Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part 3, chapters 9-12, Conclusion. Notre Dame: University Press of Notre Dame, 2026.
Every political community needs bonds that hold it together, preserve its union. These include laws, customs, and acts of force. There is also patriotism, love of country, often expressed in the patriotic defense of self-government against foreigners. At the same time, an earlier form of the ‘love of one’s own,’ familial love, can serve as a building-block of the city or as its competitor, as seen in Sophocles’ Antigone. [1] The alliances and tensions between aristocratic families and the centralized modern state inform all of Shakespeare’s ‘history plays.’ Hancock remarks the emphasis the Greeks placed on self-government, the emphasis the Bible places on family. These emphases register in their different approaches to the things transcending the city and the family: the impersonal, first-mover, natural god of the Greeks; the Father-God of the Israelites. “The Christian tradition undertook to synthesize these two orientations toward what is highest, rational order and love, in what Pope Benedict XVI named the ‘personal logos.'” Personal logos in turn leaves room for “moral agency.” But “our Christian response to the ‘woke’ exhaustion of liberalism matters only if Christianity bears something essential of what Pascal named ‘the truth about man.'”
Hancock would “extend Manent’s efforts to affirm the primacy of the practical” by showing that “every understanding of the ‘highest good’ or of ‘heaven’—that is, every conception of transcendence—involves some mingling of what we call ‘the same’—what we affirm as intelligible and in principle present to our articulate experience—and ‘the other’—that which surpasses, while somehow addressing, our understanding and our experience.” This formulation contrasts noticeably with the notion of ‘the other’ in ‘woke’ socialist ideology, wherein it refers merely to human beings who are not ‘us’—not of the same sex, race, nation. Hancock’s ‘other’ is radically ‘other,’ not merely unknown or poorly understood but at least in some respects unknowable by human efforts alone. “What is ultimate,” what divinity is, “must be other than ordinary experience, or it would not be transcendent and would not offer the hope of some condition free of the burdens, the conflicts, the confusions, the tensions, or the simple boredom of our mundane existence.” Yet this “other” cannot be entirely unknowable, entirely removed from “our actual experience, or the promise of such goods would have no meaning or attraction for us.” This goes both for Greek philosophy and Biblical faith, although from different starting points and different results, at least initially.
Hancock of course well knows that what he calls the Christian synthesis of Greek and Jew, a distinction the Apostle Paul describes as having been erased fundamentally by Christ, has been challenged repeatedly. The Straussian scholar Thomas Pangle criticizes biblical transcendence, considering it incoherent, violative of the logical principle of non-contradiction. [2] Considering the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, Pangle argues that Abraham either knew that God would reverse his command to kill his son, “so it was not really a sacrifice,” or Abraham did not know that, and was willing to kill his son out of blind obedience. “It seems biblical obedience must either be purely calculating and thus not at all ennobling, or else it is simply mad and humanly meaningless.” Against this, Hancock cites Leon Kass, who writes that “God does not finally require that men choose between the love of your own and godliness,” between fatherhood and the Father of all. God “wants not the transcendence of life but rather its sanctification.” Choose life, the story teaches, but life on God’s terms, not yours; if you do, God will graciously, providentially protect you and yours. Such a God redirects love of one’s own by sanctifying it, by pointing it towards the love of the gracious God. Pangle’s “rationalist teleology,” his ‘Greekness,’ “cannot account for love as a good that enriches the lover only when he releases his rational hold on it, his claim of secure possession,” ‘his own.’
Augustine of Hippo makes an early attempt to synthesize Greek and Biblical love. Augustine responds powerfully to the ‘democratic’ aspect of Christianity. “Any true way to the liberation of the human soul,” the souls of ‘the many,’ humans ‘as such,’ “must, at least in principle, be available to human beings as such and not only to a few philosophers.” Admittedly, “there can be no logical objection to the proposition that only certain superior human beings can be raised above the limitations of the human condition.” Rather, the Bible holds that “there is something of eternal significance in human existence itself and not only in the perfection of the rational faculty but something in our humanity as such that must have some eternal significance and destiny,” a “spiritual dignity that does not depend on…being philosophers and…[is]not limited to rationality per se.” Augustine writes, “The Savior took upon himself the man in his entirety.” This means that human souls have not only a nature but an even more important ‘history,’ a story—one that occurs within the larger story of God’s creation of Man, His punishment of Man, and His redemption of Man, “the everlasting salvation of the individual person.” Whereas “Platonists measure God by the standard of human reason,” the Logos that is God encompasses and transcends human logos. Therefore, “philosophy as a way of life cannot stand by itself” finally, at the ‘end of (our) history.’ Because it isn’t only the rational ‘part’ of the soul but the whole soul and indeed the whole man, including man’s body, that matters to God, human bodies too can be saved. Salvation purifies and sanctifies even the corrupted flesh.
