Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part I. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026.
“I suffer, therefore I am. I am a victim. I am that I am a victim. This is the implicit fundamental creed of late Western humanity,” a claim to know, a claim of identity, and a claim of unchallengeable, godlike (“I am that I am”) authority. So begins Ralph Hancock’s profound meditation on ‘postmodern’ moral and political sentiment. Politically, the ‘I’ becomes ‘We’: Those who suffer, and they alone, wield a rightful claim not merely to receive assistance but to rule. Victims of oppression not only have the right to overthrow their oppressors but the right to rule them until they have mended their moral, political, and spiritual ways, as determined by the erstwhile victims.
Hancock refuses the temptation to mock or trivialize these claims. “Until we can confidently answer the self-described victim’s claim to a privileged moral status, we cannot articulate a defense of our civilization.” The “ideology of victimhood…challenges our very understanding of our humanity” and, crucially, draws upon the foundations of that understanding and of that civilization to do so. It bespeaks two impulses. The first derives from philosophy, specifically from Rousseau; it longs for a return to a pre-civilized, innocent ‘state of nature’ in which all of us are equal, without the conventional hierarchies inherent in civilization. The second derives from but is surely not the same as a Christian command; it demands an emptying of the ‘self,’ an absolute openness to the claims of ‘the other,’ the victim, “voiding whatever moral feelings or convictions we may hold to embrace another’s standpoint.” It is as if Christ on the Cross emptied Himself of His human-all-too-human character not make of Himself a sacrifice, not to suffer the punishment for the sins of all past, present, and future human beings in obedience to His Father’s command, but to empty Himself of His own “standpoint” as the Creator and supreme Judge of those sins and of those sinners.
Victimology’s double impulse thus “demands the same“—demands respect for own supposed underlying and shared identities as (injured) innocents—while also demanding “a kind of absolute transcendence, a repudiation of one’s own good in favor not of some other understanding of the good but for the sake of ‘the other,’ pure and simple,” affirming his/her/their/its own identity, self-defined. I, morally, and we, politically, must empty ourselves of our conception of the good for the sake of the ‘other’ on the basis of the claim that we are both radically equal as sufferers of civilizational inequalities. “The apparently opposite claims of the self and the other, absolute self-identity and absolute self-emptying for the other, are strict practical correlates.” We must therefore reject “the actual goods“—plural—inscribed “in the concrete institutions and ways of life of any real society, any actual moral and political order,” all goods “mediated by particular, finite, and imperfect institutions.” But this rejection of goods “in fact reject[s] the good, precisely because we have no access to any intrinsic goodness that is not in any way or to any degree contaminated by human mediation, moral, political, and religious.” Those mediations are all tokens of civilized—unequal, immoral—human beings. “For the victim, mediation is oppression”; it is rather “my common victimhood, my participation in victimhood, my communion with the oppressed,” that “is my very humanity, my essential being.” To translate such claims into politics (since despisers of civilization must somehow also say that everything is political), postmodern egalitarians must engage in the paradoxical practices of “aggressive victimhood” and “predatory humility.” Hancock urges that if we do not relearn “how to stand in, and therefore to stand up for, our humanity, even while confessing a God who descended below all things (Ephesians 4) to offer himself as the victim, we will not have supplied an alternative to the cult of victimhood.” A philosophic answer alone won’t do, because we are dealing not only with a Rousseauian but a spiritual demand. And just as Christianity is not a theory but a way of life —a practice guided not by a principle but by a Person—so too Hancock proposes an ethics not of theory but of practice, one “reconciled to the necessity of the mediation of tradition and politics as a kind of first philosophy and theology,” suggesting that “philosophy and theology, reason and faith, are insuperably bound up together for the most rigorous and self-aware thinker.”
