Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part 2: Chapters 6-8. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026.
In the first part of his book, Hancock addresses the serious deficiencies of modern “theory” or philosophy and modern theology, which have culminated in a hyper-egalitarianism that makes moral and political claims dependent upon establishing one’s status as a victim of some oppressive hierarchy. Since ruling itself presupposes hierarchy, these theoretical and theological systems may culminate in a call for no government at all—radical egalitarianism and freedom at once or, as in Marx, an initially powerful statism that will then put an end to itself, ‘wither away.’ Or it may culminate in an incoherent belief that some new hierarchy will itself be equalizing and liberating—a ‘welfare state’ in which apolitical administrators, supposedly apolitical, do not so much rule us but serve us, thereby relieving us of our victimhood. This amounts to an ‘aristocracy’ that, unlike the older aristocracies, justifies itself in term of egalitarianism from which it must obviously exempt itself. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Strauss vindicate ‘aristocracy,’ by which they mean the need for persons who are capable of acting and of thinking beyond the limits of ‘democracy’ or social egalitarianism, precisely in order to defend democracy against its own ‘totalizing’ inclinations, especially against its tendency to curtail liberty of thought and action in favor of equality, of thinking, feeling, and acting ‘in lockstep’ with increasingly uncivil majorities in civil society. Majoritarianism implies a certain sheer weightiness, a sort of materiality imposed upon the mind. Modern ‘idealism’ is really a pantheism that cloaks materialism in highfalutin talk. Its adepts are a bit like that fast-talking ‘Music Man’ in the movies, a music man who doesn’t know much about the muses but, unlike the movie sophist/rhetorician, often fails to know that they doesn’t know.
In Part 2, Hancock turns from theory and theology to practice, but especially to the relation of practice to theory and theology. Following Tocqueville, he sees that “the contemporary idea of the equal dignity of every unique human individual derives historically from Christian teaching but now must be regarded as an irresistible datum of human experience.” That the idea is irresistible does not make it true, however, nor does any and all definitions of equal dignity faithful derivations from Christian doctrine. “How,” then, “can we articulate some solid middle ground between the complicit extremes of idealism and materialism, the vaulting ambition of cosmic god,” would-be masters of nature, “and the debased realism of needy beasts,” whose mastery, insofar as they achieve it, serves their bodily appetites? Human beings do indeed exercise a degree of “spiritual freedom”; we are not ‘determined’ by matter. But that freedom depends upon sustaining a “natural order of the soul and of the city,” the rule of reason, that is “exquisitely fragile and subject to disruption” by that very freedom, which can choose fine and wonderful things or coarse and disgusting ones—longings and notions “very difficult to reconcile with a stable moral and political order,” and indeed rejecting stability and order for perpetual change assumed (but only assumed) to be progress.
The Hebrew Bible teaches that “human beings were created in the image of God.” The New Testament promises that Christians can become godlike by the process of theosis. [1]. That is, the Bible finds human individuality, not merely our ‘species-being,’ a thing of infinite value. (Hancock quotes C. S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.”) Strauss added an important caveat, however: the spirit of individuality, which is the spirit of modernity, can easily be turned to decidedly unspiritual and unphilosophic purposes, resulting in “the ravages of modern individualism and of the liberationist and identitarian delusions it prepares.” And while Hancock does not simply endorse Strauss’s stated preference for a return to “the spirit of ‘sound antiquity,'” with its ‘aristocratic’ valorization of virtuous civic life against modern individuality, he does acknowledge and endorse Strauss’s point. “There is nothing automatic in the coupling of Christian individualism or personalism with the sense of elevation and noble resignation inherent in classical virtue,” and, beyond the universally shared dignity of creation in the image of God, the worth of a human soul does depend upon the exercise of human virtues, here and now. That is, the “unquestioned authority of the idea of the dignity of every individual is far from simply good news,” even if it is indeed part of the Good News of the Gospels. In early Christianity, “the affirmation of the individual was given ritual structure and moral meaning by authoritative sacraments and commandments and by membership in a visible community of shared vocation,” the ecclesia or Church, the regime founded by Jesus Himself. And with that, Jesus also ensured that Christians would face some version of the same crisis He faced: martyrdom. His regime, the City of God, remains captive and stranger—a foreigner—so long as the earthly city, the City of Man, survives. “Membership in a heavenly city that somehow transcends the hierarchies of this world,” needs to be coordinated “with the practical imperatives of a particular human city,” as Jesus in fact said when he advised His disciples to be prudent as serpents. Under the conditions of ‘this world,’ it is as foolish (in a bad way) to live as if those conditions mean nothing as it is foolish (in a good way) to accept one’s status as a fool in the eyes of the world. Machiavelli will always suppose the Christian a fool, simply; an imprudent Christian will simply ignore him, a prudent one won’t, while knowing that Machiavelli doesn’t see the whole truth.
