Michael Hanby is one of those writers I generally want to agree with, yet whose writing often leaves me uncertain which “map” we’re on. Typically, at least when I have a lot of sympathy with the basic analysis, I just conclude that the writer must be deeply involved in a more specialized conversation than I am. This article, however, had too many good observations in it for me to pass it over.
First, then, in the context of the discussion Hanby’s having, here, “liberal” seems to mean “an American Catholic committed to functioning within post-Enlightenment secular synthesis” (roughly “classical liberal”) and “radical” seems to mean “an American Catholic who expects the post-Enlightenment secular synthesis to prove incompatible with faithful Christianity.” Specifically, some of these “radicals” embrace what has been called “the Benedict Option,” though others (including myself) are not confident that proposal is quite ready for the light of day. Hanby’s article offers some criticism of “the Benedict Option,” but also answers some “liberal” criticism that Hanby considers ill-founded. I agree with Hanby’s arguments in answer, so let me try to find a few of the pithiest portions. I will clip and add emphasis freely:
The questions at issue, then, between liberals and radicals are not first political—whether to advance or retreat, engage or withdraw—but philosophical and theological: what the truth of God and the human being is and whether it is finally worth knowing, how this truth should bear on Christian existence today and whether it begets deeper forms of engagement than those afforded by liberal order, and above all, whether we are willing to stake our lives on this truth even if it makes us strangers to the public square. These are demanding questions, and moreover, they are the questions which this moment demands. We cannot resolve them by refusing to think about them.
(source: On Retreat | Michael Hanby | First Things)
(No, don’t run away; I want you to finish the post!)
Despite my sympathy for many of [its] “culture building” elements…, I have a number of misgivings about the “Benedict Option”….
First there is a tendency, owing perhaps to its MacIntyrean inspiration, to conceive of this “option” primarily in practical or political terms, that is, as a kind of “communitarian” stance within an increasingly hostile public square. This is not simply wrong. But left unqualified it would leave us with something of a “congregationalist” ecclesiology, and moreover, it is not sufficient to distinguish the “Benedict Option” as Benedictine. Preventing the former defect would require, among other things, that we think more ecclesiologically and less politically and that we regard the ecclesial order as more comprehensive than the political.
(source: On Retreat | Michael Hanby | First Things)
To assent to the rules of engagement prescribed by liberal public reason is to accept a voluntary and arbitrary limit on how deeply one is willing to think, which then becomes an involuntary limit on how far one is able to see. … The point of those analyses and “historical genealogies” that have become an object of derision among the liberals—oddly, from those who advocate a return to Madisonian principles—is certainly not to retreat to the comfort of the library or the coffee shop; nor is it to deny the contingencies of history by suggesting that 1968 follows upon 1776 with some kind of mechanical necessity. Rather it is, first, to understand the truth of our predicament more deeply so that we may better discern how to act, and secondly, to dent the liberals’ apparently unshakeable confidence in these foundational assumptions.
(source: On Retreat | Michael Hanby | First Things)
[L]iberal Catholic thought moves entirely within the unquestioned conviction that liberal principles are mere articles of peace and that the issue between the Church and liberal society is therefore not about the true nature of things—this question can be set aside—but is merely moral and political. So it ends up settling for a truth that is just “true enough” for present practical purposes and giving us natural law without nature, which is surrendered to the exclusive authority of empirical science. Christians are then left pointing to sociological maladies to vindicate our claims or appealing to the authority of a “pure science” which doesn’t exist; or in the case of “same sex marriage,” we’re reduced to pleading for private exemptions from public “justice.” Meanwhile the state is fundamentally redefining human nature under our noses with nary a word from the Church or from Christian intellectuals, who mostly appear not to notice. This approach may suffice to win some battles—a statute here, a court case there—and these are genuine political goods which are not to be gainsaid. But it is not enough to win the war, if that means keeping alive the memory of God, nature, and the human person in an increasingly inhuman and antihuman age.
(source: On Retreat | Michael Hanby | First Things)
