The Crisis of Culture: Recovering Shared Meaning

Abstract

French political scientist Olivier Roy maintains that the West is undergoing a ‘crisis of culture’. The crisis derives from a process of ‘deculturation’ where superficial, deterritorial subcultures become the basis for shared understanding, rather than values. Roy maintains that this is a ‘dehumanising’ process. This paper seeks to understand by what means the West might recover a culture. This question demands understanding the concept itself, including its relationship to things material and transcendent. Drawing on the work of the 20th century Jesuit priest and theologian Henri de Lubac, as well as contemporary theologians like John Milbank and Carmody Grey, the paper will base its conclusions on the idea that nature and grace are correlative terms, and culture is not opposed to either. Such a conclusion, however, requires a certain religious logic that is rare in current philosophical discourse. A catholic understanding of the human can help to weave back nature, grace and culture into a proper relationship which does not isolate the natural from the supernatural, and informs the remaking of a culture shaped by Christian humanism.

1. Introduction: What Is Culture, What Is It Not, and How Has Its Meaning Changed over Time?

In his book ‘The Crisis of Culture’, the French political scientist Olivier Roy observes that ‘nothing is culturally self-evident anymore’ (Roy 2024, p. 3). The ‘crisis’ to which Roy refers does not, at first, describe the decline of culture, from high forms to popular forms, but rather the shifting goalposts determining what is, and what is not, culturally acceptable in the West.

For instance, Roy makes an example of new guidelines issued by United Airlines, detailing which animals may or may not travel with aeroplane passengers to provide emotional support. He remarks that such inventions expose a meticulousness that now governs behaviour, when previous generations would consider it self-evidently absurd to travel with a peacock.

Roy seeks to understand how we have arrived—as a culture—at a time and place in history where so much is now contested, and so little is given.

In many cases, exceptions to cultural codes have now been granted normative status. In 2004, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced in order to allow a man to marry another man before gay marriage was made legal (2022). Today, the Gender Recognition Act is routinely used, not as a “carve out” to permit practices out of the norm, but to allow people to legally change their sex and derive certain advantages from this. It has facilitated a change in the norm. As a result, whether biological sex is mutable or immutable is now contested in public discourse.

This offers a modern day example of how revolutionaries ‘take the deviation from the principle for the principle’ (Burke 1790, p. 7). This was Edmund Burke’s reflection on the French Revolution, observing how the revolutionary objective was based on ‘naked abstractions’, not the reality of human nature (Burke 1790, p. 7).

Roy attributes the loss of self-evident norms to the breakdown of a belief system that enables ‘meaning to take root and be shared’, acknowledging that the new norms that govern behaviour in the West are borne of a reaction against a universality once provided by religion, namely Christianity (Roy 2024, p. 59).

In place of cultural values rooted in shared, implicit understanding, like Christianity, ‘authoritarian pedagogy’ is the new curator of post-Christian norms (Roy 2024, p. 156). Such norms, the product of authoritarian pedagogy, are not worthy of the status of values, as they do not proceed from a shared, implicit understanding, and therefore have to be imposed on a society. Uncultured and therefore unintelligible, void of meaning and incapable of taking root and being shared. Roy observes a particular tyranny around ‘tolerance’ has been unleashed (Roy 2024, p. 156).

A new lexicon accompanies this authoritarian pedagogy. Roy notes that in 2019 the European Union appointed a commissioner to ‘promote our European way of life’ (Roy 2024, p. 190). A ‘way of life’ substitutes a ‘culture’, an ‘antiphrasis… admitting the absence of a common culture, not only because there is no consensus around values, but because the very notion of culture no longer has meaning’ (Roy 2024, p. 190). This is despite the fact that the Christian Democrats are the largest political group in the European Union (European Parliament n.d.).

Roy observes that without a powerful system of values, what remains of culture is the ‘bottom rung’, reduced to codes and norms around cuisine, sport and subcultures–the ‘deculturation of cultures’ (Roy 2024, pp. 90, 164).

2. What Are the Consequences of the Crisis of Culture?

Unfortunately, a culture cannot be rewired or built from scratch. Roy maintains that the attempt to ‘conceptualise values above and beyond culture’ is bound to fail and indeed has already led to attempts to relitigate long settled debates around the nature of things: ‘nature is making a comeback in our imaginary’ (Roy 2024, pp. 3, 31).

