A review of:

The Metaphysics of Revolution: Underlying Assumptions of Liberalism

(A Metafísica da Revolução: Pressupostos do Liberalismo)

by Daniel C. Scherer

Edições Santo Tomás, 2021

The voices of those who, in the US, argue that the solution to the current crisis of liberalism must be sought in a postliberal order, are no longer isolated. Unfortunately, discussions regarding the crisis of liberalism have not reached the same point in Brazil, a country in which liberalism reigns indisputably, especially in the public sphere and its relationship with religion. Despite this, some efforts have been made to question the hegemony of liberal thought within Brazilian public debate. Daniel C. Scherer’s newest book is the most outstanding example of such an effort in recent years.^[1] The Metaphysics of Revolution: Underlying Assumptions of Liberalism is a penetrating inquiry into the metaphysical foundations of liberalism. One might think that the search for the metaphysical foundations of a political philosophy would represent a confusion of categories, an undue leap from the speculative to the practical realm (“Perhaps a fallacy, a metábasis eis állos génus,”^[2] says Scherer). But the fact is that any art or science is rooted in assumptions that are traceable, whether explicitly or implicitly, to the kind of basic philosophical presuppositions that are precisely the object of metaphysics. The thesis around which Scherer’s work revolves—that “liberalism presupposes and imposes a certain metaphysics”—is announced in the very first paragraph of the introduction.^[3] It might seem shocking to many. After all, liberalism, since its beginning, has presented itself as a neutral, apophatic moral and political philosophy. But it is precisely this alleged neutrality that Scherer is questioning.

In the introduction, Scherer begins by conceptualizing liberalism, classifying its various forms, and showing the insufficiency of the communitarian criticism that Alasdair MacIntyre raises against liberal thought.^[4] For Scherer, MacIntyre’s argument suffers from a lack of ontological reach; he argues that the central problem with communitarianism, the political current with which MacIntyre is commonly associated (although MacIntyre himself rejects such a label), lies in the fact that communitarianism, with its somewhat romantic emphasis on the idea of community, is restricted to an internal critique of liberalism; it aims to correct and temper it rather than overcome it.^[5] Communitarianism, as Miguel Ayuso rightly observes, is still a kind of liberalism—a liberalism accompanying a group character. It does nothing more than add to individualist liberalism a communitarian dimension.^[6]

The objections that communitarian authors raise against liberal individualist anthropology are, according to Scherer, still compatible with liberalism. In general terms, what communitarians argue are the problems of liberalism are nothing more than certain sociological truisms that can easily be incorporated into a fully liberal multiculturalist perspective (as, for instance, Will Kymlicka does^[7]). It is not for nothing that Charles Taylor, one of the representatives of communitarianism, describes his own position, without embarrassment, as a “substantial” (or substantive) liberalism, as opposed to a “procedural” liberalism. Thus, Scherer recognizes the importance of communitarian criticisms, but does not believe they get to the core of the liberal problem.

Before suggesting a definition of liberalism, Scherer seeks to identify and catalog its various theoretical manifestations. He does this based on the classification suggested by Martha Nussbaum, who separates the currents of liberal thought into two large groups (delineated by their beliefs about the good life and the social nature of values): perfectionist liberalism and political liberalism.^[8] The former group is related to writers like Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Raz, and the latter to authors like Charles Larmore, John Rawls, and Nussbaum herself. Perfectionist liberalism, states Nussbaum, recognizes that a wide range of worldviews regarding human life circulate throughout society; these worldviews, despite being irreconcilable, are all equally viable options between which people can choose. Political liberalism, in turn, argues that this plurality of views entails an endless debate, especially because disagreements between different groups in society about the conception of the good life are not trivial. Nussbaum’s solution to this endless debate, then, as a political liberal, would be to find a common core of moral rules that reasonable people can accept in the public arena, while they still reserve the right to maintain their own convictions in the private sphere. Hence, morality, in the public realm, should essentially be restricted to a small set of uncontroversial ground rules.

