And while the essence of Scruton’s message is effectively communicated, the result is a documentary that is as much about Beauty- as it is about ugliness. At its best, it can arouse interest in investigating the “matter” of beauty a little further, but at its worst, it can leave the viewer with only a tragic sense of what is lost and irrecoverable. But how did we end up here? If Scruton, one of the best intellectuals of the conservative right, cannot lead us back to an original sense of Beauty, how are we ever expected to find this way on our own? Could there be some hidden resource that we could pull straight out of modernity itself, one that could offer us a glimpse of what is lost? This article claims to provide an original idea to the affirmative. But to begin by trying to answer the first of these questions, we need to think seriously about what the modern world really is. What are its hidden premises? Is it unspoken metaphysics? According to the dominant view of modern-day academia, all values, including beauty, are relative, as they are but a function of a particular time and place in history. This “historicism,” as this view is now called, will likely present the advent of modernity as inevitable: the end product of mostly random series of historical events. But that is not necessarily so. Because historicism itself has a history, and its ideas must, therefore, also be the product of a particular historical time, which is no other, of course, than the modern world they are trying to explain. To get out of this mental loop, therefore, and get a more unobstructed view of what is going on with modernity, we must step outside its historical horizon and look at our unique moment in history from a vantage point beyond it, namely, the ancient world, where Beauty had the original power that Scruton tried to communicate.

Seen through this prism, the modern world is premised on a refutation of the ancient worldview. This definition can be narrowed to a simple yet curious fact: the denial of eternity. Religion, so dominant among the ancients, was nothing but an expression, a personification even, of a more foundational concept, that of eternity. Man, according to the Greeks, was a being that was unique among others because it strived for its own perfection and could only be rightly understood in relation to that perfection. What Aristotle called “telos,” the natural end of Man, was seen as the only reference point that could explain man’s current and imperfect state. Man, therefore, was to be understood by what made him unique among the animals, his natural orientation towards perfection. Following this point, Beauty was identified by Plato as the natural instinct of the human soul that sought this perfection in the forms of time. The ancient world then was nothing if not a reference to eternity. And it’s precisely this reference that the modern world refuted, while the sciences that developed in its wake can be understood as an effort to find a new one.

And find it they did! But this “discovery” was premised on a total inversion of the ancient worldview. From this moment forward, Man was not to be explained as being “pulled” towards his ultimate goal but “pushed” by his lowest and most basic needs: his instincts and fears, his sex drive and hunger for power. In the realm of biology, this view was incarnated most visibly by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, where, for the first time in history, Man was explained not by what is different but by what is common between him and other animals. After Man’s outer form was explained successfully through Darwin’s evolution, Freud’s psychoanalysis continued with Man’s inner nature, and by following the same rules of thumb: explain the higher in terms of the lower, the drive for sex. This project of modernity came hand-in-hand with the radical egalitarianism of classical liberalism. If Man’s true nature is identified with those parts that all individuals share in common with each other, then Man’s true nature is one of absolute equality. Darwin and Freud later became the two ends of a pinch that squeezed out the ancient notion of Man as the transient being that strives towards eternity, explaining us… by explaining us away.  We can keep insisting that a white canvas exhibited as a work of art is absurd, but this is the result of ideas set in motion centuries ago. We are the children of a revolution that we were never taught at school, which barely touched our universities. And so, we never really understood the hidden assumptions of that revolution. Because if all truth is historical, subject to the material conditions that create it, following this premise to its natural conclusion, there must be at least one truth that escaped from this condition: the truth that states that “all truth is historical.” This truth, then, must be some “final” reality that will inevitably bring about a “final” culture… which is the much-prophesied “end of history.”

So now, let’s accept modernity at face value and repeat its basic premises. If modernity is built on a refutation of the ancient world, a denial of eternity, of which Beauty was the royal road, and if modernity has arrived at last at some “final truth,” the truth that all values are subjective. Then, at the end of its history, modernity must resemble a “perfect negative” of the ancient world. The shape that the modern world will take at the end of history will be a perfect “cast” of the statue that was the ancient world, and through it, we will get a proper reference to what has been lost: the sublime experience of Beauty. And so, maybe Scruton was right all along. Having traveled so far into modernity, maybe the key to restoring a sense of Beauty has to pass through its opposite. In the years following the documentary’s release, things have been moving fast towards an “end of history” that seems to follow the modernist agenda on every conceivable level: cultural, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual. Many of us feel that a cultural battle has already been lost. A campaign we were never summoned to. Some believe that what is truly needed is a complete return to a moment when the values and beliefs we hold dear become the norm. But as impossible as it is, even if that were to happen, would it not recreate the conditions that brought these values down in the first place? Yet, we cannot remain passive. Whatever is approaching us (and things are now moving at increasing speed), we cannot reverse it, and we cannot avoid it somehow; we have to go through it. And just like in Dante’s Inferno, at the lowest point of Hell, we will begin to get a glimpse of Heaven and once again see the stars.

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This seeking after unity in a broken world is symbolized in every aspect of Hoban’s novel. Even the language he uses reflects this search, and especially its treacherousness. “As much as possible,” Hoban writes on Riddelyspeak, “I tried for more than one meaning in the words. For example, when Riddley says, ‘I wer the loan of my name’ he means that he is the lone carrier of his name, [and that he is] living on borrowed time.” Another example, more poignant for what I want to discuss here, is the idea of the “1 Big 1” that shows up repeatedly throughout the story. It could refer to God, the One in whom all manyness is reconciled, but, more often in the story, it carries overtones of a nuclear holocaust, a happening in the past that sent everyone back into the stone age.

The opposite meanings echo the name Oppenheimer gave to the first test detonation of a nuclear weapon: Trinity. Perhaps the ‘1 Big 1’ refers to some future possibility, namely that of retrieving the power of a bomb all the better to rule ‘Inland’—the England of Riddley’s future time. In one phrase, that “1 Big 1,” the oneness of everything and the twoness working against the oneness come together. Being is both unified here and blown to smithereens. It is not a union of love but a rape.

There’s this moment in the novel when Riddley suddenly feels a deeper sense of the spiritual and material world lost to the destructive impulses of people. It’s so moving, and Riddely himself, just twelve years old in the story, feels immense sorrow on realizing it. He weeps, “O what we ben! And what we come to!” Another character echoes the same sentiment: “Riddley we aint as good as them befor us. Weve come way way down from what they ben time back way back.” Even given that this is from an imagined future, I don’t think that the “time back way back” he is talking about is our time. We’re living in the aftermath of such a time. It’s especially tricky now to know how we’re supposed to piece together so many fragments when the entropic force of so many wrongheaded philosophies fills so many heads, often lurking in the defaults that we live with. Default entropy. It is no wonder hope is a virtue. It takes an awful lot of gumption to have a front-row seat to the disintegration of civilization itself, at least that’s what it often feels like, and say, “ Trubba not,” or “No Trubba,” as they do in Riddley Walker.

Hoban hints very early on in that story that some sort of unity can be found, after all, perhaps not in the world itself, which is often a manifest array of discontinuities but in ‘the idea’ of things. He waxes Platonic. In the idea of things, we can find some sort of wholeness even when brokenness is so painfully apparent. In the myth of Eusa, a corrupted retelling of the story of St. Eustace that people in Riddley’s world use as a kind of scripture, Eusa sees a vision of “the Littl Shynin Man,” a Christ-figure, who he accidentally rips in two. That mythical Eusa, his name a pun on the USA, holds the little body of the Little Shynin Man, and he has no clue how it was that he came apart in his hands with such ease. Later, however, that same Littl Shynin Man reappears to him in a vision but is somehow whole again:

“Thayr apeerd tu him then the Littl Shynin Man he wuz in 1 peace. Eusa sed, Wy arn you in 2 peaces? The Littl Man sed, Eusa I am in 2 peaces. It is onle the idear uv me that cum tu gether. Yu ar lukin at the idear uv me and I am it. Eusa sed, Wut is the idear uv yu? The Litt Man sed, It is wut it is. I aint the noing uv it Im jus onle the showing uv it.”

There’s a lot here to chew on. If you haven’t read the novel yet, bear in mind that it’s not the sort of novel you read but rather the sort of novel that reads you, if you’ll let it. But I want to home in on that idea—the showing of the idea is not the knowing of it. Appearing is, as phenomenologists say, usually a sign of a greater disappearing. What is manifest suggests a deeper, more profound hiddenness. And it is there in that hiddenness, in the mystery, that oneness in twoness is best grasped. Oneness is recovered in the invisible. It is there in that hiddenness that oneness grasps us if we will let ourselves be grasped.

But it is this hiddenness that progressive modernity has long opposed. What cannot be directly perceived is taken to be as good as unreal. Love is not real to progressive moderns. Modernity itself took a step back a while to break itself off from everything that would help to keep things together. The past became anathema. Everything needed to be new, now and for always. The irony of the obsession with novelty is that the newness, by being so diabolically cut off from the old ways, ends up simply manifesting old demons. Tradition, after all, has always been an answer to problems that we have forgotten are problems. Modernity forgets tradition and so forgets being along with it. It forgets the sacred. It forgets real meaning. Everything becomes a construct.

At some point in the not-too-distant past, nihilism became the default. What that meant, among other things, was that only things you could prove, only the tangible, the materializable, the quantifiable, could be considered real. Beauty, truth, goodness—these enpatterned things were relegated to the realm of fiction. The invisible was conflated with the non-existent. It is not immediately obvious, mind you, that what is invisible is necessarily unreal. But the fact that this has been largely forgotten by modernity has opened the door to twoness and manyness against oneness. Progressive modernity says that reality is a dead thing and that what we do is to project our feelings and notions onto it merely. How thrilling it may seem to become like gods, making good and evil for ourselves. You can be whatever you want to be, and the world can be whatever you make it to be. Start from scratch. Blank-slate your way through existence!

But this is the essence of the trouble. Progressive modernity has, on the whole, made various attempts to do away with mediation. Where exactly this started is not so easy to say. Arguably, as Aristotle suggests, change is always in process, even if you happen to think you’ve identified the starting point. John Duns Scotus (1265ish to 1308) helped speed this along by discarding the delicate balance between orders of being and reducing being to a univocal category; this, in turn, necessitated relegating God to the unintelligible category of infinite being. With divinity unknowable even by analogy, mediation itself was easily threatened. William of Ockham (1275-1347) made things worse by introducing voluntarism and nominalism against universals, doing away with the idea that perceptible realities were mediations of higher realities.

The Protestant Reformation certainly played a part in entrenching the forgetting of mediation, especially in the notion of sola scriptura coined by Martin Luther (1483-1546).  The idea that people can read scripture without the mediation of tradition is absurd. Still, the fact that so many people adopted this way of thinking quite unquestioningly was probably owed to the fact that mediation is never very loud and showy. It’s easy to forget the quiet thing that grounds your existence when it’s not all that concerned with making a fuss. Priests no longer mediated between man and God either, and the sacramental order was turned into a realm of mere signs.