In ‘The Abolition of Man’, CS Lewis paints a bleak picture of intractable decline that links the dead and the not yet born in the regression of the whole human race. Warning against each generation refashioning norms and eschewing culture as a moral marker, Lewis is concerned about ‘power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument’, and the impact this has—over time—on the human condition (Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 86).

Lewis writes ‘if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power’ (Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 87). As each generation conditions the next, every generation is therefore as much a ‘patient’ as a ‘possessor’ of new technology, each less powerful than the one before.

Lewis maintains that man’s power over nature contains the seed of his own abolition as ‘Duty itself’ is subject to refashioning (Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 90). This represents the modification of morals, not just matter; when ‘Values are now mere natural phenomena’ (Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 89).

Duty is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And ‘good’ fares no better. They know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if any, they should produce.

(Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 90)

For Lewis, this modification of moral tissue is fatal; representing the ‘final stage’ before the abolition of man (Lewis [1943] 2017, p. 88).

3. Is It Possible to Recover Culture?

This essay seeks to understand the means of recovering culture. Culture is a complex concept which concerns disciplines as varying as philosophy, sociology, history and anthropology. While the material discussed in this paper is largely Continental, the objective will require an analytical approach. The essay will ask fundamental questions about the concept of culture itself, such as its relationship to nature and the ‘irresolvable’ antinomy that this creates. We will eventually require theological insight to fully understand the task of cultural recovery. Finally, the essay will return to more applied questions concerning what a “good” culture looks like, and why.

Roy has observed a return to questions around nature, particularly human sexuality. This demonstrates an attempt to “get behind” culture and its baggage, that is, the safe assumptions recommended by culture, which are increasingly considered distorting or obstructing access to more universal, pure and inerrant values.

Roy explains that

The partisans of “hard” secularism do not claim that secularism as the expression of their own culture–in this case Western culture (which would pose the problem of Europe’s Christian roots)–but as a gain made by the secular struggle against religion and thus as a means of access to universality.

(Roy 2024, p. 147)

The hope of the secularists is that a new universality can be uncovered that does not depend on religion or culture by revolting against it. Instead, they hope analysis of more scientific, material, natural phenomena might offer a purer universality acceptable to the secular imagination.

This characterises the worldview of 20th Century legal philosopher John Rawls, who insisted that behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ lies the secret to a rationally ordered society. The ‘veil of ignorance’ is Rawls’ analogy for demonstrating that only in a decultured sphere, where an individual can exist alone and atomised, can pure unadulterated reason recommend just principles.

This sphere is of course a fiction. Indeed, the sheer fantasy of such a scenario makes Rawls’ thought experiment meaningless. As Dudley Knowles points out:

It would not be me who retreated behind the veil of ignorance, but some shadowy simulacrum. How could it be me if I am required to shed, in thought, constitutive ideals which contribute essentially to the identification of who I am, ideals which Rawls has allocated to the theoretically inert realm of the ‘thick conception of the good’.

(Knowles 2001, p. 237)

The objective of Rawls’ theory is to get behind the context in which humans live and have their being, namely culture. This might be considered a ‘naturalistic’ approach since Rawls assumes that the simulated, atomised imaginary being would, naturally, prize ‘primary social goods’ such as ‘rights and liberties’ and ‘a sense of one’s own worth’ (Rawls 1971, p. 92). These things are recommended not by a culture but by nature itself.

While Martin Buber equates this approach as ‘computer science’ (Buber [1923] 2013, p. 31), Stanley Hauerwas makes this devastating criticism:

An ethic claiming to be ‘rational’ and universally valid for all thinking people everywhere is incipiently demonic because it has no means of explaining why there are still people who disagree with its prescriptions of behaviour, except that these people must be ‘irrational’ and, therefore (since ‘rationality’ is said to be our most important human characteristic), subhuman.

(Grey 2023, p. 138)

Roy makes a similar remark on the social impact of such an ethic, pointing out that the new authoritarian pedagogy that has replaced cultural values treats individuals as ‘though they were infantile, selfish and incapable of understanding what is good for them… What we are living through now is the true crisis of humanism’ (Roy 2024, p. 13).

This charge of inhumanity against a deculturing ethical theory presumes that human beings simply cannot be decultured, and that culture offers an objective source meaning.

Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ might be compared to Charles Taylors’ ‘horizons of significance’ (Taylor [1991] 2018, p. 39). Both Rawls and Taylor seek to find a source of meaning outside of our imminent, subjective experience. The difference is, Taylor does not believe that there is anything inauthentic about the source of such meaning proceeding from our social context. In fact, Taylor says, our social context offers us a ‘horizon of significance’ which we depend upon to make meaningful choices and form or own identity. For Taylor, there can be no reference points beyond the social context, as such, a ‘veil of ignorance’ is naive.

4. Culture and Nature: The Irresolvable Antinomy

The theologian Carmody Grey maintains that the modern attempt to isolate pure natural matter from impure cultural matter easily becomes unstuck. Grey states that ‘culture simply cannot be got behind, and every discipline has to reckon with this state of affairs’ (Grey 2023, p. 22). For instance, within the discipline of Sociology, Grey observes that one ‘cannot negotiate the aporia which results from holding both that humans construct culture and society and that culture and society construct the human’ (Grey 2023, p. 21). This is ‘an irresolvable antinomy’ (Grey 2023, p. 22). Neither culture nor nature can be granted primary or pure status. For Grey, the attempt to hermetically seal off and preserve a category of pure nature, apart from culture, is ‘bogus’ (Grey 2023, p. 28).

Disrupting the modern categories, Grey asks: ‘is culture natural? Or is nature cultural?’ (Grey 2023, p. 30). Her answer is as follows:

[…] stated minimally, nature is knowable only insofar as it is cultural, only insofar as it becomes cultural for us; maximally, there simply is no nature apart from culture, apart from narration.

(Grey 2023, p. 29)

Nature can only be interpreted via a cultural lens. To reveal the ‘pure’ nature of things requires pure, uncultured, human interpretation. The ‘irresolvable antinomy’ makes this impossible.

It is suspicious, then, that the values that arise from theorists such as Rawls, within the ‘veil of ignorance’, are remarkably culturally aligned, even perhaps contingent on a Western, largely Christian, inheritance. Did Rawls struggle to truly reach beyond the ‘horizon of significance’ to some purer, inner library of value.

As the historian Tom Holland said:

[…] to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology.

(Holland 2022)

Not only are Rawls’ naturally prized primary social goods distinctly cultural, they ought to be understood in their proper context as founded upon metaphysical assumptions about the dignity of the human as articulated in Christian, medieval theology.

Theologian Tracey Rowland laments the secular tendency to appropriate Christian values based on natural law as non-metaphysical—natural only insofar as they are rational:

[…] marketed as universally reasonable without any accompanying theological baggage, it can begin to sound, in Russell Hittinger’s memorable phrase, like “a doctrine for Cartesian minds somehow under Church discipline”.

(Rowland 2008)

The reality of the situatedness of humans means the quest for a universal basis for a cultureless (secular) culture cannot be achieved by an appeal to nature. The instinct to seek a sure and certain foundation for the way of believing is a noble one, but the severing of nature and culture is a dead end.

Jean-Yves Lacoste maintains that the preoccupation with isolating a sphere of pure nature is a symptom of the invention of philosophy and theology as two separate disciplines. Lacoste explains:

The idea of pure nature and its train of epistemological implications is a modern idea, which could only be formed in an age where theology and philosophy represented two quite separate courts of appeal.

(Lacoste 2017, p. 356)

5. Verifying Nature (Supernature)

Modern theology, according to Lacoste, fails to understand that nature is a ‘correlative’ term, as Lubac wrote (De Lubac 1984, p. 9). It is not ‘pure’ but itself a creation of supernature.

A great influence on Grey, the theologian John Milbank argues that the true foundation that lies behind both culture and nature is supernature. Nature and culture do not occupy different categories, and culture is not somehow secondary to nature. Rather, both are secondary to supernature. This is the superstructure where universality can be located.

Milbank expounds his own kind of theological naturalism, stating that ‘supernature is the real nature’:

‘Nature’ ‘is a mediation of transcendence and is not finitely circumscribable; the exchange of predicates between finite and infinite cannot be a priori excluded. Nature has to be taken as an epiphany of supernature; we might say, borrowing another’s phrase, that supernature is the real nature.

(Grey 2023, p. 32)

In other words, when you bring nature into theological ownership, its status as a most basic or ‘pure’ category is challenged. There is but a purer and more basic category: the supernatural. The arrangement of nature as prior to culture is flawed as nature is itself a secondary category.

