These statements capture the burden of my argument: any act or order not formed in the logic of love—any act which is forgetful of being and its Source—must invariably end up, by implication, subverting the nature and destiny of things.
Love consists in this, “not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son . . .” (1 Jn 4:10). The love characteristic of the being of the cosmos, in which the cosmos participates by virtue of its creation, is not a love that is first produced by the cosmos, but one that is always first given to the cosmos. As such it is a love that must first be received, through the power that is most basically that of the giver become effective in the gift, a power in which the creature is therefore always properly a filial participant. My proposal is that the mostly implicit ontology of modern culture—and I have in mind here especially America’s “exceptional” form of modernity—is one essentially of technology. Such an ontology abstracts from the logic of love proper to created being, and in so doing assumes a version of power that can only become in the end a caricature of the power of God, a power not of love but of a technical manipulation tending ultimately toward tyranny.
1. This paper is dedicated to Cardinal Angelo Scola, in gratitude for his work in theological anthropology and contemporary cultural issues, and for his collaboration and friendship over many years. It appears in “Sufficit Gratia Tua”: Miscellanea in onore del Card. Angelo Scola in occasione del 70 ̊genetliaco, ed. G. Marengo, J. Prades Lopez, and G. Richi Alberti (Venice: Carcianum Press, 2011).
2. George Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” Addendum [1988], in Collected Works of George Grant, vol. 2: 1951–1959, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 60.
3. Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Humanity (London: Harvill Press, 1952), 55–56.
4. Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 61.