The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

I have recently been reflecting on the overwhelming role that lies play in the contemporary world and contemporary discourse.

When I say this, I do not primarily mean "lies" in a polemical sense, referring to ideas I do not like--though I will, I confess, engage in a great deal of polemics in this essay, in a manner sure to offend nearly everyone. I mean, rather, things that are acknowledged by all, including their creators, to be lies; and, in fact, to a great degree, are valued because they are lies.

In itself, this is not a new phenomenon, but a very basic intellectual and spiritual problem as old as the human race. Lies originate with the human intellect and will; and are therefore often more natively comfortable and congenial to it than truth. Lies provide the illusion of what we want; especially when what we want is merely control, power, freedom, which is to say, escape from the reality and goodness of things and the power they have over us through desire and fear. In its most benign form, this impulse merely leads to fiction; but much more malign forms have been a feature of human culture almost from the beginning. There is a reason why the Scriptures speak of the devil as the "father of lies," and define sin as "loving and making lies." Properly understood, to prefer a lie because it is a lie is only a cogent and philosophical name for Hell. 

Still, there can be little question that, in the year 2025, our cultural fixation with lies has accelerated to a point rarely, if ever, seen before in human civilization. Assorted smart people have, since the year 2016, been talking about our entrance into an allegedly "post-truth" era. In reality, we have been there for a while now, though there is no doubt that the Internet and smart phone proliferation have accelerated the process.

We are a people whose most basic activity, taking up more and more and ever more of our lives, consists in sitting alone and passively absorbing video and text and audio, nearly all of which is false in one sense or another, and nearly all of which we know is false. The characteristic forms of this modern fixation with lies are, as I have said many times before, advertising and pornography, the two (united) pillars of our culture--both of which are valued precisely because they take us into realms where truth simply has no meaning. The supposed "AI revolution" takes this cultural fixation so far that it may actually have permanently broken it, flooding the Internet with lies that are so obvious, so incoherent, and so unattractive that they threaten to undo the system altogether. 

I have more and more begun to suspect, however, that a certain preference for lies over truth is more or less a characteristic feature of modernity as such, going back to its origins. And I think I have perhaps come to understand some of the actual reasons for this preference: the Big Lie, so to speak, behind the lies.

I have put the above in terms of a preference for lies qua lies; and I think this is the most correct and philosophical way to put it. However, what I have called "lies" are a genus that has in the past five hundred years generally gone by other names; and put in its originating philosophical and religious and historical contexts, have very different connotations. To understand the preference, one must understand the context behind it; or, in other words, the Big Lie behind the lies. 

So here is the Big Lie, divided up into its essential nature, is variable embodiments, and various ways to understand and deal with it.

Column 1/09/2023: Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Cur Deus homo? 

"Why is God a man?"

So asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, long ago; and so many us are hopefully compelled to ask, for the first or the hundredth or the thousandth time, by the Christmas season. Or perhaps not; perhaps, after a dozen or two or three or five or seven dozen Christmases, perhaps we simply take the angels and the Mother and Child and Wise Men and Shepherds all as givens. Perhaps we have never questioned them at all. Perhaps all our knowledge of Christmas comes from Hallmark Christmas movies. Perhaps we always thought that Christmas was a fictional holiday invented for Jim Carry's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Why is God a man? Why is God a human being? Why is God a child, an infant, held in the arms of his mother, watched over by a stepfather, surrounded by animals and poor shepherds and exotic magicians? Why is God nursing, why is he crying, why is he sleeping? Why is God the descendant of the founding king of a minor Near Eastern dynasty? Why is God a political subject of Gaius Iulius Caesar Augustus? Why does God need a blanket?

Why is God something?

Of course, to even begin to answer the question posed above, we have to have some understanding of what God is; and also (a much harder question) what man is. Anselm had one very good answer to these questions; and I invite you to consider this answer at your leisure. For now, I will merely suggest some thoughts that came to me recently, and which were for me wrapped together inextricably with the event of Christmas. 

Column 09/25/2023: Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

I am going to attempt what I fully understand is both a very difficult and very presumptuous task: that is, to summarize what I see as a centrally important concept to ancient philosophical and Catholic ethical theories, and to indicate why lack of proper understanding of this concept wreaks havoc with attempts to understand and apply these concepts in the modern world. This is quite an obnoxious thing to do; if you are annoyed by it, please pray for me. If you like it, pray for me anyway. 

In contemporary Catholic ethical discourses and debates, especially on a popular level, but increasingly also in academic and even clerical circles, there are two terms that are thrown around more than any others. These terms, in fact, are thrown around with such frequency that one would think that there were more or less no other issues in Catholic ethics at all; and what is perhaps oddest of all, they are thrown around by both sides of virtually all contemporary Catholic ethical debates, and in highly similar terms.

In watching these debates unfold, I have grown more and more and more certain that, put simply, these terms are being used all wrong--not just trivially or technically wrong, but in ways that, frankly, I can find no parallel in the tradition prior to the 20th century, and which taken together threaten the very edifice of Catholic ethics. This is a strong claim; but it is strong precisely because these terms refer, however increasingly remotely, to base assumptions of Catholic and ancient philosophical ethics without which the whole edifice of Catholic ethics simply makes no sense, and simply cannot be lived out or applied.

