truth was shattered, and the whole
in whose light the fragments of truth could be seen precisely as frag-
27
ments and thus as unworthy of isolated consideration was lost to
them. And through them it was lost to us, until the time of the
descent of the Whole into His now fractured world.
Saul: the Pharisee vs. the Logos

The final and perhaps most illustrative example of how fundamen-
tal error can arise through the totalistic embrace of partial truth is
the Pharisees’ rejection of Christ, particularly, that Pharisee-
turned-Apostle named Saul. In his remarkable Jesus of Nazareth,
Benedict XVI has brought out the plausibility and power of the
Pharisees’ indictment against Christ.8 In his discussion of Rabbi
Jacob Neusner’s book, A Rabbi Talks to Jesus, the Holy Father
explains why, for a Pharisee, the threat Jesus posed to Judaism was
far more dangerous than any that came before. Throughout the his-
tory of Judaism, there were always formidable foes to its survival
and God-pleasingness: subversive teachers, heretics, fanatics, trai-
tors, worldlings, indifferentists, blasphemers. But never before did
one man embody the very antithesis of the Judaic belief in the utter
transcendence and holiness of God. Jesus, by his claim to be the
definitive and full embodiment of God, the chosen Person, threat-
ened to destroy the Jews’ claim to be the chosen People. And by his
defiant abrogation of the most sacred of Jewish laws, he was poised
to dismantle the cornerstone that underlay the entire edifice of Jew-
ish culture, tradition, society, and life—the Sabbath.
Benedict pulls no punches in his defense of Neusner’s argu-
ment—it is powerful, and Benedict depicts it as such, with the
utmost respect and sympathy. Saul was only acting upon the force
of the argument’s truth when he persecuted the infant Church, for
the Nazarene’s power to destroy the chosen people of God through
his followers’ fanaticism required a violent and ruthless extermina-
tion, as violent and ruthless—and even more so—as, say, Joshua’s,
Gideon’s, or David’s extermination of the much lesser threats of the
8. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Trans-
figuration, trans. Adrian Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 103–27.
28
Jerichoites, Midianites, and Philistines. However, just as the tren-
chant and seemingly ironclad arguments of Lucifer and Adam and
Eve splintered into fragments when applied to the infinite solidity
of God’s holiness, so did the Pharisees’. As Benedict argues, from the
Pharisees’ perspective the desire to destroy Jesus and persecute His
followers was the epitome of loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to
God—if Jesus was only a human being. If He were the incarnate
God, however, then these virtues would become vices, indeed, the
epitome of sacrilege and blasphemy.
Saul was a self-condemned prisoner to partial thinking. Nothing
but an unforeseen, undesired, violent encounter with Him who, to
his diseased spirit, was the Other, a Jewish man claiming to be God,
would liberate him. If Saul had been allowed by Christ to remain in
the isolated, blinded world of the Jewishdom of his day—the way in
which some traditional Catholics would like to remain within the
isolating and alienating “Christendoms” of their fears and gnostic
certainties9—his blindness would never have been revealed to him,
and he would never have become St Paul, the Apostle to the Jewish
other, the Gentiles. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his par-
tial thinking, which was indicative not of authentic Mosaic Judaism,
but of Talmudic, anti-Logos fanaticism. Such violent divine inter-
vention (in the manner of a Flannery O’Connor story) had to
occur, for Saul’s was a particularly virulent case of partial thinking.
We Christians, however, have the unique chance to invite Christ
freely into our minds and hearts by inviting into intimacy the
salvific “others” we would rather not meet. I would argue that such
encounters are providentially available as never before, if we would
only accept them, in our modern pluralistic world.
In a remarkable passage, Alasdair MacIntyre zeroes in on the
essence of modernity’s peculiar disease:
We have within our social order few if any social milieus within
which reflective and critical enquiry concerning the central issues
of human life can be sustained. . . . This tends to be a culture of
answers, not of questions, and those answers, whether secular or
9. See my article “The Gnostic Traditionalist,” New Oxford Review (June 2007).
29
religious, liberal or conservative, are generally delivered as though
meant to put an end to questioning.10
What MacIntyre is saying, I think, is that the culture of modernity is
a culture without wonder, and since without wonder there is no
awe, as Plato taught us, modern culture tends to preclude the expe-
rience of that which is most awesome, God. What is the antidote to
this? MacIntyre once said that we need a new St Benedict, but I
wonder if we couldn’t add Socrates to the list. Dietrich von Hilde-
brand describes the Socratic, questioning, wondering spirit as
the inner willingness which is not closed against even the most
unpleasant truth, which is really free from bias, ready to make
friends with things, open to the proof of all objective existence,
not looking at things through a colored lens that allows only such
things to pass into the understanding as do not offend our pride
and self-complacency.11
The existence of even one person with a genuine spirit of erotic,
Socratic questioning, a soul with true metaphysical courage, is, I
think, the most effective antidote to the suffocating, anti-question-
ing, partial-truth culture we live in, in both its traditionalist and
modernist varieties. Those who believe themselves to have obtained
answers without having first endured the existential agony of ques-
tioning the darkness, whether because they have judged that there
are no answers, or because they believe themselves to be already
quite securely possessed of dogmatic certitude, need to recognize in
such an attitude neither a humble disposition of ignorance nor a
pious submission to God’s word, but a type of idolatry, the idolatry
of partial thinking. Paul Evdokimov, an Eastern Orthodox theolo-
gian, writes:
10. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy Recalled to its Tasks,” in The Tasks of Phi-
losophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
182.
11. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Catholicism and Unprejudiced Knowledge,” in
The New Tower of Babel: Modern Man’s Flight from God (Manchester, NH: Sophia
Institute Press, 1994), 141.
30
The outdated religious person and the modern sophisticated irre-
ligious individual meet back to back in an immanence imprisoned
within itself. . . . The denial of God has thus permitted the affir-
mation of man. Once this affirmation is effected, there is no
longer anything to be denied or subordinated. . . . On this level
total man will not be able to ask any questions concerning his own
reality, just as God does not put a question to himself.12
Perhaps what secular modernity provides to those who are open
to it is a greater existential awareness of the primacy of questioning,
as well as the heightened urgency of discovering and asking the
right questions. If so, secular modernity is, in essence, a second—
and perhaps final?—Axial Age. This time around, however, we are
all called to be Socrates, with others, and more urgently, with our-
selves.
What really is important in life is not so much to provide answers,
as to discern true questions. When true questions are found, they
themselves open the heart to the mystery. Origen used to say:
“Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of
Christ causing blood and water to flow forth.”13
12. Paul Evdokimov, Ages of the Spiritual Life (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 2002), 17, 27.
13. Archbishop Bruno Forte, “Religion and Freedom: Searching for the Infi-
nitely Loving Father-Mother,” a lecture given at a meeting of the bishops of England
and Wales, November 12, 2007, available at http://www.catholic.org/featured/head-
line.php?ID=5262.
31
2
Becoming Children of Modernity
As the benefits of Revelation disappear even more from the coming
world, man will truly learn what it means to be cut off from
Revelation. . . . The rapid advance of a non-Christian ethos, however,
will be crucial for the Christian sensibility. As unbelievers deny Revela-
tion more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent
practice, it will become more evident what it really means to be a
Christian.
Romano Guardini1
No One Gets Out of Here Alive
C
hristian modernists and anti-modernists, and those falling
somewhere in between, have offered innumerable defini-
tions, characterizations, and genealogies of secular moder-
nity, and none seems entirely adequate. There is something asymp-
totically elusive about modernity: the depth and comprehensive-
ness of our definitions increase with abstractness and distance; the
accuracy, nuance, and precision of our characterizations increase
with narrowness and obscurity. Modernity is nearly as immune to
exhaustive intellectual comprehension and description, nearly as
impossible to escape or transcend, as reality itself. Even what we
take to be “anti-modern” theoretical and practical constructs, and
our resistances and rejections of the pernicious constructs of others,
are ineluctably erected from within and in virtue of the existential
consciousness that is secular modernity itself. This is the main the-
sis of Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I think it is
1. End of the Modern World, 101.
33
a compelling one. Modernity is, in a very important sense, inescap-
able. As Taylor puts it—we are in it.
Even though we are talking about an artifact, a cultural and his-
torical phenomenon, not a natural or supernatural phenomenon
equivalent to a change in being itself (I am no Hegelian), cultural
and historical being is nevertheless, at least for us, that is, for the
culture-dependent rational animals that we are, the mediator of any
“pure” being or nature that we may experience. As Alasdair MacIn-
tyre has argued persuasively, pace the Enlightenment’s “view from
nowhere,” we never encounter reality unmediated by tradition, that
is, the cultural artifacts of human language, conceptual schemes,
social practices, ritual and narrative, moral norms, symbols, etc.
And although we are equipped with intellects and imaginations that
can ultimately transcend tradition, history, and culture to attain
timeless truth, goodness, and beauty, we do so only through the
cultural resources and productions that we both create and are cre-
ated by. Louis Dupré writes:
Those who in a particular epoch impose a new pattern of meaning
on the life and thought of their time do more than apply a differ-
ent film of thought to an indifferent reality. They transform the
nature of reality itself. If the preceding carries any metaphysical
weight, it would be contained in the original thesis that Being
must not be conceived as a substance moved by thought. Cultural
changes leave a different reality in their wake. . . . Culture, then,
consists not in what humans add to the real, so to speak. It is the
active component of the real itself transforming the passive one.2
Be that as it may, it would seem obligatory for not only Christians
but all men of good will to be against modernity—whatever its
ontological status—in light of the notorious, anti-Christian and
anti-human fruits that appear to have grown solely in the soil of
secular modernity. And it seems quite plausible to a Christian that
with enough prayer, education, and effort, by apprenticing oneself
to the supreme culture-transcending teacher that is the Church, and
2. Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),
11.
34
by immersing oneself in her pristine formative hands, one could
more or less escape at least its worst effects. Should Christians not
try to create adequately anti-modern domestic, social, cultural,
political, educational, and liturgical environments if the ones that
secular modernity has given threaten their salvation? Christians are
indeed obliged to resist and ultimately “escape” from secular
modernity, but that is because we are called to transcend in spirit all
finite times and places, especially when they become idols prevent-
ing the attainment of union with the timeless and placeless God.
The End of Naïveté

Of the many trenchant descriptions of modernity Taylor offers us,
this one is especially helpful for our purposes:
There has been a titanic change in our western civilization. We
have changed not just from a condition where most people lived
“naïvely” in a construal (part Christian, part related to “spirits” of
pagan origin) as simple reality, to one in which almost no one is
capable of this, but all see their option as one among many. We all
learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in
which we live as best we can the reality our standpoint opens us to;
and a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as
occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with
which we have in various ways to coexist. . . . The shift to secular-
ity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a
society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unprob-
lematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among
others. . . . A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals
beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls
within the range of an imaginable life for masses of peoples.3
Note that Taylor’s characterization of secular modernity (SM) is
eminently non-ideological and non-condemnatory; it is neither the
traditionalist’s rigid denunciation nor the humanist’s insouciant
glorification. Rather, Taylor identifies SM as something more akin
3. Taylor, A Secular Age, 12, 19–20.
35
to a radically new paradigm or consciousness shift, in itself neither
moral nor immoral, neither true nor false, neither good nor evil,
neither pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. For, according to Taylor,
SM has engendered diverse ideological interpretations and embodi-
ments, structures of thought and practice that have been built upon
and with secular modernity’s peculiar consciousness and potential-
ity, what he calls the “immanent frame.” What Taylor means by this
phrase is not a rejection of all transcendence, but just that the
default position is a world and self experienced in such a way that
transcendence is merely an optional “spin” one is free to place as a
filter on one’s experience. But the “given” filter lacks any sense of
transcendence.
“An age or society would then be secular or not, in virtue of the
conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual.”4 Thus SM
is the inescapable mode, background, and context for all thought
and practice in the contemporary West, rather than any particular
ideological or cultural expression of it. It is a deeper reality than
culture, for it is existential. We encounter it deep within our lived
experience of reality, before we have the chance to reflect on it. It is
not so much the reflective description or account we give ourselves
of a more fundamental, pre-philosophical and pre-reflective experi-
ence, but is itself this fundamental experience, embodied in the
warp and woof of our lives in such a way that to attempt to disen-
gage or extricate ourselves from it is equivalent to the attempt to
escape reality itself. Because SM is so intimately bound up with our
experience of reality, it serves as the background to and structure of
the very form and content of our thinking, akin to grammar and
rhetoric as the background to and structure of the matter and
expression of our words. Although we can think about and thus
gain some distance from the background and structure, we cannot
entirely escape and transcend it.
This is a bracing claim. However, I think there is one short and
powerful demonstration of its essential accuracy. Ask yourself this
question: does any religious believer in the modern West experience
his religion in a naïve manner, that is, in the way a small child raised
4. Ibid., 3.
36
within a sheltered, integrally and robustly religious home might
experience it? Is it simply the way things are, that is, immune to all
experiences of the “other”? Can one completely avoid being disen-
gaged from one’s naïve experience of what is and must be, losing all
awareness of what is not and might not be? Is it even possible for a
religious child to retain this sort of naïveté nowadays? What I am
describing is not the perennial and age-indifferent capacity of
human reason to abstract from one’s lived experience and entertain
other possible philosophical and theological accounts of reality
through and in one’s imagination and intellect. If that were the case,
there would be nothing new in secular modernity in this respect, for
even the most sheltered and parochial medieval peasant could
thereby “escape” from the Christianity he imbibed with his mother’s
milk. What does seem radically unique to secular modernity is an
entirely new incapacity to experience the reality of a particular
worldview in a naïve way, that is, without the consciousness of there
being other viable options.
For the Christian, then, the end of naïve religious consciousness
would entail an experience of reality as perpetually open to the pos-
sibility or at least the awareness of a non-Christian interpretation
and experience of the world, of the possible absence of God. Might
such a characterization of our epoch explain the experiences of St
Teresa of Calcutta and St Thérèse of Lisieux, who, as we know from
their personal writings, experienced this sense of the absence of
God with an intensity we cannot imagine—even while possessing a
robust supernatural faith? Perhaps what St Teresa experienced in an
extraordinary manner was the ordinary communal consciousness
of secular man. These and other saints in our day are representative
of what seems to be peculiarly modern form of spiritually, what Fr
Aidan Nichols has called existential prayer: “accepting in a generous
spirit our deprivation of many of the conventional props and assur-
ances of a culturally transmitted religion . . . [we] may be ushered
with peculiar immediacy into the presence of the living God.”5
Obviously, these saints did escape secular modernity to some
extent; however, it occurred precisely through a peculiarly intense
5. Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake (Great Britain: T&T Clark Ltd, 1999), 213.
37
experience of the existential absence of God, written into the very
fabric of modern secular consciousness. It would seem that these
saints escaped it by going through it.
Assuming that this characterization of secular modernity is more
or less accurate, what would happen if one were to deny secular
modernity, attempting to escape it by going against or around it? To
answer this question we must first answer the more fundamental
question of why one would desire to escape SM in the first place.
One reason, perhaps, would be the conviction that SM is evil, for
aversion is, as St Thomas teaches, the passion of the soul naturally
evoked by the presence of evil. However, if we are correct in our
assessment of SM as being something preceding or situating moral-
ity, being virtually ontological, at least, subjectively and experien-
tially, then this conviction and its ensuing passion would be gravely
mistaken and disordered. What is evil, of course, are the predomi-
nant ideological interpretations of SM, which Taylor identifies as
certain “spins” on the culture of secular modernity that are often
mistakenly taken to be the reality itself: “But this order of itself
leaves the issue open whether, for purposes of ultimate explanation,
or spiritual transformation, or final sense-making, we might have to
invoke something transcendent. It is only when the order is “‘spun’”
in a certain way that it seems to dictate a “‘closed’” interpretation.”6
This “closed spin” Taylor calls “exclusive humanism.” We can see it
today in both its “right” and “left” versions, with its twofold Janus-
like embodiment in “conservative,” nation-worshipping, secular-
messianic militarism, on the one hand, and relativistic, Pro-
tagorean, managerial totalitarianism, on the other—relativism and
fundamentalism being equally narcissistic, practically atheistic, and
nihilistic.
If we take these “closed spins” to be secular modernity itself, we
would rightly respond by either attacking them or attempting to
escape them, or both. However, if Taylor is correct, though we must
renounce and avoid all errors and evils, we should not renounce and
avoid the larger background conditions or consciousness-form—
the “immanent frame”— that has both enabled their existence and
6. Taylor, A Secular Age, 594.
38
our capacity to choose radically different theoretical and practical
alternatives to them. In short, by choosing an alternative content
built upon and within the background of secular modernity, we do
not thereby escape the background itself—nor should we wish to.
The lack of awareness of the twice-removed nature of secular moder-
nity is, perhaps, a main reason for the disordered interpretations
and embodiments of it, for fundamentalism (Islamic, Zionist, or
Americanist) and relativism (liberal or conservative) are motivated
by a mistaken aversion to what it considers evil, namely, this or that
particular aspect of secular modernity itself.
Whatever modernity is, one thing we can say for certain is that it,
and it alone, has been the mid-wife for the birth of the choice-mak-
ing individual. As MacIntyre has pointed out, the “individual” is not
a natural type of human being, but a kind of scripted role created in
modernity according to its own peculiar dramatic exigencies. What-
ever we eventually become—whether postmodern, isolated, frag-
mented, secularist, therapeutic urban connoisseurs of private self-
creation, or anti-modern, communitarian, traditionalist, paleo-
conservative, “back to the land” aspirants of a neo-medieval Chris-
tendom—we do so by choice as individuals, before we do and are
anything or anybody else. For all the alternatives that modernity
offers, modernity does not permit us to escape this fundamental
precondition for the shaping of our identities. The non-chosen and
communally provided identity of the choice-making individual is,
like secular modernity itself, neither good nor evil in itself, but
becomes good or evil depending upon the “spin” we put on it. As
Taylor argues in his essay “A Catholic Modernity?,” the greatest mis-
take secular moderns have made regarding their new identity is to
construe the radical responsibility and high dignity that attends it
for radical autonomy and spiritual independence.7 This, and not
secular modernity per se, is arguably the main cause of the culture of
death.
What, then, is the alternative to such a construal? Josef Pieper
provides a clue:
7. See Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?
39
I refer of course to the life of our fellowmen under the conditions
of tyranny. As we all know, under such conditions no one dares
trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there
arises that special kind of unhealthy wordlessness which is not
silence so much as muteness. Under conditions of freedom, how-
ever, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another. How illu-
minating this contrast is! For in the face of it, we suddenly become
aware of the degree of human closeness, mutual affirmation, com-
munion, that resides in the simple fact that people listen to each
other and are disposed from the start to trust and “believe” each
other.8
Our enlightened, free-thinking age is, ironically, a culture of suf-
focating dogmatism, and so it becomes vitally important for us to
take the great gift we have been given in these times, a heightened
capacity for god-like freedom, and use it for others. But to give to
others the gift of ourselves, we must first have an intimate experi-
ence of what is not ourselves, for, as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
(Edith Stein) taught, we can know ourselves adequately only
through the eyes of others. All of this requires a willingness to
expose ourselves to the other in the most vulnerable way, to ask, to
seek, to venture out existentially in humble questioning of ourselves
and all that is around us—even when we know the answers given to
us by the gift of Faith. Do we experience these true answers as
answers to questions, to our questions? Those who do not, who
believe themselves to have obtained all the answers without having
first endured the existential agony of searching in the darkness,
whether because one has judged that there are no answers, or
because one believes them to be already securely “possessed,”
should recognize in such an attitude neither a humble plea of igno-
rance nor a simple and pious submission to God’s word, but a type
of idolatry.
8. Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love, 41.
40
II
Logos
3
What’s Good?
Wherefrom Ought?
W
hat is it that makes any human action obligatory? We
have all had the experience of ought, of something that,
at least in a subjective sense, renders my imminent
action morally relevant, so that what I am about to do or not do is
more than a mere question of what will be pleasing to me, socially
frictionless, psychologically comfortable, or useful for some self-
serving plan of action. How to understand the character of this
moral experience? Wherefrom ought?
Innumerable accounts have been given of this universal experi-
ence, ranging from a cavalier dismissal of a psychological vestige of
our ancestors’ primitive taboo cultures that the Enlightenment
began to expunge from our communal consciousness without hav-
ing quite completed its task, to its robust embrace as the voice of a
righteous God in the depths of the soul demanding us to act
according to that righteousness in obedience to divine command-
ments. Somewhere in the middle of these is the Aristotelian, eudai-
monistic interpretation of the moral ought as an emotional and
intellectual impetus pointing us toward happiness, not so much to
do right but to be good, which is to say, to follow the natural, ratio-
nal path to self-fulfillment, perfection, flourishing, or well-being.
Depending upon one’s philosophical or cultural tastes, this could be
psychological adjustment, à la stoicism or Sigmund Freud, or virtu-
ous activity, à la Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin. And then there is
always the Kantian third way, combining the ethos of both a divine
command and the ethics of well-being, but without the need of a
revealed set of divine commandments or a feeling of well-being. In
43
other words, “Follow reason, God’s internal command in the soul,
and you will be rendered worthy for happiness . . . later.” Jack Bauer
from the television series 24 exemplifies this mentality, the contem-
porary hyper-Kantian doing his duty without quite knowing why
it’s his duty, why he should do his duty, and if he’ll ever be happy
doing it.
Which theoretical and practical interpretation of the indisput-
able, universal human experience of ought makes the most sense? It
seems to me that there are two fundamental features of the experi-
ence that must be affirmed and explained. On the one hand, there is
the sense of duty to the other, of what is right: something or someone
outside or above me requires me to act in a certain way, regardless of
my individual likes or dislikes, notwithstanding my understanding
of how or whether the imminent act will contribute to my personal
well-being, satisfaction of desire, happiness, or aspirations. On the
other hand, there is the sense of desire for self-fulfillment, of the good:
the attraction, regardless of any sense of duty I might also have or
not have, to things in the world that I experience as desirable, simply
because they are good for me, as somehow related to my own happi-
ness, which I pursue for its own sake.
Any explanation of the subjective experience of ought should
encompass and synthesize both these features. And herein lies the
problem, for these features appear to be mutually exclusive, or at
least in very great tension with each other. If I am obliged to do or
not do something, whether this obligation comes from knee-jerk
taboo, social contract convention, categorical reason, or God, I can-
not at the same time do this action for the sole purpose of my well-
being, perfection, or subjective satisfaction. But if I feel obliged as
well as attracted, then I cannot be doing what I ought to do merely
because I am attracted to it personally. For then my happiness has
become my duty. Conversely, if I find that I am personally attracted
to what I also consider my duty, then I am not doing it because it is
my duty, for my duty has now become for me a desirable good and
thus a means to my personal happiness. Happiness and fulfillment
of duty seem to be opposite motivations.
I think this phenomenological dialectic of right and good would
be resolved if we could understand what is at the heart of human
44
What’s Good? Wherefrom Ought?
moral experience; but to understand this heart we require more
than what unaided, human moral experience and purely philosoph-
ical speculation on this experience can provide. My argument for
this conclusion is this: what the duty aspect of moral experience
suggests is the reality of justice, which is inherently relational or
communal, and thus irreducible to any interpretation of morality as
mere personal fulfillment. What the happiness aspect of moral
experience suggests is the reality of our desire for the good, which is
inherently personal and thus irreducible to an interpretation of
morality as mere social or divine obligation. So, any explanation of
the moral ought must include both other-related justice and self-
related desire, and this is precisely what is provided by a theological
ethics of creation and gift: if we are creatures, then we are inherently
relational, with our actions related above all to our creator; and if
creation is a gift, then we are obligated to enjoy creation as a good.
If God created us and the world for a purpose, then we are
obliged, by definition and through our very nature, to act according
to this purpose. Even if we have been given free-will to decide
whether to correspond with our natural telos, we are not really
capable of re-creating or re-designing ourselves to become some-
thing other than purpose-fulfilling creatures. And if God created
the world as a gift, then our main purpose as the only creatures that
can receive and recognize a gift qua gift—not simply as something
desirable—is to receive this gift as any gift is meant to be received,
in love and gratitude for both the gift and the giver. In short, we are
obliged to be happy because we have a duty to love the gift of a
divinely bestowed, happy-making existence, and we are encouraged
to desire happiness for its own sake because that is precisely the way
we justly show our gratitude for the good gift we have been given.
The gift we have been given, after all, is eternal happiness, begun
here and perfected in the next life.
So, am I saying that only an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed
truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can coherently and
adequately make sense of the universal experience of ought? Indeed
I am. I think that purely philosophical explanations are helpful, for
creation is replete with secondary causality, and grace and revela-
tion can complete nature and reason only if nature and reason have
45
a relative integrity and intelligibility. Thus, I am open to purely
philosophical accounts that do justice to our experience. But I have
not yet come across any that adequately account for the infinite
desires and absolute obligations I experience.
We need a balanced synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelean meta-
physics and ethics, for then we would have the most attractive and
obligatory pre-Christian account of ethical experience, combining
both a divine-order (Plato’s Good) and happiness (Aristotle’s
phronemon)1 ethics. Synthesize this with Christian revelation, as in
St Augustine’s Platonic-Christian and St Thomas’s Augustinian-
Aristotelian ethics—but these themselves need to be synthesized
and held in balance! And integrate with all this the legitimate specu-
lative and practical advances of modernity, such as the immense
dignity of every human person, the extraordinariness of ordinary
human life, and the integrity and relative autonomy of the temporal
social and political order. Now add to these the insights of post-
modernism, such as the tradition-and-history-constituted charac-
ter of rational enquiry, the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment “view
from nowhere,” and the myth of “the secular.” Charles Taylor and
Alasdair MacIntyre have done incomparable work in this regard.
Now all we need is a new St Benedict to show us how to put all this
theory into practice.
1. Phronemon is the term used by Aristotle to indicate a practically wise person.
46
4
Plato:
Being in Exile
All education is conversion.1
Pierre Hadot
W
e know as Catholics, from the divine revelation that has
come down to us from the Apostles, that we are exiles in
this world. We also know that, nevertheless, this world is
neither illusory nor evil, but real, good, and beloved by God. But we
also know from Revelation that it is a fallen world, and that this fall
is due to human sin: the willful rejection of God by our first par-
ents, and the mysterious participation in this rejection by every
human being born into this world. We also know that the exile we
suffer is tragic, but temporary, and ultimately comedic, for there is a
way out. God Himself entered into our exilic state by becoming a
human being, and through His life, death, and resurrection over-
came our exile and put an end to it. By uniting ourselves in faith,
hope, and love to the God-Man who now reigns in heaven but
remains intimate with us even in this fallen world, we are enabled to
do what He did, through the power of His grace, and conquer
death. “After this our exile,” we, if we obey Him, are promised a life
in our true home with our Father forever.
Every human being is born into exile, and the experience of and
various responses to it constitute what we call religion, which, ety-
mologically, is re-ligio, a binding or tying back. There is a universal
1. “Conversion,” Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis

France), 4:979–81.
47
recognition in the major religions of the world, including non-the-
istic religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, of a radical separa-
tion of human existence from its true ground; an alienation from
something more real than what we normally experience; an
estrangement from a transcendent source; a blindness to a unifying,
resolving, perfecting, guiding, guarding, nurturing, and loving
presence; a deafness to a voice that answers infallibly to “why?”; in
short, we are homeless and cannot find our way home by ourselves.
Though the major religions of the world indicate our exilic status
and give hints to a way home, Christianity—and as a Catholic, I
would say Catholic Christianity—alone provides the accurate rea-
son for our exile, the correct map, indefectible navigational tools,
and an unsinkable vessel to carry us to our homeland. If this is the
case, and if we have been permitted this exile only to learn how to
overcome it, it would seem prudent to keep to the map with the
limited time we have in our pilgrimage: to keep our hearts focused
on the Sacred Scriptures and Catholic theology, to practice the sci-
ence of the saints, and to seek only the wisdom of the Cross.
This is all a preface to the question’: why read Plato? Indeed, why
study philosophy at all, the search after wisdom, if Wisdom, in the
person of Jesus Christ, has already been found? Why perpetuate
unnecessarily the asking of questions about the nature of the good,
the purpose of existence, the immortality of the soul, etc., since
these questions have already been answered by Revelation, and thus
can only distract us from the one thing necessary—knowing and
loving Jesus Christ? And why study the philosophy of a pagan who
lived before the Incarnation, and thus whose grasp of and solution
to the problem of exile is bound to be incomplete at best and erro-
neous at worst? As St Paul wrote, speaking to the pagan philoso-
phers on Mars Hill, Jesus Christ is a stumbling block for the Jews,
who preferred an earthly savior with a military program, and fool-
ishness to the Greeks, who didn’t really want answers, but rather
only to keep up their fruitless and decadent questioning.
Why Plato and Greek philosophy? Consider this: the Gospel of St
John was written in Attic Greek, which, due to its precision and
unique capacity for abstract articulation, was the language of
ancient philosophy; the word that the beloved disciple chose for the
48
Plato: Being in Exile
very identity of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was Logos, a
word with profound philosophical resonances and connotations;
the bishops and theologians of the early Ecumenical Councils that
gave us definitive declarations of the nature of the Trinity and Jesus
Christ were able to do so only because they were steeped in Platonic
metaphysics, and thus their doctrinal formulations, such as the
hypostatic union and the distinction of nature and person, were
borrowed directly from distinctions made in Greek philosophy; the
greatest Church Father, St Augustine, would most probably not
have been a Church Father, and perhaps not even a Christian or
saint, if it were not for his initial conversion to spiritual reality
through reading Plotinus, the great pagan theologian of Platonism.
But these are essentially arguments for the good of Greek philos-
ophy in general, and for Plato in particular, on account of something
else—in this case, for understanding the history and the develop-
ment of Christian theology. With all the wonderful Catholic theol-
ogy there is to read in a lifetime, theology that we know with
certainty to be true and salvific, should we not just read the great
Christian Platonists, St Augustine and St Bonaventure, and leave
Plato, and philosophy—solid scaffolding, yes, but better to be dis-
carded with the completion of the building—to the scholars and
academics? Does Plato deserve our attention in himself?
Yes. But why? One must simply read Plato. Read the “Allegory of
the Cave” from The Republic, or the “Ladder of Love” from the Sym-
posium, and if you have an open mind and inquiring heart, you will
recognize something wonderful in Plato’s writings, a profound res-
onance with the most essential of Christian teachings. The Cave is a
masterful metaphor for the soul trapped in sin, and the Ladder is a
striking description of the ascent of the soul from creation to Cre-
ator. But again, though there is certainly an amazing foreshadowing
of Catholic theology in Plato—e.g., his suggestive trinity of the One
“beyond being,” the Intellect comprising the perfect forms of cre-
ated things, and the World-Soul as their agent in this word—Plato
is essential reading on his own terms. This is especially the case
when we consider the theme of exile.
Before grace can divinize the soul, the soul must yearn for divin-
ization. What makes us so yearn? A sense of the inadequacy and
49
shadow-like nature of this world, an intense feeling of alienation
and homesickness, a profound intuition that there is much more to
reality than what ordinarily appears to us. Plato’s dialogues evoke
these senses, feelings, and intuitions. Eric Voegelin, the great twenti-
eth-century German Platonist, wrote: “There is no answer to the
Question other than the Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts
of questioning.”2 Paradoxically, the answer to spiritual questions is
found in the questions themselves, or better, in the very act of ques-
tioning, the art of which was brought to perfection in practice by
Plato’s teacher Socrates, and in writing by Plato himself. In his
capacity to prompt recognition of our alienation from true reality,
evoke yearning for it, and enable us, through the dialectical method
of inquiry he invented, to achieve participation in it, Plato is simply
indispensable, both as a precursor to Faith, and a guide along the
way home.
Philosophy as Spiritual Exercise

We touched on the Christian understanding of spiritual exile from
God as originating in our banishment from the Garden of Eden
through original sin, and culminating in, not tragic loss, but a
comedic recovery of everything—and more. The ancient pagan
world also possessed a deep sense of exile, of having fallen from an
original perfection and harmony, but tragedy was its inexorable
upshot, with any comedy only the soothing salve for an inevitable,
irretrievable pain and loss. As Peter Leithart has written in his pro-
found book, Deep Comedy:
For Greeks and many other ancient peoples, history was essen-
tially tragic. Things had begun well in a world of plenty and joy,
but the world was bound to degenerate and decline until it sput-
tered and whimpered to a halt. For some, history was seen as a
turning wheel, so that the pathetic end was a prelude to a new
2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume 4: The Ecumenic Age, in The Col-
lected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 17, ed. Michael Franz (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 2000), 404.
50
beginning. Cyclical views of history such as these look more opti-
mistic, but that is only apparent. If it is cyclical, history merely
repeats the story of decline again and again, unto ages of ages, the
tragedy becoming more banal with each repetition.3
There was only one pagan author who held a real hope for a return
to the bliss of the golden age, and it was not Plato, but Virgil, who,
in his Fourth Eclogue written only forty years before the birth of
Christ, prophesied the birth of a child who would inaugurate a new
age in which all wars would eventually cease, and earth and man
would obtain a harmony such that commerce and agriculture
would no longer be necessary—a return to Eden.
But if Virgil, and (we must add) the mysterious figure of Job—
who, neither a pagan nor a Jew, and exiled on his dung heap 1,500
years before Virgil, cried, “I know that my redeemer lives” (Job
19:25)—are the closest that non-Christians ever got to hope in a
redemption from exile, Plato got the closest to grasping what this
post-exilic reality might be like. For he hoped for something more
than this life and the shadow world of Hades in his unshakable con-
viction, modeled by Socrates through his courageous indifference
to his death (read Phaedo!), of the immortality of man’s soul and of
eternal reward for the proper care of it. Through his dialogues,
Plato invites all men to grasp the transcendent world of perfection
for which the soul yearns. “The nature of man is openness to tran-
scendence.”4 Eric Voegelin learned this from Plato, and, while it is a
truth expressed to some extent in all the ancient religions of the
world, Plato was the first to treat it scientifically, so to speak, by pro-
viding intellectual justification for its truth not only through myth,
3. Leithart, Deep Comedy, 3.