The Protestant theologian Denis de Rougemont distinguishes Greek eros from Biblical agape as two loves that work at cross-purposes. [3] De Rougemont contrasts the erotic love of the medieval ‘romances’—seen, for example, in Tristan and Iseult—with the agapic love seen in Christian marriage. Erotic love waxes, wanes, disappears; marital love is permanent, and therefore not a ‘sentiment’ as ordinarily understood. The twain seldom meet, because erotic loves desires to possess, whether it desires a woman, wisdom, or a Mercedes-Benz. Agapic love aims not at possession but at giving; it is ‘charitable,’ seeking the good not of oneself but of someone else, even as God’s love seeks the good of His creation, to the extent of sacrificing His only Son, Abraham-like, for the sake of redeeming human individuals from their sins, even as he of course ‘saves’ his self-sacrificing Son by the Resurrection; this Isaac, too, must not die.
Against this account, Hancock places the Catholic stance of Benedict XVI. Citing the first sentence of the first chapter of the Book of John, Benedict considers “the God who is Logos” as the guarantor of “the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, reason’s accord with God, and God’s accord with reason.” “For Benedict,” Hancock elaborates, “God is somehow both continuous with reason or logos as human beings know and experience these ideas, yet also, in some sense, infinitely beyond our understanding.” God’s revelation to John raises another question, however. It is one thing to say that logos is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, dividing nature into parts or “kinds” that are distinct from one another, that cannot simply be blended together either in thought or ‘in themselves.’ It is another thing to say that God, the supreme Person, is more than impersonal nature, more than a ‘kind,’ and nonetheless still reasonable—that there is “personal logos.” Personal logos “must be respected as an aporia that reminds us of the partly clear and partly mysterious character of our existence,” a fundamental and permanent problem. And yet this Person commands us, requires us to obey Him as “a touchstone of fundamental practical guidance,” a guidance that we will not comprehend if it is not logical. The story of Abraham and Isaac finds a reasoned explanation in Kass’s exegesis, which offers a rational purpose for God’s unexplained but not inexplicable command.
Hancock’s emphasis on the practicality of God’s guidance recalls him to Manent’s critique of the “hypertrophy of theory” in modernity and the need to discern the logic inherent in human action. “An ultimate, architectonic concept such as ‘personal logos’ is always at the risk of being overtheorized at the hands of ecclesiastical theologians or ambitious intellectuals and thus becoming sterile and instrumental to the authority of one or another system of thought.” One might attempt an Origen-like subordination of “personal” to “logos,” reducing Christianity “to the status of a junior partner to an intellectualist Platonism or Neo-Platonism, with its ruling idea of a rational-impersonal-necessity.” Or one might do as ‘moderns’ incline to do, “embrace the standpoint of the human person, all desires and passions included, and reduce logos to a mathematical construct, projecting an understanding of ultimate reality as a pure object of human mastery for all-too-human ends.” Benedict avoids both of these errors. The word “Eros” “appears only twice in the Bible,” both times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, never in the New—a point de Rougemont makes much of, it should be added. As Aristotle sees, eros aims at human happiness, the culmination of nature, of human nature, in the fulfillment of the aim of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, as it seeks to know itself and to know the whole, however incompletely. So far, no agape. But it is the seeking or searching quality of eros…that makes possible the synthesis”—a word to be used advisedly, as will become clear—Benedict “envisions with the sacrificial and other-regarding quality of agape” by its longing for the transcendent reality, not nature but the Creator of nature who, as Creator, did not acquire but gave. Neither the noble ethics and politics of Plato and Aristotle nor the ignoble ‘politics of acquisition,’ of material acquisition, commended by Machiavelli for his ‘prince’ can fully satisfy human longing, human eros. Human eros reaches for the agapic Person, God, although it does not by itself know what it is looking for, and hence depends upon the agapic reaching out of that Person for its fulfillment. When God reaches out in response to human eros, He does what He does for Abraham’s intention, sanctifying it. “Eros redeemed by agape elevates individuality to eternity.” Benedict calls this “the true discovery of the other.”
And, now returning to de Rougemont’s theme, marital love, “the unification of man and woman, signifies the unification of body and soul and the transcending of the dichotomy between eros and agape.” Do the married man and woman love one another erotically? Very often so, at least for a while. But do they also love one another agapically? Yes, insofar as they understand their marriage as permanent, an act performed ‘in the sight of God’ and carried on in His sight. In Hancock’s words, “true love honors both the character of the same and that of the other in the human orientation toward the good,” which both receives erotically and gives agapically. Since God and human beings are persons, love can extend both to bodies and souls, to ‘whole persons.’ After all, did not God become Man? Benedict (a German in addition to being a Catholic and a pope) goes so far as to say that with God’s grace eros is not only “supremely ennobled” but “at the same time…so purified as to become one with agape.” This looms as a bit more ‘German’-Hegelian than Christianity actually is. (And, indeed, Hegel regards marriage as an example of what later Hegelians would call the ‘synthesis’ of opposites.) Hancock more accurately describes these loves as complementary, ‘political’ in the Aristotelian sense, with agape as the unequal partner in the mutually loving rule. This rule, being political within the family, can also be politically within the polis, the political community itself. Human choice, human “agency,” is “necessarily moral-political agency,” choice responsible “in contexts always defined by mediated moral law as well as natural necessities.”
