The Contemporary Augustinian “Minor Chorus” in Catholic Social Theory

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the new pontificate of the Augustinian Leo XIV, this paper offers a survey of the ideas of the leading Catholic Augustinian political theorists of the past half century who have shared an opposition to the project of synthesizing the Thomist and Liberal political traditions. The paper is not asserting that Pope Leo XIV himself holds such positions, merely that given his Augustinian affinities, and given the contemporary interest in post-liberal political thought, it may be timely to consider the Augustinian “minor voice” in Catholic and high church Anglican social theory. The paper also highlights the work of little-known or overlooked contemporary thinkers from Central Europe. Key themes are the foundations of human rights and the socio-political order.

1. Introductory Preamble: The Augustinian Vision of Pope Leo

Pope Leo XIV began his first state of the world address to diplomats in Rome with a back-to-basics tutorial on St. Augustine’s The City of God. He described the book as a classical work that ‘speaks to people of every generation’ and he affirmed Pope Benedict XVI’s judgment that this work is ‘crucial to the development of Western political thought and the Christian theology of history’ (Pope Leo XIV 2026). He also noted similarities between the twenty-first and fifth centuries when Augustine was writing. In both centuries one finds widespread migration and dramatic readjustments of geopolitical balances and cultural paradigms.

This classic of the Christian intellectual tradition (The City of God) juxtaposes two cities founded on two different loves. There is the love of God (amor Dei) of the city of God, which includes love for one’s neighbour, and the love of self (amor sui) of the city of man. Until the end of time the two cities co-exist in time. Within each human heart choices are constantly made for or against one of the two loves. The fact that St Augustine attributed to each person a “free will” means that each person has the freedom to choose between the loves of the two cities and in making this choice they create the history of their time.

Although The City of God has never lost its standing as a classical work of the Catholic intellectual tradition, for much of the last century and a half the political ideas of St. Augustine played second-fiddle to projects to synthesise elements of Catholic social teaching with elements borrowed from the Liberal tradition.

Leo XIII (1810–1903) unwittingly began the process of assimilating Liberalism to Catholic social theory by adopting the language of natural right in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII 1891). This adoption was affirmed by the Vatican’s strong endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and beyond. (Adolphe 2006, pp. 343–83). At the time of the drafting of the Universal Declaration an issue was that of how to account for the foundation of rights. Where do they come from? On what are they based? Delegates from Communist countries had very different answers to these questions from those representing Catholic countries. According to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, the fact that different delegates were operating within totally different jurisprudential frameworks did not matter. What mattered was that agreement could be found across the philosophical divide on the rights to be recognised. (Maritain 1948, pp. i–ix).

Fast forward to the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2005), the Polish pope and other Catholic scholars were beginning to re-assess this judgment. In 1998, in a similar address to Italian jurists as that given by Pope Leo to diplomats in 2026, John Paul II drew attention to the issue of the foundations of rights. He argued that without ‘a widespread, universal consensus on their foundation’, their use ‘runs the risk of obtaining modest results or of confusing authentic rights with subjective and selfish demands’ (John Paul II 1998). He had discovered that without an agreement on the foundations, the same words could be given different interpretations. Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) held essentially the same position as John Paul II. He was content to use the language of rights but recognised that the nature of their foundations was a neuralgic point. For Ratzinger the foundations were found in reason and ‘its reverence for God and for the fundamental moral values that come from the Christian faith’ (Ratzinger 2011, p. 219). In his 2011 Address to members of the Diplomatic Corps at the Vatican Pope Benedict exhorted the diplomats to ‘reject the dangerous notion of a conflict between the right to religious freedom and other human rights, thus disregarding or denying the central role of respect for religious freedom in the defence and protection of fundamental human dignity’ (Benedict XVI 2011). He further declared that ‘even less justifiable are attempts to counter the right of religious freedom with other alleged new rights which, while actively promoted by certain sectors of society and inserted in national legislation or in international directives, are nonetheless merely the expression of selfish desires lacking a foundation in authentic human nature’ (Benedict XVI 2011).

One of several remarkable elements of Leo’s 2026 address is that he clearly recognises the problem of the multiple, contradictory interpretations of rights and their foundations, and he associates these problems with an ideological use of language. Meanings, he says, have become fluid, concepts ambiguous, and ‘in the contortions of semantic ambiguity’, language has become an ideological weapon. (Pope Leo XIV 2026). Alasdair MacIntyre made precisely this point several decades ago. While accepting that there is a distinction between philosophy and theology, he never accepted a sharp separation of philosophy from theology. His understanding of rationality was what he called “tradition dependent”. This means that reason itself operates on foundations external to itself.

In various essays MacIntyre examined how language can be deployed to prevent people from making arguments based on truth claims embedded in traditions such as Christianity. He called such deployments an ideological use of language and argued that they work ‘to conceal the features of particular conflicts, or particular contestable concepts and situations, of particular unpredictabilities; and [they do] this by working to conceal conflict, contestability and unpredictability as such’ (MacIntyre 1979, p. 50).

In his address Leo affirmed the value of dialogue between proponents of different political traditions but exhorted the diplomats to ‘re-discover the meaning of words’. No real agreements can be achieved if people mean different things when using the same concepts, or resort to the use of words that are specifically designed to paper over particular conflicts. Concretely, if one is a Catholic or any sub-species of Christian, the concept “reproductive health” does not mean “easy access to abortion”. Leo declared that there must be certainty about the meaning of concepts and that words need to be “anchored in the truth”.

Moreover, Leo concluded that ‘a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fuelling it’ (Pope Leo XIV 2026). This, he noted, leads to other consequences that restrict human rights, especially the right of freedom of conscience. He suggested that we are dealing with a “short-circuit” problem in the rights discourse since ‘rights are becoming disconnected from reality, nature and truth’ (Pope Leo XIV 2026). In other words, the nexus or link between reality, nature and truth on the one side, and human rights on the other, is weak or broken.

Thus one might suggest that Leo wishes to bring an end to the ideological shadow boxing and use of weasel words (that is, words that are deliberately employed for their ambivalence) in public discourse. He would rather have an honest dialogue about different conceptions of human dignity and their foundations. At least then the positions people take on social practices like abortion and surrogacy and euthanasia, all condemned by Leo in the latter half of his address, can be understood as different understandings of human dignity and different choices between amor Dei and amor sui, as Augustine would frame them.