Perhaps, then, the appeal to supernature could provide a more plausible means of verifying some kind of universal truth underlying a culture, allowing us to establish a more stable basis on which to recover a shared meaning.

6. Culture as ‘Sacred Order’

This was the conviction of the 20th Century Sociologist Philip Rieff whose work focussed on a rebinding of the natural and supernatural. In the first of his trilogy ‘Social Order/Sacred Order’, he said ‘No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived’ (Rieff 2006, p. 13).

While Rieff does not display the same kind of naivety as modern, liberal theorists like Rawls, his own work fails to provide any kind of tools to evaluate which ‘sacred order’ and corresponding ‘social order’ is right and true and substantively good for human flourishing.

Rieff’s analysis of our current culture is still worth discussion.

In ‘My Life Among The Deathworks’, Rieff describes how modernity marked an aberration from previous Western ‘world cultures’. Broadly, Rieff identifies paganism followed by monotheism, but the current third world ‘therapeutic’ culture is wholly unique in its absent appeal to any kind of transcendent authority.

Where the ‘social order’ is not based on a ‘sacred order’ Rieff calls ‘the anticulture’. Instead, the cultural behavioural norms that moderns are so keen to dismiss as illegitimate sources of value or meaning, Rieff maintains have a transcendent and therefore authoritative source: more authoritative than a scientific, material or allegedly natural basis.

For Rieff, culture ‘transliterates’ sacred order. He explains, the task of culture is to ‘transliterate otherwise invisible sacred orders into their visible modalities’ (Zondervan 2005, p. 127). Antonius Zonerdervan interprets Rieff’s meaning to ‘transliterate’ as the translation of sacred order into a new language of social order.

Translating is always interpreting because it is impossible to transfer the signs of one semantic field into another directly… The idea of finding the ‘closest corresponding signs’ refers to the very complex character of the transformation of the language of the sacred into that of the social order.

(Zondervan 2005, p. 127)

Rieff’s theory of transliteration rebinds culture with the true superstructure, the supernatural. The widespread adoption of certain values made self-evident by a shared metaphysical belief in some transcendent source constitutes a culture. However, Rieff is remarkably indiscriminate when it comes to what kind of social order—and corresponding sacred order—gives rise to human flourishing.

7. Which Sacred Order? The Search for Universality

While Rieff offers a corrective to the third world culture and its ‘bogus’ obsession with nature apart from any correlative term, his theory lacks specificity and prescription.

Rieff fails to prescribe or recommend a particular culture, and therefore a particular metaphysical basis or religion. There is little to protect Rieff against the charge of cultural relativism.

In ‘The City of God’, St Augustine warned against the indiscriminate treatment of cultures.

A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love, then it follows that to observe the character of a particular people we must examine the objects of its love.

(Augustine n.d., 426, XIX.24)

For Augustine, the ‘common object’ of Roman love revealed the Romans to be lacking in virtue and the city of Rome as ‘a kind of second Babylon’ (O’Daly 1999, p. 185). According to Augustine, a culture can be evaluated by its goal, and the most noble goals demand the advancement of a particular sacred order, that is, Christianity (Tornau 2024).

Interestingly, biographers remark that Rieff came to accept the virtue of the specific Christian faith later in life.

How then can we locate a reliable basis for cultural principles in a post-Christian age in order to recover culture.

The problems that we have identified concerning the inescapably cultured human condition, and the lack of a discriminating or directive trace of the transcendent in culture, beg the question that some form of special revelation is required in order to demonstrate precisely how to be human. As Milbank says, ‘there is a right way to be human’ (Milbank 1990, p. 328).

The attempt to get behind or indeed above culture to find some new universal basis for it fails on methodological grounds: the approach is neither verifying nor produces an evaluable result, only authoritarian pedagogy or cultural relativism.

The irony is that, as Roy explains,

[…] culture is in practice always a resistance to the principle of universality and never universal (since the universal culture would no longer be a culture in the anthropological sense, at least as long as there is no universal society), any reference to a system of universal values is deculturing by definition. And if a culture like the one we call “Western“ seeks to claim university, not only must it deculture other cultures but itself as well, to follow through on universalisation of its own values.

(Roy 2024, p. 149)

The cultured human does not have the capacity, without extraordinary revelation, to either verify or evaluate a universal basis for culture.