“Moral agency in a concrete community is the essential complement to the idea of love as the gift of the self to the other.” If they fail to acknowledge the “human source” of “our interest in the heavens or the whole,” philosophy and theology miss their calling, “not only morally or religiously but rationally and philosophically.” In philosophy, this is what Socrates understood, and it is why “he brought philosophy down from the heavens to consider politics and ethics.” Hancock does not mean that the human source of theological and philosophic eros can be reduced to the ‘merely’ human, whether it be convention, socioeconomic class interests, ‘gender,’ or any other such category. He rather means that human nature, filtered through such supportive but potentially distorting phenomena, points us to a “higher purpose” than material interests. “First philosophy cannot spare itself the labor of self-reflection, and, thus, of reflection on the human sources and conditions of philosophy.” There will always be “an irremediable gap between what is first in itself and what is first for us, for human beings,” but that does not relieve us of our responsibility to ourselves and to God to bridge it, at least some of the way. “‘Theology’ might be derisively defined as the pretension to speak of things beyond human capacity,” but then philosophy may be defined as “the love of a wisdom we never fully possess.” “The line between the pretensions of theology and the modesty of a Socratic philosophy becomes very fine indeed.” For philosophy to succeed, philosophers must come down to earth; for religiosity to succeed, God must.
Beyond the challenges to knowledge posed by human circumstances, is the human soul itself capable of perceiving truth and, if so, to what extent? Hancock begins to address this question with a discussion of Michael Davis’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. The soul “has a form and limits, a structure, and, if you will, a ‘nature,'” Davis observes; in attempting to know itself, the soul reveals what it is and to some degree shapes itself through, for example, habituation. The soul seeks not only to know itself but to know the world around it, ultimately to know the whole, which includes “the knowing and desiring soul.” The soul is in but not entirely of the world; it differs from the rest of the whole. “This connectedness between the soul and the world is to be understood, Davis proposes, ‘in the end as philosophy.'” This means that some souls are better at knowing than others—better ordered, better ruled internally than others. But if there is, as Davis writes, “a political aspect to the soul” (as seen most clearly in Plato’s Republic) then, Hancock asks, is there not “a political aspect also to philosophy”? Is philosophy not a ‘partisan,’ albeit a partisan of reason?
If so, then it must be open to critique by Christians, who claim a position beyond such partisanship. “One might say that Christianity attempts to overcome the essential partisanship of classical philosophy” by maintaining “that existence must lie somehow at the heart of being, that the whole would not be whole without its manifestation in human existence.” We are back to Hancock’s gloss on Barney’s mom in The Music Man: what the movie’s producers expect us to see as a comic manifestation of love of one’s own might also manifest love of a person as a person. “For truth and mineness to be reconciled, it would have to be the case that my very mineness, my existence as a person, would have a correlate at the origins of peak of the whole. God would have to be a person…or, let us say, more cautiously, there would have to be something personal about the divine.” (How, for example, could persons arise out of impersonal matter in motion?) Admittedly, “this Christian move is irreparably problematic as well, from a philosophical point of view, because the only ‘persons’ we know are people, and we cannot really know what we are talking about when we say that the Creator and Sustainer of the whole is a ‘person.'” “Christianity wants to hold together the beauty of sacrifice with the good of fulfillment, to hold together the call of otherness and the satisfaction of self-possession. And who can blame it?” Evidently, Davis can, as he regards Christianity as one of the most influential, and therefore most distorting, of the human conventions. Hancock replies that Davis has not “shown the superiority of the Greeks to the Christians (as he would wish) as to have brilliantly traced the fundamental aporia in which we must stand regarding the fundamental question of Athens/Jerusalem.”
Davis intends to answer the question. “For Socrates, he writes, love of oneself means love of whoever draws him out of himself,” whoever his dialectical interlocutor is. At the same time, Socrates will not imitate the interlocutor, make himself into a new ‘self’—precisely the invitation Christians are beckoned to accept in the imitatio Christi. For Socrates, self-rule and self-knowledge inheres not in the imitation of a person but “in fidelity to a kind of primordial and evanescent moment in which the self necessarily produces some ‘image’ of the whole” in dialogue with another. With this, Hancock remarks, “Davis seems to me to have identified very precisely what would be required to establish the supremacy of the classical viewpoint.” But he replies, “Is it not plausible that what draws me out is the personal logos?” That is, why must the impersonal image of the whole be what is drawing me out? “I remain, I confess, more attracted to the possibility of being drawn out…toward the good or toward God, toward the logos of the personal,” toward the Person who is “the ground” of either an impersonal whole or a personal destiny or calling.”
Very well, but then have we not returned to Strauss’s Jerusalem and Athens problem, to zeteticism, to “awareness of the fundamental problems”—another way of ‘privileging’ philosophic inquiry over what many of us take to be divine revelation? True, Hancock concedes, but such awareness “cannot answer for the goodness of those problems.” The modern answer is to brush them aside and to go ahead and conquer nature for our own immediate, material purposes, conceiving of the non-human elements of the world as “the pure object” of human mastery. But how is that “project,” that set of actions, to be seen as good? This is why he again invokes Manent, the “grammar of action,” the “microstructure of moral agency itself.” If action has moral implications built into it, then the conquest of nature must be ‘judgable.’ That grammar, that microstructure, “provides the only touchstone by which we may honor both the love of truth and the truth of love”; it is “our best clue to understanding personal logos, our privileged point of access both to what is high and to what is universal.” For one thing, the logic of action points us back to the actor, the ‘subject.’