4. “In the aftermath of the Montreal lecture that gave rise to ‘In Search of the
Ground,’ one of Voegelin’s auditors asked this question: ‘Is it possible that a synthe-
sis of all the current theories on the structure and operation of the human psyche
could produce a new concept of the nature of man? And would this not produce a
new ideology?’ Voegelin responded: ‘The nature of man is in principle known. You
can’t produce by new insights a new nature of man. The nature of man is openness
to transcendence.’” See Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Liberalism and the Search for the
Ground: Another Visit with Eric Voegelin,” The Brussels Journal, February 2, 2010,
available at https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4308.
51
which he employed generously in his dialogues, but also through
rational discourse and logical argument.
Alfred North Whitehead, the great twentieth-century British
mathematician and philosopher, once quipped, “The safest general
characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” That’s the truth, for Plato
was the inventor of philosophy—whose living embodiment and
exemplar was Socrates—at least as a form of written discourse, and
his dialogues cover every possible philosophical issue. It is impor-
tant to understand that philosophy for Plato and for the ancient
Greeks in general, whether stoic, cynic, epicurean, or skeptic, was
not a mere academic exercise or quest for abstract knowledge. It
was, as Pierre Hadot has shown in his many pioneering works on
ancient philosophy, a way of life, and the practice of philosophy for
the ancient Greek, whether alone with his thoughts, in his study
with a tablet, or in dialogue with others on the portico or in the
agora, was more a personal spiritual exercise than an abstract aca-
demic pursuit. As Voegelin put it, “Philosophy in the classic sense is
not a body of ‘ideas’ or ‘opinions’ about the divine ground dis-
pensed by a person who calls himself a ‘philosopher,’ but a man’s
responsive pursuit of his questioning unrest to the divine ground
that has aroused it.”5 The life of philosophy for the ancient was
more akin to the life of prayer for the Christian, with contempla-
tion, reception of the sacraments, and attendance at the liturgy con-
stituting the “responsive pursuit of our questioning unrest to the
divine ground that has aroused it.”
The great difference, of course, is that Christian spiritual exer-
cises are, when most authentic, practiced by the Holy Spirit in us
through our receptive consent. And while our souls remain in
“questioning unrest” in this life, aside from those rare mystical
moments where we find ourselves immersed in God’s ineffable
peace, we do have, through our participation in His very life, “the
answer” in Christ, along with the peace that surpasses understand-
ing. Nevertheless, reading Plato’s dialogues more as sacred texts
5. Anamnesis, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 6 (Columbia, MO:

University of Missouri Press, 2002), 96.
52
than as academic works is surely a spiritual exercise. On every page
of Plato, from the most tedious logical argumentation to the most
fantastic myths and sublime allegories, are hints, suggestions, and
sometimes what feels like revelations of that mysterious and tran-
scendent reality he had first experienced in the person of Socrates
and then in his own soul as he pursued, with more passion, intelli-
gence, and determination than perhaps any pagan before and neo-
pagan since, the divine ground that aroused his wonder.
Dialogue, Dialectic, and the Good City

So, what was Plato trying to teach the fourth-century B.C. Athe-
nians of his day, and what can he teach us, particularly about exile?
Two things must be said before we delve into Plato’s main teachings.
The first is that Plato was not only critical of poetry and literature
due to their being twice removed from reality, a copy of a copy, but
also of writing itself, including philosophical writing. Truth for
Plato was primarily found not in books or lectures, but in the soul,
and all the more when it is actively engaged in inquiry and contem-
plation. A written account of a philosophical insight or argument is
only the lifeless and shadow-like vestige of the original ecstatic
experience, one that cannot ask or answer questions, and just keeps
saying the same thing to the reader over and over again. An oral lec-
ture is better, for it exists interactively in present time, but it is also
second-rate, as it is primarily rhetorical, the attempt to persuade
another to right opinion or action, and not dialectical, the attempt
to justify an opinion or action in truth or the good. Even if the
belief or action is a true or good one, the listener is not enabled
through lecture alone to recognize this truth as true and this action
as good for and in himself; the back and forth of dialogic and dia-
lectical inquiry is required for this.
Of course, Plato recorded his thoughts in writing, but not in the
form of oral or written treatises, but in that unique literary form he
invented: philosophical dialogues. For Plato, writing at its best
should aim to imitate the drama of the face-to-face conversation in
which the soul’s movements occur at this place and in this time and
53
with this person. Like the Apostles, whose lives were transformed
not by reading Old Testament texts but by meeting in person the liv-
ing embodiment of those texts, Plato experienced a radical peria-
goge, a turning or reorientation of the soul, and a metanoia, a change
of mind, by listening to and speaking with Socrates in the Agora and
at the homes of wealthy aristocrats. Like the writers of the Gospels,
Plato wanted to convey something of his experience to those not
privileged to meet the master, so that they, too, could be trans-
formed. To do this, Plato invented the philosophical dialogue, and
he wrote over thirty of them, some the length of a book. As Plato
reflected on the master’s words in the privacy of his study, he eventu-
ally became a master himself, and his dialogues contain both
Socrates’ teaching and his own, sometimes quite hard to distinguish.
About the Platonic dialogue, Voegelin wrote: “The dialogue is the
symbolic form of the order of wisdom, in opposition to the oration
as the symbolic form of the disordered society. It restores the com-
mon order of the spirit that has been destroyed through the privati-
zation of rhetoric.”6 Voegelin was primarily a political philosopher,
but then, so was his master. Plato wrote his dialogues not just for
the purpose of personal periagoge, the conversion of individual
Athenians, but for the conversion of the entire Athenian polis,
which was radically in need of it, having suffered a tremendous
defeat at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, ending in
404, after twenty-eight years of fighting and five years before the
execution of Socrates by that same defeated Athenian so-called
democracy. The public political culture of the Athens of his day was
dominated by a cynical desire for power among the young aristoc-
racy, of whom Plato was a member, and by a ruling class of politi-
cians and educators, or sophists. These, for a large fee, would deign
to teach the aspiring politician the secret of political success,
namely, the manipulation of the populace through clever, self-serv-
ing rhetoric. It was a situation not unlike our own, with expensive
education ordered to career success and power instead of the good
6. Order and History, Volume 3: Plato and Aristotle, in The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, vol. 16, ed. Dante Germino (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
1999), 66.
54
of the soul and wisdom, and with politics a game of struggle for
dominance ordered to the preservation and extension of private
freedom or empire, instead of the common good and virtue. This is
what Plato had to say about his beloved polis in his Seventh Letter:
Finally, it became clear to me, with regard to all existing commu-
nities, that they were one and all misgoverned. For their laws have
got into a state that is almost incurable, except by some extraordi-
nary reform with good luck to support it. And I was forced to say,
when praising true philosophy, that it is by this that men are
enabled to see what justice in public and private life really is.
Therefore, I said, there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of
men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philoso-
phy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the
States by some dispensation of providence become true philoso-
phers.
In other words, unless philosophers rule, politics fails, and it was
for the purpose of making philosophy and the good, not sophistry
and might, the ruling religion of the state that Plato set out to write
his dialogues. Plato sought to replace the reigning educational cur-
riculum of Athens—an incoherent and unstable synthesis of the
older, informal education of music, stories, and gymnastics, with
the newer, formal education of sophistical rhetoric and a dialectic
of cleverness—with his own curriculum, combining the best of the
old and the new, but arranged in proper order in the light of the
highest wisdom. Socrates had discovered this wisdom, and Plato
systematized and developed it. Education, or paideia, was to be
ordered to the good of the soul, which is nourished solely on the
Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Plato was not alone in desiring
educational reform, being part of the fourth-century movement
towards a more systematic and rigorous formation of the Greek cit-
izen by the state. But he was far ahead of his time in the moral,
intellectual, and spiritual depth he sought in this formation. Rich-
ard Tarnas puts it this way:
This ideal of man was the pattern and model toward which all
Greek educators and poets, artists and philosophers always
looked. It was this universal ideal, this model of humanity which
55
all individuals were to imitate. As this ideal was to be embodied in
the community, and the goal of education was to make each per-
son in the image of the community. Plato’s primary directive for
philosophy focused on the strenuous development of the intellect,
the will, and the body, motivated by a ceaseless desire to regain the
lost union with the eternal, for the recollection of the ideals is both
the means and the goal of true knowledge. Education, therefore,
for Plato is in the service of the soul and the divine. Under Plato,
the classical paideia assumed a deeper and metaphysical dimen-
sion in his Academy, holding forth the ideal of inner perfection
realized through disciplined education.7
For Plato, what began as a meeting with an unkempt bricklayer
walking around the marketplace bothering people with his inces-
sant questions was to end, through the establishment of his Acad-
emy and hopefully schools modeled on it throughout Athens, in a
vast educational system producing rulers for Athens who, being
brought into intimate soul-contact with the Real, would, like an art-
ist gazing upon beauty in his mind and incarnating it on canvas,
incarnate the just political order by gazing on the eternal and
immutable Forms and effecting a constitution mirroring eternal
wisdom in this time-bound and mutable world.
Intimations of Christ:
The Cave and the Ladder of Love
Although Plato’s teachings are spread out among the over thirty
dialogues he wrote, I think we need look no further than his
description of the Ladder of Love in the Symposium (210a–212c) and
the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic (VII, 514a2–517a7) to
encounter the core of Plato’s teachings. “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains.” So goes the opening line of The Social
Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, intellectual architect of the
French Revolution. For Rousseau, the chains were political ones, to
7. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that
Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 42–43.
56
be broken only by the revolutionary institution of his social con-
tract. For Plato, however, and this is the essential meaning of the
cave allegory, they are chains binding the soul, only to be broken by
an intimate encounter with the Real, culminating in a vision of the
Good. The Real is bright and undeniable as the Sun, but we the
unenlightened seemed doomed to mistake the shadows it casts for
the Real itself. The teaching of Plato that we discover in the cave
allegory is that our true exile is from ourselves, who, though divine
and destined for immortality, have somehow forgotten our true
identity. And the way to recover our true selves, and thus the true
world that is our home, is through the moral, intellectual, and spir-
itual exercise of philosophy. But such contemplation must be trans-
lated into action—though many contemplators would have it
otherwise!—and by being formed in an educational system and
state ordered by and to the Good, we the exiled in mortal bodies can
best prepare ourselves for the liberation of the soul unto the life that
never ends.
The cave, then, is not an actual place but a state of mind or con-
sciousness, one in which the soul, our true self, is eclipsed by the
false self and the illusory world it mistakes for reality. It is akin to
the Christian tradition’s identification of the three main sources of
evil as “the Flesh, the World, and the Devil.” The flesh for St John
the Evangelist meant a life intent on the goods of the body at the
expense of the goods of the soul; the world connotes the desire for
prestige above truth; the Devil is, well, the Devil. For Plato, the true
evil we face is deception, in whatever form and through whatever
agency, through the abuse of language, an evil against which the
philosopher must fight incessantly with the sword of dialectic and
passionate philosophical inquiry. In short, the material world we
live in is not the cave—the cave is our unenlightened perspective of
this material world. If we look with the eyes of the soul, which
requires great discipline and ordered desire, we would see not a
dark, suffocating cave full of flickering shadows cast by lying
manipulators upon the eyes of slaves, but an infinite and eternal
heaven of truth, goodness, and beauty overseen and pervaded by a
mysterious, transcendent source whose essence is pure giving and
who is mysteriously present in what He gives. If this sounds like
57
Christian theology, then the reader is beginning to understand
something of the miraculous wisdom of Plato. But how do we look
with the eyes of our soul? Who can show us how to do this? Who
can break the chains of us prisoners? And how did the mysterious
person described in the allegory who descends into the cave to lib-
erate the prisoners break his own chains? Does Plato give us
answers, or even hints? Read Plato and find out, especially his vivid
description in Book II of the Republic of the perfectly just man
deemed unjust by all and crucified. That Plato had an intimation of
the Just Man is indubitable.
Finally, let us consider Plato’s “Ladder of Love” from the Sympo-
sium. What this passage articulates is Plato’s teaching on participa-
tion. The particular, changeable, and multiple realities that appear
to us are precisely because they, to a certain extent, are not. For
Plato, things of this material world are real, but in, by, and for
themselves only as real as shadows—real to the extent that they bor-
row reality from something else that possesses reality in itself, as a
reflection, imitation, image, and copy are parasitical, so to speak, on
their original hosts. Nevertheless, there are not two realities: the
individual material things in this world, on the one hand; the uni-
versal forms of which they are the reflections, on the other. There is
only One, which appears to us as particular things and distinct ideas
due to our unenlightened state. The material things we see are just
the Forms, though perceived on a lower level of consciousness; and
the forms are, when properly perceived, just the One. To use the
Symposium example, it is Beauty itself that appears to us in beauti-
ful things.
We are exiles from Being only because we do not see what is right
in front of us. But how are we to escape this myopic exile, and is
such escape even possible? These are questions that Plato the pagan,
however noble and enlightened, was not able to answer adequately,
for only divine revelation can tell us these things. What he did teach
the world is that the examined life is alone worth living, and that
such questions are the very life of the soul—and he taught us how
to ask them.
58
5
The Good, the Right,
and Theology
D
ivine revelation has been a curious non-interlocutor in
public debates among conservative theists regarding how
best to defend the objectivity, intelligibility, and communi-
cability of moral truths, along with their application to contempo-
rary legal issues, such as racial discrimination, human rights, and
abortion. One such debate occurred in the pages of First Things.1
The main issue of the debate is not the content of basic moral prin-
ciples, but their epistemological, ontological, and rhetorical aspects:
the fundamental structure of moral thinking and judgment, its rela-
tion to what precisely is being thought about and judged, and the
most reasonable and effective mode of public ethical and legal dis-
course. The two interlocutors agree “that the source of morality is
human nature, that human nature is essentially a rational nature,
and that moral truths are discoverable through reason apart from
revelation,” and they both condemn the moral evil of racial dis-
crimination. What they are at odds about is exactly why this or any
evil act is evil, and what makes an act good and a moral principle
true. The question comes down to the precise ontic and epistemic
character of “ought.”
For Arkes, racial discrimination is a big “ought not” because—
and only because—it is unreasonable; it is an act that violates a
known principle of reason, that humans have moral status and dig-
1. For a summary of and commentary on the debate, see Micah Watson, “A Tale
of Two Philosophers,” First Things Web Exclusives (February 18, 2002), available at
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/02/a-tale-of-two-philosophers.
59
nity by virtue of what makes them human, namely rationality and
freedom. Thus, treating a human being as less than human based
upon what does not define him essentially as human, such as skin
color, is unreasonable and therefore wrong. And since reason is ulti-
mately anchored in the law of non-contradiction, racial discrimina-
tion, as well as any other moral evil, is evil because it violates this
most fundamental and self-evident law of human reason. If a
human being is properly defined as possessing an essential equality
with all other humans, then it is self-contradictory to commit racial
discrimination, since it treats a human being as not having this
equality. Thus, legal proscriptions against this evil practice, for
Arkes, should be explicitly grounded in and justified by this sort of
explanation. O’Brien, on the other hand, identifies Arkes’ character-
ization of the location, derivation, and justification of moral knowl-
edge as essentially Kantian and therefore problematic: “To have
substance, morality needs to go beyond mere rational consistency
and find its grounds in the form of ‘rational animality,’ as Aristotle
and Aquinas saw, but which Kant mistakenly rejected as ‘heterono-
mous.’” For O’Brien, moral evil is not evil primarily because it is
self-evidently unreasonable in light of some sort of a priori, abstract
conception of the rational being as such, but because it is vicious, in
light of concrete, personal, historical, tradition-constituted, com-
munity-informed experience—in terms of a conception of human
flourishing and happiness that answers not so much the question
why one ought to do this or that, but what we, qua-members-of-
this-community-and-tradition, need in order to live well.
As it seems to me, this debate is a scuffle in an ongoing human
feud, begun in the wranglings between ancient Stoics and Epicure-
ans. It is a war between “two rival versions of moral enquiry,” to use
MacIntyre’s expression, between eudaimonism and deontologism:
an ethics of happiness, flourishing, virtues, eros, and the good versus
an ethics of self-sacrifice, duty, law, agape, and the right. This feud is
not going to end any time soon, at least not without some media-
tion by a third, peacemaking interlocutor. As I said at the outset,
theology, unlike in the ancient debates, has not been an interlocutor
in this or virtually any academic and public discussion of ethics and
politics. Sure, the theologian is allowed to have his say, but he is
60
The Good, the Right, and Theology
barred from ever having an authoritative say, from being one of
those insiders whose deliberations and speculations are to become
an integral part of “public reason.” The theologians have a compel-
ling story, the philosophers and public policy folks admit, but we
need a story more appropriate and more compelling for our plural-
istic, secular, political culture.
However, when dealing with the foundations of ethics, the Chris-
tian theologian’s story is not just one story among others; it is one
that must be read by everyone, as it is meant for everyone. It is ulti-
mately everyone’s story. Moreover, as the Radical Orthodoxy school
has shown, the ostensibly a-theological, secular stories that auto-
matically pass the muster of public reason are nothing if not theo-
logically implicated. Now, although the Christian story is everyone’s
story, only a very select audience has heard it in its entirety, believed
it fully, and made it a model for their own life’s stories. Yet, even for
the unbeliever, the theologian’s story has clear and arguable logical,
ethical, philosophical, legal, and political ramifications and compo-
nents, just as the “non-theological” stories have implicit theological
moorings. Let those who have ears, that is, those who have taken
out their old and decrepit, modernist, Enlightenment earplugs,
hear: “we are all theologians now.”
The inseparability of faith and reason in both theory and practice
is one of the main points of Benedict XVI’s teaching. We can debate
the political and philosophical ramifications of the affirmation that
we are made in the image of God, that God loves us, and that He
commands us to “be perfect as His father in heaven is perfect”; how-
ever, in the end, we either affirm these truths or we do not, based
upon whether we have or have not encountered the living Christ,
caritas in veritate, or perhaps just encountered those Christians who
have. So, if human acts are a matter of experience, choice, and
grace, not just logic, evidence, and demonstration (whether Aristo-
telian-eudaimonistic or Kantian-deontological in mode), then any
debate about the metaphysical, epistemic, and rhetorical aspects of
ethics must invite theology as an interlocutor. And this neglect of
theology is the reason that the debate between Arkes and O’Brien is,
as it stands, irresolvable.
The problem is that they are both right. O’Brien is correct that
61
arguments about and declarations of principled moral prescrip-
tions and proscriptions, even rigorous and true ones, cannot ensure
a public commitment to and embodiment of Christian or even
humanistic values in our post-Enlightenment, neo-pagan, pluralis-
tic political culture. Moral principles are experiential, cultural, and
historical in their genealogy and in the subjective apparatus of
human recognition. But Arkes is also right that we can and must
transcend these contingencies to see and act on principles in an
absolute and universal mode. In other words, although reason is
tradition-dependent (pace Kant), it is also tradition-transcendent
(cum Kant). Somehow we must hold these together, and my argu-
ment here is that we cannot do so outside of a theological narrative
and discourse.
Western nation-states lack a shared intellectual tradition to pro-
vide grounding for the abstract meaning of universal human rights
and moral values. They also lack a communally-shared ethos, which
is required for the effective, authentic, and integral political and
legal embodiment of rights and values. However, as O’Brien’s argu-
ment suggests, the discourse-of-moral-principle-alone, in prescind-
ing from experiential genealogy and a moderate historicist
sensibility, is ultimately sterile. On the other hand, public reason in
today’s secular culture eschews any theological dogmas that might
shed authoritative light on the ultimate meaning, derivation, and
fulfillment of human life and experience. And, as Arkes maintains, a
discourse-of-moral-experience-alone, absent the universal, history-
and-experience transcending logos, is ultimately indeterminate, for
it is deficiently rational. The right and the good must live together
or die alone.
Critiquing Maritain’s “democratic charter,” where natural law
norms without religious or philosophical particularity are to
ground the political consensus, MacIntyre sums up what he consid-
ers the essential problem with a natural law morality and argumen-
tation that tries to transcend contingency and experience:
What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas’
thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural
knowledge of divine law and hence of what every human being
62
owes to every other human being. The plain pre-philosophical
person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what
Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in
many cultures and notably in that of modernity plain persons are
misled into giving moral expression to those capacities through
assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the eigh-
teenth century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and
absent from Aquinas’ thought.2
According to this view, Arkes’s model would be analogous to
Maritain’s, and so not sufficiently aware of the fact that while men
may argue and think about moral truth, and value and pursue
moral goods without conscious deference to a particular philosoph-
ical theory or religious belief, they nevertheless possesses implicit
and unconscious philosophical commitments that influence and
condition the character and interpretation of that evaluation and
pursuit. These commitments determine to some extent the charac-
ter of behavior that is the conclusion of the practical reasoning that
begins with the evaluation and pursuit of particular goods. Since
rationality itself is a practice, it inevitably takes on the shape of the
particular lived tradition of which it is a part. In practice, then,
there is no rationality as such, but only particular rationalities
informed by particular religious, philosophical, anthropological,
and epistemological commitments that condition the manner in
which that rationality is understood and applied to practical ques-
tions. Therefore, with citizens divided in their ultimate concerns,
one should not expect rational agreement on practical matters of a
moral nature, especially not on the foundational moral values of
the political order. As MacIntyre argues in Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?:
There is no way to engage with or to evaluate rationally the theses
advanced in contemporary form by some particular tradition
except in terms which are framed with an eye to the specific char-
acter and history of that tradition on the one hand and the specific
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia,

Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 76.
63
character and history of the particular individual or individuals
on the other.3
For MacIntyre, a strictly principled, obligation-laden, logic-
derived articulation of moral goods and rights cannot serve as the
political foundation of a tradition-pluralistic regime. For we are
“tradition-constituted, culturally dependent rational animals” who
cannot effectively separate our metaphysical beliefs from our values
and the actions derived from them. Though the citizens in a plural-
istic polity may share a common lexicon of “human rights” and
“democratic values,” it is a house built on sand with a sinking foun-
dation of entirely disparate understandings of that lexicon and radi-
cally disparate traditions of practical rationality: Thomist, Humean,
Kantian, Rousseauian, Nietzschean, Deweyan, et al. For MacIntyre,
shared moral evaluation and understanding is extremely limited, if
not impossible altogether, in the absence of a shared tradition of
practical rationality, including a common reservoir of theological,
philosophical, ethical, and anthropological concepts, and common
virtues and goods attained and obtained in and through various
practices, especially the architectonic practice of politics, that con-
stitute a shared tradition. And this is why we have so much moral
disagreement in our public discourse. Tracey Rowland summarizes
MacIntyre’s position: “’MacIntyre’s analysis raises the question of
whether there can be any such things as ‘universal values,’ under-
stood not in a natural law sense, but rather…the idea that there is a
set of values which are of general appeal across a range of traditions,
including the Nietzschean, Thomist, and Liberal traditions.”4
MacIntyre again:
Abstract the particular theses to be debated and evaluated from
their contexts within traditions of enquiry and then attempt to
debate and evaluate them in terms of their rational justifiability to
any rational person, to individuals conceived as abstracted from
their particularities of character, history, and circumstance, and
you will thereby make the kind of rational dialogue which could
3. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 398.

4. Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II (London:
Routledge, 2003), 141.
64
move through argumentative evaluation to the rational accep-
tance of rejection of a tradition of enquiry effectively impossible.
Yet it is just such abstraction in respect of both the theses to be
debated and the persons to be engaged in the debate which is
enforced in the public forms of enquiry and debate in modern lib-
eral culture, thus for the most part effectively precluding the
voices of tradition outside liberalism from being heard.5
Let us suppose it is true that citizens belonging to the same nar-
rative tradition would form a more unified, robust, stable, and
strong political order, so that exceptionless and self-evident rights
and laws deriving ultimately from the law of non-contradiction and
man’s end-in-himself dignity would serve as the most effective pub-
lic discourse. Unfortunately, the demographic and sociological exi-
gencies of the modern, pluralistic nation-state preclude such
narrative unity. We cannot have forced conversions to our narrative
of choice, and so we must accept the limitations of our “concrete
historical ideal,” as Maritain would say. The “fact of religious plural-
ism” requires us to attempt, even if it seems impossible, the separa-
tion of the public, legal, political sphere from the particularity of
our tradition. But can such be done? Is this kind of acquired schizo-
phrenia necessary to be a good pluralist citizen?
Conservative theists endorse wholeheartedly the infusion of inte-
grally religious practices and discourse into the naked public
square; yet they also tend to limit the participation in and scope of
these practices and discourses to the in-house crowd, as it were. For
those outside their tradition, and for the secular public sphere in
general, it is to be a program of translation—a translation of
dogma, ritual, charitable acts, and especially the natural law. It is
urged to speak only the language of principled, universal “public
reason” to strangers, thereby secularizing, moralizing, and politiciz-
ing what is distinctly theological and spiritual in our tradition, both
in doctrine and in practice, to render it intelligible to non-theists
and practically effective for secular society.
However, this strategy presupposes two fundamental claims that
are highly dubitable. The first is that there is such a thing as the
65
“secular,” that is, an ideologically neutral, universal, public world
accessible to and based upon a universal public reason, abstracted
from the practical and speculative particularities of tradition. For,
as the argument goes, if there is no objective, public reason accessi-
ble to all, then we are left with the postmodernist hermeneutics of
suspicion and the will to power, where any affirmation of true or
good is unmasked as either mere idiosyncrasy or the will to domi-
nate. The second dubitable idea is the separability of theoria and
praxis, such that one can effectively strain out from the concrete
practices and particularist discourse of one’s tradition a secular,
universally accessible remainder that is intelligible to all regardless
of traditional allegiance.
Regarding the existence of a secular reason or public space neu-
tral to any particular tradition, MacIntyre writes:
Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it
is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking
their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disin-
terestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third
possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards
being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither
neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of
moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be
excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more
especially for moral and theological enquiry.6
For MacIntyre, it is only through active participation in particu-
lar authentic traditions that men are rendered capable of discover-
ing and achieving their ultimate good. For it is always through a
particular tradition that we ascend to universal truth. Indeed, with-
out tradition we are unable to make any sense of reality at all. As
body and soul composites, our encounters with reality are mediated
and influenced by bodies, which are themselves mediated and influ-
enced by history and culture. Even the words and concepts we use to
interpret and make sense of the brute facts of reality originate and
develop in what MacIntyre calls “traditions of rationality.” All men
6. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 59.
66
are necessarily habituated into a particular tradition, even if it is an
incoherent and considerably defective one like the tradition of liber-
alism. Outside of tradition, coherent knowledge and discovery of
the good is practically impossible. We are, in MacIntyre’s improve-
ment on Aristotle’s classic definition, “tradition-dependent rational
animals.” As Paul Griffiths puts it: “To be confessional is simply to
be open about one’s historical and religious locatedness, one’s spec-
ificity, an openness that is essential for serious theological work and
indeed for any serious intellectual work that is not in thrall to the
myth of the disembodied and unlocated scholarly intellect.”7
Regarding the capacity to translate particular religious truth into
non-religious public reason, MacIntyre articulates the traditionalist
dilemma:
The theologian begins from orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy which
has been learnt from Kierkegaard and Barth becomes too easily a
closed circle, in which believer speaks only to believer, in which all
human content is concealed. Turning aside from this arid in-
group theology, the most perceptive theologians wish to translate
what they have to say to an atheistic world. But they are doomed
to one of two failures. Either [a] they succeed in their translation:
in which case what they find themselves saying has been turned
into the atheism of their hearers. Or [b] they fail in their transla-
tion: in which case no one hears what they have to say but them-
selves.8
Is there a solution? Is there a resolution between Arkes and O’Brien,
between eudaimonism and deontologism? If there is, the indispens-
able condition for its realization is the recognition of the illusory
nature of secularist liberal pluralism. Indeed, there is really no such
thing as “liberalism,” if this means a sphere of reason or action or
culture that escapes the particularism and exclusivity of tradition.
For there is also no such thing as “the secular,” since traditions of
7. Paul J. Griffiths, “The Uniqueness of Christian Doctrine Defended” in Chris-

tian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed.
Gavin D’Costa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 200.
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), 19–20.
67
rationality are distinguished by the particular way they grapple with
matters of ultimate concern—all traditions are ultimately religious.
This has immense political implications. David Schindler writes: “A
nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order
of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of
religion, a priority of either ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom for’—both
of these priorities implying a theology.”9
If believing theists of diverse traditions do not think, speak, and
act distinctively as Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims—
bringing their intellectual, moral, and liturgical traditions wherever
they go in imitation of Socrates, whom Catherine Pickstock once
described as a “walking liturgy,”10 then our “ecumenical jihad”
stands no chance at converting the “liberal traditionalists” of the
culture of death, who have no qualms about communicating to
themselves and others exclusively in their religious parlance of tol-
erance and diversity, and inviting all into their liturgical practices of
aggressive war, false-flag terror, scapegoating, abortion, same-sex
marriage, and euthanasia. Indeed, they see themselves as the “true
believers,” the only ones truly defending “life,” with us as the here-
tics, obsessed only with death and control.
How can these deluded devotees have any hope of ever renounc-
ing their enslaving tradition unless they are made aware of its
enslaving character? And how can they become aware unless they
have some palpable experience of an alternative? The tradition they
inhabit deprives them of the existential conditions required to see
moral truths, let alone religious ones, as Tristram Engelhardt has
pointed out: “In the grip of Enlightenment dispositions regarding
religion, few are inclined to recognize that the moral life once disen-
gaged from a culture of worship loses its grasp on the moral pre-
mises that rightly direct our lives and foreclose the culture of
death.”11 D. Stephen Long puts the point powerfully:
9. David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1996), 83.
10. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Phi-
losophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 40.
68
Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church,
theology alone can give due order to other social formations—
family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not
in abstract speculation, but in a life oriented toward God that cre-
ates particular practices that require the privileging of certain
social institutions above others. The goodness of God can be dis-
covered only when the church is the social institution rendering
intelligible our lives. . . . For a Christian account of this good, the
church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church
is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not
know their own true nature.12
Moral judgments are certainly principled judgments, and we
should search for and declare these principles, even enforce them in
law when prudent and possible. Yet all principles of reason, whether
moral or logical, are first and foremost expressions of the divine
Logos, who can be encountered in and through his manifold, princi-
pled, universal expressions. But absent a personal, experiential
encounter with Him through Faith, in the very particular place and
time where His Flesh becomes available to touch, eat, and experi-
ence, principles are just principles—fleshless, bloodless, and dead.
11. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Life & Death after Christendom: The Moral-
ization of Religion & the Culture of Death,” Touchstone (June 2001), available at
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=14-05-018-f.
12. D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology the Church and Social
Order (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 26, 28.
69
6
Where Top and Bottom Meet:
Public Discourse Rightly
Understood
Without bad will, political philosophy cannot refuse to consider reve-
Where Top and Bottom Meet
lation’s insight into political things when politics does not solve its
own problems in its own terms about its own subject matter.
James V. Schall1
P
urely philosophical, natural, rational explanations of moral
experience exist and are necessary, but they are not adequate
without a complementary theological account. This is not to
say that theology is the starting point for our understanding of the
phenomena of obligation and of our orientation towards goods and
the Good, but rather that it is and must be the ending point. This is
not to say that reason can provide no grounding for or direction to
our moral experience and thinking, nor to advocate a mode of pub-
lic discourse that begins with revelation. Instead, I would like to con-
sider a public discourse where “top and bottom meet,” as it were,
with the central nexus being an ethics of gift. This certainly does not
exclude a bottom-up approach; indeed, it presupposes it. Beginning
with the natural law is often the standard operating procedure for
theists and conservatives in out pluralistic culture, as it should be,
but this does not mean we should always end with the natural law,
ppp
1. James V. Schall, Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexing-

ton Books, 2004), 157.
71
or that we cannot offer a supra-rational foundation for the exist-
ence, universality, force, and intelligibility of the natural law. Of
course, a human person without the light of faith can recognize gen-
uine goods that evoke authentic obligatory sentiments and reasons,
and he can act upon those sentiments and reasons through a ratio-
nal decision that can achieve a real, particular good; but reason
cannot—as reason itself concludes, when it is honest and humble—
adequately account for and motivate those sentiments and deci-
sions without some help from above. Reason, as James Schall has
argued persuasively,2 is bound to close in on itself when it is not
internally open to the transcendent, becoming a distorted, hidden
theology.
Though I am not entirely sure a gift anthropology and theology
is something that reason can discover on its own, I do think that rea-
son can recognize its truth, as well as its beauty and goodness, and
that a person can act morally with this recognition as the main—
but not necessarily exclusive—emotional, existential, and intellec-
tual ground and motivator. And wouldn’t actions based on such a
recognition be morally superior to those that are not, all other
things being equal? If so, an ethics of gift should be argued for pub-
licly as that way of approaching and dealing with reality that best
explains and perfects what reason can know to be true about the
good, human nature, and God, without fully knowing how, what,
and why it knows.
To make the case for a discourse neither exclusively top-down
nor bottom-up, but one where top and bottom meet, where faith
and reason unite, I would like first to discuss Jacques Maritain’s
arguments for the impossibility of a purely rational ethics, and then
conclude with an examination of Pope Benedict XIV’s last encycli-
cal.
2. James V. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catho-

lic University of America Press, 1996).
72
Philosophy Rightly Understood
For Jacques Maritain, a Thomist who was vigorously engaged in the
public discourse of the mid-twentieth century, any science of
human action that excludes the realm of the supernatural from its
purview is deficient, and radically so. There is no such thing as
“pure ethics” if that means a discourse or methodology that
excludes consideration of what God has revealed about the destiny
of man. Maritain does distinguish between moral philosophy and
moral theology, with the former relatively autonomous in its meth-
odology and conclusions, resolving its judgments in the light of
human reason alone; yet the philosopher of Christian Faith, when
engaged in public discourse with non-Christians and even non-the-
ists, cannot consider his philosophizing to be theologically neutral,
since his faith presents to him at least two incontrovertible and eth-
ically relevant supernatural truths about man’s existence in this
world: man is fallen and redeemed, and his happiness is not to be
found in this world. But even the non-Catholic or non-theistic eth-
ical philosopher cannot adopt a purely agnostic stance towards the
existence of an ethically and politically relevant supernatural reality,
because his understanding of and particular prescriptions for the
fundamental structure of the social and political order necessarily
imply either an affirmation or denial of the supernatural end of
man, and so of any other fundamental fact about human existence.
The denial of this end is at the heart of secular modernity in gen-
eral, and of John Rawls’s project in particular. It fundamentally
explains the failure of his attempt to articulate a “purely political”
conception of justice able to serve as a generic module fitting into
any comprehensive doctrine whatsoever—as long as it is “reason-
able.” Maritain writes:
Man is not in a state of pure nature, he is fallen and redeemed.
Consequently, ethics, in the widest sense of the word, that is, in so
far as it bears on all practical matters of human action, politics and
economics, practical psychology, collective psychology, sociology,
as well as individual morality—ethics in so far as it takes man in
his concrete state, in his existential being, is not a purely philo-
sophic discipline. Of itself it has to do with theology, either to
73
become integrated with or at least subalternated to theology. . . .
Here is a philosophy which must of necessity be a superelevated
philosophy, a philosophy subalternated to theology, if it is not to
misrepresent and scientifically distort its object.3
Ethical enquiry is incomplete and bound to err if it is not “subal-
ternated” to theology. What Maritain means by this term is philo-
sophically complex, but at the risk of oversimplification, we can
characterize Maritain’s conception of moral philosophy as neither
completely autonomous from theology nor essentially identical to
it; it is distinct from yet dependent upon moral theology. It is
dependent upon theology because it is incomplete without it; it is
distinct from theology in that it resolves its judgments in the natural
light of practical reason and experience, not in the light of divine
revelation.4 “Theology looks on the supernatural ultimate end first
and foremost as a sharing of the intimate life of God, and . . . moral
philosophy adequately considered looks on this same ultimate end
above all insofar as it brings completion to human nature.”5 Mar-
itain explains that because in a practical science ends serve as princi-
ples, any practical science that does not know the ends of its subject
matter does not possess its own principles. Since man’s ultimate end
is unknowable by the light of human reason alone, and since man’s
end is the first principle of both moral theology and moral philoso-
phy, then moral philosophy without the light of divine revelation
does not possess its first principle; therefore, moral philosophy must
be subalternated to theology. In this subalternation, moral philoso-
phy makes the data offered to it by moral theology its own, shines
the light of human reason on this data, and thus arrives at first prin-
ciples and conclusions of a philosophical character. In this way,
moral philosophy is “superelevated” and perfected so that it can
become “adequate to its object,” namely, man’s end.
It is not that Maritain denies that natural truths about moral
reality are accessible to human reason, for he affirms the validity of
3. Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy, trans. Edward H. Flan-

nery (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 39–40.
4. Ibid., 72.
5. Ibid., 81.
74
the distinction between and the autonomy of both moral philoso-
phy and moral theology. But for Maritain, man is not in a state of
pure nature, since God created a world both natural and graced;
consequently, a purely natural ethics can be neither adequate nor
entirely accurate.
Caritas in Veritate
To be rhetorically effective, a writer must construct his argument
carefully with an eye to the presuppositions, beliefs, attitudes, senti-
ments—the mindset of his audience. Thus, the discourse of choice
for a professor at, say, a Christian college speaking to like-minded
but not confessionally identical conservatives, or, for that matter, a
pope speaking to a post-Christian West about love and truth,
would, one might think, be one that avoids the particular, tradition-
exclusive truths of Catholic theology, proposing instead the univer-
sal, tradition-inclusive principles of the natural law; for, “men of
good will,” although sinners, are by definition cognizant of it. As St
Augustine says in The Confessions, “Thy law is written in the hearts
of men, which iniquity itself effaces not.” In his dialogue with the
atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, Pope Benedict wrote: “The
natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the
key issue in dialogue with the secular society and with other com-
munities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in com-
mon and to seek the basis for a consensus about the ethical
principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society.”6
However, the most remarkable characteristic of Benedict XVI’s
encyclical Caritas in Veritate is its theologically rich mode of dis-
course. Although it employs language and encourages values intelli-
gible and attractive to men of good will, especially in its more
practical analyses of and prescriptions for remediating the univer-
sally recognized, worldwide economic crisis, it is nevertheless per-
vaded with substantive argument that is unapologetically Trini-
tarian and Christological in nature, based in a strong theological
6. Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization: On Rea-

son and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 69.
75
anthropology of person and society as gift, and delivered in a pecu-
liarly Platonic and Augustinian rhetorical mode. This stands in
great tension with, and counts as a departure from, the strategic
project of recent magisterial documents that use only the language
of “secular reason,” while quietly informing it with theologically
particular philosophical and anthropological content.
In his dialogue with Habermas, then Cardinal Ratzinger went on
to say:
Unfortunately, this instrument [the natural law] has become
blunt. Accordingly, I do not intend to appeal to it for support in
this conversation. The idea of the natural law presupposed a con-
cept of nature in which nature and reason overlap, since nature
itself is rational. With the victory of the theory of evolution, this
view of nature has capsized.
Going further than the pope, I would say that we are contending
not merely with formidable anti-nature and anti-reason ideas, but
with a systematic and consistent body of such ideas, united by a his-
torical narrative, and embodied in well-entrenched and concrete
habits, attitudes, customs, rituals, institutions, and practices—a
full-fledged tradition. I wonder, then, how effective a purely natural
law discourse is, even as a starting point, in this milieu of nihilistic,
anti-logos traditionalism. As Benedict XVI warned on the day
before his election to the pontificate, “we are building a dictatorship
of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and
whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”7 It
is as if the culture that Western man inhabits today embodies an
alternative, unnatural law with radically different notions of nature
and law, as well as being, the good, the human person, and the rela-
tion of all these to each other. Charles Taylor writes: “It is not that
we have sloughed off a whole lot of unjustified beliefs, leaving an
implicit self-understanding that had always been there, to operate at
last untrammeled. Rather, one constellation of implicit understand-
ings of our relation to God, the cosmos, other humans, and time
ppp
7. Homily for the Mass Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice, April 18, 2005.
76
was replaced by another in a multifaceted mutation.”8 But if there is
no longer a consensus in Western culture on natural law truths and
values, and if revelation is even more incomprehensible to it, how
can those who still believe in God help save the world?
Benedict suggests a more complex yet satisfying and credible
solution in Caritas in Veritate. In both proclaiming to believers and
unbelievers alike the postmodern insight (though the Church had it
first) of the inescapable intertwining of theoria and praxis, of reason
and faith, in all personal and social human activity, and revealing
the ultimate explanation and foundation of this intertwining in the
person of Christ, the very embodiment and integration of truth and
love, the pope has written the first truly postsecular encyclical, one
that strategically and spiritually capitalizes on the contemporary,
post-Enlightenment weariness with secular reason, and its new
openness to religiously-informed narrative and practice. From
Ratzinger’s “Subiaco Address”:
The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs dis-
daining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the
abyss, to man’s ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse
the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: even one who does not
succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless,
seek to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God
existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not
believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our
affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent
need.9
The pope does not expect his Trinitarian, Christological, Catholic-
tradition-constituted encyclical, calling for an economics and poli-
tics of gratuitous, self-giving love informed by the truth of the Gos-
pel, to be immediately embraced by a non-believing audience.
What he is attempting instead is to meet his audience in its interior
state of emergency—where bottom meets top, as it were—as well as
8. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Hastings Center Report

(March–April 1995), 24, 27.
9. An address given at the convent of Saint Scholastica in Subiaco, Italy, April 1,
2005.
77
to help bring about a state in which the choice for God becomes
desperately urgent and overwhelmingly attractive in the face of the
only alternative—a culture of death, force, fraud, meaninglessness,
and despair.
MacIntyre has written:
There is no way to engage with or to evaluate rationally the theses
advanced in contemporary form by some particular tradition
except in terms of which are framed with an eye to the specific
character and history of that tradition on the one hand and the
specific character and history of the particular individual or indi-
viduals on the other.10
Western culture in both theory and practice has moved, in the
words of Archbishop Javier Martínez of Granada, “beyond secular
reason.”11 The era of enlightened, modernist, foundationalist, uni-
versalist, and tradition-prescinding rationalism has been displaced
by post-Enlightenment, postmodernist, anti-foundationalist, par-
ticularist, and tradition-constituted narrative. And for all of post-
modernism’s nihilism and its disdain for any normative under-
standing of nature and truth, it is radically skeptical of the knee-
jerk, anti-religious, reason-idolizing, autonomy-seeking discourse
and practices of the Enlightenment; it is intrinsically open to a new
“story” (though not necessarily inclined to the true one), to radi-
cally new hermeneutics and explanations, to radically “other”
ontologies and epistemologies, indeed, to alien theologies and spir-
itualities. The “new atheism” of Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins is
not new at all, but the outdated, pathetic, “last gasp” of modernity,
to use the phrase of James K.A. Smith. In short, Enlightenment sec-
ularism is dead. As Jürgen Habermas has stated, Western culture is
now “post-secular.”
The Enlightenment’s reductionist explanation for truth and love
in secular pragmatic reason and individual self-interest is no longer
publicly authoritative in culture; it is now just one narrative among

