Month: September 2005

The AP interviews Huston Smith (via Godspy) on his new book The Soul of Christianity. I’ve always enjoyed Smith’s writing, even though I have fairly substantial disagreements with him. He’s very good on debunking “scientism” and pointing out that science does not give us an exhaustive account of reality, as the article mentions.

Where I depart from Smith is in his religious pluralism. He tends to view each of the “great” religions as expressions of a kind of “perennial philosophy,” each one teaching us essentially the same important truths about ourselves, God and the universe. To his credit, he’s not a kind of metaphysical reductionist – if anything he probably has a more robust ontolgy than most contemporary Christian theologians! But he doesn’t think the particular claims of individual religions are essential to the truth that they all affirm.

My problem with that kind of pluralism is that it assumes a kind of privileged epistemic position from which we can determine what constitutes the “essential” core of each religion. But how do we determine which aspects of, say, Christianity or Hinduism or Islam are “essential” and which are “inessential”? To take the most obvious example, the Christian claim that Jesus is the unique incarnation of the Son of God is essential to Christianity, but pretty clearly unacceptable to adherents of other religions. But pluralism can’t allow that kind of exclusive claim. So, the ostensibly humble and tolerant pluralist often ends up being quite intolerant of the particualristic claims made by individual religions.

I think a better position is one of epistemic humility. We should affirm the truth-claims of our tradition, but recognize that our knowledge of ultimate things is likely partial and distorted. “We see in a mirror dimly” and could be mistaken in what we affirm. And because these matters are difficult to discern, it may well be that adherents of other traditions are justified in what they believe, even if we think that what they believe is, at least partly, false.

Robert Novak reports (from an elite gathering in Aspen) that the ultra-rich are turning on George Bush:

For two full days, George W. Bush was bashed. He was taken to task on his handling of stem cell research, population control, the Iraq war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina. The critics were no left-wing bloggers. They were rich, mainly Republican and presumably Bush voters in the last two presidential elections.

The Bush-bashing occurred last weekend at the annual Aspen conference sponsored by the New York investment firm Forstmann Little & Co. Over 200 invited guests, mostly prestigious, arrived Thursday night (many by private aircraft) and stayed until Sunday morning for more than golf, hikes and gourmet meals. They faithfully attended the discussions presided over by PBS’s Charlie Rose on such serious subjects as “global poverty and human rights” and “the ‘new’ world economy.” The connecting link was hostility to President Bush.

[…]

I was surprised that the program indicated the first panel, on stem cell research, consisted solely of scientists hostile to the Bush administration’s position. In the absence of any disagreement, I took the floor to suggest there are scientists and bioethicists with dissenting views and that it was not productive to demean opposing views as based on “religious dogma.” The response was peeved criticism of my intervention and certainly no support. (emphasis mine)

Now I obviously think there are sound reasons for being peeved with President Bush’s performance in office, to say the least. But I think one thing this highlights is the ongoing tension between the super-rich donors and supporters of the GOP and the socially conservative base. In particular, the divide over “life” issues.

There is a long history of the rich supporting population control and eugenics, with abortion-on-demand as a key plank in the platform. Big foundations like Ford and Rockefeller are well-known for their support of groups like Planned Parenthood. And rich individuals such as Ted Turner and George Soros are very involved in the population control efforts of the UN. To put it mildly, this puts them at odds with the social conservatives who support the President on these issues.

Some sharp thinking from Matthew Yglesias.

Apropos of nothing in particular, here are some thoughts of mine on St. Athanasius’ classic work On the Incarnation, which I sat down with the other night.

Athanasius has a rather noetic understanding of sin (and, consequently of salvation). This really isn’t that surprising considering that many of the Fathers were deeply influenced by Platonic philosophy. According to Athanasius, sin consists in turning our gaze away from God, in ceasing to contemplate him. As a result we are attracted by finite goods and come to be mired in our attachment to them, which leads to all kinds of sin. Nevertheless, the original turning away is an act of will, so sin is not attributable to ignorance, as it seems to be in some versions of Platonism.

