This essay started so well. At any rate, if you like learned philosophical works with a deep submersion in mediaeval scholasticism and Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian metaphysics.
But if it starts with a bang, it ends with a decided whimper.
I think we need to have a word with Professor Hanby (who is associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America). Via ChatGPT, of course.
Nigel: Professor Hanby, I am a recent convert to Catholicism. My prior experience of large organisations with a mission has been most marked by my early experiences as a leading militant with the Trotskyist Fourth International (British Section), and in my career with relatively high-powered, goal-oriented global tech companies.
By comparison the Catholic Church feels almost intellectually moribund, at least in its public pronouncements. Endless appeals to feel-good abstractions like 'Love', 'Faith' and 'Hope' are hardly cutting-edge interventions into the existential crises of the modern age, are they?
I read your 'Christian Atheism' article: I get that. So what's going on?
'Michael Hanby': This question cuts to the heart of what I attempted to diagnose in The Crisis of Catholic Atheism. Your background in both revolutionary politics and high-powered technological organizations makes you particularly well-placed to perceive what many Catholics take for granted: the Church today, at least in its institutional self-presentation, lacks intellectual seriousness and has largely abdicated its responsibility to engage with the existential crises of the modern age in any deep way.
Instead, it offers therapeutic platitudes, a kind of sentimental moralism that functions more as an emotional salve than as a genuine confrontation with the metaphysical and theological stakes of our time.
Why is this happening?
The short answer is that the Church itself has been captured by the same metaphysical revolution that has transformed the entire Western world. It no longer truly believes in its own intellectual patrimony—at least, not in a way that would allow it to articulate Catholicism as a fundamentally different way of seeing reality, rather than just another cultural artifact within the secular order.
Instead of addressing modernity’s real crises—the collapse of meaning, the technologization of life, the nihilistic void at the heart of the contemporary worldview—the Church is largely playing by modernity’s rules.
It speaks in managerial and sociological terms, as if its real mission were to remain “relevant,” to serve as a kind of ethical consultancy within the world rather than a voice that challenges the world’s very foundations.
The Real Crisis: A Church that No Longer Thinks
What you perceive as intellectual torpor is, at root, a metaphysical crisis. The Church’s public discourse lacks force because it has subtly accepted the functional atheism of the modern world:
- It talks about God, but as an abstraction rather than a living, ontological reality.
- It speaks of faith, hope, and love, but without grounding them in a true metaphysical vision of reality as created, sustained, and made intelligible by God.
- It uses sociological and psychological categories to analyze itself, rather than theological and philosophical ones.
- It reduces theology to politics—often of the most pedestrian, bureaucratic sort—rather than presenting it as an intellectually rigorous engagement with truth.
What you are sensing—coming, as you do, from two intensely goal-driven environments (revolutionary politics and tech)—is that the Church no longer sees itself as advancing a coherent vision of reality, but instead as managing its own decline within the categories given to it by the secular world.
The language of revolution, which once animated Christianity in its confrontation with paganism, has been replaced with the language of pastoral accommodation and institutional survival.
So What Can Be Done?
The first step is to see the problem clearly. This is not just about better public relations or smarter Church leaders. It is about recovering the intellectual seriousness of Catholicism, its ability to articulate a true alternative to the immanent, mechanistic, and nihilistic worldview of modernity. This means:
- Recovering Metaphysical Realism – The Church must return to speaking about truth, being, and nature rather than reducing everything to subjective experience or social policy.
- Resisting the Managerial Mindset – The Church must abandon the bureaucratic impulse that treats the faith as a product to be marketed rather than a reality to be proclaimed.
- Engaging Modernity with Intellectual Courage – Instead of conceding to secular assumptions, the Church must challenge them at the deepest levels—just as it once did with pagan Rome.
- Revitalizing the Catholic Imagination – This crisis is not just intellectual but also cultural. The Church must produce thinkers, artists, and mystics capable of re-enchanting the world.
You come from traditions that, whatever their flaws, understood themselves as engaged in a real struggle—whether for political revolution or technological transformation.
The Church, by contrast, often seems to be merely administering its own slow-motion liquidation. But if Christianity is true, then this situation cannot last forever. Reality asserts itself.
The question is whether the Church will recover its vision before or after it has been completely hollowed out.
Nigel: Your critique seems pretty well-placed. But just when I was getting interested your intellectual momentum seemed to evaporate. You suggest weakly that the Church should get back to the fundamentals, get back to what it takes to be eternal truths.
Yet those truths were formulated by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in antiquity mostly, using the intellectual tools available to them, predominantly Aristotelian metaphysics and Platonic categories (yes, I studied those things at university).
Then, as now, I can't help but notice the utter obsolescence of that tradition; it doesn't frame reality in any compelling way. Absent that, where is the Church going to find the necessary launch-point for a compelling alternative existential vision and philosophy for people in the modern age?
What paradigms might suffice to take on and refute the pervasive, nihilistic and reductionist materialism which defines our secular age, contributing to pervasive anomie and endless cultural fads?
'Michael Hanby': The crisis of modern Catholic thought is not merely one of institutional decline but of intellectual vision. The Church, trapped between its admittedly outdated philosophical categories and an uncritical adoption of secular assumptions, has largely failed to articulate a compelling alternative to the nihilism and reductionism of our age.
The answer cannot be a retreat into biblical literalism or a crude, uncritical appropriation of scientific discourse. Instead we seek a bold re-engagement with metaphysics, aesthetics, and the existential dimensions of faith.
