Nothingness Rules
Our Political Void & the Disintegration of Truth
by Michael Hanby
American politics, regardless of one’s political persuasion, seems characterized above all these days by a sense of dread. But there is no agreement about the meaning and origins of this dread. That those on opposite ends of the political spectrum give diametrically opposed accounts of it and regard the other side as the repository of their darkest fears may turn out to be one of its deepest symptoms. And since there is no longer any aspect of American life outside the political spectrum, this sense of dread hangs over just about everything. How are we to understand this?
It has been astonishing to discover in recent years just how fragile is the unspoken consensus underlying civil society. None of us predicted how fully our electoral politics would descend into farce or anticipated just how quickly the fragile bonds of our liberal order would go up in flames. Yet the riots of 2020 and the aftermath of the Dobbs decision—to say nothing of the frequent spasms of mass violence roiling our society—call into question whether even the basic efficacy of the law can outlast the wholesale loss of faith in the foundations of its authority or the discrediting of authority as such, phenomena seemingly as widespread among those responsible for executing and enforcing the law as among those who feel themselves chafing under it.
None of us anticipated the breadth, much less the success, of the cultural iconoclasm aimed at destroying the entirety of our civilizational memory nor, I daresay, how quickly and thoroughly human nature, already effectively demolished by a reductive and functionalist science, would be abolished in culture, language, and law. None of us foresaw the scope and power of our decentralized surveillance system—the mutual surveillance of all against all.
Such pervasive violence, despair, and disintegration raise fundamental questions both about the success of the American experiment and about the future. What is left to a people who have believed only in politics when their faith fails them, when they simply cease to believe in the foundations and principles of their own civilization and the myths that made them a nation? Are bureaucratic entanglement and a common antipathy toward reality enough to sustain their unity as a people?
Elsewhere I have tried to show that the moralism and pietism of American Christianity, and even, sociologically speaking, its relative vitality in comparison to Europe, is consistent with the death of God and the absolutization of politics, system requirements of the order in which we live. What is left to a people who have believed only in politics after they lose their faith is “nothing,” or perhaps “The Nothing.” And what follows the failure of politics is not another form of political order but most likely the end of political community as such and therefore of properly human self-government. We are on the cusp of a new age that is at once post-political and post-human, and both for the same reason.
The Power of Nothing
In the twelfth of his Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’s senior demon quotes a characteristically beautiful collect from the Book of Common Prayer, which addresses God as the One “without whom nothing is strong.” Lewis’s devil adds the brilliant twist that
Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
It’s a pretty good description of our nation of Last Men, addled by every kind of pharmacological and digital anesthetic and by a system of public instruction that has long confused education and ignorance. Still, I want to suggest that our time is revealing Nothing to be much stronger than even Lewis imagined.
There seems to be a powerful nihilism haunting our social order, a “spirit of negation,” to borrow a nineteenth-century term. Americans are inherently pragmatic, which makes our nihilism as superficial as our native optimism. Where reality has no depth, the abyss seems rather shallow, which is why, for example, we can seize and redefine the basic constituents of human nature—man, woman, mother, father, child—with hardly a serious thought about what we are doing. We are incapable of apprehending the gravity, much less the ramifications, of our deeds. And yet it may turn out that this very shallowness, the absence of real thought if not the incapacity to see and be moved by the truth, is a measure of nihilism’s triumph. Categories such as “liberal” and “conservative” and basic concepts like “rights” and “liberty” do not comprehend our nihilism so much as presuppose, and therefore inadvertently perpetuate, it.
To begin to see what we’re really up against, we must try to grasp the metaphysical, theological, and religious meaning of our historical moment. The real drama of our time is the practical and political outworking of the death of God in the institutions and intellectual structures of our society, what John Paul II and Benedict XVI called “the eclipse of the sense of God and man,” a darkness, we must confess, from which Christianity and the Church are not exempt. Indeed, arguably the greatest crisis internal to Christianity in the West is the pervasiveness of an atheism that does not know itself, where religiously enthusiastic, pious, moral, and even doctrinally orthodox Christians have found a way to smooth over the fault lines that lie between their professed faith and the functional atheism that guides nearly every aspect of their lives.