Thus, whether perfectionist or political, liberalism presents itself as a moral and political philosophy which holds that those in the public sphere should be neutral regarding any particular morality. Even though this neutrality is not absolute for most liberals, none of them, as Scherer points out, would disagree with the fact that such neutrality aims to prevent any particular system of morality from receiving special protection from the state, as this could encourage oppression against people who hold different moral views. Scherer, however, will demonstrate that, despite its appearance of neutrality, liberalism is built upon a philosophical doctrine which has its own moral and metaphysical assumptions (whose foundations will be discussed in depth in Part II). The much-vaunted liberal neutrality is a qualified neutrality, directed not only especially against religious views, but in particular against Catholic ones.

Scherer argues that there is nothing new or strange about this observation. It is commonly understood that liberalism began in the context of the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation, which inspired the work of authors such as Hobbes and Locke. The theoretical solution that these political philosophers found for the civil wars they witnessed, as highlighted by Thaddeus Kozinski, was a model of political consensus based not on any particular Christian doctrine, but on universally acceptable principles derived through “reason.”^[9] On this point, Scherer quotes Christopher Ferrara, who argues that “Hobbes and Locke did not merely seek to separate Church and State, but rather to subjugate the Church to the State by stripping the Church of any direct or indirect power over politics, reducing churches to the status of private clubs whose authority is strictly limited to enforcing club rules against their respective members.”^[10] In other words, liberalism has always had a specific target. Not all religions have been hit in the same way and with the same intensity; the main enemy was then, as it is today, Catholicism. “Let’s say it clearly: the whole purpose of liberalism—from its beginnings until today—is to constitute a secular political order to replace Christianity,”^[11] affirms Scherer. In arguing this, he follows in the footsteps of Miguel Ayuso, who does not hesitate to say that our age may well be described as a “counter-Christendom.”^[12]

Chapter two, entitled “For a Non-Liberal Legal Theory,” is devoted to discussing how liberalism manifests itself in theories of law. It is divided into two parts: “Theories of justice and theory of law” and “The (neo)classical natural law theory.” In the first part, Scherer argues that there is a necessary link between a legal theory and its implicit theory of justice. He maintains that a theory of law not only can but must be analyzed from the perspective of the theory of justice underlying it. And the category he uses to classify theories of justice is liberalism. Liberal theories of justice are those that allegedly exclude comprehensive doctrines about human life from their horizon of reflection (I emphasize allegedly because all practical philosophy, as Scherer proves, is grounded in some metaphysics, regardless of whether its advocates expressly recognize it or not); non-liberal theories of justice, in contrast, are explicitly grounded in comprehensive conceptions about the good life.

Scherer’s method, although somewhat innovative in the domain of legal theory, has a solidly Aristotelian background, insofar as it utilizes Aristotle’s famous substance/accident distinction; Scherer classifies legal theories based on the similarities of substance that exist between them, while relegating their innumerable accidental differences to a secondary level. This allows Scherer to gather under the same umbrella all legal positivist theories (such as the systems of Kelsen, Hart and Raz), post-positivist theories (which have Dworkin as their most prominent representative), modern rationalist natural law theories (e.g., Grotius and his “impious hypothesis”), and contemporary natural law theories (represented by the New Natural Law Theory, NNLT), which he analyzes in detail in chapter two. All of these are liberal legal theories, insofar as they present themselves as if they excluded from their horizon of analysis any comprehensive moral conceptions about human life. However, according to Scherer, these theories just replace one metaphysical doctrine with another—they replace, to paraphrase Octavio Nicolás Derisi, a metaphysics of transcendence with a metaphysics of immanence. As Scherer writes, “What we say is that all practical philosophy implies a comprehensive substantive doctrine. There is no other way. The alleged liberal neutrality in the face of plurality is just a pretext for reducing this plurality to a secular or, more exactly, immanent uniformity.”^[13] This is the overarching thesis of the book, which Scherer will painstakingly develop in Part II. To all these theories, in the field of law, he opposes the only legal theory that does not shy away from basing itself on a comprehensive conception of the good life: the classical Aristotelian-Thomist natural law theory.

