Adrian Pabst (right) speaking at IDC on 29 March 2010

After Value: Religion, Faith and Spirituality in a Post-Secular World

by

Adrian Pabst

I. From Virtue to Value

In his book After Virtue which was first published in 1981, the British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre shows how modernity marks the exit from the tradition of virtue ethics and the passage to a conception of morality centred on values.[1] This inaugurated a long process whereby universal ancient and Christian virtues instantiated in particular practices were abandoned in favour of modern values which tended to be general, abstract and disembodied.

For example, civic and political virtues such as courage and justice are framed by the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and they are also linked to transformative action aimed at ordering the city or polis according to the principle of the supernatural Good in God. By contrast, the dominant modern understanding of values such as freedom and equality is divorced from any notion of transcendent goodness that governs all things. Instead, modern conceptions consider values to be based almost exclusively on reason and sentimentality.

In large part, this is why modernity was characterized by the bizarre co-existence – and also the complicit collusion – of rationalism and emotivism. Rationalism diminishes reason by cutting off the intellect from the cognitive import of faith. Emotivism impoverishes human nature by reducing moral judgements to expressions of individual preference, attitudes or feelings. Since emotivism claims that any attempt to provide a rational justification for an objective morality is bound to fail, these two conceptions seemed to be diametrically opposed to each other.

However, both theories share more in common than is at first apparent. Consider the following two fundamental presuppositions: first, emotivism and rationalism view universal ethical principles as expressions of the preferences of the individual will which is the ultimate source of moral authority; second, they view the Good either as being restricted to the transcendental sphere of the supernatural or as a non-natural property which can be intuited but not be reasoned about. As such, the Good itself is erased from nature and subordinated to human volition and equated with personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments. In this sense, rationalism and emotivism can be said to collude at the expense of virtue ethics and the overarching vision that the supernatural Good in the Creator God endows all created things with goodness.

In consequence, modern morality has bequeathed a series of dualisms that continue to pervade the dominant structures of thought and practice and extend to political and popular culture: pure nature and the supernatural; faith and reason; grace and nature; transcendence and immanence; finitude and infinity; the temporal and the eternal; the universal and the particular; the intelligible and the sensible; the substantial and the accidental; the cosmic and the psychic; the first cause and secondary effects; the collective and the individual; the material and the spiritual. As such, to call for purely spiritual values is to reinforce and perpetuate the fundamental chasm at the heart of modern morality.

Moreover, the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour – in his book We Have Never Been Modern – refutes the idea that there was an absolute, irreversible break in history that gave rise to a coherent system of ideas and institutions which we commonly call ‘modernity’.[2] Instead, Latour identifies an irreducible aporia between human artifice and unalterable nature at the heart of modern thought and modern practice. As a result, modern morality is inherently unstable and collapsing under the weight of its own inner contradictions. It is this logic that governs the dominant modern ideologies, in particular liberalism which underpins virtually all the variants of conservatism and socialism.

As I have argued elsewhere, modern secular liberalism is a false universalism which is political absolutist and culturally relativist. It denies universal objective moral truths, flattens organic cultures and eliminates the hierarchy of virtues by subordinating the sanctity of life and land to the quasi-sacrality of the modern biopolitics of power.[3] Sterile appeals to 'spiritual values' alone will not break the secular hegemony of the modern liberal creed.

II. Beyond Secularism

Conceptually and empirically, modern secularism has conspicuously failed. Conceptually, secularism claims to protect the state and the public sphere from the divisiveness and violence religion by promoting universal neutral values. But in reality, the ideology of secularism has subjected all institutions and practices to the sole authority of the centralized bureaucratic state which polices the sacred boundaries of the private sphere and civil society which are increasingly dominated by the anarchic logic of the unbridled free market. Common to the social contract upheld by the state and the freedom of trade and association guaranteed by the market is the idea that human, social and natural life can be subject to the abstract, formal standards of positivistic law and the commodification of commercial exchange.