But if this is so, rediscovering, much less living in, the light of the Sun, preserving a memory of the human and living humanely as a people, will require much more than American Christianity, in either its Catholic or Protestant form, has thus far shown itself capable of. For this darkness cannot be overcome merely by a revival of piety or morality. It will require nothing less than a renewal of the Christian mind, capable of contending at every level—philosophical, scientific, technological, aesthetic, political—with the spirit of negation haunting our world.
Total Revolution & Its Seeds
An entryway into the political dimensions of our nihilism is provided by the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who was virtually unknown in the United States during his lifetime but has recently become something of a phenomenon, thanks to his translation into English and the vindication of his philosophy by events, which have made him something of a prophet. But already in the 1980s, Del Noce was warning against a “new totalitarianism,” more total if less obviously violent than the old. The novelty of the new totalitarianism is its scope and its essentially negative, revolutionary character, indeed its character as total revolution.
Total revolution becomes total by bringing the whole of reality, including human nature, within its purview. It is aided by a reductive science that claims to represent the whole of reason while reducing human nature to an aggregation of biological functions. Fusing “eroticism” and “scientism”—Del Noce’s terms for the sexual and technological revolutions—the new totalitarianism aims not at dominating the world with positive ideological content but is instead a negative “totalitarianism of disintegration” aimed at the annihilation of every given order, but especially the metaphysical, religious, and social vision given in the Christian synthesis of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.
For Del Noce, the new totalitarianism has its roots in the defining drama of the twentieth century, the triumph of a new kind of atheism ushered in by Marxism, whose simultaneous victory and defeat he calls “the suicide of the revolution.” Just as the internal logic of a liberal order that sought to defend liberty above all else seems to be realizing itself in its totalitarian opposite, so Marxism comes to fruition in the bourgeois society of well-being in the contemporary West.
This is due to the peculiar nature of Marx’s atheism, which remains poorly understood and differs in kind from the apologetic or “scientific” atheism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marx’s atheism overthrew ways of seeing the world that had framed Western thought since Plato and had made the “contemplation of truth” the goal of human life in its philosophic and religious traditions. But as Marx put it in the last of his Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
If the goal of thinking is no longer understanding but action, then God, nature, being, truth—every form of transcendence—simply cease to matter. It is not that their non-existence is demonstrated by argument, as earlier forms of atheism had sought to do; it is that within the new “scientific” conception of reason, they have become, strictly speaking, unthinkable. Neither God, nor nature, nor truth is a question that can be seriously posed from within a paradigm of thought that equates truth with practical success.
What matters now is history: the past historical, social, political, and economic conditions that make all truth claims into expressions of ideology, and the future historical conditions that will be changed by human praxis, that is, by science and political action, whose “truth” is now verified by its effectiveness. Marxist atheism surpasses all previous forms by passing into irreligion, which simply erases God and the religious dimension from thought and life.
Taken by itself, there is something reassuring about Del Noce’s argument to a certain type of American conservative, one long accustomed to blaming Marxism or other foreign influences for the corruption of America’s founding principles. It absolves us of a serious philosophical self-examination, a result Del Noce would no doubt lament. Yet it is difficult to imagine that Marxism, which never succeeded in establishing the sort of political foothold in the U.S. that it achieved in Europe, could have such a corrosive influence if there were not already something “irreligious” about American Christianity and if our own native soil were not already prepared for it by something internal to the American experiment. And when we dig into that soil a little more deeply, we see that the American Revolution contained the seeds of “total revolution” already and that Marxism is therefore but one powerful manifestation of a deeper metaphysical revolution already underway.
Possibility over Actuality
This is not as abstract as it may seem. Every political order unfolds within a horizon of meaning, within some basic, shared conception of what and how things are that gives our actions and deliberations their intelligibility. Ours is no exception. It is no accident that the architects of modern political order, from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson, were also natural philosophers; nor is it an accident that the pursuit of scientific and technological progress has been, above everything else, our collective raison d’etre.
America, the quintessentially modern nation, has always resembled the New Atlantis as much as the Second Treatise or the Federalist Papers. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to “promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts,” prompting Leon Kass to comment that “the American Republic is . . . the first regime explicitly to embrace scientific and technical progress and officially to claim its importance for the public good.” Modern politics unfolds within the same new vision of nature that gave birth to modern science, a world composed not of the intelligible forms of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, but of quantifiable, manipulable forces. This vision ensures that the pursuit of scientific and technological progress will not be simply one of the many activities undertaken within a modern democratic society, but will be its defining activity, its very lifeblood, and eventually a regime of unavoidable necessity, which is what it has become for us.
