By Neil G. Robertson, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of King’s College, Halifax

A review of Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World
by Chantal Delsol, ISI Books, 2003, from Intercollegiate Review, Fall/Winter 2004

After more than three decades of a constant stream of French post-modernist theory, for many of us the identification of contemporary French thought with post-modernity has become nearly complete. It is therefore with a certain sense of wonderment, or at least curiosity, that one must greet the publication of this translation of Chantal Delsol’s explicitly un-post-modern contemplation of “contemporary man” and the cultural situation in which he finds himself. For Delsol, contemporary man is not flying high in the ether of deconstruction, difference, and the endless play of meaning. Rather, he is an Icarus fallen, a creature whose wings have melted from flying too close to the sun and who now walks confused and disillusioned in the labyrinth of the very human condition from which he sought escape. From this perspective post-modernity is but a final form of modernity—broken wings flapping wildly. For Delsol, such efforts to fly from reality have come to an end. The truth of the contemporary situation is that we stand disappointed and disoriented in a world we hardly recognize as our own, clinging to principles and postures we know at the same time to be empty and vain.

Delsol is clearly a formidable person. She is the mother of a small tribe of children, the wife of a controversial conservative French politician, and is involved in religious concerns, specifically contemporary Catholicism. Professionally, she is a university professor, a respected novelist, and a noted contributor to French political thought. In the latter field she has been particularly involved in questions of European federalism and in efforts to apply the originally Catholic concept of subsidiarity to the contemporary political world. Thus, she has been a critic of the centralizing tendencies both within France and in the European Union. In short, while she is a critic of “contemporary man,” she is also— and knows herself to be—fully a “contemporary.” As she puts it, “I obviously do not feel that I am essentially any different from the contemporary man of which I write.”

She describes Icarus Fallen as “very much a sociology of the mind.” Her intent in this work is to elucidate the spiritual or mental standpoint in which humanity today finds itself, a standpoint which finds the world empty, or meaningless, or uncertain. Her general claim is that modernity has exposed itself, especially with the collapse of Soviet Marxism, as a failed flight from the real. As a result, the hyperbolic ideals and hopes that modernity propounded have led to a radical deflation. We now live in a strange realm of humanistic complacency, where there is a powerful morality of inclusion and equality, but without foundation or purpose. For Delsol, this late modern/ post-modern morality is ultimately a morality of withdrawal and despair. The contemporary mind is wounded, unable to look beyond its own self-satisfaction to realities that are constituting and elevating. From this point of view, the contemporary mind is a paradox: both self-satisfied and despairing, complacent and restless. However, throughout the book Delsol suggests that the contemporary is not simply this standpoint of resignation and complacency, but that there are present in it as well intimations of larger structures of reality: intimations that point to questions of good and evil, truth and falsity, the passing character of the world and the eternity of the divine.

In the face of these deeper intimations Delsol ends the book with a call to a new vigilance and a new sense of responsibility. Contemporary man needs to live more directly and openly within the fragility and contradictions of existence. Refreshingly, she does not call for a simple repudiation of the modern and a simple return to pre-modern forms of meaning and significance. As she states, “The great difficulty will be to defend the gains of modernity while at the same time struggling against its excesses. For taking a simplistic approach is always the first reflex, and the great temptation of this disappointed era could easily be an overall rejection, a return to the besieged cocoon of a priori certitudes, or purity-seeking fundamentalism, which is just another form of utopian delusion.”