And since God is the source of all being, to turn away from the contemplation of God is to turn toward non-being or corruption and death:

For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit), and had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.

As a result, a large part of Christ’s work for Athanasius is to restore fallen humanity’s knowledge of God. You might say that he comes in the flesh to paint a picture for us of what God is like so we will turn back to contemplation of and communion with God.

There are, he thinks, other sources whereby we can come to know God:

God knew the limitation of mankind, you see; and though the grace of being made in His Image was sufficient to give them knowledge of the Word and through Him of the Father, as a safeguard against their neglect of this grace, He provided the works of creation also as means by which the Maker might be known. Nor was this all. Man’s neglect of the indwelling grace tends ever to increase; and against this further frailty also God made provision by giving them a law, and by sending prophets, men whom they knew. Thus, if they were tardy in looking up to heaven, they might still gain knowledge of their Maker from those close at hand; for men can learn directly about higher things from other men. Three ways thus lay open to them, by which they might obtain the knowledge of God. They could look up into the immensity of heaven, and by pondering the harmony of creation come to know its Ruler, the Word of the Father, Whose all-ruling providence makes known the Father to all. Or, if this was beyond them, they could converse with holy men, and through them learn to know God, the Artificer of all things, the Father of Christ, and to recognize the worship of idols as the negation of the truth and full of all impiety. Or else, in the third place, they could cease from lukewarmness and lead a good life merely by knowing the law. For the law was not given only for the Jews, nor was it solely for their sake that God sent the prophets, though it was to the Jews that they were sent and by the Jews that they were persecuted. The law and the prophets were a sacred school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of the spiritual life for the whole world.

However, our sin was so great that even this isn’t sufficient to bring us to knowledge of God:

Yet men, bowed down by the pleasures of the moment and by the frauds and illusions of the evil spirits, did not lift up their heads towards the truth. So burdened were they with their wickednesses that they seemed rather to be brute beasts than reasonable men, reflecting the very Likeness of the Word.

[…]

What, then, was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Savior Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God. The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the Image.

But sin and salvation are not strictly matters of knowledge, because in turning away from God we incur guilt and fall under the law of death. Yet it’s not entirely clear to me whether Athanasius understands death as a punishment for turning away from God, or just the natural and inevitable consequence of our sin. Maybe the best way to resolve the tension is to say that becasue in God there can be no division between his will and his nature that the distinction between punishment and inevitable consequence disappears?

Here’s what Athanasius says:

We saw in the last chapter that, because death and corruption were gaining ever firmer hold on them, the human race was in process of destruction. Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word Himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone. The law of death, which followed from the Transgression, prevailed upon us, and from it there was no escape. The thing that was happening was in truth both monstrous and unfitting. It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption.

This makes it sound like God is bound to sentence humankind to death because that was the consequence he stipulated for eating the forbidden fruit. Again though, does the consequence only contingently follow from man’s disobedience, or is it a necessary consequence? To say that it would “have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die” makes it sound contingent since it is a matter of God not going back on his word. But of course, in some sense, God can’t go back on his word since that would presumably violate the divine nature.

In any event, the fact that humankind is now under the law of death makes it necessary, according to Athanasius, that someone else has to die in man’s place. We’re so used to the familiar typology of atonement theories that attributes the “Christus Victor” view to the early church that it’s somewhat surprising to see Athanasius use language that sounds a lot like penal subsitution:

The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection. It was by surrendering to death the body which He had taken, as an offering and sacrifice free from every stain, that He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent. For naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered His own temple and bodily instrument as a substitute for the life of all, He fulfilled in death all that was required.

But for Athanasius, this is not just a matter of accepting the punishment due to humankind for their transgressions, it’s also a matter of effecting an ontological change in human nature. For human nature, by turning away from God, has become corruptible. It doesn’t just need forgiveness, but needs healing:

Naturally also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all. You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.