The arrival of a new pontiff who is a member of the Order of St. Augustine may herald a revival of interest in Augustinian political theory. This new ecclesial moment may be propitious for an audit of the Catholic social theory of the past century and a half that has been described as more Kantian than Augustinian. (Kraynak 2001). What follows in this paper is therefore a survey of the criticisms of the liberal tradition to be found in the minor neo-Augustinian chorus of Catholic social theorists.

2. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025)

Reference has already been made to MacIntyre’s work on the ideological nature of the natural right discourse. This is perhaps one of the most famous elements of his criticism of the Liberal tradition, though it is not his only criticism. In an interview delivered in 1996 MacIntyre declared that his critique of liberalism was ‘one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it—and that was when I was about seventeen years old’ (MacIntyre 1996, p. 47). MacIntyre was a “root and branch” critic of the Liberal tradition. He was not a bower bird who picked and mixed elements from the tradition to furnish his own nest. He wanted nothing to do with liberalism and famously quipped, in reference to a popular liberal idea of the state as nothing more than a corporate manager of public utilities or ‘bureaucratic supplier of goods and services’, that to lay down one’s life for such an organisation is ‘like being asked to die for a telephone company’ (MacIntyre 1994, p. 303). Moreover, he did not read Aquinas as the first Whig as Lord Acton famously tried to do. Rather, he followed the lead of Richard Tuck, author of Natural Rights Theories (Tuck 1979), in locating the source of the Liberal tradition in the late medieval Franciscan tradition. According to MacIntyre what led to the modern concept of “right” was the Franciscan property disputes and their adjudication by Pope John XXII (1249–1334), who inadvertently accepted a conception of right as ‘attached to individuals as such, independent of the place and status of such individuals in a community, let alone their contribution to the common good’ (MacIntyre 1991, pp. 102–3). This new conception of right as it developed contrasted with older conceptions in four important respects: (i) claims to these new rights were no longer derivable from a conception of the virtue of justice grounded in a teleological order at once created and commanded by God, rather they were deemed to be self-evident to every rational person or justified by reference to their utility; (ii) they attached to individuals qua individuals rather than to individuals qua members of a particular community subject to divine and natural law; (iii) such modern rights are no longer ‘the expression of a particular community’s shared allegiances’ but are rather, ‘an expression of each individual’s autonomy’ and (iv) the justification of such rights ‘must be, and be seen to be, wholly independent of religious or theological beliefs of any kind’ (MacIntyre 1991, p. 105). All four of these principles are problematic for MacIntyre’s Augustinian-Thomism wherein rationality is intrinsically linked to theological presuppositions embedded within communities and their institutions. He concluded:

The dominant contemporary idiom and rhetoric of rights cannot serve genuinely rational purposes, and we ought not to conduct our moral and political arguments in terms derived from that idiom and rhetoric. In so saying, I formulate a position at odds not only with liberal proponents of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, but also with utterances of, for example, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. My quarrel in his latter case is not, or not necessarily, with the substance of what the bishops have intended to assert on a variety of moral and political matters; but insofar as the form of their assertions has involved an appeal, or has appeared to involve an appeal, to the dubious idiom and rhetoric of rights, I believe that the bishops, quite inadvertently, may have injured their own case.

(MacIntyre 1991, pp. 96–97).

For MacIntyre, the marriage of the Liberal natural right and Thomist natural law traditions was an ‘own goal’ for Catholic leaders, notwithstanding the good and even honourable intentions of those involved in the project.

3. Ernest Fortin AA (1923–2002)

Ernest Fortin strongly concurred with MacIntyre’s judgment. Fortin was a member of the religious Order known as the Augustinians of the Assumption, or more formally, the Congregatio Augustinianorum ab Assumptione. The Order was founded in 1845 by Emmanuel d’Alzon, a monarchist and staunch opponent of the French Revolution. It was thus a religious community with an interest in political life and it had a strong French culture. Fortin was a North American of French descent who undertook his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne.

Fortin offered at least two significant criticisms of the project to synthesise liberalism and Thomism. The first was a point about its intellectual history, the second a point about the relation of natural law to the eternal law or, more fundamentally, of reason to revelation. In relation to the intellectual history he observed that the decision of Leo XIII to adopt the idiom of the natural rights tradition was influenced by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), author of Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appogiato sul fatto (A Theoretical essay on Natural Right from an Historical Standpoint). In a letter written to his Jesuit superior, Taparelli admitted that he was influenced by the ideas of John Locke and other modern authors. In his essay ‘Sacred and Inviolable: Rerum Novarum and Natural Rights’, Fortin quoted the following judgment of the Belgian Jesuit Leon de Sousberghe (1903–2006) on Taparelli’s project, the general gist of which is that Taparelli did not really understand what he was doing:

As we can see from his letters, Taparelli became an innovator without any conscious intention of modifying the tradition and simply by applying a Christian good sense, freed from all tradition, to the modern philosophy of his age. He thus excerpts from the heritage of the eighteenth century (where he no longer even recognizes the elements of Scholastic origin) whatever he deems capable of being assimilated by Christian teaching.

(Fortin 1992, p. 231).

The Catholic adoption of the idiom of natural rights thus appears to have been an historical accident, not something driven by an aporia—an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a theory—in need of a resolution.

This leads into the territory of discussions about the principles that should be applied when adopting ideas from foreign traditions. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) argued that ideas should never be adopted from foreign traditions simply because of their rhetorical power. As he poetically expressed the idea: there must be something deeper than a ‘mere mechanical adoption of alien chains of thought with which one can adorn and garland the Christian understanding externally’ (Balthasar 1993, pp. 155–56). There must be, in other words, something of intellectual substance in the external tradition that is worthy of adoption. Fortin thought there was nothing of real intellectual substance to be gained for the Catholic intellectual tradition by buying into the idioms of Lockean philosophy and that there were ‘better ways of guarding against modern totalitarianism, its deification of the state, and its threat to freedom’ (Fortin 1992, p. 227). Although he did not name the “better ways” it is probable that he was thinking of the British common law tradition that certainly recognises “rights”, but these British common law rights are developed from within communal frameworks and are different in foundation and often in content from so-called natural rights. (Plucknett 2010). Fortin also noted that neither the Bible nor St. Thomas Aquinas used the concept of ius in a Lockean sense.