This is a beautifully written and finely translated book that falls within the French essai genre. As such, it is written in a direct and meditative fashion, without the normal scholarly apparatus. While this approach is very appealing, especially for the common reader, it does have its frustrations. I would have valued learning about Delsol’s view of how she is situated in the long tradition of the critique of modernity. For it is here that I have my most basic question for this book. Let me state bluntly what I take to be the general tenor of the critique of modernity: Modernity seeks to establish an impossible standpoint which leads to its own undoing, evidenced by a situation of nihilism, meaninglessness, and despair; this in turn points us to an abiding standpoint beyond the modern, return to which provides us with renewed structures of significance. [emphasis added] Such an account may be found in a multitude of figures throughout the twentieth century: T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, Josef Pieper, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre are but a few names one could mention. So one might well ask, beyond some new images and rhetorical figures, what does Delsol have to say about the character of contemporary man that cannot be found by reading Eliot’s The Waste Land? At the most fundamental level, I would judge that there is nothing to distinguish them—putting aside the evident difference in genre. But is this to say that Delsol is simply repeating the thoughts of the great critics of modernity from the early twentieth century? No. Delsol is writing in the context of early twenty-first-century Europe, and this crucially informs the whole character and significance of her work.

But it is on this count that I would criticize this American edition of Icarus Fallen. Delsol herself tells us, “In spite of my fragmented and insufficient knowledge of North America, I am convinced that there is a similarity between your societies and our own, at least as far as this ‘sociology of the mind’ is concerned.” But I am not so convinced. Even if what she claims is true, her argument still cannot make sense to North American readers without a more extensive explanation of European political developments, and particularly French intellectual history. This is where a much more informative introduction to the book would have been a great addition.

For Delsol, the whole meaning of the fall of Icarus is the fall of Soviet Marxism. To North Americans, this defeat is a great and important event, but is so primarily in terms of a shift in geopolitics. It has not led in North America to the conviction that modernity is in crisis. Indeed, insofar as it has affected North American self-understanding, this has appeared in Francis Fukuyama’s popular “end of history” thesis: namely, the claim of the final triumph of (modern) liberal democracy. The defeat of Soviet Marxism has clarified for North Americans that their forms of government are not just one pole of the Capitalist-Communist dialectic, but rather are self-standing wholes capable of bringing civil order and contentment to modern life.

Thus, I would argue that Icarus has not fallen in North America; if anything, the fall of Soviet Marxism has brought forth a bolder, more confident modernity here. By contrast, for Delsol, coming out of the tradition of twentieth-century French political thought, modernity is essentially identified with Marxism. Consequently, Icarus really did fall in 1989. While North Americans have never seriously been attracted to  the extreme politics that have been so powerful in Europe throughout the twentieth century, much of French intellectual life has been, for at least fifty years, essentially post-liberal, and so fundamentally critical of the relation of society and government characteristic of liberal democracies. For the North American reader to really follow Delsol’s argument and its specific import, this larger intellectual and political context needs to be brought out. Of course, behind my criticism is the claim that Delsol’s argument is not directly translatable to the North American context; she and the editors of Icarus Fallen may well have judged otherwise.

Such a judgment is certainly not without some warrant. After all, so much of North American social, intellectual, and moral life seems to be found in the pages of this evocative text. Certainly conservatives will find much here that resonates with their intuitions and daily experience. Delsol does bring out with real delicacy the ambiguous, tentative stance many in the contemporary world find themselves adopting. We know the failure of the radical politics that so enlivened the twentieth century, the failure of radical secular humanism: and yet we seem unable to return to the older forms of thought and belief that can give place and order to our lives. We seek structures of significance: and yet, as soon as they become determinate, we flee them as oppressive and limiting. Delsol herself can only point to this dilemma without actually resolving it, for she guards against any direct turn to metaphysics or theology. She points to the need, as she puts it, “to defend the gains of modernity”: modernity in its failure exposes an abiding principle, but now one that we, as moderns, must come to know for ourselves, through a tentative, exploratory “new anthropology.”

But is this tentativeness itself not yet another form of the contemporary malaise Delsol works to expose? My own judgment is that while North Americans have tendencies towards the “contemporary man” that Delsol describes and seeks to overcome, fundamentally we North Americans are already beyond this European condition; we live with a straightforward confidence in our institutions and religions that seems altogether impossible to contemporary Europeans. But is this claim true? It is precisely in forcing us to confront our ambivalent intuitions that we can see the virtue and importance of Icarus Fallen. This book brings to the North American reader a searching and powerful account of the contemporary European soul, and then asks that reader whether he too finds himself reflected there.