11. Javier Martínez, “Beyond Secular Reason: Some Contemporary Challenges
for the Life and Thought of the Church,” Communio 31.4 (2004): 557–86, available
at https://archive.secondspring.co.uk/.
78
others. Can we now count on the power of straight Truth—truth
both natural and supernatural, untranslated, unmediated, unfil-
tered—to help convert to the good and the right those who, precisely
because they are now disillusioned by the Enlightenment’s false
promises of “reason alone,” are newly open to both reason and reve-
lation?
Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly
life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal
driving force behind the authentic development of every person
and of all humanity. Love—caritas—is an extraordinary force
which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engage-
ment in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that has its origin
in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth.
For the unbeliever, such declarations are not immediately believ-
able, self-evidently persuasive, or even fully intelligible. What is uni-
versally acceptable and, more importantly, evocative of love, is the
human experience of love of others, desire for truth, the obligation
of conscience, and the goodness of gifts, and so the pope chose to
write an encyclical to be read by both theists and non-theists that
provides the best explanation—one grounded in the Most Blessed
Trinity—for these phenomena. This, to me, is public discourse at its
best—and most reasonable.
79
III
Metanoia
7
An Apology for Uselessness
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be
men who devote their lives to contemplation.
St Thomas Aquinas1
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human
needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.
G.K. Chesterton2
I
would like to put liberal education in its place, by unmasking its
essential uselessness to students and to society at large. And I
would like to apologize for all the time wasted by my students
and all liberal-arts professors in trying to make liberal education
useful. However, the place where I would like to put the liberal arts
is at the forefront and foundation of education, as the raison d’être
of every college and university in this country and the world. And
my apology is to those who have suffered under any educational
program not ultimately founded on and integrally oriented towards
the study of the liberal arts, that is, to what is ultimately useless.
Solely useful education is inherently dysfunctional; non-liberal
education doesn’t work.
There is, of course, an essential role for useful, non-liberal, voca-
tional, career, and professional training in the typical university and
college curriculum. I am not arguing for the exclusivity of liberal
education, that every college and university should be wholly
devoted to liberal arts education and nothing else. What I’d like to
1. Cited in Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (San Francisco, Ignatius
Press, 2009), 41.
2. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane Company, 1909), 40.
83
propose instead is that the success, which is to say, the usefulness, of
non-liberal education for individuals and society is inextricably
bound up with and necessarily dependent upon 1) the uselessness
of liberal education; 2) a widespread awareness of the preeminent
value of this uselessness; 3) liberal education being at the very core
of every college and university curriculum. Robert Hutchins,
founder of St. John’s College’s integrated Great Books curriculum,
sums all this up nicely:
The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoid-
able. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a
human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be
an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the
highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is
whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.3
The tension between useful and useless knowledge has been around
for millennia. Consider Plato’s Protagoras. Here Socrates asks the
sophist Protagoras what he teaches young men: “I teach them good
planning, both in their own affairs, such as how one should best
manage his own household, and in public affairs, how one can best
speak and act in the city-state.”4 Contrast Protagoras’ pragmatist
notion of education to these notions:
Of possessions . . . those rather are useful, which bear fruit; those
liberal, which tend to enjoyment. By fruitful, I mean, which yield
revenue; by enjoyable, where nothing accrues of consequence
beyond the using. (Aristotle, Rhetoric I.5)
In music, numbers, sounds, and measures; in geometry, lines, fig-
ures, spaces, magnitudes; in astronomy, the revolution of the
heavens, the rising, setting, and other motions of the stars; in
grammar, the peculiar tone of pronunciation, and, finally, in this
very art of oratory, invention, arrangement, memory, delivery.
(Cicero, On the Character of the Orator, 42)
3. From “The Great Conversation” in Great Books of the Western World, Book 1
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 5.
4. Protagoras, 318a.
84
Such studies are the way to the highest things, the way of reason
which chooses for itself ordered steps lest it fall from the height.
The steps are the various liberal arts. (Augustine, De Ordine I.8.24)
The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirable-
ness, considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it
of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be
an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called Liberal. Not to
know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or chil-
dren; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the
ambition, of Philosophy. (Newman, Idea of a University, “Knowl-
edge Its Own End”)
What all these educational thinkers have in common is an idea of
education as its own end. In other words, the end, goal, or use of lib-
eral education is not found in anything outside of the study itself. So,
is the mere studying of the liberal arts the purpose of the liberal arts?
That does seem self-referential and circular. The liberal arts, as all
arts, are tools, in a sense, but they are tools for making humans. They
perfect the intellect, the highest part of man, and thus enable man to
know the world, oneself, and God as these really are. Is this useful?
Consider an analogy. What do all humans desire for its own sake
and never for something else? Nothing else but happiness. And in
what activity or activities do we find our happiness? This is a diffi-
cult question, of course, for although we must agree that happiness
is our ultimate goal, we disagree quite a bit as to the best means to
get there, or else we say that the way to happiness is personal and
not able to be judged objectively and universally. However that
might be, we can all agree where happiness does not lie—in that
which is only instrumental, a means, good for another thing. For
whatever happiness is, we find it in those objects, persons, and
activities that we consider good in themselves. Thus, happiness is
the most useless thing, since it is never a means, but always an end.
No one wants happiness in order to be healthy or to be rich or even
to have pleasure, for one wants all these in order to be happy.
Again, unlike money or political order or freedom, liberal knowl-
edge is a good in itself, for it is perfective of the human qua human,
and not simply human qua worker or pleasure-enjoyer or freedom-
employer. Just as happiness is the point and purpose of all our
85
desires, the formation and perfection of ourselves as humans is the
point of all our knowledge. Part of this formation and perfection is
in the realm of the practical, since we are not intellects trapped in a
body but integrated body-soul composites. In other words, we are
meant to live in what Josef Pieper calls the work-a-day world, the
world of instrumental goods, means-to-end knowledge, economic
production, and materiality. But to confine knowledge only to this
sphere, to say that all education must be ordered to use in the work-
a-day world, is to imply that there is nothing that transcends it, that
we are trapped in the realm of the temporal, material, and instru-
mental. And this is to make human happiness not an end but a
means, bound to whatever we can use from this world: bodily plea-
sure, emotional satisfaction, wealth, honor, power, and the like.
These are legitimate goods, and education can help us obtain these
goods. But unless there is a transcendent reason for pursuing these
goods, unless this work-a-day world is seen for what it is—a means
and never an end—we end up making a means out of an end, and
an end out of a means, and we thus make human happiness, and
concomitantly true education, impossible.
In any means-end relationship, the existence of the means only
makes sense if there is also something to which this means is
ordered. If everything is a means, nothing is a means. The reason
we study engineering or marketing is because it provides us with
something else that we desire. Engineering provides a skill that we
can employ to make, say, airplanes, but the making of airplanes is
not the end, for that is to permit travel, which is a means to the soci-
etal good of mobility, which is a means towards the common good
of political order and ultimately friendship. No one reads an engi-
neering book to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of engineering,
although this may be part of its attraction. Again, one goes for a
walk. Why is one walking? It might be for purpose of diet and
health. It might also be because walking itself is enjoyable, but even
in this case, it is the enjoyment that one is after, the happiness ensu-
ing upon the activity of walking. No one would want to be happy so
that he may walk! Similarly, if we see utility as all there is—if all we
do and know are merely useful activities, with nothing serving as
what these are useful for—then the whole notion of use collapses in
86
on itself. If there is the useful, there must be the useless. What hap-
pens if we accept only the useful and deny the useless? What if the
world-of-work encompasses us, so that any notion of leisure, philo-
sophical speculation, contemplation of the whole, festivity, and
enjoyment of God is construed as a means to an end, as merely use-
ful? We rest and we philosophize and we celebrate—so that we can
be more productive workers and successful consumers?
What underlies the argument so far is a claim that cannot be
proven, but that there is no good reason to deny: there is more to life
than the work-a-day world. The declining role of the liberal arts; the
constant refrain of “what are you going to do with a liberal educa-
tion”; the transfer of university funding away from the liberal arts to
science, engineering, research, technology, and the practical profes-
sions; and the perversion of liberal education into purely subjective,
emotional, and private concerns, on the one hand, and into the
politicized categories of gender, class, race, and sex, on the other—
all of this indicates that we, as a culture, believe, at least implicitly,
that there is nothing other than the work-a-day world, the world of
instrumental reason and goods, and that we think human happi-
ness is to be obtained within this world alone.
But—and this is the claim of Josef Pieper in his book Leisure the
Basis of Culture—the whole work-a-day world is itself only intelligi-
ble and livable as a means. To what? To the world of what he calls
leisure, the world of goods that are good for their own sake, the
world of knowledge that is worth having for itself, and the human
encounter and celebration of this world. Education, then, is for lei-
sure, to make leisure possible, and this means that all knowledge is
preparatory for the contemplation of truth, goodness, beauty, and
being—in short, the “philosophical act” by which man transcends
the world of work and enters into the world of true freedom. The
liberal arts are precursors and constituent parts of that one disci-
pline that is the implicit goal of every other study: philosophy, in
the broad sense of theoria, the contemplation of truth for its own
sake. Philosophy as wisdom is the culminating discipline of the lib-
eral arts and thus of all education whatsoever. The liberal arts are
the arts of freedom, for they are pursued for their own sake, and
thus are perverted when they become slaves to another master.
87
But this freedom means that philosophical knowing does not
acquire its legitimacy from its utilitarian applications, not from its
social function, not from its relationship with the “common util-
ity.” Freedom in exactly this sense is the freedom of the “liberal
arts,” as opposed to the “servile arts,” which, according to Thomas,
“are ordered to a use, to be attained through activity.” [Commen-
tary on the Metaphysics I, 3]. And philosophy has long been under-
stood as the most free among the free arts (the medieval “Arts
Faculty” is the forerunner of the “Philosophical Faculty” of today’s
university).5
What does it mean to transcend the world? Is this a “peak experi-
ence” only obtainable by a small elite of privileged and wealthy lib-
eral artists? Not remotely! As Pieper writes, anyone who loves and
truly yearns for true happiness has already experienced this tran-
scendence:
The lover, too, stands outside the tight chain of efficiency of this
working world, and whoever else approaches the margin of exist-
ence through some deep, existential disturbance (which always
brings a “shattering” of one’s environment as well), or through,
say, the proximity of death. In such a disturbance (for the philo-
sophical act, genuine poetry, musical experience in general, and
prayer as well—all these depend on some kind of disturbance)
man senses the non-ultimate nature of this daily, worrisome
world: he transcends it; he takes a step outside it.6
If we want to live in a world where there are only means to other
means with no end in sight, where only the kitsch consumerist
monuments of selfish human will and desire exist, where all knowl-
edge is ordered to use, then we must say goodbye to liberal educa-
tion. And to a large extent, this is precisely what we have done. But
have we really eliminated the transcendent, true leisure, the philo-
sophical act, and the liberal arts, or have we just transformed them
into mere tools to contemplate the idols of our own making—the
idols of consumerism, pleasure, power, and self-worship? If we no
longer have a place for the truly useless, for the good-in-itself, for
5. Josef Pieper, “The Philosophical Act,” in Leisure, op. cit., 93.

6. “The Philosophical Act,” 87.
88
speculation on the meaning of reality, then we ultimately have no
place for the useful either. Those goods and truths that are so above
our worldly needs as to remain transcendently useless are violently
brought down into the work-a-day world, with the most useful
goods and truths shoved into a transcendental world where they do
not belong and must die. The end result is human degradation and
unhappiness.
I conclude with the words of Simone Weil, one of the philoso-
phers of our time most dedicated to the useless. She takes our argu-
ment to the next step:
All study, whether inherently useful or useless, must ultimately be
prayer. Our purpose in life is to imitate that Being whose very
nature is useless, for out of the contemplation of His own useless-
ness comes the entire universe of useful things, useful, according
to His plan, as steps on a ladder to Him, the only reality that can
truly be said to exist for its own sake. students must therefore
work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations,
to win school successes; without any reference to their natural
abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks,
with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of
that attention which is the substance of prayer. When we set out to
do a piece of work, it is necessary to wish to do it correctly,
because such a wish is indispensable in any true effort. Underlying
this immediate objective, however, our deep purpose should aim
solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer;
as, when we write, we draw the shape of the letter on paper, not
with a view to the shape, but with a view to the idea we want to
express. To make this the sole and exclusive purpose of our studies
is the first condition to be observed if we are to put them to the
right use.7
7. Simone Weil, “On the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of
God,” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 59.
89
8
Why the Philosopher
and the Catholic University
Need Each Other
The Philosopher and Catholic
A
s Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is “tra-
dition-constituted” and “tradition-dependent,” as well as,
University Need Each Other
paradoxically, “tradition-transcendent.” And as he suggests
in God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic
Philosophical Tradition, that institution most indispensable for the
preservation, sustenance, and development of human knowledge,
or, in MacIntyrean terms, an intellectual tradition, is the university.
For, as MacIntyre writes:
Philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied
and of arguments advanced and critically evaluated, but of philos-
ophers in particular social and cultural situations interacting with
each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumenta-
tive wrangling, so that the social forms and institutionalizations of
their interactions are important and none more so than those uni-
versity settings that have shaped philosophical conversation, both
to its benefit and to its detriment.1
The philosopher is created, nourished, and perfected in and by
the university (or college), for it can most effectively preserve, sus-
tain, develop, revise, and transform a philosophical tradition; the
ppp
1. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the

Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2011), 1.
91
university is its institutional embodiment and the primary locus of
philosophical practice, with the individual philosopher serving as
the tradition’s personal embodiment, as well as apprentice, interloc-
utor, and custodian. In short, Catholic universities have since the
Middle Ages served as the philosophical guilds in which the Catho-
lic philosophical tradition has been passed on from masters to
apprentices, for it is through, in, and by universities that appren-
tices become masters. It is no different today, except for the fact that
the typical modern university has become a guild for careerism and
sophistry. Nevertheless, today’s Catholic philosopher requires good
Catholic universities not only for his philosophical flourishing, but
also for his very existence qua philosopher; and, conversely, the
Catholic university requires good Catholic philosophers, for no
institution can survive, let alone flourish, without the personal
influence, participation, and oversight of its personal practitioners.
Openness to the Other

As Cardinal Newman taught, the fullest embodiment, the culminat-
ing fruit of the liberal arts university, is the philosopher—not neces-
sarily the academic or professional philosopher, but that humble
lover of wisdom with a properly “enlarged” intellectual vista and
distinctly “philosophical cast of mind.” The philosopher should also
be, as MacIntyre insists, first and foremost a servant of the “plain
man,” translating the non-philosophers’ commonsensical and
informal—though still vital and profound—questions into formal
and rigorously examined philosophical questions, giving these
questions philosophically rigorous answers, and then translating
these philosophically purified questions and answers back into that
commonsensical and informal, vital and profound, and existentially
satisfying and intellectually intelligible discourse appropriate for the
vast majority of non-philosophers in the world.
So, exactly how does one become this sort of philosopher? Indis-
pensable, of course, is an apprenticeship to a master philosopher, as
Plato was to Socrates, St Augustine to Plato, St Thomas Aquinas to St
Augustine and Aristotle, the whole Church to St Thomas Aquinas,
92
The Philosopher and Catholic University Need Each Other
Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre to St Tho-
mas Aquinas, and we to them. But, as important as are the erudition,
skill, modeling, and experience only personal guidance can impart
to the philosopher, it is to no avail apart from a certain indispensable
existential attitude or condition: what might be called metaphysical
courage or existential openness. The good philosopher must possess
a radical existential openness to the incompleteness, myopia, and
errors in his present philosophical understanding, and a metaphysi-
cally courageous orientation of the soul towards all aspects of being,
one that evokes and sustains a perpetual desire for further inquiry,
revision, and even conversion. He must cultivate a deliberate, relent-
less, and lifelong vulnerability to refutation, and an unquenchable
passion for dialectical exchange with and enrichment by the other.
As David Walsh puts it: “Socratic wisdom is indeed the deepest avail-
able to us, only now grasped as an existential condition rather than
simply an attitude toward existence. It is because we now recognize
that reason cannot contain itself that it possesses an openness
toward being.”2 Again: “Speculation is not a separate avenue toward
what is, but rather the result of a prior existential awareness.”3 Phi-
losophy is, above all, a way of life.
The identity of this “other” for the aspiring good Catholic philos-
opher is not necessarily someone outside the Catholic philosophical
tradition, but precisely that person, idea, argument, or tradition of
argument most resistant to becoming merely a confirmatory mirror
image of one’s present philosophical understanding, that which is
eminently immune to being narcissistically assimilated and sophis-
tically manipulated by the philosopher. Now, while this openness is
bound up with a perpetual readiness to be corrected, it in no way
excludes a robust confidence in the truth of one’s present under-
standing—as long as truth is secured and justified by rigorous and
humble philosophical inquiry.
2. David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Exist-

ence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 16.
3. Ibid., 93.
93
The Good Philosopher—Institutionalized
It is philosophers who most of all need to be institutionalized, at
least to protect the emotional well-being of everyone else. In any
event, the qualities of the good Catholic university are analogous to
the qualities of the good Catholic philosopher. Just as the good phi-
losopher needs to be a master of his philosophical tradition and
adept at the dialectical, analytical, synthetic, and imaginative skills
with which his trade is plied, the good Catholic university requires a
rigorous and sophisticated curriculum and pedagogy firmly rooted
in the Catholic philosophical tradition. Taught without sufficient
rigor, the liberal arts become jejune exercises in sentimentalism or
self-expression, philosophy becomes sophistry, and theology be-
comes soft blasphemy. But just as one’s commitment to Catholi-
cism, philosophical erudition, and dialectical skill, without the
proper philosophical attitude of metaphysical courage and existen-
tial openness, cannot render a philosopher a good one, so a Catho-
lic university cannot be good without the right institutional ethos
and telos. The perfection of the intellect is the proper telos for which
university disciplines are taught, around which they are hierarchi-
cally integrated, and in the light of which their pedagogy is ordered.
And such perfection requires a robust Catholic sacramental and vir-
tuous culture in which the emotions, soul, and spirit can be effec-
tively purified and perfected. Taught without the right telos,
philosophical disciplines become sophistical and rhetorical linguis-
tic skills to gain power for oneself and over others. If the university
is Catholic and orthodox, but if its telos has an exclusively spiritual
or moral orientation and focus on moral formation at the expense
of a robust intellectual life, then one ends up with a suffocating
Catholic moralism, a world-contemptuous and suspicious Jans-
enism, or an anti-philosophical fundamentalism. If the university is
secularist in foundation, this same misguided telos results in some-
thing like secular fundamentalism or political fanaticism. St Tho-
mas Aquinas forbade a religiously fundamentalist notion of
education, as MacIntyre points out: “Intellectual enquiry, like all
other secular pursuits, is [by some] taken to have no worth whatso-
ever in itself, but to be worthwhile only as a means to salvation.
94
Contrast Aquinas, for whom many secular pursuits and, notably,
intellectual enquiry are worthwhile in themselves and as such to be
offered to God as part of that offering that is the path to our salva-
tion.”4
The ability to think clearly, accurately, deeply, and comprehen-
sively about reality so as to come to a knowledge of the essential
truths about the universe in their unity and diversity is the point
and purpose of a Catholic university. The proper antidote to the
tendency of today’s Catholic universities to destroy the morals and
faith of their students is not to turn the university into a retreat cen-
ter or a training ground for piety and morals, even though moral
and spiritual formation are higher goals than intellectual forma-
tion. For, when the primarily intellectual end of the Catholic uni-
versity is eclipsed, ignored, or denied, through religious enthusiasm
or power-pragmatism, the liberal arts lose their character as true
arts, philosophy becomes ideology, and theology becomes some-
thing unholy.
A philosophically good attitude with respect to curriculum is also
essential to the good Catholic university. The liberal arts are ends in
themselves, surely, and should be taught as such, with literature
taught in a primarily poetic, not philosophical, mode, but not all
liberal arts are equal, and this should also manifest itself pedagogi-
cally: grammar must be ordered to logic, grammar and logic to
rhetoric, the trivium to the quadrivium, all seven liberal arts to phi-
losophy, and philosophy ordered to and practiced in the light of
revealed theology. In turn, theology must be fecundated, enlivened,
purified, and penetrated by philosophy and dialectics—indeed by
all the liberal arts—to prevent the queen of the sciences from
becoming rigid, graceless, fundamentalist, anti-liberal, and enslav-
ing. That which is lower than theology should not be glossed over
and given short shrift due to immoderate religious zeal or an ortho-
doxy-at-all-costs mentality, for this suggests a fanatical and emi-
nently unphilosophical mindset. If either Socrates or Christ is
banished from the curriculum and pedagogy of the Catholic uni-
versity or the soul of the philosopher, the result is theological totali-
4. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 127.
95
tarianism or a dictatorship of relativism, in the one, and fanaticism
or dilettantism, in the other.
Both extremes display an anti-dialectical, reactionary, “answers
without questions” ethos, whether the answers are the true ones of
divine revelation or the false ones of secular ideology. Such a uni-
versity, if Catholic in affiliation and confession, offers true answers
to its students, but perhaps at the expense of the necessary dialecti-
cal questioning and Socratic ethos that is indispensable to yielding
answers to real questions in students’ hearts. Similarly, on the per-
sonal level, such a philosophical “answer-man” might possess true
answers, but they would be poisonous to his soul, a bulwark for his
spiritual pride and gnostic, “inner circle” certainty. Neil Postman
suggests the right balance:
Knowledge is produced in response to questions; and new knowl-
edge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new
questions about old questions. Here is the point: once you have
learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and sub-
stantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can
keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.5
Just as philosophy and theology must be held in the right balance,
the curriculum must also hold in fruitful tension the poetic and the
philosophical. The liberal arts must not become mere poetic fodder
for the “real” intellectual food of, for example, Aristotelian philoso-
phy or Thomistic theology, nor poetic knowledge become hege-
monic and all-encompassing, with philosophy dismissed as so
much useless and pride-inducing abstract speculation, only good
for the poetic meat one can glean from its scanty bones. To secure
the right balance of the poetic and the philosophical is a complex
matter, as Plato’s ironic yet unassumingly sophisticated and
nuanced treatment of it in the Republic reveals, but, as Peter Red-
path has suggested, without the right balance, philosophy becomes
neo-Protagorean, mytho-poetic sophistry under the aegis of politi-
cal ideology, and poetry fails in its charge to keep both systematic
5. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity

(New York: Dell, 1969), 23.
96
philosophy and theology in touch with the earthly realities of man’s
senses, from which all human knowledge has its origin, and in the
absence of which the human intellect becomes unmoored, delu-
sional, and dangerous.
Lastly, the pedagogy of the university must be properly ordered
and balanced, with pride of place given to Socratic tutorial over lec-
ture and seminar. The lecture and seminar modes of teaching,
though appropriate and necessary on certain occasions and with
certain subjects, must never be the primary mode of teaching for
the liberal arts and philosophy. When lecture predominates, the
class becomes one of teacher-derived-and-promulgated questions,
answers, and arguments, with the students serving as mere passive
receptacles of catechetical knowledge, so that the vital student-
derived and initiated questions and aporias that must precede and
evoke any definitive answer or resolution are bypassed and
repressed. Excessive and impertinent seminar teaching can result in
an educational ethos of “questions without answers,” resulting in
misology and skepticism, and a false sense of intellectual sophistica-
tion and self-sufficiency.
In conclusion, what our anti-philosophical culture of death
needs most is conversion and spiritual healing. An effective means
to this is the reappropriation, rejuvenation, and rearticulation of
the Catholic philosophical tradition, which both presupposes and
requires a refounding of our Catholic universities firmly and inte-
grally upon this tradition. Our Catholic philosophical tradition
cannot flourish without integrally Catholic and Thomistic, that is,
good, universities. But such universities, in turn, require an already
flourishing Catholic philosophical tradition to inform them and
render them good. It’s a paradox, yes, but one that should not leave
us without hope, as long as there are a few good Catholic philoso-
phers in the world.
97
9
Catholic Education and
the Cult of Theistic Evolution
A
uthentically Catholic liberal arts colleges and universities
accept the harmony of faith and reason. The overall intel-
lectual bent of Catholic schools should thus be, at least to
some extent, and hopefully to a great extent, Thomistic. The teach-
ing of Thomism and the philosophia perennis with regard to the phi-
losophy of nature and science is, in contrast to nominalist,
scientistic, materialist, and fideist rationalities, that secondary
causes are truly causal, and that God tends to do things in the world
through them, even giving them genuine co-creative power. In
other words, nature is distinct from God yet never separate from
Him (for, through created esse, He is closer to all beings than they
are to themselves), and nature possesses a relative autonomy and
causal power that does not require God’s perpetual interventions,
though He can and does intervene. Nature is so powerful that it
would appear to have full autonomy, and this is the misguided pre-
text and source of the prima facie credibility of materialism and
atheistic scientism. Furthermore, nature’s causal structures can be
known through man’s unaided reason, and the effects of these
causes, including biological phenomena, can be explained without
the use of Revelation, though, of course, not explained exhaustively,
as all things, especially man, possess a certain unfathomableness
due to their having been created and sustained in existence and
activity by an ultimately unfathomable, transcendent, and mysteri-
ous God.
All this is to say that science should be taken seriously at any
Catholic college or university, and where modern science has dis-
99
covered truth about the material world, this truth should be
embraced. “Fundamentalism” denies this, in a misguided attempt
to vindicate Sacred Scripture. Scriptural interpretation must take
such truths into consideration, and sometimes traditionally held
views, such as six literal days of Creation and a 10,000-year-old uni-
verse, must be looked at anew in the light of the latest and true sci-
entific evidence. But one has to be careful to discriminate between
genuine scientific discoveries and counterfeit claims by the so-called
“consensus of scientists.” Regardless of what the “scientific commu-
nity” now holds to be indubitable, I have yet to come across any sci-
entific evidence that conclusively proves evolution or an old earth,
and even today a serious case can be made for latest astronomical
evidence of which I am aware, thanks to Robert Sungenis, suggests
plainly a motionless earth at the center of the universe.1
Science has the capacity and duty to take care of its own, as it
were, without any undue interference from other disciplines, even
the higher ones of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology—unless it
oversteps its humble charge of cataloging, describing, law-making,
predicting, interpreting, shaping, and controlling matter. But due
to its deliberately narrow and superficial purview, it is obliged to
offer up its material data to the higher sciences for ultimate, and
more certain, interpretation and adjudication. If modern, empirio-
metric science attempts to teach on things that it knows nothing
about, such as the metaphysical truths of the philosophia perennis,
the purpose and meaning and origin of things, the mystery of man,
the supernatural, and God, and dares to trespass against the natural
and supernatural hierarchy of wisdom, then Aristotelian natural
philosophy, Thomistic metaphysics, and orthodox theology are
within their rights to step in and put science in its place.
Have there been some oversteppings and trespasses in the mod-
ern era up to the present? Catholics of a traditional cast know all
about the Enlightenment, modernism, rationalism, etc., and the
incessant and insufferably ignorant machinations of today’s “four
horsemen” of atheism. But the transgressions of the atheistic Dar-
1. See the four-hour documentary of Robert Sungenis for a thorough review of

the astronomical evidence: https://gwwdvd.com/.
100
Catholic Education and the Cult of Theistic Evolution
winians are not the focus of this chapter. I wish to speak rather of
the behavior of many Catholic theistic evolutionists. They overstep
science’s bounds when they claim that debatable theories, such as
the theory of evolution, are “facts,” a maneuver Pius XII con-
demned in Humani Generis. They overstep science’s bounds again
when they attempt to render certain unverified non-facts, such as
common descent from monocellular organisms, as verified, indis-
putable facts by recourse to, not actual indisputable evidence, but
the social force of the so-called “scientific consensus”—that same
force that fires and character-assassinates people who publish peer-
reviewed scientific articles that conclude to (for example) the intel-
ligent design of certain cellular processes, and that excludes anyone
but committed evolutionists to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
They overstep philosophy’s bounds when they teach debatable and
idiosyncratic philosophical theories about causality in the natural
world and its relation to God, claiming, for example, that God’s
providence over the world is compatible with genuine chance in
nature—not just the appearance of chance, but chance!—as if this
were the only rational and Thomistic way to explain things; as if
serious philosophical challenges to it, such as found in the work of
Robert Koons,2 are a priori otiose and tending towards fundamen-
talism. They overstep theology’s bounds when they dismiss the seri-
ous challenges not only to evolutionary theory, but to the very fact
of evolution, found in the Catholic Magisterium and the Fathers of
the Church—not to mention the latest scientific evidence, which
has, it must be said, proved neither common descent of humans
from primitive organisms, nor the generation of all life, in all of its
glorious complexity and design, from mindless natural selection
conserving random genetic variation and mutation.
There is surely scientific evidence for micro-evolution, namely,
that living beings change and adapt, and that living species have
genetic similarities. But, as there is no indisputable scientific evi-
dence that all species have descended from a primitive ancestor, that
species macro-evolve, and that evolution of species has taken place
2. See especially Robert Koons and Logan Gage, “St Thomas Aquinas on Intelli-
gent Design,” Proceedings of the ACPA 85 (2012): 79–97.
101
at all, we are dealing here with a dialectical topic, not a demonstra-
tive one. In fact, the many missing transition fossils in the fossil
record, the Cambrian species explosion, and the irreducible com-
plexity of many biological phenomena, along with a host of other
evidence that has been censored, belittled, or ignored by academia
and the mainstream scientific community, seem to disprove Dar-
win’s original theory as well as the neo-Darwinism of the theistic
evolutionists, or at least make these highly debatable.
Intelligent design, and I would also include some of the findings
of good creation scientists, is as scientific and confirmed by evi-
dence as neo-Darwinian theistic evolution, and perhaps even more
scientific and reasonable, but one would never know that intelligent
design and non-evolutionary biological theories were even debat-
able, let alone possibly true, due to the irresponsible deference
among so many in academia and media, including the vast majority
of Catholics, to the idols of the tribe, the sacred cows of Darwin and
the so-called “scientific consensus.” Such deference bespeaks not
loyalty to reason and science, but kneeling to the world.
What is the educational upshot of this? It is beyond obvious that
a good case can be made for intelligent design—the debate has
occupied the pages of First Things for years. For the sake of the stu-
dents’ intellectual good and the integrity of the school, Catholic col-
leges and universities should give as much deference to the possible
truth of intelligent design as they do to neo-Darwinian theistic evo-
lution, regardless of the private beliefs of any professor, which he is,
of course, free to express to students. Students taking science in a
Catholic liberal arts college should be led to investigate all the issues
with an open mind, conducting dialectical inquiry into all the posi-
tions that are not “beyond the pale” of Catholic orthodoxy, philo-
sophical possibility, and real, not just claimed, scientific evidence.
The point of such courses is not indoctrination into a certain debat-
able scientific or philosophical or theological viewpoint, but to
teach students how to think scientifically, how to think philosophi-
cally and theologically about science, and how critically to assess
scientific and philosophical theories so as to be able to arrive at
truth. Of course, the teaching of the relevant scientific facts and
actually confirmed theories is essential to such courses, but the sta-
102
tus of “fact” and “theory” is not always something finalized in sci-
ence, as any liberally educated, non-scientistic, scientific theorist
knows, and this should also be made clear to students. The idolatry
of science is ensconced in culture, as John West argued in First
Things,3 and Catholics must go against the grain to combat it. The
proper suspicion of claims of science is not fundamentalism or con-
spiracism, but reasonableness and prudence.
There is simply no view-from-nowhere on the issue of evolu-
tion—no knockdown theological, philosophical, historical, or sci-
entific argument that resolves the evolution issue to one side over
the other. One’s presuppositions and starting points, usually
implicit and unconscious, tend to determine what kind of data is
taken to be legitimate evidence, what data can be ignored, what
kinds of arguments may be deemed “scientific,” and which conclu-
sions appear plausible. The claim to have “overwhelming evidence,”
made incessantly by pro-Darwinists like Laurence Krauss and theis-
tic evolutionists, does not render a debatable issue a non-debatable
one. Evolution, in both its factual and its theoretical claims, is, most
certainly, debatable. It is, after all, being debated, at least among
open-minded truth seekers, perhaps only a small minority these
days. But even if it were no longer a topic of debate among main-
stream scientists and intellectuals, this alone would not prove its
having been definitively resolved and concluded.
The purpose of a Catholic college course on this debatable issue,
as well as all the other ones at the nexus of science and religion, such
as the historical existence of Adam and Eve, the age of the earth and
the universe, and the geography of the cosmos, is to introduce stu-
dents to the debates, and to present the best case for each side, even
if the professor leans to one of them—and he is surely permitted,
even encouraged, to share his leanings and the reason for them with
the students. The purpose of both liberal and specialized education
is not to teach only one side of a debatable issue as the only possible
truth of the matter, whatever the so-called “consensus of scientists”
says. Much evidence against both the fact and the theory of evolu-
tion is censored, belittled, or ignored by the scientific establish-
3. John West, “The Church of Darwin,” First Things (June–July, 2005).
103
ment, a sad fact so obvious that it can no longer be relegated to
“conspiracy theory.” Just consider the work of Pierre-Paul Grassé
(1895–1985), the renowned French zoologist and die-hard evolu-
tionist, who himself admitted: “Through use and abuse of hidden
postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudo-
science has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biol-
ogy and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists.”4 By the
way, have you heard of the soft blood tissue found in dinosaur
bones? Thought not.
The Church has surely given us strict guidelines on the legitimate
interpretations of Genesis and other relevant sacred texts, but she
has also approved of openness to the possibility of the truth of cer-
tain modern scientific theories, such as evolution. We do know that
scientific, philosophical, and theological theories cannot be true if
they trespass against known natural and metaphysical principles
and revealed truths. Something cannot come from nothing,
potency cannot actualize itself, unformed matter cannot alone
cause form; Adam and Eve existed, Eve was created from Adam (she
did not evolve from an ape!), they actually and literally committed
the first sin from which Original Sin derives, God created the uni-
verse from nothing, and He specially creates every human soul from
nothing. Positions that fall within the limits of genuine reason (not
consensus-obsessed, secularist, scientistic, materialist or fideistic
“reason”) and Catholic orthodoxy (and this requires us not facilely
to dismiss challenging statements of popes and Church Fathers as
outdated or irrelevant) are genuinely debatable, and students need
to learn to see them as such. Of course, the most difficult part of the
dialectic is to determine definitively these limits and which posi-
tions fall within them, but this is the teacher’s task.
If a professor thinks a particular debatable issue has been resolved
in one way or the other, he is within his rights to say so to students
and to present his case and the case of others. He would not be
within his rights, however, to induce the students to think that his
view of the matter is somehow indisputable and “the obvious truth
4. Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory

of Transformation (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 6.
104
of things,” especially if this is done by presenting competing theories
as strawmen, with that exquisite condescension and sarcasm and
selective use of evidence that is legion these days among Catholics.
On controversial and debatable issues, it is a grave disservice to stu-
dents for Catholic theistic evolutionists to use canards and conver-
sation stoppers such as “science tells us,” “we now know,” “evolution
is a fact.” Of course, science does tell us some indisputable things,
such as the fact of micro-evolution (since we have actually observed
this taking place), and we do “now know” certain things we didn’t
know in the past, such as the existence of genetic similarities
between different species. And, of course, there are indisputable
facts (pace postmodernism) that modern science, and modern sci-
ence alone, has enabled us to see, such as the unfathomable size of
the universe. Macroevolution is simply not one of these facts, and
thus it should be taught as precisely what it is, a debatable theory.
On a practical note, the policy upshot of my position relates to
academic freedom. Professors who teach a course on evolution or
other debatable scientific issues have the freedom to select the texts
they think are most appropriate and excellent—some might choose
Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, others Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s
Doubt, still others Gerald Keane’s Creation Rediscovered—and,
although the course should be taught dialectically, the professor is
within his rights to teach one of the positions as the superior
account, as long as he refrains from using his mere authority as a
professor or as a degreed scientist to make unsubstantiated claims,
and avoids the use of inappropriately dogmatic language (unless it’s
a matter of a self-evident philosophical principle, manifestly true
established fact, or magisterial teaching) and facile arguments to
influence the students to think that such-and-such must be true,
that no other positions have any merit or plausibility, and that only
“those people” would talk that talk way about the origin of species.
Am I saying one cannot support evolution as a Catholic? No, but
I wonder about being an adamantly pro-evolution Catholic, which
is the position of the Catholic theistic evolutionists. Nowadays, even
to have an open mind about the possible wrongheadedness of the
theory of evolution, let alone the fact, is to be cast into the outer
darkness, to join Ken Ham and, as they would say, the biblical-liter-
105
alist morons. However, the “evolution as fact” attitude goes directly
against Pius XII’s teaching in Humani Generis, which, if anything, is
more germane now than ever. As Stephen Meyer has shown, and
many biologists (Stephen J. Gould, for one) have now admitted, the
evidence for Darwinian macro-evolution has become less compel-
ling since 1950, so it makes Pius XII’s condemnation of “rash trans-
gression” even more pertinent:
Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when
they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and
living matter were already completely certain and proved by the
facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on
those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine
revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in
this question.5
My main concern is that such moderation and caution is not
being exercised by Catholic evolutionists and other Christians,
especially in today’s Catholic and Christian colleges and universi-
ties, and in Christian and Catholic intellectual circles in general. It
seems to me that many academics and professors are afraid to ques-
tion evolution for fear of being ridiculed or at least being put on the
outskirts as “one of those people”—a fortiori the Catholic scientists
who question the Sacred Cow, as all the smart Catholic science peo-
ple know that evolution is the indisputable truth and the only posi-
tion for the educated Catholic to hold. It seems to me that an
evolution cult has developed among conservative Catholics. Father
John McCarthy describes it well:
The movement to accommodate traditional Catholic doctrine, as
well as the traditional interpretation of the accounts in Sacred
Scripture, to the supposed “fact” of the evolution of man from
primitive matter by a relentless process of spontaneous transfor-
mations of species over an enormous period of time has become
so widespread in Catholic intellectual circles that it has now
assumed the appearance of a “mainstream” point of view. The
assumed “fact” of biological evolution, as pictured in contempo-
5. Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Humani Generis (August 12, 1950).
106
rary biological theories, has moved in our time from a far-out to a
central theological position and is now threatening to become a
supposition of the updated “teaching of the Church,” with all the
inevitable consequences of such a development, not only as
regards the two-thousand-year-old teaching of the Church on
such issues as Original Sin, but also as regards the very credibility
of Church teaching as such. At this moment in the historic assault
of modern secular humanism upon Catholic belief, we are wit-
nessing to our dismay more and more heretofore “solid” defenders
of Catholic tradition ceding to Darwinism and its progeny ground
without which they cannot survive for long as orthodox thinkers.6
It is my hope that a continuing conversation about this—most
debatable—issue will help to expose and thus dispel an ideological
approach and the “rash transgression of the liberty of discussion”
that is its hallmark.
6. John F. McCarthy, “The Evolution of Original Sin,” Living Tradition (Sept.

