Further Comments on "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self"
An Afterword of Sorts...
When I wrote my critique of Carl R. Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (RTMS), I mainly focused on the fact that Trueman’s positive positions on the nature of the self, and the relation of the individual to society bear much in common with those which are being promoted by the secular world against the Christian faith — viz. the self as the historically-embedded by-product of dialogically (i.e. linguistically) based social interactions, anti-individualism, and communitarianism. What I was not aware of at the time was that those very same postmodern ideas have a prior source in Roman Catholic theology and philosophy. This is a subject I will be covering quite a bit in my upcoming book From Fruit to Root: A Genealogy of “Radical” Hospitality (which I am publishing in serial form here for paid subscribers of Logia),1 but I think needs to be touched upon at the moment so Christians can understand the depth of Trueman’s erroneous thinking in RTMS, and avoid them at all costs.
The Roman Catholic Roots of Communitarianism
The developmental history of Romanism’s false doctrines — to wit, the mass, the immaculate conception, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the veneration of saints, and the treasury of merit (to name just a few) — has been noted by many Protestant theologians who have made it clear that the Church of Rome today is not the same church it was two thousand years ago.2 What I have not seen critically analyzed as much, however, are some of her key ethical teachings. It seems like many Protestants assume that the Roman Catholic Church happens to get these ideas right somehow. This is obviously false, given that issues like the veneration of Mary and the saints are actions deemed good and holy by the Roman Catholic Church, despite the fact that they are forbidden by God throughout the entirety of the Bible.
Nevertheless, it does happen.Nominal protestants have long partnered with Roman Catholics on moral issues in society, claiming that they share the same views, and derive them from the Scriptures,3 when nothing could be further from the truth.4 This seems to have taken place with the interpretation of Matthew 25:31-46, a key text for social justice advocates.
The passage in question teaches that on the day of judgment, Christ will separate the sheep (i.e. believers) from the goats (i.e. hypocrites/false-believers) on the basis of how each group responded to “the least of these” (i.e. representatives of Christ who are in need of basic assistance). In church history, the interpretation of this passage was initially very straight forward. Those who are “the least among” the Christians were other Christians in need, travelling missionaries, preachers, teachers, evangelists, persecuted Christians fleeing the sword. Early church fathers didn’t write a lot about this passage, but when they did they viewed it correctly as that the “least among” them were Christians, not an undifferentiated mass of people in need.
This position, however, changed over time due to various historical and socio-economic reasons. Helen Rhee explains this in her book Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, writing —
When Constantine seized the imperial power in the West with the power of the Christian God (312 CE), the church had been functioning as a formidable social and economic institution with a massive operation of charity, as already suggested. Constantine’s unprecedented imperial patronage of the church did not prompt a brand new theological base for the work the church had been doing, which by then had been securely established, but it transformed the scale, way, and impact that the church’s charity and wealth had on Roman society. Conferring religious freedom on all, Constantine restored church properties and granted the churches and bishops financial subsidy and clerical exemption from all compulsory public services and personal taxes. With further “pro-Christian” policies before and after his sole reign of the Empire in 324, their overall impact on the church was nothing less than revolutionary. Among other things, he exempted church lands and other properties from pious endowments and taxation, endowed lands in many parts of the Empire, and in sum provided the church with “the abundance of good things” (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 10.8.1). Furthermore, Constantine granted bishops the final judicial authority in arbitrating civil suits especially on behalf of the poor.
With imperial largesse (restricted to the Catholic Church), Constantine made the church not only officially visible but also accountable to the public for the very public gifts it received. Up to this point, the church received offerings from the faithful, especially the middling group and the wealthy, because it primarily cared for the poor of its own, that is, Christians. Now, traditional Christian charity came to be regarded as a public service, and Christian identity was all the more linked to the church’s care of the poor in Roman society, both Christians and non-Christians, as “the rich must assume the secular obligations and the poor must be supported by the wealth of the churches” (Cod. Theod. 16.2.6).
With a Christian population reaching a majority in the mid-fourth century and Christianity becoming a major social force, the church would literally act as a mediator between the rich and the poor of the society, and bishops emerged as “the lovers of the poor” and “the governors of the poor” in their public role. For all the imperial gifts and privileges in exchange for the ecclesiastical care of the poor, the faithful were not necessarily off the hook for their obligation to almsgiving and charity. Although there was hardly a new theological basis of almsgiving that had not already been addressed, church leaders, to be seen in the rest of the readings, tirelessly exhorted the (wealthy) faithful to almsgiving and charity with further theological augmentation.
Familiar and interconnected themes continued to appear in the writings of the Greek, Latin, and Syriac Fathers now as the established church tradition: for instance, earthly wealth versus heavenly wealth; almsgiving as effecting atonement for sin and pious lending to God; the symbiotic exchange between the rich and the poor; the pious poor and the wicked rich; God’s creative intent of common use for humanity; and identification of the poor with Christ. The last theme underwent significant development in this period; based on Matthew 25:31–45, a classic message now with universal application would be set for the rest of Christian history: in every poor person (regardless of one’s Christian faith), Christ is fed, given drink, and welcomed as a guest. Whatever is given to the poor is given to Christ.5
Monasteries would unofficially codify this new misinterpretation of Matt 25:31-46 in their monastic rules, developing a way of life around the misunderstanding that Christians must dispossess themselves of all of their goods in the service of others or else be deemed a thieving goat by Christ on the day of judgment, and consequently be thrown into purgatory or eternal hell. For their new teaching on “God’s creative intent of common use [of creation and, therefore, products made from creation] for humanity” implied that those who do not provide for others who are in need are guilty of theft. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church’s teachers conflation of the Imago Dei6 (which all men are by virtue of creation) with the Imago Christi7 (which only the elect are by virtue of re-creation/redemption), further implied that a failure to place the common good over and against one’s individual pursuit of his own good is a direct attack on the dignity of the human person, and an indirect attack on Christ.