“The modern discussion of ‘mineness’—of the soul’s relation to itself—centers on the concept of the ‘subject’ or of ‘subjectivity,'” with its attendant problems of ‘epistemology,’ of self-knowledge and of knowledge of all that is outside itself. Further, is the human subject obligated or simply forced to surrender its agency “to some nonrational power, whether naturalistic or divine”? Hancock contends that “the only alternative to the abyss opened up” by this prospect “is the soul’s acceptance of the mediation of a politics and of a poetry respectful of the mutual dependence between the order of the soul and the order of the whole” since “we can never fully possess ourselves—that is, grasp our subjectivity immediately and transparently,” given our situation within a family and a political community eager to tell us who we are. In pursuing this inquiry, Hancock will consider Tocqueville, Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, but “only Tocqueville, I hold, appreciates the appeal of both aristocratic pride and democratic-universalist subjectivity,” honoring both “elevation” and “justice.”
Poetry, philosophy, politics: these are “the three human possibilities.” (There is also the not-so-human possibility of religion, which has hovered over the argument from the start, often classified by the classical philosophers under the categories ‘poetry’ and ‘politics’ but perhaps susceptible to philosophic management.) Human beings make poetry in the sense that “we cannot exist without acting, we cannot act without imagining—that is, without conceiving purposes.” Conceiving purposes entails “conceiving (however dimly and implicitly) some understanding of the whole, of the way things are, and of our place in the whole among the things that are”—as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton in fact do. Philosophy “is the natural (albeit rare) extension of this natural interest in conceiving the whole” and of “understanding our place in the whole.” And politics “is the natural (albeit not effectively universal) extension of our awareness that the conventional whole whose authority precedes us can be conceived as an arena of human reflection and choice,” as Publius reminds his readers. “What of religion? We are beings open to—or vulnerable to—the claims of revealed religion because neither poetry nor philosophy nor politics can fully respond to our interest in understanding the whole and our place in it, in grasping what is, and in grasping ourselves.” The classical philosophers, one recalls, puts religion together with philosophy and politics under the rule of prudential if not always theoretical reason. For Christians, however, logos bows to Logos.
If Aristotle’s Politics consists of a sort of dialogue between an oligarch and a democrat, Tocqueville continues that dialogue in the world of the modern state. In terms of poetry, aristocracy concentrates attention of “what is concrete and particular,” thus “reinforc[ing] the meaning of purposive action within a largely inherited world of meaning.” Aristocratic imagination inclines toward the elevated, the mythic, heroic conflicts between demigods and monsters. Democratic poetry is real-worldly, seen first in the nature-poetry of a James Thompson, but finally in down-to-earth human action—not to elevation but to extension, to humanity, to pantheism, to Walt Whitman. In response too aristocratic poetry’s verticality it ‘goes horizontal.’ Courtly love disappears; tender lyrics addressed to real women proliferate, veering toward the vulgar (an old-fashioned term for the people) in soap opera and pornography. But this vulgarization has been preceded by a vulgarization of the whole, which was reconceived as an object of conquest by Machiavelli and Bacon.
Poetry and politics, then, provide a “natural mediation” between human nature and nature as a whole. Christ’s mediation provides a supernatural mediation between them, and between the Father-God behind both. But Christ is not only God but Man, and so can only be understood, insofar as He is Man, by “some natural interpretation of the human.” As for His godliness, “can God’s kenosis or self-emptying escape the negativity of the modern subject/self without drawing upon the natural understanding, upon political poetry, or poetic politics?”
Levinas argues that self-emptying is indeed the foundation of ethics. Levinas is Jewish, so he doesn’t take Christ as the model for this, drawing instead “on a parallel Jewish theme of ethical law as the absolute obsession of the self by the other” which takes “the very constitution of the self or subject” as “the ethical bond to the other.” This amounts to “a radical break with the Western rationalist tradition,” although, as Hancock sees, this makes his thought align with “modern secularism” or wokeness, with its privileging of ‘the other.’ Levinas claims that “consciousness precedes reason, and conscience grounds consciousness.” Conscience produces ethical conduct and “ethics is thus first philosophy,” raising the question not of why there is something rather than nothing but why being is good, “how being justifies itself.” Hancock wonders, how does this respond “to the questions of the basis of knowledge and the purpose of life?” “Can such a primordial ethics either illuminate or guide human choice?” He finds no real answer to those questions in Levinas’ profound-too-profound theory. Levinas may (or may not) have discovered the foundation of freedom, but it is a freedom from which no one could derive any particular action. Levinas therefore substitutes “obsession with the other” for choice. Sober Hancock prefers not to ground ethics on obsessiveness. Further, this obsession is encapsulated in the Jewish proverb Levinas valorizes: “The material needs of the other are my spiritual needs.” But that, Hancock remarks, means that “there is no choice above necessity,” above material choice. Levinas has reconstituted Marxism as a spiritual endeavor. Sure enough, his beau ideal of a statesman is Léon Blum, the kindly French socialist who flourished between the world wars. But “can an expression of progressive idealism be judged apart from a consideration of its conception of the common good?” The obsession with ‘the other’ “cannot evade some reference to the meaning of the world in which human beings find themselves,” and so Levinas “falls back into the technological and progressive or historicist attitude,” a sort of Heideggerianism of the Left. Tocqueville would not be surprised.
