Christian postliberal writers often characterize modernity as an “ontology of violence.” By this, they mean a set of modern assumptions on which human relations, and thereby political affairs, are grounded most basically in rivalry and antagonism. Human beings are the holders of competing “interests” to be balanced one against another, through the interposition of coercive mediating powers like the modern state.
For writers working within this genealogy, the “ontology of violence” is a distinctly theological problem. Specifically, it has to do with the metaphysical relationship between God and the world. In the modern age, the argument runs, “secular reason produces a discourse about providence, which, unlike medieval theology, violates the distinction between primary and secondary causes, and invokes a final cause—‘God’ or ‘nature’—to plug some supposed gap in immanent understanding.”[1] In other words, when “God” is taken to name simply a maximally great being among other beings, the highest component of a world-system that operates according to a logic of powers and counter-powers and that can operate without ongoing divine sustenance, coercive force as such becomes the grammar of political order.
This worldview represents a departure from what John Milbank—one of the foremost proponents of this paradigm—describes as an older “analogical ontology of peace which is also an ontology of the participation of the Creation in divine creativity.”[2] For the Christian not steeped in modern priors, it is the reality of the One God from whom all things proceed, Who is no thing among other things and no causal rival to the causality of finite actors, that alone makes peaceful difference possible.
Historically and theologically, this genealogy is certainly defensible. It provides the fundamental theological underpinning of a particular philosophy of history, in which the history of Western civilization is a history of the emergence and eclipse of the Christian “ontology of peace.”
But several decades after this argument was first pressed, it is worth revisiting. To interpret Western modernity as a story of philosophical rise-and-fall is, essentially, to assume a genuine rupture in the tradition, a collapse of one all-encompassing world-picture and the emergence of another. There was a time when Christendom was, along with its ontology of peace; now Christendom is not, and the ontology of violence has come. The choice to adopt such a hermeneutic of discontinuity is just that—a choice. Is there really so little continuity within the broad “Western” tradition?
As Ephraim Radner has demonstrated, the problem with the “discontinuity” reading is that it inevitably exculpates Christian thought from reckoning with modern problems as theological problems within the Christian tradition.[3] To adopt a narrative of rupture is to pull the conceptual ripcord too quickly—to assume that solving the problems of modernity is a matter of reversion to a more perfect past, rather than regeneration within the conditions of the present.
Modern people ask questions that simply never emerged within medieval horizons, such as the status of the individual and the question of personal authenticity. But that is very far from establishing that those questions were in principle unaskable within a Christian frame. If traditions develop—as they do— and remain vital, then new questions will constantly emerge. A Western world where Luther or Ockham died in childhood would probably still have learned to ask the same questions they so famously posed. If the “secular” world is an “implicitly Christian” world that has in fact forgotten itself, then Christians are in uncharted waters.
* * *
Many postliberal arguments regarding the “ontology of violence” emerged against a particular historical backdrop: the defense of religious claims, as such, against their cultured despisers of the late 1990s and early 2000s. A generation of critics attacked “religion” as a uniquely pernicious source of violence, epitomized by the radical Islamists of September 11, 2001.
Theological critics of modernity—most famously, William Cavanaugh, in his influential The Myth of Religious Violence—aimed to neatly turn the tables. Modern secularity, with its supposedly “rational” demarcation of spheres of religious and nonreligious activity and aggressive policing of the suitability of certain forms of moral appeal, was just as “violent”—that is, coercive—as any theologically grounded social order ever was.[4] Modern leaders had merely learned to cloak their theology better, by eschewing its ritual trappings. Any alternative to this interplay of ontologies of violence—that is, to “a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter-force”—must involve the reclamation of a premodern Christian ideal.[5]
Perhaps the most notable restatement of this ideal is Andrew Willard Jones’s 2017 study Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, which offers a decidedly theological reading of Catholic polity in early-medieval France. In a worldview where creation flourishes within the horizon of a transcendent God who is “nonrivalrous” with his creation—that is, Who subsists in a radically different manner than creatures subsist—then it becomes possible to conceive the originary condition of all things as a peaceful interplay of difference, rather than a crudely Hobbesian “war of all against all.”[6]
On this view, the exercise of coercive force by the state against violence is not oppression; it is the restoration of a more primordial peace. In service of this reading, Jones places significant weight on King Louis’s repeated appeals, in the course of carrying out juridical action, to “the business of the peace and the faith.”[7] “Sovereignty,” understood in the contemporary sense as a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, looks very different in such a paradigm.[8] (Notably, Jones’s account was promptly taken up by latter-day “integralists” seeking the real-world restoration of a Catholic sociopolitical order, constituted along essentially premodern theoretical lines.)[9]
Hence, the choice as it is often posed: a premodern ontology of peace, or a modern ontology of violence. Framed in those terms, the correct answer from an orthodox Christian perspective is obvious.
