Philosophical Grounds

National Review, Oct 7, 1991 by Robert Royal

In Philosophical Grounds, Molnar outlines some of the foundational concepts of all human thought, showing how they are transmuted--while persisting--across human history. These "grounds" are not merely idle speculations, says Molnar because our responses to such issues have immediate and large-scale consequences. For example, a Buddhist who regards the entire world as illusion and seeks liberation in an empty transcendence will not be much concerned for individual and social liberties in this world. Similarly, a materialist who denies free will in favor of a chain of mechanical causes will not be able to account for many components of human life. Even to conceive of this world as real and good and shapable by our wills requires some notion like the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of creation.

One reason the modern West is so disoriented is precisely its loss of a vital equilibrium between the transcendent and the immanent, says Molnar. Healthy societies, in this view, posit a kind of heavenly original reflected in an earthly replica. Communities then recognize themselves as subordinate to and linked with a sacred realm. When the sacred pole is suppressed, however, "The laws are felt to be arbitrary, the citizen's loyalty becomes brittle, mere subjective ambitioons and individual interests prevail." Modern communities are thus founded on contract, says Molnar, which means mere will.

Multiculturalists are forever telling us that we have much to learn from other civilizations. In a sense, this is true. But, as Molnar points out, what we will mostly learn from them is that they do not believe in human history as it is understood in the west. For most cultures, time is cyclic. Individual acts count for little. Events cannot have the rich contingency and unrepeatable significance that they have in a culture informed by Biblical ideas of unidimensional time. Classical Western "modes of thought" are not limitations, but rather liberations from fixed archaic patterns.

Much of the above was lost sight of in the West'soveremphasis on material progress in the last few centuries. In fact, says Molnar, "history" was transmuted into "progress," a secular substitute for the sacred story. This ideology assumed that each age is by definition superior to previous ones. In science, this is generally true, but human life is not merely science, and the disasters of the twentieth century have cast doubt on the unholy alliance between technologies and utopias in the modern world.

A major consequence of the widespread suppression of the transcendent model and its historical replica has been the emergence of what Molnar calls "Nocturnal Man." In Kafka, Rimbanud, Poe, Nietzsche, Camus, Beckett, Borges, and others the human ego, isolated in an alien world, seeks something that modern rationalism does not allow to exist. Hence the prliferation of self-referential theories of language, empty concepts of "play," and groundless literary fantasy. Molnar sees these as last gasps of a strick secularity that eventually must jump the divide back to the sacred again.

For Molnar, the fullest expression of the combined transcendent, immanent, and historical has been the Roman Catholic Church. In the past, the Church has been the institution most resistant to the acids of modernity. Recently, however, that has changed. Many observers have catalogued the disorder of the Church since the second Vatican Council, and Molnar joins them in pointing out several misplaced hopes.

Molnar criticizes Left and right in the modern Church, both of which he sees as deviations from sacralized conceptions of society. Liberation theologians are dismissed along with other socialists, but so are Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak. Somewhat inaccurately, Molnar thinks Neuhaus judges the current church as strong enough to take advantage of the "Catholic Moment." Novak promotes contractual models of society that Molnar deplores. In any case, he views the various wings in the Church as accommodations to modernity in the form either of civil society or of socialism: "To many of our contemporaries this seemed a reasonable objective, just as it seemed reasonable a few hundred years ago to loyal partisans of kings and emperors that the Church should espouse the monarch's cause."

The most speculative part of Molnar's analysis lies here, in his view of how the modern Church, state, and civil society relate. The Church, he says, is always dealing with two problems: how to preserve doctrinal purity and evangelize the world, and how to forge tentative worldly alliances to further her main mission.

Church and state in pre-modern times were both allies and competitors, but at least they shared a vision of the common good and the need for supervision of public affairs. By contrast, civil society--"a definitely harsher master than the state," writes Molnar--has come to dominate modern democratic systems, marginalizing both the secular arm and the religious, except as they fit into the established program of secularization.