By becoming united to our human nature, the Word of God heals the corruption and proneness-to-death that followed as a result of sin. (We might ask if this implies a kind of universalism. If human nature as such has been healed of corruption, how can the benefits not accrue to all individual humans?) And Athanasius is careful to point out that it is the love of God which impels the Incarnation and Atonement. There is no hint of an angry God who has to be appeased by the sacrifice of his Son.

This great work was, indeed, supremely worthy of the goodness of God. A king who has founded a city, so far from neglecting it when through the carelessness of the inhabitants it is attacked by robbers, avenges it and saves it from destruction, having regard rather to his own honor than to the people’s neglect. Much more, then, the Word of the All-good Father was not unmindful of the human race that He had called to be; but rather, by the offering of His own body He abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching. Thus by His own power He restored the whole nature of man.

Of course, for the contemporary reader this raises some problems. Most of us don’t think of “human nature” as a substantial thing in which individuals “participate.” So for us it’s hard to see how the Word becoming united to “human nature” can effect a change that makes a difference for us. We tend to think more in relational and moral, rather than ontological, terms about these things. This may be why, despite objections, the penal substitution and moral influnce theories remain popular (though usually with different people). Neither one requires us to think in terms of the Incarnation and Atonement directed primarily toward an abstract human nature, and it’s easier to see how it affects individuals (whether through removing our guilt, or providing us with a powerful revelation of God’s love).

Addendum. I should add that whatever misgivings we might have about some of Athanasius’ metaphysical baggage, I do think his emphasis on contemplation of/communion with God is something we could stand to recover. So much of modern Christianity (especially Protestantism) seems to have an almost exclusively moralisitc understanding of sin and salvation. The beatific vision seems to have largely faded into the background in our thinking and piety.

Maybe it’s bad blog etiquette to elevate one of my own comments to the status of it’s own blog post, but, well, it’s my blog after all.

Anyway, in a comment to this post I said (comments slightly edited):

It seems there can be at least three “levels” of morality:

1) Specifically Christian morality

2) The “minimal morality” that is accessible to everyone (natural law?)

and

3) The morality that can or should be enforced by the government/law.

Do we want to say that 2 is a subset of 1? Or might 1 and 2 actually conflict in places? And do we want to say that 3 is a subset of 2? (i.e. only moral truths that can be agreed to, in principle, by everyone are candidates for state enforcement, but not necessarily all of them?)

This seems relevant to the topic of liberalism since what’s at issue is whether there is an ethic that “moral strangers” (i.e. people who disagree about questions of religion, the good, the meaning of life, etc.) can agree on and that offers a sufficient underpinning of a tolerable, decent society. Despite whatever qualms we may have about “secularism” it seems to me that this kind of pluralism is simply a fact of modern societies, and we need some way to negotiate our interactions with others who may not share many of our assumptions about morality.

UPDATE: Joshie sez:

I’m sort of treading on unfamiliar ground here, so bear with me. I don’t how helpful thinking of subsets and the like is, but if pressed I would say 1 is a subset of 2.

Both 2 and 1 are from God. I would hesitate to call 2 natural law, since I think Paul makes it clear this is a law on the heart of every person (and perhaps creature), it comes from God (thru Gos’s Wisdom, thru the Spirit) into the person testified to by that person’s conscience, not from God to nature to the person.

1 is a hightened, clarified, completed version of 2 due to the highened clarified, completed level of communion with the Spirit one experiences in the church. This is a fuller revelation through the Spirit via the preaching and teaching of the Word, study, dialogue, and meditation on the scriptures and the rest of the tradition, and personal revelations trough prayer (ALWAYS clarified and controlled by the tradition and teaching of the church, and intended for the church at large, not a secret intended for one or a select few).

As for 3, just laws should A. be a reflection of 2; B. be a reflection of the culture and C. deal with the problem of sin and the limitations of human knowledge and action. Those are my unrefined thoughts at the moment.

But then, Bishop Will Willimon is probably a little biased:

In his fine new book, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, historian David Hempton shows that part of the genius of early Methodism was its ability to hold together seemingly contradictory ideas in its mind at one time. Against Calvinistic reductionism, we held together the universal salvation wrought by Christ and the need for a personal, life-changing commitment by each person. Against Lutheran reductionism, we held together justification and sanctification. Against Puritan anti-sacramentalism, we held together preaching and sacraments, the local congregation and the holy catholic church, free church and catholic forms of worship.