But, of course, we have various other modernist thought patterns to thank for furthering the cause against mediation. We have, for instance, the idea that the world itself doesn’t have to be there for us to think about it, a la Descartes (1596–1650) and, later, the American pragmatism of people like William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952), which doesn’t waste time on abstract notions and launches into just acting. Ha! Acting? How’s that for a paradigm shift? The absence of mediation produces so much action—so much activism—but also so much pretending. Slacktivism. Faketevism. You see, the twoness gets into the oneness without much ‘Trubba’.

No doubt, Nike’s Just Do It slogan is one consequence of this stupid pragmatism. Pragmatism makes some sense if the horizon we’re acting from is shared and coherent. Democracy itself could work if we had a shared horizon, I suppose. But with the horizon torn into myriad pieces and dished out to impoverished souls like so many scraps at a charity kitchen, pragmatism, and democracy become manifestations of a loss of reality. Pragmatism becomes relativism. Democracy becomes a demonocracy.

More generally, progressive modernity, on the whole, forgets formal and final causality in favor of a reductionist understanding of efficient causality—I’m thinking of Aristotle’s four causes here—and this is just one more of many other ways that mediation is forgotten. The quiet thing, the thing that’d help us to find unity, is forgotten. The point, of course, is not that mediation ever really goes away but that many people over a fairly lengthy historical span, while acting as if escaping mediation is possible, have fostered in culture precisely the sort of consciousness that would render a coherent worldview impossible.

Nowadays, I regard it as near-miraculous to find anyone whose worldview consists of more than a dying bouquet of knee-jerk reactions. Most of the students I teach, even those of some strong religious affiliation, have had their worldviews shattered into millions of pieces because they are no longer capable of fixing their attention on any sort of unity for long enough to let it put them back together. In 1916, GK Chesterton once joked that it does not matter if Homer’s Illiad or The Book of Job were written by many authors instead of one: “The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now, one man is like a city in civil war.” It was over a century ago that he said this. What a terrible thing it is to contemplate just how bad the civil war within people has gotten.

Not all modern philosophers have neglected mediation, of course. Hegel places mediation at the center of his philosophy and at the center of his dialectic. But in the end, he makes the same mistake as so many other moderns. He reduces mediation to self-mediation. He leaves it in the hands of the mere sad, measly self to generate some sense of coherence in the world. And no self is up to the task. Hegel ends up simply riding on the progressive modernity train. In this regard, Russell Hoban does a better job than Hegel does when paying attention to mediation. He gives his protagonist a title. He calls him a “connexion man.” I want to be a connexion man like Riddley Walker. His job is to be receptive to “blips,” “nindicaters,” “syns,” “tels,” and “reveals”. He must see how the “sync” can be “tempted” by always remaining “sinful” and attentive not only to the world but to the deep truths working through the world. His job is to be, at a bare minimum, a Platonist.

Here’s a translation for those who need it. Be aware. Wake up. Notice that the world is a revelation. There are signs and indicators everywhere, and their immediate equivocality suggests, to anyone paying attention, a deeper unity than the one that is most obvious. The world is no dead thing. It speaks of a connectedness that no default nihilism can account for. But, crucially, some forms of mediation are better than others. Plato warned against mediations that are too far removed from reality to allow us genuine contact with what would put us back together. It should be no surprise to us that in a world of media, especially of mediations that excite the more degraded parts of ourselves, we distrust mediation. But the false mediations of sophists and screens and AI programs carry with them a tragic forgetfulness of mediation. What they present is a seeming immediacy. Instant messaging. There’s no room for connexion men and connexion women in a world of absolute immediacy. There’s no pausing, praying, spacing out. We need leisure to be connexion people, as Josef Piper argues in Leisure: The Basis for Culture. But from Hoban’s Riddely Walker, we can learn to wait patiently. True mediation is in that Other-Power that calls us beyond ourselves into a unity that we can’t necessarily articulate but which we can, nevertheless, feel.

In connection with this idea, I often think of Hajime Tanabe’s profound philosophical work Philosophy as Metanoetics (1945). As Tanabe introduces that work, he discusses how he found himself in desperate existential distress. For one thing, it was owed to the sheer inability to get the right information as his government forced a certain narrative onto its people such that the truth of Japan’s dealings in the Second World War could not be ascertained. Then, as the shame of Japan’s role in the War became apparent, as loss and grief dawned on its people, there was, for Tanabe, a terrible sense that he, as a philosopher, was no good to anyone. What was he supposed to say when all of that had happened? He went mute. He didn’t know how to help anyone understand the devastation. And then, he did something that all of us need to do. He gave up. Perhaps he was made to give up. Something beyond him told him to wait. “I, the Lord, will fight for you. You have only to do nothing” (Exodus 14:14).

This was no swallowing of some black pill. This was no mere resignation. This was a call to confession and repentance. This is the essence of metanoetics. This was a call to let the Other-Power speak. Self-Power had, after all, proven itself so weak and pathetic. Weakness can be a kind of strength, he discovered, when it learns to recognise the face of truth again. This was a call to return to mediation. Return to what moderns have forgotten.

We try, don’t we, to make all the connections ourselves? We are all modern in one way or another, all possessed by certain modern illusions. We try to put the pieces together according to our own limited understanding. We end up, predictably, with a string of knee-jerk reactions and intuitions fairly haphazardly hurled together. Little coherence is possible when this is how we work in and with the world. But what Tanabe suggests, and what Hoban suggests after him, and what we find again and again in the metaxological philosophy of William Desmond, is something humbler. A patience with being. A willingness to wait. “In quietness and trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). Things may not make sense now. But sense will be made of things, even if not by you. In Gravity and Grace (1947), Simone Weil has this to say, which echoes the above: “Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”

I realize how unpalatable this position is to well-indoctrinated moderns. This is no call for more information, more communication, more data, etc. I realize, too, that the best I can say here is that unity is possible, even if I can offer no clear method for how to find it. I’ve suggested the word mediation, and I’ve indicated Tanabe’s way: confession and repentance. What this means, in practice, is, first, to let being mediate itself to you; second, to relinquish what isn’t true to being. Truth can only speak when we’ve given up on our precious illusions. This is not a call for science and the reign of quantity. Those are precisely the illusions. They offer nothing of love and say nothing of beauty and goodness. We need to get our ontological ducks into a row better than all previous moderns have.

Here’s a starting point: default nihilism isn’t true to being, so repent of it. Let go of that which would insist on twoness when oneness is what you’re after. Weep for “what we ben” and “what we come to.” Grief may be more needed in a time of brokenness than we may tend to realize. As Miguel de Unamuno says, “I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling on God. … The chief sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common … It is not enough to cure a plague: we must learn to weep for it.” This is a very different approach from the common one: grievance airing, not grief. Anger, not weeping. Self-power, not Other-power. Crying aloud and calling upon the government instead of upon God. Perhaps it is no wonder “the 2ness of everything is working against [us].” We have forgotten how to mourn.

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Leo Strauss was one of the most insightful and consequential if not otherwise controversial, political philosophers and classicists of the last century. To his critics, Strauss is the bugaboo guy who is the dark mastermind of American imperialism and neoconservatism (notwithstanding, such conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked and dismissed in academic studies). To his students and his defenders, Strauss was a great exegete of the classics who brought Plato, Thucydides, Al-Farabi, and Machiavelli to life for a generation of political theorists who had been cut off from anything written prior to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss brought back into academic study and consideration the insights of the classical political tradition shunned by the modern political science of post-Hobbesianism.

Athens, Jerusalem, and all That

Part of Strauss’s fame was his elaboration on the Western dynamic caught up by two cities and the concepts they represented. For Strauss, the Western tradition cannot be lifted out of the indissoluble tension between rationalism and revelation, symbolized by Athens and Jerusalem. The Athenian rationalist tradition, for Strauss, was cut-throat, pragmatic, and suffered from a tension between hubris and realism. The Jerusalemite revelatory tradition, by contrast, was moralistic and zealous but also suffered the tension of hubris and realism, albeit for different reasons. One need only look at the long history of Jewish and Christian messianic movements for how faith could be as equally hubristic as an aspirational form of political apotheosis.

Strauss never believed that there was a peaceful coexistence between reason and revelation. Instead, reason and revelation were at war with each other. This violent dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem was mediated by the ascendant Catholic Church, but that mediation was eventually broken by Machiavelli and the Protestant Reformation—though that mediation was already facing problems with men like Marsilius of Padua and from within the Catholic tradition like with Augustine’s separation of the city of man (rationalism) and the city of God (revelation). Although Strauss does give attention to that Catholic mediation (namely in his short but important reflections on Saint Thomas Aquinas), this mediation is a betrayal of the real dynamic between the two: conflict not synthesis.

Central to Strauss’s thesis on the Western dynamic is the theologico-political problem. What comes first? God or the polis, God or the state, God or the lawgiver, etc. To where do our loyalties orient themselves: the realm of the white rose and the city of divine love or the city of man with its deified lawgiver like Lycurgus, Solon, or Numa – or in the American context where Straussianism thrives as an intellectual movement, the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln? This is the tension between Athens (the city of man) and Jerusalem (the city of God). The highest good in life for the Greeks was political life. The highest good in life for Jews and Christians was the theological and contemplative life (focusing on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, and morality, leading to the numerous philosophies and theologies of love that we have inherited). Some Jews and Christians eventually found minority support from a handful of Greek philosophers who maintained intellectual contemplation and politics were compatible goods (namely Plato and Aristotle), but this revision of Plato and Aristotle was exactly that—a revision, and Strauss wanted to reclaim Plato and Aristotle from that revisionism to highlight how the intellectual impetus of Plato and Aristotle was subservient to political ends rather than intellectual ends in of themselves. This division is significant, and in the world of political struggle, it can have serious consequences when contemplating the fall of civilization in an isolated monastery, which takes precedence over the defense of the political order and allows for contemplative mysticism in the first place.

Despite this irreconcilable difference, Strauss maintained that the dynamism and greatness of the West was the dialectic between these two antagonistic traditions. When Athens veered into hubris, Jerusalem was there to reel it back in. When Jerusalem veered into hubris, Athens was there to reel it back in. The medieval conflict between the popes and Holy Roman emperors, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, embodied this dynamic of conflict. The outcome of this tension between reason and revelation is compromise, and the population at large benefits from such compromise between the forces of political fanaticism and religious zeal.

What Athens gave to the West was political and military zeal and ingenuity, “daring, progress, and the arts.” What Jerusalem gave to the West was contemplative and spiritual discipline, a yearning for heavenly things, and a deep anthropology that contributed to the study of nature human nature, and created an important place for intellectual contemplation as a serious and noble pursuit in itself instead of the pragmatic, political-oriented, intellectualism of the Greek philosophers. These two forces produced a schizophrenic civilization and human person, but we have all benefited from this dynamic tension between pure politics and contemplative theological anthropology. For instance, the great treasures of Western art are the byproduct of this tension wrestling with each other; take the great art and literature of the West, so much of it influenced by Christian philosophies of love yet commissioned by political leaders to serve the purpose of political propaganda.