Neil G. Robertson is an Associate Professor in the Foundation Year, Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Studies programs. Dr. Robertson graduated from the University of King’s College in 1985 with a BA in Political Science. He went on to take an M.A. in Classics at Dalhousie University, and in 1995 completed his PhD at Cambridge in Social and Political Science. He has held the position of Director of the Foundation Year Program and is past Director of the Early Modern Studies Program, which he helped to found. Dr. Robertson was the King’s College Dean of Residence in 1989-1990 and has been Chair of Faculty since 2001.

This review is republished from the Fall/Winter 2004 edition of Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Copyright 2004. Used by permission. ISI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization that seeks to educate future leaders in the timeless principles that make America free and prosperous—the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization that are rarely taught in the classroom. The website address of ISI is: http://home.isi.org

“While seeming to defend the Western tradition from its enemies, New Jacobins advance a ‘secular, ahistorical, and egalitarian’ appropriation of that tradition. Despite their rhetoric of piety toward tradition, they are the enemies of ‘pre-Enlightenment Western civilization.’ Whereas America’s ‘old moral ethos’ acknowledged the binding authority of tradition and custom and the contingencies of particular circumstances, Neo-Jacobin consciousness is ahistorical, universalist, and driven towards greater and greater concentrations of power.” –an excerpt from this review

by Richard Gamble, Associate Professor of History, Hillsdale College

A review of America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire
by Claes G. Ryn Transaction Press, 2003, from Intercollegiate Review, Fall/Winter 2004

Many Enlightenment ideologues hoped to see fulfilled in America all the dreams of the Age of Reason: an empire of unfettered minds, natural rights, unbounded human benevolence and progress, the first fruits of a world reborn. Impatient utopians soon despaired, however. Faced with ratification of a conservative Constitution rooted in the long Western tradition of classical and Christian civilization, they turned their imaginations to the promise of revolutionary France. Nevertheless, some Americans persisted in their secular millennial expectations for the United States. Foremost among these at the opening of the twenty-first century are those whom Claes Ryn calls “new Jacobins.” In America the Virtuous, Ryn analyzes the defining elements of their worldview. In his own words, his “study aims to identify, illustrate, and analyze a general ideological phenomenon, a powerful tendency of thought, imagination and action with its own distinctive logic and momentum.” That tendency, in Ryn’s estimation, is leading America toward profound disorder.

Neo-Jacobinism, like its original embodiment more than two centuries ago in revolutionary France, displaces a concrete, localized, rooted, classical and Christian view of man and society with an abstract, universalized, restless, Enlightenment and Romantic view. To some degree, Ryn is carrying into the twenty-first century the ideological argument between Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ryn stands with Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, and Russell Kirk against Rousseau, John Locke, the French revolutionaries, and—perhaps surprising to many conservatives—Leo Strauss, and, particularly, Allan Bloom. While he does not hesitate to name names, Ryn’s “primary purpose is not to classify particular individuals but to identify a particular intellectual-political dynamic with its own inner logic, to show how certain ideas belong together and form a coherent, if philosophically highly questionable, ideology.”

The strength of Ryn’s analysis is his identification of deep discontinuities in American history and experience: namely, transformations of leadership, ethical conduct, political philosophy, social and economic structures, language, historical consciousness, and national self-perception and ambitions. Ryn roots American civilization in the heritage of Greece and Rome, Western Christendom, and British culture. America emerged from a particular past, a concrete  historical experience. America is indebted to that past for its culture, political institutions, and freedoms.

