There is a general tendency, both in serious scholarship and in some genres of folk wisdom, to characterize contemporary liberal values as an outgrowth of Christianity. More recently, this has led to the conviction that an authentic Christian faith should be re-embraced to ward off the more noxious consequences of rapid secularization. Spurred on, at least in the Anglosphere, by readings of Tom Holland’s historiographic opus Dominion, the idea seems to be that, whether we like it or not (whether we even realize it or not), we are still engulfed by the shadow of religion. In fact, all the good things we have come to appreciate—free markets, freedom of conscience and of the press, freedom of association; in short, everything aimed at maximizing human autonomy—are owed to our long-standing ‘Judeo-Christian heritage.’ Failing to appreciate this, we naturally risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
On this account, late-stage ‘hyperliberalism’ is merely Christianity in disarray. As the political philosopher John Gray put it recently in his latest book, hyperliberal ideology “provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.” Holland goes even further, suggesting that all the most recent cultural revolutions are themselves intrinsically Christian in nature. Modern revolutions and counterrevolutions arise precisely because the Christian spirit is ever restless in condemning the numerous hypocrisies incurred by its own efforts. The jibe usually aimed at gullible socialists may well be driving a transhistorical society of believers, as each new generation of pure-hearted zealots rediscovers the dubious claim that “true Christianity has never been tried before.” Nietzsche confirmed this suspicion when he insisted that “the sense of truth, highly developed through Christianity, ultimately revolts against the falsehood and fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and its history.” Who killed God? Look no further than to his most devoted acolytes.
In Holland’s book as well, we read that “any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derived from a framework of values that was itself utterly Christian.” This is certain to prove problematic for anyone hoping to wield the bulwark of institutional Christianity to stave off “the viral spread of woke ideology.” Holland, after all, did not simply mean to show that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms … find their roots in Christianity.” Much the same goes for secular dysfunctions: if it were not for the enduring fact of a widely disseminated Christian ethic, Holland argues, “then no one would ever have got woke.”
Did the Christian tradition merely shift registers (by continuing to operate on an increasingly secular plane)? Or do the simulacra of civil religion, the ersatz faiths, that proliferate today no more resemble an authentic Christendom than did the polytheism of the ancients? Can we draw a clear decision boundary between these positions or does the truth lie somewhere down the middle? These are momentous questions. Trying to answer them exhaustively would obviously require far more time and space than any single essay can accommodate. Let us, nonetheless, try and see what we can find out.
Christianity and humanitarianism
One of the more prominent intellectuals to have considered a radical discontinuity between modern secularism and the tradition of Christendom that preceded it was the German phenomenologist, Max Scheler. One of Scheler’s most enduring works, entitled Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Ressentiment in English), treats this topic in the broader context of a serious response to Nietzsche’s less than favourable interpretation of Christendom’s historical origins. Rather than simply ignoring Nietzsche or dismissing him as yet another wily deceiver, Scheler set out to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s attacks on Christendom, though ultimately misdirected, could still be appreciated when applied to modern ideology. It was Scheler’s contention that “Christian values can very easily be perverted into ressentiment values and have often been so conceived.” But, as he went on to clarify, “the core of Christian ethics has not grown on the soil of ressentiment.” By contrast, “the core of bourgeois morality, which gradually replaced Christian morality ever since the 13th century and culminated in the French Revolution, is rooted in ressentiment.” These statements are especially significant because they run counter to many of the increasingly popular narratives circulating today.
Scheler agreed with Nietzsche that the “flower of ressentiment” had taken root in European history, but he disagreed that it stemmed from a Christian source. After all, at the core of Christianity there is a kind of love that “springs from inner security and vital plenitude,” couched in an “awareness of safety in the fortress of ultimate being itself (Jesus calls it ‘kingdom of God’).” Hardly the stuff of ressentiment. In contrast to the classical world, for which “love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion [the] great ‘agon’ of all things for the deity,” Christians believed in a love that reaches downwards—all the way from the highest being to the very lowest. (Socrates’ hesitation in deciding whether things that are “rather ridiculous, such as hair, mud, dirt” should correspond to separate Forms would have been inconceivable to someone like Francis of Assisi.) Concomitantly, “God [could] no longer [be] the eternal unmoving goal—like a star … moving the world as ‘the beloved moves the lover.’” He was treated instead as a creator god who willed the inception of the world “out of love.”