Fortin’s second criticism is his argument that the second tablet of the Ten Commandments will not be self-evidently rational to people who do not accept the first tablet, especially the very first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods” etc. Fortin declared: ‘What the Thomistic theory essentially requires is not only that the content of the natural law be naturally known to all human beings but that it be known precisely as belonging to the natural law, that is to say, to a law which is both promulgated and enforced by God as the author of nature and hence indispensably binding on everyone’ (Fortin 2017, pp. 185–86). Concretely, this means that according to Fortin, if one does not start from the position of thinking of oneself as a creature in a filial relationship with a Creator-God the chances that one will accept such teachings as “adultery is always wrong” are diminished. The idea that it is possible to construct a framework of moral action without reference to the God of the Two Testaments upon which theists and atheists might agree, with the Jewish and/ or Christian affirmation of the Ten Commandments being an extra source of moral guidance for Jews and Christians, was not regarded by Fortin as a viable project for Catholic social theorists. Quite simply he thought that those outside the Jewish and Christian faith traditions were unlikely to buy it.

This has in fact become the fate of many projects that seek to promote a version of natural law disconnected from divine law. While such projects are designed to appeal to people from all faith traditions and none, the people who have been most enthusiastic about them are Catholics who grasp hold of them in a desperate attempt to find a lingua franca for dialogue with atheists and agnostics. However, those outside the Church, the atheists and agnostics, tend not to buy them because they view them as a Trojan horse for Catholic moral theology. The difficulty is that one cannot park Christ in a back street and pretend that his claim to divinity does not have an impact, one way or another, upon perceptions of the good and the true and the beautiful and thus of justice.

The Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973), renowned for his work on the relationship between reason and revelation, was also of the view that Thomistic natural law is inseparable from revealed theology (Strauss 1953). This means in effect that Christ cannot be a mere optional extra. The optional extra concept presupposes an extrinsicist account of the relationship between nature and grace, faith and reason. An extrinsicist account is one according to which the two concepts in the pair always remain external or extrinsic to the other. Colloquially, this is known as the “cup-cake theory” since the icing on the top of cupcakes sits on top of the cake and does not penetrate the dough beneath. This extrinsicism has been subjected to sustained critique by Catholic theologians over the last century, most famously by Henri de Lubac and others in his Communio journal circle, including the two scholar popes (John Paul II and Benedict XVI) in their works on theological anthropology. (Ratzinger 1969, pp. 115–63). Contemporary self-labelled “Ressourcement Thomists” also recognize the problem with extrinsicism and seek to avoid it. This is evident in Kevin O’Reilly (2026)’s Thomas Aquinas’s Cruciform Theology of Natural Law.

Fortin was introduced to the work of Strauss by Allan Bloom (1930–1992), author of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), when he and Bloom were both students at the Sorbonne.

4. Robert P Kraynak

Robert P. Kraynak, author of Christian Faith in Modern Democracy: God and Politics in a Fallen World (2001), was also influenced by Allan Bloom. Kraynak studied under Bloom when he was a student at Cornell University.

Kraynak has described the problems with the liberal tradition in the following terms:

The present problem of modern liberal democracy, then, is not the danger of imminent collapse, as Marx predicted, nor even the visible decline that eventually led to the fall of the Roman Empire…The fundamental problem is not the obvious one of physical decay or social disorder but the subtle and elusive one of moral degradation: the proclamation of a lofty commitment to respecting and cherishing the dignity of everyone, especially by eliminating historic barriers to human potential, combined with a culture of scepticism and materialism that drains the soul of all higher longings and encourages slavish conformity to mass society. Stated succinctly, modern liberal democracy proclaims in principle, but subverts in practice, the dignity of man.

(Kraynak 2001, p. 29).

According to Kraynak, the rejection of the idea of a human ecology, or model way of developing one’s humanity, along with the culture of scepticism and materialism, turns subjects and citizens into ‘the anonymous “masses”—an undifferentiated collection of rootless, traditionless, and isolated individuals, each claiming to be unique and special but in reality identical to each other in their mundane pursuits, seemingly free but in reality slavishly conformist and ripe for exploitation by new kinds of tyrants, both violent and banal’ (Kraynak 2001, p. 29). Kraynak acknowledges that such criticisms of the “mass society” have been made by numerous scholars before him. These include: Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, José Ortega y Gasset, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, and Pope John Paul II. Having offered this “roll call” of critics he emphasises that ‘what is important to see about these critics is that the new kind of human degradation that they describe is not an accidental by-product of liberalism but is caused by the theoretical project of liberalism itself’ (Kraynak 2001, p. 30). As he sees it, the core claim of the liberal tradition is the idea that ‘the less certain we are about the highest ends of life the more all people gain in dignity by seeking to determine their own identities and becoming the masters of their fate’ (Kraynak 2001, p. 30). In contrast, Kraynak observes that ‘the Thomistic conception of man is not that of an autonomous being whose rational will is an end-in-itself. For Thomas, reason has an end beyond itself—the knowledge and love of God and of God’s creation’ (Kraynak 2001, p. 81). In other words:

[Whereas] modern philosophers see reason as an autonomous power that reflects on itself or legislates for itself, the patristic and Scholastic theologians viewed reason in Platonic and Aristotelian fashion as a kind of eros or as potentiality directed toward actuality that seeks unification with the First Cause, which is God, and with the eternal ideas that exist in God’s mind as the rational patterns after which the universe is created. Using the classical conception of reason, human dignity and cosmic order appear on a comparative scale of rational substances…[D]ignity within the human species [thus] depends on one’s fullness of being as a rational substance whose mind and soul are drawn upward to God.

(Kraynak 2001, p. 83).

Having distinguished the Thomistic conception of human dignity from that of the liberal, especially the Kantian variant, Kraynak offered five reasons why Christianity has a deep resistance to the concept of human rights. Some of these five reasons overlap with the MacIntyrean four reasons listed above. They are: (i) Christianity places duties to God and to one’s neighbour before individual rights; (ii) Christianity’s foundation on divine revelation implies a duty to accept transcendent truth as well as authoritative pronouncements about truth by a hierarchical church rather than to accept the dictates of individual conscience, (iii) the Christian notion of original sin ‘instils a keen sense of how freedom can go awry’, (iv) Christianity places the common good above the rights of individuals, and (v) the Christian teaching about charity makes the notion of rights appear selfish. (Kraynak 2001, p. 153).