New Jacobins, however, viewing the past as a dark prison from which humanity must be liberated, construct an alternative America that fulfills Enlightenment dreams of emancipation, abstract natural rights, and unbridled democratism. Their interpretations of the American founding, canon of state documents, and cultural identity— while perhaps ideologically alluring—are at odds with historical reality. While seeming to advocate “traditional values,” they are actually revolutionaries who subvert the decentralist constitutional democracy of the founders. While seeming to defend the Western tradition from its enemies, New Jacobins advance a “secular, ahistorical, and egalitarian” appropriation of that tradition. Despite their rhetoric of piety toward tradition, they are the enemies of “pre-Enlightenment Western civilization.” Whereas America’s “old moral ethos” acknowledged the binding authority of tradition and custom and the contingencies of particular circumstances, Neo-Jacobin consciousness is ahistorical, universalist, and driven towards greater and greater concentrations of power. In fact, Ryn argues, “what the new Jacobins defend as Western civilization is actually but a small and relatively recent part of it, chiefly that part which came to political prominence with the French Revolution and that finds its other beginnings in the rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its precursors.”

If America is an “idea,” as the new Jacobins insist, then it is properly defined, now and always, by exceptionalism, universalism, democratism, restless innovation, and ideological imperialism. To the new Jacobin mind, the American story is one of unbroken, triumphalist continuity and robust good health. If, on the other hand, as Ryn contends, America over the past two centuries has actually abandoned its moorings and jettisoned the ballast of its classical and Christian heritage, then the American story is discontinuous and headed, perhaps, to an unhappy ending. Most alarmingly, America has abandoned its longstanding fear of power and pride; instead, “the signs are now everywhere that the will to dominate is breaking free of such traditional restraints.” Ryn blames the new Jacobinism for transforming the more modest old republic into an aggressive, ideological, revolutionary state bent on empire and driven to remake the world in its own image.

Ryn’s analysis is disturbing and provocative. It provides a framework within which to organize a range of slogans and policies into a coherent pattern of thought and conduct. From one angle, however, there is something inescapably authentic about the neo-Jacobin temptation. While recent enthusiasms for America as a messianic “universal nation” may represent a discontinuity from earlier American self-conceptions, there are also clearly continuities here, and these continuities need to be exposed and their implications understood. This is not a criticism of Ryn’s painstaking analysis, but a doorway into further in•quiry, perhaps of a more historical nature.

What do we make of, and what do we do, with the messianic, meliorist, liberationist impulse that in one form or another, to one degree or another, has been with us for four hundred years? A type of redemptive universalism came to the New World with the Puritans and reappeared from time to time even among the most sober-minded of the founders. From “God’s American Israel” to Crèvecoeur’s “new man,” from Yankee nation-building in the Civil War to Wilsonian social-gospel globalism in World War I, America has wrestled with this expansionist revolutionary tendency. There is something about Jacobinism that is persistently and in some sense genuinely American. At the dawn of the twenty-first century we are perhaps merely witnessing the further evolution of a contagion that we have carried in us from the beginning. Doctrines and impulses that we once consciously and deliberately suppressed are now allowed to run free. A more extended analysis of how and when these checks were removed in our history may provide a key to reinstating these checks institutionally, culturally, and personally.

Ryn has not written a book for the lazy, impatient, or haphazard reader. As hard as it may be for his likely opponents to accept, his analysis is refreshingly non-ideological. He ponders his subject with impressive care and attention, taking time to define terms, to trace the redefinition of familiar terms, to establish context and proper categories, to reaffirm hierarchies of obligation, to dichotomize between true and false notions of particular principles, and to distinguish between appearance and reality. Despite its provocative thesis and bold analysis, Ryn’s is in fact a cautious book that patiently makes its case, limits its implications, guards the careful reader from misinterpretations, and points out wherever necessary what it is not saying. Anticipating misunderstanding, Ryn frames and fences his argument at every turn. A proper reading of this book requires the all-too-rare mental habits of attention, discrimination, and judgment.