The Bishop also has some worthwhile things to say about not being “single-issue” Christians.

I thought the light blue background was easier on the eyes than a stark white. What do you all think?

(For previous posts see here and here.)

Having argued that, pace Milbank, liberalism is not necessarily a manifestation of ontological violence or ethical nihilism, Insole turns to the more specific criticisms made by Milbank and fellow Radical Orthodoxist Graham Ward about social life in a liberal society. According to Milbank and Graham, says Insole, liberalism gives rise to a society characterized by “social atomism” – an extreme form of individualism that corrodes social bonds and leads to anomie, dislocation, anxiety, lonliness and alienation.

This has become such a common criticism of political liberalism that it’s become a truism. Which makes it all the more startling, and refreshing, that Insole actually responds by asking what the actual evidence for this claim is. Why, he asks, should we suppose that Milbank or Ward’s experince of the modern world is actually representative of the way many, much less most, people experience their lives?

Insole agrees that anxiety and lonliness characterizes some aspects of some people’s lives, especially perhaps urban professionals and academics. But that’s a far cry from saying they’re the pervasive and signature feature of liberal society. Moreover, he points out that those experiences accompany other experiences afforded by “thin” communities like opportunity, choice, and mobility. By contrast, there are many more “participatory” communities, where a greater sense of solidarity, sense of belonging, and shared values prevail. But these more participatory communities are also more likely to be characterized by conformism, surveillance, and intolerance of those perceived to be “different.”

His point is that both kinds of communities exist in liberal society and that both involve trade-offs among goods. To gain a greater sense of belonging and shared values I may have to give up some privacy and freedom. To gain choice and opportunity I risk exposing myself to lonliness and anxiety.

We might say that there are two sorts of ‘liberty’, which are incompatible, and that each bring their attendant problems. There is the liberty of the ‘city’. Around such ‘liberty’ we can gather such experiences, limitations and possiblities as loneliness, lightness, unpredictability, choice, anxiety and mobility. The ‘liberty’ involved in more cohesive and participatory communities – more provincial, traditional or rural – tends to gather around it such notions as participation, heaviness, belonging, predictability, routine, duty, surveillance, care, judgment, attention and immobility. Both modes of life have their own glories and own problems, but it is vital to acknowledge that one is not in any straightforward sense the cure for the other, although both can look like it when one is immersed unhappily in either extreme. The problems are attendant upon the possibilities, and one removes the former only by eliminating the latter. (p. 144)

Insole is here following an insight developed by the 19th century liberal Benjamin Constant in his classic essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns.” In the polis of the ancient world, Constant says, there was a much greater degree of participation in collective decision making by each citizen. But the trade off was that the public power over the life of the individual was near absolute. By contrast, in the modern state each individual has much less say over the workings of the state, but she has a much wider sphere of liberty wherein she acts at her own discretion.

The chief problem with Radical Orthodoxy, Insole thinks, is that it proposes a participatory community as the alternative and solution to what it takes to be the atomism of liberal society. He quotes a, frankly rather chilling, line from Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: “True society implies absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and entire harmony amongst its members, and this is exactly (as Augustine reiterates again and again) what the Church provides, and that in which salvation, the restoration of being, consists” (quoted on p. 142). Though Milbank avoids the charge of theocracy by making the Church rather than the state the location of his polis, it’s still not clear how it will avoid the dangers attendant to any participatory community.

My anxiety about the participatory solutions called for by Milbank and Ward is not that what they hope for is always impossible, but that there are non-accidental attendant dangers in seeking to build participation and unity, and that these dangers remain when the ‘building’ is symbolic and theologically literate. It is never politically advisable to work toward solutions whose prerequisite or goal is a radical transformation of the human condition, whether conceived individually or collectively. (p. 146)

Insole wants to characterize Radical Orthodoxy as a species of communitarianism – the idea that what we need more of is “thicker” communities that make claims on us and orient us around a shared vision of the good, and less assertion of liberal-individualist “rights” against public authority. Matters are complicated, though, by the fact that for Milbank, et al. the Church is not like any other community, but is the place where people are transformed and come to participate in the life of the Trinity. For Milbank the Church, not the state, provides “absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and entire harmony amongst its members.”