Kraynak concluded:

If this diagnosis is correct, then the highest priority of religious believers (indeed, of all concerned citizens) in the present age should be to restore the proper balance between the spiritual and political orders and to re-establish proper hierarchies in each order. I can think of no better way of restoring the proper order of things than by recovering St. Augustine’s doctrine of the Two Cities—the distinction between the city of God and the earthly city—and applying it to the modern age. This is actually a fairly radical proposal, the equivalent of replacing the Kantian Christianity which predominates today with the Augustinian Christianity in one form or another.

(Kraynak 2001, p. 181).

In this statement Kraynak has pointed to one of the most neuralgic issues in contemporary Christian intellectual life and it is that of whether to treat Kant as a friend or at least a foreign agent with whom one can do business, or as an enemy to be opposed.

5. James V Schall SJ (1928–2019)

Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy was endorsed by Fr James V Schall SJ who in his back-cover blurb described Kraynak as ‘one of the few but growing number of scholars who are aware of the limits of modern liberalism, particularly as a neutral or positive support for Christianity’.

Schall was a political philosopher who held positions at the Gregorian University (1964–1977) in Rome and later at Georgetown University in Washington DC (1977–2012), as well as an appointment at the University of San Francisco (1968–1977). He produced some 30 books of his own as well as editing and co-editing others and writing over 350 academic essays. He was also famous in Catholic literary circles as an opinion-piece writer and in this context he has been described as an “American Chesterton”. Significantly, for this paper, he was a strong critic of the Catholic attempt to marry natural law with natural rights. Like MacIntyre, he thought that those pursuing this project were well-intentioned, but he nonetheless judged that it was a self-defeating strategy. He compared Catholics who try to defend the Church’s teaching using the idiom of natural rights to a mouse in a cartoon in the New Yorker. In the cartoon the mouse is grinning happily while being pulled along in a toy car by a cat. One of the mouse’s friends is standing on the sidelines ‘frantically yelling at his companion in the toy car, “For God’s sake, think! Why is he [the cat] being so nice to you?” (Schall 2007). Schall implicitly agreed with the judgment of Michael Ignatieff that ‘secularism has become the lingua franca of global human rights as English has become the lingua franca of the global economy’ (Ignatieff 2011, p. 53). In his Jacques Maritain: the Philosopher in Society (1998) Schall acknowledged that Maritain did not want a Thomist conception of rights to be based on a voluntarist conception, that is, the idea that rights are whatever any individual wants them to be because the will of the individual is the highest good that trumps everything. Nonetheless, he concluded:

Whether Maritain’s tactic to retain the use of the words, while reformulating their meaning, is the best one seems less viable in the years since his death in 1973. Both rights and values are generally understood in a subjective manner that allows no objective component that would examine the meaning or content of the values or rights proposed by comparing them with natural law, the content of which is not solely formulated by the subjective will.

(Schall 1998, p. 95).

The idea that a legal regime built upon a bill of rights would automatically produce freedom and justice was regarded by Schall as utopian. He could point to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to show that state-directed violence can still flourish when bills of rights are a part of the constitutional law of a regime. He understood that what matters is the political culture and the political theories forming the political culture, not pieces of legislation that appear on their surface to say one thing but are then interpreted through an ideological sieve to mean something completely different. Moreover, Schall agreed with St. Augustine that grace was a gift, not a product of political prudence. (Augustine 2014). He concluded that ‘however important politics might be, the real drama and action in the world has to do with the City of God and the City of Man, neither of which could be located in an existing polity but passed through the hearts and choices of each person’ (Schall 1996, p. 4).

6. David L Schindler (1943–2022)

David L Schindler, who, like Schall, was based in Washington DC for much of his career, was first and foremost a metaphysician who approached questions of legal and political philosophy from a foundation in metaphysics. Theologically, he was primarily associated with Hans Urs von Balthasar, not with Augustine, though Balthasar was himself a great admirer of St. Augustine and published a work that took the form of selected quotations from The City of God and an introduction to them. (Balthasar 2021). Schindler’s attention to metaphysical foundations made him an opponent of the tradition of natural right. He observed:

A “right” as conventionally understood—as understood in the liberal tradition which has been a dominant force in America—is a claim which the self has on the other. The supposition is that the direction of obligation is from the other toward the self. The form or logic of the liberal understanding of rights, in other words, is self-centred. That logic presupposes a primitive externality of relation between the self and the other, which in turn makes the self the centre of relation. A right in this context, then, merely expresses the kind of obligation which results from this self-centricity of relation—that is an obligation first of others to me.

(D. L. Schindler 1990, pp. 17–18).

Concretely, Schindler suggested that those who attempt to use the language of rights to protect the unborn in their mother’s womb fail to see that they are appealing to a self-centric mode of reasoning that is precisely the kind of rationality that created a culture open to the practice of abortion in the first place. (D. L. Schindler 1990, p. 18). Moreover, in appealing to a version of natural law that may be acceptable to people of any religious tradition and none, they are engaging in ‘exactly the sort of abstraction of form which is characteristic of Cartesianism’ (D. L. Schindler 1990, p. 23). There can be, Schindler insisted, ‘no nature or natural laws which are neutral of religious form’ (D. L. Schindler 1990, p. 24).

“Cartesianism” is one of the key concepts in Schindler’s analysis of the culture of modernity. He contrasted the “form of love,” which is relational, with the “form of the machine”, where the components of the machine exist as separate, self-contained, non-relational entities, and he regarded the “form of the machine” as the key component of Cartesianism. The mechanical form gives priority to power over love. Schindler too can therefore be seen to frame his social theory on the perennial choice between two loves—one of power, and one of love understood as a gift of God and a gift of the human self, a nuptial relation of the two, the fruit of which is freedom.

