Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and Provo

At the beginning of the West, Plato did it for the ancient Greeks; then, centuries later, Tocqueville did it for the dawning modern democratic age. Ralph Hancock has sought to do much the same for the late-modern West in his book Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. What do they all seek to do? They all seek to promote human self-knowledge and civic improvement by means of the categories of the city and man.  

Plato’s Republic introduced the capital notion of the city and man, and, more precisely, the conceptual scheme of regime-types and soul-types. To understand politics, you have to understand political regimes, but also different soul-configurations. To understand man, you have to understand the human soul and the configurations it will take on in different political formations. In the Republic, Socrates retraced what became the canonical schema of both. After Plato, Western human beings had a template and a portfolio to draw from in understanding themselves politically and anthropologically.  

Centuries later, Tocqueville discerned the dawning democratic age in the West and set about understanding and guiding it. A novelty in human history, to do so required novel categories, such as “social state.” To bring out what was distinctive in democracy, he conducted studies of contrasts with its predecessor “aristocracy,” while also analyzing the impact of the democratic social state on its denizens, democratic human beings. In Volume II of his great work, Democracy in America, he retraced its democratizing “influences” on the human intellect, human passions and sentiments, and the mores of society, and then turned the tables and looked at the influence these ideas, sentiments, and mores would have on social and political life going forward.  

If democracy only followed its natural tendencies, the human soul would be enervated and turn inward, while debilitated democrats would look increasingly toward a tutelary state to define and supply their “needs” and “rights”. Fortunately, antidotes to this natural tendency were available, and Tocqueville pointed them out for citizens and statesmen to appreciate and apply. Chief among them were an elevated notion of human liberty – what he called “liberty under God and the law” - a clear distinction between an envious and leveling form of equality and a truer, more elevated and virile form, and a judicious blending in law and mores of what he called “the spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion”.  

While Tocqueville is indispensable for Hancock because closer to us in time and subject, Plato provides the overriding image of what he is doing: he descends into the cave beneath the cave of late-modern humanity, sheds light on its soul-deforming confines and shadows, and points the way upward and forward toward the Sun.  

Woke Ideology and Late-Modern Souls 

Like the classics, who began their investigations by following the lead of endoxa, of authoritative public opinions, Tocqueville recognized the hegemony of a distinctive democratic endoxon, which he called the democratic “dogma” concerning man and social order. 

Hancock too discerns an overarching, soul-penetrating-and-forming endoxon dominating the contemporary Western scene. This one, however, is more encompassing, as well as more restrictive, than the previous authoritative opinions of the modern West. It encompasses all of Western history, all of contemporary society, and sets the grooves, public and private, for right thinking and action today. It is restricting because it reduces all of human history to the opposition of “executioners and victims,” to use Camus’ famous formulation. Restricting too because it puts human history and human societies within a wholly immanent frame: there is no opening to transcendence in the human condition; all such claims, and the institutions and lives built on them, are built on lies, deceptions, and self-deceptions. In this worldview, humanity is utterly self-enclosed and its history heretofore one of oppressive binaries; now, however, a new world, a world based on the dark truth of the past and the radiant promise of a fully rectified and reconciled Humanity, is aborning. 

This endoxon has made significant inroads into the institutions and authorities ostensibly based on alternative worldviews and anthropologies. Borrowing a phrase from the contemporary French Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent, Hancock also calls this invidious reductionistic view “the religion of Humanity,” and, with Manent, he notes its erosion of traditional beliefs and institutions. Among those affected is the Catholic church, especially under Pope Francis, but other Christian denominations equally or more so, including Hancock’s own.  

This has led in many quarters to an alternative Christianity, one that Hancock sees as the complement to victimhood in contemporary society. While holding on to trappings of traditional Christianity, this ersatz Christianity sees itself as called upon to “be open to,” to “embrace,” and to “affirm the Other.” Thus, for Hancock, the regnant ethos of the West combines two ersatz forms of religion: an ersatz Christianity that transforms “love” into an affirmation of a litany of sacrosanct victims of the Western past and present. Rainbows on altars and DEI struggle sessions are two sides of this unholy alliance. 

Digging deeper, Hancock probes the two conspiring soul-types of our age and subjects them to critical inspection. He also uses the telling anecdote (thus relieving the abstract character of the discussion) to initiate a discussion, to illustrate it, or to cap it. These are vignettes that all of us can recognize and relate to. The insolent victim, the self-denying believer (or liberal), the demi-educated DEI “administrator,” the “compassionate” and “inclusive” cleric, and the self-loathing American or Westerner, are not philosophical or literary fictions.  

Paradoxes abound here, although the subjects are rarely aware of them. An anti-Christian “Christianity” that despises its original and historically authentic versions and yet wants to cling to the name and title indicates a mind and soul at odds with itself, while, similarly, the soul given over to late modern binary ideologies (wokeness, but also multiculturalism and settler colonialism) is captive to a patently false promise of total human emancipation and freedom. Both cut themselves off from the truths of the Christian religion and from the truths of the human condition that common sense intuitively grasps and philosophy takes as its proper matter for reflection. These demonstrable deficiencies lead to the next part of Hancock’s increasingly ambitious project. 

