I. THAT LIBERALISM IS JUST ONE BIG, BAD BIBLE COMMENTARY
The trouble with liberalism is the trouble with all heresies -- it has no idea that it is a heresy. It believes that it developed sui generis, without parents, as a sudden insight of an enlightened mind which finally decided to be rational, see all men as equal, abhor slavery, recognize democracy as the ideal form of government, posit the nature of man as a self-interested actor, relegate religion to the sphere of private belief, and otherwise constitute the world of open elections and iPad sales that we know and love today.
This is, from a historical point of view, rubbish, a word which here means, “unable to hold up to the light of an even cursory reading of the liberal canon.” It is also balderdash, a more technical term which highlights “the near-impossibility that any worldview would be constructed out of anything but the worldview which preceded it,” which was, for everyone from the Puritan Fathers to Adam Smith, Christianity.
To put it more clearly: liberalism is an interpretation of Scripture. To put it more coarsely: liberalism is the sum of many heretical commentaries on the Bible, especially on the Pentateuch, which were extremely popular between the 16th and the 19th centuries, and which have now become normative. To live and move and breathe as a “modern” is simply to live out this set of commentaries without citing them.
This is a coarse summary, because, unlike the Medieval or the Patristic commentary traditions, where orthodox and heterodox thinkers alike clearly set out to provide a gloss on a particular passage of Scripture or an attack on a particularly onerous theology, liberalism blossoms within a literary tradition of long-windedness. As Jacques Ellul put it, a “characteristic of this scientific literature is that it attempts to set down in one book the whole realm of knowledge. It is not rare to find, in works on law in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, extended treatments of archaeology, theology, psychology, and linguistics, not to mention history and literature. Entire chapters concerned with magical practices or Peruvian sociology may interrupt the course of a book devoted to revenues or to the jurisprudence of the Parliament of Bordeaux.” [1]
Within this tradition, no one bats an eye when Locke casually interprets the Tower of Babel as the establishment of a Commonwealth in his Treatises on Government; when Hobbes calls Moses an absolute sovereign in the parts of Leviathan that no one reads; when John Adams includes in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson an argument disdaining the “total lack of political realism on the part of the [Hebrew] prophets.” [2] It falls to the critic to pull out the scriptural exegesis from the humanistic attempt to say everything about everything; but without addressing the liberal fathers’ appeal to Scripture, we fail to understand them, and thus their progeny — ourselves.
II. THAT MALTHUSIAN ECONOMICS IS A COMMENTARY ON GENESIS
Thomas Malthus famously articulated the basic principle which props up liberal economic theory: scarcity. We live his “Essay on the Principle of Population” when we presume that human beings, by virtue of living within a world of scarce (finite, limited) goods, can be described as racing against misery, in a state of competition for individual survival. Rather less famously, Malthus, an Anglican priest, defended this vision of man in a re-reading of Genesis.
The reason for the re-reading is obvious: If increased population dooms men to war for finite resources, then the Genesis blessing “be fruitful and multiply” is no blessing, but a curse. So Malthus sought to reconcile a scarce universe and a misery-damned humanity with a God of blessing and abundance.
III. THAT MALTHUS WAS A BIG, BAD HERETIC
Malthus posited, first of all, that God was not omnipotent. The reason he created a universe of scarce resources was because he created under the necessity of developing the mind of man: “[T]o the Great Creator, Almighty as he is, a certain process may be necessary, a certain time (or at least what appears to us as time) may be requisite, in order to form beings with those exalted qualities of mind which will fit them for his high purposes.” [3]
It is not the case that misery and toil are evils which man must bear insofar as he disobeys God. Rather, God creates the world with the intention that man will be threatened with misery, as it is precisely the threat of misery and death, and the subsequent necessity of toil, which serves as “a process necessary, to awaken inert, chaotic matter, into spirit; to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul; to elicit an æthereal spark from the clod of clay.” This leads Malthus to assert his real heretical whopper, that “the original sin of man, is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter, in which he may be said to be born.”
Let us be clear of the reasoning that now forms the substratum of our own. Matter is evil. Mind is good. To get mind out of matter, it was necessary that God make a scarce universe, rather than a universe of abundant provision, because “[t]he first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body.”
They are the first stimulants that rouse the brain of infant man into sentient activity: and such seems to be the sluggishness of original matter, that unless, by a peculiar course of excitements, other wants, equally powerful, are generated, these stimulants seem, even afterwards, to be necessary, to continue that activity which they first awakened. The savage would slumber forever under his tree, unless he were roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger or the pinchings of cold; and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by procuring food, and building himself a covering, are the exercises which form and keep in motion his faculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity. From all that experience has taught us concerning the structure of the human mind, if those stimulants to exertion, which arise from the wants of the body, were removed from the mass of mankind, we have much more reason to think that they would be sunk to the level of brutes, from a deficiency of excitements, than that they would be raised to the rank of philosophers by the possession of leisure.
