The differences between Christian theology and the philosophical foundations of the modern world cannot be starker. With Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian Christianity asserted that human beings are real beings with a substance or nature and that nature has a purpose or end built into it. This teleological universe, and we as part of it, is intelligible and intrinsically ordered. There were some in theology who adhered to a nominalist understanding of the universe and who questioned the Thomistic tradition. Prime examples are William of Ockham and later some in the Protestant tradition who sought to vindicate divine sovereignty and freedom. All order in the universe, they held, is extrinsic from the rambling chaos of matter. God imposes a given order but could have imposed another. God willed a given order but that order is extrinsic, only found in Him. His will overcomes reason. Such nominalism was introduced into politics by way of an extreme adherence to human freedom. Just as God was free to impose an order into chaos, individuals are free to impose an order into society and into their own lives. If will overcomes reason, freedom in political life should reign, they surmised.
Now, as Professor Mathew Berry tells us, “political nominalism provides a stronger foundation for brutal imperialism and fascism than it does for good government.” The reason is that only Aristotelian Christianity can tell us what freedom in the political order is for, because the teleological nature of social reality constrains the impulse to freely determine it from the outside. As Berry tells us, if we cannot say what freedom is for, we can only curtail it when it infringes the rights of others—the famous harm principle. (Mathew Berry, “Nominalism, Nihilism, and Modern Politics” Public Discourse, June 23, 2021.)
If the order in the universe is imposed and the order in civil society is also imposed and ruled by freedom and will, not by reason, any talk of human rights is not intelligible. Modernity just needs to deny any specifics of a divine command and impose their own, but these are all imposed commands, not natural realities discovered. From a divine command imposed to a human secular command imposed there is but a short leap. Moreover, the rationale for respecting your freedom disappears. We become what Sartre called us, beasts to the other. Or, as his lover Simone de Beauvoir said, over the brute fact of silent and unintelligible matter, “social law” reigns.
From absolute divine power to impose His “universal law” over nature to the power of the ruler to impose his will over society there is a leap but in the same horizon. As Cardinal Ratzinger puts it, obsession with freedom leads to the tyranny of the stronger. What is decadence or malice if all is social law imposed through the triumph of the will? This triumph slipped—slightly at first—upon the slopes of nominalist denials of the Aristotelian doctrine of essence. It is no mystery that modern philosophy and modern political theory began to distrust the doctrine of essence when given the idea that they had the power of reshaping humanity, society, and reality itself within the grasp of their desires and will moved forward through power.
Why not rearrange the furniture of existence if we can? If freedom is the ability to act according to what our passions demand, why not do it? Why remain entrapped within discussions of what is the ultimate end of things when the ultimate end is our freedom? If we are, as Beauvoir told us, “freedoms”?