Hancock therefore offers a critique of ‘critique,’ a critique of today’s dominant theory, which is “a secularized and purely horizontal humanitarianism,” an egalitarianism that finally requires what Tocqueville predicted egalitarianism must require, namely, pantheism—the rejection of an absolutely holy or separate and unequal, unqualifiedly superior God for a ‘god’ which (not ‘who’) pervades all things as energy pervades and is convertible to matter (and vice-versa). The answer to egalitarian humanitarianism, the morality and politics of victimhood, is “virtue-religion,” a reasonable faith “in which transcendence does not exclude the real goodness of practical virtue, or, in Thomas Aquinas’s terms, in which grace does not destroy but perfects nature.”
“To act is to aim at some good,” a good that “always has a public dimension,” inasmuch as we all live in communities and would not exist if a male human being and a female human being had not joined in producing us, and if some human being or beings had not protected, nourished, and taught us, shaping our ethos, our character, in relation to the character of themselves and of the political society composed of other human beings beyond our family. If those things had not occurred, we would have no “minimal experience in the good,” no standard of action, however imperfectly we may live up to it. Victimhood, however, “adopts a purely negative standpoint,” claiming “to name an oppressor without taking responsibility for defining what a common existence without ‘oppression’ would look like.” In this, it resembles those forms of communitarianism that beckon us to revolutionary action without specifying what things will look like after the revolution has been effected, what regime will replace the old regime—or perhaps telling us that there will be no regimes at all, any more, only human beings (whatever they will turn out to be) living in unlimited freedom and complete equality. The logos of victimo-logy, combining or ‘synthesizing’ “pure Sameness” and “pure Otherness,” exempts itself “from the practical problem of constructive action in the world, action for a practical good.” In so doing, victimology has appropriated the language if not the ethos of Christianity, the language of love. “Love wins.” “Love Has No Labels.” Indeed, and in a way indisputably, “Love is Love.” The Beatles put it to music: “All you need is love.” Question authority but “do not even think about questioning ‘love,’ understood as absolute acceptance and nonjudgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness.” Hancock calls this notion of love, a sort of transcendent self-reflection, “the mirrored dome that arcs over our heads.” Under this dome, “all true individualism must be laid low; there must be no permanent, authoritative pillars of order, no mediating representations between the all-too-human and the divine.” Pantheism rejects mediation, since God and humanity are as interchangeable as energy and matter.
Hancock cites the important work of Daniel J. Mahoney, who calls this “humanitarian pantheism,” with its “endless project of humanitarian equalization” the “idol of our age.” All “vertical aspirations to nobility or virtue” must be sacrificed to the horizontal-humanitarian god, a god to whom no one need look up since “divinity has no meaning other than humanity,” a humanity that “can mean nothing but the complex of (1) material necessity, (2) trivialized, empty freedom, and (3) spirituality converted into warfare serving (1) and (2)—that is, warfare for a ‘justice’ that is pervasively, exclusively, ‘social.'” The problem is that “the ideal form of universality can never be fully reconciled with the givenness and particularity of actual humanity.” This fact may well animate increasing demands for the ‘trans-human,’ beyond but encompassing the ‘trans-sexual’ in morality and the ‘trans-national’ therapeutics-without-borders in politics. “How can universal truth (whether understood to be rational or revealed) accommodate human nature as inevitably inflected by particular loyalties and beliefs?” Why, because “love is love,” and “love knows no barrier of race or nationality.” Love “must prevail over all particular creeds and loyalties.” But love must have some object, someone or something deemed loveable, and that is said to be the victim, the sufferers of all forms of inequality, which is now defined as oppression.
This ideology derives from Christianity. Christianity is indeed a form of universalism. It overcomes “the particularism of the Jews,” the first receivers of God’s “rigorous, revealed law.” Christianity also overcomes “the natural particularism of our political condition, authoritatively described by Aristotle,” The Philosopher, as many Christians once called him, who argued that while “the natural virtues have a universal aspect,” they “are always bound up with the common good of particular cities or political communities,” each with its “ruling ethos” resulting from its ruling order, its regime. “Christian universalism thus necessarily confronts the particular claims of both revealed law and natural virtues, prior revelation and proud reason, Jerusalem and Athens.” Christians sometimes confront these claims very resolutely, indeed, as when Marcion rejected Judaism entirely in a non-secular form of ‘Love Wins,” and when Augustine called the pagan virtues “splendid vices,” additionally deeming philosophy too elitist-aristocratic, too much a rejection of the fact that we are all equal under God. We are all equally in need of His grace, Augustine taught, if we are to be saved from the consequences of our sin, which we all equally have, if not necessarily in equal quantities, kinds, and intensities. Hancock regards this Christian universalism not as true but deadly but as true but risky, always hovering close to “hollowing itself out, evacuating its own substance” by denying human particularity. By rejecting Christianity, modern secularism does not guard against this risk. On the contrary, it succumbs to it.