But we have to ask to what extent can or does the Church according to Radical Orthodoxy “transcend” the problems associated with “thick” participatory communities? Insole doesn’t address this question as much as I would’ve liked. Do Milbank et al. see the Church as susceptible to these problems? To what extent do they identify the visible Church with the invisible? To what degree does sin and failure still characterize the life of the Church?

However, this question of ecclesiology doesn’t necessarily affect Insole’s case for political liberalism. There’s no reason in principle why a liberal polity can’t encompass a variety of other communities of varying degrees of “thickness.” Of course, Radical Orthodoxists may complain that a liberal polity, by institutionalizing religious freedom, can’t help but make membership in thick moral communities more tenuous. But it’s hard to see what the alternative is, short of making one vision of the good publicly authoritative.

Political liberalism, then, is not committed to the view that there are no true comprehensive doctrines of the good, nor is it committed to the view that people are inherently selfish (and to approving of that selfishness). All it is committed to is that people are different and can reasonably hold incompatible views about the good. To recognize this requires, according to liberalism, that we refrain from imposing any one particular arrangement of values.

Insole quotes F.A. Hayek to good effect:

[Liberalism] merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s, that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends shoudl be supreme and not subject to any dictation by others. (quoted on p. 173)

(See here for previous post.)

In chapter 4, “Against Radical Orthodoxy,” Insole argues, um, against Radical Orthodoxy, specifically the claims made by John Milbank, et al. that “political liberalism … is symptomatic of an ontological nihilism” and “that liberalism leads to a social atomism and individualism that can be overcome with the help of a participatory-analogical theology” (p. 128).

For Milbank, liberalism is the condition of the modern human subject facing a world that has been evacuated of meaning, with no transcendent basis for claims about truth, beauty, and goodness. The only way to have meaning, truth, or value, then, is for us to assert them by an act of will. But my assertion of will is bound to come into conflict at some point with other people’s assertions of will. In liberal theory the public realm becomes “secular”–that is, it is the realm in which no one’s conception of the good is permitted to be publicly authoritative and binding, but everyone is permitted to live according to her own lights. This is supposed to provide for a peaceful solution to the struggle between rival conceptions of the good, especially between religions.

But, following postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Milbank thinks that the “peace” of the liberal order actually masks acts of violence. The “genealogical” project of thinkers like Foucault is to “unmask” the mechanisms of social power that reinforce truth- and value-claims. Thus the peace of liberalism is shown to rest on a hidden violence. In the view of the geneaologist, there are no “truths” as such, but rather a never-ending struggle of assertions seeking to wield power. The “secular” space of liberalism is not theologically neutral, but actually conceals a particular theology (or anti-theology).

According to Milbank, once liberalism’s claims to neutrality have been unmasked as a power play, the space is cleared for the counter-assertion of a Christian “ontology of peace.” Instead of competing centers of power, the Christian mythos posits a harmonious “participation and analogical interrelatedness between all levels of a hierarchical and teleological universe.” In the Christian universe, I needn’t experience claims of truth and value as oppressive, because my telos – the inner principle of my being – consists in greater participation in the life of the Triune God. This participation makes possible a harmonious reconciliation of differences, rather than the eternal agonistic power struggle.

Unfortunately, says Insole, by the rules of the Foucaultian game Milbank’s assertion of an ontology of peace is just one more instance of the will to power. Milbank admits that the Christian mythos is “equally unfounded” as the modern ontology of violence, so his move is tantamount to simply making a counter-assertion. The ontology of peace is simply posited, or even constructed, so in what way has he really escaped nihilism? Why is the assertion of the Christian meta-narrative any less “violent”?