“Societies need competence” and indeed excellence if they are “to produce the physical and symbolic goods that sustain them,” and individuals need “concrete, more or less determinate standards by which to judge their own and their fellows’ contributions and deficiencies, and no amount of abstract talk about infinite personal worth will supply such needs or such goods.” Strauss (and Tocqueville) are right, too: “Christian love cannot dispense with classical virtue.” There is need for ‘aristocracy,’ and especially for the characteristic aristocratic/classical virtue of prudence, the virtue that mediates between the City of God and the City of Man, as the supreme Mediator, Jesus Christ, insisted.
Hancock astutely calls attention to Tocqueville’s phrase, “the laws of moral analogy,” in this regard. By this, Tocqueville means the connection between moral ideas and moral sentiments, “the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs,” the bond between theory and practice, which most emphatically does not mean the erasure of the distinction between theory and practice, the consequence of pantheism. Tocqueville’s example of the rupture of moral analogy is “the extremism of the French Revolution.” Under ordinary circumstances, under circumstances when the laws of moral analogy prevail, revolutionaries would not behead (for example) Marie Antoinette. They would not kill a helpless person. “When our conceptual universe falls out of alignment or loses attunement to what we know ‘in our bones’ as practical agents in the world, then we lose touch with our humanity”; “in imagining ourselves to be theoretical gods”—rigorous and incorruptible enforcers of the Rights of Man—we “become practical (ideological and revolutionary) beasts,” murderers in the name of justice. “Our idealistic abstractions do not remove us from the world of action but commit us to perpetual violence against our natural moral-political condition,” the only limit to that violence being exhaustion or defeat at the hands of some greater force. This “internal contradiction…lies at the heart of the modern democratic or rationalistic,” not rational, “project,” inaugurating an “addictive commitment to revolutionary transformation” incapable of limiting itself.
Hancock is quick to observe that the laws of moral analogy are not laws in any formal sense, part of some “explicit and universal philosophical or theological system.” Rather, they are a reasonable sensibility that inclines human beings in their actions to “look up to, to defer to, or be aware of the superiority of something above” action, above practice. “Practice must find some realizable guide and compass in theory,” but without thinking of theory or of theology as programmatic, our actions as somehow similar to computer ‘printouts.’ That is, for its part “theory must never betray its practical touchstone,” leading us to imagine that the purpose of action is “some ineffably transcendent ‘ideal'” or “an ever-elusive, ultimately incoherent, and therefore self-undermining idea of ‘progress.'” Theory needs a practical “touchstone” because, first, theory consists of a set of generalizations about human nature as seen not only in human biology and human thought but in human practice and, second, because such generalizations, such theoretical ideas as we derive from such observations must be ‘brought down to earth,’ made consistent with the limits imposed existing circumstances. The worst enemy of practical reasoning is wishful thinking. “As Aristotle and Pierre Manent (one should add Jesus) remind us, the end we seek is always in an important sense in some way always present within the practical means by which we seek it—that is, in the practical habitual dispositions, the virtues, that, for the most part implicitly, shape our understanding of a good life and of a good society.” As Hancock emphasizes, “in an important sense, theory must rule practice, while at the same time practice must rule theory.“
It is important to recall another Aristotelian theme, here. Aristotle locates the origin of political life in the family in the sense that all three forms of ruling, of governance, can be seen there: the two forms of ‘command-and-obey’ rule—parents over children, rule for the sake of the good of those ruled, and masters over slaves, rule for the sake of the good of those who rule—and the one form of what he calls “political” rule—the reciprocal ruling and being-ruled of husband and wife. What Hancock thus suggests is the reciprocal or political rule of theory and practice, both in individuals and cities, the City of Man. He leaves the ruling conditions of the City of God, the mysterious monarchy of a triune God, to the theologians.
