Modernity: The Disease and the Cure

By Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

Western culture is a misnomer—ours is, rather, a “culture of

cultures.” One of the most distinctive and, I would say,

unprecedented features of the contemporary west is the phenomenon

of neighboring individuals living in distinct social networks,

engaging in myriad cultural practices, learning in diverse

educational institutions, and communicating in idiosyncratic

imaginative and conceptual idioms. Our “neighbors” often live

within radically divergent and virtually airtight intellectual,

moral, and spiritual universes, holding beliefs utterly

incompatible and irreconcilable with our own. One unfortunate

ideological upshot of this unique situation is a prima facie, a priori

public incredulousness regarding anyone “having the whole truth.”

It is no wonder that the Roman Catholic Church, whose founder

identified the whole truth with His very person, is tolerated in

western society only when lost in translation, as “one

denomination among others,” juxtaposed with other equally “belief

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expressions” in a multicultural boutique. Indeed, any dogmatic

belief system in its raw, untranslated form appears as a

dangerous and inhuman cult, an intolerable opponent of the

indisputable reign of “freedom” and “pluralism.”

Although I think our contemporary pluralistic situation,

which Glenn Olsen has accurately named deep pluralism, is certainly

unprecedented, I do not think it is an unprecedented evil. Of

course, the existence of a pluralism of “truths” is not a good

thing, for there is only one truth, and error is, simply, the

result of sin. Pluralism, in short, must be seen per se as a grave

defect, a spiritual, intellectual, social, and political

disorder. Pace neoconservatism, religious pluralism is not the

ideal for politics, nor the “best we can hope for this side of

paradise,” and “the most prudent accommodation to the real world.”

The Church’s perennial political ideal of the reign of Christ the

King simply does not permit such resignation to sin and

worldliness. Yet, because this otherwise tragic pluralism has

been mysteriously permitted by God, I think it could be an

occasion for, though not the cause of, what Peter Leithart has

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called “deep comedy.”1 Perhaps our pluralistic milieu can provide

Catholics and other men of good-will open to the transcendent

with a unique opportunity for unprecedented intellectual and

spiritual growth. As John Paul II wrote in 1999, “if by modernity

we mean a convergence of conditions that permit a human being to

express better his or her own maturity, spiritual, moral, and

cultural, then the Church saw itself as the ‘soul’ of

modernity.”2 Indeed, pluralism itself can be, if interpreted and

utilized correctly, a potent catalyst for the New Evangelization.

Modernity, as I shall try to show, is both the cause and the cure

of its own intellectual and spiritual disease, one that can best

be described as a descent into partial thinking.

1. Feeling the pull

To borrow from the thesis of Charles Taylor’s recently

published masterpiece A Secular Age, with the peculiar

“consciousness shift” that constitutes the essence of modernity 1 Peter Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Culture (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press), 2006.2 “General Audience Homily of November 24, 1999,” L’Osservatore Romano, 25 Sept. 1994, 5, quoted in Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 152.

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comes a heightened capacity intimately to feel the pull of other

worldviews and belief systems, especially those we might

otherwise deem unworthy of attraction. Modern secular pluralism

provides an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to

experience the “other” from the inside, that is, not just as an

abstract possibility of thought and practice, as is possible in

all ages, but intimately, as a living, breathing, concrete, coherent

(or perhaps not so coherent, as in the case of the tradition of

liberalism), historical tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre describes

this immersion in other traditions as akin to learning a second

conceptual and imaginative language, and he judged it

indispensable for the authentic understanding and practice of

one’s own tradition. Moreover, without such immersion, we lose

the capacity to recognize and correct the defects in our own

tradition, rendering us ineffective as participants in its

further development.

By encountering the partial truths in other traditions, we

are more able to recognize partial truths as partial, both within other

traditions and our own, including the partial way in which we

appropriate and understand the non-partial truths of our own

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tradition. The tradition of which we are a member may indeed be

the true tradition, providing supreme access to the whole truth,

yet it is more often than not perceived and grasped by us in a

partial, tendentious, or distorted way. Encountering the truths

in other traditions can serve to expose that false dichotomy in

our mind that leads us to interpret other views as nothing more than

full-fledged errors, and our own personal view as nothing less than the

whole truth. Our perspective, in an objective sense, might very well

be the whole truth, or quite close to it, but as finite,

fallible, sinful creatures, our subjective grasp of it is

inevitably partial.

