I promised levity for this week. I like to keep my promises, but I also considered, after my deep bow to Lady Philosophy, that it might be prudent to instill some balance by highlighting the many characteristic failings of hyper-thinky people. And I do mean “many.”

All arrows are pointing here to Paul Johnson. His 1988 Intellectuals is merciless in its send-up of Great Thinkers. It’s also extremely funny.

This book is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. It’s basically a collection of hit pieces on modern thinkers, and Johnson approaches his targets in the mode of a tabloid writer or oppo researcher, reveling gleefully in every broken vow or destroyed friendship, delighting in the absurd hypocrisies that define all of these lives. It’s intensely polemical, and sometimes unfair, but so very entertaining. Who can get to the end of this paragraph without guffawing?

Behind [Rousseau’s] self-pity lay an overpowering egoism, a feeling that he was quite unlike other men, both in his sufferings and his qualities. He wrote: ‘What could your miseries have in common with mine? My situation is unique, unheard of since the beginning of time…’ Equally, ‘The person who can love me as I can love is still to be born.’ ‘No one ever had more talent for loving.’ ‘I was born to be the best friend that ever existed.’ ‘I would leave this life with apprehension if I knew a better man than me.’ ‘Show me a better man than me, a heart more loving, more tender, more sensitive…’ ‘Posterity will honour me… because it is my due.’ ‘I rejoice in myself.’ ‘…my consolation lies in my self-esteem.’ ‘…if there were a single enlightened government in Europe, it would have erected statues to me.’ No wonder Burke declared: ‘Vanity was the vice he possessed to a degree little short of madness.’

Vanity is a vice possessed by most intellectuals. They tend to think they know everything. Here is the first paragraph of Johnson’s chapter on Bertrand Russell:

No intellectual in history offered advice to humanity over so long a period as Bertrand Russell, third Earl Russell (1872-1970). He was born in the year General Ulysses S. Grant was reelected to the US Presidency and he died on the eve of Watergate. He was a few months younger than Marcel Proust and Stephen Crane, a few weeks older than Calvin Coolidge and Max Beerbohm; yet he lived long enough to salute the revolting students of 1968 and enjoy the work of Stoppard and Pinter. All this time he put forth a steady stream of counsel, exhortation, information and warnings on an astonishing variety of subjects. One bibliography (almost certainly incomplete) lists sixty-eight books. The first, German Social Democracy, was published in 1896, when Queen Victoria still had five years to live; his posthumous Essays in Analysis (1973) came out the year Nixon resigned. In between he published works on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social reconstruction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, the ABC of atoms (this was in 1923; thirty-six years later came a book on nuclear warfare), science, relativity, education, scepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future, disarmament, peace, war crimes and other topics. To these should be added a huge output of newspaper and magazine articles embracing every conceivable theme not excluding The Use of Lipstick, The Manners of Tourists, Choosing Cigars, and Wife-Beating.

He’s just so good. Johnson, I mean.

Is it wrong to take some pleasure in this defiant refusal of intellectual charity? Possibly. I do think one should bear in mind the character of the book one is reading. It’s not the whole story on these people. Nevertheless, their failings were very real! Fairly egregious in fact, and their personal failings really did flow over into moral and intellectual errors, which is part of the point of the book. It’s full of salutary warnings about the tremendous harm intellectuals can do, to everyone around them and the world as a whole. Even tiny two-bit thinkers like me can benefit from occasional reminders of how absolutely monstrous intellectuals can become.

Thinkers easily persuade themselves that they’re better than normal men, but are they in fact much worse? This seems to me like a complex question. Certainly, they are prone to characteristic temptations. People whose IQ is a standard deviation or two above other people’s do tend to experience the world a bit differently, and easily persuade themselves that this is a mark of great superiority. A rarefied economy gives them many possible outlets for using those gifts abusively. And, in an age that often glories in the destruction of custom and tradition, it’s child’s play for a high-IQ person to make the case that “people like me can’t be expected to tell the truth, keep promises, share, or care for others. It is precisely to facilitate the genius of men like me that we tore down all those stodgy old rules.”

Truthfully, there are also real burdens attendant on an intellectual life, which we shouldn’t lose sight of completely in our (justifiable) eagerness to bring thinkers back to earth. Other people don’t readily understand brilliant people, which makes them lonely. They’re easily prone to persecution complexes, but that’s partly because they are likelier than most to be persecuted for their ideas, even or perhaps especially if they have the courage of conviction. Even if you don’t end up in prison, alienating people who used to like you really is an occupational hazard for anyone who “works with ideas,” and honesty and integrity won’t save you. Dishonesty probably won’t either, actually, but at least it gives you more of a sense of control.

I have a pet theory that the most defining failing of intellectuals is really cowardice. The hubris is more obvious, but the argument runs like this: Living an honorable life as an intellectual actually does require considerable courage, or at least it may. But intellectuals’ early life experiences don’t often cultivate courage. In youth they get all the gold stars, win all the prizes, attract patronage from important people. Later on, when it comes time to accept real risks or sacrifices for the sake of the truth, they just don’t have the grit for it. Their intelligence, unfortunately, helped them to bypass the morally formative experiences that are needed to attain virtue.

I don’t say this to excuse anyone, though. Intellectuals have their problems, sure. Who doesn’t? It doesn’t justify moral turpitude, and one of Johnson’s points is that intellectuals are often in a position to do far greater damage than most others, in light of their disproportionate influence. In excusing themselves from moral requirements, they end up demolishing guardrails for everyone. The book is almost 40 years old now, but the insight certainly holds. There’s no magic solution, but the best thing we can do for thinky people (or the best things they can do for themselves) is to hold onto the normal moral requirements. Maybe you can be forgiven for being absent-minded or having a poor sense of fashion. Maybe you’re permitted to become a professor instead of taking over the family farm. But keep your promises. Take your commitments seriously. Above all: Tell the truth.

I’ve been in the clouds a bit these past three weeks, thinking about philosophy, modernity, the well-lived life, the Christian tradition, hylomorphism, virtue. Heady topics! I think I’ll come off the mountain for a bit now, and explore some topics closer to earth. First though, I’m taking a recharge week, doing The Fun Things with my boys a few more times before school returns. I may post next week, or not, but if I do I promise fluff and levity! Then I think we’ll do some politics. Stay tuned.

Before moving on though, I need to cap the present series with an important From the Stacks. This piece, originally written for Law & Liberty, recounts my experiences as MacIntyre’s student, reflecting on what he did for me as a mentor. I touched on this topic in Friday’s post, but this is the fuller story, written as a tribute just after his passing. It was a very uplifting essay to write. It’s extremely humbling to look back and remember his generosity and integrity, especially now, when greater life experience has taught me that those qualities aren’t as ubiquitous as we might like.

I have told my children that MacIntyre “was my Socrates,” which sounds kind of melodramatic but I think it’s just true. As I relate:

MacIntyre had a quasi-prophetic aura, surely helped by the fact that he was brilliant and immensely erudite. But it was more than that. He had passed through a gauntlet of bruising professional and political encounters, but still somehow radiated conviction and an undiminished hunger for truth. His ideas were thick and complex, but his manner was disarmingly artless. He treated philosophy more like a vocation than a discipline or profession. And despite his reputation for cutting remarks, he could be extremely generous towards anyone who seemed to be trying, however clumsily, to do it.

It may have been a paper assignment that supplied an official excuse for my first visit to his office. The debate that occasioned it was so exhilarating, however, that the next time I dropped the pretext. I simply worked out a position I wished to argue (over and against something he had said in class), and showed up to his regularly scheduled office hour. Over time, this became a regular occurrence, with the format basically the same each time. I knocked, and MacIntyre offered me a chair. He asked genially, “What can I do for you?” I staked out my chosen dialectical ground. We sparred.

It was a good old-fashioned elenchus! Read the piece for more. I would never try to pass myself off as a MacIntyre scholar, because, well, life just went other directions; it’s been years since I’ve been able to make philosophy (as an academic pursuit) a central part of my life. And sure, there were some disappointments there, but that doesn’t tarnish the memories. MacIntyre wouldn’t have been ashamed of me for allowing life commitments to lead me out of the Academy. I end here:

MacIntyre’s business was doing philosophy. That’s what mattered to him. He sometimes helped others to do it too, but afterwards, he simply sent his students off into the wide world to make whatever contribution they would. He had no interest in heading up a school or research program, but I don’t doubt he left his mark on far more people than have contributed to the secondary literature on his work.

Anyway, that was me. At 20, he made me feel the tug of some high-minded philosophical calling. It’s been years since I thought much about that eager-beaver philosophy student, but on the occasion of his death, I look at my life, my faith, my writing, my classically educated children, and wonder: am I still perhaps on that mission?

A year after writing that, I started Christendom Reborn. Huh.

It’s been an immense pleasure doing philosophy again over these past few weeks. I’ve picked up some books I hadn’t touched in years. What a treat! Obviously the job is not finished, but this is a wide-ranging Substack so I’ll explore some other topics for awhile, and return. If you’ve tuned in only intermittently, feel free to browse back over the series, which has its own internal arc. I started with a week on what philosophy is, and described the two workhorses of the old Christian synthesis that, in my understanding, enable it to command such remarkable breadth. In “modernity week” I considered the question: Why, if the old system was so wonderful, did it break down? I approached that question through two lenses: materialism (a sad case of “a good methodology morphing into a bad metaphysics”), and postmodernism (a kind of “universal solvent” that dissolved foundational connections to reality and truth).

Finally, this week, I considered the Return of Aristotelianism in the twentieth century, before circling back to where I began: with an essay on the purpose of philosophy and whether we can still aspire to do it, despite the many traumas that have upended the world these past several centuries. I think we can.

Indeed, the ultimate takeaway of this series is that I think we are better positioned in this regard than our great-great grandparents, or perhaps even our parents. I understand that it doesn’t feel that way when we’re actively watching materialism empty the world of meaning, while the acid of postmodernism (in the form of wokism, Third Worldism, aggressive new political religions) erodes the things that we cherish. I’m not promising short-term cultural thriving and stability. I just think we have much better resources now for understanding what’s happened in the world, for building alliances, and for crafting dignified responses rooted in both reason and tradition. Political and cultural churn are (regrettably) a regular feature of the world, but you have to try to look beyond the latest social media spat to find deeper sources of hope.

On that note, I’ll call it a wrap. But since I’m not writing a separate Sunday Faith Reflection today, I’ll just end with this passage from today’s readings, from 1 Kings. It’s Elijah’s encounter with the Lord. It’s lovely to think about it as a metaphor for modernity’s appalling noise and mess, and the voice that, despite everything, is still audible after the storm. One last moment of truth before we come down off the mountain.

At the mountain of God, Horeb,
Elijah came to a cave where he took shelter.
Then the LORD said to him,
“Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD;
the LORD will be passing by.”
A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains
and crushing rocks before the LORD—
but the LORD was not in the wind.
After the wind there was an earthquake—
but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake there was fire—
but the LORD was not in the fire.
After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.
When he heard this,
Elijah hid his face in his cloak
and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.

1 Kings 19:9-13

Truth is no less powerful when it’s quiet.

Thanks again for reading. I know that time and attention are precious, and I hope it’s been worth it.