Tocqueville agrees with Hegel (whose disciples he otherwise detested) in claiming that “the best minds of classical antiquity were blinded, by the aristocratic conditions of their own societies, to the manifest injustice of slavery, and so were at pains to prove that slavery was somehow authorized by nature”—a “fundamental linkage between Christianity,” which both philosophers take to be opposed to slavery, “and the modern movement of generalizing equality.” In Tocqueville’s own words, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” or, as Hancock elaborates, “beneath the democratic revolution lies the Christian revolution.” Several qualifications to this might be advanced: Aristotle’s idea of “natural slavery” would strictly limit actual slavery; as the Apostle Paul makes clear, Christian slaves are not encouraged to rebel. More important in terms of the discussion at hand, however, is the point that democracy or natural equality, eventually leading to social equality, comes to earth via the teachings and example of a monarch, indeed the supreme Monarch, the King of kings, albeit one who acts ‘aristocratically’ in the role of a mediator between His Father and the human beings formed out of clay and animated with His breath, His spirit, thereby fashioning them in His “image” as beings capable of exercising logos, speech and reason. This divine making is the foundation of human equality and of human inequality, inasmuch as all men are not created equal in physical beauty or intellectual capacity. But in emphasizing the equality of human beings in their ‘humanness,’ Christianity acts monarchically, not aristocratically, monarchy, the rule of the one, and democracy, the rule of the many, being natural allies against the rule of the few. The danger in this is that “democratic ontology is thus fundamentally at odds” with moral analogy, “with the tempering of the abstract idea by the concrete experience, as well as the informing of the concrete experience by the idea that aims to transcend particular experience.” The command to be innocent or harmless as doves and prudent as serpents could counteract this tension, were it more generally heeded. But virtue is difficult, else it would not be virtue, as Strauss’s beloved ‘classics’ knew and taught. Hancock writes, “Christians must find a way to give due support to the pride that is inseparable from the nature of human agency or moral analogy and thus to restore confidence in the natural, mediated goods of practical virtues and bordered political communities.” Put Thomistically, divine grace perfects nature; it does not replace it.
Genuinely moral and political action cannot be determined either from ‘above’ or from ‘below,’ whether ‘above’ means a theory, a god, or the ‘end of History,’ and whether ‘below’ means the earth, the body, or the passions. Genuinely moral and political action presupposes choice, freedom. Such freedom “is an intrinsic good” or “at least somehow points to a good that is good in itself.” This means that freedom is “elevated,” ‘aristocratic,’ not ignoble or slavish. “Freedom is spirited and spiritual; it is associated with human pride and self-assertion” while “at the same time” aspiring “toward an undefined elevation, toward something beyond the all-too-human.” Acting “is central to freedom.” And “this free action is bound up with speaking, reasoning, deliberating,” which is why the document that constitutes the American federal government (for example) guarantees freedom of speech as a sine qua non of political freedom. Finally, political and rational freedom presuppose freedom to “breathe,” to live. “Even the simple and universal gift of life must be defended against those who would act even against the freedom to breathe—that is, against our very survival” as individuals and as political communities. Being rational and political, freedom has limits; it “is not altogether limitless, boundless, or undefined.” It “expresses itself within a meaningful horizon in which there is commerce,” or in Aristotelian terms a political relationship, “between the most elevated and the most common.” “Both voluntarist and lawful,” freedom “is ordered by virtue, and virtue is free.” It is lawful in the sense that it obeys the natural laws of moral analogy. In the Bible, God sets down the laws, enacts his commands; He is a Person (indeed, the Person of all person, the One who endows the many with personhood) who commands laws, which are impersonal but purposive rulers of the many human persons, who are nonetheless free to violate those laws, at least up to a point. To obey the Ruler and His rules, the supremely personal and the impersonal, is to live “a life that is right and good.” “This duality within the highest possibilities of meaningful existence corresponds broadly to the two great sources of the Western tradition, Jerusalem and Athens,” the Creator-God and the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The Creator-God is both eternal (“I am that I am”) and free (“I shall be as I shall be”). The laws He has built into His creation are necessary, unfree. A fully human life will choose to live in terms of both, not one or the other. “The divine must be understood in a way that supports both the lawful quality and the freedom or independence of human action; Providence, the ultimate guarantor of a truth whose face is not turned away from humanity, must be a friend of freedom.”