Radical Critique Requires Radical Rejoinder 

Implicit in Hancock’s critiques are positive alternatives laid out later in the book. Put another way: the thoroughgoing character of the challenges posed by today’s humanitarian-victim ideology requires that the response be equally comprehensive.  

Since it attacks the entirety of Western civilization, it requires a defense of “our civilization” and indeed of civilization tout court. Since it presents itself as an unquestionable public ethos, it requires a defense of so-called “traditional morality” and, more capaciously, of what he calls “responsible moral and political thinking.” And because it challenges the highest reaches – the transcendent aspirations – of human beings, whether philosophical or religious, it requires a defense of transcendence (“the Sun”), as well as some specification concerning its complex relationship with “immanence,” or our common human experience of the human. At this point, the grand ambition of Hancock’s endeavor fully shows itself.  

This ambition and endeavor have roots in his singular individuality. 

Provo to Cambridge (MA) and Back 

As Hancock presents today’s western societies, and especially its American portion, nature and supernature are tacitly denied, largely hidden, sometimes aped by ersatz religion and ersatz reason or Ideology. They exist under the obscuring cloud of what Eric Voegelin called “surreality.” This raises the question: how does one have access to them? How does one at least glimpse them in the midst of dominant shadows and censorious authorities? How does one escape from beneath the cave? To answer these questions, it is necessary to say a few things about Hancock himself.  

He lives and teaches political philosophy at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, with all that that may conjure up in terms of environment, way of life, and even commitments to faith and the life of the mind.  He attended Harvard University as a grad student and studied with Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., an encounter that opened his mind to the study of political philosophy, and a bit later came across Pierre Manent and other Catholic thinkers, living and dead, who spoke directly to his concerns about faith and philosophy under the conditions of advanced or late-modernity. 

All these gave him access to what one could call the “relatively normal” or non-Ideological modern world. Family life in Provo was vibrant, often fruitful, and taken for granted in ways that it was not in Cambridge, MA. Likewise, politics were more Tocquevillian, i.e., local-scaled and a mixture of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty, and the parties that contended were considerably less ideological than they became. This personal experience, and the broader learning and vistas he began to acquire at Harvard, and his encounter with Catholic thought, made him aware, in broad outlines and some detail, of our modern circumstances and the fundamental issues raised by modernity. He has been filling in and deepening this understanding for several decades now. 

Actual Goods and the Good 

We should give Hancock the rostrum and let him articulate the starting point in reality for his positive argument:  

To grasp more concretely what is at stake in this radically enlightened or woke sensibility, we must look at … what they have in common, … where they engage the actual practical world, the moral, religious, and political world in which we live: in a word, … both [are] sworn enemies of the good.  

He then explains:    

When we say [they] are sworn enemies of “the good,” we mean that they disdain the actual goods inscribed in the concrete institutions and ways of life of any real society, any actual moral and political order. We [further] mean that by rejecting all understandings of what is good that are mediated by particular, finite, and imperfect institutions, all norms that reflect the influence of human beings, past or present … , [they] are in fact rejecting 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. 

In precise philosophical categories that characterize “any real society,” “any actual moral and political order” (concrete, imperfect, mediated), Hancock delineates the human scene in terms of “actual goods” and intimations of “the good”. 

A Spectrum of ‘Takes’ on the Mediated Goods 

For Hancock, this is the necessary starting point and constant touchstone for reason and reflection. It is also the object of a great division and debate in Western thought that he guides us through. He considers a range of thinkers and positions precisely on how they view what one could call, at least provisionally, the natural or ordinary order of human things (heterogeneous sexual couplings and hierarchy in the family; inherited moral norms; and social deference to political and religious authority). At one end, there are those who condemn such an order as shot through with corruption. Proponents of this view can be either religious or secular: in its demand for pure Social Justice, wokeness joins with certain versions of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, to descry the corrupt or “fallen” character of this world. 

At the other end are those who see, as Hancock does, the goodness and goods of normal human common life. These too can be either believers or philosophers. This heterogeneous group tends to see common life in terms of goods, goods that indicate or intimate a Ground or Source that gives them – and human life – ultimate significance. Some ascend philosophically from the imperfect goods to a Perfect Good; others claim a revelation and a descent, variously articulated, from this Good to the realm of goods. Some – a precious and ambitious few – work both “the way up and the way down” (Heraclitus). Hancock uses critical engagement with both parties, but especially the latter, to work his way from earth to Heaven, and back again. 