***

The roiling debates surrounding the NNLT are well-known to North American and European audiences. Scherer’s motive for entering these debates is to demonstrate that the interpretive innovations proposed by Grisez and Finnis move NNLT farther away from, rather than closer to, Aristotelian-Thomist natural law theory—although the same authors claim to desire a return to such a theory.^[14] The changes advocated by Grisez and Finnis are actually so substantive that they end up transforming NNLT into another form of a liberal ethical and legal theory. This becomes quite evident when we analyze the thesis of the incommensurability of basic human goods. We find the most complete defense of this theory in Germain Grisez’s article “Natural Law, God, Religion, and Human Fulfillment.”^[15] Grisez’s main objective is questioning one of the capital doctrines of the Thomist theory of human acts, according to which there is only one final end of the rational creature: beatitudo. Grisez maintains that St. Thomas is wrong. According to Grisez, human beings have two classes of ends: natural ends, which they achieve “as human,” and a supernatural end, which they achieve “as divine,” after being elevated by God to the beatific vision. In order to see God face to face, human beings need to be enabled by grace. So far, there is nothing in this theory that is different from what St. Thomas Aquinas would say. However, Grisez irremediably distances himself from Aquinas by holding that this distinction between ends transforms the human being into something substantially different from what he was; it transforms him into a human being “as divine,” in such a manner that his ultimate end “as human” cannot be the beatific vision, but instead is “integral human fulfillment.” This end, described in the NNLT’s famous thesis of the incommensurability of goods,  is attainable through the pursuit of basic human goods, goods that do not exist in a hierarchy but rather are hierarchized by the agent himself through his own preferential choice. This leads Grisez to conclude that a rational creature must have different ends in each of these states—before and after being enabled by grace to see God face to face.^[16]

Fulvio Di Blasi, in his article “Ultimate End, Human Freedom, and Beatitude: A Criticism to Germain Grisez,”^[17] warns of the serious theological consequences of such a split. What would this human being “as divine” be, who would see God face to face? The only two possible hypotheses show that Grisez’s theory is meaningless. If a human being “as divine” is still a human being, then he was always capax Dei, before and after being elevated by grace to the beatific vision; if not, then Grisez is accidentally proposing some kind of pantheism, since human being “as divine” would be a form of divinity. Scherer criticizes Grisez’s interpretation not only to show how far it departs from St. Thomas’s understanding (in this case, expressly and intentionally contradicting Thomas’s adage gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit), but also to prove his own point regarding the logical end of liberalism. By denying the existence of a single and ultimate end for the rational creature and promoting a split between the natural and supernatural ends of man, Grisez is replacing Aquinas’s metaphysics of transcendence with a metaphysics of immanence. Segregating nature from grace necessarily results in the conclusion that man, “as human,” is self-sufficient. At this point, Grisez’s liberal position, says Scherer, converges with Dworkin’s “religion without God.”

It is impossible to fully understand John Finnis’s theory without considering the tremendous influence that Germain Grisez had on his thinking. The shadow of Grisez’s metaphysics of immanence can be seen in the main proposals of the NNLT. Finnis merges the thesis of the incommensurability of basic human goods with two other ideas: the denial of a single ultimate end for man and the premorality of the first principles of natural law, the latter of which was first presented in Grisez’s celebrated 1965 article “The First Principle of Practical Reason.” And the result of this could be no other than a liberal vision of moral and legal orders. It is true, stresses Scherer, “that the requirements of practical reasonableness—synthesized by the idea of integral human fulfillment—give us an apophatic criterion to distinguish moral plans from immoral plans, by prohibiting acting in direct detriment of a basic human good, but, in Finnis’s theory, there is no notion of the good life that serves as recta ratio for judging those various plans.”^[18] This makes a defense of this idea, obviously, convenient in our liberal world; after all, NNLT opens up space for a broad range of conceptions of the good life, all of which are considered equally viable options that are worthy of government protection. Despite some evident differences, this position—based on the denials of an objective hierarchy between human goods established in reality and of a single ultimate end for man—brings NNLT closer to the Rawlsian theory of politics. It is pertinent to remember that Rawls, in Political Liberalism, maintains precisely that as long as basic rules are agreed upon, a political model can be sustained across several comprehensive doctrines or worldviews held by the individuals who make up a society, an idea that gives support to his famous “overlapping consensus” thesis.

