Professor John Rist is regarded as one of the Church’s finest living scholars of ancient philosophy, classics and early Christian philosophy and theology. 

An English convert to the faith, he is an expert on St. Augustine of Hippo, Plato and Aristotle and a prolific author who has held the Dominican Father Kurt Pritzl Chair in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and is a life member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, England.

In these comments, some of which formed part of the recent Register article on England’s moral and spiritual decline, Rist explains how secularization and moral fragmentation stems from the Reformation and the rise of nontheistic rights theories. He also discusses how the collapse of traditional Christianity, especially Catholicism, has left a void, leading to a de facto nihilism where the power to enforce desires trumps objective morals. 

Rist believes this shift, exacerbated by the decline in influential Christian intellectuals and the failures of replacement ideologies, leaves little hope for a turnaround in the foreseeable future.

 

Professor Rist, what is your assessment of the decline of England? How does it perhaps differ from the rest of Europe? 

I think that the English situation is now becoming more and more like the European situation in general. One of the reasons that distinguishes England from Europe is that England was the first semi-industrialized “great power” to become stoutly Protestant. 

By far the best study of the secularization of not only England but Europe generally is Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, in which he emphasizes that the ending of uniformity in religion was bound to lead, and did lead, to the non-uniformity of morals, not least when, even before the Reformation, morality was increasingly becoming separated from salvation. 

This was also apparent when the modern (i.e., nontheistic) version of rights theory got a huge boost from the American Founding Fathers and their documents because they were able to foist their unargued “self-evident” claims about rights and God (as of “happiness”) on a population which still shared some, now disappearing, basics of religious morality. Also remember that [Thomas] Jefferson was a deist; therefore, many of his pronouncements about God were humbug and intended to deceive. But, inevitably, the plurality of religion was going to lead to the plurality of moralities — or nonmoralities. 

 

If rights are not divinely ordained, can they be justified on purely secular grounds?

The point about the theistic and nontheistic versions of rights theory is that if, as now, we live, in most people’s view, in a purely naturalistic world, rights — whether or not recognized as such — are just nonsense, as intelligent atheists or de facto ones like [Thomas] Hobbes and [Jeremy] Bentham recognized clearly. If, that is, there is no god, rights can only be, as [Alasdair] MacIntyre put it, like believing in fairies or witches. 

A more general basic problem was already identified by MacIntyre in After Virtue — note the title. Objective morals exemplified in the virtues have been replaced. Now all that matters is that we respect everyone’s rights, though we have no idea — without the metaphysics which we reject — on what a right is or who is entitled to what. 

Hence virtue ethics — theist or other — is in effect replaced by the “right” to claim whatever you want; hence, what matters is the mere power to enforce your desires, whatever they are. 

One practical application of this is that, in a democracy, the parliament, or its equivalent, is replaced by judges as arbiters of what is “acceptable.” [British Prime Minister Keir] Starmer is a typical product of this mentality, which expresses itself as “lawfare.” But the phenomenon goes back at least to [Samuel, baron von] Pufendorf. I am attempting to write a book to be called From Christianity to Nihilism to describe the general European (and British) mood. 

 

How much of England’s decline owes itself to the collapse of Christianity, and especially the Catholic faith, in the country?

I certainly agree that the collapse of traditional (i.e., Catholic) Christianity is an important factor in its decline, not least because all other forms are far less defensible. The Church of England, being Erastian [a church ruled by the state] from the start, was bound to collapse into its components with, say, “Laudian” Anglo-Catholicism on the one hand [Archbishop William Laud of Canterbury, 1573-1645], and local varieties of Calvinism on the other. 

Not that much has survived among today’s nonconformists (except perhaps hypocrisy, already identified in the 18th century by [Bernard] Mandeville as a typically English vice — or is it a virtue for Mandeville?), which would please Calvin, but the fact that since Anglicanism tried to retain some, but not enough, bits of Catholicism, it was inevitable that the “holes” would become apparent and the whole thing would be discredited. Bishop [George] Berkeley in the early 18th century already rightly pointed out that by then “his” church was full of deists. So Stage 1 is from theism to deism (of course, thus dropping Christian biblical history en passant), then from deism to what the late unlamented Don Cupitt called “Christian atheism.”

As to English history in particular, it seems the Reformation was helped along in its English version by identifying hatred of Spain with hatred of the papacy. Then come the atheists: [Christopher] Marlowe must be one of the very first, along with other members of the circle of Sir Walter Raleigh; then the wars of religion, then (libertine) weariness, with all the gruesome killings, which all had engaged in for so long, leading to the sense that religion is merely savagery (c.f., Voltaire) and should be replaced by science and shopping — and that was helped along very well by the profits of a growing empire. 