7. David C Schindler

The philosopher David C Schindler has taken the baton from his theologian father, David L Schindler, and offered a whole series of seminal works on the relationship between metaphysics and freedom. (D. C. Schindler 2012, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023). Many of his publications reach the same conclusion as Kraynak—that modern liberal democracy proclaims in principle, but subverts in practice, the dignity of man. As David C. Schindler expresses the point: ‘freedom has come to represent little more in the popular imagination than the power to choose’, and this emaciated understanding is ‘essentially self-destructive’ since ‘the nature of what we pursue erodes the very thing we wish to affirm and cultivate’ (D. C. Schindler 2012, pp. xiii–xiv). Through his studies of the great names of German Idealism, Schindler demonstrates that the problem is ‘that we think of freedom as an end but define it as a means’ (D. C. Schindler 2012, p. xiv). Such a notion of freedom, he suggests, has become a source of nihilism.

Some Catholic social theorists would agree with Schindler’s analysis to this point, but their solution is to say that we simply need to order freedom ‘by reason, nature, law, or some other determining principle that lends meaning by providing an orienting context’ (D. C. Schindler 2012, p. xv). However, David C. Schindler thinks that such strategies, typical of people still trying to work within the tradition of liberalism, only contain the problem; they do not resolve it. As he writes: ‘it is not ultimately a critique of the conception of freedom so much as a critique of the use to which it is put; it is, in other words, an essentially moral rather than a substantial response. And because this is the case, it arguably tends to reinforce the nihilism…even in its efforts to combat it’ (D. C. Schindler 2012, p. xvi). Both Schindlers, father and son, have gone to war with the concept of freedom as freedom of choice. In his Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017), David C Schindler concludes:

If there is no basic reality that is given, and which as such presents a prior claim on our freedom, then even our biological origins fall in principle under our control, regardless of how much this possibility may continue to elude us practically speaking. There is a deep connection between the givenness of our theological origin and the givenness of our biological origin: one cannot stand for long once the other has been denied. When our very genetic code, the actual order at our foundation, is turned into an option…we reach a kind of perfection of the diabolical.

(D. C. Schindler 2017, pp. 274–75).

David C. Schindler also follows Augustine in God and the City: an Essay in Political Metaphysics (2023) in holding that political communities are “goods” in themselves and not something of merely instrumental value. As he writes: ‘We form community not just to be able to achieve certain goods impossible otherwise, but because it belongs to the highest human good to be in community. (D. C. Schindler 2023, pp. 87–88). This is consistent with the judgment of Oliver O’Donovan, author of Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community who suggested that ‘a view of politics as a [mere] choice between economic systems for distributing material goods would strike Augustine as a choice between two roads to hell’ (O’Donovan 2002, p. 23).

8. Michael Hanby

The theme of the intrinsic goodness of communal life has been taken up by David C Schindler’s colleague, Michael Hanby, author of Augustine and Modernity (2003), and given a more explicitly theological treatment. Hanby writes:

The classic, Catholic formulation of the spiritual reality of peoplehood is given to us in Augustine’s modification of Cicero, that a Republic is an ordo amoris, a group of rational beings bound together by a common love, which is to say, a common good. He offers an extensive argument that Truth, understood not simply as the a posteriori epistemic effect of searching and dialogue but the a priori ontological cause of them, is an indispensable dimension of this good. Such an understanding is reflected in the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium, which roots the historical reality of the populus Dei ontologically in the communio of the Trinity and in the aprioricity of God’s movement toward us in the Incarnation. It is because of the ontological aprioricity of truth before we possess it, that it is thus truly common and increased rather than decreased by our mutual communion in it. It is because there is first a common truth indivisibly present to all who participate in it, that we inhabit a common reality, and it is because of our prior communion in this common reality that communication between us is even possible. If there were no truly common truth, there could be no common good and ultimately, no common world. And where this common truth and common good go unrecognised, where there seems to be no common world, there can be no people and no political community. It is on such grounds as these that Augustine argues that Rome, in elevating private and divisible goods over the only god that is truly common, was never truly a republic.

(Hanby 2025, pp. 49–50.)

This conclusion relates directly to the distinction drawn by David Goodhart between two types of citizen/subject—the “anywheres and the somewheres” (Marr 2017). The “anywheres” feel no real connection to their place of domicile. Their sense of wellbeing is disconnected from membership of a community of people where they live, and consequently, they do not have a conception of a common good, that is, of a good that transcends the good of the individual. Often, in fact, they do not have one place of domicile but are constantly travelling and have multiple homes, apartments or “base camps”. Their conception of liberty, like that of the ancient Athenians in their decadent phase, is that of freedom from civic responsibilities. “Anywheres” are connected to money markets or industries that are multinational, and what interests them about the political realm is the way in which governments influence their niche within the international market. They do, in fact, have an idea of government as something like the management of a telephone company and they are content with that. They have no interest in patriotism. The “somewheres” in contrast are deeply embedded in their local community and are committed to fostering the good of the whole community.

Modern so-called republics built upon liberal theories that admit of no conception of a common good give epistemic authority to the ideas of technocrats and other “experts”. These people are trusted because their ideas are supposed to be neutral in the war of competing traditions. They are supposed to be experts in formulating policies that are “value-neutral”. These types were particularly powerful managers of the COVID epidemic and the people responsible for the suppression of civil liberties during that time. They exercise enormous authority over public policies. The foundations for their “authority” have however been subject to extensive critique from within the stable of post-liberal authors. Alasdair MacIntyre famously wrote:

The expert, that figure who so often justifies financial subsidizing of the social sciences by public and private corporations, turns out to be a mythological beast. Like the unicorn, a social existence and social importance is conferred upon him as long as people believe in him….He thus legitimates the treatment of the surface phenomena of social life in one way rather than another by invoking the notion of deeper structures. This was once the claim of the prophet and the priest, and the expert plays a role in modern bureaucracies not dissimilar to those played by prophets and priests in more traditional societies.

(MacIntyre 1973, p. 339).