Is Christianity maladapted to the modern world? Or is the modern world deeply fragmented such that any effort at a cohesive, meaningful life will necessarily be difficult?

Over the past few weeks, I have tried to show why I lean toward this second possibility, and why, acknowledging the challenges, I still think Christianity is in a strong position to surmount them and thrive. We have some distance to go. But the pieces are all there, and the project is already well underway. After some hard knocks in the early modern period, Christianity is again positioned to offer a satisfying philosophical synthesis of a sort that can ground a meaningful life.

Does it matter? I realize that to many people, my fixation on philosophical synthesis will seem highfalutin, blinkered, naive. A classic case of exaggerating the importance of the thing that happens to interest you. I’ve considered that possibility myself, and indeed, I could sit down and write myself into a Flannery O’Connor-esque caricature, who wandered into some fancy philosophical circles in a youthful phase and decades later still couldn’t quite rub those stars out of her eyes. A ridiculous person. The critique writes itself.

What are the Neo-Thomists doing for working-class families being dragged down by the “affordability crisis”? What’s Aristotle’s role in staunching “the great dechurching“ across the Western world? What percentage of the world’s population gives a fig about Catholic intellectuals and their little niche enthusiasms? Talk about insular and out-of-touch!

Well, I’m undeterred. I realize, obviously, that very few people—in a public opinion poll, say—will cite “a satisfying philosophical synthesis” as one of their top life priorities, but I still think it’s an immensely powerful thing. Let me finish this three-week series, then, by pulling the pieces together and explaining why I’m still a believer. In multiple senses of the word.

Looking back over my early adulthood, I would name three intellectual influences that defined my perspective in lasting ways. One is my father, legal theorist Steven D. Smith. (Though I… don’t call him that.) A prolific author and esteemed First Amendment scholar, he spent his career diagnosing the incoherence of legal positivism, secular neutrality, and other reductive modern postures, while also exploring the positive value of custom, tradition, natural law, and transcendent truth. I imagine his work will pop up here at some point.

The second is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—already mentioned on this Substack—a brilliant Catholic thinker originally involved in the Ressourcement movement of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was another of those intellectuals, like Newman, who was less-than-thrilled by the Thomists and yet in retrospect looks to most of us like an obvious fellow traveler. He “retranslated” many great Christian thinkers in ways that were conversant with modern philosophy, wrote rich texts on the value of liturgy, and helped keep the Church from going off the rails after Vatican II. And, for good measure, he became Pope Benedict XVI.

The third was Alasdair MacIntyre. He was probably the 20th century’s highest-profile philosophical convert to Aristotelian Thomism (Maritain is the only other serious contender), the man whose iconoclastic Aristotelianism gave analytic moral philosophy a good, brisk shake. Also, he was a professor of mine at Notre Dame.

Today I’m mainly talking about MacIntyre. But I mention the whole trio because it may give helpful perspective. All three of those thinkers were fairly severe critics of liberal modernity, but none descended into furniture-breaking revanchism, nor did they sit around all day wallowing in despair. The relationship between reflective philosophical synthesis and the well-lived life generally isn’t obvious or quick to explain; it’s easy to see how error can lead people to misery, but harder to grasp how cohesion leads to virtue or happiness. Sometimes one can get a glimpse of it though, by looking at particular people. If I have a strong confidence in the potential of a philosophically reflective traditionalism to overcome the errors of modernity, it surely has something to do with Smith, Ratzinger, MacIntyre.

I encountered MacIntyre at 20, in a heady moment of life when my mind was already on fire with both philosophy and Catholicism. He left a deep mark. From the start, I found his lectures absolutely riveting. He was brilliant and effortlessly erudite, turning the history of moral philosophy into an epic narrative with civilizational stakes. It wasn’t the sort of class where anyone asked whether a particular thing “will be on the test.” When MacIntyre unfolded a philosophical text, it sometimes felt like the fate of the entire world was hanging in the balance.

In some ways, perhaps, the fascination of MacIntyre’s approach had parallels to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, the 1969 BBC documentary series which told the story of the West through a history of its high art. Clark treated art as a kind of visual presentation of the soul of a culture. MacIntyre did something relevantly similar for moral philosophy, placing each philosophical text in full historical context and helping us think about what they reflected, how they in turn shaped history, and how the cultures they reflected and shaped were (or were not) able to sustain rich and meaningful human lives. The parallel to Clark isn’t perfect, because MacIntyre was more than an intellectual historian; he was also a practitioner of philosophy, and wanted to train us to be the same. To extend the analogy, you’d have to expand the 13 Civilisation episodes to include lessons in painting or sculpture. But both clearly thought in civilization-forming terms, and that was part of the fascination.

How successful, then, was our own world at grounding rich, meaningful human lives? Well… not very. MacIntyre was famously a harsh critic of modernity. He considered that our moral universe was chaotic and fragmented; it lacked the resources to understand itself, or to help us understand ourselves. (That’s generally a prerequisite to thriving, as the Oracle at Delphi warned.) He expended great energy diagnosing this grim situation, in the classroom and his published work. At the same time, MacIntyre never propelled us towards activism, political revolution, or a bitter rejection of modern life. The appropriate response to modernity’s chaos, he taught us, was not rage or violent disruption but doing philosophy well. Insofar as modernity had shattered the moral universe, we should work on putting it back together.

It all seemed very noble when he was lecturing, and I smile a little at that, but truthfully, even decades later, I can laugh at myself only a little. He meant everything he said. And he lived it, or tried to. I was young and naive, naturally, but knowing much more now about his life and work… I didn’t misjudge him, at least not by much.

“Living it” meant more than just thinking carefully and working to harmonize different kinds of truth. That was part of it, certainly, but it also meant working continually to live in accord with the conclusions that we drew. Be curious. Be intellectually honest and rigorous. And don’t be a phony; have the courage to live your convictions. MacIntyre combined the raw seriousness of a French existentialist with the rich traditionalism of a Thomist. It was potent stuff.

Earlier in this series I noted how, in graduate school, I encountered a more mainstream breed of analytic philosophers, who seemed largely content with their empty materialism despite its (to me glaring) inability to ground purposeful action or a meaningful life. My bewilderment perhaps makes more sense when one understands that the standard, for me, was MacIntyre, for whom “philosophy as puzzle-solving” was anathema. I thought philosophy should be more than that. Truthfully, I still do.

A few weeks ago, writing about What Philosophy Is For, I introduced Mary Midgley, who compared philosophers to plumbers, as people who help sort out civilizational problems when they arise. It’s rather a delightful analogy in some ways, taking philosophy out of the realm of the effete and making it into something down-to-earth, practical, even plebeian. I like thinking of philosophers as the sort of people who are supposed to roll up their sleeves and get down to it when they’re needed. And it’s true actually that “solving problems” sometimes requires a patient effort to sift through definitions, subtle distinctions, or logical connections that are fairly boring to the ordinary person but may nevertheless have important implications. Having said that, the analogy does have limits. I think most people are quite happy to leave their pipes entirely in the hands of trained experts. By contrast, everyone has reason to care about the big questions that are the proper province of philosophy. Maybe everyone does need a bit of philosophy, even if they think about it as something else.

MacIntyre delved deep into those questions, considering how ordinary people could, with the help of philosophy, overcome some of the fragmentation and alienation of modern life. He thought there was a real alternative to the unfortunate modern habit of lurching haphazardly this way and that, driven by the winds of commercialism, populist politics, raw appetite, empty entertainments. He thought we could learn to live lives of integrity. And I really think his top priority, with his undergraduate students, was to help us do that. Drafting us into a cause was secondary, but perhaps there was still a cause: the reconstruction of philosophy. Maybe some of us, over time, could add something to that effort. It didn’t necessarily need to happen in philosophy departments.

I do have disagreements with MacIntyre now, which I won’t get into here; among other reasons, I’m writing about some of them in a forthcoming review for Law & Liberty. If you’re curious, you can wait for that. He definitely wasn’t a fan of free markets, and his modest late-life forays into political theory don’t look terribly successful to me. But while it’s interesting to think about all that, those topics aren’t at all central to what I learned from him. He never wanted us to be acolytes, anyway.

If it seems hubristic to view my own chosen discipline as life-transforming, try viewing the question from another angle. Aren’t there really scores of people out there who clearly believe, “the world would all go swimmingly if other people would just agree with me and live the way I do?” Quite often, they pair that with harsh judgments of the bad sort of people, who refuse to get with the program (whatever that is). In my experience, even people who claim up-front to be tolerant and accepting (“live how you want, I don’t think there’s a right answer!”) usually do have some fairly hard lines that they blame people for crossing. Sometimes those people turn out to be the most judgmental of all.

So, I too think that the question of how we should live is an important one. I have some ideas about it. But I acknowledge that it’s very hard to get this right; when people mess up, there’s some excuse for them. I acknowledge that my own chosen tradition has only been partially successful thus far in filling the bill. In completing the picture, I welcome the cooperation and assistance of fellow travelers in parallel traditions. Is that stance so hubristic?

Either way, I’m keeping it, because here’s the thing. Truth does matter, but it’s also much stickier than people tend to suppose. That’s the other conviction that MacIntyre rooted in my soul. To err is clearly human, and yet, terrible ideas tend to collapse over time under their own weight. By contrast, some ideas that seemed outlandish when first proposed, centuries or millennia ago, are now widely taken for granted across the world. Why does that happen?

I think the answer is usually straightforward. It’s because they’re true. Only truth can ultimately ground a life worth living.

Thanks for coming with me on this three-week philosophy series. What a gift to get to revisit the ideas and convictions that laid the groundwork for my own life.

In the early days of this Substack, I wrote about “despair books” and how they spurred me to start Christendom Reborn. It’s time to put that point in sharper focus. I don’t think we’re living through some uniquely bad period for Christianity, in the world or even the West. Our politics is fairly dysfunctional right now, and the culture isn’t in good shape. The global order is feeling a little precarious. Christianity, though? I think we’re watching it pull back to its feet again after some pretty hard hits. Admittedly, it’s a slow process.

I dislike despair books because I consider relentless doomerism unfitting for a Christian. It is a pusillanimous posture. That’s true just in general, but it’s especially aggravating when Catholic intellectuals, my own set, ride the crest of the doomer wave, advancing the cause of despair with pseudo-intellectual explanations for why modernity is irredeemably broken.

It’s hard for me not to see this as a kind of scholarly malpractice. Training in the Catholic intellectual tradition does indeed position one to offer some trenchant and compelling critiques of modernity, an advantage some influencers have used to great effect. But it also positions one to appreciate some real, and genuinely hopeful, sources of remedy. The despair sells more briskly in today’s public square, which helps explain why some have traded so heavily in that commodity. But that’s an explanation, not an excuse. We should know better. We do know better.

For readers who’ve read all about the cancer of individualism, liberalism’s rebellion against nature, the rise of militant secularism and so forth, but not about neo-Thomism, Christian personalism, or the rebirth of Aristotelian realism, it’s time you heard the rest of the story. This really is not just about the Catholic-philosophy world, though that’s the piece most familiar to me. It cuts across many disciplines, denominations, and cultures, a complex network of ideas and movements that have for a considerable time been working to rebuild something humane, ennobling, and true in a landscape marred by reductive materialism and the flight from reality. Many people, viewing the picture from various angles, have come to see how those errors tend to empty the world of order, purpose, and love.