But when the empire collapsed, what was left? Nobody knew. All was discredited — Catholicism, Protestantism, communism, fascism — so where else to go? [This thinking posited] Best perhaps to kill yourself since, as Stephen Hawking put it, we are just scum on the surface of a middle-sized planet. The impotence of mankind in the vast universe encourages this sense: i.e., that human life (except perhaps mine!) is worthless. Compare this with the easy acceptance of abortion, the desire for infanticide and the killing off of the (economically unprofitable) oldies.

And note that abortion now is not, as it once was, almost an economic necessity but a mere social convenience in many cases. There is no doubt that the sense of impotence encourages the sense that we are mere units. Democratic states thus reach a potentially totalitarian conclusion.

So we need to ask: What happens if the ideologies which largely replaced Christianity are shown to be unsatisfactory, let alone brutal, as they normally are? If you can’t go back to what is “discredited,” you must go on, and the next stage — if progressivism seems ineffective or merely unrealistic — is de facto nihilism, although society will pretend that this is not the case; which brings me to a very important point. Anna [Rist] and I talked a bit about compartmentalizing of the mind in our book Confusion in the West: Retrieving Tradition in the Modern and Post-Modern World, but since then, I have come to think it is much more important than, for example, questions of whether we are “successive selves,” though that still does much harm. 

I have written some thoughts about this in my “philosophically framed” autobiography, which will be published in September, for one sees examples of it everywhere, whether among bishops, politicians or the ordinary bloke in the pub. They all act, of course, in the 

marketplace of ideas of which we spoke earlier, but also, in effect, adopt the attitude of “I don’t want to know about that” (i.e., they don’t want to be confronted with the nihilistic conclusion of their unbelief). It reminds me of a particularly egregious example in a book about the Second World War when Albert Speer was advised that it would be better — i.e., for his state of mind — if he did not visit Upper Silesia, which meant, of course: You don’t “want to know” about Auschwitz.

 

How much does England’s decline owe itself to a lack of Catholic intellectuals? 

This is relative to both the decline of Catholicism in Europe generally and the English decline in particular. The number of highly intelligent people in charge of, or influential in, the various Christian denominations has radically declined in the last 30 or so years. 

Among Anglicans there were in my youth several highly educated Anglican individuals in the universities. Of this group, Rowan Williams [former archbishop of Canterbury] is pretty well the last survivor. Among Catholics, the academic tradition in England has not been much since the Reformation. Many Catholic intellectuals (Pope, Dryden, etc.) kept their heads down, understandably then, but less so now; although, in the 20th century, there were quite a number of prominent Catholics in universities, but until they retired, you could hardly recognize them as Catholic. We are down to a privatized religion. 

Of course, in Europe more generally, especially in France, the intellectual decline is more obvious. One may not agree with the various claims of Catholic intellectuals in France (Congar, Chenu, De Lubac, Danielou, Maritain, Gilson, etc.), but the intellectual level was obviously high. Now, they have virtually no comparable successors. And eggheads matter: Their views trickle down via students, journalists, “influencers,” etc. The Church lost much of the working class in the 19th century, and in the late 20th, the Church lost most of the intellectuals for whom evolution destroyed the last religious straw. 

Of present-day academics, there are a few traditional anti-papists, but most of my university colleagues simply accept that Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, is a thing of the past, now cultivated by nostalgics or people terrified to admit the “reality” of an almost value-less universe (see [Martin] Heidegger, [Derek] Parfit, etc.). They think of Christians as, at best, belonging to some kind of (sometimes) do-gooding NGO. This is not helped by “Thomists” talking to themselves — in most cases — and publishing their works in journals not read by secular thinkers.

 

Looking to the future, how hopeful are you that things can be turned around? 

I think talk of any new spring in the foreseeable future is whistling in the wind. As Brad Gregory put it, when doctrine is always disputed, it loses interest and ceases to be compelling — and we go shopping! 

As for the Lambeth Conference of 1930 that allowed contraception, that was merely a further stage in a continuing process, and we are tending to go the same way ourselves, although the “pill,” pace its Catholic as well as Anglican advocates, has certainly become a minefield for morals — and not only about sexuality. Or perhaps in contemporary idiom, I should compare it to a grenade thrown into a bar.