At the core of this metaphysical vision is the elevation of possibility or power over the givenness of the actual world. The celebration of possibility takes on mythic tones in American romanticism about the “frontier,” in our political homage to the “American dream,” and in a thousand mind-numbing commercials. But it is also deeply inscribed into our public philosophy, both political and natural.
Liberalism elevates possibility over actuality in the political sphere by identifying freedom with rights. Rights create what D. C. Schindler calls an “enclosure of a field of power” around each citizen, transforming every given reality that would define me prior to my choosing—God, the moral order, and, now we discover, even my own nature—into a possible object of choice. Liberal order thereby undermines these basic realities while appearing to uphold them. The liberal conception of religious liberty, for example, claims to protect religious freedom while transforming every religious tradition into a variation of Protestant congregationalism, a voluntary association within the large and authoritative civic whole.
The fundamental transformations in the conceptions of God, nature, and the human being wrought by liberal order, and the “irreligious” atheism operating within its conceptions of nature and reason, were concealed in the earlier stages of liberalism by the pietism and moralism of American Christianity and the inertial force of a historically Christian culture, but the hollowing out of the natural and divine order undergirding Christian morality would make their collapse swift and inevitable, like a dead tree blown over by a windstorm.
Equating Truth with Control
When the winds of historicism and scientism finally swept across the American plain, dissolving human nature into history and erasing the last traces of the divine hand from the cosmos, they bore the name not of Marx, but of Darwin. While Marx may have understood himself to be founding a “science of society,” Marxism never succeeded in becoming an empirical and experimental science in the Baconian sense. Nor did it really succeed in bringing human nature under the sway of science.
The impact of the Darwinian revolution upon the world of American Protestantism, and thus American culture, cannot be overstated. Long emancipated from Christian Platonism and having already abandoned nature to the mechanistic philosophy and Baconian science of technological progress from which Darwin himself emerged, American Protestantism at the end of the nineteenth century had no choice but to assimilate itself to the progressive vision of nature or try to stand athwart history on the grounds of biblical literalism, a resistance that was doomed to fail. The story of American Protestantism in the first decades of the twentieth century is thus largely the story of its practical assimilation to the Darwinian vision by means of the progressive and eugenical assumptions that were establishing themselves as cultural axioms, even for those who opposed Darwin’s theory on doctrinal grounds.
The real meaning of Francis Bacon’s conflation of knowledge and power, truth and utility, is not that we understand nature for the sake of controlling it, though this is certainly true. It is rather that we understand it by means of controlling it, that the truth of our knowledge is identical to the various kinds of control we are able to exercise over nature. We know our experiments are “true” when they work. Reality is thus measured by what is technically possible; what is is measured by what we can do. Or as John Dewey would say, “things are what they can do, and what can be done with them.”
This transformation of the meaning of both reason and things is a fundamental source of that pervasive and superficial thoughtlessness I noted earlier. St. Thomas Aquinas once said that
the name intellect arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing.
But where there is no longer an interior essence and therefore nothing to read, intellect, in the traditional sense, is no longer intelligible. Or necessary. If by manipulating variable x in an experiment, I can produce result y, and this in turn allows me to move on to the next experiment, it is superfluous to ask what truth, or cause, or an entity is, or even what x and y are. And in fact, from within this form of reason, there is no meaningful way to think about what anything is or to pose questions in the “What is?” form, but only to ask functional questions: How many? How far? How fast? Where from? Under what influence? To what effect? There is a disincentive to understanding, indeed an inducement to thoughtlessness, built into our most authoritative form of reason, the one that now determines what it means for us to think.
Never-Ending Process of Negation
The seeds of “total revolution” are already contained within this vision of things, coming to fruition, and becoming ever more “total,” the more the political, the scientific, and the technological converge into one “biotechnocratic” order. We saw an anticipation of this in the eugenics programs of the 1920s and 1930s, and we are seeing a more complete version now in the fusion of politics, medicine, and information technology and the vast science experiment being performed on the nation’s children.