Moreover, secularism claims a monopoly on values like individual freedom, the separation of powers and the rule of law. However, these and other quintessentially ‘liberal’ principles were neither invented nor perfected by the secular liberal tradition. Much rather, liberalism co-opted “those values of liberality (fair trial, right to a defence, assumed innocence, habeas corpus, a measure of free speech and free enquiry, good treatment of the convicted)”, as the theologian John Milbank has rightly argued.[4] Moreover, ideals such as freedom and justice derive from the Christian synthesis of ancient and biblical virtues and the transformation of Roman and Germanic law in accordance with the Christian notion of charity. The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it inverts the Christian hierarchy of primary and secondary values by privileging individual freedom of choice over communal justice. In so doing, it grants the central state and also the free market supreme authority and power, as I have already indicated.

Moreover, the conception of religion as a psychological or social phenomenon is part of distinctly modern theories which view religious ideas and rituals through a secular prism. But from the point of view of traditions in different world faiths, religion signifies a community of believers who practice their faith within a communal body such as the synagogue, the temple, the church or the mosque – rather than a set of abstract doctrines, beliefs or world-views held by individuals on account of psychological inclinations or social needs. As such, many forms of religion are far more mediated and more holistic than proponents of "secularization" and "de-secularization" commonly suppose.

Empirically, secularism claims that the rise of modernity would be synonymous with the decline of religion and the spread of secular values freed from the constricting shackles of God, the Church and faith. But in reality, the "secularization" of philosophy and political theory since the Enlightenment critique of theism was not matched by a concomitant "secularization" of politics and culture at the national and the international level. Except perhaps for post-revolutionary France and some other parts of continental Europe, different religions continued to exert their transnational sway across the globe throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Arguably the twentieth century, which saw a clash of secular ideologies with unprecedented levels of violence, is an exception to the enduring presence of religion in politics and as such represents the ‘first and last truly modern, secular century’. If this is true, then the contemporary global resurgence of religion can be seen as the return to a more ‘normal’ presence of religious ideas in national and international politics. For these and other reasons, the twenty-first century might turn out to be post-secular. In short, the idea that secularism has not been an important modern reality is just as misguided as the idea that religion ever went away, or that it cannot return to public political and cultural significance.

III. The Enduring Importance of Theological Virtues and Civic Practices

The religious language of spiritual values provides an important counterweight to the secular discourse on individual human rights and the sole sovereignty of the market-state. However, to present spiritual values as an effective antidote to secular materialism is to accept and embrace the secular terms of modern moral debates. For these and other reasons, the more radical move is to view materialism and spiritualism as mirror images of each other and to restore the integral reality of religion and faith as an alternative to the secular worship of material life and the bizarre fetishization of spiritual otherworldliness. Specifically, the task is to retrieve and extend the catholic orthodox vision of theological virtues and civic practices.

By placing love, hope and faith at the heart of the ‘moral economy’, Christianity avoids the irreducible modern dualisms that dominate contemporary culture, politics and the economy. The hypostatic union of the human and divine in Jesus Christ alerts us to the divine intention and promise of a restoration of the created order in and through an ever-closer union with God. Knowledge of God’s providence is neither confined to faith in scriptural revelation nor a reliance on natural reason alone. By contrast with the modern separation of reason and faith, catholic orthodox Christianity has always viewed reason itself as a gift of God which is elevated by revelation and faith. As Pope Benedict suggested in the Regensburg address, faith habituates reason to see the effects of God in all things, just as reasoning helps faith seeking understanding by relating the natural desire for the supernatural Good in God to the whole of creation which reflects the Creator in diverse ways that no finite mind can ever be equal to.

Far from reactionary nostalgia, his intervention seeks to recover and extend the shared Judaic and Hellenic emphasis on the rational intelligibility of the divinely created cosmos. This ancient legacy was accomplished by the Biblical revelation that God is the incarnate Logos and that faith intensifies reason through universal divine grace and love – a revelation mediated in and through the complex interplay of the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, as both patristic and medieval theologians argued.[5] As such, the theological virtue of faith upholds the universal faculty of reason and broadens its scope. At the same time, reason binds faith to cognition and thereby ties together perception and imagination (or ‘lower reason’) with intellectual vision (or ‘higher reason’). Knowledge of the world (scientia) and knowledge of God (sapientia) converge and prepare man for the beatific vision in the life to come, so that ‘we evermore dwell in him and he in us’ (1 John 4:12–13) – ‘for of him, and by him, and in him, are all things’ (Rom 11:36). To love in truth is to encounter the relational Good that comes from God and infuses all things with divine goodness – the self-diffusive Good (bonum diffusivum sui) in both Greek and Latin theology, from St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine via John Chrysostom and Boethius to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Gregory Palamas.