Classics and Moderns

The other famous distinction, or dialectic, Strauss drew was between the classics and moderns which is found in his magnum opus, Natural Right and History. Here the classical and Christian traditions were allied but allied only because they shared the same basic anthropology that humanity was social in its nature and had a telos undergirding it. While the Greco-Romans and Christians differed, Strauss noted that it was primarily the Catholic tradition of science and philosophy that kept the disparate visions of Athens and Jerusalem united under the principle of the common good and common understanding of human nature (though never a common or universal culture).

Contrary to popular misinformation, the modern project of philosophy was a complete break from Greek philosophy and not its resurrection. Any undergraduate in philosophy would know this. Yet, paradoxically, in breaking from the Greek philosophical tradition, modernity was also a return to the Greek philosophical tradition—namely, the pre-Socratic tradition of materialist sophistry. While Strauss saw Machiavelli as a forerunner, the culmination of this return to empty materialism and self-preservation as the highest end (read: lowest end) of life was in Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. While the moderns turned to the pre-Socratics for inspiration, namely in the assumption that metaphysics begins with nature or matter and not God or the Platonic Ideas/Forms, that’s where the similarity ends. For modern materialism, born out of the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, was guided by Francis Bacon’s New Science of scientific conquest and the transformation and mastery of nature – concepts alien to the pre-Socratic materialists.

In a dazzling exegesis of the so-called “classical liberals,” Strauss highlights how their philosophical outlook is premised on relativism, hedonism, and solitary and atomistic individualism. In rejecting a summum bonum, the classical liberals decisively destroyed the possibility of unity in a society. In promoting hedonism, or lack of bodily harm, as the highest good in life, the classical liberals turned everyone into a robotic copy of each other, destroying all distinctive particularity to life. In considering humans a-social and solitary creatures, the classical liberals denied the possibility of political virtue in its Greco-Roman form centered around patriotism and phronesis, or in its Christian conceptualization through the politics of the common good in service to each other as an expression of loving God (love God and love your neighbor).

Life in the state of nature was terrible. Even in Locke, who was nothing more than “the wolf Hobbes in sheep’s clothing,” as Strauss described him, the classical liberal solution to the problem of a brutish and short life in the state of nature was the imposition of the leviathan overall who came under the tentacles of the social contract. Locke goes as far as to state that part of the responsibility of government is to “decide the rights of the subject, by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges.”

Locke, as Strauss showed, is hardly the benign libertarian that he is made out to be on the internet by people who have never understood him (and perhaps haven’t even read him). After all, his rosy state of nature necessarily descends into the state of war, which compels us out of the primal state of existence. Conflict defines an atomized society in a war over the scarcity of resources. Thus, Strauss shows, after many close and intense readings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and others, that the logical conclusion of the modern liberal vision moves to “the outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state.” How prescient, all things considered. Even Locke’s political logic is the slow growth of statism—the more “rights” one has, the more power the state must have to enforce those rights “by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges,” as Locke himself states, whose legislature must be “sacred and unalterable.” What of Locke’s call for revolution, might one ask? If you read Locke carefully, he never advocates that in the way we moderns think of revolution; Locke’s revolution is a return to government because it has nullified itself, dissolved itself, through its own abuses and living under no government (now that it nullified itself) is the antithesis of our call into the social contract.

The crisis of modernity is, therefore, one of permissive nihilism and encroaching statism. With nothing to call citizens up toward besides comfortable living, the gains won by liberal democracy would be threatened. It was threatened by fascism but managed to survive, something that Strauss focused on in his lecture/essay “On German Nihilism” (1941). In Strauss’s time, liberal democracy was in a struggle with communism. From Strauss’s perspective, communism offered humanity something to be zealous for and strive to achieve. Liberalism, not so much. This would, in turn, Strauss feared, lead to non-communist young adults embracing communism because the apotheotic aspiration of communism was far more alluring than the empty hedonism of liberalism. Strauss wanted to avert this possibility.

Strauss was not an anti-liberal in the manner that Strauss’s critics ignorantly and erroneously charge (and one is often left to wonder if the critics ever bothered to read him). On the contrary, he was a friend to liberal democracy. He believed that the liberal democratic states, for all their metaphysical and philosophical problems, still retained the spirit of classical Athens and acceptance of spiritual matters and religion (even if in a much more depreciated form) in the promise of freedom of religion. Despite the problems of liberalism, Strauss believed that rejuvenating liberal polities with classical virtue ethics would safeguard it from slipping into nihilistic tyranny and from losing the contest with communism. In a world where tyranny was everywhere, liberalism—while in danger of falling into its own tyranny—had the most freedom to confront decadence and despotism from within. Strauss’s hope, then, was that the recovery of classical ideals and virtue would bolster the implicit nihilism and hedonism of liberal thought; this was only possible in liberal polities precisely because of their relative openness. Plato and Aristotle may have been forgotten, but they were not banned. As such, they could be recovered. Strauss was, in fact, a great friend and supporter of American Democracy and was deeply concerned about what would happen to the world if American Democracy decayed, degenerated, and failed to remain steadfast in its opposition to its more authoritarian opponents who followed the single path of creating salvation on earth.

Three Waves of Modernity

In his essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss charted the tripartite struggle for modernity as an ideological one. Conservatism need not apply because conservatism was premodern and anti-ideological. The contenders in modernity were liberalism (including many who go by the label “conservative” in today’s world), socialism, and fascism.

Liberalism was marked by the discovery of humanity’s mastery over nature through technology (or what we call “science”). The essence of liberalism was to create safe, pleasant, and harmless lives through the instruments of the new science, “The purpose of science is reinterpreted: propter potentiam, for the relief of man’s estate, for the conquest of nature, for the maximum control, the systematic control of the natural conditions of human life. The conquest of nature implies that nature is the enemy, chaos to be reduced to order; everything good is due to man’s labor rather than to nature’s gift: nature supplies only the almost worthless materials. Accordingly, the political society is in no way natural.” Furthermore, Strauss writes in reflecting over the movement of modern political ideology, “I can here only assert that the increased emphasis on economics is a consequence of this. Eventually we arrive at the view that universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.”

The materialization of life and the triumph of scientistic-economism was the outcome of the first wave of modernity. It was reacted against by the second wave, or socialism. The head of the second wave was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as much a modernist as any Enlightenment philosopher before him.

Rousseau protested on behalf of nature, but he protested on behalf of human nature more than he did the green trees and flowery pastures interrogated on the rack of post-Baconian science, “[Rousseau] protested in the name of virtue, of the genuine, nonutilitarian virtue.” If liberalism was about remaking the world to make humanity’s consumeristic life pleasurable and peaceful, socialism also concurred with liberalism in this regard. Hence, the two movements are bitter enemies. They agree on the same end that “universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.” The difference is that socialism disagreed with the means to the end.

According to Strauss, the discovery of the second wave of modernity was the dissolution of any form of realism in nature. While the assault upon nature commenced in the Renaissance, in the writings of Machiavelli, and especially Francis Bacon, it wasn’t until the aftereffects of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution that the true war on nature was unleashed with the belief that nature was entirely changeable, reducible, destructible. The goal of life wasn’t harmony with nature, wasn’t to be taught by nature, wasn’t to dwell in the beauty of nature; the goal of life was the transformation of nature for the self-pleasure and contentment of man. Technology made this possible. If you refuse to be part of this project, you will be made to journey to a better world whether you want to or not. As Rousseau said in The Social Contract, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” The world of freedom through the mastery and transformation of nature is the only world that we must create. This was a communal endeavor, not an individualistic one.

While the second wave of modernity came to these conclusions from the spirit of the first wave, the real difference between socialism and classical liberalism was socialism’s moral fire vis-à-vis liberalism’s moral relativism. Here, one can see Strauss laughing like Democritus. While there were some religious socialists, most socialists have been, and remain today, anti-clerical, atheistic, and opponents of religion. Yet they were filled with the moral spirit of Jerusalem, lending credence to the dismissive jeering of socialism as a “religion” or new “theology,” a religious faith for those who have lost their religious belief in a Transcendent Deity like the Christian God. Liberals, in their Athenian and Thrasymachean materialism, were the unintentional heirs of Athens, just like socialists became the unintentional heirs of Jerusalem with their moralism and zeal for reform. The new dialectic of Athens and Jerusalem was between the cut-throat materialism of Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke against the sentimental materialism of Rousseau and his heirs, especially the Romantics. Socialism preached the gospel of techno-sentimentalism, or “scientific socialism,” a transformation of the world for moral ends using the same means and methods as classical liberalism’s transformation of the world purely for the self.

Then Strauss reached his elaboration on fascism, which was the cruelest of all the modern ideologies. Fascism was defined as “the experience of terror and anguish rather than of harmony and peace, and it is the sentiment of historical existence as necessarily tragic.” The perpetual struggle was what would bring humanity happiness. Herd life, the life of the “last men,” was simply to have a full stomach and a warm bed to retire to at night. To the fascist, the emptiness of modernity was where humans lived “without any ideals and aspirations” and simply wanted to be “well fed, well clothed, well housed, well medicated by ordinary physicians and by psychiatrists.”

The seductive danger of fascism was achieved through its synthetic combination of discoveries of the first two waves of modernity. From liberalism, fascism took the cult of technology and science to new levels of repression, interrogation, and control. From socialism, fascism took over criticism of liberalism as morally weak, relativistic, and too self-centered. With the power of technology now in the hands of the Übermensch, the new brave new world of could be made real. The purpose of life was the struggle to make that world a reality since nature and technology called for a world of control to be established. If liberalism was the thesis of modernity and socialism the antithesis to liberalism, then fascism was the synthesis that drew on the discoveries of liberalism and socialism while also rebelling against liberalism and socialism. Far from a “reactionary” movement like the medieval romanticism of the nineteenth century opining for a return to the throne and altar, fascism was an intensely modern and forward-looking movement. Fascism represented the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, the totalizing embodiment of modernist philosophy and science gone awry.

In this contest of ideologies, fascism had fallen with its defeat in 1945. At the time of Strauss’s death, liberalism and socialism remained. From Strauss’ point of view, socialism could have still emerged as the victor when he died in 1973. The ever-present threat of a socialist victory in the ideological wars of modernity and the slow-growing nihilism and relativism that lay at the heart of liberalism was something with which Strauss was extensively and intensely concerned.

Strauss Today

The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more external enemy to threaten liberalism, liberalism’s internal contradictions would prove to be its own worst threat. Without the great external foe, liberal polities would grow politically impotent as society relativized itself and liberal states became impotent to act.

Contemporary Straussians, then, tend to be virtue ethicists. They believe in the importance of the classical conception of virtue, either in its Greco-Roman or Catholic flavor, as the great buttress against relativized disintegration. (Strauss follows the classical theorists who, in assessing the decline of classical Greece, latched onto the idea of moral softness and materialism as the primary cause for their degeneration into tyranny, civil war, and eventual conquest—despite their wealth and large militaries—to comparatively poorer entities: Macedon and, eventually, Rome.) Strauss, who knew Oswald Spengler’s thesis in Decline of the West well—he even references Spengler directly in his seminal essay “The Three Waves of Modernity”—feared that without virtue in political life the eventual political impasse of an increasingly decadent, relativistic, and nihilistic West would leave itself open to the return of the politics of force, tyranny, in which the formerly relatively free and open polities of the West would slip into despotism.