1991), 37, available at http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt37.html.
107
10
Why Modern, Liberal,
Pluralistic, Secularist Democracies
Cannot Educate Themselves
I
n his masterpiece, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Werner
Jaeger writes:
Why Modern Democracies
Education is the process by which a community preserves
and transmits its physical and intellectual character. . . . The forma-
Cannot Educate Themselves
tive influence of the community on its members is most constantly
active in its deliberate endeavor to educate each new generation of
individuals so as to make them in its own image.1
For Jaeger, what education requires is a well-defined community
capable of and willing to engage in deliberate, collective action.
And for this action to effect a definite, effective, and lasting educa-
tional result, the community must possess a distinct, coherent,
and intelligible image of itself, and be willing systematically and
integrally to impose it upon its members. Do the communities we
call modern, liberal, pluralist, secularist democracies meet these
indisputable requirements for authentic and effective education of
the soul? Can they educate themselves?
Of course, in a certain sense the answer must be yes, since millions
of citizens in today’s Western liberal democracies are, indeed, edu-
cated. Yet, if one asks precisely how such a high level and broad
extension of education has occurred, the answer, as we shall see, is
manifestly not through the deliberate, communal, image-making,
1. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 2nd ed., trans. Gilbert
Highet (New York: Oxford University Press), vol. 1, xiii.
109
educational agency of the modern, liberal, secular, democratic state.
At best, this state has provided some free yet ideologically tainted
space for the true educational agents to do their work. The state is
an educational agent by its very nature—but in order to function as
such, it must first of all be a state, that is, a genuine political com-
munity embodying an intelligible and obtainable common good,
and not a mere public interest organization or military alliance.
Insofar as it is not an authentic political agent, it cannot be an
authentic educational agent.
Not only does modern, liberal, pluralist, secularist democracy
lack a distinct, coherent, and intelligible image of itself, but the
image it does purport to have is an illusory spectre of an ideological
ghost, an incoherent and insubstantial parody of paideia overseeing
the deliberate refusal communally to impose any image whatsoever
on its members. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it:
Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by
whatever conception of the good he or she pleases, derived from
whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that
conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the
community in accordance with it.2
If Jaeger’s understanding of education is correct, such a “commu-
nity” of private goods and private good seekers could not possibly
educate its members. Yet as MacIntyre points out in the same pas-
sage, the collective refusal to impose an educational image irresist-
ibly becomes itself a collective, imposed image! It’s an anti-image
imposed in a project of anti-education:
And this qualification of course entails not only that liberal indi-
vidualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good,
which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and
culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in so
doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public
arena is severely limited.3

3. Ibid.
110
Why Modern Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves
If a community is defined both by its possession of an authentic
self-image involving a definitive conception of the good and by a
willingness to impose this image upon its members, then we can say
that liberal democracy is a community only in spite of itself, a com-
munity trying its best not to be a community, with all the atrocious
educational distortions that attend such social schizophrenia. Secu-
lar pluralism embodied in its pure ideological form without the
authentic communal influences and embodiments that spring up in
spite of its hegemony, is an anti-community devoted to the anti-
education of its members. MacIntyre suggests just this in a powerful
passage:
Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of
unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run
tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social
and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through
state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever
they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possi-
bility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and
achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it
attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human commu-
nity within which this project has to be embodied.4
By applying MacIntyre’s community-defining terms—tradition,
practice, telos, the good, reason, and revelation—we can see why the
liberal secular state is incapable of paideia. Democratic pluralism
fails as a community and therefore as an educational agent due to
the lack of any substantive, intelligible realities that correspond to
these terms in the community, and a radical confusion at best, ideo-
logical mendacity at worst, regarding such realities as may indeed
be present in the community, but which serve an anti-communal
and anti-educational agenda.
Communities are essentially embodied theories, and since educa-
tion can be effected only in, by, and through communities, we can
best understand the character and evaluate the effectiveness of any
ppp
4. Alasdair MacIntyre, “An Interview with Giovanna Borradori,” The MacIntyre

Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 258.
111
educational practice by examining the theoretical architecture its
overseeing community embodies. Real education is concerned not
primarily with job training, social, political, cultural, psychological,
or spiritual indoctrination, or even the acquisition of knowledge,
however sublime; education is primarily the development of intel-
lectual and moral virtue, which renders us capable both of knowing
and of achieving our good, the telos of all human activities. And vir-
tues, whether moral or intellectual, are not acquired on our own
through our own isolated powers, but in community with the help
of the mentoring and cooperation of others, through participation
in what MacIntyre calls practices:
By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form
of socially established co-operative human activity through which
goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of
trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appro-
priate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with
the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human
conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically
extended.5
Education, then, is a practice, involving and embodying internal
goods, human excellences, and ends, the active and intelligent par-
ticipation in and understanding of which enable us to make these
goods and excellences our own and to render ends theoretically
intelligible and practically appropriable. Just as virtues, because
they are human powers that can develop only in and through com-
munion with others, have their home, as it were, in communal
practices that situate their performance and learning and thus
enable their acquisition, so practices, because they embody and
make intelligible to us goods, excellences, and ends, must be situ-
ated within an overarching tradition, giving to them both theoreti-
cal and practical point and purpose. For MacIntyre, all rational
enquiry is inherently tradition-guided and tradition-bound, and
ppp
5. After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984), 187.
112
education is essentially a practice of rational enquiry—more specif-
ically, a sharing of and participation in the fruits of rational enquiry.
The social and cultural setting in which the practice of rational
enquiry takes place is all-important, for it is the nutrient-rich soil
without which no fruits can grow. For MacIntyre, rigorous philo-
sophical conversation in the setting of the well-ordered university is
the primary fertilizer.
Just as an individual life becomes intelligible only in the context
of an historical life narrative, so a communal life, as well as the com-
munal practices that constitute it, is made intelligible only through
a historical, communal narrative. Tradition just is this communal
narrative:
A living tradition, then, is a historically extended, socially embod-
ied argument, precisely in part about the goods which constitute
that tradition. . . . Once again the narrative phenomenon of
embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is gener-
ally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in
terms of the larger and longer history of that tradition through
which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the his-
tory of each of our own lives generally and characteristically is
embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and
longer histories of a number of traditions.6
Tradition, for MacIntyre, is the concrete, contingent, particular, and
historically embodied realities of our daily lives, unified in a coher-
ent system of thought and practice. It is any set of practices, cus-
toms, rituals, texts, arguments, authorities, institutions, artifacts
(and any other type of historically extended and socially embodied
phenomena) unified by a distinct narrative serving to interpret and
order these phenomena, and affording the participant particular
habits of knowing, judging, and feeling, and thus, intellectual access
to an overarching comprehension of the world, the good, and his
proper place in these. MacIntyre insists that it is only through active
participation in particular authentic traditions that men are ren-
dered capable of discovering and achieving their ultimate good; for
6. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 223.
113
it is only through a particular tradition that we can properly appre-
hend universal truth.
About the telos of education, MacIntyre writes:
What education has to aim at for each and every child, if it is not
to be a mockery, is both the development of those powers that
enable children to become reflective and independent members of
their families and political communities and the inculcation of
those virtues that are needed to direct us towards the achievement
of our common and individual goods.7
The powers and virtues that are developed in authentic educa-
tion are ordered to the full flourishing of the human being, and thus
to the human good—a good that must be known with a high level of
certainty by the educational agent if it is to lead students to know it
and achieve it. The good to be known and achieved is both individ-
ual and common: learned about, exercised, obtained, and finally
perfected via, in, and for oneself qua member of community,
whether family, educational, or political. Education enables us
human beings to become the actual “dependent rational animals”
we already are in potentia, fully actualized with the help of others
more actualized than we, which is to say, by the mentoring of the
teachings of tradition, the truth-and-good-embodying practices
that transmit it, and the masters who personify it. Being animals,
we find that such practices embody and enable the obtainment of
bodily and emotional goods, as well as the truth of their essential
yet subordinate role in human perfection. Being rational, we find
that these practices include the good of reason—that is, natural and
supernatural truth, offering an apprenticeship into the contempla-
tive life we all must live to some extent. Being dependent, we find
that they include the goods and virtues that cause, are made possi-
ble by, and are inherent in community—love, service, sacrifice,
compassion, solidarity, and friendship—and the truth that no man
is an island.
7. Alasdair MacIntyre & J Dunne, “Alasdair MacIntyre on education: In dia-

logue with Joseph Dunne” Journal of Philosophy of Education (2002): 3.
114
Ultimately, education is about developing the ability of human
beings to reason, to become, as MacIntyre says, “independent prac-
tical reasoners.” But the ability to reason is valuable only if used as a
means to knowing and achieving the good of human beings, an
essential aspect of which is the good of reasoning itself. What is this
good? It is, as Aristotle made clear in the Nicomachean Ethics, hap-
piness; but Aristotle did not know clearly and fully what, or rather,
whom happiness ultimately is. For all of Aristotle’s pagan wisdom
regarding the nature of community, virtue, education, and the soul,
any Aristotelian project of education must be incomplete, however
well founded and rightly structured it is, without the God-revealed
knowledge about man’s ultimate good. Natural reason, and the tra-
dition-guided and embodied practices that aim at its full develop-
ment in its practitioner-apprentices, is itself not a fully competent
educational agent. Reason itself requires a “master-craftsman” to
guide and develop it, as MacIntyre suggests here:
Part of the gift of Christian faith is to enable us to identify accu-
rately where the line between faith and reason is to be drawn,
something that cannot be done from the standpoint of reason, but
only from that of faith. Reason therefore needs Christian faith, if it
is to do its own work well. Reason without Christian faith is always
reason informed by some other faith, characteristically an unac-
knowledged faith, one that renders its adherents liable to error.8
Modern, liberal, pluralist, secularist democracy not only rejects
the master-craftsman, faith, but also its forever-budding, natural
apprentice, reason. Secular liberal pluralism relegates Christian
faith to the purely idiosyncratic, subjective, non-rational, apolitical
realm of the “private,” and reason to the reductively objective, inhu-
manly universal, instrumentally rational, and pragmatically utilitar-
ian realm of the “scientific,” which amounts to a reduction of reason
to the purely pragmatic role of managing the private, irrational
desires of individuals. The sole, unimpeachable, authoritative edu-
cational agents in modern liberal democracy, as MacIntyre makes
clear, are the “managers,” “bureaucrats,” and “therapists,” a self-
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 152.
115
appointed elite who together execute, in the name of human libera-
tion, equality, and well-being, a quite imposing paideia on the rest
of us.
Secular pluralism, because it has rejected both supernatural faith
and metaphysical reason as politically relevant desiderata and
authoritative communal guides, and because it has subjectivized
and privatized the good and the true, cannot possibly educate itself.
But because it still pretends to be—and, in a highly attenuated and
perverted fashion, actually is—a political community, it unfortu-
nately does act as a powerful educational agent. It makes a mockery
of both education and community, seducing—when it is not
demanding—citizens’ participation in defective practices embody-
ing counterfeit goods and transmitting an anti-tradition of, ulti-
mately, self-and-nothing worship. Secular liberalism’s communal
telos is the aggrandizement of an elite class of sophist-educators
who teach their students to abandon the quest for their own good
and the common good for the pursuit of idiosyncratic ephemera,
and to seek, not the truth about God, the world, and man, along
with the political and cultural instantiation of these truths, but
purely practical “knowledge” ordered to nothing but the equal satis-
faction of individual desires. Such a program serves only to require
and extend the hegemonic power of the state authoritatively to
manage and define this equality by preventing the existence and
flourishing of genuine common good organizations ordered by and
to the transcendent—in other words, by persecuting and neutraliz-
ing true educational agents.
The upshot of this pluralistic, inclusive, tolerant, and rational
“community” is, as MacIntyre puts it, “interminable moral argu-
ment with no prospect of resolution,” “civil war by other means,” a
controlled anarchy where power, profit, and fraud are the true edu-
cational agents, and where the citizen-student is taught—rather,
brainwashed—that such a state of affairs is good, and, what’s more,
the only real possibility for free men. MacIntyre continues:
What each standpoint supplies is a set of premises from which its
proponents argue to conclusions about what ought or ought not
to be done, conclusions which are often in conflict with those of
116
other groups. The only rational way in which these disagreements
could be resolved would be by means of a philosophical enquiry
aimed at deciding which out of the conflicting sets of premises, if
any, is true. But a liberal order, as we have already seen, is one in
which each standpoint may make its claims but can do no more
within the framework of the public order, since no overall theory
of the human good is to be regarded as justified.9
If “no overall theory of the human good is to be regarded as justi-
fied,” then education in the proper sense of the term, paideia, is ren-
dered impossible. Yet insofar as secular democracy retains the
fundamental structure and function of community, an image of
itself is indeed imposed on its unwitting members, even when this
image is denied by the very imposers (imposters). What sort of an
image is it?
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is
enlightened or unenlightened. Behold! Human beings living in an
underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and
reaching all along the den; here they have been from their child-
hood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot
move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains
from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is
blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there
is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along
the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of
them, over which they show the puppets. . . . To them, I said, the
truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.10
Of course, there are still many communities of education not yet
wholly modeled on and obscured by modern liberalism’s seductive
shadow-images, and many of these exist as educational institutions
chartered and overseen by secular democracy itself, such as the
hundreds of public high schools, colleges, and universities, which,
though tainted by the political correctness peddled by the cane
puppeteers and unwittingly fostering anti-educational practices
that promote the goods of effectiveness over the goods of excellence,
9. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 343.

10. Plato, Republic, 514a-515a.
117
are still permitting good educational work to be done, through the
efforts of those few educational craftsmen who have managed to
acquire an “old school” education, and who are courageous and
cunning enough to pass this “secret” wisdom on to new initiates
and keep the true liberal arts guilds alive. Let us be vigilant to pre-
serve and increase the autonomy and integrity of institutions that
have not been entirely corrupted, and to build new ones to be as
incorruptible as possible.
118
IV
Keep Yourself from Idols
11
Sacred Ambivalence
We are thus approaching societies without the sacred and without
power. The political enterprise is no longer justified in calling itself the
concretization of the heavenly law. Political power is subverted in its
symbolic foundation and sacred identity. Its roots, hence its mediating
legitimacy, have been removed by a quiet revolution. Liberal democ-
racy has proved to be a passage from society founded on the sacred to
society founded on nothing but itself.1
W
“ estern democracy—at least as we have known it—turns
out, itself, to be a kind of theocracy too.”2 Remi Brague’s
words suggest the inescapability of theocracy, for even
the so-called secular regimes of modernity entail hidden, theocratic
foundations. Though “the idea of divine law has been swept out of
sight,” it still works in the background, as it were, as the hidden, sac-
ral underpinning of, say, the “dignity of moral conscience.” In other
words, it is not that modern liberal democracy has successfully
desacralized politics, but rather it has changed the locus of sacral-
ization from cosmic order, divine law, and the Church, to the
human person, the sacred freedom of individuals to choose their
own sacred allegiances. Brague is skeptical of the attempt to radi-
cally desacralize politics, such that “the idea of the contract is even
meant to put out of court whatever might claim an extra-human
origin.” Can we citizens of apparently secularized, desacralized, reli-
giously pluralistic, liberal democracies be firmly committed to the
fundamental principles and ethos of secular liberal democracy—
1. Molnar, Twin Powers, 116.

2. Brague, “Non-Theocratic Regimes,” 3.
121
freedom of conscience, consent, democracy, human rights, etc.—
while remaining ambivalent about the sacrality of political order?
Must we take a stand one way or the other?
But if religious truth is to have any influence in the public sphere,
perhaps the primary task of its contemporary devotees is to be a
prophetic witness of the possibility that the sacred is still as founda-
tional to politics as it ever was, and, perhaps, always will be.
Romano Guardini describes a very different conception of the
power of religion in the public sphere:
The law of the state is more than a set of rules governing human
behavior; behind it exists something untouchable, and when a law
is broken it makes its impact on the conscience of man. Social
order is more than a warrant against friction, than a guarantee for
the free exercise of communal life; behind it stands something
which makes an injury against society a crime. The religious
dimension of law suffuses the entire moral order. It gives to ethical
action, that is, action necessary for the very existence of man, its
own proper norms, which it executes from without and without
pressure. Only the religious element of law guarantees the unity
and cooperation of the whole order of human behavior.3
However, in any society, Christian or not, should not citizens
attempt to create a political order whose public culture permits not
only the free practice of one’s religion, whatever that may be, but
also, in a religiously pluralistic culture such as ours, a political and
cultural ethos most conducive to discovering and practicing the
true religion, or, if one is non-religious, the secular values most con-
ducive to human flourishing? It is hard to see how the pluralistic,
desacralized state could facilitate this sort of ethos better than the
religiously unified, sacral state; thus, there is a good argument that
the real “power of religion in the public sphere” must be a sacred
power.
What is this good argument? It is one predicated upon Alasdair
MacIntyre’s concept of “tradition-constituted rationality,” which,
when applied politically, must be a tradition-constituted theological
3. Guardini, End of the Modern World, 112.
122
Sacred Ambivalence
rationality. James Kalb characterizes liberalism as not only a tradi-
tion, but a religious tradition:
The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and
purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world,
moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which
religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering
that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral igno-
rance. We do not know what the good is, it tells us, so we should
treat all desires the same. The satisfaction of all desires thus
becomes the unquestionable good. Man becomes the measure,
human genius the principle of creation, and individual will the
source of value. The limitations on moral knowledge on which the
liberal outlook is based lead to a definite result, and so become
constituent principles rather than limitations. In short, they con-
stitute a religion, a fact concealed by the moral doubt that is liber-
alism’s first principle. This new religion, based on the denial of the
knowability of truth, consists in nothing less than the deification
of man. To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as
wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In prac-
tice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of
things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot
know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will
soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and
that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In
short, you will say that we are God.4
Now, the liberal state never explicitly affirms “we are God,” for in
its official agnosticism, it does not explicitly deny or affirm even the
possible or actual existence of a transcendent being. Moreover, it
insists that it leaves open the possibility of some such being’s reveal-
ing or having revealed himself and his will to man. Secular liberal-
ism, in the form of the purportedly non-theocratic state, simply
does not deem it necessary to recognize any such being and revela-
tion for the purposes of either political philosophy or political prac-
tice. It claims public ignorance about, but does not deny outright
ppp
4. James Kalb, “Skepticism and Dogmatism (Snippet from Book-to-be),” June

6, 2006, http://antitechnocrat.net/node/1472 (accessed August 28, 2019).
123
the possibility of, an authoritative revelation demanding personal
recognition.
Yet the believer in a being who has clearly and publicly revealed
to man his will for the political order could argue that a studied
ignorance regarding the existence of such a publicly accessible
divine revelation is intellectually unjustified and politically unjust.
For a Roman Catholic, for example, the Church exists as a public
institution claiming to be the embodiment and spokesman of a
publicly authoritative divine revelation bearing directly on morality
and politics. Therefore, the Church is at least a possible candidate
for a publicly authoritative social institution. Even if one prescinds
from the question of the truth of this revelation, the Church’s claim
about itself to be the authoritative spokesman for this truth is still
an objective, intelligible fact within societies, and while a political
philosopher can deny the truth of this claim, he cannot plead igno-
rance to the fact of the claim itself, let alone maintain that it is self-
evidently false. Thus, in articulating any ideal political order, the
political philosopher must deal in some way with the Church’s
claim to have the authority to define the ultimate meaning of good-
ness and politics, by either recognizing or denying the Church’s
public authority to do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibil-
ity of such an authority is, in effect, an implicit moral judgment of
the injustice of its ever becoming an actual, living authority, and
therefore an implicit theological denial of the authority it may
indeed have.
Any moral or political theory involving the question of ultimate
political authority that excludes this theological issue from its pur-
view inevitably makes a theological judgment, as D. Stephen Long
points out: “Ethics cannot be the province of a philosophical dis-
course that brackets out theological consideration, unless philoso-
phers assume a being greater than God giving access to goodness.”5
Claiming ignorance or uncertainty of the truth of the Church’s
claim to public authority, or even just acting as if one were ignorant
or uncertain of it by committing oneself to a political theory and
ppp
5. Long, The Goodness of God, 300.
124
Sacred Ambivalence
practice in which the Church’s authority could never, without caus-
ing grave injustice, be publicly recognized, is effectively to make a
negative judgment about the Church’s claim. In practice, it
amounts to a theological judgment against the Church’s authority,
and when such a judgment becomes part of a lived social, cultural,
and political tradition, and becomes embodied in its set of prac-
tices, one can accurately call such a tradition a religion.
In order to fulfill its basic function of organizing the social activ-
ity of human individuals, authority in society must determine,
authorize, and implement practical answers to matters that are
inextricably bound up with religious considerations and commit-
ments: life and death (what is a human being?, whom does the gov-
ernment have an obligation to protect?, who speaks authoritatively
on these issues?); war (what are the criteria for conscientious objec-
tion?, for just or unjust war?); sex (is fornication or adultery to be
socially prohibited, celebrated, or ignored?); the family (is marriage
an unchanging social and religious institution, or is its character
open to perpetual redefinition by individuals?); rewards and pun-
ishments (what kinds of behaviors should merit societal approba-
tion and opprobrium?). Social and political authorities must
inevitably consider and make judgments regarding these issues.
Even the decision to depoliticize and privatize these matters, leaving
them to be settled freely by individuals, is socially and politically
significant and habit-forming. Thus, “secular” “non-theocratic”
regimes are de facto religious regimes, in the sense that even if there
were a way fully to depoliticize these sorts of issues, there could
never be “religious neutrality” on the part of the state with regard to
them. If there is a possibility of a God-ordained answer to any of
these questions, and if there is an institution that claims to articu-
late authoritatively this answer, then societal and political authority
must respond one way or another to this claim. It either believes it
or it does not. Affirmation, denial, or indifference is a non-neutral
commitment involving at least an implicit judgment pertaining to a
politically relevant religious matter, and thus has significant social
and political consequences.
In a dialectical confrontation between non-theocratic liberalism
and Catholicism, then, theological questions such as God’s exist-
125
ence, man’s knowledge of God’s will, and the political ramifications
of this knowledge, are necessarily involved. Any adjudication
between a theistic tradition like Thomism and an anthropocentric
tradition like secular liberalism must evaluate radically opposed
and strong theological standards of political justice and rationality.
Moreover, a consideration of the standards of rationality involved
in adjudicating theological claims also involves the question of the
truth of one’s own theological commitments.
Alasdair MacIntyre claims and shows in all his major works that
non-Aristotelian rationalities eventually fall “into ineradicable
incoherence,” that they are inevitably “compelled to acknowledge
points at which there is an unavoidable resort to attitudes of unjus-
tified and unjustifiable belief.” However, “pragmatic” liberals, that
is, those who purport to eschew any philosophical or theological
foundation for liberalism, would deny “ineradicable incoherence”
in their tradition, and affirm that the primary belief upon which
this tradition is founded, that is, the necessary non-existence of
publicly authoritative political theology, is perfectly justifiable
according to its particular pragmatic standards of rationality. Prag-
matic liberalism is not, of course, justifiable according to Thomistic
rational standards, but this does not settle the matter, because
Thomism itself is unjustifiable according to secular liberalism’s
standards. Jean Porter makes the point well:
It is not clear how the rival claims of disparate moral traditions
could be adjudicated through an encounter of rival traditions. It is
not even clear that moralities can come into conflict, in such a way
that we can plausibly regard them as rival traditions. You, collec-
tively, arrange your lives in one way, we arrange our lives in a dif-
ferent way. Is it clear that we even disagree? Even if we do, what
would count as resolving our disagreements, since there is no
question here of coming to agree on a description of anything?
Certainly, we might come to agree on the best way to arrange our
lives, but that would represent a change in mores, and not a con-
vergence of thinking about a shared object of enquiry. We do not
necessarily need to conclude that moral traditions are a-rational.
Nonetheless, it does appear that MacIntyre’s account of rationality
as tradition-based inquiry is not sufficient, taken by itself, to
126
Sacred Ambivalence
resolve the issues raised by contemporary moral pluralism and the
interminable character of moral disputes.6
Can Alasdair MacIntyre’s “tradition-constituted rationality” pro-
vide a positive prescription for the right theology to undergird the
inevitably theological regimes under which we all must live? It is
well known that MacIntyre confines himself to answering strictly
philosophical questions, that is, questions the adequate consider-
ation of and definitive answers to which require only the resources
of divinely unaided, tradition-constituted-and-dependent human
rationality. Thus, I think he is ultimately unable to argue effectively
against the theological judgments we have shown to be implicit in
the tradition of secular liberalism. Indeed, MacIntyre the philoso-
pher is unable to argue effectively against any anti-Thomistic or
anti-Catholic prescription for an ideal political order because such a
prescription would unavoidably involve theological judgments and
commitments, whether these are implicit or explicit. The method-
ological avoidance of theological judgments and commitments is
the primary weakness in MacIntyre’s project, for it attenuates the
effectiveness of both the vindication of his own theologically-based
and theologically-informed Thomistic tradition, and its dialectical
challenge to rival traditions.
Any intellectual tradition articulating an ideal political order
must necessarily include a judgment as to whether God has com-
municated His will to man regarding the political order. Neither
MacIntyre nor pragmatic liberalism makes any explicit judgment
on this question, but the absence of such a judgment on this matter
is a judgment. By not prescribing an authoritative role for political
theology, both MacIntyrean Thomism and pragmatic, secular liber-
alism effectively deny that God has spoken authoritatively regarding
the proper construction of the political order; in short, they deny
the intellectual and political authority of revealed political theology.
The primary weakness of MacIntyre’s thought is not peculiar to it,
for it is attributable to any system of thought bearing on the moral
6. Jean Porter, “Theology, Morality, and Public Life,” delivered at The Pew
Forum on Religion & Public Life, February 26–27, 2003, accessible at https://www.
pewforum.org/2003/02/26/theology-morality-and-public-life/.
127
and political order that prescinds from theological commitments
and judgments. Although Jacques Maritain prescinds from particu-
lar theological commitments in his practical political prescription
of the “democratic charter,” presented in his famous Man and the
State, he endorses their methodological necessity:
Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to
be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theol-
ogy, and it is precisely as a theologian that St Thomas wrote De
regimine principum. . . . The knowledge of human actions and of
the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an
integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to
the ultimate end of the human being. . . . The rule of conduct gov-
erning individual and social life cannot therefore leave the super-
natural order out of account.7
What Maritain suggests here is that a theologically informed tradi-
tion-constituted political philosophy, all other things being equal,
would be superior to a theologically uninformed one. Such a joint
philosophical and theological enquiry could be vindicated against
all rivals, and would serve as the first step to solving the problem of
the “non-theocratic” regime that is not what it says it is. Providing a
workable practical political model deriving from and justified by
this philosophical-theological basis, as well as the political steps to
eventually attaining it, would be the next step in the argument.
7. Jacques Maritain, The Things that Are Not Caesar’s: A Translation of ‘Primauté
du Spirituel’, ed. Mortimer Adler, trans. J.F. Scanlan (London: Sheed and Ward,
1939), 128.
128
12
America/Leviathan
ichael Hannon and Robert George1 are both Catholic
M thinkers who subscribe to a personalist anthropology and

Aristotelian/Thomistic social philosophy, one that inter-
prets the character of the modern autonomous individual as an evil
fiction, that recognizes the existence and priority of intrinsic com-
mon goods, and that posits the indispensability of social communi-
ties ordered by and to such common goods and the virtues requisite
for human flourishing. However, there is a substantial disagreement
between them. George claims that politics is essentially instrumen-
tal, that is, not a good in itself, but only good insofar as it enables
the flourishing of a multitude of intrinsically good, sub-political
communities, such as families and churches, made up of persons
who discover and possess their good only by participation in such
communities. Hannon, on the other hand, claims that politics, or
the state and its political activity, is essentially an intrinsic good, and
as such, even a higher good than the communities it is meant to
serve, due to its being more common. Indeed, the political is the
architectonic natural good (subordinate only to the ultra-architec-
tonic, supernatural common good that subsists in the Church, that
is, the City of God), since it alone is responsible for and capable of
coordinating the activity of the communities within it, with an eye
ppp
1. Michael Hannon, “Man the Political Animal: On the Intrinsic Goodness of

Political Community,” Public Discourse, May 16, 2013, available at https://www.the
publicdiscourse.com/2013/05/9897/; Robert George, “The Common Good: Instru-
mental But Not Just Contractual,” Public Discourse, May 17, 2013, available at https:/
/www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/05/10166/.
129
to the greatest common good of all, God Himself, and human beat-
itude in friendship with Him for eternity.
These thinkers are good representatives of the two positions
regarding the foundation and end of politics that one finds in con-
servative Catholic circles. These positions do not appear, prima
facie, too dissimilar, for they are, after all, in full agreement on
important conservative Christian basics, i.e., that man has an objec-
tive, God-given nature; that good is an objective, knowable tran-
scendental; that common goods are real spiritual goods of spiritual
persons that take precedence over individual, material goods; that
men have souls; that the purpose of politics is, ultimately, bound up
with the care of souls unto eternal salvation; and that the natural
law governs all communities and must be authoritatively recog-
nized. But, though in agreement on these fundamentals, they dis-
agree on the nature and end of political community.
What is the root cause of their disagreement? To discover this, it
might help to speculate a bit as to the experiential ground and rea-
soning process that might have brought them—and us—to their
and our positions. What political phenomena, facts, experience,
ideas, and considerations might have led George and the instrumen-
talists, on the one hand, to conclude that the political good is merely
instrumental, and Hannon and the intrinsicists, that this good is
truly intrinsic, on the other? I think the first and last place to look
for the answer is the American regime itself, and particularly, its
founding documents.
Regarding George’s position, politics as instrumental good: do
not the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution indicate
explicitly or implicitly, or perhaps just in presupposition, an under-
standing of the political common good as instrumental? If govern-
ment is said to be established to secure the pre-political rights of
men, to allow them merely to pursue (not enable them to attain)
happiness, and to secure the general welfare, not the common good,
that is, if the Founding were even remotely Lockean—there is surely
a plausible argument to be made that the Founders held the instru-
mental view of the political common good; at least the overall
thrust of the Founding Documents can be interpreted this way. But,
prescinding from the question of George’s intellectual genealogy for
130
America/Leviathan
a moment, we can ask why Locke himself might have thought the
way he did, that is, rejecting so categorically the traditional Aristo-
telian account of politics. I think the answer to this is bound up
with his experience of the nation-state, only recently on the scene in
earnest in Western history when Locke was alive. His experience of
the pre- and post-birth of the British nation-state itself—born in
the Glorious Revolution of 1688—was an experience that could also
explain the Founders’ views, as well as George’s.
Alasdair Macintyre has made a persuasive case that the nation-
state is not and cannot be the custodian of the common good, for,
agreeing with George and the instrumentalists, whatever political
good it might embody must be an instrumental one:
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and
unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a
bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about
to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on
the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time
invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. . . . It is like being
asked to die for the telephone company. . . . The shared public
goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a
genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-state mas-
querades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is
bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both.2
If this is the case, then the instrumentalist view is right, for MacIn-
tyre is only describing theoretically what has been the case practi-
cally in America from the beginning. In 1787, America was a full-
fledged nation-state, though in latency in extent and scope; by now,
it has been actualized quite fully (it even seems to be in dotage—if
dotage denotes a nascent police state). So, both then and now, the
American regime is constrained to the kind of goods it can embody
and enable by its merely instrumentally good, nation-state
essence—an essence that, as William Cavanaugh put it in his land-
ppp
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” in After MacIntyre:

Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. John Horton and Susan
Mendus (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 303.
131
mark article, is not, and can never be, the keeper of the common
good.3
Now, subscribing to this understanding of the nation-state, iden-
tifying it with American politics ab initio and in concreto, and accept-
ing the idea that the nation-state, by nature, cannot keep anything
but instrumental goods, does not mean one has to be a Lockean
through and through, in, say, religion, epistemology, and anthropol-
ogy. And this is why it seems to the instrumentalist perfectly reason-
able to accept everything we have said about the American nation-
state, if he does indeed accept it, while demurring from Locke and
the Enlightenment and affirming the nature and priority of com-
mon goods, politics as care of the soul, and the publicly authoritative
nature of the natural law and the Roman Catholic Church.
Let us agree that the nation-state, in whatever configuration it
happened or happens to be (Federalist or Anti-Federalist, libertar-
ian-market or welfare state, Republican- or Democrat-controlled,
lower or higher taxes, Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street ethos, Bush
or Obama, Obamney or Hillary or Trump) is what it is—an alli-
ance, not a common good institution, suitable for and capable only
of providing goods and services to those polis organizations that can
(but only with the alliance’s instrumental help, as the instrumental-
ist insists) embody and keep common goods. Thus, it is just good
philosophy to recognize what is and must be the case, and to act
upon it. This, to me, is where George and the instrumentalists are
coming from. Whether he would prefer to live under a state that
could indeed keep a common good, such as a medieval French city
or an ancient Greek polis, doesn’t matter; the nation-state is here
and here to stay, and we must accept its exigencies and limitations
so that we can work with it to uphold the mediating institutions
that alone can secure those common goods we need in order to
flourish and get to heaven.
There isn’t much to add to the instrumentalist account to explain
the intrinsicist’s, other than that what the former considers accept-
3. William Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-
State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20.2 (April 2004):
243–74; also reprinted in his book, Migrations of the Holy, op. cit.
132
America/Leviathan
able and normative—the American-alliance-nation-state instru-
mentally helping sub-political communities to do their intrinsically
good things—the latter rejects as unacceptable and impossible. It
would be one thing, the intrinsicist says, if the “United Alliance of
America” understood itself to be what it is, merely an alliance of
poleis, securing only the kinds of private, sub-political goods that
the individual poleis themselves are unable to secure for themselves,
such as protection from foreign invaders, coinage of money, inter-
state commerce regulation, etc.—precisely what the American Con-
stitution presents itself as being, at least prima facie. However, as
the intrinsicist seems to think, the American government’s true
nature as shown in historical action is not a mere alliance, but an
alliance-polis, that is, a political contradiction, sometimes advertis-
ing itself as a polis, sometimes as an alliance, but always masquerad-
ing as one or the other to attain more and more power for itself at
the expense of the good of its citizens, personal and common, indi-
vidual and collective, soul and body. And this is not an unpredict-
able outcome, for it is precisely what happens when genuinely
political communities are not recognized as what they truly are
(namely, more than instrumentally good), and when one expects
families and churches to do what only the architectonic political
community can do: the coordinating and harmonizing of intrinsic
goods in light of the common good, thereby securing it.
In short, this creation of a Frankenstein-Jekyll-and-Hyde politics
is what happens when one charges politics with nothing more than
providing instrumental goods to sub-political, non-architectonic
communities. This is, in effect, to destroy politics, and political
nature abhors a vacuum. What you get in its place is not limited
government and a flourishing civil society of happy and free per-
sons and intrinsically good communities, but a totalitarian police-
state nightmare. In short, for the intrinsicist, the nation-state, in the
absence of a polis in which the political good is more than instru-
mental, will cease being a mere alliance, if it ever had been one, and
turn into a monstrous anti-polis, pursuing anti-goods to the detri-
ment and eventual eradication of the common good as well as indi-
vidual goods. Robert Nisbet has traced the history of this process in
his indispensable work, The Quest for Community.
133
For the instrumentalist, on the other hand, there is no need to
prophesy doom, for such intrinsically good-making poleis are a
thing of the past. And even if they were somehow possible in our
religiously pluralistic, technocratic, nation-state age, they would not
need to exist as long as there were flourishing cultural communities
embodying and keeping intrinsic common goods, and as long as the
state is confined to the duties deriving from its alliance-essence,
assisting these communities in their unique role of securing human
flourishing and salvation. Thus, both agree that the nation-state
shouldn’t try to be a polis, but they disagree in this: whether the
nation-state can remain and function as a mere alliance in the
absence of genuinely political poleis. Who is right? How to resolve
this debate?
Since its official beginning in 1787, the nation-state of America
has indeed presented itself as both a public-interest alliance, aiming
only to secure individualist and collectivist goods, such as property
and security from foreign aggression and as a common good polis,
aiming at intrinsic goods such as virtue, peace, and solidarity. The
latter aspiration, however, in the present form of an increasingly
centralized, managerial, intrusive, incontestable, war-mongering
federal government bureaucracy and military-industrial complex, is
much more apparent today, and it is working not so much for the
common good as for the common evil. This tyrannical tendency of
the federal government was much harder to see two hundred years
ago because the polis-like states at that time still retained a goodly
amount of political hegemony and autonomy. After the Civil War,
however, and exponentially after IXXI, the Leviathanian nature of
the federal government has revealed itself without a mask.
How? Domestically: the Obamacare/HHS fiasco; Obergefell; the
metastasizing police-surveillance state; the exponentially declining
middle class and increasing pauperization of the 99%; the vulgar-
ization, brutalization, illiterization, and sexualization of mass cul-
ture—caused and supported by monopolistic media conglomerates
and the federal government; the criminal rapaciousness, systemic
usury, and institutionalized and legally protected mendacity of the
1% (both national and global). The federal government is now
opposed to the existence and autonomy of genuine, non-alliance,
134
America/Leviathan
common good seeking-and-embodying poleis within its bound-
aries. But wasn’t it always this way? The individual states never had
any real rights, pace the rhetoric of the Tenth Amendment, which
takes away with the left hand what it gives with the right. The Anti-
Federalists were right. As Locke would have it, all groups, practices,
and institutions that actually aim at the common good, virtue, and
human flourishing in the United States are, by definition and law,
privatized and depoliticized, relegated to “civil society,” or as Rawls
called it, the “background culture.” Can these flourish better in such
a marginalized, depoliticized, and demoralized position, as Ameri-
can political mythology insists? The early history of the United
States says no. Can they flourish at all, barring miracles of grace, in
such a position? The state of contemporary American culture sug-
gests they cannot.
The U.S. Constitution affords the federal government a political
monopoly over every citizen, as the Anti-Federalists warned it
would. The newly federated government did not exercise this
monopoly at the beginning, as it had appeared to delegate much
governing authority to the states. In other words, it was de facto pre-
cluded from monopolizing political and economic power by those
non-Madisonian/non-Lockean, Aristotelian/Pius XI/distributist/
agrarian/Tocquevillian/subsidiarist principles and practices that
remained in the American political culture—at least for a little
while. The states grew less and less sovereign over their own citizens
and are now practically non-existent as competing loci of power
with the “Federal” (read, Leviathan). Why is it that the states in
America gave up their governing autonomy so soon after the Con-
stitution was implemented? And why, after the Civil War, did things
get so much worse in terms of centralization of power and loss of
states’ rights? Was it because authentic classical liberalism was
rejected, as George might say? Or was it that classical liberal princi-
ples and institutions were fully actualized, as Michael Hanby has
compellingly argued?4
4. Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity,” First Things