How then can a culture be recovered? If cultures are by definition not universal, but contingent on a time and place in nature, how can they be verified or evaluated? Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Grey points out that Western values are not

axiomatic, in the sense of self-evident and obvious to all; rather, they derive historically from a particular narrative of the creation, redemption and sanctification of this singular, unrepeatable world through its linear unfolding in time, which imparts the highest dignity to matter and history, gives them a definite purpose and an intrinsic intelligibility, and so makes them worthy objects of knowledge.

(Grey 2023, p. 95)

8. The Irresolvable Antinomy Revisited: The Logic of Satiety vs. The Logic of Gift

How can it be that Christianity, for instance, be culturally contingent–not universally intelligible–and yet universally true?

The desire to square this circle might be described by Lacoste as influenced by the ‘logic of satiety’ (Lacoste 2017, p. 364). It is a desire beyond what can be claimed. Lacoste maintains that the logic of satiety is life diminishing for it ‘forbade himself to hope ‘naturally’ for what he could not claim, though he felt the lack of it and felt diminished by the lack’ (Lacoste 2017, p. 364).

Is the quest to recover culture along the terms of our current enquiry bound to fail for it is simply out of reach?

Lacoste recommends the ‘logic of gift’ as a means of breaking this cycle, meaning, unlike the logic of satiety, one can understand the imminent and material in light of a future promised but not yet realised. The logic of gift rationalises the desire beyond claim since–though it can ‘only ever received in the form of a divine gift’–one can hope (Lacoste 2017, p. 19).

The 20th century Jesuit priest and theologian, Henri de Lubac, offered one such example of a divine gift that cannot not be presumed upon but is in the gift of gratuitous grace. Lubac is credited for contributing to the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican which reiterated the Roman Churches concern for human values such as justice and peace. For Lubac, the beatific vision, the ultimate satisfaction of all natural desire to know and love God in an example of a divine gift because, ‘while it remains forever “un-naturalizable”, it profoundly penetrates the depths of man’s being (De Lubac 1984, p. 41).

Applied to the problem we have encountered in this paper, the logic of gift is able to square the circle, recommending a particular culture, above all others—as universally good—despite the fact that universality is by definition deculturing. Ultimately, it is the incarnation of Christ that offers us this gift.

9. The Antinomy Resolved: The Incarnation

Before I expand on the gift of the incarnation, I will offer some more explanation as to how the logic of gift operates on different terms to the logic of satiety.

We have already learned of Milbank’s theological naturalism which applies theological reasoning to an otherwise secular domain. This same theological reasoning, Milbank argues, testifies that ‘one tradition alone is defensible’ (Grey 2023, p. 35). Fundamentally, for Milbank, the objective truth in Christianity ‘starts to appear’ exposing ‘all other cultural systems… as threatened by incipient nihilism’ (Grey 2023, p. 35).

Grey interprets for us this paradox which allows Milbank to ‘reunite the objective and the relative, the true and the constructed, as complementary rather than oppositional’ (Grey 2023, p. 139).

While Milbank does not depart from maintaining that there is such a thing as public reason—some rationale that is universally accessible—he does not believe that it necessarily follows that what is reasonable cannot be recommended by a particular narrative–and the logic of that narrative. In other words, the narrative of Christianity only makes sense if one employs the logic of Christianity, that the supernatural and the natural can combine in the single cultural moment at the incarnation of God. Jens Zimmermann puts it like this:

Most generally put, the incarnation permitted the successful mediation of transcendent values through the imminent ontological structures of human action, language, and history.

(Zimmermann 2012, p. 23)

At this point, it is necessary to understand Milbank’s philosophical order which holds ‘mythos’ prior to ‘logos’ (Grey 2023, p. 133). Mythos should be understood as a story that gives coherence to otherwise dislocated and unintelligible facts. Logos should be understood as reason or rationally understood information. Grey explains for us that any logic we might wish to employ is fundamentally of a myth, already situated in a narrative. Christian mythos, or narrative, offers humanity a logic by which we can believe in a truth which is ‘not a truth like other truths’ (Grey 2023, p. 95) The contextualising of truth in myth does not make the truth less true, but it does place Christian mythos ‘above’ reason, or logos.

Reason alone, without the guardrails of narrative that recommend how to apply such reason, is ‘incapable of dialectical vindication with respect to competing narratives’ (Grey 2023, p. 139). However, conversely, reason does become a legitimate tool when subject to Christian logos, a ‘mythically specific’ logos, as it proceeds from a Creator who has given humans reason to believe the truth of Christianity (Grey 2023, p. 139).