Ultimately Milbank wants to insist on two theses: first of all, that there is no need for Christian theology to engage rationally or apologetically with ‘secular’ reason, just because there is no neutral, foundational, rational space in which such a dialogue can really appear. We are simply called to out-narrate other stories, all of which are equally (un)founded. This thesis is justified because of a broad acceptance of the Foucaultian notion of geneaology, where truth claims are identified with power claims; hence Milbank’s comment that ‘one’s only resort’ is ‘to put forward an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an “ontology of peace”. Which brings us to the second thesis Milbank wants to endorse, which is almost the opposite of the first, because indeed ‘Christianity is the precise opposite of nihilism’. The second thesis is that the Foucaultian conflation of power and truth, the assertion of ontological violence, is wrong when and only when it comes to describing the alternative mythos which is Christianity. In a wonderful conjuring trick Milbank uses Foucault as his ladder to climb high enough above apology and dialogue in order to be in the right space to assert his meta-narrative ‘that-Foucault-is-wrong’ (the ‘ontology of peace’)’ but we can only claim that ‘Foucault-is-wrong’, in this case and in this way, if Foucault is right. (p. 137)

The problem goes deeper, though, because Milbank has already conceded too much to the deconstructive/genealogical project. For the entire Foucaultian argument contains a fatal equivocation on the term “power.” In one sense, power is any exertion of influence on the world. So brute force, bribery, seduction, and rational persuasion are all forms of power in this sense. But “power” can also have a sinister connotation of dominating and oppressing the other. The Foucaultian argument that all truth claims are “really” power plays works only by conflating these two senses of “power.”

Everything is described as a power struggle: even a charity or a minority justice-based resistance group is understood in terms of this social physics. Inasmuch as everything is accounted for as ‘power’ it seems to be simply a descriptive term, with no more sinister moral connotations than a notion such as ‘gravity’. This descriptive notion of power is used to get the thesis off the ground that ‘power’ operates everywhere. But then there is a movement which associates ‘power’ with oppression and violence, and the term carries strong prescriptive undertones, which seem to make emancipation and peace impossible. The impossibility is not something discerned in the world, but is rather smuggled in at the very beginning prior to any observations. (p. 138)

In other words, we needn’t even play the Foucaultian game to begin with. We’re back to distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. So, according to Insole, Milbank’s assertion of the Christian mythos as the only alternative to nihilism rests on an erroneous description of our condition. And it hasn’t been demonstrated that liberalism is categorically or necessarily nihilistic. As we saw before, liberals like Burke and Acton readily believed in a transcendent order of truth and value but thought that our apprehension of it was limited and fragmentary. This insight, combined with a sense of human fallenness and charity toward the neighbor–not ethical nihilism or constructivism–provides their rationale for liberal politics.

(To be continued…)

Christopher J. Insole, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, has written a very interesting book called The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism. He sets out to provide a Christian defense of political liberalism against its neo-traditionalist and “Radically Orthodox” detractors.

The now-standard critique of liberalism is that it is ethically nihilistic, resting on the unbridled will-to-power and that it presupposes an “ontology of violence” in which individuals are locked in a never-ending struggle for survival and self-assertion. This allegedly results in a society of atomized individuals with no shared notion of the good.

As Insole puts it:

Liberalism, according to this conception, is based upon an illusory human subject who constructs order and denies transcendence. The ‘liberal’ focuses on the will at the cost of attending to reason or order. This focus on the will engenders a fetish for freedom of choice and the removal of all impediments to human liberty; consequently, the notion of ‘freedom/liberty’ is emptied of any substantial historical, traditional, or philosophical content. Flowing from this entirely stripped down notion of freedom, liberalism has a voluntaristic account of values and meaning, with ‘ethics’ being a construction by the subject. This voluntarist meta-ethics fosters a destructive individualism and social atomism. In an attempt to distract from the poverty of the liberal conception of freedom, liberals tend to support a psuedo-Messianic/Pelagian progressivism about history, often finding expression in a fixation with technology and economic growth. (p. 1)

While Insole concedes that this may be an accurate criticism of some forms of liberalism, he argues that there are other strains which are not vulnerable to this critique. He focuses on the thought of Whigs like Burke and Lord Acton and, as background, the thought of Anglican divine Richard Hooker to sketch a theologically-informed liberal tradition that is not susceptible to these charges.