Hanby would no doubt concur with MacIntyre’s judgment here. In his essay “Synodality, Sociologism and the Judgement of History”, Hanby explicitly endorses MacIntyre’s critique of bureaucratic rationality as a form of the reduction of ‘authority to power by detaching power from its inherent ordination to goodness and truth’ (Hanby 2021, p. 720). Echoing MacIntyre, Hanby asserts that ‘bureaucratic processes are naturally manipulable, and they conceal unaccountable accumulation and exercises of power behind the supposed neutrality of procedures and the alleged objectivity of the social sciences’ (Hanby 2021, p. 720). Neither in the body politic nor in the Church, the body of Christ, are bureaucratic forms of decision-making conducive to fostering the common good. Lyndon Shakespeare (2016), in his The Body of Christ in the Age of Management, has written an excellent account of how church bureaucracies operating by reference to contemporary business management theory often undermine the work of evangelisation.

Positively, Hanby offers the richest of the contemporary Augustinian political theologies since he examines subjects such as freedom and the common good from the perspective of the Holy Trinity. Or, to put the matter differently, he works downwards from the Trinity to theological anthropology, and then from theological anthropology to ecclesiology and social theory. Revelation is not quarantined so as not to scare off the atheists. It is foundational. The key argument of Augustine and Modernity was that ‘at issue within the culture of modernity is the Trinity itself and specifically whether the meaning of human nature and human agency are understood to occur within Christ’s mediation of the love and delight shared as donum between the Father and the Son, or beyond it’ (Hanby 2003, p. 73). Put differently, one might say that the key issue is whether Christology is needed to understand human nature. Joseph Ratzinger made precisely this point in his essay on the treatment of human dignity in Gaudium et spes. Ratzinger agreed with the criticism of Walter Kasper and others that Gaudium et spes was poorly drafted, with the result that the sections were not well integrated. In particular, the first part was merely ‘theistically hued” while the later part was specifically Trinitarian. Speaking of a subterranean extrinsicism that runs through the document, Ratzinger rhetorically asked why exactly the reasonable and perfectly free human being described in the first sections of Gaudium et spes should suddenly be burdened with the story of Christ that comes in the later sections? (Ratzinger 1969, p. 120). Hanby’s point is that the culture of modernity is what developed when Immanuel Kant decided that it mattered not whether there are three persons in the deity or ten or, in other words, when philosophers failed to understand the significance of Trinitarian theology for social theory.

9. John Milbank

Hanby’s doctoral dissertation that became the book Augustine and Modernity was supervised by John Milbank. From outside the formal Catholic stable, in the territory of Anglo-Catholicism or “High Church Anglicanism”, one can find a wealth of neo-Augustinian social theory publications by John Milbank and others in his “Radical Orthodoxy” circle, including Catherine Pickstock and Adrian Pabst. Milbank has in fact described his work as a “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”—where Postmodern does not mean abandoning the idea of truth, but literally post-modern in the sense of seeking to escape the modern and often totalizing “logics” or metaphysics of everyone from Duns Scotus forward to the heroes of the so-called Enlightenment and then onto the new set of problems created by twentieth century social theorists falsely marketing themselves as metaphysically and theologically neutral. The Radical Orthodoxy team has mapped the cultural force of a series of “bastard dualisms” (above all the separation of nature and grace, and faith and reason, from their intrinsic relationship to each other) that began to develop from the 14th century and Milbank has unmasked the pretensions of contemporary sociologists to theological neutrality. The Thomistic synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christian revelation began to unravel with the interventions of Franciscan scholars, principally Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (1287–1347). Contrary to those who argue that St. Thomas Aquinas was the first Whig, Milbank, Pickstock and others in their milieu argue that this dubious honour should go to Scotus. (Pickstock 2005). Milbank insists that the culture of modernity is at root Franciscan, not Thomistic. On the Radically Orthodox reading, Whig Thomism really owes more to Scotus than Aquinas. (Milbank 2012). One might suggest that Milbank and others in his circle are, like MacIntyre, champions of “Thomas the Augustinian”, not “Thomas the Kantian”.

The two most recent political theory publications from this stable are Milbank and Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future (2016) and Pabst’s Postliberal Politics (2021). In The Politics of Virtue, Milbank and Pabst, consistent with David C. Schindler and others, are critical of a merely negative conception of freedom as “freedom from”, built upon ‘a procedural, formalistic conception of justice and an instrumental notion of reason’.(Milbank and Pabst 2016, p. 18). The combined result is that ‘individuals are proclaimed “autonomous” when all the while they are subjected to the instrumental logic of bureaucratic control and commercial exchange’ (Milbank and Pabst 2016, p. 19). Milbank and Pabst strongly concur with the judgment of Slavoj Žižek that negative liberty has led to an explosion of bureaucratic regulations that limit human freedom in the name of protecting other people from an ever-increasing list of forms of discrimination. In an earlier work, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (2003), Milbank observed that professionals are ‘no longer trusted, but instead must be endlessly spied upon, and measured against a spatial checklist of routinized procedure that is alien to all genuine inculcation of excellence’ (Milbank 2003, p. 185). Today, Milbank and Pabst conclude that ‘a new, rootless oligarchy now practises a manipulative populism while holding in contempt the genuine priorities of most people’ (Milbank and Pabst 2016, p. 2).

In his Postliberal Politics, Pabst also explores the ways in which ‘capitalism, liberal and authoritarian ideologies collaborate in creating a system of bio-surveillance’ (Pabst 2021, p. 43). Pabst traces such totalitarian temptations to the positivism of Auguste Comte and ‘his vision of a society in which humans are mechanical systems ruled by the laws of science’ (Pabst 2021, p. 44). As he writes: ‘What matters [for the contemporary Comteans] is not the free choice of the individual but rather collective welfare, and this is best maximized by a class of technocratic planners and scientific elites who re-engineer human beings’ (Pabst 2021, p. 44).

Both Milbank and Pabst have also been critical of the natural rights tradition. Milbank reads it as yet another by-product of Franciscan nominalism and Pabst has linked the culture of rights to what Pope Benedict XVI called the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ (Milbank 2012; Pabst 2010). According to Pabst:

The fundamental problem with modern human rights discourse is that it reduces all rights to subjective rights granted to, and exercised, by freely choosing individuals—an entirely circular logic that brackets questions about the source of rights and practical ethical guidance for their exercise.

By contrast, Christianity and other religious traditions offer an alternative account. If rights are seen as actually objective rather than exclusively subjective, then they are not merely grounded in individuals but relate to a wider political, socio-economic and cultural order that mirrors objective reality. Such an order is primarily composed of individuals organised in groups and associations—rather than ruled by the market-state or a theocratic regime.