Both Hauerwas and Roy comment on the inhumanity of approaches to verifying or evaluating cultures which place rationality as the highest human characteristic. I suspect that Milbank would agree.

Grey points out that Milbank faces charges of ‘hidden claims for a new universal reason, a rationality of narrative which pretends to be specific while smuggling in universality once more’ (Grey 2023, p. 35). But, unlike Rieff for instance, Milbank does not recommend ‘tradition-specificity per se’, but the specific tradition of Christianity, its mythos and its logos (Grey 2023, p. 35).

Milbank points out that some ‘modicum of… universal mythos’ is available ‘only by virtue of a local ecstatic opening to this universal that one has giving, or community, or sacred locality at all’ (Grey 2023, p. 138). The incarnation is this opening in culture where supernature is revealed in nature.

Grey explains how

[…] divine life can be understood from below, ‘conjecturally’, while creaturely life is understood from above, ‘theurgically’. This paradox is defining of orthodoxy itself, since in the Incarnation flesh becomes our privileged means of seeing God, yet God alone remains the adequate condition for seeing flesh.

(Grey 2023, p. 154)

Between conjecture and theurgy exists what Augustine called the ‘inner world’ (Tornau 2024). A substitute, perhaps, for whatever might be behind or above culture according to liberal thinkers who employ the logic of satiety to construct fiction such as the veil of ignorance. Christian Tornau explains that the inner world is a product of actualising ‘some latent or implicit knowledge that is stored in our memory’, and this knowledge is the revelation of Christ incarnate, ‘a-temporal intellectual insight that transcends language’–the signifier of the divine in nature (Tornau 2024).

Through the logic of gift, the incarnation resolves the ‘irresolvable antinomy’ that makes Rawlsian and other liberal attempts to get behind or above culture bound to fail. We have, in the incarnation and the example of Christ, a universal basis of culture that is neither fictitious, tyrannical, wholly relative, unverifiable or unevaluable. Milbank states, ‘there can only be for us truth tout court because the Truth has redemptively become incarnate in time’ (Milbank 1990, p. xxx).

10. Concluding Thoughts: How Then Are We to Live?

Where then, does culture fit in the grand schema that is grace and nature?

In ‘A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace’, Lubac describes culture as ‘something proper’ to human nature (De Lubac 1984, p. 15). Indeed, it is man that marries culture and nature together. Quoting French and Flemish philosophers (Claude Bruaire, Albert Dondeyne, and Alain Cugno), Lubac writes:

“Man is that being whose norm is nature, but who goes beyond nature. Yes; but can he do this entirely?” He cannot simply be reduced to “nature”, and this has been pointed out in this century by theories as diverse as phenomenology, personalism and existentialism, as well as by a whole branch of marxism. Man, therefore, cannot be content merely to “follow nature” because it offers him nothing normative–but neither can he simply “struggle against nature”, “as though he himself were in no way biological but was entirely a creature of culture”. His task is rather to “welcome” it in order to transform it.

(De Lubac 1984, p. 14)

In other words, humans are naturally endowed to form culture in the direction that has been made reasonable to us by the given narrative.

However, Zimmermann observes that secularisation, over time, has ‘outrun the momentum given to it by Christianity’ (Zimmermann 2012, p. 34). In other words, the values once recognised as distinctly Christian are becoming detached from their heritage and perverted as a result.

For instance, Christian values—like dignity—were once attributed to every human being, for dignity is the very thing that makes us human beings–created by God ‘a little lower than the angels’ (The Holy Bible, Hebrews 2:7, NIV). However, secular reasoning now recommends that dignity is a status only held by those ‘with a particularly prized quality, property, capacity, or attribute’(Mumford 2023). We have seen this new invention of dignity employed by proponents of the legalisation of Assisted Suicide in the United Kingdon. James Mumford concludes that ‘Modern secular philosophy typically takes the “human” out of “human dignity”… when dignity is unmoored from its religious foundation, it metastases into something unrecognisable’ (Mumford 2023).

11. Christian Humanism and the Catholic Tradition

Zimmermann observes that secular forms of humanism fail where Christian humanism does not because the doctrine of the incarnation means that Christianity is ‘intrinsically hermeneutic and humanist’ (Zimmermann 2012, p. 34).