“Why then,” skeptical interlocutors sometimes ask, “haven’t they done anything about it?” Well, they have. Actually they’ve done quite a lot.

Looking back over the past 150 years, one finds many self-conscious efforts at reform which at this point can be helpfully viewed, in a very broad sense, as constituting a neo-traditional or neo-Aristotelian tradition. (If you like the word “conservatism,” that is fine, because I think these overlap very substantially. I’ll delve into that in another essay.) Many of these efforts have borne real fruit. I think that harvest will increase manyfold over time. Given the depth and extent of the challenges, one can’t expect cultural and spiritual renewal to sweep the globe effortlessly in just a few years, but if you think there’s nothing to build on, that “conservatism hasn’t conserved anything,” that we are sitting right at the nadir of liberal modernity… you are probably the victim of way too much rage bait.

Intellectual history rarely admits of discrete beginnings, but to me, Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris is something of a watershed moment, which dovetailed with the work of great intellectuals like St. John Henry Newman. This is a little bit funny, because Aeterni Patris was a ringing call for a rediscovery of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Newman wasn’t all that keen on Neo-Thomism. One often finds sharp disagreements among would-be reformers. To my eyes though, these men were all clearly swimming the same way, all recognizing the urgent need for a revitalized Christian synthesis and a recovery of its intellectual tradition. Across the next century and more, quite a lot of people would come to appreciate that adequate responses to modernity, though rooted in tradition, had to move beyond a desperate effort to suffocate modernity in its cradle. They had to supply answers to new questions. We needed living traditions, not fossils.

Twentieth century Thomism turned into a fairly wild ride. It was riven with factions, which in many ways undercut its effectiveness. Certainly, the movement never cohered into the kind of transformative global movement that Pope Leo presumably hoped to see. At the same time the factionalism inspired rigorous scholarship, innovation, and furious intellectual ferment. I like to think of this as a kind of intellectual pressure cooker, which ultimately blew up but sent spores in many directions, cross-pollinating other movements and leaving its mark in all sorts of unlikely places. Its influence extends far beyond the places where most people actually know what “Thomism” is. It didn’t quite go as planned, but it certainly mattered.

To be clear, I’m not advancing a thesis that Neo-Thomism was the sole or definitive catalyst of cultural renewal; the broader phenomenon I have in mind—neo-traditionalism, political conservatism, the re-embrace of organic order—had many intersecting tributaries. But Neo-Thomism was a crucial riverbed in that landscape, and highly illustrative of how deep ideas work. And, as I noted yesterday, the fact that it happened at all would be astonishing to the early modern mind.

So Pope Leo hoisted a flag, and some fairly brilliant people gravitated to it. They all pretty clearly grasped that what was needed in this moment was a comprehensive Christian synthesis capable of bridging the spaces between different truths, as Scholasticism once did. Modernity had issued its existential challenge. In this moment of crisis, it was essential that faith and reason join hands once more. That intensity of purpose makes the Thomism Wars pretty arresting, but the ask was big, and the early decades of the twentieth century were hard ones. Granted, the world is always troubled, but between two World Wars, the fall of multiple empires, state-sponsored atrocities on a horrifying scale… it was a confusing time.

Working against that backdrop, the Neo-Thomists had a lot of things to settle. So they fought. They fought about the relationship of grace and nature. They fought about authority and the modern state. They had deep disagreements about the extent to which Christian philosophy could intersect fruitfully with modern philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant. Ultimately they were unable to get in sync, and not a single one is a household name even among Catholics. (Alright, maybe one or two. If you count Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.) Nevertheless, ideas from these intense philosophical controversies flowed outwards into all sorts of other areas: Christian personalism, International Law, phenomenology, Catholic Social Teaching, and an analytic Thomist tradition that ran through Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre.

The further impacts of that are, to my eyes, quite extensive, but that’s a long conversation. I’ll just mention a few things. The contemporary Catholic’s “open-to-life” ideal is deeply shaped by Thomist architecture and ideas explored by those thinkers, and that’s been relevant to the Catholic understanding of marriage and family (which model has also surely influenced many Protestant denominations) but also to the pro-life movement, and to Catholic advocacy across the world for the unborn, the elderly, and other vulnerable people. The Church’s embrace of religious freedom, and political freedom more generally, has also been very significant, and owes much to Thomists like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray.

Another relevant thought. Over the past few years, there’s been considerable discussion on the American right of Catholics’ disproportionate influence within intellectual conservatism. We represent a minority in this country. And for ages Catholics were mostly Democrats. Why are they always punching above their weight among conservative intellectuals? Various answers have been debated but to me this is kind of a no-brainer: because Neo-Thomism. It doesn’t matter whether those thinkers were household names. That kind of intellectual work creates a framework, which in turn facilitates further intellectual projects, which in turn attracts brilliant people looking for firmer foundations. Things tend to happen at the point where faith and reason meet.

Synthesis is powerful. It’s especially powerful in a world where people are fragmented and ravenous for meaning. I appreciate that it won’t be immediately evident to everyone how the world can be transformed by a bunch of neo-Scholastics scholars shouting at each other about grace and nature. How will that defeat gender theory or the new socialism or raging nationalist movements trending into fascism? How do philosophy books that hardly anyone reads address the very real problem of falling marriage and birth rates, or European countries where regular church attendance rates are in the single digits?

Well, there’s always a lot of sturm und drang in the world at large. Periods of transition are particularly anxious. But, as Richard Weaver once told us, ideas have consequences, and that doesn’t just hold for intellectual errors. Actually I think it’s far truer of, well, truths. There have been other periods of history when very few people went to church. Unhinged ideas and destructive cultural fads have ravaged whole cultures on many occasions. Political conflict, out-of-touch elites, creative destruction, mass migration, factionalism, and propagandistic “fake news” are all old problems that have impacted the world many times. Truth has more staying power. If we’re talking about carefully crafted philosophical paradigms that successfully draw together many different types of truth, synthesizing them into meaning-rich worldviews that can explain and order human life? Those can endure for a very, very long time.

I’m not saying we’re quite there yet. There are a lot of new (known) truths today that need synthesizing, vastly more than in St. Thomas’ day or even Pope Leo XIII’s. All I’m saying is: Keep your eye on the ball. There are in fact many movements and developments parallel to the ones discussed here that are breaking out of too-limited modern paradigms, seeking something broader or more integrated. Some of these can be found within Protestantism or Orthodoxy, or other world religions. There are also intriguing developments in certain secular disciplines, as for instance in medicine and the biological sciences, where theorists have discovered that life, mysterious as it is, must be recognized as a thing in its own right: You can’t really understand the workings of the human body by breaking it down into component parts, treating a living person as “a vivified corpse.” I have mentioned already how breakthroughs in physics, especially relativity and quantum mechanics, have put real pressure on materialists to break out of their narrow, dated metaphysical worldviews and search for a synthesis that can accommodate new truths.

The nice thing about terrible ideas is that it’s comparatively easy to improve on them. If you view the matter in that light, it suddenly appears that the world is our oyster! Modernity tried to build a world on gears, bits of matter, and existential noise–and it exhausted itself. What we’re seeing right now, in philosophy, theology, and even many of the sciences, is the gradual return of order, purpose, and form. The Aristotelians have come surging back, bringing with them some time-tested tools that can help us rebuild. The lights aren’t going out for the Christian intellectual tradition. They’re coming back on.

Suppose you could pick up a Universal Translator and have a conversation with an early modern philosopher. Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, pick your favorite. What could you tell them that would truly amaze?

Would you tell them about skyscrapers and airplanes? DNA? The first moon walk? The internet? I mean, whatever. Sure, they might think that stuff was cool. Then again, early modern thinkers like Francis Bacon explicitly expected that the world would keep hurtling forward across new technological horizons. I’m not sure it’d challenge any basic assumptions.

Here’s what I would tell them. In the 20th century, Christianity still covers the globe, and Aristotle is cool again. I guarantee they wouldn’t see that coming.

This week is about two things. I’m going to talk about Aristotle’s re-introduction to the modern world, and what an amazing thing that is. The early moderns chased teleology and hylomorphism right off the stage, and here they are, back in the spotlight. More people (and not just, say, Benedictine monks off in a monastery somewhere) are coming to appreciate why that organic order, that capacity for synthesis, the connections to real language and lived experience, the bridging of Being and Doing, really matter. Maybe reducing everything to inanimate matter isn’t such a good idea after all.

I’ll discuss that more tomorrow, and Thursday muse on real-world manifestations and applications. Does neo-Thomism or the return of virtue ethics actually matter to anyone who’s not an academic philosopher? Admittedly, this is a hard question. Hopefully the answer will bring us full circle, back to the question that started this whole series: What is philosophy for?

I’m not going to argue that we’re on the cusp of a new golden age. Anything’s possible, but we clearly have a lot of problems, and it’s not as though Aristotelianism has visibly remade the world; it’s still a minority view even within academic philosophy. I’m aware of this, of course. One shouldn’t make too much of the enthusiasms of one’s own circles, and yet… perhaps we shouldn’t make too little, either. To see The Philosopher revivified after two millennia is a remarkable thing. The lights are coming back on again. He did some amazing things the first time around. Who knows where this might go?

Once again, this week’s readings seem providentially ideal for pivoting from last week’s theme to next week’s. Last week I discussed the muddle of modernity, and how materialism and its aftermath left us spiritually desiccated. Here’s the first reading for this week:

Why spend your money for what is not bread;
your wages for what fails to satisfy?
Heed me, and you shall eat well,
you shall delight in rich fare.
Come to me heedfully,
listen, that you may have life.

Isaiah 55 1-2

It’s a beautiful pairing of readings. Isaiah first makes the obvious point that while bread may feed us for a day, we need spiritual food to be genuinely happy and fulfilled. Where would we get that? It comes from Jesus, of course. This Sunday’s Gospel is especially moving because it begins here:

When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist,
he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
The crowds heard of this and followed him on foot from their towns.
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.

Matthew 14 13-17

He’s grieving and wants to be alone. But the people won’t cut him any slack; their needs are relentless. He could yell at them to go away, but he doesn’t. They’re sick, so he heals them. They’re hungry, so he feeds them. He’s got bigger problems than any of them can understand, but he still makes their problems his own.

Another nice detail from today’s Gospel: When the Apostles tell Jesus that the people are hungry, he initially asks them to handle it themselves. They acknowledge that the problem is beyond them. “Five loaves and two fish are all that we have here.” At that point, Jesus turns their lack into plenty, and everybody gets enough.

The story of modernity can easily be read as this same narrative writ large. The moderns have in fact done an excellent job of feeding people. It turns out though that their provision is grossly inadequate to fill the actual scope of human need. Where should we go from there, then? This will be the subject of next week’s discussion. It’ll be more than just a week-long injunction to “let go and let God,” but I do think it’s important to begin by moving beyond the modern tendency to assume that some human science or political program can “fix it.”

At the same time, nothing is beyond fixing for God, a point St. Paul drives home very forcefully in the second reading.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor present things, nor future things,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8 37-39

Is it a misfortune to be modern? It’s the perennial question for reflective traditionalists, and always hard to put in perspective. Of course, the question itself is so very modern. We just can’t stop navel-gazing.