Two “difficulties” arise respecting such an appeal to an objective moral order. There is the “epistemic” difficulty of knowing that it is and what it is; there is the “substantive” difficulty of how to obey it, how it could be consistent with human freedom, the human capacity to reason. Hancock suggests that while “the moral law must indeed be understood as ‘objective’ in the sense” of existing “somehow above us,” authoritative, ‘better than we are,’ “it must not be understood as simply outside us, as absolutely ‘other’ with respect to our rational and spiritually self-aware humanity.” That is, “the appeal to a higher law is not alien to, but in fact, deeply continuous with, the full, responsible exercise of human agency.” As Daniel J. Mahoney argues, Christianity must “encourage citizens and believers alike to take seriously the full range of one’s political and civic responsibilities,” responsibilities seen in our membership in political communities, organizations with territorial boundaries that need to be defended against assaults aimed at violating the self-government, the freely set limitations citizens impose upon themselves within those boundaries. [2] Mahoney “reconciles the word of God and moral law with the spiritual needs of humanity precisely because human spirituality is understood to embrace human liberty or the nobility of responsible choice and action” while “divine providence is understood as holding open the space of human prudence,” the guidance “of one’s own natural reason,” self-government. One may hold oneself responsible to, and be held responsible by, the Holy Spirit and His promptings.
Pierre Manent elaborates upon these themes, correcting the “hypertrophy of theory” with the “grammar of action.” That is, he counters what he understands to be the excessively abstract, impractical, utopian approach to politics in contemporary life not with a ‘pragmatism’ that seeks the most efficient path to satisfying self-defined self-interest but with moral and political action infused with prudential reasoning that recognizes the good that is, so to speak, built into human action itself, “the unsurpassable good inherent in action itself.” Such action will also be “holding open space in eternity for this good.”
What does that mean? Hancock would have helped his reader had he followed Aristotle’s practice of providing examples of such action. Nonetheless, he circles around his meaning sufficiently to afford some glimpses of what he has in mind. This involves a political relationship between the “pride” of prudential reasoning in action and the Christian humility that acknowledges the impossibility of any rational solution to the political problem, absent divine intervention. Following Manent, who follows Aquinas, he eschews the Aristotelian philosophic standard, itself derived from Plato: the founding of “the best city” in speech and the description of “the best soul.” For Christians, the best person cannot be human, even if human beings were not afflicted with ‘original sin.’ What Christians can look to as a standard is the natural law. Very well then, what is the natural law?
The natural law begins with “universal motives” discernible in human beings: the pleasant, the useful, and the upright (the honnête). None of these motives is an idea. Each is actually present in our souls. This includes the upright, which orients itself ‘upward,’ toward nobility, toward ‘aristocracy,’ without itself being outside of ourselves. “Manent sees reason, in our present circumstances of theoretical hypertrophy, as investing too much in speculations on goods, beyond those we actually experience in some way in the practice of moral agency and practical deliberation.” All of these motives take us outside of ourselves; even the experience of pleasure frequently requires us to seek external things that give us pleasure—food, water, even air, which we seek in order to survive but not only in order to survive. Human motives bring human individuals to extend themselves, go beyond themselves. This going-beyond includes (as Aristotle and Aquinas insist) in “enhancing the ‘sweetness’ of social bonds and our interest”—themselves potentially pleasant, useful, and upright—in “our hope for a higher and more complete good.” Prudential and even theoretical reasoning can take us some distance in discerning the object of this hope, but only so far. “At some point, our quest for such a good exceeds the limits of reason, and so we must choose whether or not to let the divine truth come toward us,” to “allow God’s grace to supervene upon our natural practice of moral and political agency.” That is, at some point, having reasoned as assiduously as is possible for me to do, why would I not ask the God whose existence I cannot discover by a rigorously logical proof to show Himself? After all, if He does not exist, what harm in the exercise? I will remain within the bounds of Socrates’ humane zeteticism, carefully rejecting the inordinate pride of modern rationalism.