Spengler argued that in the final descent of the West’s civilizational death, politics would become so untenable that force would be the only answer to political problems. Caesarism was the future because Caesarism coincides with political and cultural decadence. This is precisely what Strauss feared and was warning against.

Thus, Straussians tend to be conservative only insofar that they understand the enemy of liberalism is itself; more specifically, the hollow relativism embedded in Hobbes and functionally present in Locke, which threatens to destroy the very world that liberalism helped to create, is the enemy within liberalism that must be addressed. The conservative reputation of Strauss is because—unlike fanatical Whigs who do not think we have anything to learn from the past—he saw much wisdom from the ancients to help us with the questions of life, politics, and the destiny of humanity which moderns have shunned or lowered the standards of. Ancients concerned themselves with how humans should live. Moderns, according to Strauss, “start from how men do live.” However, in taking this approach, “one must lower one’s sights” to the lowest common denominator of human existence: self-preservation. Ironically, Strauss is more an idealist than a realist in that he wanted to return to what we could become rather than what we are. The low realism of hedonistic self-interest, which rests at the core of modernistic anthropology and philosophy, does not permit anything beyond this and, therefore, the striving for a superior life (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, spiritually, etc.) disintegrates into an atomistic relativism of everyone pursuing their self-interest which produces weakness within society.

The victory of modernity, the crowning achievement of Whig civilization, is that we simply live and then die alone in a warm bed with three meals a day provided by the state. There is no striving. There is no goal. There is no telos for humanity to consummate. If we live comfortable, peaceful, and pleasant lives, we have won the game of life according to the New Science ideology of modernism. This is why, in the 21^st century, so many children of the victorious liberals of World War II and the Cold War are abandoning liberalism and turning to alternatives that offer them something to strive for.

Those who present Strauss as a closet fascist, a synthetic philosopher of rationalism and religion, a reactionary, or an opponent of liberalism have not read him or portray him in deceptive and misleading ways meant to advance their own grinding axes. In concentrating on classical natural right and the philosophers and historians of Athens, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, we begin to see the kind of intellectualism that Strauss advocated: a return to the rationalist philosophy of Athens and not the moral revelation of Jerusalem. Why? There is a kernel of moral virtue deep within the atheistic rationalism of Athenian philosophy, and that is the only path amenable to moderns who need saving from their own apathetic nihilism and the totalitarian moralism of utopianism but who cannot accept the love of God and neighbor as the highest good in life because of hyper-individualism, leaving the cultivation of individual virtue in the city of man as the only possibility for moderns. This, however, would require a return to the classics—not to serve the New Jerusalem but to reinvigorate the New Athens. When all is said and done, Strauss endorses the only city he believes truly exists, the city we do, in fact, live in: the city of man.

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To point out how this distinction was once present, Weaver uses the example of how people in the eighteenth century would write letters to newspapers and sign them with the Latin word Publius or something like it. This old practice nicely captures how people distinguished between their private and public existences. They protected their own inner worlds while still serving the common good. What was in the public eye and so assumed to be in the public’s interest was not one’s private life but one’s sense of duty to the political whole. A person was thought perfectly capable of fulfilling his duties to others without parading his feelings and experiences, including his various vices. But, as Weaver writes, “Whatever barrier made this delicacy possible has long since been broken down. It is now felt that the individual’s entire life is subject to public report and review. Any privacy claim is viewed as a form of exclusiveness, to be denied in the interest of an onrushing democracy.”

Today, privacy is almost anathema. If not quite entirely gone, signs are that it is disappearing. The very addition of the word social to the word media, or perhaps the way that social media has in many ways replaced older mass media, is just one signal of how the private has been taken up not just as a part of the public but almost as its main form and content. It is not just celebrities who have been tabloidified. Unfamous people can now, through various channels, undertake to destroy their inner worlds in the name of publicity. You and I may be sharing images and thoughts within the confines of an intimate domain while simultaneously broadcasting them throughout the known universe.

It is astonishing to consider, however, that Weaver observed the above already sixty-five years ago, long before the advent of the internet and social media and trolling, well before the arrival of TikTokkers who, like so many celebrities and politicians before them, have so easily and unselfconsciously made a spectacle of themselves; well before it was possible, in other words, to publish the content of your own life without any access to a mainstream platform and the mediation of some public relations expert. Again, the trend is not owed to the digitalization of our lives but has become more apparent thanks to recent developments in diabolical electric circuitry.

For quite a while now, the attention economy has been an economy of self-publicity and self-commodification, which is to say that it prefers people to willingly offer themselves up to Hayekian market logic that allows atomized selves to become subject to whatever seemingly spontaneous order the market has for them. The problem identified by Weaver has deepened. The barrier between the inward and the outward is gone in this postliterate, narcissistic age of ours. But we are witnessing the effects and not the causes, although the causes are many and complex. The causes are bound up in the Lockean worldview that had Skinner turn rat psychology into something applicable to humans, that had him and other behaviorists believe that every child and every worker is a blank canvas on which you can paint any picture you like—as long as you externalize all motivations through incentives.

Nevertheless, it is not the cause I want to examine here, although I get to the main one and its remedy below. In bringing the above to light, I mainly want to challenge the all-too-common view that our age is overly subjective and subjectivistic. I realize that evidence for the emphasis on subjectivity seems everywhere; claiming the opposite may, therefore, seem to be an example of some outlandish Žižekian inversion. After all, self-help pop psych is huge, and with it, so are mental healthism, personal days, and emotivist rights protests, which mimic revolution even while they ultimately serve the extremely banal status quo. The managerial class is obsessed with incentives, and almost every day, I hear people mention incentives as if it is genuinely possible to motivate people by placing all motivation outside of those people.

Still, surely this age is all about the subjectivity of subjects? Various discourses in the humanities have been obsessed with so-called subjectivities for a while now. It is based on subjectivity alone that people declare themselves to be non-binary. Is it not the reign of subjectivity that gets people to spill out their raw, unrefined thoughts on social media? Didn’t Philip Rieff call this the age of psychological man? Are the various turns towards interpretation, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and psychologisation not incontrovertible proof that subjectivity is alive and well? Is all the messaging around identitarian politics and conspiratorialism, and fake news, not evidence that objectivity is dead? Even following the science, after all, is less about the science than about the degree to which the social will has coagulated around some objective agreement. The  American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson can claim, as a scientist, that what matters most is not the complex tensions and developments in scientific discovery and understanding but rather the “consensus” seems to be one sure sign that it’s all subjective. Isn’t it?

To all of the above questions, my answer is simple. No. If anything, the above proves that we have all but abandoned the realm of subjectivity and entered the world of artifice and artificiality. Perhaps people have given up on science, but the social realm and the degree to which people might agree upon neatly externalized values seem to have replaced it as an alternate objectivity. Why else would everything need to be externalized and declared? What is apparent, shared, and performed is what counts most. What recedes from consciousness is nearly irrelevant.

This is perfectly captured in a phrase I have heard some academics bandy about. Two words: performative subjectivity. The phrase is not meant to be oxymoronic, but it is deeply, deeply oxymoronic. That modifier, performative, ultimately suggests not that people are coming out of some proverbial closet to reveal their inner lives in some outward fashion. It means something else. There is no subjectivity anymore, or nearly no subjectivity. There is only the performance of subjectivity. There is only live-action roleplaying. One cannot feel what one has no access to feeling. If anyone claims to be someone else based on a feeling, the feeling is not about the thing itself but about an external and often highly stereotyped image. We live in an unphenomenological age, in which it is possible to claim to have experienced what you have not experienced, yet you can be believed. The age of all of this surface is also, it turns out, an age of lies.

How about a less controversial example of how subjectivity is nullified? At the time of my writing this, a new trend on X has been to name your most common deadly sins in the order in which you tend to commit them. How’s that for a sign of our times? What was once meant for the confessional booth, spoken in silence and shame and out of a desire for absolution to a priest, is now to be paraded for everyone to see and appreciate. Everyone applauds with tiny likes as if to say, “I see your sins; they are like mine. We are not absolved of anything, but in solidarity, we might feel better.” I wonder if anyone who fell for this trend did anything more than identify the surface of the problem. Was any real self-insight part of it? Unlikely.

The trend here is, or perhaps was, like the party game I Can’t Believe I Did That, which gives you points, as the box says, “for sharing awkward, awesome, and unforgettable moments.” Of course, anyone unwilling to play the game of sharing and self-shaming would be a spoilsport. Even your shame can be commodified. Even your depression can be commodified. Even your sadness can be turned in for a profit.

The modern world has based its metaphysics on advertising. You can externalize your nihilism so easily now, but, having externalized it, you don’t have to feel it, to wallow in the horror of it, and so you can carry on doing whatever it is that you like doing, oblivious to the subjective consequences of living in a meaningless universe. Or maybe you do feel it, if only for a moment. Don’t worry, I’m sure someone with Advertising-style metaphysics will be there for you to help you to escape your inner pain. Even your mental health will be met with corporate attempts to address the problem of your mental health. Isn’t this what the transparency society is all about? You get to utter or outer what’s going on inside you. But this is less to confront it, to see it, to help you process it, rather than to get rid of it. Self-insight is not the aim.

Another concrete example of a widespread antagonism towards subjectivity is found in studies on how television and other screens affect people. It is easy to forget, since so many of us weren’t alive at the time, that when television first arrived on the world’s stage, many were thrilled at how that new technology would improve everyone’s imagination. Television was considered this magical inspiration machine, an objective hallucinogenic of a kind, something to enrich the inner worlds of people, especially children. The truth turned out to be otherwise. Where imagination was once, in some ways, unbounded by external expectations, it became increasingly clear that children and grownups alike felt compelled to imitate only what they saw and not what they experienced. Overwhelmingly, studies have shown a decline in imagination. And people with poor imaginations tend to prefer action and violence. Now, let’s see what that does to our world.

Well, it’s only gotten worse as we have placed more screens around us, like shields against the world. They stimulate us without allowing us to feel the stimulus too deeply. Imagination is no longer reflective of the rich complexity of human psychology, like the psychology we find in Dostoevsky’s work, for example, but is concerned with the entirely external. It is telling, I think, that storytelling advice now focuses so heavily on action. Pick up an old novel and look at the dialogue. Now, pick up a new novel and do the same. Notice a difference? A character is only what they do, say the storytelling experts. Your ideology is what is entirely externalized, says Žižek, more or less. What you believe doesn’t matter, he says. All belief is outside of you. The university believes in education when you don’t. The church believes in God when you don’t. The television believes in imagination when you don’t. Is this how it has to be? Is this how it is?