Our modern, secular, godless culture, of course, due to its

propensity for narcissism3, can cause a loss of the capacity to

feel the pull of those parts of the truth one requires to attain

wholeness. The modern tendency to liquidate the other, to use a phrase

of Josef Pieper’s, is far from being a sign of loyalty and

devotion to the truth. Rather, it indicates a totalitarian

solipsism of the self, an intellectual narcissism or self-3 See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Revised edition, 1991) and The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 1984).Also, Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985).

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inflicted, epistemological violence that translates all one’s

experience of the other into the same. When this occurs, any part

of the truth genuinely recognized and possessed loses its healing

properties as truth, becoming deadly. Instead of a part of truth,

it functions now as a full-fledged error, and one becomes blind

to precisely those other parts of the truth that could render him

whole again. In other words, truth, when embraced partially but

interpreted holistically, becomes error, becomes a lie. However, if

the diseased mind could learn to see the parts as parts, and not

simply hateful errors to condemn and fear, and from which to

escape at all costs, he could recognize the prison into which his

soul has fallen. As Plato’s cave suggests, liberation from our

intellectual and spiritual prisons can only occur through the

dawning upon our intellects of the light of the whole, the Good,

who is both that by which all knowledge occurs and the knowable

par excellence. And for our non-angelic, discursive, and fallen

intellects, this can only occur through a persistent and often

excruciating dialectical comparison of whole and part, a dynamic

exemplified by Plato in his dialogues and brought to near

perfection by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae. It is a kind of

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ongoing intellectual crucifixion. Might modernity, for all its

tragic evils, serve as our Calvary that can bring about a deeply

comedic intellectual and spiritual resurrection?

None of this is meant to suggest that there are not full-

fledged, pernicious errors and evils in the modern world, as

distinct from merely partial truths—indeed, there more and worse

ones than ever before, as is clear. Nor am I suggesting that

Catholicism is not the whole truth, objectively speaking. But,

again, often what we perceive to be absolute error is only a

partial truth distorted into error by its being removed from the

whole; and often what we perceive to be the whole truth is only

an exaggeration of a partial truth. Finally, the partial truths

we tend to reject as unworthy of our consideration are often

precisely those we need to embrace for the completion and

correction of our thinking. In short, strategic and prudent,

intellectual immersions in our pluralistic milieu, always

preceded and followed, of course, by extensive and intensive

periods of nursing at the bosom of the Holy Mother Church, is, I

think, a necessary regimen to enable us to recognize the

partialness of our own and others’ appropriation of the truth, to

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transcend whatever in modernity that holds us back from union

with God, and effectively to help end the reign of relativistic

pluralism and bring about a new Christendom.

As Catholics, we do, of course, have the whole truth, so why

risk plunging ourselves into pluralism, one might demur, why play

around with alien traditions that we know to be fundamentally

false? We must recognize that the Church alone sees and possesses

the whole truth (at least implicitly and latently; the expression

and recognition of the whole truth by the Magisterium is time-bound

and discursive, being historically mediated and occasioned as

Cardinal Newman has taught us). We the Church’s members, however,

are always, subjectively speaking, approaching this whole truth;

but—and this is the peculiar evil of modernity and pluralism—what

we think to be the whole truth is often only our own partial

appropriation of it, and, even worse, a part pretending to be the whole.

This is the spiritual disease of modernity, and Catholicism is,

as always, the cure of all spiritual maladies. But the occasion

for the remedy is to be found in modernity itself. Catholics in a

pluralistic society are uniquely gifted to accomplish the “whole

and part” dialectical exercise we have described, for we possess

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both the whole, by grace through the Church, and the part,

through the charity and humility that prompts us to open and

humble dialectical encounters with our neighbors’ and our own

partial truth fragments. Fragmentary, partial knowledge,

unrecognized as fragmentary and partial and substituting for

comprehensive holistic knowledge, is the intellectual condition

of our fallen nature, and the besetting bane of modernity; but

with the intrinsic help of grace, the extrinsic help of the

Magisterium, and our cooperation through courageous philosophical

analysis and dialogue coupled with contemplation, we can ascend,

at least partially, to the whole which awaits us personally in

the Beatific Vision.

I would like to offer three examples of the modern disease

of partial thinking: the fall of Lucifer, the sin of Adam and

Eve, and the Pharisees’ rejection of Christ. And I shall try to

illustrate the way in which a partial yet subjectively

significant truth, when eclipsing a truth of momentous and

fundamental import, becomes a full-fledged error, that is, how

comparably equal, complementary partial truths, when pitted against each

other as contraries, become illusory, self-sufficient whole-

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truths. When this occurs, even the partial truths are lost, and a

totalitarianism of the psyche ensues. The only cure for this is a

radical, vulnerable openness to the other, a Socratic spirit of

questioning and wonder.