Having established the difference between Christians and their ancient predecessors, Scheler turned towards the more contentious contrast with the moderns: Whereas Christianity is at bottom “nothing but a blissful ability to stoop, born from an abundance of force and nobility,” modernity evinces “a completely different way of stooping to the small, and the common, even though it seems almost the same.” In the modern world, “love does not spring from an abundance of vital power, from firmness and security.” It is instead “only a euphemism for escape, for the inability to ‘remain at home’ with oneself.” To put it in terms derived from Pascal, modern life is plagued by a near-constant irruption of divertissements and agitations which frustrate any kind of genuine other-directedness. Love instead becomes “empathy,” “concern,” a hypocritical condescension—more crudely emotive and reactive, and more plainly sentimental than compassionate.
Scheler’s numerous indictments of what he called ‘humanitarianism’ seem to me largely incontrovertible. That any abstract ‘love of mankind’ should differ essentially from Christian neighbourly love also seems, instinctively at least, to be pointing in the right direction. (Moreover, Scheler’s sketch of “a certain type of man … with an ever-ready ‘social conscience’—the kind of person whose social activity is quite clearly prompted by inability to keep his attention focused on himself, on his own tasks and problems” is of course eminently recognisable today.) However, Scheler’s overall approach ultimately suffers from a foreshortened genealogy. While richly illustrated, the contrastive account found in Ressentiment only scratches the surface in terms of drawing out how a Christian ethic might have morphed into its distorted mirror image. A deeper, more detailed account of the transition from the mediaeval period to the modern one might easily undermine Scheler’s lofty generalisations. Nietzsche’s own genealogical work, while in many respects wide-ranging and perspicacious, is similarly impaired. A more formidable challenge is mounted by political philosopher Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, which sought to demonstrate how many of the central commitments of modern liberalism could be traced back, in embryonic form, to prior, quintessentially Christian intuitions.
Like Holland, Siedentop is convinced of a profound continuity between mediaeval religiosity and broadly secular instincts. As he puts it in Inventing the Individual:
Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world, ideas and practices which have often been turned against ‘excesses’ of the Christian church itself … [The crux of secularism] is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty.’
Siedentop insists that secularism “is not without moral content.” It “does not mean non-belief or indifference.” Rather, “secularism identifies the conditions in which authentic beliefs should be formed and defended. It provides the gateway to beliefs properly so called, making it possible to distinguish inner conviction from mere external conformity.” Siedentop has a point, and the argument he makes is couched in genealogical work that cannot be easily dismissed. What I will suggest, however, is that the ‘moral content’ Siedentop has identified no longer thrives under secularism in any way that would have been recognisable to the mediaeval mind. If Christianity did indeed invent the individual (Scheler mentions “the Gospel’s profound spirit of individualism”), modernity might be said to have reinvented it.
Creatio ex nihilo?
Whatever its origins, modernity cannot be said to have come from nothing. Despite the self-styled radicalism of early modern thought, nothing in history comes without a preamble. Siedentop points to the innovations of a few late-mediaeval schoolmen as a possible premodern source of modern sensibilities. Scheler also mentions in passing the preparatory work done by “certain Franciscan theories” but fails to elaborate any further. Invoking the names of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (both Franciscan theologians) when discussing the transition to modernity has indeed become something of a commonplace. Depending on how one is disposed to that transition, these names are uttered either with reverence or with disdain.