(Pabst 2010).

Pabst encapsulates many such post-liberal arguments against the natural right tradition by suggesting that it is nothing less than a mythology that ‘masks the sinister reality of the collusion of political absolutism and cultural relativism’ (Pabst 2010).

10. Gregory Morgan

The theme of a secular mythology also arises in Gregory Morgan’s Natural Law and the Secular Mythos (2025). Morgan, a millennial generation Catholic priest, declares: ‘[natural law], when construed as an epistemological and trans-cultural lingua franca, adjudged capable of legitimating the rational intelligibility and universal applicability of specific Christian moral principles within contemporary “secular” discourse—has failed’ (Morgan 2025, p. ix). The bottom line for Morgan is that too many Catholic scholars have bought into the mythology of a secular order and have engaged in all manner of intellectual contortions to prove that natural law can have standing in the courts of this supposed order by simply muting or even hiding the relationship between natural law and divine law. Morgan applauds John Milbank for avoiding that rabbit hole. Rather, Milbank has ‘helped lay the cornerstone for restoring natural law to the theological reality of divine government, thereby inviting theologians to reconsider how the recovery of this explicitly theological element of the tradition need not invalidate the discourse but, in fact, grounds its very possibility’ (Morgan 2025, p. 169). That said, Morgan does not follow the Milbank project all the way. Milbank subscribes to a different ecclesiology and even elements of a different moral theology from that of the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church and Morgan does not concur with every single element of Milbank’s genealogical reading of how Christians got themselves into the tangle of doing homage to a secular mythos. However, Morgan’s work does draw attention to the irony that it is the Anglican Milbank’s account of natural law that is most consistent with the Trinitarian anthropology of Gaudium et spes, not the theologically neutered account offered by many Catholic scholars.

Paragraph 22 of Gaudium et spes, loudly amplified during the pontificate of John Paul II and endorsed in the theological anthropology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, rejects a sharp separation of the orders of nature and grace. It rejects what in theological parlance is called the “duplex ordo” or colloquially the “cup-cake theory” of the relationship between nature and grace. A theologically neutered account of natural law is congruous with the duplex ordo since it recognises an order of “pure nature”, and those who recognise an order of “pure nature” have no problem going one step further and recognising an order of “pure reason”. Pure nature and pure reason share a logical affinity. All accounts of natural law rest upon ontological and epistemological presuppositions, that is, upon theories about the nature of being and the nature of rationality, and it is typical of Catholic versions of natural law that seek in one way or another to assimilate natural law to the liberal tradition, that they presuppose the duplex ordo. They presuppose an order of pure nature and an order of pure reason to which can be added grace and revelation for those who want to take the supplements. As Morgan explains: ‘in the same way that Kant exploited the space of “pure nature” carved out by duplex-ordo theologians, so now are certain natural law theorists exploiting the epistemological space of “pure reason” that Kant carved out for philosophy” (Morgan 2025, p. 191). If however one rejects the duplex ordo, this means that one needs an account of natural law that factors in the work of grace and revelation from the base line, not as discretionary add-ons or supplements like a sun-roof is an “optional extra” when buying a car.

Morgan’s central argument is that different accounts of natural law can be classified by reference to how they understand the mythology of the secular and what they propose to do in relation to it. He concludes:

Once a theory of natural law is prophylactically constrained by the boundary instilled by the assimilation of a duplex-ordo ontology, it becomes limited to what we might call an epistemological ethics of the sublime, that is to say, an epistemology that sharply recoils from a teleological discourse of participated perfections and gravitates inwards towards a delineated discourse of “possessive individualism”

(Morgan 2025, p. 191).

Both the Augustinian and Thomist traditions offer ‘a teleological discourse of participated perfections’ and their conceptions of human dignity are linked to these perfections. (Loughlin 2026). Morgan’s argument is that instead of marginalising or even suppressing this element of Catholic thought, its amplification would offer a disenchanted world and especially a generation searching for avenues of re-enchantment with the foundation stone of a Christian Humanism. Moreover, this full-bodied Christian Humanism would be sufficiently robust to compete with the failed humanism of Kant and his circle, and the not-so-attractive humanism of Nietzsche that gives priority to power over love. Conceptions of human flourishing need to factor in a role for love, since humans cannot operate without love, and love takes us back to the choice between the two cities of Augustine.

11. A Non-Secular Mythology and the Inspiration of Central Europe

The above “snap-shots” of voices critical of projects to assimilate Catholic social theory to the liberal tradition, all tend to agree that the realm of the political is always undergirded by some “mythology”, whether it be the mythology of “pure nature” and “pure reason” or the mythology of the worker’s paradise where all social divisions and all private property will be abolished, or the mythology of the Third Reich where the world will be run by Aryans who enjoy listening to Wagner, or the “mythology” of Auguste Comte by virtue of which technocrats will rule the world and use science to improve the order of nature, the mythology of the “Anywheres” for whom there is no common good at all and governments are not really all that different from telephone companies, or other public utilities, and the “mythology” (or, as Christians would say, theology) of Augustine’s City of God, to name just some of the options. As Charles Taylor argued in his Modern Social Imaginaries, implicit in our social imaginaries is the ability to recognise ideal cases and beyond the ideal stands some notion of a moral or metaphysical order, of which the norms and ideals make sense. (Taylor 2004, p. 24).

Much of liberal political theory, however, is an attempt to construct a harmonious society in the absence of any such moral or metaphysical order. The mythology of liberalism is that we can live without mythology and we can construct a form of government that is completely indifferent and neutral regarding all mythologies. Many post-liberal theorists reject this claim as a sinister and manipulative lie that masks the totalitarian tendencies of the modern liberal state. This awareness of the totalitarian temptations latent within liberalism is often stronger among scholars in countries formerly caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain—countries that prior to 1989 were known as the “captive nations” (following the establishment of the National Captive Nations Committee by President Eisenhower in 1959). This may be because the choice between some version of liberal political theory and another form of social theory that embodied metaphysical presuppositions was the choice that stood before the anti-Communist leaders of the generation of 1989. This was the Polish Solidarity generation and their fellow anti-Communist intellectuals who led the “velvet revolutions” in the Czech and Slovak Republics, in Hungary and Romania and other parts of the former Habsburg empire. They were reluctant to replace one social theory (Marxism) based on the mythology of dialectical materialism with another social theory (liberalism) based on the mythology of the social contract.