The modern world has remedied many serious evils, especially in the realm of material want. Often those benefits literally enable us to snatch life from the jaws of death. I myself contracted pneumonia in my first few days of life, which would also have been my last without the aid of modern medicine. At least one of my sons was likewise saved in his earliest weeks from an illness that two centuries previously would probably have been fatal. I quite like being alive, and I’m grateful my son is too! And I do think it important to reflect soberly on the great blessings modernity has yielded to us, which are in fact quite numerous. (I expanded on this point when I discussed Paul Kingsnorth’s book a few months ago. As a funny aside, one of my sons asked me a few weeks after writing that post about the ideology of the Unabomber, and as we researched the question I realized, “Oh, so he’s Paul Kingsnorth, with bombs.” So that’s not disturbing at all.)

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to end the discussion there. The modern world has given rise to a lot of new problems, and unfortunately we can’t necessarily choose to shuck off the existential angst and “just live.” We live within networks of people: families, communities, states. We are affected by the state of our culture, our politics, our economy. Even just thinking about ourselves as individuals, we carry some fairly heavy burdens that might be labeled “the necessity of choice.” The modern world doesn’t lay out a brick road for us to follow from childhood; we have to do that ourselves. If we fail to set the bricks properly, we probably won’t come careening to a premature end, but we may well drift through decades of broken relationships, lost jobs, hours frittered away on vapid entertainments, a crushing sense of underachievement and failure. That’s not a good fate. And a lot of people do seem to end up there.

If you succeed in filling your life with meaningful activity, that burden can be heavy in a different way. As a writer, editor, practicing Catholic, wife and mother of five, I have no shortage of worthwhile things to do. Many of them are very good and enjoyable! I love spending time with my family, but actually, my job is pretty interesting too. My life is full of beauty, joy, and intellectual stimulation! However, arranging and prioritizing can be a major source of angst. In any given hour I could read submissions to Law & Liberty, exercise, pray my Rosary, engage my children in Meaningful Conversation, wash the dishes, call a friend or relative I haven’t spoken to in ages, or apply myself to what I simply call “the crapple.” (Making appointments, registering people for things, submitting invoices, filling out forms. There’s always so much crapple, which of course is my least favorite thing.) No matter which you do, there will be a lingering sense of guilt over the ones you didn’t do. Welcome to Middle Motherhood as a Modern.

So they’re First World Problems. They’re still problems! Handled improperly (but maybe even if we handle them well?) they make it harder for us to be happy and thrive. And now we cast our minds back to the medieval Hamlet and think. Yes, they buried more babies and plucked more chickens. Hunger and cold loomed much more forcefully. If a loved one emigrated to foreign shores, you might never see them again, and were lucky to get the occasional letter. However, they probably experienced less betrayal and loneliness. They spent lots of time enjoying the company of immediate loved ones. Lots of physical labor, but hardly any crapple. People probably didn’t wrestle much with questions like “is it a good idea to get married” or “are kids worth it” or even “do I believe in God?”.

In a nutshell, they were less alienated. Less fragmented and lonely. And that’s also a real gift.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the medievals were more or less fortunate than we. Our job is to work the fields in front of us. The question is worthwhile mainly just as a way of helping us appreciate what that work involves. That will be a central question of next week’s essays.

On that note, a brief wrap-up.

On Sunday I reflected a little on King Solomon. (Was he really the wisest man ever?)

Monday set up the questions of Modernity Week. (If the Christian synthesis was so great, why was it rejected in the modern era?)

My Tuesday essay then dug into “The Muddle of Materialism,” explaining how materialism took hold in the West and how it created a serious crisis of meaning.

Wednesday I stayed in that vein by recommending Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which explores many of those questions in more depth. (He then informed me that the book is presently on sale at 30% off. So many reasons to pick it up!)

Thursday I shifted gears and delved into postmodernism, which I present as a kind of “philosophical cope” for a meaning-starved world. It supplies a kind of simulacrum of meaning, which people desperately want. Unfortunately, by severing itself from both rationality and truth, it ultimately makes the meaning crisis even worse.

I finished out that train of thought on Friday with a re-up of a review of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, which gives a diagnosis of wokism (“the identity synthesis” in his terminology) that’s genuinely helpful on a fairly granular level, but, I argue, not sufficiently attentive to some the deeper problems of postmodernism more broadly. We’re going to need a little more than “be reasonable and play nice” to bring our culture back together.

And what would that be? We’ll get there next week! Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

Following yesterday’s piece on postmodernism, it seemed like a good time to re-up my review of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, a (former?) leftist critique of wokism. Mounk is one of those figures reminiscent of the neo-cons who started on the left, got “mugged by reality” and moved somewhat right… but maybe not all the way to a full-blown conservatism or traditionalism.

I found his book quite interesting in some ways and frustrating in others. It’s admirable when a person is willing to critique their own team. And as someone with experience of that world, he was able to give some real insight into what it was like on the ground when postmodern activism marched “into the C-suite” as he put it. That was useful.

He supplies a kind of intellectual map of wokism, though he calls it “the identity synthesis” in the interests of avoiding inflammatory or prejudiced language. (Having noted that, I’ll just call it “wokism” because… that’s what everyone calls it. I salute his effort, but I think this is one of these cases where relabeling doesn’t actually help.) It was interesting to muse on, and fairly helpful for thinking through the lineage of the pathologies infecting (say) university campuses right now. It does feel like he’s pretty fixated on one particular strain, though, without a very clear grasp of the broader context. That being the case, his advice for reform didn’t seem particularly helpful. “Let’s all play nice now,” seemed to be the gist. Friend. That won’t work. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Effective remedy will have to involve a strong dose of tradition. Throw in some truth and reason, too. Postmodernism has a strong tendency to descend into insanity because it’s not tethered to anything real. Appeals to common sense won’t get you anywhere until those ties are reestablished. Thinking about that, one notices something further: Mounk reiterates again and again his willingness to share the country with impoverished white Appalachians, but he doesn’t have much to say about, say, pro-lifers or marriage traditionalists. So, hmm. You can find something nice to say about people who are floundering, struggling to find meaning, but what about the ones who’ve already found something? Ready to link arms with them too?

It was a worthwhile book. Gave me some insights into particular “postmodern psychoses.” The thing about postmodernism, though, is that it mutates very easily. “Wokism” seems to be waning at this point, but unless people find better sources of meaning, its successor (Third Worldism, perhaps?) will probably be no better.

Here’s a question I used to ponder as a philosophy graduate student at Cornell in the early 2000s: Why was materialism (or “physicalism,” as they more often called it) still the mainstream view? Materialism is a deeply impoverished metaphysical position; I think it’s fairly easy, in fact, to appreciate that. And these were very brainy people. What explained their attachment to such a deeply deficient view?

I now work among political conservatives, so I’m aware that this question would be uninteresting to most of them. What’s to explain? University professors are blinkered, narrow-minded, and obtuse in all sorts of ways. Don’t we all know that the entire Academy is little more than a rank, progressive-dogma swamp?

Well, I’m still perplexed. And like a good analytic philosophy student, I’m prepared to defend my perplexity.

Here’s the first thing that would perhaps surprise the jaded conservative: physicalism really wasn’t an “unshakable dogma” in this setting. Academic philosophers were aware of other positions, and some even adopted them. That was not unacceptable, merely eccentric. To be a dualist or an Aristotelian was to have an accent. Physicalism was simply the standard lingo.

Unquestionably, it had pervaded many of the philosophical sub-disciplines I encountered. My philosophy of mind class mainly wrestled with the problem of how physical brains could somehow give rise to consciousness and human experience. Metaethics was about making moral relativism work somehow. These philosophers (again, very brainy!) appreciated that the task they had set themselves was quite hard. They acknowledged the warts. There were even iconoclasts like John Searle or J. L. Mackie who wrote cutting critiques explaining the deep problems with physicalism, and we read them. And then we went back to puzzling. It was all very… puzzling.

I would not have been so perplexed if other metaphysical views had been met with blistering scorn. If the whole thing had felt like a head-in-sand groupthink exercise, I could at least have read the room with ease. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like hanging out in a ramshackle house with genial people who cheerfully acknowledged that the roof was leaking, the walls crumbling, the floorboards rotting away—and look! Right over there is a nicer, cozier house with space for all of us! But nah, let’s just stay where we are. Hey, grab that bucket, there’s another leak over there.

It’s been years now since I was enmeshed in that world, but I still muse on it sometimes. One factor, perhaps surprising to the uninitiated: Analytic philosophers are avid puzzlers. They thrill to intellectual challenges the way some people love crosswords or jigsaws. Thus, they do have a certain appreciation for the contrarian, the out-on-a-limb radical, the dogged defender of a minority view. It’s fun to have a few of those around. Those disagreements tend, however, to be explored purely at the level of the logic puzzle. To extend my analogy, analytic philosophers are a bit like people who, yes, are sitting in a very tumbledown house, but they don’t much mind the leaky roof or rotting floorboards because home repair is their favorite thing. They’d get bored without something to patch.

That’s a quirk of the academic-philosophy world. But I think there’s a further point here that applies to the modern world more generally. We’re used to fragmentation. We’re habituated to meaninglessness. We can play in the sandbox of materialism because we’ve ginned up some copes that make it feel bearable. In the day-to-day, those copes can prevent people from spiraling into total apathy and despair. Usually. Until they don’t.

I think postmodernism can be fruitfully understood in that light. It’s a kind of philosophical “cope” that moved into the meaning vacuum created by materialism, spawning its own lingo and style of discourse, giving people causes and a sense of righteousness. It should be noted that postmodernism wasn’t particularly popular in the analytic circles where I was trained. Not on the level of theory, at least. But I think the modern mind is so habituated to it that it can serve as a kind of psychological buffer even for very smart people who’ve never bothered much with the theory. They reflexively thought like postmodernists when reading Newsweek or watching the BBC, whether or not they formally bought into it.

Unfortunately, postmodernism has no real capacity to build a thriving society. It exists to tear down and destroy, dissolving all that is fixed or familiar. As critics, postmodernists can at times be quite brilliant. But postmodernism is a kind of universal solvent: there’s no natural limit to its destructive energies. And nothing is more inimical to it than nature, tradition, or ordered liberty.

Postmodernism has roots in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, both genius-level thinkers who were keenly attentive to the chasm at the heart of modern societies. The erosion of the ancient and medieval worldviews had created a kind of meaning-vacuum. After rejecting all the original sources of normativity or teleology, modern people struggle to justify any end, purpose, or moral judgment. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger, in their different ways, wanted to address the problem through what we might call “heroic existential reassertion.” (It’s entirely unsurprising that fascists love both, though that’s not the only possible application for the work of these genuinely brilliant men.) The details of those recommendations need not concern us here. What matters for the present is that they exposed the sheer depth of the abyss. Strip away the ancient teleology, and modern man is left without a handhold: we can’t explain why anything is worth doing. Nothing intrinsically matters anymore. Nihilism is simply the modern condition.

We don’t normally think of those men as postmodernists, but they described the hole that postmodernism moved to fill. Instead of embracing Nietzsche’s will to power or Heidegger’s “resoluteness” (but perhaps those seeped in after all?), the postmodernists took a more straightforward approach. They threw out the rulebook. Rejecting the time-honored demand to treat philosophy as the reason-driven pursuit of truth, they shifted their focus to narrative.