(February 2015).
135
In the absence of the balancing dynamic of non-liberal princi-
ples, institutions, and practices that embody community-integrat-
ing and substantive human goods, that is, poleis, what can a nation-
state do otherwise than create citizens and institutions in its intrin-
sic-good-eschewing image? Was the centralized statism that Lincoln
set in motion in order to “save the Union” intended or unintended
by him? by the Founding Fathers? What does it mean for a state to
be “indivisible” other than that it has become a sacred monolith? If
the main principles of the American Founding, i.e., limited, instru-
mental-good-providing government, religious freedom, and the
preservation of inalienable human rights, are not the root of the
problem, as George, I think, would say, then one has to ask why pre-
cisely these principles were not stuck to, why centralization of
power occurred as it did and so quickly, why those genuinely com-
mon good communities that were supposed to have worked hand-
in-glove with the alliance-government have suffered so much under
the American regime.
The good can only be truly known, embodied, practiced, and
possessed in communities and practices of virtue, as both George
and Hannon, the instrumentalist and intrinsicist, accept. But what
if common good communities of intrinsic worth can only embody
and enable intrinsic goods if they are also, to some extent, political
communities, that is, ones with real political and legal teeth, self-
sufficient and architectonic, with actual deliberative, judiciary, and
executive power? What if the ability of smaller intrinsic-good-
embodying-and-enabling communities to survive and flourish
requires the larger society in which they exist to itself be embodied
politically in a more-than-instrumental way? What if the sine qua
non of the solution to a government out of control and at odds with
basic human goods is a radical alternative to the alliance-nation-
state of America? If these things are true, then what we desperately
need is a newly revamped and reconfigured and workable Aristote-
lian polis, one subordinate to the divine polis of the Roman Catholic
Church. For the political order by nature, even the American one, is
all about intrinsic goods, and ineradicably so. In other words, Aris-
totle—and Aquinas, and MacIntyre, and Leo XIII—are right.
136
13
From Socratic Subverter
to Status-Quo Supporter
What MacIntyre Knows
W
hat Alasdair MacIntyre used to know, and has been the
master teacher of for decades, is that the modern nation-
state, particularly in its present Levianthanian-Imperial
configuration, cannot, on its own terms and by its own power, do
anything truly good for its citizens. MacIntyre has argued consis-
tently and forcefully that political liberalism, whether European or
American, due to its essential foundation in the anti-Aristotelian,
pro-Lockean privatization of the good, its defective, Enlighten-
ment-inherited notion of practical reason (which inevitably
becomes the Nietzschean will to power, albeit a smiling bureau-
cratic and therapeutic one), its Weberian compartmentalization of
agency and authority, and its embodiment, since the late nineteenth
century, in nation-states of ever increasing unnatural size and
unwieldy complexity, is simply not adequate to the job of true poli-
tics, a politics of the common good. Rather, pace its stubborn
defenders, such as John Rawls on the left and Pierre Manent on the
right, the liberally construed nation-state is, according to MacIn-
tyre, simply not a functional political order. Yes, it seems to do
“political” things sometimes, but as I argued in the previous chap-
ter, the nation-state is an alliance-pretending-to-be-a-polis, an alli-
ance being sub-political; and the American nation-state, through
having a Lockean/Hobbesian/Rousseauian conception of politics
and man (with their opposing elements somehow alchemically syn-
thesized) enshrined in our authoritative documents and political
ethos ab initio, aims only at preserving life and natural liberty (and
137
property, if you like), but not the good life and moral liberty. As
Kenneth Craycraft has shown, the Founders effectively established
the philosophy of liberalism as the “religion” of the nation, leading
to the indeterminate and vacuous, Enlightenment/Masonic religion
of religious liberty.1
But all is well and good, for it is the privilege and prerogative of
sub-and-supra-state agencies, practices, groups, and institutions of
civil society, so the liberal story goes, such as the family, philan-
thropic associations, and churches, to secure the common good and
the flourishing of individuals—not the state. Being a morally and
religiously neutral agent, by design and common consent, the lib-
eral state cannot know what the good is, so it is charged merely to
create and maintain safe spaces of civic freedom in which those
other quite capable agencies and individuals, the ones that can and
do know the good, can secure it for themselves and the public at
large. Of course, good is still in some sense determined by the liberal
state, as the state, and it alone, is the only agency permitted and
authorized to employ coercive power to restrict the practice—and
sometimes even the expression, if it is politically incorrect and
“harmful” enough—of any conception of the good that inhibits the
freedom of others to live out their self-chosen conceptions of the
good.
In short, the liberal democratic state is, it itself insists, “non-con-
fessional,” and as such is superior to all political orders that came
before it. In restricting itself to promoting and defending the private
interests of its citizens, and only those public interests—the “general
welfare”—that are a means to securing private interests, man is lib-
erated from being, as Rousseau famously stated, “everywhere in
chains.” But, as MacIntyre has argued, by the fact that the liberal
state does not dictate to citizens what its interests should be, or try
to secure them by its unwieldy and morally ignorant power, it is not
a true political order. It is, rather, a “public interest” organization,
more like a utility company than a city—though one that some-
times asks us to die for it, and, in William T. Cavanaugh’s amplifica-
1. Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., The American Myth of Religious Freedom (Dallas:

Spence, 2008).
138
From Socratic Subverter to Status-Quo Supporter
tion, kill for it. We do sometimes benefit from the state’s largesse,
but this is accidental to, and many times in spite of, its intentional
motives and actions.
In MacIntyre’s view, the state, at its best, provides space and
resources for the obtaining of certain modest, private goods by and
for individuals; and it can secure some protection from criminal
depredations, economic fraud, and domestic and foreign violence.
Liberal democracy can and has established tolerable public orders.
However, due to its bloated size, ubiquitous scope, centripetal cen-
tralization, and, most importantly, ideological contradictions, such
“benefits” have usually been at the expense of, and even on the
backs of, the poor, the marginalized, and the politically powerless. It
is also not too friendly to those who accept God’s law as standing
higher than the state’s laws, and who talk and act like it, such as
those few non-state-worshipping Christians that still exist in Amer-
ica, e.g., Kim Davis. But whatever good has done for us, the liberal
state always seems to place obstacles to its citizens’ moral and spiri-
tual flourishing as the inevitable accompaniment of its blandish-
ments. It tends to morally lobotomize its citizens.
Suffice it to say, MacIntyre has not in the past been a supporter of
the American political, cultural, and economic status quo. He has
repeatedly criticized the contemporary practice of “free market”
capitalism for its elitism, irrationality, injustice, and deceitfulness;
he has depicted the centralized, bureaucratic nation-state as an
“unmanageable and dangerous institution,” pretending to be a
moral agent but almost always acting like a moral idiot, demanding
of its dupes to treat it like a mere utility company, but then, some-
times, asking them to “die for the telephone company”; and he has
excoriated the infernal union of consumerist, corporate capitalism
and irrational, bureaucratic politics as just another form of the
tyrannical liberalism that transcends party lines:
Liberalism . . . is often successful in preempting the debate by
reformulating quarrels and conflicts with liberalism so that they
appear to have become debates within liberalism, putting in ques-
tion this or that particular set of attitudes or policies, but not the
fundamental tenets of liberalism with respect to individuals and
139
the expression of their preferences. So, so-called conservatism and
so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general
mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates
within modern political systems are almost exclusively between
conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is
little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system
itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.2
What MacIntyre Doesn’t Know

In short, MacIntyre has been, from the publication of his magiste-
rial After Virtue in 1981, to his provocative God, Philosophy, Universi-
ties in 2009, perhaps the most influential and sophisticated Socratic
subverter of liberalism and the pretensions of the liberal nation-
state in the Western world.
However, in his 2015 plenary lecture, “Justification of Coercion
and Constraint,”3 given at the Notre Dame Ethics and Culture Con-
ference, Alasdair MacIntyre not only posed no challenging ques-
tions to the liberal nation-state, but also gave arguments to justify its
employment of coercive power, and not just in theory. MacIntyre
called for the strong use of nation-state power, right now and right
here, in the realms of health, education, military service, and public
speech. And judging from the import of his words, MacIntyre was
not calling merely for a small-scale, non-Lockean, polis-like, natural
law founded, subsidiarity-respecting, good-knowing-and-willing,
morally capable, alliance-transcending, and otherwise legitimate,
trustworthy, modest, and capable political authority to be empow-
ered to secure certain morally robust goods and prevent certain
morally repugnant evils through coercion and constraint—some-
thing he has called for in the past. The clear import of his words was
that the power and authority to regulate health (government-man-
dated vaccines with no exemptions), dictate education (government
prescribed “virtue education”), mandate military service (this
indeed seems to be the import of his words), and punish acts of pub-

3. It may be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nx0Kvb5U04.
140
lic speech (swift and severe penalties for “harmful speech”) is to be
wielded by none other than the actual nation-state of today, which
he once deemed a “dangerous and unmanageable institution.”
If an embedded intellectual, talking-head, think-tank elitist, glo-
balist apologist for empire, or spokesman for the industries of edu-
cation, medicine, or the military, that is, an obvious court sophist
and regime propagandist, had said what MacIntyre said, it would be
unsurprising; but Alasdair MacIntyre? Is this the same Alasdair
MacIntyre who in 2004 wrote this anti-voting manifesto4 for the
same Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture (which is, curi-
ously, no longer available on their website)?
When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alterna-
tives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is
presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public
consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to
withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the
imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to
themselves the power of framing the alternatives. . . . In this situa-
tion a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is
also a vote cast for a system that presents us only with unaccept-
able alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.
It would be wonderful if health, war, education, and speech could
be more effectively, intelligently, beneficially, and justly adminis-
tered and managed by the liberal nation-state. But certain questions
arise when one seriously considers that possibility. On the topic of
mandatory vaccinations: why do we find no suspicion whatsoever
in MacIntyre’s lecture regarding the possibility of government vac-
cine policy being influenced by a profit and ideology driven scien-
tific establishment working hand in glove with a corrupt Big
Pharma? Granting that some vaccines have been very beneficial to
humanity, why did MacIntyre not speak about the harmful, some-
times fatal, vaccines conceived and sold to the public in the wedding
of these two corrupt institutions? Why did MacIntyre claim, nay,
ppp
4. http://brandon.multics.org/library/macintyre/macintyre2004vote.html.
141
insist, that vaccine technology is based upon the “best science avail-
able”? How does he know this? Why would he trust so naively in
such notoriously money and prestige driven, government-entan-
gled institutions as contemporary science and pharmaceutical med-
icine?
Regarding coercion by the state in the realm of education: as
MacIntyre has told us many times, the liberal state is based firmly
upon the “privatization of the good” (the title of his inaugural lec-
ture as Chair of Philosophy at Notre Dame in 1990), as well as the
relativism of moral and religious claims, the quantification and
pragmatization of knowledge, and the ideological hegemony of
power utilitarianism. Should such a state have its coercive power
increased so as to dictate not only education policy in general, but
also the curricular content, including, as MacIntyre suggested in his
lecture, inculcation in those virtues that can best empower students
to make moral choices? Which “virtues” would these be exactly?
Which choices, and for what ends? Would students be taught to
serve the common good and moral, intellectual, and spiritual flour-
ishing, or would they end up serving the gods of mammon and
empire, becoming either their mindless devotees or their elite and
equally mindless priests? As MacIntyre knows, and as John Taylor
Gatto has demonstrated,5 the mindset of most educrats is the prod-
uct of a formation and training in the ideology of John Dewey, that
is, a concoction of naturalism, collectivism, emotivism, progressiv-
ism, materialism, atheism, Darwinism, pragmatism, democratism,
and utilitarianism.
Regarding coercion by the state in enforcing military service
(MacIntyre didn’t explicitly call for a draft, but his words implied
that military service and state coercion can go together): is the
nation-state, along with its globalist overseers, NATO, the UN, and
the Zionist entity in Palestine, as well as the sundry NGOs that wage
untold influence over military policy and the financial and arma-
ment industries to which such policy is often wedded, and in its
pppp
5. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (New

York: Odysseus Group, 2000).
142
present power configuration of global empire,6 capable of waging a
just war? Has the last decade or so of wars been manifestly just?
Apparently not, at least if they have been anything like the invasion
and occupation of Iraq, which even the most stalwart war hawks
now admit was based upon deliberate lies, and thoroughly unjust
ad bellum and in bello. And how about since World War II? In their
2013 book On Western Terrorism,7 Chomsky and Vltchek claim and
document that “between 50 and 55 million people have died around
the world as a result of Western colonialism and neocolonialism
since the end of World War II.” And what about the horrific-to-con-
template phenomenon of false-flag, state-sponsored terrorism,
which is now, due to the Internet and courageous journalists and
writers, no longer a forbidden topic of discourse? In fact, it has now
been substantially documented in peer-reviewed journals.8 Of
course, citizens must defend their country against enemies, foreign
and domestic—when there is an actual, not made up, imminent
threat—and sometimes this may require coercion and restraints on
certain individual freedoms, but…
MacIntyre also called for the state to have the power to limit and
punish speech whenever it is “harmful or dishonest.” But it must be
asked: who decides whether speech is harmful or dishonest, and
upon what criteria? I am tempted to say something here about “the
pot calling the kettle black.” Couldn’t such censoring measures, in
6. David Vine, “The United States Probably Has More Foreign Military Bases
Than Any Other People, Nation, or Empire in History,” The Nation (September 14,
2015), available at https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably-
has-more-foreign-military-bases-than-any-other-people-nation-or-empire-in-his-
tory/.
7. On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (London: Pluto
Press, 2013).
8. Lance deHaven-Smith, “When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs: Detecting
State Crimes Against Democracy,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 28.3. (September
2006): 330–55; “Conjuring the Holographic State: Scripting Security Doctrine for a
(New) World of Disorder” (Matthew Witt is lead author), Administration & Society
40.6 (October 2008): 547–85; “Preventing State Crimes against Democracy” (with
Matthew Witt), Administration & Society 41.5 (September 2009): 527–50; “Beyond
Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American
Behavioral Scientist 53.6 (February 2010): 795–825.
143
the present Orwellian climate of mass propaganda (read Jacques
Ellul’s Propaganda on this) and endless wars and rumors of wars
(most if not all based upon lies) result in the empowerment of the
federal government to punish more effectively and ruthlessly those
who dare to question publicly its propaganda, immoral activities,
and self-serving agenda? Of course, manifestly dishonest and harm-
ful speech can and should be justly suppressed, when prudent, by
legal force. But, again, Whose “dishonesty”? Which “harm”? Recall
that the government of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984 was given such
carte blanche power with similar justifications. Who is to watch the
watchers?
Unjustified Coercion and Constraint

In sum, why was there no hesitation in MacIntyre to give philo-
sophical support to the coercive power of a nation-state that has
shown itself more than willing to use its redoubtable powers to pro-
mote and protect domestically sodomy, usury, fornication, contra-
ception, and abortion, and abroad to engage in preemptive strikes,
regime change, drone assassinations, and aggressive, illegal, im-
moral wars? This is the same government that has shown itself able
and willing to hide its misdeeds with a sophisticated and ubiquitous
propaganda ministry that exerts much influence, even control, over
mainstream media, entertainment, law, and academia, and to pun-
ish with media calumny, legal penalties, and even violence those
who blow the whistle on these crimes, expose the lies, and unmask
the propaganda. Remember, or learn, that we are dealing with a fed-
eral government that, with Obama, has given itself presidential
power to detain American citizens indefinitely without evidence or
trial—the so-called National Defense Authorization Act.
Are we living under a political order that can be trusted to wield
its tremendous coercive power for good, or is the picture more like
this: rule by secrecy and deception; rule by bureaucrats, dema-
gogues, unelected agencies and officials, “experts,” lobbies, pressure
from foreign governments, big banks and big bankers, Wall Street
financial elites, the Federal Reserve, special-interest groups, corpo-
144
rate power, globalist elites, NGO’s—rule by, first and foremost, sec-
ularist and Zionist ideology and power and money and prestige? If
things are even remotely close to the picture I have drawn, then
prudence dictates that federal and even some state powers should
be restricted, decentralized, and enervated, while being distributed
to those more local governments and mediating institutions,
elected agencies, and individuals—that is, to people of good will,
who can and do actually know the good, and can embody and pro-
mote a true common good and human flourishing. But even if we
live under something less malevolent than my dour description, is it
prudent to justify the power and prerogative of the nation-state at
this time? The time of Obergefell, HHS, and NDAA? The time of a
never-ending and escalating “War on Terror,” a war that is better
named the war of terror, for it has only led to increased terror, the
destruction of millions of innocent Muslims, and the restriction of
the liberty of citizens?
All of the coercive and restraining measures MacIntyre called for
would be appropriate for a genuine political order, one whose scale
allows for a robust conception of the common good and for the
governing agents to know and secure what human flourishing actu-
ally entails, but, again, we are dealing now with a “Deep State,” a
ruling class that is certainly not “neutral towards comprehensive
conceptions of the good,” but at war, morally and spiritually, with
the Good in general and the citizens’ good in particular. I used to
live in a small town where there are still hints of the “old America,”
the one de Tocqueville admired, but when you leave small towns
and go out to where the federal government and its innumerable
agencies have more power and influence, what one finds, as a func-
tion of increasing government size and scope, is rule by corruption,
deceit, exploitation, and propaganda—in short, soft tyranny. We
still have remnants of real political authority, particularly on local
levels, and there are good people doing good things on all levels of
government, and this is what I still love about the American people,
their “don’t tread on me!” dignity—but it is the federal government,
and now even state governments (which, it would seem, have no
real independent power anymore vis-à-vis the Federal, although
they might try asserting their power sometime against the feds and
145
see what happens) that is doing the worst treading. So, I can under-
stand desiring to empower local governments and mediating insti-
tutions with more coercive authority vis-à-vis the state, to have
more authority to change the present health-care racket, more
power over protecting their own land and property against state
confiscation and robbery, more power over true educational needs
instead of educratic insanities, and more power over reasonable
limits of free speech (not the silencing of whistleblowers and truth-
tellers). But empowering small-scale authorities and agencies to do
these things is quite different from empowering bureaucracy,
unelected elites, and the federal government to do them.
The contemporary practices, at the federal level at least, of state-
mandated education, war, medicine, and the policing of “free
speech,” are, at worst, abysmally corrupt and destructive of the
good, and at best, driven by a combination of financial and ideolog-
ical forces along with some genuine health, knowledge, and safety
concerns, with some genuine competency in these areas. Again, I am
certainly not against the use of true governmental power in secur-
ing the best public education; waging defensive and manifestly just
wars—not wars for empire and libido dominandi; providing harm-
less and disease-preventing vaccines; and ensuring an honest and
propaganda-free public square. But the government must actually
be a true government, with its agencies acting on a more or less true
knowledge of the human good, to do these things. As a Thomist and
Catholic, and not a libertarian, I see no problem with true political
authority, one with a modest size, a consistent theory and practice
of subsidiarity, and a non-liberal, more-or-less Aristotelian/Tho-
mistic, natural law and common good foundation, that is, a state
actually capable of knowing and securing the common good, using
its power to promote and even enforce the good in the realms of
education, the military, medicine, and culture, as well as other
realms where the common good is at stake. In this I tend to disagree
with the radical Augustinians, such as William Cavanaugh and
Stanley Hauerwas—though for all I know, they may be more right
than I presently think they are—who are more libertarian, tending
towards anarchism in their approach to state power. But, again, I
would support more state power only if such a state, in practice and
146
not just in words, were to respect subsidiarity, the antecedent and
superior rights and privileges of the family, the superior moral and
spiritual, and, dare I say, political authority of the Catholic Church
on moral and spiritually relevant political issues, as well as all other
institutions and practices based upon immemorial and good cus-
toms, and the natural and divine positive laws. Does our present
nation-state configuration respect these things? Is it even possible
for it to do so, based as it is upon a Lockean/Rawlsian privatization
of the good and relativism of the true? Is the modern state even
capable of recognizing, let along respecting and protecting, any
competing authorities or powers? Based not only on its theoretical
underpinnings, but also on the history of the state’s actual behavior
since its birth in the so-called “Wars of Religion” (truly the Wars of
the Nation-State, as William Cavanaugh has persuasively argued9),
it is not so capable.10
When the state’s coercive power is used on behalf of the true
good of its citizens’ bodies and souls, it is legitimate and worthy of
support and consent. But can the coercive power of the liberal,
social contract, consent-absolutist, centralized, bureaucratic, mana-
gerial, secularist, pluralist, technocratic state, where an increasing
pluralism of irreconcilable conceptions of the good is relentlessly
promoted and even demanded (multicultural ideology, unrestricted
immigration policy), and where equal preference satisfaction
(Casey and Obergefell in theory, abortion and same sex marriage in
practice) has become the absolute criterion of “good” government
and healthy culture, be used on behalf of the true good of its citi-
zens? No one has argued more persuasively for the need to ask this
question, and to ask it seriously, than Alasdair MacIntyre. But, it
appears, no more.
9. William Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The

Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Age 11.4 (October 1995).
10. As Robert Nisbet argued powerfully in 1953 in The Quest for Community: A
Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010).
147
Out of the Cave, Into the Light
I mentioned earlier that I would try to explain what might account
for MacIntyre’s giving philosophical support to the power of the
modern liberal state when he has been so adamantly against it, in
both theory and practice, for so many years. Honestly, I am not
sure, and I hope that I have misunderstood the import of his entire
lecture. If I have, I am ready to be corrected. But if I did not misun-
derstand it, I think there is one plausible explanation: if Alasdair
MacIntyre, a respected and influential public Catholic intellectual,
were to say plainly that the emperor has no clothes on, by talking
about the real dangers of the Deep State, or its imperialistic crimes
and domestic tyrannies; if he told the full truth of the decadence
and corruption of our political parties—both of them—as well as
academia, law, media, police, the military, intelligence, and enter-
tainment, all of which support, and are, to some extent, complicit
in these same crimes and tyrannies, he would soon be relegated to
the academic, social, and political margins, and he would certainly
not be invited to give any more Notre Dame plenary lectures. Per-
haps this pressure, along with a naïve (and uncharacteristic for a
Socratic philosopher) credulity towards mainstream narratives and
claims of the state and its various official mouthpieces, explains why
a man who has been for decades the preeminent spokesman in aca-
demia of the political defectiveness and duplicity of liberalism and
the liberal nation-state, would be willing to give support to the cor-
rupt, mendacious, and money-and-ideology-driven practices of
medical profiteering, educational sophistry, unjust belligerency, and
truthful speech-policing.
One could see that these practices are as I characterize them if one
looked carefully enough at the actual practices, and not what their
paid lackeys and court sophists say about them, that is, the people
who pretend to be statesmen, experts, doctors, educators, lawyers,
journalists, and professors, but are actually just paid apologists for a
corrupt regime, puppeteers in the cave, with most of them probably
completely unaware of what they are doing and who they are really
working for. MacIntyre is certainly not one of these, but perhaps he
has been overly influenced by them in recent years, as all of us
148
undoubtedly have been. Their malign influence is inescapable now,
though we can do things to protect ourselves against it.
To see the actual practices for what they are requires turning one’s
gaze away from the seductive shadows, and this means, first and
foremost, from the mainstream media—in both its left and its right
masks. I mean media in its fundamental sense—that which medi-
ates, but does not actually offer, reality to us. Then we need to look
toward the puppets and puppeteers that construct the shadows, the
mediated lies, “facts,” narratives, reports, etc. Next, we need to
expose the counterfeit firelight, which darkens the mind with Man-
ichean scapegoating, inner-circle intrigues, and dogmatic answers
with no questions. Finally, we repair to the real light of truth, humil-
ity, and courage streaming into the cave. It is Christ, the Logos, and
the Church, the real world, and good-willed people that iconically
mediate His presence. With the Internet we still have ready access to
truth-mediating media, and if we can get a decent liberal arts educa-
tion and a sense of historical context to fill in the Orwellian memory
hole, become and remain good-willed, practice natural virtue and
become disposed to supernatural virtues, and, above all, practice as
much as possible the presence of God in our hearts, in silence, and
within the world around us, we can learn, know, and love the Truth
and save our souls. We must not simply accept mainstream media
and government narratives and claims anymore, no matter how
much psychological and emotional pressure there is to do so. God
will judge us for preferring shadows to reality.
I hope I have at least made a plausible case that Christians and
freedom-loving men of good will should think twice about follow-
ing MacIntyre’s blanket endorsement of state power, prerogative,
and scope in these four vital areas of human welfare, as well as any
area that can seriously affect our souls. Let us remember the big pic-
ture. The earthly City of Man has always been and will always be
opposed to the City of God, that is, the true religion, the Church
that embodies it, and all those men and women who love her and
what she stands for, whether official members of Her or not. The
present-day culture of the West is not liberal, tolerant, rationalist,
religiously neutral, enlightened, morally progressive, secular, and
non-violent. Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of good people
149
who have created alternative sub-cultures ordered to truth, beauty,
goodness, freedom, and virtue—in a word, to God—mainstream
culture, including mainstream political and imperial culture, which
is now under the empire of mammon and ideology, is becoming
increasingly totalitarian, intolerant, materialist, atheist, fideist, spir-
itualist (dark spiritualism), religiously fanatical (the religion of
anti-logos), morally decadent, inquisitional, and violent—all its
endless and ubiquitous propaganda to the contrary notwithstand-
ing. If you want a good depiction of what American mass culture is
becoming, read Thucydides’ description of the plague at Athens
during the Peloponnesian War:
The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves
were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they
were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what
was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything,
whether sacred or profane. . . . Nor was this the only form of law-
less extravagance which owed its origin to the plague. Men now
coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and
not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by
persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had
nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend
quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as
alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was
popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be
spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoy-
ment, and all that contributed to it, was both honorable and use-
ful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As
for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they wor-
shipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the
last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offenses,
but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed
upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell
it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.11
For, at the heart of all cultures, pace the Enlightenment and its
post-Enlightenment child of nihilistic technocracy—a chip off the
11. The Peloponnesian War, at 2.52.3.
150
old block—is always the Sacred, and at the heart of our post-IXXI
imperial culture of death and deceit is a terrifying sacred power in
mortal conflict with the Logos, with Christ. What we need, then, is,
not an easy compromise with and valorization of state power, nor a
total rejection of it, but its—and our—healing, repentance, and
transformation. This requires a wholehearted fight against the
increasing nihilism and power-worship that has poisoned American
political culture, with its ever centralizing, punishing, restricting,
censoring, surveilling, taxing, policing, invading, terrorizing,
bombing, droning, and lying state practices, and the propaganda
that hides them, which cunningly portrays the state as beholden to
the people’s will and their rights, and promoting only our “free-
dom” and “security,” even while it acts only for its own interests and
the interests of immoral and power-insane elites. And now, as
MacIntyre’s portrayal of liberalism would lead one to suspect, we
are dealing with an emboldened ruling class, both left and right (a
quite effective controlled opposition), that has become in their own
eyes, and, tragically, in the eyes of many American Christians, an
unimpeachable, unquestionable authority brooking no opposition.
Just consider the reprehensible way many Christian “conservatives”
treated the heroic act of Kim Davis against the state.12
How this resistance to the state might be translated into Christian
teaching and everyday life, as well what a blueprint for building a
political culture of love, truth, goodness, solidarity, humility, non-
violence, compassion, and beauty might look like, are matters that
need urgently to be addressed by Church leaders, lay and clergy, and
Christian intellectuals, especially at places like Notre Dame.
12. The following chapter takes up this issue in detail.
151
14
When Christians
Persecute Their Own
E
very Catholic, Christian, and man of good will should have
recognized as soon as the decision was made that the so-
called “law of the land” of Obergefell is pure lawlessness and
will-to-power, and this, not because the Supreme Court does not
have the constitutional right to interpret law, but because its inter-
pretation, insofar as it makes legal the violation of the natural and
divine law on marriage, is wrong. And it should also be obvious that
the Supreme Court itself, insofar as it accepts no higher law than
itself—however much it may make deceptive references to the
authorities of the Constitution, precedent, scientific consensus,
rights to privacy, ad nauseum—is itself a highly questionable politi-
cal and legal authority. So, what to make of otherwise conservative
and traditional Christians, highly educated ones at that, implicitly
defending Obergefell and the authority of the Supreme Court,
Christians who were not too long ago criticizing both unequivo-
cally? With regard to none other than Obergefell, we heard these
Christian intellectuals solemnly utter declamations about “the law
of the land,” and “the rule of law.”
In the meantime, an ordinary, not highly educated woman,
belonging to an obscure Christian sect, one who, we now know, was
steeped in sins related to marriage herself, but who was trying to
obey in a public way what small grasp of Jesus Christ’s teachings on
sexuality she had—in this case, a quite accurate grasp of His con-
demnation of sodomy and sodomite marriage—was discredited,
humiliated, undermined, and indeed persecuted by these same con-
servative Christian intellectuals. Their criticisms of her and her
153
refusal to sign same-sex marriage licenses were not remotely as
malicious and vitriolic as were those from the secularist left, and
they were careful to make distinctions, qualify their condemnation
of her defiant act, and otherwise pad and couch what amounted to
a betrayal of a fellow Christian in her time of trial. They showed no
solidarity with Kim Davis whatsoever.
That Christians, and especially Catholics, have been engaged in
attacking, ridiculing, undermining, and, it must be said, scapegoat-
ing Kim Davis—who, whatever real faults one may find in her tac-
tics (maybe resigning was the better option) and character (she’s
been divorced and remarried several times), was actively resisting
the tyranny of liberalism of the Kennedy/Obama Regime in its pro-
grammatic attack on Christianity and the natural law—is, it must
be said, scandalous and disgraceful. I would have thought for sure
that conservative Christians, especially Catholics, would have
responded to the Kim Davis event, not with statements like “She
took an oath and needs to do her job or resign,” but with arguments
more along these lines:
1. The present Kentucky law states unequivocally that marriage is
between a man and a woman. Thus Kim Davis is upholding that
law, and that was indeed the law at the time she was sworn in and
made her oath.
2. Pace Obergefell and its tendentious interpreters, there is no
“law of the land” mandating that marriage is not uniquely and
exclusively between a man and a woman, and that all civil authori-
ties must secure and facilitate and preside over same-sex marriage.
Please show me the law. And even if there were such a law, no one is
obligated to obey or enforce or facilitate an unjust law, which is pre-
cisely what any law is that promotes same-sex marriage or sodomy.
3. Obergefell is a blatant attack on the natural law and Christian-
ity and so can be disobeyed by citizens, and treated, not as legiti-
mate law, but as a tyrannical act of force, the imposition of elite
ideology on majority rule, states’ rights, the Constitution, the natu-
ral law, and Christianity.
4. Since the arbitrary will of a small ideological minority has been
and is now being imposed on due-process majority rule, on sacred
customs, on state laws in good standing, on the freedom of religion
154
When Christians Persecute Their Own
(properly understood), on the freedom of institutions to act in
accordance with the dictates of their beliefs (without any compel-
ling reason to the contrary), public resistance to this tyranny is
surely a live and legitimate option, with when, where, and to what
extent dictated by prudence.
5. No American can be forced to enforce, cooperate with, or facil-
itate the application of an unjust law, regardless of the present status
of her moral character and the precision of her grasp of Christian
ecclesiology and dogma. Kim Davis has every right, and perhaps the
duty, to disobey the order that she put her name to licenses for sod-
omite marriage. She could have resigned, yes, and perhaps that
would have been the better move. But she had every right not to
resign.
Notwithstanding all the sophisticated, absurd mental gymnastics
displayed by public, “conservative” Christian intellectuals, such as
Rod Dreher, to disparage and even mock Kim Davis in the name of
defending the “rule of law,”1 she was imprisoned because she would
not comply with the legal and political support of same-sex mar-
riage, something evil in itself, but which also entails endorsing the
practice of sodomy, a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance.
Anyone who denies that Kim Davis was persecuted because she dis-
played a principled opposition to the homosexual agenda is living
in an unreality of legal positivist ideology, state idolatry, subterfuge,
scapegoating, and sophistry. And this describes most especially the
Catholic and Christian “conservatives” who threw a fellow Chris-
tian under the bus, who, indeed, persecuted one of their own, how-
ever “soft” in mode. I would never have predicted that this would be
the way otherwise upstanding public Christian intellectuals would
respond to the beginnings of the coercive persecution of Christians
in America. But then again, cowardice, backstabbing, moral inco-
herence, and hypocrisy are the norm in American culture, so why
should one expect anything different from embedded intellectuals
1. See here for an example: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/