Toil, instead of a punishment, becomes the means of man’s salvation from his original (and sinful) state of being mixed up with torpid matter. This description is “fundamental,” because Malthus applies it, not to man as a sinner, but for man as he is created by God.
Malthus’ heresies are expansive: He indulges in Manichaeism, with its assertion that matter is evil; Dualism, in which evil is a necessary principle of creation; Pelagianism, with its optimistic belief that man, through toil, can attain his salvation; Gnosticism, by which the development of Mind is posited as the true end of Christianity; and a few more, I don’t doubt. Malthus’ wiser friends warned him that his position was untenable, and he stripped his theological groundwork from all subsequent editions of the Essay on Population. [4] This serves as a kind of metaphor for liberalism as a whole, in which a theological “first edition” is stricken from subsequent texts which entire generations believe and carry in their backpacks, blithely unaware that the whole show once involved an immensely dubious reading of Scripture. [5]
IV. THAT A VIEW OF CREATION AS SCARCE CORRESPONDS TO AN IDOLIZing OF TECHNOLOGY
When I say that Malthusian economics has been digested into the gut of every contemporary man, I do not mean that we have read Malthus, nor that, if we were to read him, we would agree with his dire predictions of overpopulation. I mean that we have absorbed his fundamental description of Adam, the original man, as a being who works because he is compelled by fear for his own survival. Malthus makes the threat of misery essential to the very existence of the human being, and thus describes all of man’s possible actions as strife against the threat of a lack. This is a fundamental theme of classical liberalism, obvious in thinkers like Hobbes and Darwin, but equally present in “the good guys.” It is apparent, for instance, in the theology of John Locke. Locke argued that Adam toiled in the Garden of Eden: “When God gave the world in common to all mankind, he commanded man to work, and man needed to work in order to survive.” Working for his survival, man creates property, which Locke describes as belonging to the order of competition between men: “A man who in obedience to this command of God subdued, tilled and sowed any part of the earth’s surface thereby joined to that land something that was his property, something that no-one else had any title to or could rightfully take from him.” [6]
In our own lives, the liberal account of Adam’s work in the Garden plays out in our inability to rest; to enjoy things for their own sake; to do anything that doesn’t give us money or property; to appreciate art; to imagine a society that does not operate on the principle of competition or a world that is not scarce, but abundant. But it is most apparent in our worship of technology.
As Josef Ratzinger puts it, “technology originally arose as the means for assuring man’s security.” [7] As Jacques Ellul writes in his description of technique, “In his struggle to survive, man interposes an intermediary agency between himself and his environment…It is a means of protection and defense: alone man is too weak to defend himself.” [8] In this respect, technology is a great good — a tremendous capacity of human beings to see the world as parts and resources that can be ordered into systems and devices that solve problems, cure diseases, and otherwise fill needs. In another respect, technology is the offspring of famine, war, and death; a shield flung up against the fiery sword that casts mankind out of paradise; a desperate ordering of nature’s goods into the effort of staving off death and dearth. Our oscillating opinions about technology — praising it as our future and fearing it as our apocalypse — are grounded in this fact: Behind every technological device is an imperfection that it purports to heal. If Malthus, Locke, and all the rest are correct that man is created in and through his confrontation with lack, then man’s natural gaze must be technological.
The book of Genesis takes a polar opposite view. It actively rejects the description of the world as scarce, and it castigates the technological gaze.
V. THAT ADAM’S LABOR WAS NEITHER FEARFUL, COMPETITIVE, NOR MOTIVATED BY THE PERCEPTION OF HIMSELF OR CREATION AS LACKING
Genesis describes Adam as the one who perfects other created beings. The plants are not made except insofar as Adam exists to till them: “[N]o plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.” (Genesis 2:5) Likewise, as Ephrem the Syrian says, “the animals came to Adam as a loving shepherd.” [9] The “keeping” of Adam, which the Fathers took in the allegorical sense of keeping the commandment, probably referred in the literal sense to shepherding ( שָׁמַר to keep, watch, preserve, i.e. Genesis 30:31 and 1 Samuel 17:20), and just as his presence perfects the plants of the field, his shepherding perfects and finishes the animals: “whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” (2:19)
Thomas Aquinas argues, concerning Adam, that “God created things not only for their own existence, but also that they might be the principles of other things” (I, Q. 97, a. 3). [10] Thus, when the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till and keep it, we can understand this tilling and keeping as the fulfilment of the nature of the plants that “waited” for their gardener and the animals that waited to be named by their shepherd — their principle of perfection. At this original juncture, labor is not toilsome, but restful, as Augustine says: “Although man was placed in paradise so as to work and guard it, that praiseworthy work was not toilsome.” [11] To till and keep what one is created to till and keep can no more be described as a toil for survival than breathing or laughing at a joke.