Well, of course not. But, in our time, inner qualities are increasingly chaotic, and in the chaos, we are easily tempted to seek the solace of externality. Self-regulation, emotional control, and a sense of autonomy, even in our individuality, are all threatened because what is beyond us is what often tends to count more. Some theorists suggest that a sort of displacement has occurred, where external pressures have shoved out the inner worlds of people. The example mentioned above of how imagination has been compromised is just one. Another one is the phenomenon so often discussed by young people whose brains have been rewired by pornography. One of my younger friends admitted to me recently that he has erectile dysfunction, and he’s not even thirty because of all the porn he’s watched. He thought this was normal.

It’s no wonder that a certain kind of vitalism is making a comeback in our time, even if it is not yet sufficiently deep and reflective to mirror the vitalism of, say, Michel Henry. It’s impossible to feel the atrophy of desire without, in some way, wanting to restore it to its former glory. But doing so is far from easy. What Rieff calls the psychological man is the shallow man, the one-dimensional man, the man of personality but no character, the man who constantly relies on external stimulus because he has been emptied of the ability to connect with his inner world. The narcissism of our time is not, then, a narcissism of obsessive introversion; it is, rather, the exact opposite. It is a flight from the inner man.

Your authentic self, it may seem, is no longer you, doing good works in secret, as Jesus commands, but the publicly performed self, the publicly humiliated self, the self who shares his own cringe like it’s everybody’s business. Arguably, even the proliferation of self-help books is, at its best, an attempt—a rather feeble one, I’d say—to reclaim some vague sense of inwardness. It is arguably the result of the widespread failure to nurture resources within ourselves that would help us to overcome the pull towards externalizing everything. The very terms and coordinates of such books, so many of which are overly technical and depthless, are not generally about inwardness at all. Compare any mainstream pop psyche book to the richness of Nietzsche’s insights into human psychology to understand what I mean. Subjectivity is dead, and we have killed it. Is that not one possible meaning of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God? The King is dead; long live publicity!

One example of this is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. The book, my goodness, how I hated it, is fairly neatly and even well argued and deals with soft skills around persuading people. But it’s so very, very shallow. The overwhelming aim of the book is to get results—objective, measurable, tangible results—not to generate any measure of self-understanding. It did not at all surprise me that Voss notes, at the end of that book, how someone was speaking to him using his very own techniques to manipulate him. He was so taken in that he didn’t even notice at first how his own techniques—for technique is what subjectivity is often reduced to—were being used against him.

Human psychology commonly, although thankfully not always, becomes all about external incentives, whether the carrot or the stick. External aims and objectives. The inner man matters only insofar as those external aims and objectives can be achieved. But I need to sound a warning in all of this. As I’ve already hinted, none of this is because of the external world. This is because of a subjective unwillingness to tarry with our inwardness, nurture it, and let it grow. The erasure of inwardness is owed to the neglect of inwardness. But it is a sign of our times and must be noted and dealt with because it is pervasive. The pressure to accept it as normal has been with us for as long as most of us have been alive. I have noticed, in the time I have worked in education, how it is just getting worse. I meet all kinds of sparky and interesting students in my work. But they are increasingly deaf to their own inner voice. So many of them have allowed the internet, in its shallowness and hyperlinking, to shape the destiny of their own souls.

Now, the question of what is true is replaced by questions of what is effective or whose interests are promoted. Philosophical and theological positions are easily subsumed under sociological allegiances, which is to say that what matters is less the nuances of any thoughtful position than the possibility that some activism can be generated in its name. What anyone thinks about anything is close to irrelevant, while the side anyone picks is of utmost importance. Allyship triumphs over personality. The transformation of religion or any faith into a matter of merely private concern and the extroversion of state or other political concerns is no new thing. But as the state or hyper-individualism mixed with identity politics has become virulent even to the point of generating a kind of ideological cytokine storm, there has been a sense that even slight disagreement with the dominant ideology deserves the utmost derision. Public humiliations and cancellations indicate that independent, individual thought is not called for.

The old phrase declaring that the personal is political may mean many things, but among them, now, is the idea that what is personal is no longer really personal. What is personal must go for the sake of the political, even if the political is desperately sick. I have never fully agreed with any political side, and yet I am doomed, because we are in a transparent society, to have my own views conflated with and thus erased by what is most univocally self-evident. All of this is to say that there seems to be a widespread expectation that people should be one-dimensional. This may not be explicitly stated. In fact, when explicitly stated as I have done, people may recoil in horror. But the expectation is there, nevertheless. It lines up rather well with various attempts to reduce reality to being equivalent to some or other abstraction.

“Possibly the worst result of this one-dimensional concept of the person,” says Weaver, “is that it makes self-knowledge deceptively easy. In spite of the popularity enjoyed by psychology in recent decades, it may be questioned whether men understand themselves any better today than they did when Socrates was exhorting the Athenians to examine themselves and to learn whether man is a creature mild and gentle by nature, or a monster more terrible than Typhon.” But then, it seems, even in so much modern psychology, that genuine insight into people and ourselves is hardly the point. Helping people to understand themselves—in the way that, say, C. S. Lewis does in his still astonishingly perceptive Screwtape Letters—does not seem to be the aim. Helping them to “function” is often the goal. Just get people to modify their internal state sufficiently to help them conform to patterns in the world, even if those worldly patterns are inhuman.

There’s something in this, I realize, of Ted Kaczynski’s rather exaggerated but still pertinent claim that society, given a somewhat odd degree of agency here, often creates conditions that make people unhappy and then, instead of changing those conditions to stop making people unhappy, offers that the best cure for unhappiness is some antidepressant. People find other ways to alter their inner state to tolerate the intolerable. Kaczynski mentions antidepressants, and I take it he means these quite literally. But there’s a figurative dimension to his observation, too: often, we find ourselves adjusting inwardly, even if it means removing a sense of inwardness, to cope with external pressures. Often, the cure really is worse than the disease. Arguably, we are left with some subjectivity, but it is a shrunken subjectivity, so small and pathetic that it doesn’t even know how to fight back as the walls of a constructivist world keep closing in.

Very interestingly, Weaver notes that one way that the objective usurps inwardness is found in a widespread obsession with communication. “Communication is usurping the place formerly held by expression,” he says. “What used to be studied as an art, with some philosophical attention to the character and resources of the user, the truth of what was being expressed, and the character of the potential audience, is now being stripped down to a technique.” What was once meant to be the disclosure of being and inseparable from being has been replaced by mere sign exchange. This is evident everywhere in rapid-fire responses to immediate happenings in social media, but it is also there in vapid chatter and content creation.

Life is often reduced to being mere content now, which is another way of saying that it has been increasingly bewildered, rendered empty of being, and full of sign value. “The word communication,” writes Weaver, “presupposes the victory of the secularized society of means without ends.” Implied in this, although not explicitly stated by Weaver, is the idea that all you have to do to destroy inwardness is to destroy silence. If you want people without access to their inner life, keep talking. This, it seems to me, is the key cause for the destruction of inwardness. Haste. Busyness. Chatter. The buzz of the hive and the thrum of the hive-mind. Noise pollution and the often unconscious desire to fight fire with fire and produce an unhealthy compulsion to extrovert everything.

A number of years ago, I saw a documentary series produced by the BBC called The Big Silence. In it, Benedictine Abbot Christopher Jamison invited five people to have a silent retreat. The dear Abbot said at the start that he believed all participants would find God if only they allowed themselves to be silent long enough to hear him. This, to my mind, is precisely the right way to find God. The intellect alone can’t do it. All it can do is clear away some hindrances and nudge us in the right direction. But any genuine experience of revelation would be the result of listening. And you cannot listen when caught in the chatter and trying to fight it by adding to it. Well, the demands of the retreat, for those modern input-thirsty de-subjectivised selves, were pretty steep. Total silence for close to a week. Initially and without exception, the five participants were like naughty children sneaking out of their bedrooms to chat in the way that some of my high school classmates used to bunk classes to go and have a smoke. They craved noise because it had become the norm. We can become addicted to normal even when it’s killing our spirits, and those five participants proved this.

But after a time, true enough, each and every single participant did, indeed, find God. One even quit his job and started a new venture because, in that encounter, he realized that he had been throwing his life away on big business. This, of course, is an echo of some very ancient wisdom. In the nineteenth chapter of the first book of Kings, the prophet Elijah was expecting to hear the voice of God. He stood in a cave on a mountain and waited. As God passed, there was a great and terrible gust of wind that ripped into the mountain’s rocky face. But God was not in the wind. After that, there was an earthquake. But God wasn’t in the earthquake either. Then, there was a blazing fire, an eruption of luminescent power. But God wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there came a very small, quiet voice, nearly silent but still audible to anyone sufficiently present to it. Elijah heard it, and he wrapped his face in his mantle and stood at the cave entrance. Because he knew that God was discernable in the silence as a very quiet voice, as power whittled down to something even a mortal man can take in.

I often wonder about those five people in that documentary. Already towards the end of it, when it showed all of them returning to their lives, they discovered again that the modern world is all wind, earthquakes, and fire and that silence was more and more difficult to find. It is not said explicitly in the documentary, as far as I can remember, but it was obvious to me that each of those people, in finding God, also found themselves. They had, in a very tangible way, denied their lives and, as a consequence, had found their lives. But when returning to the bustle of busy lives, it became nearly impossible to hear the still, small voice of Divinity. And it would not only have been God that would have been lost, then, but themselves.

Without genuine, deep inwardness, we cannot take a stand against the inauthenticity of the world. Fighting noise with more noise will not do. In doing so, inevitably, the crowd becomes the measure, just as political chatter so easily becomes the content of our thinking. Commitment to The Discourse demands that we stay in touch with every insipid offering by pop culture. But one of the greatest powers we have is the power to exit all of that, even for a little time every day, to shut the hell up, to be silent and listen. Prayer is primarily this: silence and listening. It’s the best shot of connecting to something—to someone—Who is genuinely transcendent. It’s the best shot at gathering and healing all the pieces of ourselves that have been shattered, taken up, and commodified by the tyrannical reign of objectivity. The obliteration of subjectivity does not have to have the last word. But we have to lose ourselves before the truth of our subjectivity can speak.

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Regardless, however, of particular circumstances, we should examine the phenomenon of epiphany in regard to the doors it opens when it comes to individual consciousness. Some regard life as being essentially tragic, mainly due to the feeling of “thrownness” that permeates the life of a newborn. The newborn doesn’t choose the starting level of difficulty in his life. He doesn’t choose his parents, his country or much less his cultural conditionings. He is just thrown towards a world where he will encounter all these and more and adaptation is key to survival. His life is, to a great extent, homogenous and predictive. But then, with the coming of age, and if he happens to be among the “chosen” ones, comes the epiphany, a sudden realization of something that wasn’t taught to him directly by his peers or even socially expected for him to learn. To elucidate what triggers such a phenomenon would be a titanic task. Whether it is an internal genetic disposition or something that is stimulated by a specific set of outer circumstances would, nonetheless, give plenty of room for debate. Defenders of a more deterministic approach claim that there is a genetic predisposition, while others think it can be externally activated in various ways, for instance, actively searching for such experience through the use of entheogenic substances.