kim-davis-political-prisoner-martyr/. In 2017, this same “conservative” journal
fired the great Philip Giraldi for writing an article on another journal critical of the
State of Israel.
155
with a vested interest in appearing respectable and sophisticated,
and maintaining their intellectual prestige and authority? Those
who choose the respect of men over the respect of God already have
their reward.
What accounts for the emergence of such a strange group-mind
(to use the term of John McMurtry) among Christian conservatives?
In addition to, perhaps, a pre-rapture separation of the wheat from
the tares, the sheep from the goats, the Peters from the Judases, what
we are also seeing is an exemplary instance of the radical incoher-
ency of moral and political discourse and practice in America,
something Alasdair MacIntyre has been talking about for decades.
We do not have in America, and never had in anything but fits and
starts and on the local level, rational and widespread political delib-
eration eventuating in the rule of laws delivered through such delib-
eration; rather, we now have, and have had for some time, the rule
of arbitrary fallen men, the wills of “experts” imposed on the rest of
us with no deliberation, protest, or resistance permitted, unless it be
merely private or otherwise sterile and harmless (the Occupy Wall
Street protest was not sterile and harmless; hence, its having been
violently quashed). And it cannot be otherwise when theological
and moral and metaphysical considerations are shunned in public
discussion, when legal positivism is mandated ideology, when sub-
sidiarity is systematically violated by a centralized, Leviathanian
state ruling as an unimpeachable bureaucratic technocracy in which
domestically, as James Kalb has shown, the indiscriminate satisfac-
tion of individual preferences is the exclusive and incontestable cri-
terion for the use of coercive state power, and in which non-
domestically, the security and growth of a world empire of “creative
destruction” is the primary and unquestioned desideratum. What
fills the vacuum when logos is banned from the public square and
banned as the foundation of law is naked, fallen, human will, the
human will of ruling-class elites masking as “reason,” “the will of the
people” or the “rule of law.” What we have is the disordered, revolu-
tionary, and logos-averse human will of ruling-class elites ruling for
their own self-serving desires, and/or the desires of the true Rulers
in the Deep State, the precise definition that Aristotle gives of tyr-
anny in his Politics.
156
Of course, we know that the sexual revolutionaries on the left are
lying when they talk about the need to obey “the rule of law” and
“the Constitution.” Along with the conservatives, they wax pious
about “obeying the rule of law,” when only yesterday they were
decrying the tyranny of the law “imposed on us by elite white Chris-
tian males,” as they work to overthrow all traditional order to hasten
the imposition of their utopian, lawless schemes. They were and are
anti-logos revolutionaries who are mendaciously using the conser-
vative rhetoric of “oaths” and “law of the land” and the like simply
because that ploy can further their attack, perversion, undermining,
and destruction of the true rule of law, which is the law of truth and
goodness, the logos, the moral law and those human laws that corre-
spond with it, ultimately all reflecting and supporting the loving
rule of God. If human law explicitly reflects in any way the natural
law, as it does right now still in Kentucky, for example, they are all
for disobeying it and telling others to do so. However, if a moral evil
is imposed on the majority tyrannically, as in Obergefell, then sud-
denly they’re pious and solemn and constitutional.
But that conservative Christians on the right are employing their
own version of this shell game, indicating the same deference to the
Hobbesian conception of the legally positivist secularist state as
those they purportedly oppose, is telling. Do they really hope to be
able to carve out a safe space, a “Benedict Option” to practice Chris-
tianity inside of the very Leviathan they are supporting and
enabling? They can disassociate themselves from the Kim Davises of
the world all they want, but if the Masters suspect they are doing
more than Christian play-acting, that is, if they become a real threat
to the regime’s authority, they are going to be liquidated, one way or
another. Already, outspoken pro-lifers, as well as anyone who pub-
licly casts doubt or questions official government narratives, such as
IXXI, no matter how preposterous, are being named and surveilled
as “domestic terrorists” by Homeland Security because of the tyran-
nical Patriot Act. But then again, it is easy for intellectuals to define
any action or speech that causes the ruling powers to oppress an
individual or group as being “against the rule of law” or “un-Ameri-
can” or “imprudent,” and so never have to suffer for Jesus Christ in
the public square.
157
The persecution is coming, and it is has been shown to us now in
the form of a spiritually and morally wounded, hypocritical in some
ways, and theologically unsophisticated woman, one who, surely,
has shown herself capable of flouting the Bible and the moral law in
her past divorces and remarriages. But what she has done by con-
tinuing to resist the state’s injustice is heroic, perhaps even moti-
vated supernaturally as a penance for her past transgressions. In any
event, God likes to humble the proud with such as these, as Flan-
nery O’Connor portrayed for us. Anyone who scapegoated or ridi-
culed this woman in public is going to have to answer for it before
Our Lord.
Is there a solution to all this, other than simply accepting with
courage the persecution that seems inevitable? I don’t know, but
what I do know is that when Catholics who have access to Magiste-
rial teaching on the proper ordering of Church and state and claim
to believe it defer to and promote principles and practices that con-
tradict this teaching, America is doomed. As Orestes Brownson
maintained in his 1865 masterpiece, The American Republic, the
American project cannot succeed without Catholicism. But I would
go a step further than Brownson and say that the American project
cannot succeed unless Catholicism, or at least a robust, Augustin-
ian, natural law based theism, replaces liberalism as the ultimate
source of moral and political authority in the state. In this, I am
echoing what Aidan Nichols has written with regard to the moral
bankruptcy of English political culture without some sort of inte-
grally implemented confessional state model.2
As Brad Gregory has so magnificently recounted in his The Unin-
tended Reformation, the Protestant revolutionaries denied funda-
mental truths declared by the infallible teaching authority of the
Magisterium of the Catholic Church, as well as the capacity of her
custodians and all faithful Christians to be certain of her possession
of the truth. They supplanted this ecclesial and magisterial author-
ity and certainty with sola scriptura, an inexorably subjective, “from
the inside,” and thus incoherent conduit to definitive and saving
knowledge about Christ. The Enlightenment liberals, stuck in eccle-
2. See Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake.
158
sial subjectivism, epistemological reductionism, and ontological
nominalism, then attempted to build something “objective” on this
subjectivist sand, and supplanted the Bible with “reason.” The post-
modernists then supplanted reason with “irony” and “narrative”—
in short, the authoritative “truth” that there is no access to universal
truth about reality, let alone the will of God, or at least no way to
know that one has access to it. And at the end of this line of revolu-
tionaries, we find ideologues like the late Catholic Anthony
Kennedy, as well as those Catholics who, though explicitly renounc-
ing ecclesial subjectivism, nominalism, and liberalism, speak and
act in practice as though the Catholic Church were just a private
sect; as though that the truths of the natural and divine law should
never have any privileged authority in law; and as though the Amer-
ican experiment would be a success if only Catholics, Christians,
and other men of good will were virtuous, active, and sufficiently
educated—that is, with no need for any restructuring of the regime
in light of Catholic social teaching, the philosophia perennis, and the
natural law.
But as the Nietzschean Stanley Fish has demonstrated,3 the just
separation of Church and state is, in a word, impossible, if it is to be
accomplished within and according to liberalism and the liberal
nation-state—and this includes also the classical liberalism of the
American Founders, however much better this form of liberalism
was than what we have now. If this is true, it would explain why
there was no good and rationally coherent solution to the Kim
Davis issue. Within the intellectual, moral, legal, and political con-
straints of the contemporary American regime, a regime that is
utterly incoherent on the relations of Church and state, the just sep-
aration of Church and state is, as it were, mission impossible. Either
Davis goes to jail, or she is permitted to abstain from signing the
licenses, or some compromise is made. But whichever outcome is
determined by the coercive power of the regime, it is not, and can-
not be, a rational determination; for, insofar as the American
regime, both on the federal level and the local, constitutionally and
3. “Mission Impossible: Settling the Just Bounds between Church and State,”
Columbia Law Review 97.8 (December 1997): 2255–333.
159
legally prescinds in its legal and political deliberations from any
consideration of the moral and political and theological claims of
the Catholic Church, as well as of the authority of the natural law of
which she, the Church, is the unique authoritative custodian, and
impedes other citizens from considering these authorities in those
arguments and debates in the public square, in Congress, in the
Senate, in the Supreme Court, and in any other forum where argu-
ment and debate can ensue in law, it renders itself incapable of
resolving fundamental political issues, let alone ones that bear upon
the supernatural realm, the Church’s rights and privileges, and the
authority of God.
And this is so because, ultimately, only Jesus Christ has the
authority to settle the just bounds between Church and state—for
He is the author of both. By the fact of His Incarnation, he brought
together Church and state, heaven and earth, divinity and human-
ity, and after bringing them together, He commanded their proper
separation: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is
God’s.” Therefore, in order to know what we owe to Caesar and
what we owe to God today, we must listen to His authentic and
infallible mouthpiece, which isn’t the Supreme Court or “conserva-
tive” court sophists. Unless we have access to the voice of Christ,
Fish is right—there is no way of solving the problem. Yet there must
be a solution, because Christ commanded us to solve the problem.
In short, Christ must have given us a sure and “from the outside”
way of determining His will regarding the proper ordering of
Church and state. Anything other than a living, visible, unified, uni-
versal, hierarchical, concrete, corporal institution whose unity, holi-
ness, universality, and apostolicity could be recognized by all “from
the outside” could not afford humans the clear determination of
Christ’s will in matters political, as well as any other matter. Any-
thing less would perpetuate both the denial of access, and the sub-
jective uncertainty of that access, to the definitive truth regarding
Christ’s will for the proper ordering of society and the political
order, a denial and uncertainty that would make the just separation
of the prerogatives of Church and state impossible, and would thus
make a just resolution to particular conflicts between Church and
state impossible, such as the Kim Davis conflict. What we would
160
have without it is either outright war, or the Procrustean attempt to
make the message of the Gospel fit into the arbitrary will of who-
ever happens to be ruling in the state—in short, chaos or a hope-
lessly compromised Christianity. And this is indeed what we have,
the latter being exemplified in the sophistry of the Christian intel-
lectuals I have exposed.
161
15
Speaking the Unspeakable:
Political Correctness on the Right
T
here is and should certainly be much leeway for discussion of
Christian social teaching, and contemporary political and
economic issues in light of it. There are those who, under-
standably and legitimately, lean in different directions, more to the
The Unspeakable:
left on some issues, and more to the right on others, more libertar-
ian when it comes to economic matters, more conservative on cul-
Political Correctness on the
tural and moral issues, but all intentionally within the ambit of
Right
orthodox Christianity and the philosophia perennis, within a cos-
mos of thought that is in line with the entirety of the Gospel and
right reason.
However, a serious problem within Christian discourse among
those who consider themselves orthodox Christian conservatives is
the existence of a certain secular orthodoxy or ideology masquerad-
ing as authentically Christian. Now, some level of ideological taint is
inevitable in otherwise sound theological and philosophical analy-
ses and discussions, and no one is immune to this. The only way to
counteract ideological infestation, which is a liability of all open
and free truth-seeking, is to cultivate open, honest, free, respectful,
and rigorous discussion. As I see it, the most important principle of
such discussion, for those of us subscribing to authoritatively Chris-
tian first principles, is that none but these first principles, including
those of right reason or the natural law, be a priori secure from crit-
ical questioning, and even these can be interrogated to ensure cor-
respondence to reality and precision of articulation. I am not
advocating complete skepticism on matters outside these secure
realms, as if we are not certain of the truth of anything but the Sym-
163
bols of Faith. But even the most fundamental or self-evident truths
need to be probed and developed and questioned to ascertain if we
are interpreting them correctly and with sufficient depth and com-
plexity, whether we see their proper relation to other truths, and
whether we have distortions in our thinking about these and other
truths that flow from them, particularly in their application to the
world of time and space and human action.
Christians are defined by their unwillingness ever, under penalty
of sin, to reject the truths of Faith. Much else, however, is fair game
for discussion. This, to me, is the gift and genius of the Western,
Christian intellectual tradition. It is tolerant and generous, in the
best sense of the terms, but also uncompromising and truth-seek-
ing. It combines unswerving loyalty and belief with the obligation
of critical analysis and flexibility. Socrates has not been banished
from the Church, for his gadflying helps us to know and to live the
absolute truths of our faith in humility. Thus, political correctness
is the death of truth-seeking discussion, and so we must reject it, in
both its left-wing and right-wing varieties. However, many evangel-
ical and Catholic Christians see and decry only the left-wing version
of political correctness, but not the one that that especially tempts
them. This political correctness of which I speak is not deemed
debatable by its staunchest and most outspoken proponents, and
not only this; it is assumed a priori to be in line with Christian
orthodoxy. In fact, any view that contradicts its principles or their
application to political or economic reality is determined to be her-
esy, or proof of unbelief and even of immorality. For example, if one
articulates a skeptical position with regard to the justice ad bellum
and the official narrative in bello of the “War on Terror,” or if one
doubts the goodness, truth, and Gospel-appropriateness of Chris-
tian Zionism, basing one’s doubt upon, among other things, the
treatment of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli regime, one may
find oneself accused of hating one’s country or being anti-Semitic.
If one expresses skepticism about the truthfulness of government
pronouncements and narratives about dramatic, violent events, and
the more or less good intentions of our rulers with regard to
domestic security policy and the ever-expanding wars, rumors of
wars, and occupations, one may be accused of a kind of modernist
164
The Unspeakable: Political Correctness on the Right
skepticism about truth in general, or, horror of horrors, of being a
“conspiracy theorist.” When a Christian questions this political
orthodoxy or even any part of it (let alone suggesting that it is alto-
gether unsound), or attempts to interpret contemporary political or
economic events in a way different from this rigid orthodoxy, the
politically correct ideologues make blatantly ad hominum attacks,
engage in shaming tactics, and make threats to one’s livelihood. It’s
a kind of neo-Inquisition.
What are the doctrines of this political correctness on the right?
From my experience, the following are claims and “facts” one is not
permitted to question in public lest one be excommunicated from
the conservative temple:
• America exercises its military power only or mostly for the sake
of good ends using morally justified means, and any unfortunate
results like the death of innocents are unintended and eminently
excusable in light of the enormous good that is usually the result.
• American empire is, all other things being equal, good for
America and for the world. America is and has always been a force
for good in the world, and the more force it has, the better off
everyone is.
• America, along with Israel, our greatest ally, is a chosen nation
with a special charge from God to liberate, democratize, and
Americanize the world. One can criticize how this chosenness is
sometimes expressed and executed, but if you don’t really believe
in the American government and military’s intrinsic goodness and
chosenness, you’re one of the bad guys.
• Zionism and Christianity are perfectly reconcilable, and Chris-
tians must support Zionism and the State of Israel, even when
there is an appearance of injustice on the part of the Israeli gov-
ernment and military.
• Any criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel, except perhaps
superficial criticism regarding occasional and unintended misuse
of force, is proof of anti-Semitism.
• In conflicts and wars, the state of Israel is always right and the
Palestinians are always wrong. Israel fights defensively and the Pal-
165
estinians fight offensively. Israelis are the victims, and the Palestin-
ians are the aggressors. Israel never intentionally targets civilians.
Israel never uses disproportionate force, except on accident. Pales-
tinians who fight for their people and land are terrorists, not an
occupied people with a right to self-defense.
• Capitalism is good. Period. Talk about the problems of usury,
fiat currency, and banker machinations is the stuff of conspiracy
theorists, Islamists, or weird Catholic monarchists and distribut-
ists.
• Christianity in general and Catholic social teaching in particular
is entirely reconcilable with the principles of the American Found-
ing, American Constitution, and Declaration of Independence.
America represents Good Liberalism, rooted in the Good Ameri-
can Revolution and the Good Enlightenment of Locke, and
blessed by the Church, while Europe represents the Bad Liberal-
ism, with roots in the Bad French Revolution and the Bad Enlight-
enment of Hobbes and Rousseau.
And here are some politically correct applications of the above:
• All the wars engaged in by the United States were done in the
name of freedom and democracy in opposition to the enemies of
freedom and democracy, and in order to liberate other countries
from these enemies, and so have all been, more or less, just wars.
• We shouldn’t make too much of the bad ways Native Americans
and African Americans were treated in America, for such treat-
ment was a betrayal of true American principles, not a result of
following such principles as “Manifest Destiny” and “The City on
a Hill.”
• The United States fought World War I to make the world safe for
democracy, and World War II to liberate the Jews and save the
world from Nazism. The standard narratives about the reasons for
these wars, and what happened during them, should not be ques-
tioned. There were no secret motives or behind-the-scene players,
and the results were overwhelmingly good for America and the
world. The Germans in Dresden and the Japanese in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were not treated unjustly—or even if they were, it
was a strategically necessary use of force.
166
The Unspeakable: Political Correctness on the Right
• The founding of the State of Israel was eminently just in princi-
ple and in the way it occurred, and certainly willed by God. Thus,
the state of Israel had the right to displace tens of thousands of
Palestinians in 1948 and in the ensuing decades of conflicts, a right
established in the Old Testament, blessed by Christianity, morally
required due to the Holocaust, and confirmed by the United
Nations.
• America has engaged in Middle East conflicts for purely defen-
sive or humanitarian reasons against an enemy who poses an
imminent threat to us and the world, so they are just exercises of
force.
• The War on Terror is just, ad bellum and in bello, and morally
necessary to defend America and the West, and any critique of its
narrative, and U.S. behavior in accordance with this narrative, is
equivalent to hating America and helping her enemies. Perhaps
Iraq was a mistake, but one can’t expect perfection in war.
• The official American government, IXXI Commission, mass
media explanation of the September 11, 2001, attacks is authorita-
tive, unquestionable, and eminently reasonable. Any questioning
of it whatsoever is a sign of mental insanity, moral turpitude, trea-
son—and probably all three.
• False-flag terrorism, if it exists, was something only Hitler or
Stalin did, and is now engaged in only by “rogue” states or radical
Muslim regimes, like Iran or Pakistan. America and Israel have
never engaged in it.
What prevents Christians from uniting together to create a polit-
ical order and culture that is God-pleasing and enabling of true
human flourishing is that these doctrines—ones that support the
ideologies and self-serving behavior of the ruling class, and the nar-
cissistic tribal worship, idolatrous self-exceptionalism, and scape-
goating passions of the populace—are protected from any critical
analysis and refutation by none other than the millions of politi-
cally-correct Christians who serve this orthodoxy by not only sup-
porting it but also by policing it. This produces in Christians who
seek the truth a real fear of being harmed in their livelihood and
even in their persons, at the hands of “orthodox” Christians, simply
167
for articulating positions that challenge, directly or indirectly, this
Orwellian political orthodoxy. Christian intellectuals need to
become more aware and vigilant regarding the influence of this
political correctness on the right, and when they see it, to bring it to
public awareness so that it can be challenged in a reasonable way.
Only the truth deserves unimpeachable authority.
168
16
The Conspiracy
Against Conspiracy
A
conspiracy theory can be used as a psychological and intel-
lectual crutch, an impregnable bulwark against critical
thinking, and an excuse for intellectual laziness. However, to
have an a priori, intransigent skepticism towards any marginalized
theory simply because it’s marginalized, or because it accuses a par-
ticular person or group not obviously suspicious, or simply because
it attributes to a minority of specific agents or groups a dispropor-
tionate historical and political influence, is itself to hold a kind of
conspiracy theory against conspiracy theories. Indeed, the term
“conspiracy theorist” is a misnomer, for it denoted, and should con-
note, pace our Orwellian discourse, those who do not accept wild
and implausible conspiracy theories, such as the one that assigns
the ultimate blame for certain buildings being destroyed from the
inside, and in spite of defense technologies second to none in the
world, to a known CIA-asset sitting in a cave, choreographing
jumbo-jet planes with a laptop.
Before one can attack a so-called conspiracy theory, one needs
first to discern if it has some measure of rational plausibility. If it
does, one has the duty to take the time and energy to analyze it to
see if it is actually false before judging it to be so. One should nei-
ther believe nor disbelieve any theory, no matter how far-fetched it
appears on the surface, without putting it through at least a small
measure of Socratic questioning; if it dies at the first barrage of ele-
mentary questions, only then can it be summarily dismissed. Sim-
ply because a theory might make one feel uncomfortable—perhaps
because it threatens the airtight, comfortable, neatly furnished,
169
intellectual penthouse one has created for oneself, doesn’t mean it is
worthy of dismissal.
Couldn’t the facile dismissal of a certain theory about historical
causality—let’s say, the theory of the profound global influence of
Freemasonry—be itself the symptom not of intellectual integrity
but of the very success of the dismissed theory? Might not its elu-
siveness and impenetrability to intellectual analysis and judgment
have been planned? When a demon is to be exorcised, it does every-
thing it can to prevent the awareness of its presence, for it knows
that once it is discovered, it has already lost the battle. I once lis-
tened to a radio talk show in which it was mentioned that many of
those who were early and vocal proponents of the Iraq war were
Israeli Zionists. Immediately, the statement was dismissed as tanta-
mount to conspiracy-mongering and racism. I am not arguing one
way or the other here about the truth of this statement in regard to
this war; I am merely pointing out that the analysis of whether this
purported fact was true or not was strategically precluded by the
mere mention of “conspiracy theory.” If it were true that Israeli
influence was disproportionate in the decision to attack Iraq, and
more recently to attack Iran and Syria, and if this influence had a
vested interest in being hidden, I can think of no better means of
doing so than of somehow convincing the media to shut down all
public discussion at the mention of even a hint of such influence.
Once again, without judging the truth or falsity of the aforemen-
tioned statement, is it not plausible to consider the existence of
some level of concerted effort to prevent the discussion of the verac-
ity of this fact? Is this a “ludicrous” consideration?
It is interesting to note that many who condemn conspiracy the-
ories in one area of historical causality accept them readily in oth-
ers. For example, many of the same people who see nothing but
Annibale Bugnini’s face and a coterie of evil men of “The Rhine”
when they think about the Second Vatican Council, condemn as
antipatriotic or even treasonous those who detect a certain level of
organized deception in the “War on Terror.” Again, some of those
who would easily admit a strategic and planned effort by a minority
of atheistic intellectuals to undermine public morality in the revo-
lution of the 1960s in America are the same people who spew super-
170
The Conspiracy Against Conspiracy
cilious sarcasm and aspersions of disloyalty when it is pointed out
that many of the American Founders and Revolutionaries were
Freemasons who had the explicit, publicly noted intention of pre-
venting Catholicism from ever having any effective political, moral,
and spiritual influence in the Land of the Free.
If Freemasonry is so easily dismissed, then why was it the subject
of more papal encyclicals than any other topic in the history of the
Catholic Church? On March 13, 1825, Leo XII published his encycli-
cal Quo Graviora condemning Freemasonry, as well as all other
secret societies. He wrote:
They have dared publish works on religion and affairs of state,
they have exposed their contempt for authority, their hatred of
sovereignty, their attacks against the divinity of Jesus Christ and
the very existence of God: they openly vaunt their materialism as
well as their codes and statutes which explain their plans and
efforts in order to overthrow the legitimate heads of state and com-
pletely destroy the Church. . . . What is definitely ascertained is
that those different sects, despite the diversity of their names, are
all united and linked by the similarity of their infamous plans.1
Are we to be nervous about conspiracy-mongering when we read
these words, or should we be more worried about not believing in
conspiracies enough when they are at least rationally plausible?
Could it be that the most ingenious of their “infamous plans” is to
conceal their existence by convincing good Catholics that the belief
in such traps is almost always symptomatic of psychological disor-
der or intellectual laziness and narrowness?
There are two errors to guard against. One is to accept only those
theories and grand narratives of the world and history, including
conspiracy theories, that make us secure in our easychairs, that
exculpate us from any blame for the evils in the world. In an essay
contest that posed the question, “What is wrong with the World,”
Chesterton answered, “I.” He won, and he told the absolute truth.
But the other error, just as dangerous, is to fall into the traps of
those diabolically influenced and energized men who would need
1. Emphasis added.
171
nothing more for their success than for angelically influenced and
energized men to turn a blind eye to their machinations under the
invincible cover of being “reasonable.”
With respect to official narratives, such as those regarding IXXI,
the War on Terror, the Aurora Sandy Hook, and Charlie Hebdo
shootings, and the Boston bombing, one must ask himself what it is
about a government’s official narrative that warrants immediate
acceptance? For someone to begin to question whether he knows
what he thinks he knows with regard to any media-mediated event
of which he lacks direct experience, all it takes is merely the realiza-
tion that such events have indeed been significantly and to a large
extent mediated to him, and that there is no a priori reason to
believe that the mediators, especially the corporate-controlled,
mainstream mediators are mediating truth. Indeed, there is every
reason to doubt the mainstream mediators’ capacity or willingness
to convey truth. To demonstrate adequately why a priori doubt is
more reasonable than a priori credulity with respect to official nar-
ratives regarding such events as 9/11, the War on Terror, and the
shootings reported at Aurora, Charlie Hebdo, Sandy Hook, and Las
Vegas, would take an entire book. Suffice it to say that independent
investigation of these events turns up glaring inconsistencies and
what seems like a disinformation program.
Sometimes the emperor (a symbol here for historical reality)
wears majestic clothes of many layers, with convolutions and fringes
and perforations not to be easily discerned and appreciated in one
easy glance. It would be disrespectful to the emperor not to be will-
ing to take a deeper and more detailed look to gain a true apprecia-
tion and perspective. But sometime the emperor is truly naked, and
respect for him requires one to admit what is obvious to the unprej-
udiced, unfearful, truth-seeking eye.
Why is the topic of conspiracy important to Catholics? In a word,
idolatry. Now, the fundamental prescriptions of the natural law, rig-
orously researched and corroborated historical and scientific facts,
clear scriptural teachings and magisterial doctrines—these may
reach the level of the indubitable. But official, governmental, main-
stream-media parroted narratives do not! Any of these may, under
rigorous examination and interrogation, be shown to be the most
172
The Conspiracy Against Conspiracy
probable theory, but why do so many Catholics treat them, even in
the absence of such examination and interrogation, with the same
level of submission of intellect and will as Catholic doctrine? When
we unite unwavering commitment to an ultimate object of alle-
giance that is not God or directly related to God with a belief in the
absolute truth and indubitable character of our opinions about this
object, and when the commitment and belief are held not only
without recourse to adequate rational evidence but even directly
against such evidence, we commit an act of idolatry.
As far as I know, there is only one institution whose “conspiracy
theory”—a con-spiratio among the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit—is absolutely true and deserving of complete loyalty and
adherence; only one authority structure that both declares and lives
up to the declaration that it is especially favored by God, and pos-
sesses an explicitly God-given mission to declare truth for all
humanity; only one indispensable source and incarnation of divine
goodness present in the world. Only the Catholic Church has a truly
divine pedigree, foundation, and spirit, which, despite human sin
and error, cannot be eradicated or supplanted by another. The
Church alone is favored and chosen by God, for it is the new
Israel—she is the only shining city on a hill—for she is His own
bride and body, and He infallibly brings saving goodness and truth to
the world through her alone. The Church will never lose these divine
attributes, and she will continue to display them visibly for all to see
until the end of time, however clouded by human error and sin, in
her hierarchical and incarnate body and head. This is undeniable
and indubitable. This is not mere opinion. This is attested to by all
the rational evidence. Hers is the cult in which it is not idolatry to
worship. Hers is the conspiracy theory deserving of all men’s belief.
173
V
Apocalypse
17
The Tradition
of Nothing Worship
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
The Worship of Nothing
T
he essence of the Luciferian program is to seduce human
beings into believing that their salvation lies in experiencing
and acting upon the “freedom of absolute autonomy” that
Lucifer inaugurated when he rebelled against God. That hesitation
we often feel in our wills, even when confronted with an obvious
good, is the sinful inheritance of Adam, but in the religion of Luci-
fer, it is to be deliberately cultivated as the supreme virtue. The ever-
elusive experience of autonomous choice becomes the new sacra-
ment of initiation, the baptism by which we are prepared to partici-
pate in the worship of . . . nothing. As the Eastern Orthodox
theologian David Bentley Hart maintains, the worship of nothing is
the established religion of the modern West:
177
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—
we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do
not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshak-
able, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness
as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we ven-
ture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we
measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter
more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable
nihilism.1
If we want some tangible evidence that the established religion of
modern Western culture is the Luciferian worship of nothing, we
have only to look for its visible fruits. The most visible fruit of the
worship of the living God would be joy, and in a Catholic culture
predicated upon this worship, one would see evidence of this joy,
particularly among the young. But what do we see when we look at
the countenances of today’s children? Absolute boredom—the rot-
ten fruit of nothing worship. Michael Hanby writes:
A world that is “beyond good and evil,” in which nothing is either
genuinely good or genuinely bad, and no truth, goodness, or
beauty are revealed, is a world in which nothing is either intrinsi-
cally desirable or detestable. Such a world affords no possibility of
seeing and using things as holy, which means to some degree let-
ting them be, because in such a world there can be no holy things.
Boredom is therefore the defining condition of a people uniquely
in danger of losing their capacity to love, that is, a people uniquely
in danger of failing to grasp “the mystery of [its] own being” and
losing its very humanity.2
Abstracted from Abstraction by Abstraction

Since nothing, literally, does not exist, how is it possible for humans
to worship it? How can men encounter, let alone worship, no-thing?
How did Lucifer choose nothingness over the overwhelming irre-
1. David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” First Things (October 2013).
2. Michael Hanby, “The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the
Resistance of Joy,” Communio 31.2 (Summer 2004): 187.
178
The Tradition of Nothing Worship
sistibility of the presence of God? Charles DeKoninck gives us a
clue:
One can say, “It is possible to be and to not be at the same time and
in the same respect”; “The part is greater than the whole,” though
one cannot think such things. But yet, they are grammatically cor-
rect phrases. Transcendent power of language: one can say both
the thinkable and the unthinkable. Power to use the purely irratio-
nal. I can say, “I do not exist.” And with that I can found “I exist”
on pure non-being. I say it! Who will stop me? Let them stop me. I
will say it again. Myself, and myselves. Before long, a society of
myselves. The liberty of speech is discovered: speech set loose from
intellect. . . . Free, finally. In the beginning, the word of man.3
Perhaps Lucifer employed his unimaginably powerful intellect to
create and then immerse himself in an abstract and unreal universe
of words—”liberty” and “equality” come to mind—thereby sever-
ing himself from the concrete and real Being of God. I think man’s
worship of nothingness is made possible with a similar misuse of
language, through a relentless program of abstraction. Since his cre-
ation, man has attempted to flee the ubiquitous reality of God
through creative abstraction from the natural things of His creation
and the supernatural plan of His redemption. Fallen man has
always been offended at the “scandal of particularity,” always seek-
ing to live in a universe of his own devising, always abstracting from
the concrete, contingent, particular, fleshy, historical realities in
which he, as a creature of matter and spirit, finds himself, and
through which God has chosen to communicate Himself to him.
All was well in the Garden until Adam and Eve began abstracting:
“It can’t be this particular fruit on this particular tree that could be
so significant to God and to our happiness!” For the ancient Greek
philosophers, God’s existence was knowable; for the Jews, He was a
living presence. But that he would limit Himself to a backwater vil-
lage in the Middle East, or become anything less than a divine con-
queror, was foolishness to the former and a stumbling block to the
3. Charles De Koninck, “On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the
Personalists and the Principle of the New Order,” in The Aquinas Review 4 (1997):
86–87.
179
latter. Martin Luther accepted the truth that the universal became
particular in the Incarnation, but denied that this Incarnation
should be seen as continuing mystically in a particular, historical,
visible institution demanding man’s obedience. Enlightenment
man accepted the existence of God and absolute truth, but
demanded that these be universally accessible solely through man’s
reason. “Enlightenment” would be the result of abstracting from
one’s particular and contingent cultural and religious “supersti-
tions” to attain the universal truth transcending them. But such a
position was tantamount to abstracting the Incarnation out of real-
ity, to rejecting the entire supernatural order made manifest in and
through Our Lord, and denying the necessity of His grace and
teachings for an accurate understanding and practice of even natu-
ral truth and virtue. Postmodern man appeared to have overcome
this error, rightly rejecting Enlightenment man’s facile claim to have
discovered self-evident absolute truths in abstraction from particu-
larist commitments. He discovered that the historical, the cultural,
the societal, that is, the particular, cannot be so easily cut out of the
picture. “Self-evident”—to whom? A fair question, that. Yet by
denying the possibility of attaining universal truth through and in
its particular embodiments, the atheist-oriented postmodernists
rejected the reality of transcendence for the abstraction of pure
immanence. In short, every error of man throughout history has
been the result of missing the balance between immanence and
transcendence, the human and the divine, the particular and the
universal, by abstracting out some particular realm of natural or
supernatural reality.
Extra Traditionem Nulla Salus

It is in the simple enjoyment of humble, everyday things—”boats
and boots,” to use the words of C.S. Lewis—that we stay in contact
with creation and the Creator, where abstractions break down and
we encounter the living God. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “The sim-
ple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant
independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial defini-
180
tions, is the basis of spirituality.”4 It is only inside the universal and
bloodless abstractions of our own making that we can escape real
things. There we may, as Adam and Eve, hide from God and be-
come, like Lucifer, indifferent to Him.
One way of ensuring contact with reality is immersion in the liv-
ing, breathing Roman Catholic tradition, which we might compare
to Chesterton’s praise for “a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a
good cigar”—no abstractions there. Recapitulating what we have
said so far: the intimate encounter with God immunizes us to noth-
ing worship, the robust encounter with real being is the prerequisite
for divine encounter, and authentic tradition enables the intelligible
encounter with reality. The devil knows all this, being an expert
logician, and so he desires above all the annihilation of authentic
tradition. His main target is Catholic Tradition, for it provides the
surest means to an intimate encounter with both natural and super-
natural reality.
The diabolically fomented World Wars of our past century
sapped much of the life out of the religious and cultural tradition of
the West, with the anti-traditional abstractions of communism, fas-
cism, and Nazism serving as demonic parodies of the Catholic
Church. But Lucifer’s coup de grâce would be saved for the next cen-
tury. To his dismay, his all-out destructive assault on tradition in the
first half of the twentieth century had provoked a robust counterat-
tack by men of good will in the second half. Lucifer learned his les-
son: men cannot exist without some sort of tradition. Thus, instead
of attempting again the direct destruction of the Western Christian
tradition (rendered rather vestigial, decrepit, and paltry, it must be
admitted, from his first assault), this time he pursued a subtler but
more effective method. Realizing that any authentic tradition, even
a barely-breathing one, is a receiver and transmitter of the divine,
his stroke of genius was to inspire the construction and establish-
ment of an abstract anti-tradition that would receive and transmit
nothing. Although similar in its unreality to the abstractions of
communism, fascism, and Nazism, it would bear such a striking
4. G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Nonsense, and Other Essays (New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co., 1911), 11.
181
resemblance to the Christian tradition that it would escape detec-
tion. Implemented surreptitiously and cloaking itself in the form of
its host, it would serve as the tradition to end all tradition. Not only
would there be no counterattack this time, men of good will would
have no idea what hit them—or even that they had been hit.
Secular liberal democracy is the cave, liberalism the shadows on
its walls, and “conservative,” “liberal,” and “radical” shadows of vari-
ous shapes and sizes. For those in the cave, reality is contacted by
comparing and choosing among the shadows; certain shadows
appear “true,” while other shadows seem “false.” But since shadows
are all they know, it cannot be said that they really know any of these
shadows at all. They do not know the shadows as shadows. They
may use the word “shadow” in their many echoey, cave discussions,
but they do not know of what the shadows are. Indeed, if they ever
recognized the shadows as shadows, they would escape the cave.
Liberalism is just such a cave. People in the modern West may use
the term “liberalism,” and identify “other” points of view in contrast
to it, but because they are inside liberalism and do not know it, they
do not recognize the liberalism of liberalism. They do not see it as an
alien, artificial ideology projected upon the walls of their minds by
the elitist puppeteers of academia, religion, bureaucracy, and media,
but simply as “just the way things are.” They are like fish that never
recognize their immersion in water because they know of nothing
else. Liberalism claims to provide a religiously neutral social frame-
work within which individuals can autonomously determine their
own vision of the world in perfect freedom. But we must reject liber-
alism’s official public claim that it lacks any particular conception of
the good and any restrictions on others’ conceptions of the good.
Since liberal culture is founded upon a particular conception of the
good and a particular doctrine of truth—namely, the good of the
privatization of all claims to truth, and the truth of the irreducible
plurality of conceptions of the good—and since the publicly author-
itative rhetoric of liberal culture denies having any substantive con-
ceptions of its own, what liberalism amounts to is an established and
intolerant belief system—a religion—that indoctrinates citizens
into disbelieving in its very existence. Just as the puppeteers must
ensure that the shadows are never recognized as shadows, else the
182
cave be identified as a cave and the prisoners break their chains, lib-
eralism must never be exposed as liberalism, that is, as a historically
contingent, non-necessary, manmade ideology. It must at all costs
be identified with “the facts,” “the way things are,” as the inexorable
social reality. In short, as the great Nietzschean ironist Stanley Fish, a
cave-puppeteer with a genius for exposing his fellow puppeteers to
the light, has confessed: “liberalism doesn’t exist.”
The problem, however, is that it does, and its existence is no
longer limited to an abstract idea or a revolutionary experiment—it
is now a well-established social reality. The liberal incubus has
found a willing consort in the decrepit culture of the secularized
West, and unfortunately, we citizens of the modern liberal democ-
racies of the West are its traditionalists. Cavanaugh’s name for liber-
alism is the “worship of the empty shrine,” and, according to
Cavanaugh, its main temple is the United States of America:
The public shrine has been emptied of any one particular God
or creed, so that the government can never claim divine sanction
and each person may be free to worship as she sees fit . . . . There
is no single visible idol, no golden calf, to make the idolatry
obvious . . . officially the shrine remains empty. . . . The empty
shrine, however, threatens to make a deity not out of God but out
of our freedom to worship God. Our freedom comes to occupy the
empty shrine. Worship becomes worship of our collective self, and
civil religion tends to marginalize the worship of the true God. Our
freedom, finally, becomes the one thing we will die and kill for.5
And the priests of the empty shrine have become quite zealous of
late to evangelize, both through preaching in a variety of media
(McDonalds, MTV, pornography, condoms…) and, especially since
2003, through inquisition—democracy and freedom at the end of a
gun, a white phosphorous bomb, or an electric shock to the geni-
tals. The god of the American state is a jealous god, commanding its
devotees to kill for it. As Cavanaugh writes: “You may confess on
your lips any god you like, provided you are willing to kill for Amer-
ppp
5. William Cavanaugh, “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperial-

ism and the Church,” A Journal for the Theology of Culture 2.2 (Summer 2006): 15.
183
ica”—and to be killed for it. As MacIntyre wryly puts it: “It is like
being asked to die for the telephone company.”6
With a track record of human sacrifice, how has the empty shrine
of liberal nothing worship (to conflate names for a moment) man-
aged to escape our detection? The short answer is that it has
removed our eyes. Authentic traditions, both natural and supernat-
ural, embody and transmit the ultimate realities of man’s existence,
the transcendent origin, end, and meaning of things that cannot be
grasped by the isolated individual, and cannot be fully rationalized
or defined. Ultimate reality must be experienced through and in its
incarnation in tradition. It is in this sense that tradition is the eye
that allows men see the spiritual, eternal, and transcendent mean-
ings hidden in the physical, temporal, and mundane facts of every-
day existence. Participants in the anti-tradition of liberalism,
however, are prevented from ever seeing themselves as participants
in a tradition, even though they are its slaves. They are blinded to
their God-given identity as members of a common good higher than
themselves, even as they serve as mere cogs in the liberal machine.
How does liberalism do this? Like any demon, its power over us
lies in its ability to imitate the divine. America’s worship of freedom
at the empty shrine bears a striking resemblance to the Church’s
worship of the Holy Trinity in the Eucharist. First of all, like the
Catholic Church, the empty shrine defines itself as both universal
and particular: as a universal idea, that of equal freedom for all, and
as a particular country with a particular history, the United State of
America. Like the Holy Trinity, absolute freedom is transcendent,
ubiquitous, and infinite. Discourse about freedom, like talk about
the Trinity, is necessarily abstract, since to speak in a concrete man-
ner about that which transcends any particular object would be to
profane it by limiting it, a kind of idolatry. Since America is not
only an abstract idea but also a real place, its worship is both imma-
nent and transcendent, like the mystery of the Holy Eucharist. The
immanent body, blood, and soul of the Eucharist are a thirty-three-
year-old Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, but these are inseparable
from His higher identity as the transcendent and eternal Second
6. “Partial Response,” 303.
184
Person of the Blessed Trinity. The immanent land, citizens, and
government of freedom-worship are a 250-year-old regime located
in North America, but these are inseparable from its higher identity
as the very locus of transcendent and eternal freedom. Thus, Amer-
ican worship of freedom competes with the Holy Eucharist. But to
most Americans, the empty shrine seems the more holy of the two:
According to [Michael] Novak, the shrine has been “swept clean”
in democratic capitalism not out of indifference to transcendence,
but out of reverence for it, and out of “respect for the diversity of
human consciences, perceptions, and intentions.” Transcendence
is preserved by the freedom of each individual to pursue the ends
of his or her choice.7
The freedom cult includes all others, even the cult of the Eucharist,
and so it is more universal, more “catholic,” and therefore more
divine than the Eucharist. By not prescribing any particular object
of public devotion, America’s empty shrine appears to allow all
devotions to exist and thrive more successfully than if there were an
exclusivist, established cult, such as Catholicism.
However, all of this is a grand illusion. As David Schindler points
out: “The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of reli-
gion, a priority of either ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom for’—both of
these imply a theology.”8 By prescinding from the particularity of
religious truth in the organization of the American body politic, the
American Founders enshrined a theology, a religion. The implied
theology of its First Commandment, the First Amendment, is that
the order of nature is separable and separate from the order grace,
temporal matters from spiritual ones, reason from faith, freedom
from truth, the state from the Church. Though some of the
Founders favored Christianity as an ideal civic religion, the Ameri-
can Founding was essentially exclusivist, anti-pluralistic, dogmatic,
and Masonic. It was an implicitly anti-Catholic theological estab-
lishment, not just a “prudential accommodation” of religious plural-
ppp
7. Cavanaugh, “Empire of the Empty Shrine,” 7.