The monasteries held to a communitarian understanding of the individual and his relation to the group/society, in other words, which laid great stress on the dignity of the human person in general, and more so on the poor who are said to reflect Christ in a particularly stronger way. Socio-economically, that there are striking commonalities between this kind of thinking and Marxism is not a moot point. Much later in history, after the new interpretation of Matt 25:31-46 and its attendant doctrinal changes had been codified by the church of Rome, in the 1930s-1950s, Roman Catholic social teaching began to be articulated by church authorities (including the pope) in a more explicit manner.
As Nazism and Marxism wreaked havoc on nations, killing millions of people, and threatened the Roman Catholic Church’s existence, intellectual hot spots of France during the 1930s-1950s saw the development of a new philosophy, primarily among its Roman Catholics thinkers, called personalism. Thomas D. Williams explains —
Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood – human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person’s essentially relational or social dimension.
...Personalists stress the person’s nature as a social being. According to personalists, the person never exists in isolation, and moreover persons find their human perfection only in communion with other persons. Interpersonal relations are never superfluous or optional to the person, but are indicated by his nature and an essential component of his fulfillment.8
Although primarily made up of Roman Catholics, the personalist movement in France also included philosophers from different religions, including Judaism. The most significant among the Jewish personalists was Emmanuel Levinas, whose thinking had a great influence on the ethical, anthropological, and socio-political thinking of one of postmodernism’s key architects — Jacques Derrida.
The Parisian personalists were very well acquainted with one another, and contributed to one of the most historically significant intellectual journals of the time period called Esprit. The personalists attacked capitalism, “bourgeois individualism” (i.e. individualism), and critiqued the Enlightenment’s prioritization of reason its ability to apprehend and understand reality.
During their popular reign, the Roman Catholic personalists were in conflict with intellectual Marxists. However, their conflict was over a difference of understanding as regards socio-economics, nor was it about the relationship of the individual to the social body; rather, their conflict was primarily over theology proper and, therefore, the church. Thus, despite all of their conflict it remains the case that for the Catholic Personalists (as well as Levinas) and the Marxists, there were several key points of agreement. They agreed that —
Modernization had resulted in man’s alienation from his true purpose as a social being
Capitalism was to blame for man’s alienation
Individualism was to blame for society’s moral decay
A corrective to the Enlightment’s emphasis on the individual as autonomous knower and actor was a form of collectivism which subjected the individual to a broader set of goals beyond self-interest.
These ideas were promulgated by the Personalists, the Communists, and by the Postmodern philosopher influenced by them both — Jacques Derrida.
This accounts for why so much of the thinking presented in RTMS overlaps with that of the present day communitarians, Marxists, and contemporary Roman Catholics from which Trueman derives his analysis of the “modern” self — they come from the same source, Roman Catholic social teaching as it was articulated by the French Roman Catholic Personalists.
While I have pointed to Hegel as one of the key influences on Trueman via the philosophy of Charles Taylor, it ought to be noted that Charles Taylor is a Roman Catholic (i.e. a communitarian). As for Hegel, although he was a “Protestant” by dint of being born in a protestant European country, his notion of dialecticism was, in part at least, derived from Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism.9 And this is something he shares in common with Aristotle's other descendant responsible for the development of Roman Catholic philosophy, namely Thomas Aquinas.
What this demonstrates, again, is that RTMS is not a genealogical assessment of the “modern” self. Rather, it is an apologetic for a moralistic, family-friendly version of the socio-political thinking we are seeing on the left — it is a communitarian/collectivist criticism of individualism, capitalism, and the primacy of reason. RTMS promotes an anthropological and socio-economic way of thinking that is destructive of nearly everything the Bible directly identifies as evidence of our distinct and dignified existence as the only bearers of God’s image.
—h.
Here are the available section, as of this time —
If you’re interested in this subject, check out Timothy F. Kauffman’s excellent podcast The Diving Board, and his article “Reclaiming Irenaeus” over at the Trinity Foundation’s website.
e.g. Evangelicals and Catholics Together and The Manhattan Declaration are two abominable documents in which evangelicals openly partner with Rome on an assumed shared foundation of a biblically derived understanding of morality.
See Robbins, John W. “Bleating Wolves — The Meaning of Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=142.
Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xxx—xxxii.
Image of God.
Image of Christ.
“Personalism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nov 12, 2009, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/. (emphasis added)
The situation is a little more complex and can’t be delved into here, but if you are interested in understanding the basic point, see Gentry, Gerard. “The Concept of Life in German Idealism and Its Aristotelian Roots”, in Intellectual History Review Vol. 31, No. 3 (August: 2021).