“Modern secularism is founded on a kind of mutually eroding interaction between Christian faith and pagan reason: Christian humility debunks the ‘virtuous’ pride of Greek reason, and Greek reason questions the supernatural claims of Christianity.” In Hancock’s assessment, this was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation, “a movement based on a reading of Paul and on a radicalization of Augustine,” a radical “separation of grace from nature” which “tended to deprive biblical commands of any rational support but a purely utilitarian understanding” (emphasis added). Modern philosophy, preceding and then following up on this Protestant tendency, more or less explicitly “deploy[s] Christian motives (along with others, of course) to undo Christianity” altogether. Descartes, for example, “appeals explicitly to a secularized law of humanitarian love” in order to replace Christian love—agape, caritas. Hancock distinguishes “the counterfeit from authentic Christianity,” the “holy love of a neighbor” from “the ideological project of the universal mastery of material need and inequality.” He wants to understand how we can “discern the radical Christian virtue of humility in such a way that we do not renounce the classical virtue of magnanimity and thus sacrifice our souls along with our pagan pride.” There is a sense in which, indeed, all you need is love, but personal salvation and genuine politics or civilization require loves that are quite distinct from love victimological. Christian love according to Aquinas holds, as Aquinas writes, that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”; and since human beings “are by nature familial, social, and political beings—and, for Christian, created as such by God—the human inclination to form families and political communities and to defend our particular families and political communities”—families and communities as they actually are—was “also a legitimate given.” Having dismissed such particularity in favor of, so to speak, universal universality, Christians have given in to the universalism of secularizing modern philosophic universalism. “The universality of our Christianity has outlived the Christianity of our universalism.”
Is it, then, “possible for nature—including our familial and political nature—to be God’s transcendentally free creation and yet for us to affirm it rationally as intrinsically, eternally, essentially good?” “This book is an essay”—in the original sense of an attempt—in “vindicating this possibility.”
In the first of the four parts of his book, Hancock addresses the theoretical dimensions of the matter. Some time ago, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher; it consisted of what were once called ‘close readings’ of books by André Malraux. A reader’s report came back, deploring the lack of “theory” in the manuscript, which in those days meant literary theory, which in those days meant Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism.’ My own references to Plato, Aristotle, and other such folk evidently didn’t amount to the presence of theory, despite Derrida’s own frequent recourse to them. In tune with the academic temper of the time, the editor rejected the manuscript. The reader’s complaint was an early example of what Pierre Manent calls the “hypertrophy of theory,” the inclination to use abstract notions as a substitute for looking carefully at what is in front of you. Hancock notes that in moral deliberation this practice “obscures the essential goods of practical human existence,” an existence which is indeed not only right in front but all around us and in us, too. In us, it is conscience. “Manent shows that Christian conscience can be interpreted either as the consummation of classical confidence in the inherent good, of morality or, in the form of sheer consciousness of sin, as a tipping point tending to the subversion of morality.” The postmodern moral theory that confuses Christian charity with compassion, “this flattening, secular universalization” of moral and political thought, can be countered by recourse to “the virtue of practical wisdom or prudence.” But virtues are strengths, and strength requires difficult exercise. This may be one reason why easy and lazy sentiment so often prevails over prudence.