But it is worth pausing here to note a critical assumption underlying these debates. Up to this point, arguments about a modern “ontology of violence” have generally taken the form of justifying theological-political claims to other Westerners—specifically, Westerners who can be credibly described as “post-Christian.” And this means that what tends to be lost from view is the common, implicitly Christian world-picture that in fact unites theologian and critic alike.
In 2019, Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World first hit bookshelves, and plenty of Christians took a victory lap. Here was a prominent secular historian demolishing the old left-wing caricatures of Christianity as a tool of oppression. Quite the opposite: for Holland, virtually everything known and loved about the contemporary world bore the stamp of the Christian past. Here, in short, was a genealogy of the Western world that once again placed faith at the center.
But the closing pages of Dominion are far more haunting, and far less comforting, than many of Holland’s early readers may recall. As Holland sees it, the glittering fragments of Christian thought, once seemingly united, now lie dispersed across a constellation of rival ideologies:
That the great battles in America’s culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emancipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less of a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix. . .
To install transgender toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental teachings of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United States, there could be no escaping their influence—even for those who imagined that they had. America’s culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.[10]
Whether consciously or not, Holland intuits, today’s most vicious political battles are waged under a long Christian shadow. Today’s “Right” and “Left” both bear the stamp of this inheritance. Even the argumentative structure of everyday moral appeals—grounded in some notion, however inchoate, of universal moral standards applicable to all—is distinctively “Christian.”[11]
For present purposes, the upshot of Holland’s point is that the distinction between an “ontology of peace” and an “ontology of violence,” conceived as live options for Western minds, is not quite so absolute as postliberals often contend. This is so because both of these “ontologies” are advanced within a tradition that ineluctably bears the impress of Christian history.
This claim, in turn, invites an important question. What would a real “ontology of violence”—a true alternative to this history—actually look like? Can it even be conceived? As it turns out, it can.
* * *
An iconic image of Aztec civilization haunts modern minds: a feather-robed priest standing atop a pyramid, hands stretched to the sun, gripping a still-beating heart as blood splatters the victim beneath. Human sacrifice is the rite for which the Aztecs are best known, to the point that (despite decades of postcolonial scholarly efforts to the contrary) references to them are still often shorthand for civilizational barbarism.
Whether the Age of Discovery is conceived in positive or negative terms, though, a common assumption predominates: that the Aztecs were a primitive sun-worshiping people, crushed by the superior technology of Hernán Cortés and his tiny band of conquistadors, about whose development relatively little is known. As late as the Weimar period, Oswald Spengler could comment on the fundamental unknowability of Central American civilizations: “this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing. . . . Of the literature three books survive, but no one can read them.”[12]
Without access to this literature, the interpretive key to Mesoamerican civilization was simply lacking. Core to Spengler’s conception of “Cultures” is the notion that each Culture is dominated by a “prime symbol”—that is, by its respective interpretation of “depth,” or ultimate reality.[13] Each great Culture, for Spengler, is dominated by a different sense—pervading all domains of theological and philosophical and cultural endeavor—of what is most truly real. In practice, this manifests as the classical civilization’s horror of the unformed infinite, or the “Arabian” world’s quest for transcendence in a cosmos composed of interlocking spheres. The Classical prime-symbol is the finite body formed and filled; the Arabian prime-symbol is the “cavern” into which divine light breaks.[14]
While Spengler identified “Mexican” civilization as a great Culture, he said nothing about its prime-symbol. Indeed, he could not: that information, as far as he knew, was lost. To the extent there was such a thing as “Aztec philosophy,” it could not be traced in any detail, because its unifying motif was simply unknown.