Manent holds (in Hancock’s words) that “the divine truth can come toward us only as we assume practical responsibility for the common goods of the real communities of which we are a part.” Christian love (agape, caritas) inheres in the act of taking such responsibility for ourselves but especially for those around us—the sober, unsentimental love of neighbor. “Neither (1) modern rational mastery for the sake of humanity nor (2) the humble Protestant or postmodern abnegation of responsibility for human goods nor (3) classical or medieval speculation on a highest good altogether beyond practice can relieve us of our responsibility as rational, moral, and political beings for the only goods available to us by nature, and thus the only goods of which we can coherently speak—that is, the good inherent in our moral and political agency and inseparable from the very practice of that agency.” Human experience entails action, and action entails an aim, a purpose, “some substantial, actionable understanding of what is good.” That goes for action guided by theology as much as action guided by philosophy. As Hancock ingeniously puts it, “Theology, no less than philosophy, must be respectfully attentive to a certain necessary ‘grammar of action'”; Christians “must humble themselves in order to enter into what might be called the essential pride of human action, the active human contribution to the good.” That contribution, which is the natural law inherent in action, “consists of human participation in eternal law; indeed, the natural law consists of human participation in the active and productive realization of eternal law.” Although there are passages in the New Testament that seem to claim that human souls are little more than rocky battlegrounds for conflicts between far more powerful spiritual persons, demonic and divine, our souls are more than that because our souls think and will, desiring the good, however we may misconceive the good or simply fail fully to apprehend it.
Political life illustrates and ineluctably involves this natural human quest. Life in a ‘city’ or political community centers on the regime of the city—who rules it, what its ruling offices or institutions are, and most pertinently for the purposes of this argument, its purpose and its way of life, all of which incline citizens or subjects to form a certain character, an ethos, both individually and as a community. Inevitably, political life or activity fosters disagreements about specific actions the city might take or indeed about the regime itself. This debate about “the meaning of justice” “constitutes the city.” As Aristotle teaches, the underlying parties in the debate are the few who are rich, the oligarchs, and the many who are poor, the democrats. But the debate cannot be reduced to that conflict, as it involves many claims to rule, including birth, liberty, wealth, virtue, and military valor. Try sorting out all those claims in a coherent theoretical system and you will fail, becoming not a person of wisdom but a terrible simplificateur, an ideologue. What happens in a real city is rather a practical solution, sometimes long-lasting, imposed by politicians or ‘statesmen.’ If the politicians are statesmen in the valorizing sense of the term, the practical solution they arrive at will take account of the reasonable claims of all groups within the citizenry before arriving at their authoritative decision and issuing their authoritative commands. “The judgment or decision that resolves this problem is seen”—seen by the citizens themselves—as neither “derivable from some theoretical principle…nor as an arbitrary act of the will.” In Manent’s words, this “complexity” “holds out the promise of the good” which is “inescapably bound up with the mind’s and soul’s engagement with the plurality of substantive claims that emerge from our natural political existence,” the “practical commensuration of theoretically incommensurable goods,” giving each good its due as ‘its due’ is defined within the unifying regime of the city. “The highest human good, the good actualized in the statesman’s responsibility for the political community, appears thus to consist in reflective or rational responsibility for the practical viability and cohesion and consistency of the irreducible plurality of human goods.” Hancock characterizes the “implicit understanding that graces the practical operation of a good that is common” finds in that commonality a good that is “higher” than (apparently) the particular goods advanced by the citizens. This is the highest practicable good, the highest humanly possible, because there is no theoretical way to make the various particular goods commensurate with one another on the level of theory.