“Can rigorous thinking support meaningful living?” While Nietzsche despised all easy ways out of the moral labyrinth, ridiculing the passive, shallow ‘Last Man,’ he also doubted the power of reason, famously preferring the ‘will to power.’ Manent traces such irrationalism to what he calls the “irreparable, unpardonable error” of modern natural right, which sought to derive moral commands from the ‘state of nature,’ the supposed condition of human life when there were no commands. This does indeed put morality under the command of the wills of those who agree to a moral code, effectively (in Hancock’s words) “render[ing] us ever more subject to the abstract and impersonal machinery of the modern state,” as is already explicit in Hobbes’s Leviathan. “Hobbes’s project truly foreshadows modern existence as the illusion of absolute freedom under the reality of absolute and inhuman sovereignty.” Hobbes in turn derives his theory from Machiavelli, who defines a “new world” to be “defined not by our human subordination to certain intrinsically moral ends but by our amoral knowledge of the circumstances or obstacles” to what we want, which is to place those circumstances or obstacles under our control, not the control of ‘Fortuna’ or, sotto voce, God. That is, he replaces both classical and Christian virtue with virtù, virtuosity, the savvy triumph of the will.
In this, Manent argues, Machiavellianism was oddly, and inadvertently, supplemented by Martin Luther, who assuredly did not intend to conquer God and vigorously denied that he was a ‘theorist’ or philosopher. By claiming that the salvation of human souls depends solely on faith in God, Luther brought Christians to deprecate human action. The Christian believer replaces the Christian agent. And all believers are more or less equal, as believing cops and cobblers are “no less priests” than priests, equally charged with evangelizing the word of God. “This leveling is possible only because the dignity of such functions has been severed from any humanly accessible evaluation of lower and higher necessities and purposes, such as those that have framed the classical tradition of political reflection.” The spirit of leveling then begins to replace the spirit of, well, spirituality: the hierarchy of a secular realm obliged to obey “the superior, spiritual realm.” In order to undermine the priestly rule of Roman Catholicism, Luther “liberat[es] the secular from the spiritual,” making spirituality entirely “a matter of conscience,” a matter of the inner man, while making this world “wholly external,” the realm of “mortal life and property.” The inner life, Luther insists, “is immune from external force”; this contrasts with Aquinas, who “taught that political authority was essential to our humanity, even our uncorrupted humanity prior to the fall,” when human life was not mortal and there was no property. For Luther, insofar as life in ‘this world’ is lived by Christians, it registers the love of neighbor; politics ministers exclusively to the secular needs of neighbors. “Secular needs become authoritative for Christians as someone else’s needs.” If Machiavelli inaugurates the modernity of atheist ‘selfishness,’ Luther inaugurates the modernity of theist ‘otherness,’ a doctrine encompassing “the Christian duty of love.” Once Machiavelli’s atheism overtakes Christian theism, love becomes a sentiment, politics a Leninism pervaded by Lennonism. As Luther puts it, with characteristic forthrightness, “it is a Christian act and an act of love confidently to kill, rob, and pillage the enemy, and to do everything that can injure him until one has conquered him according to the methods of war.” Alternatively, such militancy can ‘go soft,’ as it does in a Beatles tune.
Philosophically, postmodernism owes a supreme debt to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s early writings clearly indicate that “Martin Luther’s idea of faith and sin played a decisive role” in his “conversion from a staunch Catholic philosopher working within an Aristotelian-Scholastic framework to an atheist philosopher who embraced temporality or historicity as the insuperable horizon of human existence.” With Luther, Heidegger insisted that human corruption “can never be grasped radically enough,” that “hope comes not from works but from suffering.” Consistent with the overall tendency of Lutheranism, Heidegger regards “all human action” as “presumptuous and sinful.” As with Luther, nothing in humanity is not ruined by sin. Human nature is in no way naturally inclined toward God; “the being of man as such is itself sin,” the “real core” of humanness. Hancock comments, “We might say that Heidegger uses Luther to deconstruct Aristotle,” then “uses Aristotle to deconstruct Luther” by avoiding any belief in “a transcendent personal divinity.” Thus, while “an Aristotelian method strips Luther of God Luther strips Aristotle of the Good,” in a “mutual erosion of faith and reason” characteristic of postmodernity—existentialism in place of essentialism. “Rebellion and flight are the human condition, and authentic human existence is nothing but the lucid and resolute embrace of this condition.” In sum, “the absolute denial of a natural orientation toward the good,” whether in its modern, atheistic Machiavellian form or in its Lutheran form—with Heideggerianism as a sort of synthesis of the two—”entails a wholesale repudiation of the practical standpoint of the insuperable ‘gap’ of action,” that is, the gap between creator-God and created Man, philosophic theory and political practice, wisdom as sophia and wisdom as phronēsis.