Returning briefly to Strauss, Hancock recalls “the fragility of [his] claim “of the self-sufficient happiness of the philosophic life,” with its understanding of the reason-revelation aporia and its difficulty in proving that the philosopher really is motivated by the eros for wisdom rather than the desire for recognition, as Kojève charges. This is especially true since for Strauss there is no guarantee that there is “a God who could verify the philosopher’s purity of heart,” and surely no ‘history’ that judges anything, only an impersonal nature that can limit but cannot observe the inner workings of any human soul. “He hesitates in his dismissal of the biblical critique of aristocratic [that is, philosophic] pride.” At the same time, Strauss resists any coordination of Athens and Jerusalem because “he abominates the modern synthesis,” historicism. This brings Hancock back to Tocqueville, who does want coordination if not synthesis between aristocracy and democracy, calling upon aristocrats to “guide” democracy, moderate it, guard it from its excesses. But Tocqueville, who lived only into middle age and pursued an active political career, did not “propose a comprehensive vision that might hold together and sustain the bonds between freedom and law and divinity.” Building upon the work of Tocqueville, Aquinas, and Manent, Hancock pushes ahead, asking, “What understanding of the whole and of the divine would accord with (while, of course, transcending) the ‘grammar of action’ that has emerged from my reflection on Manent’s understanding of natural law?” and “What vision of God, the soul, and true community would reasonably extend and support Tocqueville’s exquisite equilibrium between the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ dimensions of human being” and, what is still more, “What answer to the perennial question of political theology, the question which theory and practice ultimately must converge—that is, ‘Quid sit Deus?’—would honor and account for Strauss’s bracing pagan response to the Christian and democratic subversion of philosophic nobility while remaining open to the biblical truth of subjectivity and universality, to the mysterious, infinite value of the human person under a personal God?”
Large questions beg for a large answerer. Hancock has one ready at hand, Thomas Aquinas. As a student of both Aristotle and the Bible, Aquinas understands “that Providence must be understood as holding open the space of human prudence” under the auspices of what his erudite contemporary follower, Benedict XVI calls “personal logos.” Under the Christian dispensation, rightly understood, “the good must be both in action”—part of its grammar, its logic—and “above it”—superintended by Logos seen as a ‘Who,’ not a ‘What.’ While “real, practical action…must be respected and not sacrificed to the inherent tendency of theory and theology to hypertrophy,” “the nobility of practice, of moral agency, must not assert itself as some absolute and transparent ground of meaning but must be held open to some glorious plenitude that transcends it” along the lines of Tocqueville’s “moral analogy.”
To address these questions, Hancock has recourse not only to moral analogy but to the longstanding Thomistic topic of the analogia entis, the analogy of being. This question initially arose with regard to the problem of how to describe God, the Being who is in some sense beyond our necessarily finite, human terms, a Logos far greater than our logoi. How can we human-all-too-humans say that God is good, wise, just, when we can’t comprehend Him? It is the story of Abraham and Isaac, again. Hancock’s suggestion is to put “moral analogy” and “analogy of being” together, to think of “the essential bond between ideas and practical existence,” morality, at the same time as we think of “the linkage between divinity and humanity.” They are “two approaches to the same fundamental moral, political, philosophical, and theological problem” because “sound morality and politics need the support of some understanding of the whole.” When human beings use their own necessarily limited vocabulary to register attributes of God, they are doing what they must do to think about God at all: winnowing a human meaning, “meaning for personal beings who are embodied agents in the practical world,” from what they hear about a Being whom no one can see and live.
Hancock traces the problem of the analogy of being to Greek philosophy, to the dichotomy between Parmenides, who claimed that “reality is one, and…plurality and change mere illusions” and Heraclitus, who claimed that “the only reality” is “ever-changing manyness.” Plato and Aristotle would “navigate between these extremes,” locating life between being and nothingness, between stable forms and changing phenomena. Aristotle brings this insight to language, seeing analogy “as a kind of mean between univocity (a word’s meaning is always the same) and equivocity (one usage of the word in question is absolutely different from another)” and identifying two kinds of analogy: one in which “various usages are associated together owing to a common point of reference,” as when we call a human being healthy, a dog healthy, a medical treatment healthy, and so on; another, “the analogy of proportion,” which “involves the comparison of two different proportions, as with numbers and also with words, in metaphors, the proportion usually illustrated by saying ‘A is to B what C is to D.’ In Thomistic theology, there is an analogy of proportion “between the being of God” (‘A to B’) and “the being of creatures” (‘C to D’). The contemporary adept of the analogia entis is Erich Przywara, who argues that an analogy exists between “mutable and finite things” such as ourselves “are grounded in their ultimate essence in something immutable and infinite, which is essentially distinct from them.” Thus, as Hancock straightforwardly puts it, “the creature is the image of the Creator, and thus an analogy of the Creator,” since “God is incomprehensibly beyond all things, yet ‘tangibly present’ in all things.” In terms of things thought, “the paradox extends to the very relationship between reason and revelation, between, on the one hand, a purely natural and rational theology and, on the other, theology understood as dependent upon revelation and grace.” That is, the “natural, rational insight into the character of reality bears within itself the invitation to an openness to what necessarily transcends nature and reason.” That is, the analogia entis means that “the divine is at once in and beyond the natural world of human experience,” seen in the Book of Genesis in the account of God “breathing life” into clay in order to make Man, an act that enables Man by nature to think towards God, even after being expelled from Eden. At the same time, Hancock acknowledges the insistence of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, that the Creator-God’s dissimilarity to His creations must be understood to be greater than His similarity to them—that the analogy must break down at some point.