The Guiding Thread:  Responsible Reason 

In these engagements, he displays two other features of his intellectual character: utter fairness toward others and a constantly probing mind. Both lend themselves to length. Here I will simply report some important aspects of his engagement with three thinkers:  Leo Strauss, Pierre Manent, and the twentieth century Jesuit thinker, Erich Przywara. What links them together is that each took upon himself the task of what Hancock calls “responsible reason.” This is reason self-conscious of its grandeur and its limitations, aware too of its responsibility toward reality in its given articulations, its mysteries and intimations. One might say that it is the opposite of – and an antidote to – modern reason in its main iterations. 

What Hancock is most interested in is how each of these thinkers articulates the common human world of practical action and goods, and how each conjugate it with metaphysical and ultimate realities. Strauss, a Jew, is the representative of philosophy; Manent and Przywara, both Catholics, of political philosophy and of Catholic theology and metaphysics,  respectively.  

Strauss had an acute sense of the artificiality of modern life (“the cave beneath the cave” as he put it), and his return to the ancients was motivated by a desire to recover the natural order of things and thus give philosophical thinking its matter and its proper starting point. This return allowed him to rediscover the primacy of the political over economics, “culture,” and History, but for him, the political was more properly articulated as “the theologico-political.” What the moderns had sundered, the premoderns, ancient and biblical, had kept united. Within it, he retrieved a more natural set of categories of analysis, headed by law (nomos), the noble and the just. As he proceeded, he went, or pointed, in two directions.  

On one hand, he explicitly recognized the “sacred limits” found in ordinary human moral experience, with all that that entailed in terms of “Thou shalt not’s!” and of intimations of a supervening invisible Order. But in other places, he “instrumentalized” morality and presented “the philosopher” as beyond moral good and evil and leading a nearly inhuman existence. Strauss kept this tension alive, while certain of his disciples dissolved it and effectively equated philosophy, or reason at its purported peak, with skepticism and nihilism. This was not the path to take. 

The Catholic thinkers committed to nature and grace provide better guidance than Strauss, and Hancock engages in a most respectful, if ultimately critical, dialogue with them. Manent helps with a very penetrating (and original) articulation of the practical domain and of man as an agent. In particular, he has a distinctive take on practical reason, on what he calls “commanding reason.” Hancock is fascinated by this recovery of the starting points during a time of political and ecclesial humanitarianism. This was especially the case when Manent, later in his career, conjugated this understanding of prudence with a Thomistic understanding of eternal law, or divine Providence, in which God gives his rational creature the freedom and vocation to pursue the goods that reason and revelation make known. 

Fulsome admiration does not preclude criticism, however; Hancock sees the starting points to be more indicative, more expressive, of the transcendent than either Catholic author does. This is both a philosophical and a religious difference. In his Pascalian moment, Manent proposes a Christianity that is rather estranged from the fallen political and moral world in their compromised created goodness and goods, while in his more “Aristotelian” moments, he tends to leave the two orders, natural and supernatural, to distinctive “operations,” without ordering them theoretically or practically. Hancock wants more explicit synthesis or coordination. 

Something comparable characterizes Hancock’s engagement with Przywara. In the twentieth century, the Jesuit thinker revived and developed the traditional scholastic teaching of the analogia entis, the analogy of being, which helped the Church articulate the nature of the two poles of created and Uncreated Being, as well as the infinite ladder that went from one to the other. This was an attempt to spell out a dogmatic affirmation of the Church at the Fourth Lateran Council, according to which “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” Given the infinite distance and disproportion between the Infinite and the finite, this seems to be a necessary inference. Hancock, however, argues for more immanence of the transcendence, more “real presence,” or direct linkage of faith or theological discourse and human realities and discourse.  

As it happens, there are other Thomistic resources for this countermove, including a notion of divine omnipresence. Earlier, Augustine gave it its paradoxical human application when he declared to the Lord God in the Confessions: “You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.) (Confessions 3.6.11). Hancock may be on to something, or Catholicism may be closer than he realizes. The dialogue needs to continue. This leads to my final remarks. 

Genuine Ecumenism for Ecclesial and Public Good 

It is remarkable, and a sign of hope in our rather dark times, that a book of such broad and deep learning, grand scope and ambition, and probing intellect has been written and seen the light of day. I think we can extract two broader lessons from this fact. One is the promise offered by genuine ecumenism. Hancock dedicates the book to his late Catholic friend, Peter Augustine Lawler, and the book is published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In these facts, there is real intellectual and ecumenical friendship “across the aisles.” Hancock, his Catholic interlocutors, and Notre Dame Press show us that real theological differences need not be a barrier to intellectual openness, candid discussion, and mutual enrichment. With the proviso that it be conducted with the virtues that Hancock displays, this ecumenism is good for the individuals and the individual confessions involved. 

Secondly, in our spiritually parched western lands, Hancock and his Catholic friends make visible the much-needed waters of life that political philosophy, philosophy, and real theological investigation can offer. Here is a genuine pluralism that could help save the West.  

Paul Seaton, an independent scholar, is the translator of The Religion of Humanity (St. Augustine Press) and the author of Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us (St. Augustine Press).