I refer, of course, to the two terms intrinsically wrong and prudential. 

Column 8/19/2023: Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King

Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King 

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three]

Day had dawned before he was even aware he had been asleep, and when he awoke the priest Apollon was waiting by his cot, his old face drawn and worn, as if he had slept even less than Theodotus. Such hours suit me; the soldier and the deacon alike. Less sleep means less time for dreams.

Surely the old confessor must have similar dreams? For a moment, as the sleep cleared from his mind, he toyed with the idea of asking him about them. I saw so many like you, old man. Do you dream of the walls and the chains that held you? Or the men in fine robes who questioned you, day after day, always the same question, over and over again? Or the soldiers who held you by the arms and struck you on command? Or do you merely dream of the day they put out your eye? But the first words he spoke were more to the point: 

"My investigation of the palace is proceeding well. Today I must interview the clerics of the court."

Column 04/25/2023: Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Once upon a time, there was a bottomless abyss of unformed, undefined, unrelated infinity.

Once upon a time, there was a single, absolutely solitary, absolutely unrelated, and so absolutely sovereign will.

Once upon a time, there was a Father and his Son.

What is God? 

Is God something?

Is God nothing?

An acquaintance of mine, Timothy Troutner, a theology graduate student at Notre Dame, has recently published "Five Theses on Apophaticism," a distillation of his dissertation in which he issues a public challenge to what he sees as a troubling trend in modern theology by which a kind of apophaticism has come to assume a "systematic, total, and regulative" governance of Christian theological doctrine. I could not possibly hope to do justice to his overall thesis, particularly in its treatment of various specific modern academic-theological trends and actors. I am not familiar with or embedded in the world of modern academic theology; I am, I think, quite familiar with the world of ancient philosophy and theology in general and Trinitarian controversy in particular, about which I am in the process of publishing a monograph. It is from this perspective, then, that I write, and which will shape my focus in responding to Troutner's theses.

Before I begin, I would direct my readers to two recent pieces I have written that lay some of the foundations for this discussion: my argument about Trinitarian theology and its relationship with ancient Platonic debates, and my attempt to summarize Hilary of Poitier's doctrine of divine equality. As will become clear, I think these articles are related to Troutner's points in several ways. For the broader points made here, I would ask readers to consult Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Zlatko Plese's excellent scholarship on Gnosticism, and eventually my forthcoming monograph.

To quickly sum up my responses to Troutner below: while Troutner does appear to be in certain ways unfair to Patristic and Scholastic treatments of apophaticism, I think his argument does highlight a perennial danger for Christian theology, which to a large extent modern academic theology has not avoided, and helps us in setting some limits for apophaticism as a concept. My main critique, as will become clear, is that he seems to concede far too much to his modern apophaticists even in conceptualizing an escape from them, and thus produces a construal of the Trinity that I find very hard to accept.

Column 03/25/2023: The Trouble with (Modern) Physics: Lee Smolin's Time Reborn

In my last essay, I decided that I understood ancient Platonism. In this post, though, I will not pretend to understand modern physics. I will, however, say some things about a recent book from an eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lee Smolin (who also happens to be my uncle), that I recently read: Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. 

Many of my posts on here are notable for their sheer cheek in tackling topics, but this one, as they say, takes the cake. If you happen to know about this topic, then please accept this humble disclaimer that I emphatically not a physicist, and take this as what it is: some hopefully interesting comments from a non-expert.

What is the Trouble?

Lee Smolin's task over the last decade or so has been to argue that (1) modern physics and cosmology has reached a crisis point that threatens the bases of the entire field, and (2) only a radical paradigm shift can save it. The former point was argued at most length in his previous book The Trouble with Physics, while Time Reborn attempts to provide a way forward and a sketch of the necessary paradigm shift: an effort that he has more recently followed up on with several other volumes along the same lines. 

This, I think, is the best sort of book to gain some measure of understanding of a field: not a textbook or popularization, both of which typically present caricatured versions of research from decades ago without interpretation or explanation, but a interpretation of a field by an acknowledged master with a clear and obvious angle. 

Of course, such interpretation of a whole field, especially a field as abstract and analytical as theoretical cosmology, cannot help but be philosophy.

I won't defend this claim, which would drive many physicists crazy, but I will, as stated above, comment on the book's conclusions and arguments from the perspective of someone well-versed in ancient and medieval philosophy.

Column 03/11/2023: The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

Recently, while engaged in scholarly work, I suddenly had a moment of revelation where I felt, for the first time, that I understood ancient Platonism and how Christian Trinitarianism both arose out of and resolved the conflicts within it. It was frankly an incredible high, which has since faded into the common light of day, but I am now attempting to relive it by trying in labored fashion to express what I saw then.

What follows is best understood as "pseudo-scholarship": arising out of my academic research, but written quickly in a slapdash fashion without references, to sum up my own reflections on many, many hours of reading and research on these topics.

So: here goes.