In cutting themselves free from the constraints of reason and reality, the postmodernists achieved a terrible liberation. Understanding reality was no longer the goal; indeed, even the desire for that was intrinsically suspect, since “reason” and “reality” were now viewed in narrative terms as “weapons of the oppressor.” Postmodernism, in the words of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, embraced a sweeping “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Truth claims are really just bids for power. Language builds reality instead of describing it. The world is ours to create; anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to dominate or steal from you.

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger (masters of metanarrative!) provided the inspiration for this movement. Karl Marx was another titanic influence. But later postmodernists turned these power-and-language games into a full body of theory, a full-blown conceptual machinery, relentlessly seeking to remake the world. Much ugly fruit has come from this, but it’s important to understand that postmodernists were able to have this impact in part because the theory is not entirely without value. It’s actually quite true that language shapes our world in some very nuanced ways. That truth claims are often used to solidify status or pursue power. “Metanarratives” do in fact move whole societies in very consequential ways, and postmodernism threw a bright light on some of those realties.

Postmodernism also resonated because it made sense of another feature of modernity that’s already been discussed here at Christendom Reborn. Human nature turns out to be more complex in certain ways than many historical societies have recognized. As the human race became richer and better educated, we came to appreciate just how diverse people are. And, we came to understand that many of the assumptions of the ancient and medieval worlds, about bloodline, race, sex, and so on, are far less grounded in “nature” than most societies have believed. Postmodernism was well equipped to furnish explanations for those mistakes.

That’s a lot of upsides but there’s just one problem. The world is not ours to create. Reality isn’t endlessly malleable. And the rejection of reason and truth leaves us utterly vulnerable to manipulation, domination, and endless civic strife. In the end, postmodernism has no real tools for building. It dangles a tantalizing promise that new worlds may be ours to create, but in reality its activity is relentlessly oriented around deconstruction. Breaking down traditions. Upending established order. Persuading people not to believe their lying eyes, because language and power! Postmodernism’s goals are utopian, but its tools are overwhelmingly destructive. It promises fulfillment but delivers crippling victim complexes. Think now about the host of unhinged causes that have run roughshod across our political landscape in recent years. Is there a single one that isn’t deeply shaped by postmodernism?

Whether we’re looking at postcolonialism, Third Worldism, feminism, Critical Race Theory, the new socialism, or any of the right-wing variants that now compete for air time in our public square, postmodern terms and patterns of thought are now ubiquitous in our public life. They’re hard to refute, because on the one hand they aren’t always wrong (power and language are indeed a big part of the world), but at the same time, insofar as postmodernism is the main driving engine, these movements intrinsically lack the capacity to be right. Postmodernism rejects the demand to conform itself to reason and truth. It’s up-front about its refusal to “play fair.” There’s no way to critique it, and no workable method for finding common ground. By asserting that power and language are everything in life, postmodernists have to a certain extent made that true.

Of course, it’s not entirely true. The universe is not really a blank slate for human narrative, and reality always bats last. Recovery is possible, but diagnosis is an important first step. Materialism and postmodernism have between them created a kind of “culture of meaninglessness” in which people are actively habituated in reductive and anti-rational patterns of thought. Materialism furnishes a metaphysical foundation for modern thought, while postmodernism supplies a framework for addressing questions of value. But these are both deeply flawed frameworks, whose defects reinforce one another, ultimately sowing emptiness, despair, and endless civil discord.

There are better options. One has to begin by wanting them. Happily, many people do, and even in the world of philosophy there are signs of hope. I’ll pick up there next week, which will be dedicated to the theme: The Aristotelians Strike Back.

I’m dashing rapidly through the history of philosophy this month, in pursuit of a big-picture thesis that I want to frame. This inevitably leaves a lot underexplored, but if you want to dig deeper into the Rise and Fall of Materialism, my friend Spencer Klavan has you covered with his Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Spencer is a wonderful writer, as well as a trained classicist, and he covers a lot of science and metaphysics in this book without ever letting the story drag. I laughed a little to see this book described as “a daring new story about how we got here.” It didn’t seem all that new to me, but hey, I’m a huge fan of “books that make old things feel daring and new to publishers.”

The book covers the transition I discussed yesterday, from the sweeping synthesis of the medievals to the “small gods” of modern materialism, and I appreciate Spencer’s ability to explain this shift in a way that illuminates long-term consequences without treating the men themselves as villains. We can understand why the moderns made certain mistakes without looking for malevolent motives. Given its incredible successes, it’s not at all surprising that empirical science, and Newtonian physics more specifically, blinded the world with its dazzling brightness.

That hour is rapidly passing though, or perhaps is already gone. Spencer gets into that too. We still have thoroughgoing materialists (“physicalism” is the preferred term in contemporary philosophy departments), but they’re dated. Science has moved beyond those Newtonian horizons, opening new realities that materialism just can’t handle. The quantum revolution is especially relevant here; relativity poses hard questions too. Metaphysical materialists are dinosaurs nowadays. They can’t make sense of faith, transcendence, human experience, mind… or the science they claim to worship! Small gods can be very fickle.

We can find new hope in that. Spencer Klavan certainly does! Here are the opening paragraphs of the final segment of the book, titled simply “An Invitation”:

We have a choice to face. It is a choice between two visions of the world. The first is well established and even canonical, a kind of dogma. Gradually, what began as a convenient fiction has become a hidebound absolutism: for the messianic prophets of our dangerous age, the world is an object to be dominated and humanity a primitive stain to be wiped from the face of a perfectly mechanized universe.

But cutting-edge science and inherited wisdom alike are revealing a totally different picture–a picture of a world that cannot be what it is without us, that is endowed with all its meaning and structure by our presence in it. A world spoken into being by the eternal Word and made complete by the words of his creatures, who bear his image on Earth.

That story–ancient but forever new–now stands as the indispensable, the desperately needed alternative to a savage and ultimately irrational new faith, a grim and monstrous new tower of Babel whose silhouette is already rising against the skyline. There has only ever been one proclamation that can bring such towers crashing to the ground and leave their builders in confusion: the proclamation that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Good book. I reviewed it here.

Why did the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis lose its hold on the West? If Christian philosophy has such immense explanatory power, why did it get tossed in the attic?

Last week I argued that hylomorphism and natural law are the “Two Workhorses of Christian Philosophy,” capable of pulling the world behind them. But it’s undeniable that they were both sidelined to a considerable degree in the early modern era. If they’re so amazing, why put them out to pasture?

That question is at the center of this week’s posts, and it’s closely related to the “Who Killed Christendom?” theme from a few months ago. Historical diagnosis is tricky, forcing us into thorny discussions of free will, moral responsibility, and the workings of Divine Providence, and I don’t want to get lost in that labyrinth. So I will simply set two points on the table here, both of which seem very relevant.

First, it became quite hard to maintain the serene, holistic worldview of the Middle Ages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the world was simultaneously imploding and exploding. Christendom was consumed byinternal instabilities even as the world opened up to trade and exploration, forcing Christians to grapple with an explosion of new questions. To the brilliant minds of the early-modern period, hanging onto the Thomistic synthesis felt backwards and silly. The world was fragmenting, and philosophy chased it.

Second, though, this was not merely a question of changing fashions. Great thinkers are affected by a prevailing cultural mood, but new theories gained strength in large part because they did seem to explain certain things more effectively than medieval Aristotelian Thomism. A ten-thousand-foot Perennial Philosophy doesn’t always excel at rapid response. As modernity pushed new questions to the fore, the massive, plodding Clydesdales of Christian philosophy often lost out to sleek racehorses that outpaced it in the race towards specific destinations. These competitors were never able to capture the medieval gift for synthesis. But in the early modern era, with the whole world fragmenting, that may have seemed like a feature more than a bug. Maybe it’s just a mistake to try to integrate all the different varieties of truth onto a single map. Maybe we should start by explaining something and go from there.

A few centuries on, we have a much clearer sense of what is lost when we simply shrug our shoulders and allow the world to fragment. But the early moderns had no real sense of what would happen on the ground when traditions eroded and ties ceased to bind. They were eager to ride those new steeds off into Christendom’s sunset, exploring new horizons. This week I’ll look at two “modern horses”: materialism and postmodernism. Between them they explain a lot about how we got to our present juncture.

Think of these as the two clearest big-picture options when teleology is jettisoned. If we’re not committed to things having natures, if we don’t understand them in terms of their function and final purpose, then we find ourselves faced with two obvious alternatives. We can understand things mechanistically as part of a cold chain of material causes and effects. Or we can sideline both form and final purpose and zero in on subjective experience, analyzing the world through the lens of social constructs, political power, and cultural narrative.

It would be fun, perhaps, to create a quiz to help people determine which kind of modernist they are. But I think the truth is that most modern people are both. People today are heavily shaped by both materialism and postmodernism, marinating from childhood in anti-traditional and anti-teleological ideas. We’re fluent in both languages, and the fact that they don’t really cohere is, in fact, part of the point. It helps explain the atomization and nihilism of our time, along with the rise of political religions and shallow philosophies like expressive individualism. But I’ll return to that point next week.

For now, let’s look a little closer at materialism, which might for convenient shorthand be thought of as “what happens when the scientific method overflows its banks.” Empirical science can do some incredible things working from mechanistic premises. Galileo was fairly aggressive about pushing that envelope, stripping away qualities like color or taste (which he treated as figments of subjective human experience), and treating physical nature as a mechanistic system governed by mechanical laws. This is distasteful, or even offensive, to the Aristotelian-Thomist mind, but it opened whole new vistas for scientific discovery and engineering. Isaac Newton brought that approach to its zenith in his Principia, which dazzled the world with its clean harmony and incredible predictive power. It seemed to many that a new kind of synthesis had emerged, replacing the fusty old medieval one. Empirical science had ushered in a new reality.

Can that synthesis incorporate moral realities, though? Can it explain the rich complexity of human experience? Some early-modern thinkers were eager to try. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, constructs a moral and political philosophy that treats the human body as a machine and human experience and desire as nothing more than another form of physical motion. Hobbes flattens “good” and “evil” into nothing more than a question of physical survival, paving the way to Darwinian anthropology and evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and other materialist efforts to explain human beings as nothing more than collections of atoms, bumping around in mechanistic ways.

Hobbes’ moral psychology isn’t particularly compelling. Very few people read Leviathan and see a picture of human nature that they want to adopt or affirm. But later physicalists improved somewhat on that effort, and it should be said in fairness that even human affairs can sometimes be described, or even predicted, in helpful ways through social sciences operating on methodological materialism. These sciences have real limitations, and they’re extremely prone to “overrunning the banks,” treating methodological assumptions as established truths. Nevertheless, they aren’t entirely without value.

The limitations, however, are severe, and already visible in Hobbes. Materialism can’t really make sense of human experience as such. Suggesting that it’s really just physical motion seems like a category mistake; no one who has ever experienced anything can really agree that that reality is captured in a story about intersecting atoms or firing synapses. Even if a particular human experience (say, fear) reliably corresponds to a particular sort of brain activity, how does that in any way explain what it means to be afraid? A person who somehow lacked that capacity could spend a lifetime studying the physical process and still have no real idea what the experience is like. And doesn’t that matter? Of course it does. In their effort to incorporate everything into a beautiful, Newtonian-type science, the materialists seem to have shrugged off trivialities like love, beauty, justice, human friendship… in short, everything that actually makes human life worthwhile.

