We must ask ourselves: Is freedom, as the nominalists insist, the ability to act according to one’s imagination and desires? Or is freedom the ability to act according to what is best, free from the domination of base passions or a sinful disposition, but in accordance with a standard that necessarily requires limits?

In his 1943 book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis predicts that there will be a time, “not too far off,” when humanity’s technological prowess will enable us to conquer human nature—to reject, alter, and abolish limits heretofore thought to be permanent. Since his time, we have made great strides toward moderating cyclical economic crises (such as the Great Depression of 1837, the Long Depression of the late 1800s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s), eliminating the structural or natural causes of famine, and reducing the rate of infant mortality to a fraction of what it was even sixty years ago, let alone for most of human history. And yet, in overcoming natural limitations—in overthrowing forever not only the externally imposed “ought” of gods and kings, but also the “ought” implicit in the still, small voice of nature itself—we have, as Lewis put it, “stepped into the void,” in which “everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo [thus I will, thus I command] has been explained away.” The only ground for human action in such a world is the necessarily untutored movements of human will.

William Bain, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore, paints a very similar picture in his 2020 book Political Theology of International Order. The world in which we find ourselves “discloses no pre-given pattern of meaning or purpose,” in which all meaning is constructed meaning, all order “imposed order.” Put differently, we live in a world in which the only basis for human action or belief is “conditional assertions of will.” Yet Bain’s account differs from Lewis’s in two crucial respects. First, Bain locates the origins of this world in the very last place Lewis would have thought to find them: Christianity itself. Second, where Lewis feared that nihilism was a prelude to unprecedented tyranny, Bain argues that nihilism is both the necessary result of a world transformed by Christian freedom and the foundation of the modern liberal order (and indeed of all future political action).

However, this apparent reconciliation of Christianity and the modern world comes at too steep a cost, not least because Bain’s nominalist Christianity proves to be irresponsibly self-abnegating. It undermines the naturalistic basis for non-nihilistic politics, but then—unlike the Christians of the first millennium—blanches at the responsibility of exercising or sustaining political power itself. It instead abandons politics to nihilism; and since nihilism is more favorable to tyranny than to humane government, Bain’s nominalist Christianity fulfills the worst fears of those ancient pagans who referred to Christians as atheistic anarchists and hostes humani generis—enemies of the human race.

It would be truer to intellectual history, and better for intellectual debate, to acknowledge instead the sharp differences between Christian theology and the philosophical foundations of the modern world—foundations that are neither Christian nor simply nihilistic. And if those foundations eventually culminate in nihilism, as the Nietzschean critique of modernity suggests, then the proposed conflation of Christianity and modernity would render Christianity unable to fulfill the salutary role, envisioned by thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, of the friendly critic, sparring partner, or perhaps just bad conscience of modern politics.

Medieval Christianity and the Triumph of the Will

To understand why Bain’s argument fails, we first need to understand his striking assertion that modern nihilism was born from medieval Christianity. According to Bain, the only coherent interpretation of the creation account in the Book of Genesis is given by nominalism, or what he also calls “the theory of imposed order.”

Bain traces the origins of this theory to a group of medieval theologians who sought to combat the influence of Aristotle on Catholic theologians and philosophers, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas. Saint Thomas and the Aristotelian Christians asserted that human beings possess real natures that incline them toward the fulfillment of their natural ends—e.g., the enjoyment of the fruits of political life and the practice of virtue—which can be discerned by the light of natural reason, a position Bain refers to as the “theory of inherent order.”

Against the Aristotelians, the nominalists sought to vindicate the freedom of the omnipotent Creator God, unconstrained by natural necessity or reason. The nominalists asked: if there are real natural necessities, could the world have been otherwise? If the world could not have been otherwise, was God compelled to create this world? And if God was compelled in any way, can He be said to be omnipotent? In response to the Christian Aristotelians and Aristotelian Christians, the Franciscan nominalist William of Ockham composed treatises inveighing against the reality of universals, the existence of nature or natures, and thus the intelligibility of the universe. This overthrow of Aristotle laid the foundation for empirical modern natural science, the conquest of—rather than submission to or cooperation with—nature, and the reconceiving of human beings as radically free, equal, and individual instead of members of an organic, hierarchic whole.

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