***

Chapter three, entitled “From the Sensible World to the Ipsum Esse, and Back,” is devoted to explaining the heart of Thomistic metaphysics, namely, the doctrine of the real distinction between essentia and esse. Fr. Álvaro Calderón, in El Orden Sobrenatural: Una Inmersión en el Tomismo Profundo, accurately notes that St. Thomas, by taking the Aristotelian theory of act and potency from the realm of physics (where Aristotle uses it to describe movement), by way of analogy, to the realm of metaphysics, elevates it to the apex of its philosophical elaboration. According to Aquinas, essentia and esse are really distinguished in creatures, as potency and act, respectively. Aquinas adds the Platonic doctrine of participation to the Aristotelian theory of act and potency, maintaining that essentia is potency because it participates in esse. Essentia is potentia essendi; esse is actus essendi. Every creature participates in esse by its essence. Essentia and esse are co-principles of the created suppositum.^[19] As Scherer writes, “Only in God are essentia and suppositum identified, because God is the Ipsum Esse.”^[20]

A meticulous explanation of this doctrine of St. Thomas is proposed in chapter three. Scherer intends to demonstrate that the doctrine of the real distinction between essentia and esse in creatures is the cornerstone of metaphysical realism. Only this distinction makes possible the ultimate distinction between ens per essentiam and ens per participationem. On it depends, says Scherer, the correct philosophical account of transcendence: “Without it, thought somehow slips, sooner or later, at least potentially, into immanentism.”^[21]

Scherer then goes on to argue that, in the history of philosophy, two major metaphysics can be identified: the metaphysics of transcendence and the metaphysics of immanence. The former finds its highest form in the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essentia and esse; the latter, as he demonstrates in chapter four, promotes the inversion of the relationship between act and potency. And it is this latter immanentist inverted metaphysics that will culminate, in the field of practical philosophy, in liberalism.

***

Chapter four is intended to trace a genealogy of immanentism, with the aim of identifying the metaphysical roots of liberalism. Scherer begins by addressing the inversion of act and potency and the denial of the real distinction between essentia and esse in creatures, which is the germ of liberal thought. According to Scherer, without the real distinction, being can only be seen as internal to the essence of the created suppositum, as something that belongs to it by essence. As a result, there is an inversion of the relationship between act and potency. The supreme actuality of the created ens would reside in its very essence, which means the external reality that ontologically precedes it would thus become a “purely potential field, plastic and moldable matter.”^[22] Here, Scherer is following closely David Schindler’s Freedom from Reality. In this work, Schindler proposes a metaphysical analysis of the modern concept of freedom, a concept which, he argues, was forged mainly by the influence of John Locke, who subverted the classical idea that freedom is a potency for the good. In the classical view, good is something real; it exists in reality, from which it is perceived by the intellect and consequently presented to the will, which makes the will a receptive power in relation to that good. In Locke’s conception, however, freedom turns into an active power, disconnected from any real relation to the good, which is no longer considered to be in act. The will, in this perspective, is now considered merely a capacity for self-direction—it is an autopoietic power,^[23] capable of actualizing by itself the good that has become purely potential. This absolutization of freedom, so characteristic of modernity, was superbly diagnosed by Pope St. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor: “Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values.”^[24]

In A Letter Concerning Toleration, one of the foundational documents of Western liberalism, Locke deals with the consequences that his sui generis metaphysics of freedom have for the role of religion in the public sphere; in particular, he defends political tolerance toward religious doctrines, on the condition that they are not disruptive to public order. Locke inaugurates, therefore, the defense of the metaphysical-religious neutrality of politics. It is important to say, however, that Locke does not deny the existence of God or the truth of religion. What he does deny is the objective authority of any concrete historical form of religion. This is because, as Schindler explains, if a religion—an effective manifestation of an ultimate meaning—concretely exists in history, it necessarily influences the entirety of reality. Thus, a true religion is incompatible with the Lockean interpretation of freedom as an active power.^[25] And this interpretation is precisely the metaphysical revolution that is at the genesis of liberalism. Liberalism, asserts Scherer, is not only the search for political peace through the neutralization of conflicts between worldviews. Rather, it is the practical result of a comprehensive and controversial metaphysical doctrine, which imposes itself under the pretext of neutrality. There is, within the core of liberal thought, a fundamental contradiction: liberalism violates the very metaphysical neutrality that it proposes as a strategy for achieving social peace. As Scherer writes, “Therefore, according to its own criteria, liberalism must be rejected as the governing principle of public order. Social peace, which we all aspire to, must be sought outside the pax liberalis.”^[26]