Ryn offers more than diagnosis, however, and his book is infused by hope. This is not a work of despair and cynicism, nor is Ryn nostalgic for a world lost beyond recovery. Indeed, he sees little left for conservatism to conserve. Despite the dreams of mere traditionalists, “the old Western civilization cannot return. It has been too badly damaged.” Instead, the task is one of reconstitution of the cultural preconditions of the well-ordered city. To that end, American civilization needs to re-appropriate the best of the Western tradition to meet new times and circumstances. Urgently, America requires “a new moral realism,” a foreign policy based on what Ryn calls “responsible nationhood,” and a return to limits personally and nationally, including “the rediscovery of responsibilities that are near, immediate, and concrete.”

The task, then, is not to win elections and capture positions of political power, but to renew the culture. The greatest responsibility rests with those who help shape the mind and imagination of the rising generations to offer them a coherent, compelling alternative. America requires the reaffirmation, by each of us, of the qualities of character necessary for authentic constitutional self-government—modesty, discipline, demonstrated ability, and a due sense of limits and proportion.

America the Virtuous calls for critical self-examination. It leads us to meditate on the contours of America’s past and present. Ryn equips us with an analytical tool that may provide a way of rethinking and retelling at least one part of the American story. He leads us as well to ponder the future of these tendencies, the implications for the nation if Jacobinism triumphs, completing the uprooting of America from the principles that once ordered its civilization. At a historical moment when the American people are being told that their Declaration of Independence and their Constitution embody political principles that ought to govern all peoples in all times and places and that Americans are the global guarantors of God-given rights, Ryn calls us back to constitutionalism and away from empire, back to character and away from sentiment.

Richard M. Gamble is Associate Professor of History at HIllsdale College, Michigan and the author of The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (2003) and of a forthcoming book entitled The Search for the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth (to be released in August 2012).

This review was first published in the Fall/Winter 2004 edition of Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Used by permission. ISI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization that seeks to educate future leaders in the timeless principles that make America free and prosperous—the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization that are rarely taught in the classroom..The website address of ISI is: http://home.isi.org

“…what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity….The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.” –an excerpt from this review

by Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Government at Berry College

A review of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
by David Bentley Hart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) from Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2010

This brilliant, stunningly erudite, and powerfully provocative work begins as a tough criticism of the naive stupidity of the books of our popularizing “new atheists”—the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. Those best-selling authors have made atheism newly fashionable by spinning it shamelessly to appeal to our “sophisticated” prejudices. They criticize the immoral effects of Christianity from an anti-cruelty, pro-freedom, pro-Enlightenment perspective. They paint a historical picture of the scientifically advanced civilizations of the ancient Greeks and Romans, reasonably adorned with an easygoing polytheism. That admirable world was ruined, they explain, by the repressive disruption occasioned by the superstitious belief that there is only one, true, personal God.

Hart’s “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.

Hart repeatedly highlights, and shares, the contempt of the old atheist Nietzsche for the cowardly unsustainability of such groundless preferences. It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions. It was Nietzsche, “the most prescient philosopher of nihilism,” who predicted the coming of a world full of Last Men lacking the great aspirations or profound longings that are the foundation of cultural creativity. For Hart, what follows Christianity is inevitably a post-Christian world that’s all about nothing. Still, much more than Nietzsche, Hart sees the pre-Christian world as also, in a different way, being all about nothing.

Hart describes for us a pre-Christian world that was cruel and capricious— reminding us forcefully of the torture and murder that ancient paganism tolerated as a matter of course, precisely because it regarded particular persons as unreal. The truth was best seen by the philosopher who became dead to himself, who resigned himself to the ephemeral insignificance of his particular existence. Christianity was, in a way, the slave revolt Nietzsche described, a “cosmic rebellion” against the enslavement of each of us to natural and political necessity. Christ, the Christians claimed, freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of God’s nature and man’s nature. He was, the Nicene fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his redemption was to divinize every man. Christ freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image; Christ was the foundation of a virtuous way of life based on a vision of the good that has no pagan counterpart. Charity to all became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith in the first place, given that those ideals had so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.

