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The Order We Did Not Make

The Order We Did Not Make

Last updated on: November 9, 2026 at 11:33 am by Dennis Knapp

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The Order We Did Not Make 2026-11-09T11:33:39-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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Guest writer: Pilgrim.

Part Two: The Order We Began to Remake

Part One, The Order We Did Not Make: The World We Received, argued that Christendom accepted three things as given: reality is intelligible, human nature has an end, and God confers dignity on every person.

This essay asks how those foundations stopped seeming obvious, and why few noticed when the account of reality that supported them began to fall away.

When the Given Order Became a Question

Return to the three apples of Part One. For most people in the Christian centuries, “redness” named something real, even if philosophers disputed how it related to individual red things. Realists held the same of humanity: the mind’s task was to discover what was there. Then, in the fourteenth century, the Franciscan William of Ockham gave an influential answer to an old question about universals. Do they refer to something real outside the mind, or do they organise what the senses give us? He is often counted a Nominalist, since he held that universals exist only as concepts in the mind. Yet he did not deny a real order behind the apples. He asked what the mind is entitled to claim about it, and in doing so made the link between concept and thing something to be argued for.

Later thinkers drew a further implication: if our concepts are all we have to explain what human beings share, can we still say that we discover human nature? Or does “human nature” instead become a name for the way we classify people?

Ockham’s second move concerned what makes things good. Aquinas had held that goodness is grounded in God’s nature and wisdom, so that a thing’s end is written into what it is. Ockham gave the divine will a stronger role in determining moral obligation. In his view, what God commands has force chiefly because God commands it, not because it answers to a standard that stands apart from his will. Scholars debate how far Ockham went; later theologians certainly went further. Voluntarism, or Divine Command Theory, a related but distinct view, emphasised God’s unconstrained will and absolute power rather than grounding his commands in his goodness and nature. In his Regensburg lecture, Benedict XVI traced this turn to Duns Scotus, comparing it with the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas.

Consider a string tuned to the note it was made for. If the note is only the maker’s choice, with nothing in the string to call it to, tuning becomes obedience to an option that could have been otherwise. For Aquinas, by contrast, a thing’s end follows from what it is. Natural law rests on this connection between a thing’s nature and its good: its ends are given, not invented at will.

Ockham’s arguments left two questions for later thinkers. Does the concept “human nature” describe something that exists independently of our thinking? And is our good grounded in that nature, or does it depend solely on what God commands? Neither question makes the individual the judge of good and evil. Both, however, call for a defence of an order previously received as given.

When Reality Was Given a Date

Philosophers did not stop at words. Gradually, without a single dramatic moment, they turned the cross-examination to the relation between the mind and the world.

Descartes is known for his statement, “I think, therefore I am,” which uses his own thinking as the foundation for certainty. Kant wrestled with how the mind can truly know the world, suggesting that our experiences are always filtered through our mental frameworks. Both thinkers grappled with the nature of knowledge, yet neither wanted to completely disconnect the mind from reality. Even so, their inquiries led later thinkers to ask a new question: what, if anything, ensures that our knowledge matches the world outside us? Earlier generations tended to trust reality and focused on understanding it, whereas the modern era began by doubting whether we can really know anything at all.

For earlier Christians, history was a story with an author and an end. Hegel kept history moving in a direction but understood it as Spirit’s progress towards human self-consciousness and freedom. As human consciousness develops, so does a people’s understanding. Hegel did not make truth relative, but he did tie its attainment to history: humanity reaches it by degrees, and an earlier age’s convictions become stages to pass through and outgrow. Marx kept the developmental account but recast its driving forces as material and economic relations. Where earlier ages had seen providence, Hegel and Marx saw processes developing within history itself.

Two habits of mind grew out of these developments. The first is Historicism: explaining beliefs by rooting them in their historical setting, often dismissing them as outdated rather than directly challenging their truth. Medieval views of authority or gender, for example, are set aside as “of their time,” their truth left unexamined. The given order need not be refuted; it need only be dated.