There are two important contributions that Scherer makes to Schindler’s ideas. The first is directly concerned with the field of practical philosophy. The metaphysics of immanence that permeate liberalism must be opposed not solely through a return to classical philosophy, but rather through a reaffirmation of Thomistic metaphysics and its real distinction between essentia and esse in creatures. It is above all St. Thomas’s doctrine, built on a perfect synthesis between Plato and Aristotle, that provides the most accurate philosophical tools to face the metaphysical revolution that gave rise to liberalism.

The second contribution is related to the field of metaphysics and theology. Scherer concludes his philosophical tour de force by analyzing the relationship between liberalism, panentheism, and gnosticism. He argues that this metaphysics of immanence behind liberalism could also be called by the name of panentheism. In search of a definition of panentheism, Scherer investigates several authors who belong to this tradition, both in the West (Clayton, Krause, Lataster, Bilimoria, Göcke, Biernacki, Hartshorne, and others) and in the East (Ramanuja and Shankara), taking Hartshorne’s thought as a paradigmatic model of Western panentheism.

Roughly speaking, panentheism can be understood as a synthesis between classical theism and pantheism. The former argues for the absolute transcendence of God in relation to the world, while the latter argues for the total identification between God and the world. Thus, panentheism recognizes the world to be connected to God in a more intense way than it is in classical theism—panentheists believe that God encompasses the world. Certain panentheists seek in the Sacred Scriptures the theological support for this “more intense connection,” which, in their view, primarily distinguishes panentheism from classical theism. Clayton, for instance, believes he has found it in expressions like “in Christ” (mentioned 93 times by St. Paul), and especially in Acts 17:28 (“ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’ ”)^[27]—the phrase that enchants panentheists. Clayton argues that panentheism was crushed due to the “substance-based metaphysics” that was dominant back when the Christian Creed was formulated. For this reason, panentheism ended up being marginalized in the West, surviving only in traditions that were considered heretical, mostly those linked to Neoplatonism (represented by figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius, John Erigine, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and many others).

One of the most characteristic marks of panentheism, and the mark which radically distinguishes it from classical theism, according to Scherer, is the idea that God, although transcendent in His relation to the world, depends on it in some way. What’s more, panentheism holds that God can be changed as a result of the constantly unfolding domain of human action in the world. This idea, as Scherer notes, explicitly contradicts Aquinas’s five ways, since if God can be affected in some way by the world, it’s inevitable that this dependence would imply a causal relationship, which leads to an insoluble contradiction, given that a “caused God” is not God at all. All of the five ways, as asserted by Fr. Álvaro Calderón, have the principle of causality as their major premise, leading, each one by a different path, to the conclusion that there must be a First and Uncaused Cause. Furthermore, panentheists believe that the creation of the world is a necessity, which directly contradicts Aquinas’s third way, whereby we come to conclude that God alone is necessary per se.

The heightened creativity, or autopoietic capacity, that panentheists attribute to created beings (exacerbated to the point of interfering with the divine essence itself), makes panentheism very close to liberalism—both are rooted within the same principle. For this very reason, Scherer has no difficulty in establishing the relationship between liberalism and panentheism (especially given that some panentheists, like Biernacki, expressly admit the relationship).

Moreover, panentheism infuses the divine into matter; that is, it confuses the divine substance with the substance of created beings. For panentheists, the divine being is not different from any created being. As Lataster and Bilimoria said, “We know that we are god.”^[28] Through this infusion, panentheism points to esotericism and its characteristic “spirituality without religious ties”—a plastic and moldable religiosity, so convenient to our liberal modernity. But it would be an error to think that panentheism only engenders a low-brow, new-age, vulgar kind of esotericism. In fact, as Scherer argues, “It also has sophisticated expressions, with equal penetration into non-liberal circles, and even environments critical of liberalism. Many see in this doctrine a way to oppose a materialist, secularized and rationalist modernity.”^[29] Here, Scherer is referring to gnosticism, which he understands to be the spiritual counterpart of panentheistic metaphysics. This higher strand of panentheism finds its highest form in the perennialist school of Guénon and Schuon.