2. Lucifer’s “truth”

Did “partial thinking” cause Lucifer to fall from heaven? Of

course, an angel, an intuitive, non-discursive intellectual being

never can, in a literal sense, grasp truth partially; yet, there

seems to be something analogous to partial thinking in the

angelic intellect. What “thoughts” could Lucifer have been

“thinking” to cause the complete downfall of his will? As St.

Thomas teaches us in his “Treatise on the Angels,” and as Lucifer

knew all too well, an angel receives knowledge of the

supernatural order through the mediation of angelic intellects

higher than itself. Thus, an angel in the choir of powers could

not receive knowledge of God’s plan for the salvation of man

through the intellect of an angel in the choir of, say, the

archangels, but from principalities, cherubim, seraphim, etc. Lucifer also

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knew that spirit is superior to matter, and God’s plan, as it

might be supposed, was to reveal and effect the salvation of men

through the lowly intellect of a human being, uniting spirit and

matter, nay, divinity and matter. “Now, since the purpose of

creation is to give glory to the most superior being, and since I

am the second highest being,” Lucifer might have considered,

“then how could God be justified in uniting divinity with

anything less than my angelic nature? Could it be that a human

woman could possibly take my place!? Moreover, am I absolutely

certain that this being calling himself ‘God’ actually is what he

claims to be? After all, I did not actually witness my own

‘creation.’”

Such critical analysis of and a priori skepticism towards

supernatural matters is not outlandish or malicious in itself,

especially for a brilliant intellect such as Lucifer’s, for as

Pope Benedict XVI has made especially clear in the Regensburg

Address, it is incumbent on man to bring all truth claims to the

bar of reason, even claims supposed to be from God Himself. Truth

can never contradict itself. However, for an unfallen angel,

things are not so simple. For Lucifer to have “reasoned” this way

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(whatever that would mean for a non-discursive intellect!) is

unspeakably malicious and perverse. And this is not because his

logic may have been flawed—angelic logic is always valid—but

because to doubt God in an unfallen state, no matter the pretext, is

to have entered deliberately into an abyss of unreality. Before

the existence of evil and error in the world, what reason could

there have been not to submit to the plan of God the instant it

was revealed? The very hesitation to submit, metaphorically

speaking, is tantamount to the creation of evil and error, the

origin of hell. Prudent deliberation and speculation about the

proper course of action to take in any given situation is, for us

fallen men, an indispensable means to virtue. However for an

unfallen angel, any “hesitation” or “doubt” regarding the will of

God would constitute the gravest of vices, a violent ripping of

one’s being away from the loving bosom of reality, the rejection

of the whole for the nothingness of the isolated part.

It is true that once we humans begin to think about the mere

possibility of not submitting to God’s plan, the reasons

justifying such a possibility begin to seem quite reasonable.

Perhaps this is the “partial truth” that Lucifer embraced, so to

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speak, but the price paid for it was the loss of the

overwhelmingly more fundamental truth of the perfect goodness and

infinite reasonableness of God. The origin of such “angelic

questioning,” however subtle, forceful, and coherent it may have

seemed, is not intellectual error, but willful malice, the sin of

disbelief, which, as Josef Pieper maintains, is the rejection of

God’s revelation with full knowledge of it as the revelation of God.4 It was,

for Lucifer, the rejection of the truth of the identity of God

and Love. Such disbelief, by the highest and thus most loving—at

least potentially—of God’s creatures, would be an unthinkable act

if it were not revealed to us by the Church.

3. The fall into fragmentation

Adam and Eve had not yet obtained the fullness of human

happiness or perfection in their short sojourn in paradise; for,

like us, only in heaven would their lives be brought to complete

fullness. All creatures, from the most humble to the most

exalted, were to constitute their ladder to this eventual

4 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), Ch. 1.

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fullness, both through contemplation—the stars, the order of

nature, each other— and by consumption—the bountiful and

unimaginably delicious fruits and vegetables provided by the Lord

God for their sustenance and delight. Yet, they were not

permitted to consume or even contemplate every creature; the only

other rational being they knew, the one who called himself God,

willed it so. It was the first “doctrine of conditional joy,”

which Chesterton discusses in his wonderful essay “The Ethics of

Elfland.”