But not before performing some indispensable work for us creatures. Przywara is a music man, but obviously no charlatan. For him, “a theology of analogy must remain as much a kind of poetry or music as a self-contained propositional system” which “evoke[s] actual human experiences of one kind or another as natural pointers to supernatural reality” while remaining “ever vigilant against the pretension of theory of theology to favor one pole or the other, the natural or the supernatural, and thus to risk the collapse of the musical tension.” While Przywara inclines toward the esthetic dimension of these “natural experiences,” Hancock argues for “the prominence of the ethical.” For Christians and Jews, humility stands at the center of morality, given the analogy but also the profound difference between Man and God. As analogous to God, Man has been endowed with the capacity to know Him to some small but salvific extent; as undivine beings who may, through theosis, be substantially improved, we must humble ourselves before Him. Our God-endowed capacities give us the basis for a proper pride, really a sort of self-respect, even as we must rigorously attempt to overcome wrongful pride, Satanic rivalry with God. Modern pride, the pride of ‘Old Nick’ Machiavelli, pretends “to transcendence of the common condition of humanity…not based on a positive analogy or continuity between human and divine natures, but on the assumption of a standpoint of absolute otherness” regarding our fellow creatures, whom we set out to conquer. “The boundless and incoherent presumption of modernity is that which somehow claims (at least implicitly) the standpoint of God while pretending to prove”—with its doctrine of materialism—that “human beings are nothing but animals.” Tocqueville draws the “practical conclusion,” the moral and political conclusion that “this modern, democratic age is no time to teach humility” to men inclined to conceive of themselves as brutes; “what we need now is pride,” pride of the right sort, self-respect as beings distinct from other creatures but part of a created whole, a cosmos, that we should not view as a thing to be manipulated regardless of our obligations to it, and to the One who created it. “It remains the case that humility is a Christian virtue.” We “created beings exist not of [our]selves but only through the act of creation,” creation ex nihilo.
Although “the idea of God’s creation of the world from nothing has, at best, a debatable scriptural basis,” it was crucial as a response to the Neo-Platonist philosophy current in the world of the early Church Fathers. The Neo-Platonists contended that the analogy between ‘divinity’—no Person but “an impersonal first principle”—and the many beings was very tight, indeed. The many beings owe their existence to an “eternal emanation” from the first principle: “from the eternal self-identity of the one, there emanates the logos, and from the logos, the cosmos”; “there is nothing truly new under the sun,” reality being essentially timeless. The Fathers understood the God of the Bible as He manifests Himself there, as a Person both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘free,’ with the power to create everything we perceive, including ourselves, our capacity to perceive, and with the freedom to exercise that power unconstrained by anything or anyone. “To wrest a personal God from the Greek categories of rational impersonal necessity, freedom embraces nothingness,” since pure ‘somethingness’ would entail necessity. At the same time, unlike Muslims, Christians denied that God in his freedom proceeded arbitrarily, that God is pure will. This would leave “human freedom with no standard but will. Not so: God is Logos. He endows his creatures with the capacity to reason, if not with His capacity to reason, His intimate knowledge of the cosmos, of the whole, and of the purposes to which He has intended to put it.
This is what Przywara calls, following Aquinas, the doctrine of secondary causes. God, the Person who is the First Cause, has called human beings into existence while also gratuitously, graciously endowing them with “the power also to be causes themselves.” And so he can tell Adam to give names to the creatures in Eden and to avoid eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Hancock intervenes to remark this as a call, faithfully echoed by Przywara, “to inspire men and women of faith and goodwill to the cultivation and application of their best faculties.” That is, God calls us to virtue, not a call to “service to human beings understood as beings for whom morality and law” merely serve as “temporary necessities on the path of technological and democratic progress,” but as “constitutive of their being.” Those who heard Jesus teach understood humanity as “unthinkable apart from questions of what is intrinsically good and bad, right and wrong,” being descendants of the ‘first parents’ who disobeyed God and knew—knew good and evil not only intellectually but in the intimate, Biblical sense of knowledge. This was no ‘religion of humanity.’ Jesus requires that creatures serve God as well as themselves, even if they conceive of serving themselves as compassionate service to neighbors.