What we can be certain of, however, is that the individual will not be the same person after foregoing such a process. An inner transformation occurs, and a new world of possibilities is bestowed upon him. Whether it was a sought-after experience or an involuntary happening, he will not be the same after it. But how likely is an epiphany to occur given our current circumstances? Is there a place for the uncommon in a world where post-industrial standardization is the norm? “Ask, and shall it be given you; seek and ye shall find,” Matthew 7:7. Taking this biblical verse as a reference, it wouldn’t be too risky to say that he who encounters epiphany may have been looking for it in a subconscious or conscious level, whereas the specific conditions in which it is given would come off as secondary. If this statement is true, then the conditions necessary for having an epiphany vary more from individual to individual than from era to era. It is, however, still important to examine the place epiphany holds in our current state of affairs. Let us first examine the Zeitgeist (also known as the spirit of the time) offered by modernity in a broad sense. Modernity offers romance in a short-term, quick satisfaction model. Sex is no longer a sacrament, and wars are no longer seen as holy (at least in modern, secularized societies). If all the elements we find in the 3D world are ephemeral manifestations of an emanation from nothing, then only nothingness and its infinite emptiness are the only sources of depth. It is especially common for the modern artist to look forward to a creatio ex nihilo, a creation from nothing, with a relative sense of disregard for what came before him. The weight of history becomes, with the upcoming of modernity, lighter and lighter, and so does the importance of tradition. Will this current state of affairs offer the individual enough freedom to make epiphany a more common incident, or does the lack of objective inherent meaning and solid life guidance models annihilate the capacity for escaping the mundane dread of existence? I, optimistically, believe it’s the former.

The existential void in modernity leads to a crisis, which leads the individual towards a search for meaning. Every search leads to a finding, and it wouldn’t be strange to assume that many of these findings may be of the special type, of the type that seems to burst violently into the individual´s conscience, in other words, epiphanies. What happens after that is similar to the opening of the Pandora box: a limitless amount of possibilities seemingly appears out of nowhere. Whatever thought pattern he was aligned to prior to the epiphanic experience dissolves and is born anew as a fresh set of ideas, theories, and attitudes toward life.

As mentioned before, whether the environment is receptive towards that is, in most occasions, a matter of luck. An epiphany could be considered similar to flipping a coin, but instead of heads or tails, we have social praise or condemnation. In our current state of affairs and with the advance of civil rights, the stakes are, however, not that high. It is not uncommon nowadays for someone to receive such a burst of inspiration, to have an enlightened vision and then turn it into art, philosophy, a manifesto, or scientific discovery and, in a matter of minutes, upload it to the collective consciousness depot known as the internet so it can be accessed by billions of people worldwide. Anyone confident enough regarding his vision can become a guru or a coach and, eventually, gain thousands or even millions of followers worldwide.

This could lead to the notion that religious fervor is far from extinguished and, if anything, has become disseminated and separated into small groups. The speed of life is increasing, terabytes of information travel at full throttle, and the individual is constantly stimulated, but among this sea of information, he finds very little to call his own. It is under these conditions that he needs to differentiate himself from the rest of the flock. He is looking for something, and many alternatives are given to him, but none to his satisfaction. This is definitely an ideal breeding ground for epiphanic experiences. Creatio ex nihilo occurs: seemingly out of nowhere, a new operative system is born inside him. If he doesn’t find a good way to channel such energy, his mental health could face danger. A big new input of rare information just lying stuck in his head would harm him from the inside. To let it out or not is, in part, a matter of courage, though this also depends on the nature of the epiphany he just had and also if the sharing of such information could create much distress among his peers. Some restrain themselves from expressing what they have seen due to fear of social rejection. A number of reasons could lead to this spiral of self-doubt. Maybe the realization is not that original after all, maybe he just accessed a particularly uncommon place of human consciousness that has been visited before. If this happens to be true, his excitement wouldn’t be justified. One could go as far as to say that maybe his epiphany is not even such but merely a personal delusion fueled by repressed trauma or wishful thinking.

It is due to this level of uncertainty that epiphany can be the cause of much distress. No one wants to make a fool of himself or break the weave of consensus reality without thinking about the consequences. Plus, one cannot be certain about the benefits of such temerity until the newly received input has been shared with the world. Can there be, therefore, a strong case for epiphany? Absolutely. To deny one´s epiphany is not only to deny an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-challenge but also to deny the spontaneous course of progress itself. Spontaneous is the keyword here since, after all, epiphany is probably the most spontaneous of happenings, contrary to the predictable mundanity proper of mechanical reasoning. Through escaping the realm of the predictable, the individual becomes untraceable and, therefore, free from external conditionings. He is forced, in the midst of this violent input of data, to find new life meanings for himself (or at least regarding a specific branch of life, science, and spirituality being the most common). It wouldn’t be too accurate to state that the experience of epiphany has forced him to be free since free will is given as an innate condition, but more that it made him conscious of his inherent freedom for giving things meaning.

It is in these circumstances that chaos becomes more evident; the chances of crisis are high, and so it is not uncommon for such a potentially tormented genius to undergo a dark night of the soul. William Blake said that in order for a tree to reach the sky, its branches need to be rooted in the hellish underworld. But what is this “hell” he talked about? Chaos, uncertainty, lack of sense of direction, unsafety. The relatively safe haven of consensual reality, of assumed thought patterns, of rigid mental structures, starts to fall apart. The individual has to rebuild his path towards lucidity from scratch. This entire process is similar to a return to home, comparable to Odysseus’ return trip to Ithaca. In this metaphor, home would be the state of lucidity, of balance, of clarity of thought. The epiphanic experience has demolished all signs of stability and replaced it all with a deep existential crisis in which the individual questions both his understanding of reality as well as his place in it. He knows that, in order to survive this, his new re-making of the world has to be even more solid than the world he left behind. This, needless to say, is no easy task, yet it is totally worth it. First, it is a matter of survival: not being able to correctly process this life-marking experience could lead to a shattering of his identity and a loss of position among his peers.

In other words, it is not like he has much chance. Second, the possibility of obtaining some form of glory is enticing, to say the least. If the epiphanic experience can be transmuted into a useful and comprehensible idea, concept, or art form for his peers, then the reward would be high. These two reasons are another way of describing the social appraisal versus social condemnation model expressed above. What is important to note, however, is that due to the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of the epiphanic experiences, the individual doesn’t have much chance regarding the fact that he has to face this high stakes, high reward model. The tools an individual can use to face this challenge are more generous nowadays than some centuries ago. This is due to the fact that access, not only to information but to worldwide communication, is becoming more fluid each year that passes by. A person can now share this unexpected streak of information, this spontaneous epiphanic vision, with other people worldwide. On the other hand, with the right use of search mechanisms, he can build new life-changing, consciousness-transforming connections. This leads to the notion that, even if his new vision is contrary to his particular cultural weather, there is still an escape route for the individual to share this intimate experience and get feedback in return. Social isolation can, therefore, be avoided if the right tools are used.

What we can make of all this is that epiphany understood as a consciousness-transforming process, takes a great deal of courage to face, as well as a rigorous testing of the individual´s mental stability. It is important for those who undergo such a process to look for the right tools and the right people to make their path both less lonely and less dangerous. If the individual keeps his eyes on the prize, this is, the possibility of sharing and structuralizing brand new informational and experiential input in a comprehensible manner, then chances are he will be up for a quite productive, transcendent, and satisfactory lifetime.

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“Why do people seek out stories, novels, movies, plays, and games that horrify?” Matt Cardin, America’s preeminent writer on horror, asks this important question in his excellent collection of horror essays What the Daemon Said. It is especially relevant in the midst of a disenchanted and scientistic world of technology that relentlessly pursues domination over this world. Despite living in a scientistic age, Cardin implies that our insatiable appetite for horror seems to be directly correlated with the banishment of symbolism from the world of nature and the triumph of science, technology, and commerce across the globe.

Stories about angels, demons, and monsters and stories producing a sense of dread terror, fear, and anxiety have been around since the beginning of civilization. Those who like to think humans have moved beyond dark superstitions undoubtedly scoff at the persistence of horror, often asserting it is nothing more than a vestige inheritance of the Bronze Age. Not Matt Cardin. Cardin tackles this seemingly odd question of why our fascination with dark arts, superstition, and the frightening cosmos has only gotten stronger despite the continuous advancement of science and technology, bringing a disenchanted world in its wake.

One might say that the triumph of our post-Enlightenment scientistic world—in which the forces of industry, science, and technology unite to strip the world bare of awe, mystery, and wonder and lead to a pragmatic economic world of comfort and security—must necessarily lead to an appetite for horror. Cardin begins this phenomenal exposé into horror by examining the writings of Thomas Ligotti, one of the leading horror fiction writers of the previous generation. The heart of Ligotti’s worldview of horror, as Cardin summarizes, is one of nihilistic emptiness, meaninglessness, and tragedy. Ligotti’s world of horror is a world without meaning; it is the world of modernity. Quoting Ligotti, ‘My outlook is that it’s a damn shame that organic life ever developed on this or any other planet.’”

Amid this “meaningless and menacing” existence, the old ways of finding meaning in life: in God, beauty, and family, have all been stripped away. The veil has been peeled back, torn asunder. In a Lovecraftian moment of revelation, we agree with Ligotti that the world we live in is a “nightmare vision of reality” filled with “cosmic despair” and “existential torture.” Horror, then, is the de facto state of existence in a world without meaning. And with scientism having driven away that old awe, beauty, and wonder in the world—invariably bound up with belief in God, spirits, and supernatural entities—horror has become a popular substitutionary craze for our loss of metaphysical and moral enchantment.

The relationship between science, technology, and horror is quite strong upon closer consideration. Not long after the revolution of the printing press, horror fiction began appearing in England with the publications of works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and the various novels of Ann Radcliffe. By the time filmography became a new medium for telling stories, horror was one of the first genres of films produced: stories dealing with angels and demons abounded in the early decades of film’s nascent beginning. Cardin reminds us of this often-forgotten fact of film history, “The 1890s saw the birth of the movies, and the Demon got involved in the new industry right from the start.”

Here we must ask ourselves the question: why horror? Why is horror so popular in our technological world? Why is horror bound up with the driving away of awe, beauty, wonder, God, spirits, and the moral law? Cardin convincingly answers these questions with the wrongness or repulsiveness that is essential to horror, a wrongness and repulsiveness that touches our “physical, metaphysical, [and] moral” senses. In short, horror is the manifestation of the metaphysical and supernatural impulse when a benevolent and beautiful God has been driven into exile in our age of techno-hedonistic relativism. All we have left is the ghost of metaphysical dread: “Horror horrifies: it sets out to inspire a sense of fear and dread mingled with revulsion.”

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke penned his most famous philosophical treatise entitled An Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. In that masterful work, Burke articulated a dual nature of aesthetic psychology in humans – one aspect of mankind was a spirit seeking the beautiful and the other the sublime; the two spirits often clashed with each other. The sublime, Burke continued to elaborate, was premised on a sense of “dread horror,” passionate ecstasy often leading to pain and fright, a sense of insignificance and even the apprehension to death. Anxiety was a key component of the sublime. This sense of the sublime Burke also associated with traditional religion. The loss of religion in modernity hasn’t killed the sense and want for the sublime innate in humanity. Rather, it has caused the spirit of the sublime to morph into something else: horror.