Already we begin to catch a glimmer of the orthodoxy from which Malthus departs: There is a kind of work that is not performed for the sake of survival, for fear of a lack, and out of competitive self-interest; it is that work by which man acts according to his nature as a principle of perfection of other beings — as a gardener and shepherd of this Earth.
This work is restful. Rest does not indicate a lack of activity, as Malthus seemed to assume. As Aquinas puts it, “God did act on the seventh day, not by creating new creatures, but by directing and moving his creatures to the work proper to them.” (I, Q. 97, a. 3) If God, in his Sabbath rest, sustains creation in being and moves it towards its perfection, Adam, made in the image of God, participates in this work-which-is-not-toil, directing and moving God’s creatures to their perfection. This non-technological making, motivated by our nature as gardeners of the world, is difficult to feel and to find outside of the Garden of Eden, but this is no reason to declare it non-existent and never having been. We experience glimmers of Eden in our daily lives.
VI. THAT NOT ALL OF OUR LABOR IS FEARFUL, COMPETITIVE, OR MOTIVATED BY A PERCEPTION OF OURSELVES OR CREATION AS LACKING
To be the master of a tool or of a skill is to have it as a second nature. The child learning to use a hammer toils. He feels it as a thing, a wooden shaft with a heavy, metal end that he must manipulate through space in order to accomplish his aspirations to carpentry. The hammer resists him; he bashes his thumb, misses the nail, loses his grip. But as he works and learns, he enters into communion with the tool. He no longer “aims” the hammer at the nail; he hammers the nail, knowing that it will land with the same certainty that he knows his fingernail will land on his nose when he moves to scratch it. Through repeated actions, the hammer becomes an extension of his body. He masters the tool.
Likewise, the amateur gardener toils to perfect the skill of gardening. Insofar as he is an amateur, his skill is only an ideal that his hoeing and pruning tends towards; a body of knowledge that he must continuously look up, get wrong, and look up again. But the man who has gardening as a habit and a “perfection of a power of the soul” does not fight with the soil. His toil is no toil; his work has become his rest; his labor is enjoyable; his technique is no longer technical, but a second nature.
What mastery we enjoy is a hard-earned and fragile product of toil. The mastery Adam enjoyed, he enjoyed because he was created as the natural principle of perfection for the garden in which he was planted, whereas we labor to incorporate the tool and the technique into our bodies. Aquinas argues that in the state of innocence, Adam’s work is already incorporated into his body: “of...the body itself man is master not by commanding, but by using...[Likewise] in the state of innocence, man’s mastership over plants and inanimate things consisted not in commanding or in changing them, but in making use of them without hindrance.” (I, Q.96, a. 4)
But mastery alone is insufficient to assure that work is restful. A man could perfect a skill and still find the use of it loathsome and wearying. Aquinas argues that God created man to “dress and keep paradise, which dressing would not have involved labor, as it did after sin, but would have been pleasant on account of man’s practical knowledge of the powers of nature.” (I, Q. 102, a. 3) Perfect knowledge of the beings upon which one works is also required to rid work of its toilsome aspect. We see this dimly in the phenomenon by which a “labor of love” does not seem to be a labor at all. A mother who feeds her child enjoys her work, insofar as she wants to perfect the child, insofar as she knows and loves the child and understands that her labor shepherds that child into its full stature. Aquinas seems to extend the pleasure of love’s labors to all the labors of Paradise. Adam, like Eve, is “the mother of all the living,” the one who nurtures the world to its proper perfection, and thus does not loath to labor, but delights in it.
VII. THAT MOST LIBERAL EXEGESIS IS THE RESURRECTION OF ONE PAGAN MYTH OR ANOTHER
Oh, had I been present when Malthus was scratching out his essay! I would have played a mean, but thoroughly orthodox trick: I would have leaned over his miserable desk and replaced his Bible with a translation of The Atrahasis Epic with a Post-it note reading, “Tommy, dearest, you’re working with the wrong text! Your description of Man, as I am sure you are aware, is not Jewish, but a repetition of the very Babylonian myths that the Jews wrote Genesis to counteract.”