Hancock follows his account of Manent’s dissection of postmodernism with an account of Manent’s remedy for healing. In his turn, Manent follows Aquinas, who writes that to know God is to “join with one unknown.” That is, knowledge of the Creator will always be partial knowledge. In this, Aquinas follows the pattern less of Aristotle, ‘the master of all who know,’ but of Socrates, who turned from speculation about the heavens, from what we call the ‘philosophy of science,’ the attempt to know the enormous cosmos, to the surer knowledge of human beings, those political animals he sought out in the Athenian marketplace. Practical knowledge is more certain than theoretical knowledge. For the Thomistic Manent, this means that “practical life guided by the hope of eternal salvation is life ‘directed and judged by my conscience,” a conscience “not absolute and purely individual but a matter of ‘more or less’ and decisively mediated by the institutional church.” That is, just as the “gap” between God and man requires the Son to mediate between the Father and those who offend Him with their inveterate sinfulness, so too the gap between our conscience and our sinful impulses must be mediated by the regime of God on earth, the ecclesia or assembly of God, His Church. But although Manent affirms much of the Thomistic view, he clearly sees what Hancock calls “the limitations of the medieval understanding.” There is indeed a “continuity between the natural condition (as articulated, notably, by Aristotle) and the Christian condition,” but there is also “a fundamental discontinuity” between them.
Manent takes Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity seriously and, it might be added, Luther’s critique of human nature seriously. There is something to Machiavelli’s cynical insistence on the contrast between what we say and what we do, “between the end [people] imagine and the actual motives of action.” Christianity, as he charges, can indeed lend itself to a “pretentious passivity.” This occurs when conscience is misconceived as merely the recipient of God’s grace and not as “the emblem of the continuity between nature and Christianity, the culmination of Aristotelian reflective choice and, therefore, of the true, practical condition of humanity,” a condition that requires prudential or practical reasoning if it is to make its way in the world on a path towards God. Reasoning is necessary because the path is narrow and winding, given the discontinuity between human nature and grace. That is, there is something to Luther’s claim that “the invisible and radically internal domain of the Christian soul is essentially incommunicable with respect to the visible realm in which the citizen acts.” “To recover a true and natural perspective of action—to recover natural law within the perspective of an openness to a divinity that infinitely transcends our humanity—must then require honoring the moral truth of Christianity while knowing how to avoid its overreach and, therefore, its collapse, a collapse that brings with it the loss of the classical-Christian truth of moral agency.” Manent regards Christianity both to fulfill nature and to risk undermining it. Christianity fulfills human nature by teaching that human beings can and should be more than the social and political conventions with which they live, which they have instituted for themselves. Christianity does this because conscience “crystallizes the moment of individual responsibility, the deeply personal and individual character of moral agency” under the regime of God and not only the regime of Man. In this sense, Christianity “Christian conscience is the supernatural fulfillment of the classical, natural understanding of reflective moral choice,” inasmuch as it is highly imprudent to ignore the laws of God, both natural and revealed. This notwithstanding, “the individualizing and transcending claims of conscience risk destroy confidence in all concrete norms,” which are “always connected in some way with the natural goods of particular human individuals and communities.” Speaking for himself, Hancock proposes that the good found only in the regime or ‘city’ of God, being “utterly beyond attainment by man’s natural powers,” can beckon human beings toward “hypertrophy,” as indeed can a misconceived Platonism, which without irony, that shield of prudence, holds up the standard of the best regime in a way that denigrates the ways of life human beings must consider on this mortal coil. The quest for “a unified and comprehensive system,” “a single rational standard” for human life—namely, “the contemplation of eternal, self-sufficient truth, as the highest good and lodestar of human action”—will not suffice for the conduct of real life. This is why Manent “declines to follow the ancient Greeks,” preferring an understanding of the cardinal virtues as, to be sure, “quite stable and universal in their manifestations in various regimes and cultures,” but “actualized not as independent ends-in-themselves to be grasped by theory but in practical, political deliberations relative to a particular regime and thus as means to further ends.” The good does indeed have a “structure,” but that structure can only be seen in practice, with “Christian humility and even…modern skepticism” (e.g., Hume). That is, modern and postmodern life needs a “humbling of theory in order to release the inherent good of practice.”