Social sciences, as mentioned above, have a strong tendency to “overflow their banks,” treating provisional metaphysical assumptions like deep metaphysical truths. When someone describes a position as “reductive,” this is what they mean. Complex human realities are being reduced to physical cause-and-effect, in ways that simply write out the truths that most matter. This is the legacy of a world shaped by materialism.

In many ways, it was precisely this glaring deficiency that gave rise to postmodernism. That’s Thursday’s topic, but already one can see the beginnings of an answer to the original question. Materialism had great appeal for the moderns because it moved speedily into a space where new questions were exploding, and produced brilliant answers to at least some of those questions. As a methodological stance it has some amazing benefits. For a considerable period after Newton, practically everyone wanted to imitate him as nearly as possible, turning their study into a science with that same level of rigor, and that same beautiful consistency. And there is a real beauty to it. Clearly, Newtonian physics has significantly advanced our appreciation of certain truths about the world.

Problems arise though when methodology becomes metaphysics. Empirical study can do amazing things, but it can’t do everything. As a metaphysical position its deficiencies are severe. It took some time for that reality to fully sink in, and when it did the response wasn’t always healthy. We’ll pick things up there on Thursday. But for now, keep that larger paradigm in view. Materialism was influential because it explained some things extremely well. It was so good that people were reluctant to accept a further truth: it explains some things very, very badly.

I’ll break the news up-front. I’ve decided to extend my philosophy foray into a third week. I was going to do two and switch gears for a bit, but you know how it is. Desperate times. Desperate measures. The world is facing apocalyptic danger and I haven’t quite had time to save it yet! We’ve got to see this plotline through!

Less dramatically: working on this week’s two major essays, I realized it would make more sense to break them each into two. This week I’ll explore the question: Why, if the Thomistic synthesis was so amazing, did it lose its hold on the world? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put your best workhorses out to pasture. Why the heck did we do that?

Next week I want to look at the Thomistic and Aristotelian revivals of the 20^th century and beyond. They’re coming back. I think they can come back further. But there are also some daunting challenges that need to be taken seriously. That’ll be next week’s topic.

After that, I’ll try to think of some fun, lighthearted topic to do as a palate cleanser. Ferris Wheels and Why We Need Them. How Jean-Luc Picard will restore Christendom.

But first we need to dig into the problems of modernity. Tomorrow I’ll talk about materialism and the allure of mechanistic explanation. Thursday I’ll get into postmodernism and the rejection of truth and rationality. Some big, chasm-like, Western-civilization threatening rapids ahead!

Let’s do this, people.

Christendom Reborn is three months old today! It’s been a delightful journey, and I’m very grateful to everyone who’s joined me. I happened to notice the date yesterday, and woke up this morning, appropriately, to a notice that Christendom Reborn is currently ranked #44 on Substack’s “rising” list for philosophy-themed Substacks. Huzzah!

In particular, much gratitude to my paid subscribers. Your support is deeply appreciated. It’s quite humbling, truly, when someone voluntarily supports my Substack with their own hard-earned money. I will try to justify the confidence!

Today’s readings are extremely appropriate for Christendom Reborn’s 3-month anniversary, and also for my presently-running topic. We get to think about King Solomon, and his yearning for wisdom.

God appears to Solomon in the night and offers him a wish. A House of David privilege, I suppose. He says:

O LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king
to succeed my father David;
but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act.
I serve you in the midst of the people whom you have chosen,
a people so vast that it cannot be numbered or counted.
Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart
to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong.
For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?

1 Kings 3:7-9

God is pleased, and grants him a double share of wisdom.

I give you a heart so wise and understanding
that there has never been anyone like you up to now,
and after you there will come no one to equal you.

It’s a beautiful passage for a philosopher, and it even connects to the political themes of this Substack. Solomon wants wisdom, not primarily to contemplate the Forms, but so he can govern Israel rightly. Clearly God approves, which should give us confidence that the quest for wisdom is indeed good and righteous, or at least potentially so.

How should we think about the legacy of Solomon, though? In some ways his reign really is the high point of the entire story of Israel. The narrative of the Old Testament, to be frank, is rather bleak in many ways, just one scrape after another. The people are constantly “becoming stiffnecked” and falling into sin; the worship of idols threatens at every turn; each incredible redemption story is rapidly followed by another period of decline. Solomon’s glorious reign is almost the only extended period of peace and prosperity in the Bible. And it does sound quite magnificent! The descriptions of Solomon’s temple and courts are almost reminiscent of the Arabian Nights, a fairy tale of opulence. Hooray for wisdom?

But even Solomon’s shining moment is marred in various ways. Solomon married pagan women. He too was tempted by idol worship. The book of Ecclesiastes is widely read as Solomon’s lament for the burdens of a fallen world. And, after his reign is over, Israel quickly fragments, with even the suggestion that the people of Israel may not have entirely appreciated the heavy tax burden that Solomon placed on them. (Given my classical liberal sympathies, I appreciate that tidbit.)

What’s the upshot here? What does it mean to be wise, and did Solomon prove that wisdom wins, or only that “all is vanity”? The Gospel reading supplies some help here, reminding us that the kingdom of heaven is the only true fulfillment; we should be happy to trade all other treasures for that. But why didn’t Solomon realize that, with all his wisdom? Philosophy has its limits.

Oh look! Christendom Reborn is trending.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Before I get to my Weekly Wrap-Up, I need to address a question of burning relevance to all Substackers today. It’s time to talk about… AI slop. More specifically, AI-slop art.

It’s obvious that I use an LLM (Gemini) to create most of the art for this Substack. I’m open about it, but I do know that many people have strongly negative feelings about that. Here’s what happened in a nutshell.

In the first week of Christendom Reborn I was having a lot of fun playing with AI art. Then I got cold feet. The outcry against “AI slop” was deafening, making me feel I might be creating the world’s cringiest Substack. So I shifted gears and spent a few weeks finding art on Wikimedia and other online sources, which is old hat for me as an editor at Law & Liberty. I do know how to find art online. But even though I was pleased with some of the things I found, on the whole it felt boring and uninspired. When you’re illustrating someone else’s work, you have to play it somewhat safe, but I thought perhaps a personal Substack could afford to be a little more creative, more daring, with more of a distinctive visual brand. I can use the AI to capture some of the images flitting through my own mind while I’m writing. Each week as I choose my theme, I think about what kind of artistic strategy would set the right mood. It’s satisfying to use visuals that way. Perhaps a little bit interesting to readers, too?

At the same time, I started to get irritated by all the people who complained about “AI slop” and then when I went to their sites… they just seemed to have a lot of super-random photos of houseplants or cats or restaurant meals. All The Random is fine, as long as it’s not AI slop? Seems silly.

To be clear, I’m only focused here on AI-produced art. All the written content of Christendom Reborn comes directly from my own brain and fingers, though I do use LLMs for research, and when I’ve finished something I always drop it into Gemini with the instruction, “Fact check and critique.” I’m still mulling over my views on AI-produced prose, but the critical point is that I am a writer, looking to communicate my ideas to other people in written form. So that’s what you get here. A human talking to humans.

Art is different. I am not a visual artist. I don’t expect anyone to follow Christendom Reborn for the art. However insofar as online sites have a visual component, it seems to me that the best I can do is to capture as nearly as possible what’s in my head as I’m writing, which may have some relevant symbolic significance, or humor value, or just a mood that might accent the reader’s experience. I wouldn’t be able to draw it. But Gemini can.

It’s interesting sometimes having a back-and-forth with my LLM over those images. Sometimes we fight a bit! When I wrote “Sex is Not Safe,” for instance, Gemini tried to get me to use a sweet little image of a bridal couple under an arch with hearts and flowers everywhere. I thought that was hilariously contrary to the central point of the piece, so we duked it out a little and ended up with… something different. I liked that one.

I designed this Substack in about three hours on a Sunday evening, together with my kids. It involved some heartwarming hilarity, as for instance when Gemini randomly threw a dragon into the welcome page image, and my 11-year-old argued vociferously for keeping it. But all things considered, I was pretty happy with it, and I still love my green and white chi rho logo. It seems to me like a real blessing that AI tools that enable solo writers to build a solid brand for ourselves, in a way that used to be possible mainly for entities (e.g. corporations) with the resources to hire graphic designers.

So I’m owning it. This is a Substack with AI-slop art. It’s fun, I like it, and it seems to me like the clear best option all things considered. We’ll see how things go moving forward.

I’d be interested in other people’s views, however! I’ll set the comment feature on this post to “Everyone,” so that you can leave your thoughts even if you’re not willing to subscribe to an AI-slop-driven Substack.

On that note, here was the week:

Sunday I transitioned from Traditionalist Week with a brief reflection on prayer.

On Monday, I set up this two-week series on “Why Christian Philosophy” and said a few words on ancient non-Christian faiths and how I think about them.

Tuesday I posted my essay on “What is Philosophy For?” exploring the question of what one should look for in a philosophical view. That was followed on Wednesday with some recommendations for other philosophy Substacks.

My essay on “Two Workhorses of Christian Philosophy” posted Thursday, explaining why hylomorphism and natural law are, for the Christian tradition, like the “simple machines” of classical physics. That led to Friday’s re-up of a National Review piece on “A Philosophical Supervillain” and how he was saved from oblivion by a pair of Italian philologists. Amazing story.

Many thanks to Nathan Smith, Dan Hugger, and Reepicheep for their commentary on the site! I have Reepicheep to thank for this fun supplement to a philosophy series. Greeks win! Greeks win!

More philosophy next week. Time to talk about modernity.

As I transition from medieval to modern philosophy, I thought it would be fun to revisit this piece from National Review on the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I was invited to review a book by Philipp Felsch, which told the extraordinary story of two Italian philologists who saved Nietzsche from being utterly buried as a trash-fascist polemicist. It was one of those brain-busting reviews that I wrestled with for weeks—not a bad thing at all! It was hard precisely because it raised such interesting questions about what philosophy is, what it’s for, and how and why we should do it.

Anyway, I’m always delighted when I get offered a philosophy-related commission.

Nietzsche is one of the biggest, baddest, most brilliant of modern philosophers. As I note in the piece:

If there is such a thing as a philosophical supervillain, Nietzsche is surely a strong contender for the title. He is beloved of Nazis, nihilists, and postmodernists. Hitler once sent Mussolini a beautifully bound copy of the philosopher’s complete works as a birthday gift. Nietzsche had a profound impact on such generous, fruitful, and humane thinkers as Samuel Francis and Bronze Age Pervert, and even to this day, alienated young men are thrilling to Zarathustra, savoring the sweet daydream that they might one day push their antisocial impulses to a glorious, liberating pinnacle, becoming the Übermenschen of the next age.

Perhaps the world would have been better off without him.

It was astonishing to learn that Nietzsche, a modern thinker, might really have been buried forever behind the Iron Curtain, but for these eclectic anti-fascist Italians who dedicated their lives to saving him. And would that have been good? Would we have been happier without The Will to Power? If indeed “ideas have consequences,” aren’t the consequences of Nietzsche mostly bad?