The actual world that precedes me and defines me prior to my choosing is a threat to the limitless possibility that is liberal freedom, just as the givenness of the natural order is a threat to the advance of technical progress. Indeed, freedom only becomes real—only moves from potency to act, as it were—by negating and overcoming these limits, just as science discovers the limits of possibility by perpetually transgressing them. The absolutization of possibility in the liberal conception of freedom and the scientific conception of truth thus necessitates a war against every form of antecedent order. Because possibility is infinite, and the infinite cannot be traversed, the war must be interminable. Once it is launched, there can be no end to the process of negation, in whatever form it takes.
Anti-fascism, for example—notice the priority of the negative—needs fascists hiding behind every bush, just as fire needs oxygen; there can be no end to them. Wokeness, viewed religiously, can offer no atonement save for total annihilation. We can hope that the remains of indigenous American decency or mass sedation may stave off that consequence, but make no mistake: this is where the logic leads. And there can be no rest for science, no end to its progress, save perhaps for the limit of a habitable biosphere. To renounce the technological imperative, that what can be done must and will be done, is to abandon modern reason itself. The logic of liberal order is the logic of a utopianism without a utopia, promising the interminable pursuit of happiness and forbidding its arrival.
Power vs. Authority
This is the soil in which something like Del Noce’s “decomposed Marxism” could take root. The negation of the transcendent reality of God, being, nature, and truth leaves a void in which politics becomes absolute. One initial conclusion that we can draw from this is that the essence of totalitarianism consists not in the abolition of rights, but the abolition of truth, which leaves power as the fundamental reality and establishes politics as the total horizon of meaning.
This is a built-in tendency of modern politics as such, whether in its Marxist, technocratic, or liberal form, which—appeals to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God notwithstanding—is limited by no transcendent or external principle such as the Church and which acknowledges no horizon beyond the political over which it is not the final arbiter and judge. The recent codification of a radical new philosophy of human nature by the U.S. Supreme Court illustrates the point. There is no totalitarianism so total as that which claims authority over the meaning of nature, and cases like Obergefell and Bostock show that the power of the American judiciary to define what is real is effectively absolute.
Yet it was one of Del Noce’s great insights to see that the absolutization of politics ultimately destroys the very conditions of possibility for political community, namely, the universal reason, common nature, and shared order of reality on which rest the distinction between authority and power, and the efficacy of the law. In contrast to the modern sense of power, which we can liken to a kind of force, authority is essentially symbolic;it represents an order beyond itself that is true and real.
But this means that the efficacy of authority, in contrast to the power that acts principally from without, consists in its capacity to elicit recognition and consent from within. This is what we mean when we say that law, or the truth, obliges, that it compels by virtue of its own self-evidence. As Dignitatis Humanae puts it, “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”
It is authority and not power, the willing acknowledgment of truth and goodness and not the Hobbesian fear of punishment, that is the true source of law’s efficaciousness. In a Hobbesian world, the law can compel obedience only as far as the state’s power of coercion extends, whereas, in reality, we obey the law most of the time out of the tacit assumption that the law represents what is really true, good, and just. Absent the authority of truth, adherence to law and the semblance of basic social cohesion have to be extrinsically and forcibly compelled by legal and extra-legal means, while those responsible for administering the law simply cease to be any longer obliged by it except insofar as it is a useful instrument in the achievement of ideological ends. In which case the law has power but not authority, which is to say that it is no longer really law.
Authority, the acknowledgment of a binding order of reality to which we all belong and in which we all participate, is thus the foundation of every properly political community; it is the precondition for a politics that is anything other than civil war conducted by other means. Where there is no authority, no acknowledgment of a binding order of reality beyond politics, there is no longer political society. Politics then becomes what our politics have in fact become: not shared deliberation about means to given ends, but the attempt to conquer, subordinate, and, increasingly, to erase all visible traces and even the memory of one’s enemies.
The Annihilation of Human Nature
Seen in this light, one can hardly imagine a clearer declaration of the end of political society than the assertion by Justice Kennedy in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) that the right to liberty contains “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” or a greater measure of how this absurdity has taken root than the role that “identity” has come to occupy in American political discourse. Whether the expression of an unbridled freedom of self-determination or the absolute determinism of a mechanistic nature—and it is invoked both ways, often by the same person—“identity” marks the point beyond which any further analysis or criticism or even speech becomes impossible, illegitimate, and violent.