The vision of the restful man for whom the world waits as for its principle of perfection is not spoken by the authors of Genesis in a vacuum, but as a polemic against the dominant myths of the nations with which they warred. The Atrahasis Epic [12], which contains the stories of the Flood and the Ark which the authors of Genesis obviously confronted, likewise contains a description of the reason for Man’s existence:
When the gods were man they did forced labor, they bore drudgery. Great indeed was the drudgery of the gods, the forced labor was heavy, the misery too much...
As in Malthus, there is nothing prior to drudgery. It is concomitant with existence. The solution sought by the gods is not to redeem toil, but to vacate themselves from it. They look for one whom they will force to toil for them; they create a state in which a few escape drudgery and misery by a relative increase in the drudgery and misery of others: “the seven great Anunna-gods were burdening the Igigi-gods [lesser gods] with forced labor.”
The myth describes Creation itself as the product of slaves serving their masters: “The Igigi-gods dug the Tigris river and the Euphrates thereafter.” Genesis subverts the dominant mythologies when it describes a Creation that is freely given, in which both the Tigris and the Euphrates “flow out of Eden to water the garden” (2:10) and there is peace. In Atrahasis there is class war:
"Let us face up to our foreman the prefect, he must take off our heavy burden upon us....Now then, call for battle, battle let us join, warfare!" The gods heard his words: they set fire to their tools, they put fire to their spaces, and flame to their workbaskets.
Ultimately, the insurrection of the slave-gods is quelled by the suggestion that human beings be created:
Belet-ili, the midwife, is present...Let her create, then, a human, a man. Let him bear the yoke! Let him bear the yoke! Let man assume the drudgery of the god."
Genesis attacks the myths by asserting that man was not made for toil, rather, toil was an invention of sinful man. [13] It undermines any attempts to build a society on the basis of slave labor. Genesis undercuts the idea that toil is man’s “lot,” if by it one means that toil is man’s by nature, in the order of Creation, rather than by punishment, in the order of the Fall. The technological gaze, which the mythmakers describe as the very reason for man’s existence, is castigated. In the liberal tradition, it is restored, and Adam is described as the one who must toil against a surrounding lack in order to be properly made man.
This is part one of a series plucking at a “postliberal” thread running the length of the Scriptures. Donate or subscribe to Postliberal Thought, that the series may continue.
Ellul, The Technological Society. A little long, but still, crucial revolutionary reading for anyone interested in undoing the regime of liberalism — especially if you already have an inkling that we are not so much driven into heresy by political philosophy as we are by our idolatrous relationship with machines.
“Hobbes Confronts Scripture,” by Daniel J. Elazar, referencing an 1812 letter of John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. Adams is then quoted by Elazar: “It may be thought impiety by many, but I could not help wishing that the ancient practice [of putting prophets in the stocks] [Jer. 20:23] had been continued down to modern times.”
All Malthus quotes taken from Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” Chapter XVIII and XIV. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/malthus-an-essay-on-the-principle-of-population-1798-1st-ed
For a detailed discussion of the degree and nature of the Malthusian heresy, as well as the Catholic position from which it falters, namely, that the world is in a state of “conditional abundance,” see Barrera, Albino (2005) God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency, published by University of Notre Dame Press.
Of course, one might argue that Malthus, along with the rest of the fathers of liberalism, quoted Scripture because of the times; that they were obligated to coat their disenchanted economic reasoning in Christian sugar; to sweeten bitter truths. But whether they theologized out of personal conviction or cynical opportunism, it remains the case that they could only think through and present their ideas by confronting Scripture, and thus interpreting it. If Malthus is a cynic, it is still true that, for a Christian people to believe in his ontologization of scarcity, it would be necessary for them to alter their reading of Genesis. So whether Malthus was actively interpreting Scripture, or describing a “state of creation” that would require a new interpretation of Scripture (which he first took up, and then dropped), his Essay is evidence of the overall point: that liberalism did not develop except through bad Bible commentary.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pg. 118. http://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf
Josef Ratzinger, “Technological Security as a Problem of Social Ethics,” which I found in “Joseph Ratzinger in Communio, Volume 2” published by Eerdmans.
The Technological Society.
Ephrem the Syrian, Selected Prose Works, Commentary on Genesis. All quotations from the Church Fathers, apart from Thomas Aquinas, are taken from “The Fathers of the Church,” a series of translations published by CUA Press.
The Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas, Second and Revised Edition, 1920, Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, online edition accessed at http://www.newadvent.org/summa
Augustine, Two Books on Genesis Against the Manicheans.
Atrahasis quotations accessed online: http://geha.paginas.ufsc.br/files/2017/04/Atrahasis.pdf
Genesis 3:17-19