Perennialism is conceived from a profound re-imagining of the classical understanding of metaphysics. Schuon, based on Meister Eckhart, radically separates philosophy from metaphysics, arguing that, while the former relates to reason, the latter relates to the “Intellect,” something that is “uncreated and uncreatable.” The initiate is the one who aims to reach “metaphysical realization,” the understanding of his own identity, his identification with the Intellect immanent in man (the “uncreated” and “uncreatable” spark residing in the depths of our soul), which is only possible through certain practices and spiritual techniques, and not through rational speculation, as this knowledge goes beyond “simple rational understanding.” Metaphysics ceases to be the science of ens as such, or of God as the Cause of ens, to become the science of “God qua God,” or the “science of the Absolute,” accessible only to an intellectual and spiritual elite through initiatory rites and esoteric practices. The various “Revelations,” taken as secondary and historical manifestations of the “Absolute” (perennialism recognizes the veracity of all traditional religions, which, for perennialists, are those that have some connection with the Primordial Tradition), in turn, are demoted to the status of “exoteric gateways” accessible to the masses. Insightfully, Scherer highlights how much such an understanding differs from the metaphysics of transcendence, according to which, by natural reason, we can only know the fact that God is, insofar as we understand Him as the Cause of ens; we cannot know His Actus Essendi, which, in the case of God, corresponds to His Essence. “From this it follows there are two orders of truths with respect to God: one of them is attainable by reason; the other only by the self-manifestation of God, that is, by Revelation. Such Revelation cannot contradict the truths to which we have access by natural reason, nor can it multiply itself into a plurality of mutually contradictory ‘Revelations.’ ”^[30]

Panentheism’s connection with liberalism provides Daniel Scherer with strong evidence to suggest the solution to the problem diagnosed throughout the entire book. After demonstrating that the battle does not take place between those whose ideas are based on systems of metaphysics and those who reject any system of metaphysics—but that rather, the battle takes place between contradictory metaphysics—Scherer still must answer the question: Which metaphysics should we oppose to the metaphysics of immanence? Even in the works of Plato and Aristotle there is still a tension between the metaphysics of transcendence and the metaphysics of immanence. On this point, Scherer writes that “The route to the summit of the mountain of being was opened by these two giants with great effort. But the road they discovered is not a straight one; the path is not free of dangers: there are pitfalls lying in wait for the climber.”^[31] And this is precisely why Scherer holds that there are sound philosophical reasons, alongside the truths we know from Revelation, to contest Strauss and Voegelin’s project. These authors intend to oppose the modern liberal order through a return to classical philosophy. The problem is that they intend to return to a point where the paths between a metaphysics of transcendence and a metaphysics of immanence were not yet clearly differentiated. The seed of transcendence, of course, had already been planted, but the seed of immanence, which would lead to liberal modernity, was also present there, like a weed among the wheat. Only with Aquinas and his metaphysics based on the real distinction between essentia and esse were the weeds completely set apart from the wheat. We must return, therefore, to the sowing time of Plato and Aristotle; but also—and mostly—to St. Thomas’s harvest.

Author’s note: Both for the academic excellence of Daniel Scherer’s book and for the originality of his criticisms of liberalism, The Metaphysics of Revolution deserves a translation into English, so as to become accessible to readers in the English-speaking world.

^[1] Other authors worth mentioning are the Brazilian Thomist philosophers Carlos Nougué and Sidney Silveira, who have been denouncing the ills of liberalism in their books and lectures for many years.

^[2] Daniel C. Scherer, The Metaphysics of Revolution (Formosa, GO: Edições Santo Tomás, 2021), 13. All translations mine.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] The main points of the debate between liberal theorists and communitarians are described by MacIntyre in the following terms:

The principal exponents of communitarianism have defined their own positions by contrast with some central theses advanced by liberal theorists. Where liberal theorists have emphasized rights, communitarians have stressed relationships.Where liberal theorists have appealed to what they take to be universal and impersonal principles, communitarians have argued for the importance of particular ties to particular groups and individuals. And where liberal theorists have characteristically held that it is for each individual to arrive at her or his own conception of her or his good, communitarians have been anxious both to establish the existence of irreducibly social goods and to argue that a failure to achieve such goods will result in a defective social order. (Alasdair MacIntyre, The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998], 244.)