Hence the feedback loop of ideological muzak automatically triggered by sins against identity—think of Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges’ testimony in response to Senator Josh Hawley’s question whether “people with a capacity for pregnancy” are women. I am a woman because I identify as a woman, and I identify as a woman because I feel like a woman, or rather, I feel like I feel that a woman must feel. It’s turtles all the way down. Anything else is bigotry.
There is no possible argument against such assertions, no rational resolution, because the very assertion is a renunciation of both the reason and the common reality that ground the possibility of argument in the first place. Assertions of identity act as a principle of annihilation that negates reason and obliterates our common nature and a common order of reality in which we all participate and to which we all belong; it even obliterates the very language by which we recognize this world in common. Nothing is very strong indeed.
The sexual revolution, the human or post-human face of the technological revolution, is thus revealed to be essentially nihilistic. Its complete triumph would mark the end of political society and make the “new totalitarianism,” which thus far may seem theoretical and abstract, painfully concrete.
Day by day we are seeing already that the annihilation of human nature, the abolition of the basic human realities of man, woman, mother, and father, is going to require a great deal of us. It will require new laws, a new morality, a new history, a new kind of “education,” and a new language. It will require a new fusion of medicine, biotechnology, corporate power, and politics, for there can be no “marriage equality” without reproductive technologies and commercial surrogacy as an archetypal norm of procreation, just as there can be no transgenderism without the vast, unaccountable science experiment being performed on the nation’s children, a publicly supported regime of puberty-blocking hormones and surgical genital mutilation, and the intervention of the state and non-governmental bureaucracies into the heart of familial relations.
These and other biotechnical interventions yet unimagined are integral to both the conceivability and the practicability of this new regime. This is why the sexual revolution is best understood not according to our civil rights mythology of the ever-forward march of freedom, but as a moment in the ever-forward march of biotechnology and its conquest of human nature. And since power without authority can only compel as far as the capacity for coercion extends, sustaining this regime will require new, extra-political and extra-legal mechanisms of enforcement.
The End of Politics
Earlier I suggested that where there is no acknowledgment of transcendent truth, there is no authority, and that where there is no authority, there is no real political community. Where there is no political community, the obligation to obey the law extends only as far as the power of coercion extends, which necessitates extension of this power to everything, the invention of what Thomas Hobbes called an “artificial God.” Thus, we see that totalitarianism is not another form of politics, but the end of politics—that is, the end of properly human and humane self-government.
And from the transformations already underway throughout our society, we can begin to sketch what our post-human, post-political regime will probably look like. It appears, for one thing, that the Hobbesian ambition to submit ourselves to a mortal god of our own making is more perfectly realized on a technological than on a political plane. Almighty Google, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid—more interior to me than I am to myself—more closely approximates the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence than any political institution bound by the human limits of time and space. As Shoshana Zuboff puts it, “there is no place where Big Other is not.”
And as a “common power to keep men in awe,” political rule pales in comparison to “rule by internet,” where the mere possibility that the furies could descend upon anyone, anyplace, anytime, for the most trivial indiscretion is awesome enough to induce what Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity” and “the blankness of perpetual compliance.” And this is but one of the new Leviathan’s almighty powers, as the summer of 2020 showed.
The fusion of politics, corporate power, digital and biotechnology into one biotechnocratic system has catalyzed unprecedented new powers and new forms of political agency without political responsibility, exercised completely outside traditional channels of political deliberation and decision-making and attributable to no particular agency whatsoever. A tragic event in Minnesota can “spontaneously” provoke riots around the country and indeed the world before our politicians can brush their teeth in the morning. Compared to powers of such scope and immediacy, a few hundred people gathering under a dome for part of the year to deliberate policy and pass laws seems positively antiquated.
The Rule of Nobody
It is questionable—and to my mind doubtful—whether such power, once unleashed, can be brought under political control and governed by political means. It seems that revolutions tend by nature to take on a life of their own beyond the intent or control of the revolutionaries; once launched, they cannot easily be recalled.