It is barely too strong to say that, for Hart, Christ transformed each of us from being nobody to being somebody—indeed, a somebody of infinite value. None of us is destined to be a slave, and death has been overcome. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures, because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirical evidence that death has been overcome for each particular human being. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from the unconditional love present among the early Christians and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who we are is the result of a deepened human inwardness or self-consciousness: Christ made each of us irreducibly deeper by infusing divinity into every nook and cranny of our natures.

Every feature of the personal liberation praised by our new atheists and our egalitarian autonomy boosters generally came into the world in Christian communities. Even the Stoics didn’t approach the Christians in their indifference to a person’s social status. The Christians were the first to be completely opposed to slavery; the first for raising women to equality in marriage and elsewhere; the first for faithfulness in monogamous marriage; the first for the egalitarian brotherhood of all men. For the Christians, the community of personal love wasn’t some otherworldly hope. Rather, that community was formed by obligations given to divinized beings here and now. Our divinization through Christ includes what is called life after death, but we can live lovingly liberated from death even before we die.

A big difference between Hart and Nietzsche, it should go without saying, is that Hart doesn’t hate the modern world insofar as it is a Christian accomplishment. There is ennobling truth in the egalitarianism of secular Christianity; our secularism is not simply the emptying out of all human content from our lives. Nevertheless, Hart should make clearer than he does that he actually affirms much of what’s called modern social progress in the direction of the liberation of women, the technological liberation of many from mere subsistence, the erosion of unjust conventional hierarchies, and even the affirmation of universal human rights. The modern abolitionists and the fervent partisans of civil rights, Hart repeatedly observes, were either Christians or consciously inspired by Christianity. Liberty without love is an illusion, or at least a distortion, and there’s no denying that modern political liberation was often inspired by a love for free beings, as well as by the love of being free.

Still, Hart never forgets that the effects of Christianity on political life are always incomplete and compromised. That was true of both the Roman Empire and imperial Christendom, as well as the British and American empires. The polis or nation or empire can be influenced or limited by the presence of the Christian community, but always against politics’ own grain. Hart’s view seems to be that all political life is unworthy of divinized beings, and part of our true liberation is from politics’ “inherent violence.” For Hart, it was a tragedy that the church as an institution ever played a role in political life or assumed responsibility for national or imperial unity—and so he has little nostalgia for the comprehensive dream that was Christendom. Much of his book is a description of “the history of a constant struggle between the power of the gospel to alter and shape society and the power of the state to absorb every useful institution into itself.” But he should have made clearer that the modern separation of the nation from the church—in, for example, the American case—cannot be regarded as a tragedy for the church, so long as the gospel has retained some influence. The separation of church and state, Hart acknowledges, is a distinctively Christian accomplishment. The tragedy, of course, was the nation’s eventual liberation from Christianity’s chastening influence—a liberation, Hart should have added, that is surely least complete in America.

The Christian view that our freedom is for love’s sake also included the thought that we cannot and should not change our God-given natures; we are, by nature, divinized beings free from merely biological limitations and so free for deathless, unconditioned love. The post-Christian affirms that we are meant to be free, but without any sense that we have been freed from death or necessity. So our freedom is to be used to win, by our own efforts, what the Christian God had promised to provide. Loving unconditionally from faith in an imaginary divinity is for suckers, but there’s no denying that this faith showed us that we are, in fact, free—and we won’t be satisfied until we’ve used that freedom to overcome death for ourselves. We are not, by nature, divine beings: there’s no evidence for that without faith. But perhaps we can employ our freedom to make ourselves divine—free from the impersonal limits of our biological natures. The modern thought is that faith in God can be replaced by a more reasonable faith in the unprecedented historical future, faith in what we can do for ourselves in a basically hostile world.