But Spengler’s question is now answerable. Massive advances in scholarship, particularly in the past century, have shed light on dimensions of Aztec thought once thought permanently inaccessible. In his seminal 2015 study, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, James Maffie traces and explains the contours of Aztec metaphysics—and by extension, Aztec culture. Though Maffie eschews Spengler’s specific terminology, he discerns precisely the same sort of central philosophical motif dominating Aztec thought: the prime-symbol of the Aztec worldview was none other than a great weaving, a process of immanent interaction between rival metaphysical forces.[15]
This understanding of reality-as-weaving (nepantla) was not a static truth—precisely the opposite. It was dynamic to the core. “Nepantla-processes bring, join, unite, or interlace together two or more things in a manner that is simultaneously creatively destructive and destructively creative, and therefore transformative.”[16] Indeed, for the Aztecs, stasis was equivalent to nonbeing: “[t]hat which is real is that which becomes, changes, and moves.”[17]
Numerous questions, no doubt, follow from this. Among them: what, exactly, was being woven? What were the warp and woof of nepantla?
For the Aztec mind, the nepantla weave that is reality comprises two different types of “motion-change”: olin and malinalli. Olin motion-change is a pattern of motion that is cyclical, ongoing, a rhythmic pulsing. “All things have life~death cycles and olin motion-change defines the shape of their life~death cycles: they oscillate, pulsate, and move around a center.”[18] Malinalli motion-change, for its part, “is twisting motion-change.” Like the braiding of threads into a string and strings into a rope, malinalli motion-change “transforms that which is weak into that which is powerful; that which is useless into that which is useful; and that which is disordered into that which is well ordered.”[19] As metaphysical forces constituting the warp and woof of nepantla, olin-processes and malinalli-processes in the world transmitted supernatural energy throughout the cosmos.[20]
From here, the true meaning of the human sacrifices becomes clear. Within the sacrificial rite, olin-processes and malinalli-processes converged. In the throbbing and pulsating of hearts torn from chests, olin-energy flowed to the hungry sun: “The ritual excising of human hearts involves seizing the heart’s [life-energy] and transmitting its life-nourishing energy to the Fifth Sun and Fifth Era (since the life of the latter depends upon that of the former). The Fifth Sun is one of the principal recipients of the olin-defined energy of excised hearts.”[21] And in order to send that olin-energy hurtling upward through the layers of the cosmos, “[t]he priests then rolled the victims’ bodies down the pyramid’s steps, the bodies ‘bouncing’ and ‘turning over and over’ until they reached the bottom terrace”—a malinalli-process.[22]
But why were these sacrifices needed in the first place? Simply put, the world was unstable: it was through these processes of energy-transmission that the recognizable cosmos itself was perpetuated.[23] For the Aztecs, there was no eternal metaphysical order “behind the veil” of finitude. Teotl—the primordial reality that is grasped by humans as a nepantla weaving—does not map onto a conception of transcendent Being as such, immune to the vicissitudes of time. Not only is teotl “not a god, deity, or legislative being who enacts laws of nature or laws of human conduct,”[24] but teotl “is characterized by becoming – not by being or ‘is-ness.’ To exist—to be real—is to become, to move, to change.”[25] In the starkest terms, “Aztec metaphysics embraces flux, evanescence, expiry, and change by making them defining characteristics of reality—rather than marginalizing them as mere illusion and unreality.”[26]
To inhabit such a culture is to live under the shadow of imminent destruction—the ever-present possibility that in its endless blind weaving, the nepantla-cosmos might readily rip itself apart, or simply pluck the thread of human existence altogether.[27] In this world-picture, all human beings can do is try to hold together what Maffie calls the “inamic agonistic unity” of all things, “the cyclical struggle between paired complementary polarities such as life and death.”[28]
In short, for the Aztecs, there was a terrible logic to the human sacrifices that so haunt the minds of modern people. The transmission of energy to the sun—the sustenance of the only world they knew, against a backdrop of cosmic instability—could only be accomplished through carrying out the olin-processes and malinalli-processes constitutive of reality (nepantla) as such. As the old hermetic axiom would have it: as above, so below.