However, they had, unfortunately, met another rational being

who had suggested to them that by not consuming every fruit, they

would be depriving themselves of the fullness of reality: if some

of the creatures would bring them some fulfillment, then all of the

creatures would be required to bring them all fulfillment. Nothing

could possibly justify, Satan suggested, their missing out on the

very purpose for which they were created. God’s proscription,

then, must be interpreted as a prescription, else God becomes a

miser. Moreover, precisely the fruit “forbidden” to them was

necessary for their fulfillment, for it alone could complete

their knowledge of reality, which included, by God’s own

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description, good and evil. The fulfillment of souls made to be

capax omnium requires complete, not partial, knowledge. Finally, they

perceived this fruit both immediately and upon reflection as

good, and, since error did not yet exist in their minds, it would

be sinful not to bring this fruit to the perfection for which it

was made by being consumed.

Admittedly, one can see in these arguments some

justification for at least hesitation on the part of Adam and Eve

when confronted with the command not to eat the forbidden fruit.

The essential problem with these arguments, however, is not the

content or structure of the arguments themselves, some absurdity,

incoherence, or implausibility. It is, I think, their partialness.

They are sound and valid arguments as far as they go, but only if

taken completely out of the existential and ontological context

to which they owe their very intelligibility. This is God who has

given this command, after all, and Adam and Eve are His

creatures, brought into being out of the slime. In that context,

whatever partial-truths in their argument become lies. By the

mere consideration of these partial truths taken out of the whole

truth, Adam and Eve had already lost God, the source of all

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truth. How else to explain how it could possibly have seemed

reasonable to them to disobey God in order to obey Him, to

perfect themselves by severing themselves from the only possible

source of perfection!

As the whole truth began to fragment before their eyes, to

disobey God was at first only a hint of a possibility, then it

became a valid consideration, and finally a categorical

imperative. Like Lucifer’s disbelief in the identity of God and

love, Adam and Eve, albeit through an external temptation, but

still by an autonomous act of their own free will, lost their

trust in Him. Immediately, their integral perception of the truth

was shattered, and the whole in whose light the fragments of

truth could be seen precisely as fragments and thus as unworthy

of isolated consideration was lost to them. And through them it

was lost to us, until the time of the descent of the Whole into

His now fractured world.

4. Saul: Judaism vs. the Logos

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The final and perhaps most illustrative example of how

fundamental error can arise through the holistic embrace of

partial truth is the Pharisees’ rejection of Christ,

particularly, that Pharisee named Saul. In his remarkable Jesus of

Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI has brought out the plausibility and

power of the Pharisees’ indictment against Christ.5 In the

discussion of Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s book, A Rabbi Talks to Jesus, the

Holy Father explains why, for a Pharisee, the threat Jesus posed

to Judaism was far more dangerous than any that came before.

Throughout the history of Judaism, there were always formidable

foes to its survival and God-pleasingness: subversive teachers,

heretics, fanatics, traitors, worldlings, indifferentists,

blasphemers. But never before did one man embody the very

antithesis of the Judaic belief in the utter transcendence and

holiness of God. Jesus, by his claim to be the definitive and

full embodiment of God, the Chosen Person, threatened to destroy

the Jewish people’s claim to be the Chosen People. By his defiant

abrogation of the most sacred of Jewish laws, he was poised to

5 Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 103-127.

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dismantle the cornerstone which underlay the entire edifice of

Jewish culture, tradition, society, and life—the Sabbath.

The Pope pulls no punches in his defense of Neusner’s

argument—it is powerful, and Benedict depicts it as such, with the

utmost respect and sympathy. Saul was only acting upon the force

of the argument’s truth when he persecuted the infant Church, for

the Nazarene’s power to destroy the Chosen People of God through

his followers’ fanaticism required a violent and ruthless

extermination, as violent and ruthless—and even more so—as, say,

Joshua’s, Gideon’s, or David’s extermination of the much lesser

threats of the Jerichoites, Madianites, and Philistines. However,

just as the trenchant and seemingly ironclad arguments of Lucifer

and Adam and Eve splintered into fragments when applied to the

infinite solidity of God’s holiness, so did the Pharisees’. As

Benedict argues, from the Pharisees’ perspective the desire to

destroy Jesus and persecute His followers was the epitome of

loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to God—if Jesus was only a

human being. If he were God, however, then these virtues would

become vices, indeed, the epitome of sacrilege and blasphemy.