Insole defines political liberalism this way:

[T]he conviction that politics is ordered towards peaceful co-existence (the absence of conflict), and the preservation of the liberties of the individual within a pluralistic and tolerant framework, rather than by a search for truth (religious or otherwise), perfection and unity. The crucial ambition of this sort of political liberalism is a refusal to allow public power to enforce on society a substantial and comprehensive conception of the good; driven as it is by its central passion for the liberties of individuals over and above the enthusiasms of other individuals or collectivities. Political authority is wielded on behalf of the people it protects, and is derived ultimately from their consent. (p. 5)

The form of liberalism Insole finds in Burke and Acton isn’t based on an self-constructing subject or ethical nihilism, but on a very Christian insistence on transcendent order, our solidarity in sin, the vulnerability and fragility of the individual, and our incomplete knowledge of ultimate truths. These thinkers insist that there is an ultimate order to the universe, but that we can, at best, discern it only partially. For that reason we should be wary of making any one comprehensive view of the good publicly authoritative. The point is reinforced by our proneness to sin, and the vulnerability of individuals whose identities are, partly or even largely, constituted by surrounding social forces.

Insole finds the traces of such an outlook in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker was responding to the radical Protestants of his day who thought they knew the truth and could identify the saved and the reprobate, thereby creating a purified church. Hooker, by contrast, adhered to the Augustinian notion that, until the Second Coming, the church would always be a “mixed body” containing citizens of the City of God and the City of Man. Our inability to know who’s who should caution us about collapsing the distinction between the visible and invisible church. Indeed, we may well hope that God’s grace will extend to many outside the confines of the visible church.

The conclusion is that humility and mutual regard should restrain us from seeking to impose our particular conceptions of the good on our fellow citizens. We don’t possess the truth in any straightforward way, and our proneness to sin is liable to turn any attempt to institutionalize it into a form of tyranny.

Insole quotes Michael Freeman:

Men who hate vice too much, says Burke, love men too little. Men of excessive virtue may take excessive measures to bring ordinary men into the path of virtue. In the womb of moral puritanism lies the seed of political authoritarianism. Fanaticism, even if altruistic, perhaps especially when altruistic, poses a greater threat to freedom and humanity than ordinary selfishness. Paradoxically, extreme virtue turns into extreme vice. (p. 35)

Which reminds me of this quote from C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. (from the essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” in God in the Dock)

The liberal has a tolerance of human frailty which is rooted in a sense that it is difficult for us to know in detail the truth about the good, much less to institutionalize it and make sure people live by it. He is content with a kind of political modus vivendi, allowing people of different beliefs to live together in relative peace, even if they aren’t united in a shared hierarchy of values.

The Augustinianism of liberals like Burke and Acton also protects against a naively progressive reading of history, as though we were moving toward some kind of consummation of peace and prosperity. For them social order is always fragile and in need of reform, but there is no utopia to aim for. And there is no way to publicly distinguish between the saved and the damned, or identify them with any particular group. Their eschatology is radically amillenialist. Insole contrasts this with what he calls crusading liberalism, the view that comes out of Puritan versions of Calvinism which attributes a kind of eschatological significance to the spread of political liberty and democracy (a view which, he notes, is prevalent among “certain American presidents”). Crusading liberalism is messianic and Manichean, while Burkean liberalism is modest and meliorist.

I would suggest that there is a strand of political liberalism which withdraws from using public power in instigating perfectionist and salvationist programmes, precisely because of a sense of our complicity in sin, the conviction that judgement belongs to God, and a desire to show the charity, toleration and generosity towards our neighbour which we ourselves so painfully need, and at times, so little deserve. (p. 70)

Next I’ll talk about Insole’s reply to the criticisms of liberalism that come from the Radical Orthodoxy school.