I acknowledge at the end that “I found it hard to wish Nietzsche down the memory hole.” He’s the best nihilism-fertilizer that ever existed, but he is just... so brilliant. I can’t summon the will to cancel him. You can decide what that says about me. I myself am not sure what it says!

St. Thomas Aquinas is known as “the Angelic Doctor,” a title he well deserves. To the freshman college student, however, his angelic qualities may not be evident. It’s not just that his writings are dense and perhaps obscure, though some may find them so. Even when comprehensible, there isn’t much razzle-dazzle to St. Thomas. He may feel plodding and pedantic. Some of his pronouncements seem fairly obvious, while others address questions that nobody anywhere seems to have. What’s the point of this exercise?

I can understand that perplexity. Particularly if they’ve been prepped with assurances that he’s the most brilliant man who ever lived (plausible!), students may find his actual writings a little drab. He may seem like the epitome of the Ivory Tower academic, talking to himself in a corner about things of interest to no one but himself.

He isn’t that. If it feels that way, it’s because he isn’t giving you a pyrotechnic display. He’s building the simple machines that make philosophy work.

If you’ve ever spent time around a STEM-minded kid (I have!), you’ve heard a bit about the elegant beauty of the simple machines. Classical physics has six: the lever, the inclined plane, the wedge, the screw, the pulley, the wheel and axle. On their own, none of them look particularly cool. Who wants to play with a lever resting on a fulcrum? A drug-store remote-control car is way more fun. But that lever can allow a single person to lift loads that ten strong men wouldn’t be able to budge.

The simple machines are, well, simple. But these are the devices that built our world. By giving humans mechanical advantage, they enable us to do remarkable things with very modest physical strength.

Philosophy has its own “simple machines” which convey a kind of intellectual advantage. On their own they may look fairly humdrum. But they enable the philosopher to explain the world. If you look at the magisterial edifice of Christian philosophy, it’s easy to be overawed by the sweeping archways and intricate stained glass. But if you strip the structure down to its core mechanics, you’ll find two central concepts doing the heavy lifting: hylomorphism and natural law.

They cover a lot of ground between them. Professional philosophy departments tend to separate out into two different camps of people: the M&E folks (metaphysics and epistemology) and the ethics people. They might talk to each other, and some people cross lines, but that divide tends to be visible, presumably because these are in a sense the universe-defining questions that philosophy needs to answer. We’ve got the existence question set: What exists, why, and how do we know about it? And then we’ve got the morality question set: What is goodness, where does it come from, and what are the consequences of doing right or wrong?

The “two workhorses of Christian philosophy” correspond to these question sets. Both give massive “intellectual advantage” to the Christian thinker. Best of all, they pull together as a graceful team, drawing the world behind them.

“Hylomorphism” is a fancy and forbidding word. In fact, it’s quite commonsensical. It’s a metaphysical theory that treats things as an inseparable unity of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). The things we interact with every day are made of raw material (“prime matter” is the Aristotelian term), but they also have an essence, an identity, a structural blueprint that makes them what they are. The matter and form can’t simply be separated; the thing itself is a composite. Hylomorphism stands in contrast on one side to materialism, which treats matter as “the real thing.” (Humans may be strongly inclined to assign names to particular lumps of atoms or cells, but “the stuff itself” is all that truly exists.) On the other side it repels theories like idealism or dualism, which either treat matter as illusory (only ideas really exist!), or else draw wide separation between matter and soul. (Cartesian dualism, for instance, treats the human body like a kind of ship which the soul can fly like a pilot. Hylomorphism rejects that. You are your body, but not just a body. You are, in a sense, a soul made flesh.)

Because hylomorphism takes form to be real, not something imposed from the outside by the human mind, it can also hold that things have an essence or nature. There’s a way they’re supposed to be; things that go charging off-script are defective. Sunflowers should turn to face the sun. Apple trees should have little blossoms in spring and delicious fruit in fall. Dogs should romp around, chase sticks, and be loyal and affectionate to their owners. It’s in their natures to be like that, and it’s good to fulfill our nature. The lilac bush isn’t defective for failing to grow fruit, but the apple tree is. The parakeet that refuses to fetch sticks is simply normal, but the dog that refuses is “bad.” We can see this intuitively, and that’s not just a case of humans projecting their wishes onto the world. The things themselves have natures which they might, or might not, fulfill. As rational beings we can see this. Sometimes it’s appropriate for us to help other creatures fulfill their natures, which is a proper fulfillment of our nature as rational beings.

Enter natural law. Because things have natures, we can build a moral philosophy out of the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of those natures. The core of this view is that it’s good for things to “be what they are.” We should want them to be the best version of themselves, exemplifying their type in an excellent way. This is the foundation of moral goodness (or badness). On this view, we assume that the best roses will be the rosiest, and best ears of corn supremely corny, and the best human beings the most humane. Be what you are, but in a good way.

Naturally, the human case is the one that interests us the most. But it turns out that human nature is quite complicated. Figuring out what humans are, and how they can best exemplify their nature, is an arduous undertaking, more a centuries-long endeavor than the project of a single person. It’s the sort of project good philosophers should want to undertake though, and working from that solid foundation, we can approach it with real confidence. Our God-given rational powers equip us for the task, and we have something to work with, because after all, we’re looking into our own souls. Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto.

Hylomorphism and natural law are both deeply intuitive. Your dog really is physically embodied; it’s not an illusion when you hug and pet it; but at the same time he really is a dog, not just a dog-shaped clump of matter. Also, he remains the same dog even if he gets in a fight one day and comes home with a chunk missing from his ear. (You’re now hugging a slightly different clump of cells from what you stroked in the morning, but it’s the same dog. The morphe hasn’t changed.)

Natural law, far from concealing vital truths in some esoteric Book of Masters, suggests that “right” and “wrong” are well within the realm of ordinary understanding. If a thing has been perceived by nearly every culture, in every place, to be shameful, unseemly, or unjust, that’s excellent evidence that it is in fact wrong. Likewise with intuitions about what is admirable, meritorious, and honorable. Natural law shows its face at every turn, in our innate faculties for perceiving right and wrong. The philosopher can still play a role in collecting, ordering, and synthesizing all those intuitions, and connecting them to an ongoing conversation about human nature and the human condition. But there are no secretive, arcane truths here. No shadowy society of priests and prophets holding the key to everything. This is the philosophy of the wedge and the pulley, not of the lightning bolt or mystical incantation.

Like the pulley though, it has immense power. Its simplicity is deceptive. This team can pull loads of astonishing weight and immense complexity, making it look easy. Each horse on its own is a Clydesdale, impressively muscular and sturdy, but in conjunction they truly move mountains. They make it possible to apply natural reason to every kind of question a person might ask, fitting it somewhere into this broader, intuitive picture. That’s what makes the greatest Scholastic Doctor “Angelic.”

Many years ago, as a rookie philosophy instructor, I assigned my Introductory Ethics students a massive reading from the Summa Theologica, maybe a hundred pages in all. That went over very badly and I never tried it again. I was of course ridiculously naïve, but still, there was a method to that madness. I was tired of students griping how they were bored by Scholasticism. It rankled when they read those bits of text (ruthlessly curated from a vast trove of Angelic wisdom, in deference to their apathy and laziness) and judged them tedious and arcane. It rankled even more when I could see that my impassioned pleas mainly had the effect of convincing them that I was the esoteric, Ivory Tower effete from Tuesday’s essay, with St. Thomas’ picture on my wall instead of Rasputin’s.

The super-long reading was not meant to be punitive. It seemed to me that my students were like people standing on a desert plain insisting that the world could not possibly be round, because, look! Look all around us! Do you have eyes, woman?

I do have eyes, but it turns out that by elevating yourself a bit above the ground, you can actually see the curve of the earth. Even with the naked human eye. I was hoping that a few arduous hours with St. Thomas might give my students that sort of glimpse. I wanted them to behold for themselves the magnitude, the breadth, the magisterial reach of that Christian vision. After a lifetime of meandering around, just doing this and that, it could be quite remarkable to look, if only for a moment, through those angelic eyes.

Maybe somebody did. One never knows for sure what seeds might have been planted in a classroom. But even if my students didn’t, all of us still can. Harnessing the power of the workhorses of Christian philosophy, we can build a platform high enough to put the world at our feet.

I’m hard at work on my “two workhorses” essay for tomorrow, but I wanted to drop in a few recommendations appropriate to this week’s topic.

First, I’m very pleased that Dan Philpott has a Substack now, Arc of the Universe, and I encourage you all to read and subscribe! I’ve been following Dan’s work for awhile, and have tried to persuade him to write for Law & Liberty. (He didn’t really tell me no, just “maybe later” since he was deep in a book manuscript at the time.) I always find his perspectives measured, carefully considered, and humane. Like me, Dan is very interested in finding paths to grounded, realistic political and cultural reform, rooted in justice, and respect for human freedom. I’m excited to read his Substack newsletter.

Another great Substack to follow is Tim and Faith Pawl’s Pawline Epistles, which (among other things) explores the philosophical foundations of virtue and the well-lived life in engaging and relatable ways. Tim’s work is the antithesis of the “Hulga approach” that I discussed yesterday. He exemplifies the virtues of the analytic philosopher (systematic, clear, thorough) but applies them to questions of obvious importance to anyone who wishes to thrive as a human being. (Or, if you don’t care about your personal thriving, perhaps you still want it for your loved ones?)

If, like me, you’re the sort of Christian who goes to Confession regularly, you’ll quickly realize that these are exactly the sorts of questions you’re thinking about (or should be) in the confessional line. But even if you don’t go to Confession, you’ll benefit from an enhanced capacity to examine your conscience. Read Pawline Epistles, and become a better person.

Finally, I warmly recommend Living with Lady Philosophy, written by my friends Mark and Susanna Spencer. I’ve particularly been thinking this week about a post from last May, in which Mark reflects on what it means to do philosophy. It’s not just about “making arguments.” It’s about loving truth and wisdom. But… how do we do that? I’m still mulling over his suggestions, unsure how far I agree, but it’s certainly worth your time.

Everyone loves Doctors of Philosophy, right? Flannery O’Connor captures that widespread enthusiasm with her usual verve in this snippet from her short story, Good Country People.

She had arrived at the age of thirty-two and she had a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wooden leg.

She was a large blonde girl who had an eye that went to the side, and she usually wore a green sweatshirt with a stretched-out neck and a pair of faded slacks. Her mother was always trying to tell her that if she would wear a dress, she would look like a different person, but Joy was not interested in looking like a different person.

...When Joy had gone to the university, she had changed her name legally to Hulga. Her mother had discovered it on the top of an envelope that had come from the university... Joy had chosen it being the ugliest name she could think of, but it had taken her the right length of time to think of it. She had a Ph.D. in philosophy and she knew how to choose a name.

...She considered the name her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to find the envelope again. Mrs. Hopewell had spent two hours looking for it. She said to Mrs. Freeman that night, ‘I can’t imagine why she chose that name unless it’s because she thought it sounded like a saw hitting a knot.’

‘She’s thirty-two,’ Mrs. Freeman said.

‘She has a Ph.D. in philosophy,’ Mrs. Hopewell said.

That’s a delicious passage, but if you prefer the more lowbrow send-up, here’s the Indigo Girls:

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free.