Having repudiated, each in its own way, “the evidence of practice” and “the claims of natural virtue,” modern philosophy and Protestantism have prepared the way for “a new, awakened secular spirituality for which the rivalry between reason and revelation,” still very much alive in previous centuries, “has been forgotten.” “Leftism has become a religion.” “Wokeness” parallels—some might say parodies—the philosophers’ ‘enlightenment’ and ‘consciousness’ as well as Christian’s receiving of the Holy Spirit. And while “woke religion violates common sense,” common sense “needs help defending against this violation.” Common sense receives little help in this from the modern state, since the attempt to manage Church-state relations by separating Church from state has in practice elevated the state over religion, whether in the monarchist France of the late Bourbons or in democratic America. Nor do the churches help, as Christianity for the most part forsakes the goal of salvation for the cultivation of humanitarian sentiment.
To say ‘humanitarian,’ however, raises questions: What is it? What is its purpose—what is good for it? Since Rousseau, we moderns have tended to say that the good inheres in the body, and the beginning of remedying the body’s health is pity. But, as Manent sees, when “the notion of evil tends to merge with physical suffering” it is impossible to distinguish between the rights of human beings and the rights of animals. If that is humanitarianism, then we are left with a morality of “weak and self-interested sentiment,” unable to make war or to defend the peace. This impotence of practice mirrors the omnipotence of imagination. Indeed, “Imagine” is another John Lennon tune, inviting us to worship humankind “as the Grand-Être that determines our horizon: imagine there’s no Heaven, and the world will live as one. Fat chance, common sense responds, but what chance has common sense to intervene when we ‘motivate’ ourselves with (to borrow from a song the Beatles didn’t write) feelings, nothing more than feelings. Pity isn’t Christian charity; for starters, charity isn’t easy. It is a virtue, and its aim, “otherworldly salvation” is so hard to achieve that human beings need divine help to obtain it. It is “an active disposition of the will,” activated not by human powers but by God’s power of providential grace.
With regard to the state, which rules Christians and non-Christians, the Church has “a public role.” It mediates, connecting self-government, which human beings can practice regardless of their religious convictions, with “a confidence in the primacy of the good.” Such confidence is natural to human beings; André Malraux—no Christian—titled his novel set in the Spanish Civil War L’Espoir. “Human action at its best—that is, action according to the enduring cardinal virtues—naturally opens upon a hope for and in something ‘bigger than us, too big for us.'” As Christian citizens, Manent writes, “we address the Most High from the site of our action and for the common good of the city of which we are citizens.” And non-Christian citizens still want the good for something bigger than themselves, namely, their political community. If the human good was put into man by God at creation, leaving him “in the hands of his own counsel, then the nation takes part in creation’s goodness” and, in Hancock’s words, “rational, virtuous deliberation in the production of a political common good has divine significance,” being part of God’s intention for his creations. And even atheists and agnostics reject such deliberation at their peril if they put their trust in their own sentiments, reeds that are either too weak or too blindly powerful for their own good. Love in sentimental sense is not all you need.