Certainly, there are certain nodal points where we can identify the inputs of particular agencies that are refracted through the system—this social media platform turning the spigot of information favorable to an outgroup, that bank denying its cancelled patrons access to their own money—and if we had a political society and a functioning system of law, we might be able to do something about that. But this very fact reveals the nature of technocracy as a system in which agency is diffused throughout, a system whose ensemble behavior is irreducible to the actions of its individual component parts, however powerful some might be.
This is why I say that technocracy is not the rule of technocrats, but the rule of nobody. Who is responsible for the sudden explosion of riots in the summer of 2020? Who is the responsible agent when someone gets cancelled? Who bears the responsibility for that vast science experiment being performed on the nation’s children? Yes, we can identify particular agents whose input into the system catalyzed some downstream consequences, but none sufficient to account fully for the ensemble effect. The answer, with all such deeds, seems to be that they are the work of everyone in general and no one in particular.
Technology does not wait on politics but exceeds and engulfs it, making political action almost wholly reactive to technological possibilities that exceed the political imagination and defy political control. We already know how to do things to ourselves and our posterity that we do not know how to think about. Already it is possible for us to manufacture children for whom the once-natural question, “Who is my mother?” has no obvious natural answer. We are now on the cusp of doing things that most of us, including many who are presently contributing to their eventuality, will scarcely be able to imagine until they are an accomplished fact.
It is impossible to legislate in advance against such eventualities. By the time we begin to understand the meaning of an unanticipated and undesired technological intervention launched into the stream of history—whether it’s the computer, the smartphone, a social media platform, the contraceptive pill, an assisted reproductive technology, a puberty-blocking hormone, a gene-splicing technique, or any of a thousand other examples that have profoundly reshaped the culture and our self-understanding—the decisive deed will have already been done. And the cause-and-effect trains set in motion by the systemic behavior of our New Atlantis are not linear, but viral, extending in every direction at once like an organism increasing its bulk in three dimensions.
The Way of Deliverance
It is little wonder, then, that a sense of dread hangs over the land, for some kind of post-political, even post-human, future seems like an unavoidable fate, or at least like a fate we cannot avert by political means. If, however, the essence of totalitarianism is not the abolition of rights, but the abolition of truth, then overcoming this fate, or at least enduring it in faith and freedom, is not first a political matter, as important as it is to use whatever political means are at our disposal to delay or divert this fate and to soften the blow of its arrival. Deliverance from this fate does not depend upon the success of the American experiment, and we need to contemplate and develop forms of Christian existence that do not depend upon the restoration of the nation.
Deliverance depends, rather, on the rediscovery of the truth about God, about creation, about nature, and about ourselves that has been obscured by centuries of perpetual revolution and the diminishment of Christianity. This is not simply a matter of doctrine, or morals, or of biblical interpretation, though of course it is also all of these. It is an enormous philosophical labor to bring Christian truth, the Christian mind, and indeed the Christian imagination, rigorously to bear on every aspect of life.
We will have to look very hard to rediscover this truth in its fullness, but we do not have to look far. It is an ancient and fundamental Christian principle—and it also happens to be true—that evil and falsehood are privative, parasitic upon goodness and truth, which are the fundamental reality. So fundamental, in fact, that we do not really hypothesize about them; rather, they are always already present and at work in our apprehension of everything whatsoever. Indeed, they are affirmed even in our very attempts to deny them.
This omnipresence of the truth is why St. Augustine thought it could be discovered by looking within himself. “Abolish the good,” wrote Dionysius the Areopagite, “and you will abolish being, movement, life, desire, everything.” Thankfully, the abolition of the good in reality is beyond our power. Rediscovering it in reality is the key to rediscovering the fullness of Christianity, given to us by God, as our one chance at deliverance from a hell of our own making.
Michael Hanby is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of two books and numerous essays and, as part of the movement to renew Catholic education, has co-authored the curricula for two schools. This article is adapted from his talk given at the 2022 Touchstone conference, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on conference talk from the online archives
36.4—Jul/Aug 2023
Our Political Void & the Disintegration of Truth by Michael Hanby
more from the online archives
34.1—January/February 2021
Jesus' Astonishing Other Teaching on Marriage by James Ware
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