Having been given nothing that corresponds to the high opinion he has of his personal significance (which he learned, indirectly, from Christianity), the anxious modern person believes, nihilistically, that he is on his own to make his world worthy of him. He is not nihilistic, we might say, in his own case. No Christian or post-Christian is nihilistic in his own case, and his “delusion” concerning his own personal significance is at the core of the always-futile Aristotelian (Straussian) and Darwinian criticisms of the basically Christian pretensions of all modern persons. The secular Christian incoherence that Hart repeatedly criticizes is that no person is really a materialist in his own case, even though he “knows” he has no scientific reason why he should not be. From one view, modern nihilism always amounts to the position that, after the revelation or discovery of the Christian insight about personal freedom, the individual person is a persistent, irreducibly mysterious leftover from the world described by science. How can the person be happy or secure while believing personal love—love worthy of me—and personal existence itself are, objectively, illusions? It is little wonder that Christianity without Christ leads to the conclusion that we should transform nature—and especially our own natures—to be worthy of our freedom.

It is not Hart’s intention to provide aid and comfort to those—from new atheists to conservative Darwinians, Straussians, and many Heideggerians—who wish that Christianity had never had such a profound influence in the world. But he does say that after Christ’s incarnation the alternatives are Christianity or nothing, and he sees no prospect of reversing the declining cultural influence of Christianity anytime soon. There can be no return to the prudence of the ancient world, which was based on an insight about our natural limitations that is rejected by free persons. There seems to be no return, for now, to a widespread belief that our natures have
been freed from death by the divine gift of the incarnation of God. In Hart’s view, the Christian insight about who we are will not completely disappear, but its future for now will be in small countercultural communities that will be increasingly alienated from a world that will be dominated, at best, by apathetic Last Men and at worst by eugenic transformationalists employing all means necessary to win our final freedom from nature. Christianity discredited every other understanding of god or human idealism, and so in the absence of Christ—Nietzsche and Hart agree—God more or less inevitably seems dead.

Hart says in one place that the genius of Christianity lies in its extremism. Christians contrast the intractable selfishness, cruelty, violence, and melancholic hopelessness of our merely biological natures with the unconditioned personal love that can govern our divinized nature. Hart sometimes seems to say that Aristotle was right, in his time, about our ultimate enslavement to an impersonal logos that negates every aspiration for personal significance; then, Christ transformed us— changing our natures. But surely Christians believe that, from the beginning, the world and each of us was a divine gift. And, from the beginning, human experience was, finally, that logos is only present in persons. Only persons are open to the truth about being and human being. The Christian insight opened our eyes more fully to what we can see for ourselves about the ground for personal freedom in being itself. The personal logos affirmed by the church fathers was always more true than the impersonal logos affirmed by Aristotle and Darwin.

That’s why we can say with some confidence that both Nietzsche and Hart exaggerate by describing persons today as Last Men or beings without human content or nothing—emotionally puerile and flat-souled mere consumers. And that’s why we can be more hopeful about the political and cultural future of the human person than Hart seems to be. That our world is inescapably Christian or post-Christian is more good news than not about our inescapably human future. We know we are all equally not nothing, and it’s not in our power to negate that truth. Still, we can and will, as Hart rightly shows, make ourselves (and others) miserable trying.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He teaches courses in political philosophy and American politics. He is executive editor of the quarterly journal, Perspectives on Political Science and has written or edited fifteen books. His newest book is Modern and American Dignity (ISI Books, 2010), for which he was named a Georgia Author of the Year. All his books–such as Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Aliens in America, Stuck with Virtue, and Homeless and at Home in America, have been widely and positively reviewed. He was the 2007 winner of the Weaver Prize for Scholarly Excellence in promoting human dignity to a broad audience.

This review is republished from the Fall, 2010 edition of Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Copyright 2010. Used by permission. ISI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization that seeks to educate future leaders in the timeless principles that make America free and prosperous—the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization that are rarely taught in the classroom. The website address of ISI is: http://home.isi.org