8. Schindler, Heart of the World, 83.
185
ism, as is commonly thought. In other words, liberalism doesn’t
exist—there is no such thing as an empty shrine.
We have now identified our demon. The Tradition of Nothing
Worship is not the worship of religious truth, but of religious free-
dom; not faith in the Incarnation, but belief in belief; not the desire
for God, but the desire for desire. It has no definable substance, no
particular content, no concrete object for worship, for it is only an
abstraction. But then, it is the worship of nothing. We know that wor-
ship of the Catholic religion produces saints, but what does the wor-
ship of nothing produce? James Kalb gives us the terrifying answer:
Since [for liberalism] it is choice itself that makes something good,
one does not choose things for their goodness but simply because
one chooses them. Choices thus become arbitrary, and human
actions essentially non-rational. On such a view, the rational com-
ponent of morality is reduced to the therapeutic task of clarifying
choices and the technical task of securing their satisfaction effi-
ciently and equally. . . . It is the outlook of a psychopath.9
From the First Amendment’s “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion” to Eisenhower’s “Our form
of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt reli-
gious faith, and I don’t care what it is”10 to George W. Bush’s “The
ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope still lights
the way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will
not overcome it”11—it’s all the same Masonic gospel. G.K. Chester-
ton was right: America is a nation with the soul of a church. And
with its cohort, Zionist Israel, it has established countless mission
churches in Europe and throughout the world. It is now attempting
to gouge out the eyes of the Muslims in the Middle East, whose col-
lective sight is already quite dim. The “darkness of Islamism,” to use
the words of Pius XI, is about to get much darker, and as we attempt
to blind our “enemies,” we become all the more blind.
9. James Kalb, “Liberalism, Tradition, and Faith,” Telos 128 (2006): 114.
10. Quoted in Patrick Henry, “‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-His-
tory of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
49.1 (March 1981): 41.
11. President Bush’s remarks on September 11, 2002.
186
18
The Satanic Sacred
Freedom Isn’t Free
J
ust four days after the Charlie Hebdo event, the world wit-
nessed a march in Paris, in fact, the largest in French history,
including two million people (with three million more French-
men marching in solidarity with the Parisians) and forty world
leaders. The march was held to commemorate and mourn the six-
teen people who were murdered at the Charlie Hebdo offices and at
a Kosher deli, but it also had the purpose of emboldening and
encouraging freedom-loving people, who must now risk their lives
merely to exercise their right to free speech. Nous sommes tous
Charlie Hebdo maintenant. The official government narrative of the
event was that a few radical Muslim terrorists—and precisely those
designated by the authorities immediately after the attack—mur-
dered eleven employees of a newspaper simply because of the con-
tent of that newspaper, as well as five more Jewish people simply
because they were Jewish. The official government-authorized
meaning of the event was that violence employed against the free
use of speech would not be tolerated in France. And any public
utterance that did not fall perfectly in line with this authorized nar-
rative and meaning met with the hostile force of the French state.
Criticism of the blasphemous cartoons attacking the religious
beliefs of millions of Christians and Muslims, and any hesitation in
accepting with trust and gratitude the new French status quo of sur-
veillance, suspicion, and censorship, was considered intolerant, big-
oted, and even criminal, for such could indicate only animosity
toward free speech and thus solidarity with murderous terrorists.
In short, very soon after the largest free-speech march in Euro-
187
pean history—perhaps the only free-speech march in European his-
tory—there was a massive government crackdown on free speech,
and precisely where that march took place. Included in the hun-
dreds of “dangerous enemies of free speech” who were arrested by
the Paris police in the wake of Hebdo was an eight-year old French
Muslim boy, detained and questioned by the police due to the dan-
gerous content of his post-toddler speech. And only a month after
this, a French citizen was sent to prison for two years merely for
questioning the accuracy of certain episodes of another officially
authorized narrative.1 The most obvious consequence of the Char-
lie Hebdo event was not the expansion and increased tolerance of
free speech, but a radical suspicion and circumscription of it, an
unprecedented escalation of government surveillance and legal sup-
pression. Daniel Spaulding from The Soul of the East reported:
Over the past several decades, France has prosecuted numerous
individuals for engaging in state-designated “hate speech.” The
French novelist and gadfly Michel Houellebecq, depicted in a
satirical cartoon on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the same day of
the terrorist attack, was at one time tried, and later acquitted, for
making remarks derogatory toward Islam. And a mere few days
after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the comedian Dieudonné
M’bala M’bala was arrested on the dubious charge of “glorifying
terrorism” after decrying his previous persecutions at the hands of
the French authorities for alleged “anti-Semitic” comments. If
convicted he could spend several years in prison.2
In his book, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good
Thing, Too, Stanley Fish writes:
“Free speech” is just the name we give to verbal behavior that
serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance; and we give
our preferred verbal behaviors that name when we can, when we
have the power to do so, because in the rhetoric of American life,
1. http://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/basse-normandie/2015/02/11/coutances
-vincent-reynouard-condamne-deux-ans-de-prison-ferme-pour-negationnisme-6
53515.html.
2. Daniel Spaulding, “Free Speech Farce,” The Soul of the East (January 30,
2015), http://souloftheeast.org/2015/01/30/free-speech-farce/.
188
The Satanic Sacred
the label “free speech” is the one you want your favorites to wear.
Free speech, in short, is not an independent value but a political
prize, and if that prize has been captured by a politics opposed to
yours, it can no longer be invoked in the ways that further your
purposes, for it is now an obstacle to those purposes.3
The Charlie Hebdo event and the behavior that followed it provide
solid evidence for the truth of Fish’s words. There was an unmistak-
able Orwellian cast to the event, suggesting the existence of an eso-
teric agenda underneath the exoteric one. If Fish is correct, and free
speech is just the name given to verbal behavior that serves the
agenda of capturing some political prize, who in Paris were seeking
such a prize, and what was it? The who is easy: the French-Anglo-
American-Israeli-European ruling classes, comprised of personnel
in government, intelligence, technology, military, finance, aca-
demia, media, and entertainment, the organizers of the Je Suis
Charlie Hebdo campaign and march, the budding Paris surveillance
industry, the bureaucratic drafters and enforcers of France’s version
of the Patriot Act, the South Park-esque cartoonists of the Charlie
Hebdo newspaper and their fans, and finally, every person wearing
a Je Suis Charlie T-shirt (in spirit, if not on body). But what was the
political prize? As we shall see presently, the what question is much
more complex than the who.
When an explanation for a massively violent event and its con-
comitant crisis emerges as the official, unquestionable, and authori-
tative narrative; when it includes, and without empirical evidence
or investigative inquiry, the assignation of innocence and excep-
tionalism to the victims, and utter depravity and terrifying power to
the designated criminals; when dissent from this narrative is
socially forbidden, even to the extent of legal harassment and prose-
cution; when it spawns behavior in contradiction with itself, such as
the committing of acts of terror in the name of eradicating terror-
ism, or restricting and punishing free speech in the name of
expanding and protecting it; when the narrative is immediately
supported, echoed, and policed by the vast majority of the ruling
3. Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and it’s a Good Thing Too
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102.
189
classes, including both the mainstream and “alternative” (gate-
keeping) left and right; when it successfully unites and synthesizes
otherwise opposed factions of the populace—liberals with neocon-
servatives, libertarians with statists, humanists with Nietzscheans,
theists with atheists; when rational scrutiny and frank discussion of
obvious explanatory holes in the narrative are forbidden; and when
the ritualistic, annual remembrance of an event and recitation of its
hallowed story—particularly the harrowing portrayal of the
demonic villains to which it assigns all blame for both the increas-
ing domestic strife among citizens and the perpetual Manichean
war against the newest “enemy”—instills and evokes primordial
fear and religious awe in the populace; when the narrative of an
event or series of connected events possesses all of these attributes,
or even just a few of them, we know we are dealing with no ordinary
phenomenon. We have something whose apparent mystery and
power strike at the very heart of the collective consciousness, sear-
ing it with something akin to the divine. What we are dealing with,
in a word, is the sacred. And it just so happens that the Charlie
Hebdo event and narrative bear all the aforementioned characteris-
tics. But isn’t the sacred an extinct relic of our benighted, supersti-
tious, medieval past?
The Sacred (Secular) State

Secular modernity is neither secular nor modern. Of course, we no
longer live under the medieval sacral regimes of throne and altar or
post-Reformation confessional monarchies. And who can doubt the
peculiarly modern rise of science and technology, the radically new
kinds of political and economic institutions, the undisputed reign
of democratic ideology, and our unprecedented religious pluralism?
However, these obvious historical facts and features are not what
are primarily signified by the words “secular” and “modern.” Their
inseparable concomitant is a “just-so” story of the genealogy of
modernity, which goes something like this.
Only in secular modernity did man finally achieve his liberation
from oppression and ignorance, from superstition, magic, tyranny,
190
The Satanic Sacred
and priestcraft, from the dark forces of religious power, fanatical
belief, and sectarianism. Man achieved this liberation primarily
through the secularization of reason, morality, and society, which
was effected through the separation of religion from the political
order, Church from state. Ever-increasing religious and ideological
pluralism ensued as soon as previously oppressed men of good will
were permitted to exercise freely their reason and act on their con-
sciences. It is true that when Christendom was broken up in the
wake of the Reformation, religiously intolerant, confessional,
monarchical states emerged, but these evolved quite quickly, histor-
ically speaking, into the secular, tolerant-minded, pluralistic, demo-
cratic states we have today. The rise of secular society after the
sixteenth and seventeenth-century “wars of religion”4 was rendered
possible only by the removal of “religion”5—from all positions of
political significance and power. Good-willed, reasonable people
were ready and willing to accept the desacralization of the state, so
the story goes, after centuries of witnessing incessant bloodshed
over religion. Sequestered, depoliticized, and privatized, religion
and the sacred would now no longer cause war, divisiveness, and
oppression, and the newly liberated, autonomous, politically secu-
lar individual could finally thrive. In the religiously tolerant, secu-
lar, pluralistic liberal democracy governed by the rights of men, not
the rights of God, the sacred would still have a place, as well as a
capacity to exert influence over politics; but now it would have to
coexist with the many competing, private “sacreds” residing in the
same city, proliferating and dwelling together in peace precisely
because none is permitted to obtain societal, cultural, and political
power, let alone a monopoly on power. In short, secular modernity
was born at the moment when the archaic, violence-inducing
sacred lost its public, political hegemony and influence, having been
relegated to the sub-political, private sphere of men’s fancies and
4. To see why this phrase must be put in scare quotes, see the pioneering revi-
sionist work of Cavanaugh, especially “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the
House.”
5. As Cavanaugh shows, “religion” in its newly depoliticized and privatized
form is a creation of the modern state: see Migrations of the Holy, op. cit.
191
hearts. What took its place in the public square is what should
always have been there in the first place: the inalienable right of the
individual to self-determination, to freedom of thought, action,
speech, property, and religion.
This is the familiar tale told of modernity. And this much can be
said with certainty: in modernity, man attempted, for the first time
in human history, to construct a political order not based upon the
religious or the sacred. While not denying the right of every citizen
to believe (if he wants) in a sacred, superhuman, cosmic, divine,
transcendent power as the true ground of man’s existence, both per-
sonal and social, the theoreticians of the modern paradigm—think-
ers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Madison,
and Marx—justified, by appeals to reason, common sense and con-
sent, historical inevitability, enlightened sentiment, or even the will
of God, the replacement of any power or will higher than man with
secular values and rights codified in a social contract, the general
will, a constitution, or the party line. And yet, the continual irrup-
tion and increasing proliferation of violent, crisis-making events
that bear the sacred features described above—unimpeachable nar-
ratives, an ethos of fear and awe, the sudden unification of factions,
etc.—indicate that the phenomena of the sacred is as publicly
present, influential, and authoritative in secular modernity as it ever
was in the ancient “religious” world. We need only think of other
recent sacred events, such as Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, the
Aurora shooting, the ISIS beheadings, the Sydney chocolate-shop
massacre, and all the other post-9/11 crisis events that constitute
ongoing episodes in the “War on Terror,” whose pilot episode was
that most sacred of all American events, IXXI. Can modern man
really live without the sacred? And when he has repudiated the tra-
ditional sacred, or perhaps has just forgotten about it, is he bound
to concoct sacreds of his own, in his own fallen and depraved
image? It is the argument of this chapter, and the overall contention
of this book, that a community cannot exist without a sacred com-
ponent, and that, when modernity rejected the traditional sacred of
monotheism, the shrine did not remain empty.
An objection might be raised here. Even if it were a delusional
mistake to try entirely to desacralize politics and power, did not sec-
192
The Satanic Sacred
ular modernity bring us the freedom of religion, the rule of law,
civil equality, and representative government, that is, unquestion-
ably beneficial institutions and practices unheard of in the pre-
modern world? We can say with certainty that modern liberal
democracy, insofar as it has provided the political, legal, cultural,
social, and psychological space for the free exercise of reason and
conscience, and insofar as it has helped men to flourish physically
through its scientific, technological, and medical advances, is a con-
siderably good thing. But what is the price we have paid for these
secular advances? Was the dethronement of the traditional sacred
from its rightful place at the heart of society, culture, and politics
worth it? “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world,
and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Mk 8:36).
Sacred Nihilism
One way to characterize the sacred is that which is considered
absolutely good—under, around, in obedience to, and in pursuit of
which men order their individual and corporate lives. Insofar as sec-
ular liberalism denies that such a metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual
good, if it exists at all, can or should have any public authority in
civil society, it is delusional and hypocritical. Since secular liberal
culture is founded upon a particular conception of the good,
namely, the sacral good of the privatization and desacralization of all
claims to truth, and a particular doctrine of truth, the irreducible
plurality of conceptions of the good and the sacred; and since the
publicly authoritative rhetoric of liberal culture includes a denial of
having any substantive sacred conceptions of its own; what liberal-
ism amounts to is an institutionalized religious sacred—but one
that indoctrinates citizens into disbelieving its very existence. The
“secular” state is a sacred power exercising hegemony over all com-
peting sacreds, which it has effectively privatized and neutered.
Thus, its own sacred dogmas become unimpeachable, unquestion-
able, incontestable, and, most importantly, invisible. It judges all
beliefs and actions in accord with these dogmas, and executes its
definitive judgments through its terrible liturgical violence and
193
murderous ritual scapegoating, masked by the language of rights,
democracy, freedom, security, diversity, equality, and tolerance.
Orwell, eat your heart out.
All political orders require a mechanism for engendering and
preserving unity, and the sacred has always been the source and
engine of this unity. It is no different in our “modern” day. The
Charlie Hebdo murders, though horrific and tragic, were exploited,
and perhaps even orchestrated, through a kind of psychological and
spiritual sorcery, the effect of which was to create a unified, regu-
lated group-mind in the French people and in the West at large. At
the shrine of Charlie Hebdo, “free speech” became God, but a god
with no essence, no divine identity, no supernatural content. It is a
cunning idol, nevertheless, commanding only toleration, and
promising only freedom. Yet it tolerates—and encourages—blas-
phemy and ridicule of precisely those competing sacreds it seeks to
vanquish, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the person-
ages of Muhammad and Christ—and it persecutes any who dare to
critique its sacred nihilism. The desacralization, profanation, and
degradation of Christianity and Islam is, since Charlie Hebdo, the
official meaning of “free speech.”
IXXI and the Satanic Sacred

Although Charlie Hebdo was a sacred spectacle, IXXI was the exem-
plar of secular modernity’s sacred. It will suffice to point out its
uncanny resemblance to traditional sacred mythology, ritual, and
sacrament. Sheldon Wolin writes:
The mythology created around September 11 was predominantly
Christian in its themes. The day was converted into the political
equivalent of a holy day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled
multiple functions: as the basis of a political theology, as a com-
munion around a mystical body of a bellicose republic, as a warn-
ing against political apostasy, as a sanctification of the nation’s
leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of ques-
tionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the
same time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy,
194
The Satanic Sacred
demanding of them uncritical loyalty and support, summoning
them as participants in a sacrament of unity and in a crusade to
“rid the world of evil.”6
James Alison has given a penetrating Girardian account of the
IXXI event worth quoting in full:
And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found our-
selves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless
act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giv-
ing meaning to it. All over London I found that friends had
stopped work, offices were closing down, everyone was glued to
the screen. In short, there had appeared, suddenly, a holy day. Not
what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older form of hol-
iday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to partici-
pate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the
meaningless suicides. . . . And immediately the sacrificial center
began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are
supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. Phrases
began to appear to the effect that “We’re all Americans now”—a
purely fictitious feeling for most of us. It was staggering to watch
the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly conse-
crated as Ground Zero, a togetherness that would harden over the
coming hours into flag waving, a huge upsurge in religious ser-
vices and observance, religious leaders suddenly taken seriously,
candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrements of the religion of
death. And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us
feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis,
and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy’s roots in sac-
rifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial
center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A
counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little
betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly
of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant
goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives.
And then there are those who are with us and those who are
against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly
people were saying things like “to think that we used to spend our
6. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton University Press, 2008),

9.
195
lives engaged in gossip about celebrities’ and politicians’ sexual
peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about
the things that really matter.” And beneath the militant goodness,
suddenly permission to sack people, to leak out bad news and so
on, things which could take advantage of the unanimity to avoid
reasoned negotiation. . . . What I want to suggest is that most of us
fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a
chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our hum-
drum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more impor-
tant, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is
that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic.7
All human beings “delight in being given meaning,” but the
meaning given to the masses through the IXXI and Charlie Hebdo
events is as meaningless as it is idolatrous and psychopathic. Charlie
Hebdo informs us that those who aren’t comfortable with public,
state-supported mockery of other citizens’ religious beliefs are
equivalent to murderous terrorist fanatics. Through IXXI and the
War on Terror that followed, the United States, as the metonymic
Twin Towers and the World Trade Center, was transformed into a
suffering and resurrected God, scourged and crucified by the forces
of pure evil that “hate our freedoms,” but brought back to life by
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al., as mediators of the immortal righ-
teousness of the American people. Our priest-warriors inaugurated
an endless “shock and awe” crusade against the demons of this
world, one that not only “keeps us free” but also effectively manages
to separate the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned—
”Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the divinized
oracle uttered. IXXI comes to mean the definitive, once for all,
divine confirmation of “our” exceptional righteousness, and, con-
comitantly, the irredeemable wickedness of the “other,” defined by
magisterial fiat as anyone not willing to worship American power.
Of course, Americans had some faith in the truth of this meaning
before IXXI, but only on IXXI was that faith confirmed and vindi-
7. James Alison, “Contemplation in a World of Violence: Girard, Merton, Tolle,”

a talk given at the Thomas Merton Society, Downside Abbey, Bath (November 3,
2001), available at http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_contemplation_violen
ce.htm.
196
The Satanic Sacred
cated, seemingly by God Himself, using as his divine sign demonic
planes crashing into our tallest shrines.
Death in war—what is commonly called the “ultimate sacrifice”
for the nation—is what periodically re-presents the sense of
belonging upon which the imagined nation is built. Such death is
then elaborately ceremonialized in liturgies involving the flag and
other ritual objects. Indeed, it is the ritual itself that retrospec-
tively classifies any particular act of violence as sacrifice. Ritual ges-
ture and language are crucial for establishing meaning and public
assent to the foundational story being told. The foundational
story is one of both creation and salvation. At the ceremonies
marking the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, for example,
President Clinton remarked of the soldiers that died there both
that “They gave us our world” and that “They saved the world.”8
Charlie Hebdo was a psychological-spiritual operation through
which the French masses, already alienated from the true sources of
meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty found in the beliefs and prac-
tices of traditional monotheism, were initiated into the satanic
sacred, the worship of the empty shrine of nihilism.
Two Cities
Since IXXI, individual liberty has been vastly curtailed, and global
violence has exponentially increased. Wars and rumors of wars
abound. Perhaps the next terror event, whether staged or not, will
trigger the final annihilation of our freedoms and the complete
establishment of a global police state, if we aren’t nuked out of exist-
ence first. The apocalypse seems to be upon us. So, what should we
do?
No doubt we should do all we can to restrict the scope and power
of modern states and international institutions of global gover-
nance, as well as expose the machinations of the “Deep State” that
actually rules us. We must preserve what is left of the freedoms of
8. William T. Cavanaugh, “The Liturgies of Church and State,” Liturgy 20.1

(2005): 25–30.
197
speech, protest, and worship by non-violent means, and by self-
defensive force if necessary. Moreover, if our analysis is correct and
modernity is merely the replacement of one bloody sacred for
another—we used to have bloody crusades and wars for Christ or
Muhammad, now we have them for democracy and freedom—it
would seem reasonable for us to turn our efforts towards banishing
any semblance of the sacred from the public square so as to separate
it from all political, coercive, and violence-making power and thus
from its corruption. This would protect both the sacred from profa-
nation and the state from idolatry. In other words, if Western gov-
ernments are indeed shrines and purveyors of satanic nothing
worship, then we need to strip them of all sacred authority and
power.
It cannot be denied that a more secular, less powerful, and
more—much more—decentralized government-military-financial-
educational-intelligence-media complex is the sine qua non of any
solution. If, however, we take the reality and power of the sacred as
seriously as it deserves, we should be as discontented at seeing the
sacred remain merely a private affair as we are at seeing it counter-
feited, mocked, and profaned. God exercises, whether we recognize
it or not, social, cultural, and political reign over the world—we live
now in a theocracy, always have, and always will, until the end of the
world. And this rule is not just over individual hearts, but over
institutions and states, over men organized collectively for the com-
mon good and for His honor, even if they dishonor Him and order
the sacred commons to their monstrous, vampirish appetites. He is
the ultimate common good, the ultimate ground for any human
society, and if He is relegated to the private sphere of idiosyncratic
and irrational fancy, something not so good will always take His
place. Just as there is no such thing as free speech, there is no such
thing as an empty shrine.
Thus, we must work not only to dethrone the satanic sacred, the
Abomination of Desolation now residing in the Holy of Holies, but
also to replace it with the authentic sacred, the worship of the living,
holy, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just, all-merciful God. To
dethrone the satanic sacred that has usurped the seats of earthly
power in Western society, we first must repent of our own complic-
198
The Satanic Sacred
ity in its rites and ceremonies: accepting the scapegoating status quo
because it flatters, protects, and keeps us feeling comfortable, and
refusing to speak truth to power out of fear. After a thorough exam-
ination of conscience, we must unmask the satanic face hiding right
out in the open so as to help those blinded to its existence and hor-
rific nature to escape the unholy fear it engenders, the tortuous psy-
chological and spiritual deceptions it incessantly enacts, and its
totalitarian control of public discourse. As Neil Kramer says: “For
the ordinary person, the primary power of Empire rests not in its
might or cunning, but in its invisibility. People who are not mindful
of its presence do not comprehend their conscious and spiritual
incarceration.”9
The City of God is founded on a love of God that leads its citizens
to contempt for themselves, counting all earthly things as
worthless. . . . Augustine argues that the temporal ought to be
ordered to the eternal (Civ. Dei XIX,17), but that this ordering will
never be achieved entirely harmoniously till the second coming of
the Lord. For, there is a second city here on earth in addition to
the city of God—the civitas terrena, the earthly city. This city is
founded on a love of self to the contempt of God (Civ. Dei XIV,28).
And these two cities are in conflict. . . . The earthly city is always
opposed to true religion. . . . Justice consists in giving each his
own, thus no society is just that does not give God the worship
due to Him.10
The City of Man has always been opposed to true religion, to the
truly sacred. This opposition has only increased in our “secular
age,” and exponentially since IXXI. At the heart of every culture is
always the sacred, and at the heart of our post-IXXI, pathocratic,
imperial culture of death and deception is a terrible—but entirely
vincible—sacred power in mortal conflict with the Logos, the merci-
ful, loving, and truly sacred Person who protects, guides, and saves
those who are willing to recognize, adore, and trust in Him.
9. Neil Kramer, “Invisible Empire” (May 22, 2014), available at http://neilkra

mer.com/invisible-empire.html.
10. Edmund Waldstein, “Religious Liberty and Tradition” (January 2, 2015),
available at http://thejosias.com/2015/01/02/religious-liberty-and-tradition-iii/.
199
19
Modernity and Apocalypse
Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another
while we watch—this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally
we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving
another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear.
“Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s noth-
ing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you.”
The Hunger Games1
Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
George W. Bush2
You can foresee the shape of what the Antichrist is going to be in the
future: a super victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the
name of the victim. René Girard3
Modernity’s Soteriology?
O
ne might define modernity in the West as essentially that
which happened to Christendom after it was dehellenized,
nominalized, and secularized. In its Enlightenment mask, it
is an ahistorical, non-ideological, world-view-neutral account of
“the way things are and have always been,” bereft of the supersti-
tious, irrational, freedom-suppressing and ruler-serving, ancient-
medieval theoretical and practical apparatus of scholasticism,
priestcraft, oppression, and feudalism; in its post-Enlightenment
1. Suzanne Collings, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008), 18–19.
2. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People,” September 20, 2001.
3. René Girard, Evolution and Conversion—Dialogues on the Origins of Culture
(Continuum: London, New York, 2007), 236.
201
persona, it is a parasitical cultural growth aping Christianity and
Christian culture while repudiating it in its nihilistic, anti-logos
core. Modernity is Christ without the cross, in its liberal democratic
manifestation, and it is the cross without Christ, in its totalitarian
strains. Modernity is an anti-Aristotelian tradition of rationality,
depriving persons of the knowledge of their good and the ability to
attain it personally and corporately. It embodies the moral and spir-
itual fruits of the Gospel’s affirmation of ordinary life, to use Tay-
lor’s expression, the dignity of each person, and the freedom of the
children of God—along with the negation of the Christian soil,
trunk, and branches that engendered these fruits. Modernity is a
liturgical and ecclesial counterfeit of the Church, attempting to
unify in its artificial Levianthanian body all people in a national and
global church of peacemaking and violence-restraining violence. It
is the sundry failed attempts at cultural, economic, political, and
spiritual order within a seemingly inescapable nominalistic, theo-
logical framework; the result of the extrinsicist separation of nature
and grace and the triumph of secular reason; the priority of free-
dom-from in the anti-trinitarian cultural form of the machine. And
it is the dethroning of a theology of primordial peace and the apo-
theosis of an anti-theology of fearsome violence.
There are, of course, other “just so” stories in this more conserva-
tive vein, as well as many persuasive non-theological, secularist-
friendly, progressivist narratives. Indeed, the narratives of moder-
nity are seemingly endless and incommensurable, notoriously resis-
tant to definitive adjudication and harmonious negotiation. What is
needed is an adequate synthesis in which the partial truths of all the
myriad stories and accounts can lie together.
If one teased out the most plausible and compelling threads in
each narrative, could one find a meta-thread winding through them
all and holding them together? Let me posit that such a thread can
be found in the work of René Girard, and that absent this thread,
modernity cannot be properly understood. Supernaturally power-
ful, non-violent, and authentically Catholic engagement with the
modern world requires an engagement with Girard’s thought.
Girard’s work is not only indispensable for understanding our
present predicament of escalating violence in the “clash of civiliza-
202
tions,” but also, and more importantly, our future, one which
Girard characterizes as apocalypse. These are bold claims, and I hope
to make them persuasive in this chapter.
René Girard, retired professor of language, literature, and civili-
zation at Stanford University, is the preeminent expert on the phe-
nomenon of scapegoating, or the “single victim mechanism” as he
puts it. Girard’s oeuvre is prolific and complex, including not only a
rigorous psychological, sociological, anthropological, theological,
and literary account of scapegoating, but also a persuasive analysis
of the foundation of religion and culture in collective violence and
ritualized murder.4 Girard has applied his formidable skill and eru-
dition in literary criticism in the analysis of the myths employed by
religious and cultural authorities to obscure their violence, includ-
ing an examination of modern and contemporary Western culture’s
scapegoating violence and ideological obfuscation. What follows is
a summary of the fundamental principles of Girard’s thought, an
analysis of the West’s “War on Terror” based upon those principles,
a discussion of modernity and apocalyptic violence in the light of
Girard’s most recent work, and a brief account of the pertinence of
Girard’s thought for Catholic social thought and practice, particu-
larly in America.
Scapegoating Then
The New Testament describes St Peter denying thrice that he knew
Jesus Christ. Obviously, he was under immense pressure. But what
kind of pressure could have led a three-year intimate of Jesus of
Nazareth almost to betray his master? I say almost because his full
4. It must be said that Girard’s understanding of the nature of the political

order, as well as the relationship between nature and grace, is in tension with
Thomism. Indeed, if he is denying the political order’s inherent telos to the human
good, it would be contradictory not to just Thomism but to the entire philosophia
perennis. But that’s a topic for another essay. Girard’s insights into the nature of
political evil are accurate and profound, and, I would argue, surpass the work of the
Thomists in this area. In this respect, he is especially helpful in understanding
modern politics.
203
betrayal of Jesus was preempted by Jesus Himself, whose prophetic
words about the crowing cock when recalled by Peter prevented the
latter’s fear-provoked denial from becoming deliberate persecution.
The standard explanation for Peter’s behavior is lack of courage: he
feared that he would be killed if he admitted to being a friend of
Jesus. There is, of course, truth to this, but it is only a partial expla-
nation. René Girard proposes an alternative and rather startling
explanation: “Peter’s denial should not be read as a reflection on the
psychology of Peter, on the personal weakness of Peter, it should be
read as the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism. We should have
no revelation of it since even Peter, the best of the disciples, joins the
mob.”5 As we shall see presently, identifying and understanding this
“mob” is the key to explaining not only Peter’s personal behavior,
but our own, and not only this. Cultures themselves, and hence
political orders, are created and sustained in the crucible of this
peculiar and mysterious mob-pressure. Only a vivid awareness of
the truth about scapegoating, its ubiquity and seeming inexorabil-
ity, and, most importantly, our own complicity in it, can enable
personal, corporate, and, it must be said, ecclesial emancipation
from its psychological, cultural, and political clutches.
According to Girard, the first culture was founded by Cain, that
is, upon fratricide, with the divine proscription of murder the first
law. Murder, as the omniscient God the Bible depicts must have
known, would be imitated and repeated in this originary culture,
and thus serve as the original violence of all other cultures through-
out history in the now fallen world. However, the law proscribing
murder was not obeyed: Cain’s murder of Abel would be perpetu-
ally imitated on both a personal and cultural level. The reason
humans murder other humans, and why they found and preserve
cultures upon violence is, according to Girard, mimetic desire. For
Girard, desire is not naturally ordered (at least in its specific move-
ments) but socially constructed, and though we do have an innate,
natural desire for the good, the actual form this desire takes in indi-
viduals, the particular objects that are seen and desired as good for
5. Markus Müller, “Interview with René Girard” (June 1996), available at http://
www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0201/interv.htm.
204
each person, are the result of social modeling and imitation. In
short, we desire what we see others desiring. Consider the toddler in
the nursery, whose desire for a particular toy is enkindled by noth-
ing other than another toddler’s reaching for it.
Since there is a scarcity of desirable objects, mimesis results in
competition, until a point is reached when other men’s desires
become scandalous, literally, “stumbling blocks,” to us. At this point,
there is a cultural crisis, and imminent violence is inevitable—inev-
itable, that is, without some kind of release valve or transference
mechanism. Cultures, as well as the political orders that embody
and protect them, would never have come into existence without
such a mechanism. Since cultures and political orders do exist, there
must be some force that counteracts or channels the frenetic and
violence-prone psychological storm of mimetic desire. This Girard
identifies as the “accusing finger,” the “single victim mechanism,”
or—Satan:
The shift from “all against all” to “all against one” permits the
prince of this world to forestall the total destruction of his king-
dom as he calms the anger of the crowd, restoring the calm that is
indispensable to the survival of every human community. Satan
can therefore always put enough order back into the world to pre-
vent the total destruction of what he possesses without depriving
himself for too long of his favorite pastime, which is to sow disor-
der, violence, and misfortune among his subjects.6
One has only to consider the story of Creation, in which Eve imitates
the desire of the Serpent, a desire both for the forbidden fruit and a
desire to blame Him who had forbade it. The “accusing fingers” are
then displayed in spades—Satan at God, Eve at Satan, Adam at Eve.
But men do not just imitate the concupiscible desires of others
for scarce goods; they also model for each other the irascible desire
to confront and overcome evil. Though the evil of selfish mimetic
desire is caused by the desires of men themselves, the notion that a
powerful, outside, superhuman force is somehow responsible for
ppp
6. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 37.
205
the cultural crisis is an irresistible one, and so the community trans-
forms its now uncontrollable desires into one collective desire for
vengeance. The “accusing finger” becomes the new mimetic model,
and it enables the community at the point of violent anarchy to
attain “peace” by ridding itself of the “cause” of its crisis. The scape-
goat, who is both the source and solution to the crisis, is thus iden-
tified, murdered, and, through the religio-cultural myths created to
justify and obscure the single victim mechanism, divinized. The rit-
ual reenactment of the “founding murder,” whether through actual
or simulated murder, as in the ancient worshippers of Moloch or
the pre-Columbian Aztecs, or through surrogates, as in the animal
sacrifices prescribed by Moses in the Old Testament, is what sus-
tains culture and politics in the fallen world.
Returning, then, to the courtyard of the Jewish High Priest, we
can now see that Peter was swept up in the single victim mechanism
that had already overtaken the Pharisees. When the accusing finger
was pointed at Jesus, Peter was unable to resist what his commu-
nity’s leaders determined: “It is better that one man die for the peo-
ple than that the whole nation perish” (Jn 11:50). However, due to
his three-year acquaintance with Jesus, by which he was gifted with
a mimetic model whose only desire, according to Girard, was to
imitate the self-giving desire of the Father, Peter was able to snap out
of his scapegoating trance. This, for Girard, was nothing short of
miraculous, for no human power is able to resist the scapegoating
dynamic. It is only through imitation of the divine, non-scapegoat-
ing Jesus that men and cultures can be saved from murderous vio-
lence, for He is the only man whose desires do not cause scandal and
cultural disintegration when imitated. Cultures centered on and
dedicated to Him would, thus, have no need for the scapegoating
mechanism to keep peace. Only His power can enable men and
whole societies to resist the accusing finger, and so it is only when a
culture embraces and embodies the Gospel that it can preserve itself
without resort to sacrificial murder. This is the heart of Girard’s
apologetic for Christianity, a peculiarly empirical, psychological,
cultural, political, and anthropological defense, without explicit
recourse, apparently, to the authority of divine revelation. It is,
itself, a revelation of sorts, but one that any open-eyed person can
206
see—if, that is, he desires to see the truth of his scapegoating com-
plicity.
Scapegoating Now
The Gospels, according to Girard, are the only religious literature
we have that was authored by those in solidarity with the victim,
and so they alone reveal the truth about religion and the “divine
saviors” of fallen historical communities—the truth that Satan casts
out Satan to preserve Satan’s rule over mankind. Paul Nuechterlein
writes:
The true God . . . is revealed as on the side of the victims, not that
of the idolatrous perpetrators. If we maintain the post-modern
concern that truth claims, especially about God, lead to violence,
then Girard’s answer is that the true God revealed in the cross of
Jesus Christ is always the victim of human violence, not the perpe-
trator or instigator of any new violence. . . . Anthropology guides
us into a true theology by understanding that the true God is non-
violent; humankind is solely responsible for its own violence.7
It is the conceit of modern secular culture that, unlike the barbaric,
religious cultures of the unenlightened past, it has preserved itself
and progressed morally without the need for publicly authoritative
religion, let alone ritualized murder. Yet, if Girard is correct, no
merely human-centered person, culture, and civilization can do
without the single victim mechanism; sacrifice is essential to soci-
ety, and there can be no effective, non-violent cultural engenderer
7. Paul Nuechterlein, “The Anthropology of the Cross as Alternative to Post-

Modern Literary Criticism” (October 2002), available at http://girardianlection-
ary.net/girard_postmodern_literary_criticism.htm. I do not agree with the sugges-
tion here that all violence is prohibited by the Gospel. Joshua’s genocide of the
Canaanites, the Inquisition, and the Crusades are not necessarily forms of scape-
goating in principle, though acts of unjust violence and scapegoating were commit-
ted. I do not follow most of the Girardians in condemning all religion-inspired and
justified violence. Jesus Himself did not refuse to use violence; consider his use of
whips to drive the moneychangers out of the Temple. The point to emphasize is
that violence in the hands of those subscribing to religions that reject the Gospel,
implicitly or explicitly, will always be a form of scapegoating.
207
and preserver other than the one, divine, non-scapegoating victim-
savior. Either we scapegoat ourselves in recognition of our culpabil-
ity in the sacrificial murder of the Innocent One, whose death
exposed the single victim mechanism and thus deprived Satan of
his power over the world; or we side with the Pharisees and the
Romans of yesterday and today, and remain unconverted scape-
goaters in denial.
What form might such scapegoating take in our proudly tolerant
and humanistic culture—one haunted by the Gospel certainly (as
Flannery O’Connor would say), but not converted by it, indeed, a
culture that explicitly rejects scapegoating in its maudlin concern
for victims? According to Girard, modern culture does possess
some buffers or katechons8 for mimetic desire that serve to mitigate
cultural violence. Two of these are the free market, by which desires
are multiplied and satisfied without the immediate threat of scarcity
and conflict, and our modern juridical system, predicated, rhetori-
cally at least, upon a commitment not to scapegoat, where one is
innocent until proven guilty, that is, not determined to be guilty
through the indisputable accusing finger of the community. Yet jux-
taposed with these seemingly pacific procedures of cultural order
that indicate an apparent ethos of victim-concern and non-violence
is the modern phenomenon of “apocalyptic violence” and “private”
scapegoating. Modern nation-states are virtually in perpetual war
with each other and with those stubborn states that need to be
“democratized”—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alone,
World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, the
Cold War, Bosnia, Israel and Palestine, Israel and Lebanon, Afghan-
istan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and, as I write this, aggressive plans against
Iran. What is particularly apocalyptic about this violence is that all
involved persons and state-actors insist upon the moral righteous-
ness of their use of violence and the moral depravity of their oppo-
8. The term comes from 2 Thess 2:6–7: “And you know what is restraining him
[the Antichrist] now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of law-
lessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it [ho katechon] will do so
until he is out of the way.” A katechon is therefore anyone or anything that restrains
the satanic from irrupting in its unmitigated malice.
208
nents; add to this a continuing escalation of the lethalness and
destructiveness of the forms of violence employed. Liberal, secular
democracy is purported to be peaceloving, yet genocidal violence,
of the domestic unborn and the foreign “enemies of freedom,” is
deemed somehow necessary and inevitable for peace. As Nathan
Colberne puts it:
Humanity maintains its faith in the power of violence to provide
peace (demonstrated most vividly in the belief that maintaining a
nuclear arsenal will prevent the use of nuclear weapons), but with
the exposure of the scapegoat mechanism, we are deprived of the
single technique that could justify our faith in the efficacy of vio-
lence to maintain peace.9
About the cosmic character of contemporary political violence,
Mark Juergensmeyer has written:
Looking closely at the notion of war, one is confronted with the
idea of dichotomous opposition on an absolute scale. . . . War sug-
gests an all-or-nothing struggle against an enemy whom one
assumes to be determined to destroy. No compromise is deemed
possible. The very existence of the opponent is a threat, and until
the enemy is either crushed or contained, one’s own existence can-
not be secure. What is striking about a martial attitude is the cer-
tainty of one’s position and the willingness to defend it, or impose
it on others, to the end. . . . Such certitude on the part of one side
may be regarded as noble by those whose sympathies lie with it and
dangerous by those who do not. But either way it is not rational. 10
Here I go beyond Girard to claim that the great historical and
contemporary violence engendered by the secularized nation-state
indicates that ancient, religious scapegoating and ritualized violence
have not only not ceased in the modern era, but have also mutated
into something incomparably more sinister and destructive. This is
due to the political culture of modernity and late modernity being
9. Nathan Colberne, “Engaging Girard: Is a Girardian Political Ethic Neces-

sary?,” Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace 4.1 (June 2010), available at http://
www.religionconflictpeace.org/node/73.
10. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: the Global Rise of Religious
Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 148–49).
209
at once cognizant of and opposed to the Gospel’s revelation of the
single victim mechanism. The Gospel has exposed, to those who
will listen, the inherent hypocrisy, idolatry, and violence of all non-
Christian cultures and political orders. But modernity won’t or can’t
listen to its message. Anglo-American and European political his-
tory is peculiarly guilty of this hypocrisy, idolatry, and violence, for
it conceives of the post-Glorious, French, and American Revolution
settlements as the beacons of “religious freedom” to the world, as the
only truly “Christian nations.” Surely, America, as a political order
and culture, is religious and peace-loving—but what religion are we
talking about, and what price for peace? Religious belief and prac-
tice are free in America—but are they so in more than a private
capacity? Ultimately, it seems that only those religions are tolerated
that accept, or, at least, do not publicly protest, the public religion of
the state, which is the worship of state power itself, a power predi-
cated upon perpetual Manichean enemies and scapegoating.
Modernity: Birth-Pangs of Apocalypse

