PHILOSOPHIC LIBERALISM subtly but palpably erodes the moral, political, and spiritual life of the regime it helped bring into existence. On the one hand, it powerfully affirms the fundamental legitimacy and desirability of modern democracy and its various attendant goods such as civic peace, religious freedom, self-government, and constitutionalism. On the other hand, it champions view of freedom that gradually erodes human beings' basic attachment to those inherited extrademocratic goods like religion and morality that liberal democracy must necessarily rely upon for its health and survival. Today that understanding of freedom is routinely identified with radical view of human autonomy. For this reason, contemporary democracy tends to be both egalitarian and leveling. (1) As such, it not only abhors all natural and moral limits but increasingly those political limits placed on human beings by liberal democracy itself. Christian political thought in various ways can help present-day democrats--Christian and non-Christian--rediscover the necessity, desirability, and nobility of humanizing limits. (2) But in pursuing this rediscovery, Christian political thought must resist the temptation to ape modernity and formulate its own solution to what Benedict Spinoza called the theologico-political problem. (3) It must find prudent way of coming to terms with democracy's discontents and modern philosophy's disenchantment of the world. Max Weber famously traced the roots of this moral and spiritual disenchantment to modern science and its unprecedented success in systematically exorcizing any sense of meaning or mystery in humankind's world. The disenchantment of the world consequently is reality we experience daily, an inescapable fact seared into our all-too-modern consciousness. In light of Nietzsche's annihilating critique of the last men who naively believed they had discovered happiness, Weber somberly concluded there was no intellectually honest way for late modern humankind to think that reason could discover any vital sense of meaning or value in the world. (4) As Weber jeeringly remarked, who believes in this?--aside from few big children in university chairs and editorial offices. (5) Pope John Paul II traced the disenchantment of the modern world back to profound crisis of culture, which generates skepticism in relation to the very foundations of knowledge and ethics, and which makes it increasingly difficult to grasp clearly the meaning of what man is. (6) But for obvious reasons he did not succumb to Weber's moral and spiritual fatalism. John Paul maintained that in response to late modern humankind's experience of disenchantment, moral theology must initially to philosophical ethics which looks to the truth of the good, to an ethics which is neither subjectivist nor utilitarian. (7) The formulation of that ethics itself, however, requires the prior articulation of a philosophical anthropology and metaphysics of the good. (8) If it is to address the specific moral, political, intellectual, and spiritual problems that characterize late modernity, moral theology must first turn to--and rely upon--the assistance of the kind of reflection first practiced by classical political philosophy. Only then, John Paul suggests, can moral theology begin to deal adequately with modernity and its discontents. (9) But in responding to modernity's discontents, Christian moral and political thought should not attempt to transform or merely transcend modernity. Instead, it must proceed prudently, attempting to retain the authentic social, political, and scientific gains that modernity has helped bring about. In this way it does justice to the full truth about man and the nature of reality. As Peter Lawler points out, such thought can rightly be called conservative postmodernism. (10) Christian political thought can defend what is genuinely good in the present because it is able to view the present from perspective outside of modernity. …
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Oct 23, 2024
William Mullaney 
Open Access
Just Published
