Plato argued that man’s intellect can liberate him from the unreality of the cave; St. Athanasius, that true religion can liberate him from idolatry, that is, from man calling the unreal, real. In The Politics of the Real, D.C. Schindler joins this tradition, identifying our particular cave and our most cherished idol as liberalism....
Schindler asserts that the reality mimicked by the delusions (“shadows”) is the Church. The Church which ordered the Western world in history has been co-opted by the liberal hegemony. Christianity is not an invisible abstraction, but a “form, a concrete and visible reality in the world with an infinite depth and transcendent meaning,” which synthesized the Jewish, Greek, and Roman traditions into a coherent world. The Church is a res publica. This is precisely what liberalism rejects when it extracts man from his tradition and culture (i.e., the Church) and plants him in the imaginary a-social and abstract state of nature....
This belittling of the reality of Christianity begins by belittling God.
Theologians from Anselm to William of Ockham de-emphasized God’s essence as potentia ordinata, meaning power “actualized in a particular way.” Instead, they emphasized God’s
potentia absoluta, an absolute power regarding all logical possibilities. God is no longer Pure Act, who reveals Himself uniquely in Jesus Christ. Instead, He is Pure Power, that is, infinite capacity to be actualized in this or that, or any other way. What liberals would come to call “Nature’s God” is a de-actualized form of the Christian God, his essence abstracted from his recognized goodness, from his actual, creative activity to which the Church had always responded in worship....
...As with God, so with God’s image: Schindler argues that the abstract notion of God is mirrored in the liberal order’s abstract man. Just as God is no longer the God of Jesus Christ, but absolute Power, man is no longer the one whose proper end is eternal happiness with Christ.
He is an abstract power that may decide his end. This is nothing more than a ban on goodness as such; for goodness is not an option among options. Goodness is what already moves the will, already presses upon the person and entices him to act....
...Liberalism’s tyranny is covertly perpetuated in what Schindler calls “unnatural rights.” A true right is “a social extension of a natural power,” a demand for what is due to a particular being, embedded in a particular social order, according to his particular created capacities. An unnatural right, by contrast, precedes the political body. Like many scholars, Schindler locates the beginning of this tradition in Ockham, who asserted the existence of
ius poli, a pre-political right granting protection against the pope and monarch.
Ius poli is a right disconnected from an embedded nature. It is therefore empty of reality because it derives from an imaginary condition of man which purportedly existed prior to social relations.
This creates a condition of codependency between the state and the rights bearer. Since unnatural rights lack reality, they must be coercively enforced through the state apparatus. Simultaneously, the state’s existence results from the social contract, with the sole purpose of protecting such rights. To continue to grant rights, it must perpetuate the artificial reality in which social actors exist. Due to the state’s and rights bearers’ codependency, this process continues without obstruction, and the political order grows further detached from reality....
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