The second trend is a kind of suspicion. Marx wondered what material interests lurk behind supposedly universal ideas. Nietzsche questioned what purposes our moral values really serve. They disagreed on almost everything else, but both encouraged people to ask who benefits from a claim, rather than focusing only on whether it’s true.

Origins are worth knowing. But explaining why a man believes something does not show him wrong. The serpent in the garden offered no better account of the tree. He hinted at a motive behind the command. Suspicion is the oldest move, and it found a new coat.

When Belonging Was No Longer a Decision

In 1958 Joseph Ratzinger approached the same question from the other side. Where the philosophers had examined ideas, he looked at the baptised. The religious statistics still counted Europe as Christian, he said, and yet everyone knew the figures were false. The continent had become the birthplace of a “new paganism” that grew inside the Church herself, among people “who still call themselves Christians.”

He explained that the early Church was a community of those who had decided to believe. Already in the Middle Ages, when Church and world coincided, Christian belonging became a societal presupposition rather than a decision. This gave Christendom political and social stability, but it carried a weakness: the Church came to look like one contingent feature of the Western world, and her claim lost weight.

Ratzinger’s history complicates Part One without contradicting it. The order was really given, and formation was the right way to pass it on. The weakness lay in taking assent for granted: Christendom could hand on the habits of faith long after the conviction that sustained them had thinned.

Ratzinger noticed the result in his own day. Many retained the Christian name but selected from the creed what suited a worldview formed elsewhere. Many also affirmed moral responsibilities on strictly rational grounds. The outward form stayed, but the frame of mind which once explained it had gone.

When Freedom Became Self-Definition

Examining what we have received is wise, but claiming the right to remake it is different. Most of the philosophers in this story were examining, not remaking. But a culture that has stopped trusting its inheritance to speak for itself may go further and ask who is entitled to judge it. The nearest candidate is the self. Freedom must then supply its own end.

The older account gave freedom something to be free for: nature has a direction to grow into. In its popular form, the newer account defines freedom against what is given. I am free to decide what I am, including whether I will become what I was made to be. The body, the family and the neighbour are all received before they are chosen. Each now begins to look like material for the will to reshape.

The same habit entered politics. Earlier, even kings answered to a justice they did not write. Where law rests on nothing but the will that issues it, the only check on a strong will is a stronger one, as the worst regimes of the twentieth century illustrated.

How did ideas like these become the default, when almost nobody read the men who first framed them? The same way the older vision spread, through formation. A people once learned what kind of world it lived in from the Angelus bell, the Mass, the calendar and the saint’s day. Its descendants learned something else. Schools taught them to ask first where a belief came from, and only then whether it was true. Universities taught them to treat every inherited claim as a hypothesis awaiting a date. Stories and newspapers took the self’s authority for granted. Charles Taylor has described this kind of change as a shift in the conditions under which belief is lived.

Picture a student, baptised and fairly regular at Mass, who is told in a seminar that a teaching of the Church on marriage can be explained as a product of the property arrangements of late antiquity. He has not read Marx and could not define historicism. But he leaves the room sensing that something has been explained. The Christian teaching has become a little harder to hold, though no one has said a word about whether it is true.

The same questions arise in his other courses. History lessons ask what imperial interests national stories serve. Law lectures examine whose interests the law’s principles protect. His literature course asks whose voices the canon admits and whose it silences.

Many schools of Critical Theory ask how power and history shape what a society accepts as natural or true. They differ in their methods and conclusions, but these questions now circulate beyond the traditions that developed them. By the time they reach the family, sexuality, religion, race and gender, the pattern is familiar. Who has the power to define the categories? What is presented as natural but may be the product of a particular history?

This way of questioning has helped reveal real injustices and bring hidden facts to light. The difficulty arises when suspicion becomes automatic: we start to see beliefs and institutions mainly as tools of power, and only afterwards consider whether they’re actually true or just. Just because a principle helps those who state it doesn’t mean it can’t also be right.

Some critics point out that the Christian centuries socially conditioned people just as thoroughly with the sound of the bell and the rhythm of the liturgical calendar. This is partly true. No one grows up without formation. The real question is not whether we are shaped, but what we are shaped towards, and whether that formation aligns with the nature of reality.