I think O’Connor and the Indigo Girls would ultimately diverge quite a bit in their views of philosophy. Hulga exemplifies the temptations of intellectual pride, which is not an indictment of philosophy as such, though it’s surely a warning worth heeding. The Indigo Girls are more sweeping in their condemnation of the pursuit of wisdom.

There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine.

The Girls don’t want life’s many experienced truths synthesized into a harmonious whole. “Just live!” seems to be their advice. Which might seem charming, if they were dancing through meadows, cuddling puppies, racing to bind the wounds of hapless beggars. It might even be wise, if their “crooked line” is understood in contrast to the “foolish consistency” of a tiny, zealous mind. G.K. Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy that it is reason, not poetry, that pushes people to insanity, and as often happens, he’s at least landed in the ballpark of an important truth. An obsession with consistency can be dangerous, especially when combined with an intense need to understand everything and always be right. That’s a recipe for dangerous fanaticism. By all means, dance through meadows instead of becoming Rasputin.

“Just living” carries its own perils, though. It doesn’t give you much to work with in moments of agonizing, life-or-death indecision. It can also leave you a little too comfortable when “going with the flow” might draw you into something morally monstrous or possibly suicidal. You’re a sitting duck for advertisers, demagogues, con men. People often feel deep remorse late in life for decisions that seemed good at the moment when “life” dangled them in their faces. Finally, modern people seem prone to reaching a point, perhaps in middle age when grief and disappointment start to weigh, where it’s hard to see much purpose in any of it. Does it even matter what we do? What’s the point of anything? “Just living” may lead us into those eddies, or make it hard to escape when we land in them.

Maybe we need “the doctor of philosophy” after all. (Not the Rasputin one.)

Mary Midgley wrote a book in 2018, which shared a title with this essay. She was 99 years old. She did in fact marry, raised three sons, and likely saw many B-grade movies. She was also a member of “philosophy’s first girls’ club,” a remarkable set of friends who met at Oxford in the 1930s, which also included Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. So she knew a bit about life, but also philosophy, and she doesn’t think it’s worthless.

Midgley argues that philosophy is not an esoteric, Ivory Tower pursuit. Instead, she compares it to something extremely practical and banal: plumbing. It’s intellectual plumbing, if you will. The point is something like this. In the day to day, most people don’t think much about their pipes. But if your pipes leak, burst, or get completely clogged with gook, you might suddenly be very interested in the Deep Wisdom of the plumber-man, and grateful for his help. Midgley thinks philosophy is a bit similar: not something normal people need to think about continually, but something that’s needed when things break. When a civilization has a crisis of meaning, civil tensions, grave injustices, or a constitutional crisis, it’s time to call the philosopher. Maybe he can help.

I don’t think that’s the whole story about philosophy, and this account does raise the question: When have human societies ever drifted along peacefully without any troubles, even for a short while? Nevertheless, I do find Midgley’s analogy to be a refreshing corrective, not only to the Indigo Girls’ insouciant carelessness about truth, but also to the Hulgas of the world, who want to own philosophy as something esoteric, detached, and far beyond the ken of the common man. Philosophy should not be like that. You can contemplate the wisdom of the spheres; I’m all for it! But if you can’t say anything helpful about the questions that genuinely trouble your own age, you’re probably not a very good philosopher. There have been quite a few bad philosophers across history, mostly forgotten now since they had nothing worthwhile to say.

It’s important to be clear here on what I’m not saying. I’m not restricting philosophy to things that are of universal interest. It’s okay to be fascinated by things that other people take for granted or just never consider. I’m not suggesting that philosophers can’t have their own esoteric lingo (plumbers do!), or that they’re failing if ordinary people can’t understand them all the time. Philosophy is hard, at least if one genuinely cares about the truth, and accessibility isn’t generally the highest priority for a philosophical tract.

Nevertheless, philosophy needs to retain points of contact with things that matter to real people living normal lives. When it does that, philosophers should be able to prove their value by speaking to the questions that are genuinely troubling in their own age. Their experience in applying human reason to hard questions should enable them, at the very least, to supply conceptual clarity, but hopefully also to fertilize the discussion with more timeless truths drawn from the wisdom of ages. That, you see, is one of the great virtues of philosophy: Because it is concerned with consistency and synthesis, it can potentially integrate truths from many different eras, cultures, and great thinkers, into a cohesive whole. That will probably be more helpful in a civilizational crisis than anything the Indigo Girls learned dancing through meadows.

That leads us to a further question, though. How do you tell when a philosopher is giving good advice? It’s easier in the plumber’s case; if the sink is working again, and the brown stain no longer spreading across the ceiling, that’s a good sign that he knew what he was doing. The philosopher’s success is harder to measure. It’s already been established that a fancy university degree is no guarantee of anything. You clearly don’t want to live your life by the compass of Hulga, or the Rasputin dude. An obsession with rarified reason often makes people crazy. How then do we identify the good philosophers, the ones who can season our conversations with real wisdom?

Another strategy is to look beyond particular philosophers and consider who is speaking on behalf of a philosophical tradition with a somewhat settled view of the world. If we see the matter that way, it’s more possible to consider where different convictions or commitments seem to be leading people. Who’s got it together? Understanding that weak and selfish humans can be found everywhere, where are the virtuous people thickest on the ground? Which ideas, by contrast, seem to have led people (or whole civilizations) off cliffs?

Beyond that, it’s worth considering the success of a particular view in extending itself both through time and across different cultures. Understanding that “foolish consistency” is a potential pitfall for philosophy, it stands to reason that the risks will at least be mitigated if a view has succeeded in surviving a long time and extending itself across a wide range of cultures. I’m not suggesting that this test is absolutely reliable, because bad ideas do sometimes hang around for a very long time. But it’s a plus. It’s harder to get traction with a worldview that’s just obviously bonkers.

Finally, the strongest philosophical “candidates” will be those that can speak to different kinds of questions. It can give insight into questions of right and wrong, but also muse on “why is there something rather than nothing?” Philosophy is about synthesis, after all. The most successful traditions will be the ones that can consistently synthesize a very wide range of truths. My Thursday essay will lay out a bit of a map, suggesting the big-picture “kinds of truths” that we may want philosophy to answer. For now, I’ll just note that a philosophy is far less likely to lead us into “rational insanity” if it’s broad as well as deep.

Because the philosopher, in the end, is quite different from the plumber. The plumber is a specialist; he’s interested in pipes. The philosopher is supposed to be interested in everything. Explaining the universe is his not-so-modest province (and he’s also supposed to have views on why the universe exists in the first place).

I sometimes humorously refer to philosophy PhDs as The True Doctors. It’s partly a self-mock, and partly reveling in the absurdity of universities now declaring people “Doctors of Philosophy” when they specialize in textiles or hotel management. But there’s also a small aspirational note. Philosophers should be “truth doctors.” If we’re not at least trying to be that, there’s no point in the discipline at all.

Christian philosophers have tried, though. With considerable success! I’ll turn to that subject next.

I’m embarking now on a 2-week series on “Why Christian Philosophy?” We’ll dive in tomorrow with an essay on philosophy more generally: Why should we do it, and what should one look for in a comprehensive philosophy? Then I’ll go on to explore some reasons why, in my evaluation, Christian philosophy holds up well.

Thursday’s essay will examine what I call “the two work horses of Christian philosophy.” These are two big-picture concepts that (I argue) serve as engines of Christian thought, making it particularly broad, deep, and also satisfying. Christianity can explain things in ways that really capture the tenor of human experience, the flavor of the world as we find it. It can help us dig into hard questions with real hope of finding worthwhile answers. It enables us to “seek understanding” without fear that what we find will render life empty, flat, or meaningless. I think identifying these two “work horses” is helpful for explaining how it can do that.

Next week I’m planning to talk more about “the competition.” What’s going on with modern philosophy? Against what rival worldviews must Christianity prove itself?

That brings us to the issue of other faiths, which I realize has been something of a hole in my discussion up to this point. I’ve been meaning for some time to have a week (or more?) on other ancient faiths, to give just a glimpse of how I think about them, though it’s a little tricky insofar as I don’t wish to present myself as an expert on any non-Christian religion. I’m aware that the slightly triumphalist premise of Christendom Reborn might be taken as a challenge, or even as disparagement of other world faiths. I really don’t intend that at all, and in general I view other ancient faiths with lively curiosity but also great respect. Clearly it is possible for different religions to become competitors; religious (or ethno-religious) conflict is certainly a real thing, and I don’t take it lightly. But in our own time, the threats that most deeply concern me don’t spring primarily from other ancient faiths. I worry about the collapse of social structures, the loss of meaning and connection to tradition, political polarization, atomization. Not Hinduism or Islam.

In the end of course, I choose Jesus. I do ultimately believe that Christ will win. But I also consider that any faith that’s existed for a millennium or more must surely contain a lot of wisdom. I realize obviously that faith and politics often fuse in complex ways, which complicates the picture, and it’s possible we’ll end up discussing those sorts of scenarios at some point. Islamic wars of religion. Hindu nationalism. Those Russian Buddhist communities that are pumping for Putin in his war on Ukraine. That’s all fascinating stuff, but it’s fairly tangential to Christendom Reborn. In general, I don’t tend to view other faiths as a major threat to Christianity. They’re much likelier to be “fellow travelers” working to combat the same problems that concern me.

Even insofar as they are a threat, I’m firmly committed to “winning those battles” through persuasion, answering questions, and solving problems, particularly by building institutions and healthy communities that meet people’s actual needs. Not through repressive laws and certainly not through violence. Other religious communities are welcome to pursue those same strategies. In fact, I encourage it! I like freedom, especially religious freedom. It’s the most important kind.

At some point I will say a little more about particular world faiths and how I think about them. I’ve lived in Israel and the Islamic world; I went through a period of being fascinated by Hinduism and Buddhism. Without making any claim to expertise, I can at least say a little about what I find most attractive and fascinating in each tradition, and what questions they illuminate in my own Christian mind. Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to learn more about other faiths, and engage in more interfaith dialogue. I’d love that! But one thing at a time.

For now, let’s go back to the beginning. What can philosophy do for us? What can faith do? Perhaps they could do some things together?

I smiled a little at this passage from today’s readings, which seemed quite appropriate, coming right after my Traditionalist Week:

The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
And the one who searches hearts
knows what is the intention of the Spirit,
because he intercedes for the holy ones
according to God’s will.
Romans 8 26-27

I didn’t say much this week about the dangers of rigorism, but it is of course possible for a love of liturgy to devolve into a pedantic obsession with little details, and it’s also possible to get lost in liturgical snobbery and think that only we truly know how to pray. It’s good to read this passage and be reminded that none of us can truly “pray as we ought”; we’re constantly relying on the Holy Spirit to make the most of our feeble attempts.

As a parent, I’ve more frequently found myself urging my children not to be too judgmental of other people’s ways of praying. “You can’t really know what God is doing in another person’s soul.” Having been habituated to love beautiful liturgy, they look askance at sensual, campy, or offensively performative liturgical expression. That’s pretty normal, and it’s not as though I want them to like bad liturgy, but we need to retain a sense of proportion and humility. We all need to appeal earnestly to the Holy Spirit to help us learn to pray.

I’ll be doing more philosophy this week at Christendom Reborn. Looking forward to it!