In a recent work, Girard provides an outstanding summary of his
thought on modernity and its relation to apocalypse:
My work has often been presented as an investigation of archaic
religion, through the methodology of comparative anthropology.
This approach aimed at elucidating what has been called the pro-
cess of hominisation, this fascinating shift from animality to
humanity that occurred so many thousands of years ago. My
hypothesis is mimetic: it is because humans imitate each other
more than animals that they had to find a way of overcoming a
contagious similitude, prone to causing the complete annihilation
of their society. This mechanism—which reintroduces difference
at the very moment when everyone becomes similar to one
another—is sacrifice. Man is born of sacrifice and is thus a child of
religion. What I call, following Freud, the foundational murder—
namely, the killing of a sacrificial victim, responsible for both the
disorder and the restoration of order—has constantly been reen-
acted in rites and rituals, which are at the origin of our institu-
tions. Millions of innocent victims have thus been sacrificed since
210
the dawn of humanity to allow their fellow men to live together or,
more precisely, to not destroy themselves. Such is the implacable
logic of the sacred, which the myths dissimulate less and less as
man becomes more self-aware. The decisive moment of this evo-
lution is Christian revelation, a sort of divine expiation in which
God in the person of his Son will ask man for forgiveness for hav-
ing waited so long to reveal to him the mechanisms of his violence.
The rites had slowly educated him; now he was ready to do with-
out them. It is Christianity that demystifies religion, and this
demystification, while good in the absolute, proved to be bad in
the relative, for we were not prepared to receive it. We are not
Christian enough. One can formulate this paradox in another
manner and say that Christianity is the only religion that will have
foreseen its own failure. This prescience is called the apocalypse.11
In spite of modernity’s katechons having performed their
restraining function for hundreds of years, there is still much
mimetic violence in today’s world—indeed, more than ever before.
But to the true believers in these katechons, the violence we still see
in today’s world can only be the result of a deficient application of
these katechons: a market not free enough, a state not centralized
and powerful enough, the stubborn existence of hierarchical and
morally absolutist institutions and regimes. Violence enacted by the
enemies of modernity and its professedly non-scapegoating prac-
tices and institutions, such as the September 11 attacks, is the result
of those few, surd elements of what should now be entirely an
extinct, archaic-religious, scapegoating culture. These simply have
not yet been fully modernized by the peacemaking influence of the
secular state, the globalist economy, the ADL, the World Bank, the
NSA, NATO, the United Nations, the bombs of democracy, apart-
heid against archaic and barbaric peoples, or the blandishments of
consumer, virtual, entertainment, and erotic culture. As the mod-
ern, secular, anti-scapegoating state and the modern, victim-con-
cerned culture it embodies have become more pervasive and
influential, these violent dinosaurs have indeed radically decreased
11. René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (Michi-
gan State University Press, 2010), 9–10.
211
(modernity insists), and terrorist attacks such as IXXI are merely
the last, violent gasps of a terminally ill, ancient-medieval model
that only persists due to the West’s anemic tolerance of and compla-
cency towards the futile resistance of those few fundamentalists and
fanatics who are not yet resigned to modernity’s inevitable triumph.
And thus, the occupation and destruction of sovereign countries,
drone killings, a domestic police state, NSA spying, and threats of a
nuclear attack on sovereign and non-aggressive states, such as Iran,
are only the reasonable measures the secular, peacemaking West has
undertaken to ensure that this triumph becomes a reality sooner
rather than later, for the good of all peoples. The so-called peace-
making state, the free market, international law and transnational
organizations, a commercialist, utilitarian culture of mass-pro-
duced consumer products, technology, science, the privatization of
religious belief and practice, the declaration of and enforcement of
human rights and the dignity of every human, the universal con-
cern for victims that is institutionalized in law and government—all
of these katechons, according to modernity, prove modernity’s
moral superiority, even its more perfectly Christian character; for,
these institutions and practices require no scapegoats: no human
sacrifices, on the one hand, no suppression of religious freedom, on
the other—and they have brought about an unprecedented material
prosperity and elevated moral consciousness to boot!
So much, then, for the conventional account. Some of these
mechanisms have indeed produced undeniably good temporal
effects, for, as Jacques Maritain once argued, whatever good there is
in modernity’s practices and institutions is due to the Incarnation’s
sacralization of the image of God in every human, and the dynamic
this sacralization has activated in the West, including the eradica-
tion of all dehumanizing hierarchies, repressions, and proscriptions.
However, through a Girardian lens, things look less rosy: the pro-
longation and escalation of violence, with millions upon millions of
human sacrificial victims—the unborn, the elderly, the handi-
capped, the poor and middle class in the first world, the vast major-
ity in the third world; religiously, culturally, and intellectually
starved souls; the normalization of political propaganda; pathologi-
cal sex and violence in media and entertainment; massive indebted-
212
ness; masses of brave new world soma addicts (in forms Huxley
couldn’t have dreamt of), the so-called collateral damage of millions
of innocents in perpetual wars; the perpetual fear and terror of the
national security and surveillance state; wars and rumors of wars;
the real threat of nuclear Armageddon.
In other words, scapegoating has not just continued since the
advent of modernity, but in the contemporary Western world has
both escalated beyond control and cloaked itself in an all but unrec-
ognizable form—it is now engaged in out of a concern for and in
the name of victims. The politically correct on the left persecute
those they deem the persecutors in the name of the persecuted. The
“War on Terror” terrorists of the right terrorize those they deem the
terrorists in the name of the victims of terror—those made victims
by terrorists that they themselves have, to a large extent, created,
such as ISIS.12 What is particularly apocalyptic about this new, sec-
ular, post-Christian scapegoating violence is that we are in denial,
we know not what we do; each person and state-actor insists upon
the cosmic righteousness of his use of violence and the demonic
depravity of his “enemies”—all in the name of concern for victims.
Modernity, for Girard, is now witnessing the birth-pangs of the
apocalypse, conceived, as it were, two thousand years ago through
the Gospel’s revelation of the scapegoat mechanism as the original
sin of all cultures, a revelation accepted by the Church and embod-
ied in medieval Catholic culture, but still tainted with the religious
violence it was supposed to eradicate. This revelation was either
thoroughly rejected, as in secularist Europe, or relegated to one pri-
vate opinion among others, as in America. In both, it was replaced
by an officially established “gospel” of secularized victim-concern,
with the divine victim, the only effective means to avoid the apoca-
lypse of scapegoating violence, himself scapegoated through indif-
ference and incomprehension. What ensued was the unleashing of,
in Paul’s words, “the man of lawlessness,” now in his full fury—the
uncontrollable, escalating mimetic desire of undifferentiated and
12. Garikai Chengu, “America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group”
(September 19, 2014), available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-
al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881.
213
equal, autonomous, relativistic persons in a secularized, mechanis-
tic, individualized, immanentized culture bereft of any authorita-
tive, corporate, transcendent meaning and purpose—and now
without the safety valve of the archaic mechanism of religiously
authorized human sacrifice. Girard writes:
The trend toward the apocalypse is humanity’s greatest feat. The
more probable this achievement becomes, the less we talk about
it. . . . I have always been utterly convinced that violence belongs
to a form of corrupted sacred, intensified by Christ’s action when
he placed himself at the heart of the sacrificial system. Satan is the
other name of the escalation to extremes. The Passion has radi-
cally altered the archaic world. Satanic violence has long reacted
against this holiness, which is an essential transformation of
ancient religion.13
The “War on Terror”: Satan Casts Out Satan

Perhaps the most globally-witnessed example of satanic, scapegoat-
ing, apocalyptic violence was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The
way we have interpreted and explained this event—and this
includes Girard himself—is as a terrorist attack resulting from the
resentment, perhaps justified, and religious fanaticism of some
extreme elements within the modernity-hating political culture of
radicalized Islam, an attack on, from their perspective, “The Great
Secular Satan,” and rendered justifiable by a certain tendentious and
primitive interpretation of Islam. Due to Islam’s fatal flaw, namely,
its misinterpretation of Jesus Christ, the divine Victim, as only a
prophet of the later and definitive Koranic truth about God given to
and through Muhammad, Islam has never transcended its Judeo-
pagan, violent, archaic, theological core, according to which vio-
lence is inherent in God Himself and thus commanded by Him. In
other words, IXXI was the violent, resentful, mimetic response of
those few, archaic “others” living outside the peacemaking katechons
ppp
13. Girard, Battling to the End, 216–17.
214
of modernity, those who have obstinately rejected modernity’s lov-
ing concern for victims and its sacred proscription against doing
violence in the name of religion.
Is this an accurate depiction of the cause of IXXI and the War on
Terror, or is it just another religious myth obscuring our own com-
plicity in scapegoating? Is not the War on Terror just the kind of sin-
gle victim mechanism needed to keep the masses unified and
pacified in their belief in their own righteousness?14 This is not to
say that terrorists influenced by a violent and nihilistic interpreta-
tion of Islam have not also engaged in scapegoating, but there is rea-
son to believe that this kind of Islamic scapegoating has been used,
managed, and exploited by Western military, financial, and govern-
mental elites to further their own more destructive scapegoating. In
other words, is it not possible that the relatively small number of
mostly ineffective terrorists, notwithstanding their real hatred of the
United States, have been created and manipulated behind the scenes
to become useful “enemies” to those of the elite who financially and
culturally benefit from warmaking? This appears to be what is hap-
pening with ISIS.
At the risk of being called a “conspiracy theorist” (a term in-
vented decades ago by the CIA and employed systematically, as
professor Lance deHaven-Smith has shown, to discredit doubters of
the official story of the JFK assassination),15 I wonder if the birth of
the latest “cosmic conflict” doesn’t bear the marks of a scapegoating
mechanism. There is much empirical evidence that the War on
pppp
14. Section V of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, published in 2000 by the

“Project for a New American Century,” entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant
Force,” includes the sentence: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it
brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic
and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.”
15. Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas
Press, 2013); cf. Ginna Husting and Martin Orr, “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspir-
acy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” Symbolic Interaction 30.2
(2007): 127–50: “If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have
actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue
that I would rather avoid. . . . By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the
sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.” See also chapter 16 above.
215
Terror is far more complex than the official plot “those who hate
our freedom want to destroy us.” On the contrary, it would seem
that the hatred and will-to-destruction can also be found within,
confusing the convenient wartime distinction of “us” and “them.”
Looking below the surface reveals a project of deliberate, knowing,
conscious scapegoating, which is unheard of in history and in Girar-
dian terms. I would propose systemic psychopathy as the cause of
this unprecedented phenomenon, following the work of the Polish
psychiatrist, Andrew Lobaczewski, whose work on “political poner-
ology,” making use of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and his-
tory to account for such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic
cleansing, genocide, and police states, was the fruit of his intimate
experience of political evil in Nazi and Soviet occupied Poland.16
Here’s a narrative to consider: With the cooperation of a govern-
mentally, militarily, and industrially controlled media, the new
scapegoaters—particularly the neoconservative cabal in the Bush
administration—pointed their accusing fingers at certain oil-rich
and otherwise strategically located countries, and, most impor-
tantly, the “enemies” to the continuing expansion of the State of
Israel. With the populace not clued in to the arbitrariness of the
pointed finger, and now swept up in mortal fear, like Peter in the
courtyard, and in the throes of mimetic, irascible desire, certain
countries could now be forcefully “democratized”—that is,
exploited and occupied, right out in the open and with the support
of an emotionally duped populace. This violence (e.g., over
1,000,000 Iraqis dead, mostly innocent civilians) would thus be rit-
ually legitimated, for they are our enemies, after all, the enemies of
freedom and democracy. And even the overwhelming documented
evidence that Saddam Hussein posed no real threat to the United
States, had no WMD, and bore no responsibility for IXXI has not
undone the spell. Now we’re involved in supporting, of all things,
ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with NATO as our proxy, and soon, if some
of the most strident war hawks have their way, off to Iran, with
the same lack of credible evidence of any threat to us or any other
ppp
16. Andrew Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology (Otto, NC: Red Pill Press, 2007).
216
country. Only God-blessed America can save the world from these
demonic monsters—as the record spins over and over again.
In short, there is good reason to see the War on Terror—again,
without dismissing any real threats of terrorism to our country or
the government’s right and obligation to use force against them—as
a state-sponsored, reactionary instance of deliberate, systemic
scapegoating. Without our designated “enemies,” we’d lose our very
identity. James Tracy writes:
The repression and revised imposition of September 11th and the
attendant “war on terror” on the public mind have important
implications not only for the integrity of public discourse, but also
for the collective sanity of western culture and civilization. As
crafted by dominant news media, 9/11 has become the cracked lens
through which we view and conceive of our own history, identity,
and purpose.17
Former President George W. Bush in an address to a joint session
of Congress on September 20, 2001, declared: “Either you are with
us, or you are with the terrorists.” This appears to me to be a secu-
larized and politicized version of Christ’s authoritative spiritual
portrayal of the choice between divine allegiance to Him and alle-
giance to Satan in his lying, murderous ways: “He who is not with
me is against me” (Mt 12:30). If we follow Girard, we should see
that, insofar as we are not fully living the Gospel, we are all terror-
ists now, for we inhabit a post-Christian Western culture and politi-
cal order in massive denial about its own use of murder to preserve
itself from its own self-created apocalyptic violence, as it careens
towards ever-expanding cosmic conflicts between “us” and “them.”
It is the same old, self-made, staged battle of “all against one” that
enables the many to feel—but not be—saved from “evil” and “sin”
(religious fundamentalism) at the expense of those permitted to be
sacrificed, i.e., those determined to be “our” official enemies. For
example, Iran has been targeted by the U.S. and Israel for many
years now, and, officially, it has neither attacked any country since
17. James Tracy, “9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness, and the ‘Public Mind’”
(March 18, 2012), available at http://memorygap.org/2012/03/18/deep-events-alter-
native-news-media-and-the-return-of-the-repressed/.
217
its inception as a republic, nor even threatened to.18 It has been
proved beyond any doubt that it does not have a nuclear weapons
program.
By supporting the unjust violence justified deceptively as the War
on Terror, not only have Christians been complicit in a perversion
and exploitation of the Gospel, they have also convinced themselves
of God’s approval of it. But as Girard has shown, the victims, how-
ever sinful, are never truly as guilty as they need to be for the mech-
anism to work. The guilt is imputed, not deserved, for scapegoating
chooses its victims arbitrarily. The War on Terror is, at root, just
another example of Satan casting out Satan. Being an authentic
Christian means being on the side of all the victims in all instances
of violence, including political violence masking itself as liberation
and democratization. Muslims and anyone else who carry out ter-
rorist attacks are not, of course, to be excused as mere victims, for
anyone can employ violent scapegoating, and must be held
accountable. But those who give blind allegiance to their own
nation render themselves blind to the colonization of their own
minds and souls by nationalist and now globalist scapegoating. And
Christians who refuse to utter any word of condemnation of their
own regimes for manifestly immoral acts are guilty of rejection of
the Gospel. The aggressive “preventive warfare” employed by Amer-
ica in occupying Iraq was, there can be no doubt now, a grave evil.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, referring to
the Nuremberg Tribunal’s words, states: “To initiate a war of aggres-
sion, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Yet Chris-
tians have supported this supreme crime, and some are now calling
for the same evil to be inflicted upon Iran, a country that has
attacked no one since its founding as a republic in 1979, and before
then since the nineteenth century. We have the right and duty to
protect ourselves from violence, as the just-war tradition teaches.
But the policy of preemptive strike has nothing to do with this tra-
18. Stephen Lendeman, “Inventing an Iranian Threat” (August 26, 2012), avail-
able at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32508.
218
dition. It is Hobbesian, through and through. Supporting such vio-
lence as “necessary” and even personally salvific is pledging one’s
allegiance not to America, but to scapegoating.
If modernity’s soteriology is the apocalypse, then a massively vio-
lent, global-scale event like IXXI and the War on Terror it spawned
should certainly be identified as a failed instance of ritualistic scape-
goating that has served only to escalate global violence. According to
Girard’s analysis of IXXI taken from a recent interview, the Muslim
hijackers, who we naturally locate outside of Western modernity,
were actually well within it, due to the phenomenon of mimetic
doubling and mirroring. Jean Pierre Dupuy puts it this way:
The image that appears to emerge—in place of the “clash of civili-
zations” slogan invoked by those who do not understand the state
of the world—is that of a civil war within a single global civiliza-
tion, which has come into being kicking and screaming. It is within
this framework that we must analyze the stunning mirror games in
which Al Qaeda and the West have become entangled. In the face of
an event as horrible as the tragedy of September 11, we have gener-
ally sought the reasons for the nonsensical and incredible in the
radical otherness of those responsible, thereby reassuring our-
selves. . . .What could be more different from our liberal, secular,
and democratic societies than a gang of Muslim fundamentalists
prepared to offer their lives in order to maximize the extent of the
damage they cause? Few analysts have understood that the key is to
be found not in a logic of difference, but, on the contrary, in a logic
of identity, similarity, imitation, and fascination.19
Is the upshot of this analysis of IXXI, then, that, in a certain sense,
we were attacked by ourselves, with the archaic, scapegoating,
Islamic “other” nothing but a mirror of us? The Archbishop of
Granada Javier Martínez has described it this way:
The secular society lives in daily violence, violence with reality.
This violence shows that nihilism cannot and does not correspond
to our being. But it shows also, in a very concrete way, how the
19. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Anatomy of 9/11: Evil, Rationalism, and the Sacred”
SubStance (Vol. 37, No. 1, Issue 115: Cultural Theory after 9/11: Terror, Religion,
Media) (2008): 40.
219
secular society annihilates itself by engendering the very monsters
that terrify it most and that it itself hates most: the twin monsters
of fundamentalism and terrorism. After 11th September 2001 and
11th March 2004, it is more and more obvious that Islamic terror-
ism, like Islamic fundamentalism, for all its Muslim coloring and a
certain vague connection with traditional Muslim ideas and prac-
tices, is not understandable or thinkable without the West; it is
mostly a creature of Western secular ideologies. It is pragmatic
nihilism using Islam instrumentally, very much like the emergent
modern nation-states used in their own political interest a Church
institution like the Inquisition.20
But why would modernity create, so to speak, its own monsters
and its own sacrificial victims? According to Girard, it would be to
engender cultural and political unity and, to a real extent, confer
salvation, just like any ancient scapegoating mechanism. It must be
said that IXXI, though horrific and tragic, was exploited spiritually
by its victims and those who identify with them. Did not we purge
our guilt and fear through the seemingly salvific and redeeming
catharsis of the accusing finger and the ritual mass identification
with the innocent victim—the sacrificed American regime? Was not
Ground Zero transformed into a sacred, sacrificial site at which
Americans could bury their sins and feel the redemption of ritual
identification with the innocent victims, while justifying any subse-
quent violence in its name, such as preemptive strikes against and
occupations of countries having nothing to do with the attacks? If
Girard is right, all cultures, even postmodern, secular, technologi-
cally advanced ones, especially in the throes of an insoluble mimetic
crisis, must construct katechons, and when the ones it previously
erected are found wanting, violent and public sacrificial ritual is the
inevitable fallback. When one considers the post-Christian context
in which this event occurred—a country trying its best to be com-
pletely secular but still haunted by the memory of the divine scape-
goat—its success in securing an effective purgative catharsis and
forging cultural and political unity would depend upon the event’s
likeness to the Sacrifice of Calvary.
20. Martínez, “Beyond Secular Reason.”
220
In light of Girard, in light of modernity’s programmatic repres-
sion and privatization of the transcendent, leading to (I would
argue) a cultural neurosis of simultaneous repulsion from and fas-
cination with the sacred, and in light of the War on Terror’s
unmasked identity as a worldwide, murderous, scapegoating terror
campaign of mimetic violence, the true meaning of the September
11, 2001 attacks is something like this: the inauguration of the reign
of the archaic sacred in the midst of modernity; a ritual human sac-
rifice ushering in the apocalypse for which an unrepentant moder-
nity lusts in its necrophilic heart of hearts, much like the pigs
running off the cliff at Gerasene in Mark’s Gospel, after being
invaded by the demonic Legion fleeing from Christ. When one con-
siders the apoplexy that ensues when IXXI’s nature, purpose, and
significance are questioned by those who do not automatically defer
to its authoritatively promulgated meaning, that is, to the myth that
was created by the regime’s sacrificial priests to obfuscate its true
character and orchestrators, it is clear we are dealing with the
archaic sacred in the heart of modernity. Girard:
On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed
down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions
of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then
a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.
Western rationalism operates like a myth: we always work harder
to avoid seeing the catastrophe. We neither can nor want to see vio-
lence as it is. The only way we will be able to meet the terrorist chal-
lenge is by radically changing the way we think. Yet, the clearer it is
what is happening, the stronger our refusal to acknowledge it. This
historical configuration is so new that we do not know how to deal
with it.21
Children, Beware of Idols

At the outset of this chapter, I stated that supernaturally powerful,
non-violent, and authentically Catholic engagement with the mod-
21. René Girard, “On War and Apocalypse,” First Things (August 2009), avail-
able at http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/08/apocalypse-now.
221
ern world requires an engagement with Girard’s thought. It has
been the purpose of this chapter to engage Girard’s thought as it
pertains to Catholic thought and action in contemporary Western
culture. A full Girardian program for interpreting and applying the
principles of Catholic social teaching is an urgent need, and I hope
to have contributed at least a persuasive argument for its urgency.
For the present, I think we can glean one fundamental insight
and one indispensable directive for Catholics, both lay and clerical,
from the Girardian analysis I have undertaken here. The insight is
that the liberal, secular, humanist model of political order—one in
which any conception of the sacred, as well as all religious belief and
practice, is normatively privatized, necessarily pluralistic, and pub-
licly non-authoritative, and where neither the public authority of
the cult of the Gospel, nor the mechanism of ritual scapegoating is
not and can never be tolerated, let alone hegemonic—is not just
patently false, but a massive deception. IXXI and the War on Terror
demonstrate that scapegoating has never been renounced by the
West, but only masked by the discourse of Enlightenment “reason,”
and that, pace pluralist dogma and the separation of Church and
state, the sacred is as authoritative and intolerant as ever it was in
pre-modern society, and the Empire is itself a public religious cult
that brooks no competitors. Thomas Breidenbach, who has written
an erudite, groundbreaking account of IXXI as an imperial sacrifi-
cial cult, writes:
What 9/11 ultimately reveals is a ritual landscape and technology
the secular mind is largely if not wholly unequipped to apprehend,
largely because of its own sentimental attachment thereto. It fol-
lows that the rationalist has been carefully conditioned not to
believe in (and therefore not to perceive) the very technology
being used to complexly condition him and his community. How-
ever ironically, rationalism dismisses as superstition the precise
method, craft, or secretive science being used to channel the collec-
tive desires, fears, and animosities of the West into an effective
external aggression that many rationalists themselves may nomi-
nally oppose, an aggression which their opposition (as a demon-
stration of the imperial collective’s overall freedom) serves in a
crucial sense to bolster. Meanwhile, most of the self-professed reli-
222
gious faithful are similarly unwilling to confront the intra-com-
munal or ritual dimension of 9/11, since to do so would reveal
their participation in a satanic (human sacrificial) culture).22
It is not just the rationalists, naturalists, atheists, and skeptics
who do not, cannot, or will not see the reality of violent scapegoat-
ing in their midst and their complicity in it, but also the “self-pro-
fessed religious faithful.” And our ignorance is, perhaps, a more
culpable one, since we are not atheists and skeptics regarding the
reality of the sacred and of the divine, of the spiritual and the super-
natural, of the existence of the demonic. The obstacle to the pene-
tration of the Gospel in our culture is not so much the culture’s
rationalism, naturalism, and atheism, or even its “dictatorship of
relativism,” as Pope Benedict XVI was wont to say, but its simulta-
neous denial of and resignation to human sacrifice. This is the
insight that both Church leaders and educated lay people do not
seem to grasp. Further, Catholics are themselves prone to this idola-
trous dynamic insofar as they participate in, or at least do not fully
renounce, the imperial culture that embodies it—in all its “Catho-
lic-friendly” disguises. The more orthodox and pious among us
tend towards the “conservative” forms of imperial culture, propping
up an economy of exploitation of the poor and the middle class,
consumerism, usury, fiat money, and bankster hegemony under the
guise of the “freedom of the market” and the evils of “socialism” and
the “welfare state,” citing tendentiously interpreted social encyclicals
in defense of precisely those capitalist ideologies and practices the
Church condemns. Politically, the neoconservative fascism (“You
are either with us or with the terrorists”) of the Orwellian national
security-surveillance-propaganda state—bound up with govern-
ment-sponsored false-flag terrorism, the racial/tribal scapegoating
idolatries of Zionism and American exceptionalism, and Manichean
Islamaphobic propaganda—are defended as an object of patriotism
ppp
22. Thomas Breidenbach, IX XI: A Study of the Ritual Dimension of Contempo-

rary Western Imperial Statecraft (unpublished, 2014). See his published companion
book of IXXI poetry The Wicked Child / IX XI (New York: The Groundwater Press,
2014).
223
and a suppression of the enemies of Christianity and freedom, both
domestic and foreign. Those with a more “liberal” bent support the
other dehumanizing aspects of the imperial culture, the egalitarian-
ism and deracination that, under the guise of cultural diversity and
tolerance, deprives peoples of those ethnic and cultural heritages
and traditions indispensable for their moral and spiritual flourish-
ing, as well as the moral relativism and nihilism that destroy the nat-
ural foundation of human culture in sexual complementarity and
fruitful marriage. Both factions of the imperial culture give worship
to the nation-state as the sole repository of political and legal
authority, accepting its absolute determinations of what is sacred in
public life—government narratives of terrorist attacks, on the one
hand, government identifications of “hate crimes,” on the other—
and, in accord with the dictates of pluralism, accepting its relegation
of all ecclesial, magisterial, and religious authority to the realm of
the sub-political, background-cultural, and idiosyncratically pri-
vate. Insofar as the human element of the Catholic Church has been
co-opted into thinking and behaving according to these categories,
it has made the Gospel an instrument of imperial culture: that is, it
has engaged in idolatry.
As the de facto established religion of IXXI and the War on Terror
reveals, however, America is not religiously pluralistic—it is, and
has always been, confessional. The problem for Catholics in public
life, then, is not publicly authorized atheism, but satanism, as Girard
presents it:
We have experienced various forms of totalitarianism that openly
denied Christian principles. There has been the totalitarianism of
the Left, which tried to outflank Christianity; and there has been
totalitarianism of the Right, like Nazism, which found Christianity
too soft on victims. This kind of totalitarianism is not only alive
but it also has a great future. There will probably be some thinkers
in the future who will reformulate this principle in a politically
correct fashion, in more virulent forms, which will be more anti-
Christian, albeit in an ultra-Christian caricature. When I say more
Christian and more anti-Christian, I imply the figure of the Anti-
Christ. The Anti-Christ is nothing but that: it is the ideology that
224
attempts to outchristianize Christianity, that imitates Christianity
in a spirit of rivalry.23
What we are dealing with is a sacralized, satanic, imperial culture
rooted in an established religion of ritual scapegoating and human
sacrifice—but appearing to the vast majority as something worthy
of assent, for it masks itself superbly by counterfeiting the desires,
aspirations, and commitments of everyone along the political,
ecclesial, and ideological spectrum. This, then, is the primary Girar-
dian insight for Catholics: the recognition of the satanic sacred for
what it is. This is extremely difficult, for it is a sacred that hides
itself, as Neil Kramer describes:
For the ordinary person, the primary power of Empire rests not in
its might or cunning, but in its invisibility. People who are not
mindful of its presence do not comprehend their conscious and
spiritual incarceration. For those who decide to inquire into
Empire, initial investigations usually begin with scrutiny of inter-
connected fraternal and secret organizations and their relative
aristocratic families. Then there are the think tanks, corporations,
and institutions that have been sequestered by Empire. This leads
on to analyzing the logical deleterious effects on society, law, sci-
ence, industry, culture, education, language, and media.24
The primary Girardian directive for Catholics is nothing else than
the wholehearted rejection of the imperial culture at the heart of
today’s City of Man, one that has eclipsed the City of God through
its counterfeit, satanic imitation of it.
23. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 236.

24. Kramer, “Invisible Empire.”
225
20
Why Mysticism is Not an Option
Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideol-
ogy can see clearly what has been left behind. And only those who
have fully contemplated the abyss can be sure of having attained the
spiritual truth capable of overcoming it.1
David Walsh
J
˙ ´
ózef Zycinski, in his magisterial God and Post-Modern Thought,
writes:
To live the faith of Abraham is to be ready at a day’s notice to pack
the tents symbolizing everything that is dear to one and to go to a
new, unknown place, which God will indicate, completely inde-
pendently of rational calculations or our emotional predilections.
To live the faith of Abraham in the cultural context of postmoder-
nity is to be able calmly to pack up the tents of congenial concepts
and arguments, not in order to set out on a desert path, but to set
them up again in a different context and in a different form, in a
place indicated by God. In an Abrahamic testimony of faith, one
may not lose heart on account of the wildness of new places or on
account of a feeling of loneliness in a foreign landscape. We must
constantly seek the face of the Lord (Psalm 27:8), listening care-
fully to His voice, which could be either a discreet whisper or a
delicate breeze (1 Kings 19:12). We need to love God more than the
logic of convincing deductions and the collection of respected
authorities, to which we like to refer in times of difficulty. We need
to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that the
Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his
1. Walsh, After Ideology, xii.
227
power. Only then does the contemporary “wandering Aramaean”
reveal the style in which, amidst the darkness of our doubt, flashes
the light of the great adventure of our faith.2
˙ ´
I think Zycinski’s words are compelling, particularly these: “We
need to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that
the Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his
power.” They also echo and confirm the prophetic thought of
˙
Romano Guardini. If Guardini and Zycinski ´ are right about what it
means to live in the fullness of the Abrahamic Faith today, schis-
matic and Jansenistic forms of Catholic traditionalism in general,
and the Benedict Option in particular, are simply not adequate for
living the life of Faith in today’s world and enabling others to do the
same, for they are not the proper response to how things actually
are and will be quite soon. To help us see how things really are, or at
least, to present a view of our situation for which the Benedict
Option may not even be an option, let alone the long-term solution
to our problems, I would like to present the thought of one philoso-
pher and one theologian who look at two aspects of our world: Tay-
lor, the existential, and Guardini, the spiritual. Taylor teaches us
that modernity is inescapable, and Guardini that intimate union
with God Himself—with nothing more than the humanity of
Christ and our sin-purged egos in between—is no longer an option,
but an absolute obligation and necessity. What I hope my presenta-
tion of these authors will do is not so much answer all our ques-
tions, but show us that we need to keep asking them, in deeper and
deeper ways; for honest and courageous inquiry is precisely what in
the end will defeat the evils we are facing. The evil is fundamentally
bound up with the death of questions.
In his book, The End of the Modern World, written in 1956, the
great Italian-born and German-educated Catholic theologian
Romano Guardini writes:
˙ ´
2. Józef Zycinski, God and Post-Modern Thought: Philosophical Issues in the
Contemporary Critique of Modernity, trans. Kenneth W. Kemp and Zuzanna
´
Maslanka Kieron´ (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Phi-
losophy, 2010), 130.
228
The new age will declare that the secularized facets of Christianity
are sentimentalities. This declaration will clear the air. The world
to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a
world open and clean. . . . As unbelievers deny Revelation more
decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it
will become the more evident what it really means to be a Chris-
tian. At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of
secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces
developed by the very Revelation he denies. He must learn to exist
honestly without Christ and without the God revealed through
Him; he will have to learn to experience what this honesty means.
Nietzsche has already warned us that the non-Christian of the
modern world had no realization of what it truly meant to be
without Christ. The last decades have suggested what life without
Christ really is. The last decades were only the beginning.3
Nothing but the “free union of the human person with the Absolute
through unconditional freedom will enable the faithful to stand
firm—God-centered—even though placeless and unprotected.” He
goes on:
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the
face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love
that flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage
of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was
made known in Christ. . . . Perhaps love will achieve an intimacy
and harmony never known to this day.
Guardini sees no real possibility for “safe” havens of Christian
culture, and even if we could create them, they have the real poten-
tial of stunting our spiritual growth. God is calling theists to a
higher level than mere orthodoxy and orthopraxy, indeed, a heroic
and mystical level, of faith, obedience, and trust—unshakable,
naked, intimate, experienced union with God, communicating this
supernatural reality wherever we go and to everyone we meet. Like
Christ, we will have nowhere to lay our heads (cf. Lk 9:58).
3. Guardini, End of the Modern World, 101.
229
Benedict Option — or Mandatory Mysticism?
Although the Benedict Option is a crucial strategy for theists to
protect their families and to preserve Christian consciousness and
community, it may not be sustainable in the long term. If Taylor is
right, the immanent frame is our home. But if Guardini is right, our
situation is a gift, indeed, a priceless treasure, for God will give each
of us who ask for it the grace to endure the darkness, barbarism,
and loss of many of our customary sensible and cultural signs of
God’s love and presence.4 We will emerge with our idols and
˙ ´
crutches and safety nets broken and useless. As Zycinski puts it in
the quotation at the outset, “We need to accept the provisionality of
contingent means, in order that the Divine Absolute might all the
more clearly reveal in them his power.” Thus we will be able to
know God as He is and be conduits for His Love.
We can surely try to opt out of the decaying culture and to shore
up theistic culture in small enclaves of likeminded devotees of Tra-
dition and the Transcendent, but whatever we do, we must do the
one thing most necessary, as Mary did at the feet of Jesus, while
Martha was busy with other things she thought more important.
We must all become mystics now, in intimate and real contact with
Jesus Christ, so that we can be His hands, heart, voice, and presence
in our ever-darkening world. As the great German theologian Karl
Rahner once prophesied: “The Christian of the future will be a mys-
tic, or he will not be at all.” Rahner again:
Do not despair when experiencing despair: let the despair take all
away from you, since what is taken from you is only the finite, the
unimportant, even if it may have been ever so wonderful and
great, even if it may be yourself with your ideals, with your smart
and detailed plans for your life, with your image of a god that
looks more like you than the incomprehensible One. Allow all the
exits to be blocked, for they are only exits into the finite and paths
into dead ends. Do not be frightened by the solitude and forsaken-
4. This is not to deny that Catholicism cannot exist without some sensible signs
and a certain cultural penumbra; these it generates by its own inner power—the
more so, the more healthy it is.
230
ness in your internal prison, which appears to be as dead as a
grave. For if you stand firm, refusing to flee from despair, and in
the despair over the loss of your former idol that you called God
you do not doubt the true God; if you stand firm, which is a true
miracle of grace, then you will realize suddenly that your grave-
like prison cell is locked up only against what is meaningless and
finite, that its deathly emptiness is only the vastness of God’s pres-
ence, that silence is filled with a word without words by the one
who stands above all names and who is all in all. The silence is his
silence. He is saying that he is here. . . . He is here.5
I end this book with a quotation from a paper of one of my human-
ities students at Wyoming Catholic College. She wrote this after
studying postmodern philosophy and literature, both the godless
authors—Conrad, Camus, Derrida, and Foucault—and the god-
ful—Dostoyevsky, Eliot, O’Connor, and Girard. She says it all:
Living in the modern era is a gift. Despite the broken traditions,
abolished communities, and heap of worn-out philosophies, this
era is still a gift. In one way, man can no longer distract himself
with human constructs. They have all failed, and anyone who lives
in denial of this failure will be forced to face tragedy at some point
like the grandmother6 (even if that point only comes at his or her
own death). In another way, man is called to even more intimate
encounter with God as a result of this Wasteland. Quite literally,
we have been placed in a society that purges us of pride and confi-
dence in human accomplishment. The disparity of the Wasteland
calls for deeper love and communion, but God provides a more
intimate way of encountering Himself to overshadow this dispar-
ity. And this is a gift.
5. Karl Rahner, “Lent—My Night Knows No Darkness,” in The Mystical Way in

Everyday Life, ed. Annmarie S. Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 44–45.
6. A character in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
231

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Modernity as Apocalypse

Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos

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Cover design: Michael Schrauzer

IV KEEP YOURSELF FROM IDOLS

To Tami, Anatolia, Sophia, and T.J.

The general public is being reduced to a state where people not

The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

The “Immanent Frame” and the “Great Separation”

4. Taylor, A Secular Age, 594.

6. Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University

7. See chapters 18 and 19 below.

The Dialectic of Modernity

8. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On

16. Molnar, Twin Powers, 116.

From Faith to Dialectic to Aporia

n contemporary Western nations, individuals and groups live

I in distinct social networks, engage in myriad cultural practices,

Feeling the Pull

3. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of

The Fall into Fragmentation

Saul: the Pharisee vs. the Logos

No One Gets Out of Here Alive

1. End of the Modern World, 101.

The End of Naïveté

3. Taylor, A Secular Age, 12, 19–20.

6. Taylor, A Secular Age, 594.

7. See Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?

8. Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love, 41.

1. Phronemon is the term used by Aristotle to indicate a practically wise person.

1. “Conversion,” Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis

Philosophy as Spiritual Exercise

3. Leithart, Deep Comedy, 3.

5. Anamnesis, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 6 (Columbia, MO:

Dialogue, Dialectic, and the Good City

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia,

3. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 398.

5. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 399.

6. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 59.

7. Paul J. Griffiths, “The Uniqueness of Christian Doctrine Defended” in Chris-

1. James V. Schall, Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexing-

2. James V. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catho-

3. Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy, trans. Edward H. Flan-

6. Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization: On Rea-

8. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Hastings Center Report

10. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 398.

5. Josef Pieper, “The Philosophical Act,” in Leisure, op. cit., 93.

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the

Openness to the Other

2. David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Exist-

4. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 127.

5. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity

1. See the four-hour documentary of Robert Sungenis for a thorough review of

3. John West, “The Church of Darwin,” First Things (June–July, 2005).