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Saul was, then, a self-condemned prisoner to partial

thinking. Nothing but an unforeseen, undesired, violent encounter

with who, to his diseased spirit, was the other, a Jewish man

claiming to be God, would liberate him. If Saul had been allowed

by Christ to remain in the isolated, blinded world of the

“Jewishdom” of his day (the way in which some traditional

Catholics would like to remain within the isolating and

alienating “Christendoms” of their neuroses, fears, and gnostic

certainties)6, his blindness would never have been revealed to

him, and he would never have become St. Paul, the apostle to the

Jewish other. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his partial

thinking, which was indicative not of authentic Mosaic Judaism,

but of Talmudic, anti-logos fanaticism. Such violent divine

intervention (in the manner of a Flannery O’Connor story) had to

occur, for Saul’s was a particularly virulent case of partial

thinking. We Catholics, however, have the unique chance to invite

Christ freely into our minds and hearts, by inviting the salvific

“others” that we would rather not meet into intimacy. I would

6 See my article “The Gnostic Traditionalist,” New Oxford Review (June, 2007).

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argue that such are providentially “forced” upon us by Our Lord

in our modern pluralistic world, as our neighbors.

5. Terminal Modernity?

In a remarkable passage, Alasdair MacIntyre zeros in on the

essence of modernity’s peculiar disease:

We have within our social order few if any social milieus

within which reflective and critical enquiry concerning the

central issues of human life can be sustained . . . .This

tends to be a culture of answers, not of questions, and

those answers, whether secular or religious, liberal or

conservative, are generally delivered as though meant to put

an end to questioning.7

What MacIntyre is saying, I think, is that the culture of

modernity is a culture without wonder, and, since without wonder

there is no awe, as Plato taught us, modern culture serves to

7 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy Recalled to its Tasks,” in The Tasks of Philosophy:Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 182.

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preclude the experience of God. What is the antidote to this?

MacIntyre once said that we need a new St. Benedict, but I wonder

if we couldn’t add Socrates to the list. Dietrich von Hildebrand

describes the Socratic, questioning, wondering spirit as

the inner willingness which is not closed against even the

most unpleasant truth, which is really free from bias, ready

to make friends with things, open to the proof of all

objective existence, not looking at things through a colored

lens that allows only such things to pass into the

understanding as do not offend our pride and self-

complacency.8

The existence of even one person with a genuine spirit of erotic,

Socratic questioning, a soul with true “metaphysical courage,”

is, I think, the most effective antidote to the suffocating,

anti-questioning, partial-truth culture we live in, in both its

“traditionalist” and “modernist” varieties. Those who believe

8 Dietrich Von Hildebrand, "Catholicism and Unprejudiced Knowledge,” in The NewTower of Babel: Modern Man’s Flight from God (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1994), 141.

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themselves to have obtained the answers without having first

endured the existential agony of searching in the darkness,

whether because one has judged that there are no answers, or

because they are believed to be already quite securely possessed,

in dogmatic certitude, need to recognize in such an attitude

neither a humble disposition of ignorance nor a pious submission

to God’s word, but a type of idolatry, the idolatry of partial-

thinking. Paul Evdokimov, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, writes:

The outdated religious person and the modern sophisticated

irreligious individual meet back to back in an immanence

imprisoned within itself . . . . The denial of God has thus

permitted the affirmation of man. Once this affirmation is

effected, there is no longer anything to be denied or

subordinated. . . On this level total man will not be able

to ask any questions concerning his own reality, just as God

does not put a question to himself.9

9 Paul Evdokimov, Ages of the Spiritual Life (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 17, 27.

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Perhaps what secular modernity provides us with is a greater

existential awareness of the primacy of questioning, as well as the

heightened urgency for discovering and asking the right questions

so as to avoid falling into the trap of partial thinking. If so,

what secular modernity is, in essence, is a second—and perhaps

final?—Axial Age. This time around, however, we are all called to

be Socrates, with others, and more urgently, with ourselves.

What really is important in life is not so much to provide

answers, as to discern true questions. When true questions

are found, they themselves open the heart to the mystery.

Origen used to say: "Every true question is like the lance

which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to

flow forth.”10

10 Archbishop Bruno Forte, “Religion and Freedom: Searching For the InfinitelyLoving Father-Mother," a lecture given at a meeting of the bishops of England and Wales, Nov. 12, 2007, accessed on May 2, 2008, available at: http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=5262.

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