^[5] Scherer emphasizes that this is openly recognized by MacIntyre himself: “[…] there are certainly some versions of liberal theory and some formulations of communitarian positions which are such that the two are not only not in opposition to each other, but neatly complement one another. Communitarianism from this latter point of view is a diagnosis of certain weaknesses in liberalism, not a rejection of it.” Ibid.

^[6] Miguel Ayuso, A Constituição Cristã dos Estados (São Luís, MA: Resistência Cultural, 2019), 38. Ayuso makes this observation in the prologue written exclusively for the Brazilian edition of his book.

^[7] Scherer considers Kymlicka to be an egalitarian liberal who knows how to take advantage of some of the lessons of communitarianism. See Will Kymlicka, Filosofia Política Contemporânea: Uma Introdução, trans. Luís Carlos Borges (São Paulo, SP: Martins Fontes, 2006), 267.

^[8] Martha Nussbaum, “Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39.1 (Winter 2011): 3–45.

^[9] Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), xxi.

^[10] Christopher A. Ferrara, Liberty, the God that Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2012), 80.

^[11] Scherer, The Metaphysics of Revolution, 41.

^[12] Ayuso, A Constituição Cristã dos Estados, 117.

^[13] Scherer, The Metaphysics of Revolution, 211.

^[14] The so-called “New Natural Law Theory” emerged in 1965 with German Grisez’s article “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, I-II, Question 94, Article 2,” in which Grisez proposes a radical reinterpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of natural law. Grisez believed that he was rescuing the correct reading of Thomas, a reading that had been obscured by commentators such as Francisco Suarez. In his seminal article, he argued for two essential points: that Aquinas does not extract moral norms from speculative knowledge of human nature, i.e., from metaphysics, and that the first principle of practical reason (“good is to be done and pursued and evil is to be avoided”) is not a moral imperative. In other words, Grisez maintains that the Thomist theory of natural law is not constructed from the observation of human nature, but rather from principles of practical reason, which, for him, are completely independent of speculative reason. He also argues that the first principle of practical reason is a mere directive for action. Grisez was the first to argue such things in the history of Thomism; no such positions had ever been supported before.

It can be said that NNLT is based on five fundamental pillars, as highlighted by Steven A. Long in the article “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory” (The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 [Spring 2013]: 105–131): the denial of the primacy of speculative over practical truth; the denial of unified normative natural teleology; the error of “incommensurability”; the failure to affirm the transcendence of the common good; the denial of essentially theonomic character of the natural law; and the intentionalist construction of human action.

^[15] Germain Grisez, “Natural Law, God, Religion, and Human Fulfillment,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 46.1 (June 2001): 3–36.

^[16] Paradoxically, Grisez does not deny that humans have a passive power (potentia obedientiae) to receive from a superior agent the capacity for an act exceeding nature, but he does deny that grace presupposes nature.

^[17] Fulvio Di Blasi, “Ultimate End, Human Freedom, and Beatitude: A Criticism to Germain Grisez,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 46.1 (June 2001): 113–135.

^[18] Scherer, The Metaphysics of Revolution, 191.

^[19] “Suppositum” can be defined as follows:

In metaphysics, the name subsisting subject or “suppositum” designates the particular being with all of its perfections. Thus, subsisting subjects are individual realities taken in their totality, whose distinctive characteristic is subsistence, that is, the intrinsic possession of the act of being that updates everything in its entirety. The suppositum is being in the full sense. If the substance can be called being in the strict sense, since it receives the act of being in itself, the term being undoubtedly fits the suppositum even more strictly, since the created substance never subsists without accidents. The whole, composed of substance and accidents, is what truly is—neither the substance alone nor the accidents on their own. Of course, anything can be called being, to the extent that it is real in some way (matter, form, substance, accidents). However, the suppositum is being in the most proper sense, that is, it is what subsists, what exists in itself as something complete and finished, and distinct from any other reality. This, as we have seen, is neither matter nor form taken separately, nor substance apart from accidents, nor even the act of being (in creatures) separated from essence, but only the whole which results from the union of these elements. What is involved here is precisely a whole and not a mere aggregate, ísince the other components of the subject which subsists are in potency with respect to the single act of being, the basis of the unity of the whole. (Tomás Alvira, Luis Clavell, and Tomás Melendo, Metaphysics, trans. Luis Supan [Manila, Philippines: Sinag-tala Publishers: 1991], part I, chapter 7. EPUB. [Editor’s note: The original publication of this book, in which more precise pagination information is available, was Metafísica [Navarra, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S.A., 1982], 119–20.])