How does this comport with Christianity, which most assuredly does assert a highest good for individuals, namely, the salvation of individual souls? No regime that interferes with the achievement of that good could itself be as good as it might be, although it may provide other substantial ‘this-worldly’ goods. More specifically, how can Christianity ‘play out’ within the modern state, and indeed in the liberal-democratic state, given the origins of the modern state in the political philosophy of anti-Christian Machiavelli? Manent suggests that pre-Machiavellian, Christian Thomas Aquinas would find in “the collaboration of human prudence and divine Providence” a much more solid spiritual and intellectual foundation for the limitations on state action that liberalism insists upon, even as the democratic dimension of liberal democracy inclines toward limitless expansion of state power. Those limitations are enforced, especially in modern republicanism, by enabling citizens to stand up for themselves, to exercise their virtues against statist encroachment. In so doing, the exercise of the classical ‘cardinal virtues’—courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice—point human beings toward a good beyond the Aristotelian telos or purpose—the free exercise of those virtues, bringing human happiness—and toward the good that transcends humanness, the good bestowed by divine grace and seen in ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity. “Faith as an act of partnership with a universal personal God achieves an eminent expression in the great politics of the providential nation-state, a task that compels the Christian statesman to attend to the partial truths asserted by the major claimants in today’s contest for the soul of civilization.” In effect, such Christian statesmanship would wrest the nation-state from the grip of its inventor, Machiavelli, and his progeny. In this, “the excessive or overflowing meaning of the practical on the one hand”—the “logic of action”—and “of the divine on the other”—the overflowing grace of God—meet in reciprocal action, politically, and “color each other.” Whereas there has been a conflict between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, “the good that is at work in both” might enable their coordination against their common enemies—coordination, not synthesis, inasmuch as each endeavor has its own integrity. Thus does Manent invite his readers “to recognize the spiritual good that beckons beyond the visible arena of practical liberalism.”
The common enemy is the conception of nature posited by modern philosophers, notably Machiavelli’s follower, Thomas Hobbes, who defines nature, including human nature, as “radically individuated biological being,” a materialism that somewhat dubiously (as David Hume saw) “reduces to the individual’s boundless assertion of ‘rights.” Since the ‘is’ of a nonteleological and strictly materialist nature cannot really issue in an ‘ought’ of rights, “the governing law of modern liberalism is lawlessness; modern liberalism is a flight from law—a perpetual, obsessive, ever-self-radicalizing flight from law as the essential structure of human action.” But this cannot be true because by nature human action is “archic”—commanding, initiating, ruling, and “always assert[ing] a reason for its rule.” Reasons are debatable, therefore at least open to reasonable discussion, and although only an extraordinarily naive person would expect rational deliberation to predominate in most political debates, the openness to such debate is there and the adjustment of competing demands, many of them irrational and unjust, at least requires some sort of attempt at justifying each claim in terms of the public good, usually as that is defined by the prevailing regime. The honnête has a chance; otherwise, it would have a much slimmer chance. Pleasure, utility, and uprightness are, as Manent writes, “objective components of human nature,” so they will have their say in a liberal democracy. This is the nature that connects the ‘is’ with the ‘ought.’
With respect to uprightness, the noble, its “stability and universality” are “grounded in a dynamic triangular structure of the city, the soul, and the divine.” In the city, nobility makes the virtue of justice possible; the noble and the just are “the two essential dimensions of the “honnête.” Pleasure and utility are likely to be brought to the bar of the honnête, at least some of the time, as seen in the way the spirited guardians enforce the rational judgments of the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic. The reverse is also at least partly true, as “no person is noble who does not act with some reasonable regard for the plain utility or reasonable interests of his neighbor or fellow citizen.” In the soul, nobility must stand up for itself, become part of the habitual life of the soul, if it is to maintain itself, “preserve the conditions” of the “noble action” it craves—virtue being “the principle as well as the end of virtuous action.” To fortify itself with support from lower and solid ground, “the noble is grounded by the useful, and the useful is ennobled by the noble”—reciprocal ruling and being-ruled. More, “it is because man is capable of elevating himself above the goods of the body and of scorning even life—of which beasts do not have any idea—that he knows how to multiply these same goods to a degree that they cannot conceive of.” And with respect to the divine, “the instrumentality of the noble to justice or the common good…holds the noble open to a higher good beyond the self-satisfaction of the soul as well as the necessities of the city.” Manent follows Aquinas in going “beyond Aristotle in tracing the natural passage from the noble to the supernatural,” in “humbling…the classical, aristocratic pretension to achieve a philosophic transcendence that escapes the gaps and circles of the practical (moral and political) good.” As a philosopher, Aristotle inclines “to identify this ultimate end with purely theoretical activity.” For Christians, however, the ultimate end of practice is to meet a Person, although one’s success in that effort does not depend primarily upon oneself.
Notes
- See “Theosis,” a review of Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Life, on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
- See “The Humanitarian Temptation,” a review of Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, reviewed on this website under the category Bible Notes.
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