Liberalism is a Theodicy
The holiday season tends to bring up old debates among family members. Unresolved disputes from years ago bubble up in unexpected ways. A lot of times, we think we are arguing about something new, but really what we fight about are unresolved antagonisms. To understand what is dividing us, we need to foreground the submerged issues. This too is part of the work of intellectual historians, particularly genealogists. We work to uncover the various family squabbles within the modern world. Eric Nelson’s recent The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God attempts to show the deep history of contemporary debates about fairness in the liberal political tradition. Nelson contends that debates about justice in political life are fundamentally debates about whether the created world is just. As he writes in his preface, “liberal political philosophers have been unwittingly taking up positions in the theodicy debate—that is the debate over whether the justice of God is impeached by the nature of the created world.” Nelson’s book is written in layers of historical context from the ancient to the modern. These layers are meant to elucidate that these debates mirror key theological debates that take place in the wake of John Rawls, the giant of liberal political philosophy.
It is not that contemporary figures have wholly forgotten their early modern forebears like John Milton, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Rather, Nelson maintains that contemporary liberal thinkers have neglected the theological context in which early modern debates took place. Nelson attends to the largely Calvinist frameworks in which these retrospectively secular thinkers operated and the lingering Pelagianism in their writing. Nelson reminds us that these early modern political debates were thoroughly theological and that figures adapted into the secular Enlightenment tradition were, in truth, arguing within the Christian tradition. In this, he writes an excellent companion piece to J. Judd Owen’s Making Religion Safe for Democracy. Both Owens and Judd reveal the theological import of liberal debates in order to clarify contemporary debates.
Nelson’s book makes two moves. The first is to examine John Rawls’s recently discovered senior thesis written at Princeton University, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith. (You know you are an important thinker when your undergrad thesis gets published!) For Nelson, Rawls’s ideas about moral arbitrariness, moral luck, the difference principle, and even the original position are grounded in Rawls’s critique of Pelagianism. For Nelson, Rawls’s thesis helps disclose the core debates between Pelagians and Augustinians/Calvinists that have run throughout the modern liberal tradition. As he writes, “liberalism . . . began life as a theodicy.” Even if we think we have shunted God to the side, we remain perplexed by whether there is an antecedent standard of justice which we can live up to. For Nelson, a Pelagian is “a rationalist who insists on the metaphysical freedom human beings have to address the theodicy problem.” This contrasts with a Calvinist or Augustinian who maintains that the theodicy problem—the injustice of the world—can only be addressed by grace through the salvific action of Christ.
For Nelson, the liberal political tradition grew out of the debates about theodicy and justification. These arguments formed Rawls’s early views and consequently they shape Rawls’s more mature views as well as post-Rawlsian thinkers. These debates have regarded whether the distribution of goods have arisen arbitrarily or if they have been somehow earned by their owners. These goods include such things as a positive personality, a good work ethic, or inherited wealth. If they are arbitrarily and unjustly distributed, aren’t we required to remedy that by redistributing these goods by whatever means possible? For Nelson, this question does not make sense if we ignore its underlying premises (which are historically situated in Pelagian versus Augustinian debates). The underlying premises are made up of these questions: “are moral principles discovered, or are they made? Do they exist necessarily and objectively . . . or must they be seen as the product of some agent’s will—either a god’s or our own?” For Nelson, neglecting these questions—and their roots in debates about theodicy—renders our debates incoherent. After Rawls, thinkers have maintained that someone’s work ethic exists due to moral luck and so the disproportionate benefits between the lazy and industrious are not fair. This claim depends on one’s antecedent answer to the universality of morals. Why should one care if life is arbitrary and unfair? To claim that it is—and to attempt to remedy that unfairness—is to appeal to a moral standard exterior to the moral situation at hand. Is that standard ours or God’s and in either case what is its objective force on us? Further, are we in any way capable of living up to it? Or do we require grace because of our fundamentally wounded selves?
For Nelson, these questions are neglected by contemporary political liberals because they are not attending to the history. As he writes, “getting the history right will often enable us to do better philosophy.” This is a profound challenge to the Analytic philosophical tradition, which often suffers from its ahistorical approaches. Nelson’s book ranges over the intellectual history of the West (primarily English, French, and German histories). He shows the forgotten roots of our contemporary ideas in unexpected places. My personal favorite was the connection between representation in political thought and the debates about Adam and Christ and whether they could justifiably act as representatives of humanity.
From a genealogical perspective, the core achievement of the text is its unveiling of old unresolved disputes. When a family tries to get to the forgotten roots of an argument, they hope to be able to resolve it. The hope of this book is that understanding what started the fighting amidst the uncles may help us resolve the dispute today—if only amidst the cousins. In this, the book is marked by its own Pelagianism. If we can but disclose the beginning of the fight and track its development, then we can help resolve it. This may be a laudable attempt, but it means the book rests in the Pelagian camp in ways that Nelson does not always foreground himself.
Nelson does excellent work unearthing the historical and intellectual context of Pelagian/Calvinist debates that sourced modern liberalism. He shows how the various attempts to answer the dilemma of whether morals are created or discovered (which he traces to Plato’s Euthyphro) create their own dilemmas throughout intellectual history. But is this dilemma itself contingent? Or is it an essential aspect of the human condition expressed in different ways in different epochs? I raise this question because of the decidedly anti-metaphysical context of all the debates highlighted in this text. After Augustine we get arguments about grace and works detached from Augustine’s metaphysics of goodness. Perhaps what is needed is a return to the neglected Augustinian tradition of a metaphysics of love, gift, and sharing. Nelson—grounded in anti-metaphysical strains of thought that run from Calvin to Rawlsian liberalism—does not attend to this as a possibility.
Further, for an Augustinian like me, these dilemmas are indications of an original dilemma that has riven the human heart in all epochs. Maybe the various attempts to carve out in thought the realm of human freedom—by Pelagians, liberals, and Calvinists—are recapitulations of an original error. This original error may lie deeper than Nelson attends. Perhaps the solution is to pray for something like our original position. Rather than debating about what we all deserve, we could attend to the manifold graces of being together. It may be that this Christmas season we need to be reminded of the original family dispute that has caused our long series of disputes. The reminder may help us to see the grace of human sociality: that despite sin we are one family. Nelson helps in doing this by highlighting centuries of debate. What may be needed even more is a reminder that this original dispute is always secondary to original and restorative grace.
The Good and Evil Angels by William Blake