To do this, not esthetics alone but preeminently the natural law “structured according to a hierarchy of natural finalities (self-preservation, reproduction, natural sociality, and knowledge of God)” must be acknowledged and followed. The natural law points human beings not only to the beautiful but also to the true and the good. This points us to practice first, without denying the importance of either philosophic theory or theology. “A truly good and truly beautiful understanding of the analogy between humanity and divinity, I propose, would have to honor both the grounded pride and the sacrificial humility of action,” the understanding that neighbors are intrinsically loveable, creatures of God despite their sins, and therefore worthy of sacrificing for. In so understanding the human condition, we exhibit “the capacity to receive grace,” exercising our natural powers strengthened and refined as virtues (especially the virtues of prudence and harmlessness, which is perhaps analogous to Aristotelian moderation) in the service of supernatural ends insofar as God reveals them. As in Aquinas’ De veritate, “the ultimate end is located in the supernatural, while the right content or substance is in the natural,” the relation of means and ends in which the exercise of virtue is both good in itself, an end in itself, and in service to purposes beyond ourselves. The supernatural incorporates the natural but the natural incorporates the supernatural, as God’s Spirit resides in the human heart, once the heart opens itself to Him. As Aquinas affirms, grace perfects nature by enabling it to achieve a substantial degree of “self-sufficient actualization,” the “prideful classical reason” Aristotle commends, and to open itself to the “possibility of ecstatic,” self-emptying self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ, an endeavor “far beyond the reach” of such reason, no part of Aristotelian ethics.
This dual moral obligation distinguishes classical “achievement” from Christian “participation” in Christlike self-sacrifice. Participation by definition is more than “sheer receptivity in the sense of passivity,” instead implying activity. “The human, natural pole” of the duality follows Aristotle, as Aquinas indeed does, his natural law being “human participation in eternal law,” which is “indistinguishable from God’s being and goodness,” God’s being and goodness being the ground of our own being and goodness, insofar as we have not marred them. We have not entirely marred them; had we, we could not even perceive God’s call to Himself. “There must be some positive content in the human language by which we reference God…or else our doctrines and our praise are strictly meaningless.” With the theologian Thomas S. Hibbs, Hancock finds divine goodness “deeply consonant with the highest human practical virtue,” prudence or practical wisdom, whose divine analogy is Providence. With God, Providence allies closely with techne, art, which cannot fail, given God’s power. Human artistry can of course fail, but it is sufficiently ‘creative’ to produce narration not only of the past but of an intended future which, so long as it is guided by prudence, will not succumb to wrongful pride. That intended future should take “the path of return to God,” and that requires “some understanding” of God as a Person.
But what is a “person”? To answer that question, I can only begin with myself and the human beings around me. Christian individualism “must not forget” the “political nature of humanity,” since “we gain an understanding of what is good and best for us by imitating the exemplars of human action embodied in the practices of our community,” practices which are at least said to be “oriented to the good as presented in the common good,” beyond my good as an individual. This suggests, as it does to still another Thomist, Jean-Rémi Lanavère, that the political community provides human beings with “the natural mediation” between them and the natural law, itself an instantiation of eternal law. That is, “the rational creature participates in eternal law—that is, in divine providence—not only as a recipient but also as an active, provident agent,” as one ruled but also ruling. “This active participation is the natural law.” It is not only a set of general rules but of attention to particulars; the classical concern with the limitation of law—that its generality does not necessarily do justice to particular circumstances—finds exemplary correction in Christianity’s personal God, who issues general commands but also governs individuals from ‘without’ and from ‘within,’ the latter via justice-oriented conscience and prudential reasoning. “natural law itself is by no means received passively by the human agent; rather, natural law is constituted by human reason, and then fulfilled—not distorted, or compromised—in its particular application. This leads Hancock to “the surprising and marvelous conclusion” that human law, a convention, “is tied more intimately to eternal law, to the divine mind itself, than is human reason in its work of constituting the general principles of the ‘natural law,'” and that human law completes natural law and “human beings are God’s intermediaries in the actual execution of human government.”
Well, they should be.
Mosaic Law was God’s law given to the Israelites. The new law of grace, which in no way rescinds Mosaic Law for the Jewish people, summarizes the Mosaic Law in the two Great Commandments while graciously leaving Gentiles’ politics, including lawgiving, to the deliberation, decision, and execution of human beings. What Manent calls “archic” prudence “cooperates with God’s providence in determining and commanding what natural law left indeterminate,” instantiating “the responsibility of reason under God.” Rightly understood natural law and rightly conceived and enacted conventional law both serve purposes that are supernatural. Hancock identifies his own purpose as “recover[ing] an understanding of the natural, political beings to whom Christian revelation is addressed and whose nature must not be canceled by the revelation of grace and of a supernatural purpose.” But as he also sees, human beings can “say No to God.” Saying No to God is the definition of evil. The decision for “good versus bad depends upon [the decision for] good versus evil.” “We are by grace alone free to choose freedom and eternal life, liberty under God and the laws.” In this sense, Adam and Eve’s fall from grace was “fortunate,” despite the curses God heaped upon them because it “inaugurated this history of freedom as a divine-human partnership.” (Inveterate bourgeois that I am, I for one would have been content with obedience to God regarding the initial choice, also free, which our first parents made, but I take Hancock’s point.)