We can see the American monk Thomas Merton work this out for himself in correspondence with the French Philosopher Jacques Maritian. In the early 20th Century, the two corresponded by letter, and in one such case, in 1938, Maritiain wrote, ‘liberal-bourgeois humanism is now no more than barren wheat or than starchless bread’ (Feldman 2020). Twenty five years later, and since his conversion, Merton remarked:

[…] perhaps the crisis of our time is among other things a symptom of our total lack of a genuine, valid humanism–as well as of a really living religious sense. I personally see no way at all for a genuine and valid ethical sense to exist without a religious basis (at least one that is implied or hidden).

(Merton 1994, p. 101)

And, finally, three years on further, Merton identifies that—more than a metaphysical basis for humanism—a successful humanism must be a Christian one, ‘based on the belief in the Incarnation on a relationship to others which supposed that “whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do it to me”’ (Northbourne 2001, p. 91). Merton’s journey, from a metaphysical humanism to a distinctly Christian one follows a Milbankian sequence whereby one universal foundation emerges as true, revealed by the particularities of the incarnation.

While Merton grappled with the realities of the Cold War and, as Maritain put it ‘the tragedy of democracies’, Roy notes that, today, the crisis of culture means that ‘nature is making a comeback in our imaginary’ as new forms of gnosticism emerge, especially regarding the human body (Maritain 1972, p. 17; Roy 2024, p. 3). In his essay ‘The Authority of the Body’, Matthew Mason points out that death is particularly revealing of this new gnosticism as it is the ‘ultimate example of my body’s authority over me’, and the struggle against this reality is distinctly anti-Christian humanism (Mason 2017, p. 42). The incarnation, of course, symbolises both the dignity of the body, as habitable by God himself, and the potential for it to survive death at the resurrection of the dead.

The reactivation of the debate about Assisted Suicide in the Anglosphere is indicative of this new gnosticism which centres on the will of the individual. The work of the German Romantic, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his ‘Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge’ founds a philosophical system on the ‘bare concept of subjectivity’ or, the ‘pure I’ (Breazeale 2024). Fichte said ‘My will alone . . . shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe’ (Wulf 2022). Famously, Fichte influenced the poet Novalis, who, heartbroken by the death of his beloved Sophie, sought to reunite himself with her by becoming spirit alone through the concoction of an elixir ‘on the path of chemistry… a drug to cure physicality’ (Wulf 2022).

Regarding the matters of Assisted Suicide, a consideration of Christian Humanism combines, or properly equates ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ arguments. Danny Kruger MP insists that his objection to Assisted Suicide is not a religious one, but founded on a concern for the most vulnerable (Stanford 2025). Of course, by employing a Christian Humanism we can see that a concern for the vulnerable is ‘intrinsic’ to a Christian outlook. Hence, Kruger’s objection is truly grounded in religion but it is culturally intelligible at the same time.

12. A Second Ressourcement

This essay recommends that the crisis of culture cannot be solved by a return to more basic principles of nature, if nature is something considered purely material. Nature is created and created for humans to form into a culture inspired by the Incarnation of Christ, because supernature is the real superstructure. Any such recovery of culture in a post-Christian age cannot be attempted from scratch. Rather, the eternal truth has already been revealed. Far from reinvention, we need ressourcement.

Ressourcement refers to French theologians of the mid-20th century, such as Lubac, who influenced the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. The project aimed ‘to reconnect nature and the supernatural, so as to overcome the rupture between theology and life’ (Boersma 2009, p. 9). As Hans Boersma has more recently noted, we are once again seeing interest in this cause, not only from the Catholic tradition, but Evangelicals too (Boersma 2020).

This can be seen in the UK in particular as the Anglican Diocese of London has allocated funds specifically for ‘Catholic renewal’ (Diocese of London 2024). Once such ‘new worshipping community’ combines liturgical practice and contemporary music in a bid to appeal to younger people who, according to journalist Justin Brierly, prefer to frequent traditional or ‘high’ churches in the city with a greater focus on sacramental theology than lower or more accessible churches (Brierley 2024).

A second ressourcement has been observed by Boersma, who has observed that the inspiration is precisely the crisis of culture that Roy diagnoses.

What drives recent theologies of retrieval is a deep longing for identity. It’s a desire to be linked with the past. Continuity with the past generates identities of solidity and strength.

(Boersma 2020)

Perhaps it is the second ressourcement that could end the crisis of culture.