According to Siedentop, Ockham in particular was responsible for developing a proto-liberal sense of natural right and freedom of conscience. In doing so, he is understood to have brought the social institution of Christianity in closer alignment with the original Pauline notion of ‘Christian liberty.’ As such, the transition to secularism is cast as the final triumph of Christian egalitarianism over ancient forms of social inequality (which the likes of Thomas Aquinas were helping to keep in vogue by an undue reliance on the ‘aristocratic epistemology’ of the pagans):
For Aquinas, natural law consisted of rational principles that governed God’s will as well as the human will. For Duns Scotus and Ockham, however, that position both threatened divine omnipotence and misunderstood the role of reason. They saw God’s will as limited only by his free nature. And it was God’s will, revealed in Christian faith, that humans should be equal and free agents. Thus, freedom became the bond between God and man.
Siedentop’s sanguine, triumphalist narration seems to be missing a crucial, underlying point: for most Christian thinkers throughout the mediaeval period, God’s untrammelled freedom posed the greatest challenge, not just to abstract theology for its own sake, but to the very possibility of a Christian ethical life. Far from furnishing the basis on which a true ‘Christian liberty’ could be founded, High Scholasticism would eventually, through no real fault of its own, render the Divine Intention, and therefore the ultimate orientation of a Christian life, largely inscrutable.
To better understand this, consider that the Christian worldview, besides inverting the trajectory of divine love, also included the belief that God had made the world out of nothing—something the Ancient Greeks would have found preposterous. To put it simply, Christian thinkers had invalidated the pagan principle of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) with the well-known creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing), all while still retaining Greek philosophy as their official language. The tension this produced is evident from the way Siedentop contrasts the doctrines of Aquinas with those of the Franciscans: the belief in a God who can create beings out of nothing places that God radically outside of creation, and allows Him, effectively, to be unbeholden to any of the ‘rational principles’ supplied by natural law. This in turn makes it very difficult to argue (for anything) on the basis of a cosmic rationality broadly intelligible to the human mind.
Theology was beset by this problem all throughout its long career. Augustine tried to solve it by lodging the Platonic ideas firmly in God’s mind, thus affixing to Him a Greek rationality that was, at least in principle, in tension with His omnipotence and radical freedom. Aquinas, as Siedentop tells us, tried to put Aristotelean philosophy to a similar use, performing what effectively amounted to a sublime balancing act. As the historian Henry Adams put it: “In his effort to be logical he [Aquinas] forced his Deity to be as logical as himself, which hardly suited Omnipotence.” Duns Scotus and Ockham, sometimes lambasted by more reactionary-minded historians, and hailed by the likes of Siedentop for their victories over ancient paganism, in fact merely intensified the efforts of prior theologians. Both were committed Aristotelians like Aquinas, even if they greatly modified ‘the Philosopher’s’ output (as Aquinas had also done) and in some cases sharply diverged from his central tenets.
Much of Ockham’s theology, insofar as it admits of easy summary, is essentially a monumental elaboration on the first statement in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Many of the major innovations he carried out—from his ethical voluntarism to his nominalist depreciation of universals—seem to have stemmed from this one inviolable insight: that God’s omnipotence should not be taken lightly. Instead of insisting, as Aquinas had, that “the whole community of the universe is governed by the divine reason,” Ockham believed that it was governed simply by God’s volition. Translated in terms of the classical Euthyphro dilemma (referring to the Platonic dialogue in which the dilemma originally occurs), the difference between Ockham and Aquinas comes down to how they would have answered the following question: “Is that which is good willed by God because it is good, or is it good because it is willed by God?” Ockham may have been more inclined to the second clause, while Aquinas cleaved to the first.
To be sure, Ockham did not deny the existence of an ordained moral order; nor did he think this order essentially contravened what most Christians would have considered to be common sense. Nevertheless, by giving credence to God’s otherworldliness, Ockham had allowed caprice to impinge on the natural law. The true, the good, and the beautiful could, by divine fiat, just as well have been the false, the bad, and the ugly. Writing in the 17th century, at the overture of the new age, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth noticed the enduring influence of this Ockhamist line of thinking in some of his contemporaries. (One can feel it gnawing at Descartes, all huddled up in his urban retreat, as he contemplates whether he is being deceived by “a God who is all-powerful.”) Cudworth also noticed how, when taken to its extremes, the belief in an “Omnipotent Being devoid of all Essential and Natural Justice,” cognizable only as an (almost Schopenhauerian) “Uncontrollable Power and Arbitrary Will,” dovetailed nicely with the newly revived Epicureanism of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi. Both strands of thought centred on a belief in the amorality of nature and the mere conventionalism of justice, which, taken together, sufficed to repudiate the older idea of an “eternal and immutable morality.”