God’s charity or love, as distinguished from all-too-human humanitarianism “guides and perfects the natural virtues,” “activat[ing] and extend[ing] our natural propensity to virtue. Hancock again cites Mahoney, who writes that “charity must be interpreted in the light of prudence.” In so saying, however, Mahoney’s elevation of “the mediating virtue of prudence,” which Hancock rightly calls an “urgent truth,” was urged by Jesus Himself, who commanded His followers to be innocent or harmless as doves but also prudent as serpents (Matthew 10:16). The passage is often translated “wise as serpents,” but the Greek word is a derivative of phronēsis, not of sophia. God evidently didn’t even need to read Aristotle to recognize the need for practical wisdom.
The modern philosophers, from Machiavelli to Heidegger, all draw upon Christian themes, typically in an attempt to substitute their own principles, whether natural or historical, for Christian charity, claiming that they can more effectually bring humanity to the goods it wants than the Church can. This, of course, can only be plausible if God and the human need for spiritual rather than bodily salvation remains well in the background. To do this, the moderns appeal the charm of equality that Christianity fosters, although in the moderns’ case this isn’t equality under God for the purpose of calling into question the eternal value of human hierarchies. Hancock finds more recent examples of this modern project in the writings of the United States, Britain, and France, respectively: from the philosophy professors John Rawls, Larry Siedentop, and Alain Badiou.
As “the most authoritative author of late progressive liberalism,” Rawls presents us with a perfect example of Manent’s “hypertrophy of theory.” A neo-Kantian, he repudiates “the practical point of view” and human nature altogether as sources of moral guidance. His well-known and doggedly egalitarian concepts—the “original position,” the “veil of ignorance,” and the “two principles of justice”—all depend upon “Rawls’s deep commitment to an obviously post-Protestant ‘purity of heart.'” Human beings are indeed “naturally moral,” he allows, but only “in the sense that they naturally receive the stamp of whatever morality, whatever conception of justice, a society authorizes.” He rejects such relativism while also rejecting the available universal principle of hedonism. “The only way to achieve true freedom, rationality, and humanity,” he supposes, “is to be prepared absolutely to sacrifice any concept of what is good, including emphatically any allegedly ‘higher’ good, to a system of justice based on a pure conception of right,” there being “no right or natural or divinely ordained ‘order of the soul,’ but only ‘unity of the self’ defined by a purely social, purely horizontal reciprocity of rights, and thus by the conviction that ‘we participate in one another’s nature,'” realizing our selves “in the activity of many selves”—social existence being “the absolute horizon of human existence.” “The heart of Rawls’s Theory of Justice is the sacrifice of natural and unequal virtue to a spiritualized project of material equality”—welfare-state liberalism. However, such a moral theory, unbounded by any nature beyond purity of heart (which isn’t all that natural among humans), and therefore unbounded by prudence, is “inherently self-radicalizing,” not long to be confined to the modest measures of ‘progressive’ liberalism once upheld within the confines of Harvard Yard. Victimology has overcome it.