By arguing that divine goodness positions all things relationally because that is how God’s love and wisdom govern his creation, these and other Fathers and Doctors of the Church showed how the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ reveals and perfects the true ordering of God’s creative work. For this reason, Christian theologians link charity to truth and justice to the common good in which all can participate. And in the long Christian tradition of personalism, we can argue that the genuine development of each person and all humanity involves the mirroring of the Trinitarian relationality in personal, social, economic and political relations in this world. If education is something like reasoning about revelation, then it must also be concerned with the transmission and exploration of the truth revealed in Christ and handed down by the Church.

What this means for Christians is to defend and promote relationships of reciprocal self-giving in love, such that every creature can perfect their unique God-given form in community with others and in communion with the Creator. We can participate in divine goodness precisely because the highest Good in God creates us as relational beings who flourish in stable, loving relations. As such, Christianity is more radical than the liberal left and more traditional than the conservative right. In line with this vision, we can also insist that a truly Christian anthropology and politics outflanks both secular extremism and religious fundamentalism by linking the defence of the absolute sanctity of life to the pursuit of peace and justice.

This brings us to civil virtues. By calling for an economic system that is re-embedded in civil society and sustains both human and natural life, Christians in east and west argue for a new ethical compact and a civic economy that transcend the old secular dichotomies of state vs. market and left vs. right. Christians stress that knowledge and education centred on the supernatural Good in God are more fundamental principles than the democratic will of the majority or the outcome of capitalist ‘free market’ competition, as I have already indicated.

Concretely, what is required is a new kind of settlement whereby both the centralized bureaucratic state and the unfettered global free-market are transformed in order to serve the genuine needs and interests of persons, communities and the environment. To achieve this, state and market must be re-embedded within a wider network of social relations and governed by virtues and universal ethical principles and civic virtues like justice, solidarity, fraternity and responsibility.

For example, the Christian model of a civil economy encourages the creation of enterprises that operate on the basis of mutualist principles like cooperatives or employee-owned businesses.[6] These businesses pursue not just private profit but also social ends by reinvesting their profit in the company and in the community instead of simply enriching the top management or institutional shareholders. This model also supports professional associations and other intermediary institutions wherein workers and owners can jointly determine just wages and fair prices. Against the free-market concentration of wealth and state-controlled redistribution of income, the idea of civil economy proposes a more radical programme: labour receives assets (in the form of stake-holdings) and hires capital (not vice-versa), while capital itself comes in part from worker- and community-supported credit unions rather than exclusively from shareholder-driven retail banks. Contemporary examples includes, first of all, the Basque cooperative Mondragon which employs over 100,000 workers who produce manufactured goods, with an annual turnover of around $3 billion; secondly, Crédit Mutuel, a mutualised bank which operates in several EU countries; thirdly, the employee-owned partnership of John Lewis in the UK.

Moreover, the Christian idea of a civil economy urges us to view profit and technological innovation no longer as ends in themselves but as means to secure the stability of businesses, their employees and the communities hosting them. Like the ‘market-state’, money and science must be re-embedded within social relations and support rather than destroy mankind’s organic ties with nature. For example, the world economy needs to switch from short-term financial speculation to long-term investment in the real economy, social development and environmental sustainability.

Taken together, these and others ideas developed in the encyclical go beyond piecemeal reform and amount to a wholesale transformation of the secular logic underpinning the ‘market-state’. Alongside private contracts and public provisions, a properly civil economy introduces the logic of gift-giving and gift-exchange into the economic process. The key argument is that market exchange of goods and services cannot properly work without the free, gratuitous gift of mutual trust and reciprocity so badly undermined by the global credit crunch. That’s why Pope Benedict XVI writes in his recent encyclical letter "Caritas in veritate" that “the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (section 36).