^[20] Scherer, The Metaphysics of Revolution, 215.

^[21] Ibid., 216.

^[22] Ibid., 250.

^[23] The word “autopoietic” derives from the Greek word autopoiesis. The etymological origin of the word is autós (by itself) and poiesis (creation, production). Its literal meaning is “self-production.” The term was first used in the field of biology, in the 1970s, by Maturana and Varela, and was later used by Niklas Luhmann in the field of Social Science. Scherer uses this word several times in the book to describe the connection between liberalism and panentheism. For both liberals and panentheists, the human being is endowed with an original creative capacity, with the hallmark characteristic of being capable of “first causality.” In this sense, Locke has an autopoietic view of freedom, because, as David Schindler says, he conceives of it as an active power, not as a potency with respect to the good that is in reality. Scherer expands Schindler’s analysis, maintaining that panentheism also attributes to the human being an autopoietic capacity; see, for example, the quote in footnote 28.

^[24] Veritatis Splendor 32.

^[25] These are the exact words of David Schindler, whose ideas inspired Scherer in this part of the book:

If a religion, which means the effective manifestation of ultimate meaning, exists concretely in history, it necessarily makes a claim on me prior to my act of will, because it makes a claim on everything without exception. To recognize this claim is to see that actuality precedes potency, and if this is true ultimately, it will be true, so to speak, all the way down. And this will mean that freedom will necessarily have to be interpreted as sharing in actuality, a response to the good that precedes me and makes my choice of it possible; the actualizing of the will in this case comes to mean being brought into an actual world, a tradition, and a hierarchy of goods. Actual religion is therefore incompatible with an interpretation of freedom primarily as active power. Locke can affirm freedom as power only by transforming at the same time the status of religion. It can no longer be a single truth that precedes political agents, but it has to become an array of possibilities, any one of which individuals are free to accept, at least within the constraints of political order. Within these constraints, I am permitted to affirm any religion as true, and practice it thus in public, as long as I recognize that this has a new meaning that would strike an ancient thinker as confusing, if not simply confused: it is true “for me.” Notice that the potentializing of religion in this way allows one to neutralize the implications of the existence of God without having to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would come with rejecting God outright. In short, the precondition for the emergence of the modern concept of freedom is not the denial of God, but the denial of his actual self-revelation in history. Modern liberty, at its core, is a rejection specifically of the incarnation, God’s coming in the flesh. (David C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017], 126.)

^[26] Scherer, Metaphysics of Revolution, 254.

^[27] Philip Clayton, “Panentheisms East and West,” Sophia 49.2 (2010): 183–191 at 186.

^[28] The following passage from the article “Panentheism(s): What It Is and Is Not,” by Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria, deserves to be transcribed in full, as it describes panentheism  in its deep connection with liberalism, which was shrewdly captured by Scherer in his book. Furthermore, in this excerpt, Latester and Bilimoria, two of the most important representatives of Western panentheism, send a message to those they call “the poor theists”:

A bare panentheistic view of the world typically lacks an authoritarian deity dictating commands from on high. Only the divine can tell us what to do, but we are the divine! And unlike the poor theists, who are told that they are imperfect and must take action to get closer to the deity, we need do nothing, and we need feel no guilt. For we know that we are god. And we are what we are meant to be, at any moment in time. We do not wage destructive wars based on who worships the correct god. For we are all god. (Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria, “Panentheism(s):What It Is and Is Not,” Journal of World Philosophies 3 [Winter 2018], 52.)

^[29] Scherer, Metaphysics of Revolution, 325.

^[30] Ibid., 348.

^[31] Ibid., 216.