For Hobbes, the overall remoteness and inaccessibility of the Deity is enough to give up on the possibility of a ‘spiritual commonwealth’ altogether, and to give absolute priority to the sovereignty of the ‘Mortal God’ instead. The deus absconditus et mutabilissimus (“the hidden and most fickle God”) is subtly phased out and replaced by an Epicurean deus otiosus (the inactive God) to make room for a more workable environment. Similarly, the “Tenets of Vain Philosophy” (the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which the schoolmen held in such high regard) are rejected outright because, in the absence of divine reason, they cannot but be reflections of idiosyncratic wills: The “Moral Philosophy [of the schoolmen] is but a description of their own Passions.” (Or, as Nietzsche would put it much later, every work of philosophy is but “a species of involuntary and unconscious biography.”) ‘Right reason,’ which Ockham had still tried to keep in vogue, was utterly discredited by Hobbes. Insofar as every appeal to ‘right reason’ could, in practice, have recourse only to private reasons, it lost all claims to authority. Europe spasmed into its modern phase when the absence of a divine standard by which to orient men’s lives had to be abandoned in favour of human-all-too-human standards: peace, self-preservation, and ‘commodious living,’ all of which were immediately accessible, as final causes, to the individual human subject.
Overcoming the new humanitarianism
At bottom, exercising Christian liberty has always meant following the example of Christ, whose very personhood embodies “the way and the truth and the life.” By contrast, secular liberty has, from its inception, been largely coterminous with what Scheler chose to call “bourgeois morality,” or what could also be referred to as “Epicureanism for the masses.” Insofar as there is any continuity between the two, it is to be found in the fact that the old-world order, when it finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, left a moral vacuum. There have, to be sure, also been admirable attempts to fill this vacuum. For a conscientious ‘super-nominalist’ like Hobbes, however, the vacuum could only be filled with something that diverged widely from traditional Christianity, which had, of necessity, been reduced to a meagre set of eschatological claims.
In light of all this, returning to Christianity to uphold the tenets of classical liberalism seems a bit silly. An authentically Christian life has little need for a societal infrastructure set up to maximize individual freedom of choice; historically, Christians have often preferred (sometimes profound) discomfort over the conveniences afforded by ‘commodious living’ (as the lives of saints and martyrs attest). That the possibility of a common life in Christ has been undermined by the Christian theological tradition itself is of course lamentable, but it needn’t drive anyone to despair. Christ himself had little need for theology, preferring suggestive parables and playful, sometimes lurid, mythemes to expound on his teachings; Saint Paul warned that philosophy could become “hollow and deceptive” when divorced from the basic truths of revelation; and Saint Francis, who hated nothing, came very close to hating the schoolmen for their intellectual perversions. Following these examples, one might try to imagine how a Christianity less overladen with theology, an altogether more literary Christianity, could begin to flourish as our brave new world, with its attendant ‘emotivist’ fanfare, continues to hollow itself out.
While it is heartening to see signs of a Christian renaissance (however faint such signs may be), we should not be so hasty to annex the faith to an overtly political programme—least of all one that has historically been deleterious to any non-utilitarian mode of living. Falling in love with Christianity is unlikely to strengthen anyone’s faith in the ultimate value of our liberal heritage, given how characterologically discrepant the latter is with respect to the former. If anything, new converts might discover the deeper, underlying reasons for their disillusionment with the new humanitarianism. They might come to recognize not just the ressentiment, but also the deep-seated forlornness, that lies at the heart of the modern enterprise. With any luck, they might also discover, and experience first-hand, the “luminous, almost cool spiritual enthusiasm” (Scheler), namely the divinely inspired state of grace which alone may yet overcome the dejection of the age.