Perhaps the most famous film that embodied horror during our cultural and cosmic disenchantment of the past century was The Exorcist. “In the 1960s and 1970s,” Cardin writes, “it was not just Roman Catholic culture but Western culture at large that was suffering such disenchantment, and Blatty’s 1971 novel and its 1973 film counterpart landed right in the middle of this.” Understanding the reality that horror is a manifestation of the supernatural and metaphysical, often in the throes of cultural upheaval, better helps the pilgrim understand the power and potency of horror and why it periodically emerges and flourishes in certain ages: the late 1700s, the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1970s. As society at large was turning away from a belief in supernatural presence, what made The Exorcist truly horrifying was “it posited that a vile supernatural presence, like a revenant of a mythological age thought long dead, could enter the body of an innocent young girl.”

Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in saying there is no such thing as evil and that all values are relative. As Cardin chillingly states, “What if there were evil but no good to counterbalance it?”

In an exceptional chapter on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead films, Cardin offers a penetrating reading of its spiritual qualities by bringing the film into dialogue with Meister Eckhart, Buddhism, and the seemingly sacrilegious inversion and inadequacies of Christian spiritual-cultural imagery and belief: the resurrection of the body and a communal meal as the source of spiritual nourishment (the eucharist). The zombies are resurrected bodies, but they are not beautiful and loving as envisioned by Dante and implied in the Christian tradition concerning the afterlife. Furthermore, the frailty of the body and how easily it is mangled and bloodied causes us great anxiety since we have been formed by a tradition of humanism that praises the body as good because God created it. The ease at which the zombies consume flesh and are made more horrifying dramatically confronts and evinces the eucharistic theology of Christianity, where consuming flesh and blood makes one beautiful and divine.

Romero’s films, our sagacious author explains—emerging in the maelstrom of the “God-is-Dead” era—posits a sense of “absolute nihilism and hopelessness” while playing on all the central spiritual sensibilities: death, resurrection, and judgment. Yet, in this hopelessness, there is still a spiritual bridge offering an acceptance of this hopelessness as a path to spiritual enlightenment. “[T]he starting point of Buddhist practice is a piercing realization of the fact of existential hopelessness,” Cardin writes. “The decision to turn to Buddhism looks all the more promising when we look into the classical Buddhist tradition and find much interesting material dealing with death and decay, which (as if this even needs to be reiterated) are topics of central importance in the Living Dead films.” Concluding Romero’s films with Meister Eckhart, “One of the most powerful spiritual exercises is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: die before you die.”

This, too, is wise advice, especially in a Christian and post-Christian culture. After all, the culminating moment of Christ’s own life and redemption of the world wasn’t through the life he lived but the death he died. And that death that was quite brutal at the hands of the vicious Romans which revealed the frailty of the body of the Son of God! The notion that death brings redemption and escape from the horror of this world is a very ancient spiritual belief, one that the Living Dead films call us to remember, according to Cardin’s analysis.

While some of Cardin’s commentary on the cross-fertilization of angelology and demonology in religion is not necessarily substantiated in contemporary biblical scholarship, for example, Cardin overplays the Zoroastrian-Judaism connection that has largely been abandoned by contemporary scholarship on archaeological, compositional, and linguistic grounds, What the Daemon Said is a great exposé into the history of angels, demons, and horror over the millennia of Western culture. The reader will not only find wonderful analyses of films, as I’ve covered here but also reflections on literature and poetry. The reader will also find exceptional cultural criticism, particularly directed at Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment tradition of scientific conquest and how the enchanted rainbow was destroyed and became an empty rainbow, which had a direct influence over the development of horror.

Although horror originates in supernatural and spiritual beliefs and sentiments—angels and demons, especially demons—the most enduring analysis of horror from Cardin’s brilliant mind is how horror and science are interconnected. In our cultural wasteland, the rise of horror strongly coincides with the tyrannical triumph of science and technology, which has driven a sense of the sublime and the supernatural away. Yet it hasn’t entirely driven away that sense of evil, the desire for goodness to triumph over evil (even if it doesn’t), and a want for transcendence that goes beyond this world. We may very well be stuck in “chapel perilous,” but we still find ourselves in a chapel even if covered in cobwebs, rotted wood, and eerie noises all around us.

Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023) and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

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Aristotle’s right by nature (physei dikaion) was where “everywhere [it] has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that . . . and yet it is changeable—all of it (kineton mentoi pan).13 Thus, Aristotle’s physei dikaion appeared self-contradictory, where it was valid everywhere and always, but it was also everywhere changeable. One possible solution was that Aristotle wrote esoterically, although it is not clear what would be the hidden truth.14 A more likely answer was that Aristotle meant what he wrote and left it to us to figure out what he meant by physei dikaion as being both universal and contingent.

On the one hand, Aristotle argued that physei dikaion was universal: it had the same force everywhere in forbidding such acts as murder and theft. On the other hand, physei dikaion was changeable in the sense that universal principles can have diverse actualizations according to time, object, aim, and method. The criteria of time, object, aim, and method allowed us to make the distinction between killing and murder. If certain acts fell short of or exceeded this criterion (the mean), then they were considered bad, for as Aristotle wrote, “There is neither a mean of excess and deficiency, nor excess and deficiency of a mean.”15

Murder consequently did not break some abstract rule, but it missed the mean for concrete action. Although the criteria of time, object, aim, and method may appear vague, e.g., “Do not kill at the wrong time, involving the wrong object, with the wrong purpose and method,” for Aristotle, it was appropriate to a reality that did not yield a permanent, detailed standard. Moral and ethical acts were not governed “by any art or set of precepts” but rather “according to right reason” because what was right was “not one, nor the same for all.”16 Each situation must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis with the underlying universal substance of ethics—the one way of being good—driving all of the means.

This paradox of physei dikaion was personified in the mature person (spoudaios) who saw “the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them” and who possessed the virtue of practical wisdom (phronesis) that included other virtues, for “with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences.”17 Like physei dikaion, Aristotle defined phronesis paradoxically: its possessor had the “ability to deliberate well about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general” but could produce “no demonstration” of its first principles, even though its particular actions were true in practice.18 Phronesis could not become a science (episteme) because it was bogged down in the particulars of the world, yet, at the same time, it required deliberation of what was generally good.

This paradox of phronesis can be somewhat clarified by looking at Aristotle’s concept of nous (intellect) as both divine and human. Nous was “something divine” and superior to “our composite nature,” but it also “more than anything else is man.” By following nous, humans could make themselves immortal and “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”19 Thus, Aristotle discovered that human beings possessed something within themselves that was different from them and yet paradoxically was the best thing of them—something superior to humans, which they were able to locate through a cognitive faculty that Aristotle termed nous. By making this cognitive faculty both human and divine, Aristotle had shifted divinity from the anthropomorphic gods to the intellectual faculty of the human soul.

It is clear that Aristotle believed in a divinity that was superior to but connected with humans. He wrote that there were “things much more divine in nature even than man,” which included not only the heavenly bodies but also the creator god as a physical force.20 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also stated that “first philosophy” studies ontology, eternal causes, and the “first mover” god who was “in a better state” than humans.21 However, this “first mover” was not a creator god. Aristotle conceived of it as a final cause and not as one who set things in motion. The prime mover therefore was not the cause of the world, but the preservation of it by its rational and love-inspiring attraction.22 Thus, for Aristotle, the notion of divinity had shifted from the anthropomorphic gods to both the human intellect and the prime mover, the two of which were different yet attracted to each other.

Nature therefore was all of reality’s present form moving towards the prime mover. Defining nature as a member of “the class of causes that acts for the sake of something,” Aristotle declared that the “form” of any reality and the “mover” of any nature often coincide.23 If nature could become identical with divinity, then it would be both natural and divine. Like nous, nature was both divine and non-divine in its composition, with the latter being drawn towards the former. This claim rested upon the human reflection of their nous: “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”24 As a result of this conceptualization of nature, Aristotle’s physei dikaion was the attraction that humans have both physically and ethically to the prime mover.

The apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s physei dikaion—it was universal in force but changeable in action—was resolved by his understanding of nature’s being everything and everywhere and having a dual final cause at the same time. All of reality sought unity with the prime mover and for what it was supposed to be. For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans that occurred within the nous of the mature person (spoudaios).

Strauss, Brague, and Greek Philosophy

Given the variability of phronesis, Aristotle denied it the status of science (episteme) while categorizing it as a deliberate intellectual virtue. The universal-variable principle of phronesis, the many practical paths towards the prime mover in ethical action, precluded logical and consistent proofs. But the universality of the objective was unchanged, which allowed the spoudaios to make decisions rooted neither in relativism nor deontology but something in between as a physei dikaion. However, if physei dikaion cannot be studied at the level of episteme, how can it be demonstrated, especially with regard to Strauss’s and Brague’s differing understandings of nature’s relation to divinity? Is a theory of natural rights only accessible by an autonomous reason that uncovers a nature devoid of divinity? Or does a theory of natural right rest upon an account where both nature and reason are consubstantial with divinity?

The impossibility of studying physei dikaion at the level of episteme certainly restricts the types of demonstration of its existence where the objects of natural reason can be known as the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.” Such an account of physei dikaion cannot be verified by the positivism that Strauss seemed to advocate or that modern science demands. Deductive and logical reasoning are also avenues that are blocked, since physei dikaion has no axioms from which one can reason to conclusions or first principles. By relying upon habituation in virtue and the experience of a mature person to make correct judgments, physei dikaion is beyond the grasp of those who are neither virtuous nor mature. In short, the traditional demonstrations are not available for the proof of physei dikaion.

The demonstration of physei dikaion is the same as the demonstration of nous as something both human and divine. To repeat from above, Aristotle wrote about his claim of nous, “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”25 Aristotle appealed to a philosophical introspection of human experience for the demonstration of nous and, one could infer from his other statements, for physei dikaion, too. The acknowledgment that an action is ethical—that it is right by nature—can be verified by others not through empirical, mathematical, or modern scientific reasoning but through the introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature, serious, and virtuous person.

Some may find this proof unsatisfactory because it lacks the objective character that positivism claims for itself. Be that as it may, it should be evident after investigating Aristotle’s concepts of nature (physis), right by nature (physei dikaion), human intellect (nous), and practical wisdom (phronesis) that Aristotle had rejected an epistemological framework of sense-based, logically consistent propositions that Strauss advocated. The end result is that Aristotle’s physei dikaion is not the theory of natural rights that Strauss attributed to Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s appeal to the philosophical introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature person (spouadios) to verify whether one’s actions were physei dikaion is as different as can be when compared to Strauss’s account of Greek philosophy. Simply put, when compared to Brague, it appears that Strauss had misread Aristotle and, perhaps more broadly, misinterpreted Greek philosophy.