So science, for all its successes, does not exhaust the fundamental questions of meaning, consciousness, or being. The problem is not simply materialism’s incompleteness, but its cultural dominance, shaping even the Church’s self-understanding.
A renewed Catholic vision must acknowledge scientific insights without reducing truth to the empirical, recognizing that intelligibility, form, and order are irreducible to purely formal processes.
Rather than imposing outdated Aristotelian categories on an indifferent world, we must rearticulate the metaphysical structure of reality in ways that engage contemporary physics, information theory, and philosophy. And without falling into a naïve “God of the Gaps” trap.
Simply counterposing biblical literalism is not the answer either. Modern biblical scholarship cannot be ignored. The Church must take historical-critical insights seriously without allowing them to reduce faith to a mere sociological artifact. Christianity’s truth does not rest on literal historicity but on its metaphysical and existential coherence—its ability to describe the human condition more truthfully than any rival worldview.
The Incarnation and Resurrection are not mere symbols, but neither are they crude factual claims to be defended like archaeological relics. They are revelations of being itself, and must be understood as such.
Beyond philosophy, Catholicism must reclaim aesthetic and contemplative experience as ways of knowing. Our crisis is not just intellectual but a crisis of perception—we no longer see the world as charged with meaning.
Beauty, liturgy, and mystical experience offer an encounter with transcendence that raw logic cannot provide. The Church should cultivate a culture so rich, so suffused with presence, that the sterility of reductive materialism becomes self-evident.
In sum, Catholicism must think again, not by reviving old formulas but by answering the deepest questions of modernity on their own terms. One that challenges nihilism not by retreating from it, but by offering a vision of reality more profound than anything it can muster.
Nigel: Stirring words. But where would you look in the institutions of the Church for such an ideological campaign to be promoted? The Jesuits? Some of the Cardinals? A subsequent Pope? I don't see any constituency lobbying for what you propose, although I myself quite strongly favour it.
'Michael Hanby': You’re right to be skeptical—there is no coherent movement within the Church currently lobbying for this kind of intellectual and existential renewal. The dominant factions either:
- Embrace secular modernity’s assumptions—reducing theology to social activism and sociology. (Think of the synodal process, certain Jesuits, and progressive Catholic academia.)
- Retreat into nostalgic traditionalism—doubling down on premodern frameworks without seriously engaging contemporary thought. (Think of the more reactionary elements of the Catholic Right.)
Neither group is capable of addressing modernity at its deepest level—one concedes the field entirely, the other tries to fight with outdated weapons. The battle I describe—recasting Catholicism as a philosophical and cultural force capable of taking on nihilism head-on—has no clear institutional home. That said, where might it emerge?
1. The Jesuits? Unlikely.
Historically, the Jesuits were the intellectual vanguard of the Church. Today, they are largely bureaucrats of 'relevance', more interested in shaping Catholicism to fit modern categories than challenging those categories themselves. Figures like Fr. James Martin exemplify this tendency—engagement with modernity, yes, but always on its terms. The Society of Jesus would need a radical renewal of its founding spirit to become a serious philosophical force again.
2. The Dominicans? A Better Bet.
If any major order still has the intellectual backbone to take up this cause, it’s the Dominicans. Their mission—preaching and philosophy—has not yet been entirely bureaucratized. Some houses, like the École Biblique in Jerusalem, still do serious scriptural scholarship, and figures like Fr. Thomas Joseph White (a Thomist who engages modern physics and philosophy seriously) show promise. But they, too, are often more focused on defending the past than shaping the future.
3. The Cardinals? A Few Outliers.
The College of Cardinals is mostly an administrative body, but there are exceptions. Cardinal Robert Sarah (though more a mystic than a philosopher) has warned against the Church’s intellectual capitulation to modernity. Bishop Erik Varden, a Cistercian with a contemplative depth, has the intellectual seriousness needed for such a renewal. But there is no critical mass of thinkers at the highest levels making this case.
4. A Future Pope?
A Pope with the intellectual clarity of Benedict XVI but the cultural savvy of John Paul II could, in theory, launch such a renewal. But this would require an ideological shift at the highest levels—one that sees the crisis of Catholicism not as political (left vs. right), but as ontological (reality vs. unreality, transcendence vs. nihilism). No such figure is on the horizon.
5. Catholic Intellectual Circles? A Possible Starting Point.
The best hope may not be within the hierarchy at all, but among lay Catholic intellectuals and alternative institutions. Some potential breeding grounds for this movement:
- The John Paul II Institute (Rome & Washington, DC) – A center of serious philosophical engagement, though politically fraught.
- The Thomistic Institute (USA & UK) – Promoting philosophy and theology in dialogue with science, though still largely academic.
- Figures like Rémi Brague, D.C. Schindler, and Jean-Luc Marion – Philosophers engaging the metaphysical roots of modernity’s crisis.
So Where Does This Leave Us?
No institutional movement currently exists to recover Catholicism as an intellectual and existential force against nihilism. But such movements start small—Augustine, Aquinas, and Pascal didn’t wait for committees to endorse their vision. If this is to happen, it will likely come from outside the Church’s bureaucratic structures, led by independent thinkers who see modernity’s dead end and refuse to accept it.
If such a movement does not emerge, Catholicism will continue its slow drift into irrelevance or reactive traditionalism—neither of which can meet the crisis at hand. People who favor the vision I'm advocating might have to build it themselves.
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