In his Inventing the Individual, Siedentop takes a more historicizing stance, claiming that “Christian belief is the wellspring of the moral idea of a community of equal and free individuals that we associate with modern ‘secularism.'” On that basis, he hopes to effect a marriage between Christians and secular liberals. In Siedentop’s reading of the New Testament, Paul invents individuality, if not its heir, modern individuality. Paul overthrows “the hierarchical political, spiritual, and intellectual framework of pagan civilization.” Even or even especially the ancient philosophers instantiate this hierarchy, as seen in Plato’s rigorously aristocratic dialogue, The Republic—more literally, Regime, Politeia. Paul “blasted this aristocratic framework, igniting a transformation with revolutionary social and intellectual consequences that are still unfolding in our times.” The social consequence of Pauline Christianity is of course ‘democracy’ in Tocqueville’s sense: social equality’s gradual but sure conquest of aristocracies everywhere. The intellectual consequence is “a new view of reason” that “prepares modern rationalism because it abandons the hierarchical claims of reason’s rule and instead bases reason on an egalitarian and universalist faith,” an “imperative of universal freedom and equality.” As early as Judaism, Siedentop writes, “Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will” (emphasis added)— obedience not to a god who is Logos but a Being who avers, “I will be who I will be.” To this, Paul adds a “vision of a mystical union with Christ,” one that “introduces a revised notion of rationality,” which seems foolish to the philosophers. According to Siedentop, the ancient philosophers, imprisoned by the aristocratic regime of the polis, could only conceive of inequality as natural. Natural equality made no sense to them. But in Paul’s formulation, “Judaism’s favoring of law and command over logos or reason, its preoccupation with ‘conformity to a higher or divine will,’ is miraculously combined with the maximal extension of reason’s empire, with ‘the abstracting potential of later Hellenistic philosophy.'” Hancock finds this reminiscent of the distinction made by Manent in his Metamorphoses of the City—the distinction between the few and the many that animated “the natural life of the city,” the polis, disappears into “the one-all pair” of the Roman Empire, which the Hellenistic philosophers reflect. This “finds theological expression in Christianity, and continues to haunt modern secular humanism.” For Manent, “the one and the all, radical transcendence and reductive equality, are two sides of the same spiritual coin. The difference between Manent and Sidentop is not so much in their analyses but in their reactions to what they describe. Siedentop finds the “joint reign” of “the absolute one and the formless egalitarian” as “altogether unproblematic.” Manent still finds virtue in some aspects of the limits seen in the polis. And he also sees the God, the Christ, not simply of Paul but of John: the God Who is Logos, not simply a Being of will and therefore of ever-changing mind or logos, a God approached only by “a leap of faith.” As is so often the case on the ‘Left,’ the supposedly fluid character of the ultimate Reality always flows in the same direction: egalitarianism. This is how Siedentop can call for a marriage of Christianity and secularism. In his eyes, they both aim at the same thing.
Alain Badiou also centers his argument on Paul. In his version of the Gospels, Paul is the founder of secularism, a “Christian secularism” that “does not culminate in Siedentop’s [or Rawls’s] rather complacent liberalism but rather in an extremely vague but unmistakable invocation of collective, indeed ‘communist’ revolutionary action.” Here, Christ’s Resurrection bespeaks “the submission of reason to the ‘folly of our preaching,'” which in turn “liberates human action from all ‘rational’ limits.” Utopianism is possible and, since Christianity is at heart secular, it is possible without divine intervention. As for philosophy, it “is not transformed but is simply abolished. In Badiou’s modern version of Origenism (as distinguished and indeed sharply opposed to ‘originalism’), “Jesus” means an absolute moment in History, a “purely formal and revolutionary ‘Event.'” The Event inaugurates a Trotskyish permanent revolution, “a negation of law and reason without any stable content but only the form of revolutionary subjectivity and universality and universality, radical individuality opening up upon radical collectivity” whereby “love converts thought into sheer power, ‘the real materiality of militant universalism.'” “As a good communist, Badiou projects mankind’s universal material redemption—the overcoming by and for humanity of the realm of material necessity—as the horizon and implicit telos of his passion for the radical destruction of all given horizons.”
Readers familiar with the correspondence between the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève and the Platonist Leo Strauss will hear resonances of these themes in some of Kojève’s claims. Though a rationalist, Hegelian reason reaches a limit only very late in human history, indeed in the thought of Hegel himself. Strauss “considers Alexandre Kojève’s philosophy as exemplary of the interpretation of secular rationalism as the real fulfillment of Christian rationalism,” but much more rigorously so than anything that Rawls, Siedentop, or Badiou can offer. In his version of Hegelian grand ‘synthesis,’ Kojève “combines Siedentop’s prosaic liberal and democratic sympathies with Badiou’s revolutionary resolution.” It is to Strauss’s reply to Kojève in the name of classical, ‘pre-modern’ philosophy that Hancock now turns. Hancock will go part of the way with Strauss, rather as Aquinas goes part of the way with Aristotle. His account of Strauss, and his response to ‘Straussian’ thought, which concludes his final chapter on theory and begins first chapter on practice, deserves careful attention.
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