Set aside for the moment whether, strictly speaking, an absolutization of “becoming” in this way is metaphysically coherent.[29] What is significant about this world-picture is that, in its choice to revere a principle of becoming over being, with no panentheistic remainder, this Aztec worldview represents a genuine theological alternative to the Christian (and Parmenidean/Platonic) inheritance. The Aztec and Christian theological paradigms cannot be harmonized in any comparative-religion sense; the relevant conceptualities simply do not map onto one another.
This worldview—reality as a nepantla-process of perennial becoming, with its phenomena sustained only through bloodshed—is a true ontology of violence, if anything can be said to be one. It is not “post-Christian” and does not employ any derivative Christian concepts. It is other in a much more radical way.
* * *
Here is the critical point: the “Christian” and “secular” forms of Western modernity are simply far closer in kind than the Aztec paradigm is to either. As Holland stresses, both Christian and supposedly post-Christian interlocutors operate within a common discursive frame. They can argue about what is true, good, and beautiful in an absolute sense; an Aztec intellectual would find such appeals to the eternal simply malformed. It follows from this that to characterize Western modernity as an “ontology of violence” is to obscure the difference between the Christian tradition, even in its denuded “secular” forms, and a genuine ontology of violence.
But why does this matter at all? Isn’t this distinction merely an obscure academic point?
Against any naïve postliberalism, it must be insisted that the phenomena of violence and disagreement that characterize the Western tradition are in fact actual problems for Christians, within an explicitly or implicitly Christian frame. To the extent modernity’s violence can be characterized and deplored as an “ontology of violence,” that violence occurs within a thought-world profoundly shaped by Christian ideas. Violent actions are not, in fact, uniquely modern phenomena that would be solved via an intellectual reversion to a prior historical moment.[30]
Recall Jones’s concern to characterize Louis IX’s political dealings as “the business of the peace and the faith. It is a characterization that comes to feel like something of a shell game. Does the language in which violent acts are described truly mitigate the force of blows on bare flesh? Is “the business of the peace and the faith” really so distinct from what modernity calls “sovereignty,” with all its attendant coercion?
To reckon seriously with the alien ontology of the Aztec tradition, and its integral violence, is not to deny the horrors the modern West has invented for itself. Rather, it is to admit the possibility that Western violence, both Christian and otherwise, is the messy, tragic working-out of the implications of an ontology that, at the highest levels, could still affirm in principle the peace of Being.
Against the sheer difference of the Aztec faith, the distinctly Christian shape of the problems faced by the West, even the modern West, stands out in stark relief. The self-conscious Christian, and the Western man who claims not to be one, are not so unlike as they appear. And that means that today’s intellectual problems are, in the end, theological problems indeed.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 4. ↑
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, xxii. ↑
Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 22–40. ↑
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8–9. ↑
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 4. ↑
Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017), 13–15. ↑
Jones, Before Church and State, 59. ↑
Jones, Before Church and State, 216–17. ↑
See, e.g., Edmund Waldstein, “An Integralist Manifesto,” First Things (October 2017), https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/an-integralist-manifesto. ↑
Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), ebook ed. ↑
See, e.g., David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 236–37. See also Brad Littlejohn, “The Ghost of Christian Past,” American Reformer (July 28, 2022), https://americanreformer.org/2022/07/the-ghost-christian-past/ (“Such is the reductio ad absurdum of the world we now live in. But absurd though it may be, we must have the eyes to see it as a distinctively Christian absurdity—and confront and correct it accordingly.”). ↑
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2—Perspectives of World-History (London: Arktos, 2021), 53. ↑
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1—Form & Actuality (London: Arktos, 2021), 231. ↑
Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, 232–35, 285–88. ↑
See James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Denver, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 483. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 364. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 12. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 194. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 263. ↑
Cf. Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 195. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 195. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 298. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 195. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 80. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 12. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 43. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 25. ↑
Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 137. ↑
David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 18 (“As David Bentley Hart elegantly puts it, “the nothing cannot magically pass from itself into something: fieri simply cannot precede esse.”). ↑
Cf. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 10. ↑