Returning to the present day, Hancock asks, “How can Christianity speak to the morality and politics of a definitively secular age,” where “modern societies and states flirt dangerously with totalitarian temptations,” temptations in which slavery disguises itself as freedom? Hancock regards Pascal’s treatment of this question as too anti-philosophic, an attitude he ascribes not only to the great mathematician’s ardent Christian faith but to his modern, mathematical (mis)understanding of the cosmos, which makes the whole as infinite and therefore incomprehensible as a sequence of numbers to which one can always add one more. He regards Strauss’s treatment of the question as finally too philosophic, too rationalist-naturalist, but nonetheless promising because Strauss was Socratic, recognizing “a kind of knowledge of the human soul that begins with a practical awareness of the souls ends” as “the key to whatever partial theoretical knowledge of the whole may be possible.” “By adopting an essentially Cartesian metaphysics,” Pascal “risks abetting Descartes’s technological project,” but as “the Christian virtue,” (and also the Jewish virtue, anav), humility “depends upon some minimal residue of the pride essential to human agency, upon a certain confidence in a heterogeneous order of the whole” that Socrates perceives “in some way analogous to the substantial heterogeneity of human ends.” “As is the case with Descartes’s thinking subject, Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ remains a wholly unintelligible exception, a speck of mysterious heterogeneity suspended within an otherwise undifferentiated whole.” Hancock doubts “whether this place is indeed a humanly livable one, one that provides sufficient orientation for human action.” Pascal contends that Christian love suffices, but “I have asked whether the supernatural virtue of charity must not shelter or make space for the rule of prudence, the ‘god of this lower world.'” [4] As noted earlier, Jesus Himself thinks so (Matthew 10:16). “Christianity must not attempt to secure the absoluteness of its own elevation by subverting the natural basis of our very sense of elevation.” In Tocqueville’s terms, ‘democracy’ should accept some balance with ‘aristocracy.’ Aristotle is right: the ‘mixed regime,’ duly appreciated on the level of morality as well as politics, really is the best practicable regime, the truly political one that best reflects the relation of God and Man.
Accordingly, Hancock concludes by calling for a “prideful Christianity”—a “purposely provocative and paradoxical formulation.” “The Christian warning against the sin of pride or presumption against God”—genuine evil—must “not be interpreted so as to undermine the natural and necessary confidence in the intrinsic goodness of virtue.” “The archic, initiating, commanding, and thus, in a certain sense, necessarily prideful, character of moral agency is essential to our humanity,” and God’s curses inflicted upon us have not altered that. They have made moral choice more urgent and more knowing. Christians can conscientiously accept “moral and political responsibility understood within the practical frame of our common life.” Such an approach is “‘impure’ both from the standpoint of a pure liberal-democratic theory” as conceived by someone like John Rawls “and from that of a rigorously Protestant or radically Pascalian theology.” (Woodrow Wilson could be said to hover angelically somewhere between the two.) It is nonetheless indispensable for making life in the City of Man propaedeutic to life in the City of God. As Manent sees, the Greeks “understood everything that was essential to understand of human things, and they said it with incomparable sobriety and force,” but “they could not give voice to ‘the inconceivable proximity between human fragility and divine holiness.'” Doubtless recalling Barney’s mom, Hancock quotes Isaiah 49:15-16: “For can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”—a moral and divine analogy illustrating the continued, faithful love of God for the human beings He created. Strauss was right to see that “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality'”; he was right to imply that individuality traces back to Christianity, just as Tocqueville was right to trace modern democracy to Christianity. Both were right to think that Christianity leaves humanity vulnerable to ruin, to inhumanity, when twisted into the paths of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, and finally historicism. Hancock simply replies that this is not Christianity rightly understood.
“Only Manent has, I think, in our times, proposed the indispensable task of reconciling or coordinating Christian anthropology with liberal-republican self-government and its insuperably Aristotelian dimension” by “situating the natural grammar of action, with its element of commanding pride, under a Providence that is a friend of human beings as individuals, personal beings of eternal significance.” That is, “grace is not meant to stand on its own without or apart from nature.” If Satan could not utterly destroy God’s Creation, surely human sinners cannot. At the same time, “elevated by grace, virtue rises above mere honor and the boast of self-sufficiency.” The political nature of human beings most decidedly does not issue in political theology, either in the Machiavellian sense of a moralistic cover for Realpolitik schemers or a politics somehow deduced from a “high-minded but apolitical theological system,” as seen in “integralism.” Rather, Hancock “propose[s] to coordinate the deepest premises of the Christian faith, the foundations of our conviction, whether Christian or post-Christian of the ultimacy of love, with our most sober moral and political judgments regarding the necessity and beauty of virtue.”
Notes
- See “Gods of the Family, Gods of the City: The “Antigone,” on this website under the category “Nations.”
- See Thomas Pangle: Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
- For a discussion of de Rougemont, see “The Derangement of Love in the Modern World,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
- Hancock cites Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening as a contemporary Protestant instance of a Christianity neglectful of the need not only for “competence”—a Cartesian-inspired standard—to live in this world but for the ‘pride’ or self-respect that virtue incorporates. See Mitchell, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (New York: Encounter Books, 2020). Nor can Yuval Levin’s ‘institutionalist’ and Kantian approach to liberal democracy suffice; see Yuval Levin: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again (New York: Basic Books, 2024) and Hancock’s critique (pp.249-254). For a discussion of Pascal’s Pensées and of Pierre Manent’s commentary thereon (Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition) see “A Sure Thing: Betting on Pascal”; “Pascal on Humanity and Its ‘Justice'”; “The Greatness and Misery of the ‘Self'”; and “Pascal on Christ and His Offer of Salvation,” all on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
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