However, Brague’s account of Greek philosophy as one where the concept of divinity became separated from anthropomorphic gods to reside in physis is only partially correct. What Brague fails to account for is Aristotle’s prime mover as the other repository of divinity.26 That is, physis was the expression of divinity as an intelligible, rational structure, but this expression was incomplete because it longed for unity with a prime mover. Physis therefore had a dual telos: it sought to realize its own essence as well as unity with the prime mover. The neglect of the prime mover—and Aristotle more generally—in Brague’s work does not weaken his overarching argument, but it does not strengthen it either.

Notes

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134b18–20.

14. It would seem unlikely that Strauss would make Aristotle a nihilist, given his remark that the philosopher needs to have a type of faith in his quest to know the whole of reality.

15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a25–1107a26.

16. Ibid.,1103b31–1104a9, 1106a32.

17. Ibid., 1113a30–35; 1144b30–1145a1.

18. Ibid., 1140a24–1140b30; 1142a11–30; 1146b35–1146a7.

19. Ibid., 1177b27–1178a8.

20. Ibid., 1141b1–2; also see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 98b–984a.

21. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a–1005a, 1026a.

22. Ibid., 1072a20–1072b4; 984b15–20.

23. Aristotle, Physics, 198a20–198b10.

24. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1248a25–7.

25. Ibid., 1248a25–7.

26. Cf. n. 12.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

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These two ideas of law and divinity are the two sources for divine law in Western civilization, as Leo Strauss noted: “This notion . . . the divine law, it seems to me is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy. The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner” (LG, 24). Whereas the Greeks resorted to reason as articulated in philosophy for their understanding of the divine law, the religious were dependent upon the sacred texts of faith. This dual source of the divine law raises questions about preference, superiority, and the relationship between these two sources—the so-called “theologico-political problem” (or “theio-political,” as Brague prefers)—that covers not only the political but also the ethical and economic aspects of human behavior (the “theio-practical”) (LG, 7 & 256).

Confronted with the “theio-political” problem, each pre-modern civilization provided its unique solution. But it was modern Western civilization that challenged the assumptions of the divine law. The emergence of the will as the source of law, the model of the scientific laws of nature, and the changed relationship between commandment and counsel all accounted for a revolutionary understanding of the nature of law that dispensed with the divine (LG, 262). The law of modern society lacked the divine dimension and was presented as a path of emancipation from primitive sacrality. The result was one where the state was no longer bound by anything except its own will, what Stephen Toulmin has referred to as the hidden agenda of modernity (LG, 263).1

In this article, I revisit Brague’s account of the “theio-political” problem as encountered by both classical Greek and modern Western civilizations, with specific attention paid to the concept of nature. According to Brague, nature is a repository for both the divine and the law for the Greeks—a position that is contrary to Leo Strauss’s and, therefore, deserves closer examination. But, according to Brague, over time, this conception of nature became radically transformed with its elimination of the divine from law. What ac- counted for this change is only loosely sketched in Brague’s book and also requires further exploration. I hope to accomplish both of these tasks and hopefully shed more light on Brague’s and our own understandings of the divine law.

Nature, Nomos, and the Divine

According to Brague, there are three possible relationships among the divine, political power, and the law. The divine could either 1) affect political power directly and the law indirectly, as in Greece; affect the law directly and political power indirectly, as in revealed religions; or 3) affect neither, as found in the modern Western solution (LG, 15). In pre-philosophical classical Greece, the solution adopted was the first one, where the divine could be a model of behavior but was not “an efficient cause” of it (LG, 13). Although the divine legitimized political power in the form of kingship, it did not legislate human practice. The king was the source of the law, but the law itself was not divine (LG, 14–7, 20). The result was that legislative activity was not necessarily connected with the divine: it was separate and, therefore, could be independent of it.

This separation between law and divinity was an evolving process that began with Homer and was completed by Aristotle (LG, 20). Initially, the origin of all normative behavior was divine in origin, as evident when Homer spoke of Zeus conferring the king the scepter and judgment. Although this gift permitted the king to rule, it did not dictate a type of behavior. Solon and Demosthenes also viewed the polis as resembling a divine order and the law as an invention and gift from the gods, but, like Homer, did not conceive of the divine directly legislating human practice. Finally, the dramatists, particularly Sophocles in his Theban trilogy, wrote of the divine origins of law as visibly manifested to humans and permanent in nature.

But the clear separation between law and divinity emerged only after the dual process of the de-sacralization of knowledge into philosophy and of kingship into democracy (LG, 19). Human law (nomos) was freed of its divine origins and normative direction. However, nomos was still rooted in human mores and norms, and it was accompanied by the notion of justice (dike), a gift of divine origins from Zeus to humans, but which, like kingship, did not legislate human conduct (LG, 20). Democratic governance became possible with these two concepts of nomos and dike, for neither the content of the law nor the qualities of justice were dictated by the divine. Both nomos and dike permitted democratic citizens to govern themselves with “all the rules approved and enacted by the majority in an assembly whereby they declare what ought and what not ought to be done” (LG, 20).

Philosophers introduced the concept of nature (physis) and situated nomos in relation to it: the law was either in opposition to nature, and therefore pure convention, or in accord with it, and therefore expressed the natural law. For philosophers, this notion that divinity operated within this relationship made divinity no longer associated with the anthropomorphic gods but with an abstract understanding of nature. For example, Heraclitus spoke of the “need to distinguish between the gods and the source from which they hold their divinity, or, to put it differently, between the divine and what of the divine is crystallized in one concrete figure or another, such as the Olympian gods” (LG, 23).2 Separated from its gods, the idea of divinity became associated with nature and nature, in turn, became associated with law (LG, 23–4).

Humans could discern the law from what was most divine within them, i.e., their intellect (nous). As Plato wrote, “Of all studies, that of legal regulations provided they are rightly framed, will prove the most efficacious in making the learner a better man; for were it not so, it would be in vain that our divine and admirable law (nomos) bears a name akin to intellect (nous)” (LG, 24). Aristotle also concurred: “He therefore that recommends the law (nomos) shall govern seems to recommend that God and intellect (nous) alone shall govern, but he that would have man govern adds a wild animal also” (LG, 24). Through their nous, humans were able to uncover the origins of nomos.

Thus, the notion of divinity in Greece was associated with anthropomorphic gods, nature (physis), and human intellect (nous). As human law became conceptually separated from divinity, starting from Homer and ending in Aristotle, divinity also shifted from the gods to human intellect and to nature itself. But freed from its anthropomorphic origins, the law still remained rooted in a notion of the divine, with divinity re-conceptualized as nature. The Greek divine law consequently became the expression of a permanent structure of the natural order that was to be discovered by the human intellect (LG, 29).

Reason, Revelation, and Nature

Brague’s confluence of nature and divinity as the basis of nomos and nous runs contrary to a position held by Leo Strauss and, therefore, requires closer attention. Like Brague, Strauss argued that the Greeks used intellect (or what he preferred to call “reason”) to understand the world; but, unlike Brague, this cognitive faculty was not rooted in the divine.3 Strauss believed that reason was autonomous and completely independent of the divine, as opposed to someone like Aquinas, who wrote that “the very light of natural reason is a participation of the divine light” and “natural law is the participation of the eternal law in the rational creation.”4 Brague’s interpretation of the Greek philosophy follows in this tradition, whereas Strauss held a clearer separation between reason and revelation where wisdom could only come through “the unassisted human mind.”5

According to Strauss, natural reason—“the human mind which is not illumined by divine revelation”—proceeded from sensation, logical reasoning, and an awareness (noesis) that “is never divorced from sense perception and reasoning based on sense perception.”6 The objects of natural reason presumably were non-spiritual ones, the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight,” and eventually would be systematized in order to create a set of sense-based, logically consistent propositions about reality.7 This characterization of Greek philosophy, particularly of Plato and Aristotle, not only rejected the evidence of reason’s being divinely inspired as Brague has presented,  but it  made Greek philosophy a forerunner of positivism.8 In Strauss’s hands, Greek philosophy resembled Spinoza’s project “of modern science according to its original conception—to make the universe a completely clear and distinct, a completely mathematizable unit.”9

Strauss’s theory of natural right was rooted in a conception of nature that was objective (accessible by a reason based on sense perception) and independent of the divine. Such a theory dispensed with divinity for only natural things where its principles revealed which natural things were consistent with the whole of reality, thereby raising them to the level of ethics or “rights,” and which natural things were inconsistent with the whole of reality and therefore should be discarded. But in order to proceed on this quest, one must have faith to philosophize that the whole of reality is intelligible and rational and that it can reveal to us the right way of life.10 Like Kant, whose philosophical project ultimately relied upon a type of faith, Strauss likewise must start his inquiry with a belief that the whole of reality can be known by human reason.

Although Brague would agree with Strauss that the Greeks believed nature was intelligible and rationally structured, he would disagree with Strauss that nature was independent of the divine. For Brague, both nature (physis) and reason (nous) are consubstantial with the divine. Now that we know both thinkers’ positions, the question that confronts us is how to resolve this impasse. I propose to look at Aristotle’s account of nature, particularly his “right by nature” (physei dikaion), to see whether divinity is associated with nature and thereby reveal to us which thinker has a more accurate understanding of Greek philosophy.

The selection of Aristotle, as opposed to Plato, makes understanding the Greek conception of nature easier since Aristotle’s known writings are all treatises instead of dialogues: we can somewhat avoid the whole deciphering exercise that Strauss’s esoteric thesis would demand.11 The focus on Aristotle’s right by nature is also important because it had become the basis for Strauss’s and other thinkers’ theories of natural rights and consequently raises questions about the origins of such theories. But more importantly, Aristotle was the last of the great Greek philosophers where the separation between human law and divinity as expressed in anthropomorphic gods would be the greatest, according to Brague’s argument.12 If the concept of divinity did indeed shift from the gods to nature in the history of Greek thought, as Brague contends it did, then we should find the fullest manifestation of this shift in the last great Greek thinker, Aristotle.

Notes

1. The disappearance of the theio-political problem has caused some to view it as an accomplishment of modern Western civilization that needs to be protected by the continual elimination of religion from public life. The question confronting us today is whether humans can continue to exist without a reference to the divine: “Are we liberated or on the path to suicide?”

2. For more about the anthropomorphic gods and their relationships to humans and law, refer to Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. II: The World of the Polis, ed. Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia, MO and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

3. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 87–8.

4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.12.11; I-II.91.2.

5. Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” and Other Studies (New York: Free Press, 1959), 13; “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 115; Natural Right and History, 163.

6. Ibid., also Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 122.

7. Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 116–7.

8. For example, Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics (1103a, 1177b, 1178a) that the highest element of the soul was a site of both human reason and the divine. However, Strauss argued in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952) that classical philosophers employed esoteric devices in their writings to protect themselves from political pressures, especially when discussing truths that may have been unpopular, such as the non-existence of divinity. Since a great deal of literature already has been devoted to this subject, this article will not delve into the validity of Strauss’s esoteric thesis, which is made all the more difficult to ascertain   since Strauss himself did not make clear whether he was writing

9. Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 116-7.

10. Ibid., 118.

11 Cf. n. 8.

12. Strangely, Brague pays more attention to Plato than Aristotle in his section. My focus on Aristotle should remedy this neglect.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

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