In his 1991 New Year’s address, the Czech leader, Václav Havel, argued that Central Europeans now had an opportunity to fill with something meaningful the political vacuum that arose in Central Europe after the break-up of the Habsburg empire, and to transform a phenomenon that had so far been historical into a phenomenon that is political. In describing the cultural foundation of such a new order, Havel referred to a statement of Tomas Masaryk that Czechs should be inspired by the ideas of their philosophers and theologians, Chelčicky and Comenius, and in so doing should be guided by “Jesus, not Caesar” (Havel 1990, p. 57). Havel further suggested that such a foundation should not only form the basis of post-communist culture in the Czech and Slovak republics, but that it could be exported to Western Europe, becoming the specific Central European contribution to international politics. Similarly, in his essay “Can there be a Central Europe” Erazim Kohák (1933–2020) argued that the specific contribution of Comenius was that he challenged the Cartesian rationality which came to dominate the culture of Western Europe (and scholars like David L Schindler would add, the Anglosphere). (Kohák 1984, p. 91).

Marcin Król, who was then the editor of the Warsaw underground journal Res Publica, referred to the condition generated by the fact/value dichotomy of David Hume and others as the “terrorism of the lack of ideals” (terroryzm bezideowości) (Król 1984, p. 22). In his essay on the Stanczycy group of nineteenth-century Polish conservatives, he noted that ‘a belief in a transcendent God was for them the only guarantor of the conviction that the human intellect supported by tradition did not move away from reality and enter the region of the abyss’ (Król 1980, p. 25). This was also the position of Karol Wojtyła/Pope John Paul II who, in his address to the European Parliament in 1988, declared that ‘wherever man no longer relies on the great reality that transcends him, he risks handing himself over to the uncontrollable power of the arbitrary and to pseudo-absolutes that destroy him’ (John Paul II 1988).

The Czech Jesuit Josef Zverina described the typical modern man whose intellectual horizons have been lowered by the retreat of God from his cosmology as a mere animal producens et consumens and Erazim Kohák compared the predicament of such animals with that of the ancient barbarian tribes and examined the differences between the lives of the barbarians and those Romans who embodied the characteristics of homo humanitas. According to Kohák, the homo humanitas of ancient Rome cultivated his life, not leaving it at the mercy of his momentary whims and their gratification but ordering it according to his moral sense. His humanity was not simply a ‘product’ of ‘natural’ drives and needs, accultured in the course of history to accommodate the demands of a reality principle imposed by social co-existence; he was not simply driven by stimuli but was also capable of responding to ideal motivations. (Kohák 1984, p. 91). The mark of humanitas was cultus, the recognition of the moral sense of life and the intrinsic value of the other. Antithetically, the barbarian as an ideal type was a ‘being locked in temporality, marked by the innocent egoism of a healthy animal’ (Kohák 1984, p. 112). Kohák concluded that the man of culture is one who honors the nobility of being. The homo humanitas is a being who no longer simply asks, ‘Do I like it?’, but rather, ‘Is it beautiful?’; not simply ‘Is it useful?’, but rather, ‘Is it good?’; no longer simply ‘How do I feel about it?’, but rather, ‘Is it right?’ The perspective focused on the question ‘How do I feel about it?’ is the essence of barbarism (Kohák 1984, p. 112).

John Paul II’s analogue for Kohák’s new barbarism was the concept of the culture of death. In many of his homilies he warned the world that it was currently at a crossroads between a culture of death or a civilization of love. An entirely materialistic cosmology is the foundation stone for the culture of death, or what Benedict XVI called ‘the dictatorship of relativism’ (Benedict XVI 2005).

Thus the conclusion of many Central European public intellectuals in the 1980s was that without a Christian anthropology and soteriology, liberal political theory cannot ultimately defend the dignity of the human person and fosters instead a kind of neo-pagan idolatry of the state since the political order becomes the highest good to which all other considerations are subordinated. The post-1989 publications of Poland’s Ryszard Legutko, including his Society as a Department Store: Critical Reflections on the Liberal State (Legutko 2002), The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Legutko 2016) and The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols (Legutko 2021) continue to argue the case against a Catholic embrace of the liberal political tradition. The alternative is, as Benedict XVI suggested, that people agree to live veluti si Deus daretur, that is, as if God existed.

12. Conclusions

This brings to an end the survey of the social theory ideas to be found among the publications of contemporary theorists who strongly self-identify with the Augustinian tradition. As stated above, throughout the past century and a half the dominant movement in Catholic social theory has been in the direction of a rapprochement with the liberal tradition, not a criticism of it. The arrival of an Augustinian pope may or may not herald an Augustinian social theory revival but the 2026 papal address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican certainly offered elements of hope for those identified above as members of an Augustinian “minor chorus”. At the very least Pope Leo made it clear that he understands that the natural rights tradition has what he called a “short-circuit” issue. The project of transposing Catholic natural law theory into the idioms of Liberal natural rights theory has not been without its dangers. At least since the papacy of John Paul II there has been an understanding that the foundations of rights do in fact matter.

Conversely, a retrieval of the political theory of St. Augustine may have the effect of restoring the broken links between nature and grace, faith and reason, history and ontology, and, above all, the liberal severance of the city of God from the common good of the social order. In transcending these dualisms it may also entail a rejection of the terms in which many modern political debates have been framed. In doing so it may unveil the hidden mythologies driving different social theories. It may call out the bogus claims to moral and metaphysical neutrality. Instead of shadow-boxing using a language that has been designed to thwart all appeals to a non-subjective account of rights, a retrieval of the Augustinian framework could move the discussion onto the level of competing mythologies, competing “gods”, competing conceptions of exactly what is the foundation of human dignity. If this territory became the battleground it would become easier for Catholic intellectuals to talk about competing loves, especially the choice between love and power. If it were to become clear that this is the most fundamental of all choices, the same intellectuals may find that they finally have a lingua franca for dialogue with those of good will but little or no faith. It may become evident that if there is a lingua franca it is the language of love not the language of rights.