A culture that forms people for truth asks each person to bend towards the created order. A culture that forms people for conformity will bend the world to fit its story. Ratzinger’s new paganism took root in the Church through this kind of formation. Believers did not choose a secular outlook. They breathed it.

Living inside that outlook changes how a person examines his own life. On the older view, we ask how to grow into what we have been given; on the newer, how far we can remake it. When the newer view becomes the default, even the moral instincts that formation once supplied become a draft awaiting the self’s final approval.

What Was Also Discovered

A given world is not a world already fully understood. Every generation meets the same human nature under different conditions and sees what earlier ones missed. Slavery is the clearest case. Christians tolerated it for centuries, and some defended it. When the correction came, Christian abolitionists appealed to the order’s own principle that every human being bears the image of God and insisted it apply without exception. The Church has corrected and developed her teaching in other cases too. Her teaching on religious liberty developed from an older emphasis on society’s public duties toward the true religion to a fuller account of every person’s civil right to immunity from coercion in religious matters, while leaving untouched the duty to seek the truth. She also came to condemn torture, which ecclesiastical tribunals once had permitted under certain conditions, as contrary to human dignity.

None of that makes the world negotiable. If reality is given, experience counts because it is experience of something real. Receiving reality and receiving a previous generation’s understanding of reality are different things. The hard task lies in telling them apart. The cross-examination was never the error. Modernity’s characteristic error was to treat permission to revise our understanding of reality as permission to refashion reality itself.

The Inheritance We Could Not Give Up

Yet the West did not abandon every moral conclusion it inherited from Christianity. It kept the conviction that every human being has dignity. It kept equality, concern for the poor, the judgment that exploitation is wrong, and the instinct that the weak deserve protection. But it kept them unevenly. The old conclusions gave way most visibly where will meets the body and family: in questions about the unborn, the dying and the meaning of marriage. One familiar story says that Christianity disappeared and wickedness moved in. What happened was stranger.

The West kept many of the conclusions and gradually let go of the account of reality that made them more than preferences. On that account, God made all things through the Word, governs them by his eternal law, and gives the rational creature a share in that law. Through reason, human beings can discern right from wrong and see the end for which they were made.

The West, in a sense, tried to keep the fruit while uprooting the tree that bore it.

Secular thinkers have not left the ground empty. Kant grounded dignity in rational nature and autonomy. Later philosophers grounded rights in consent, in interests, or in what any reasonable person could accept. Secular moral realists hold that dignity is an objective truth, independent of both divine command and human agreement. These are serious attempts to account for moral obligation, and they support many of the conclusions the West has kept. Jeremy Waldron offers a modern, secular account in which human dignity belongs to a person at every stage of life. Even so, a status owed to every human has to rest on something. Other accounts make moral standing depend on capacities such as sentience, or on interests that a being may or may not possess.

The old questions remain. What makes dignity something every human being possesses regardless of anyone else’s judgment, including those who cannot exercise reason, assert interests or give consent? If dignity is a status conferred, who confers it, and what grounds forbid the next conferrer from revoking it? If human nature places no limits on what we may make of ourselves, what limits can it place on the powerful?

The next conferrer is not hypothetical. Where dignity is a conferred status, the role falls to whoever holds power, whether a majority or an elite. John Paul II warned in Evangelium Vitae that “democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality,” and in Veritatis Splendor that a democracy without values “easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” More recently, Pope Leo XIV said democracy stays healthy only when “rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person,” and without that foundation it risks becoming majority tyranny or a front for economic and technological elites. The risk is greatest for a people that still votes, still deliberates and still recites its rights, but no longer shares an account of human dignity.

A society may invoke dignity while disagreeing about what constitutes a person, or uphold rights without agreeing on who possesses them. It then sustains conclusions whose foundations it no longer shares. Whether this can last is an open question.

We increasingly act as if the world were ours to remake entirely according to our desires. But we did not create it, and so cannot dictate its fundamental truths. We are called to receive and respond to a reality that precedes us.

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