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The trouble with liberalism is the trouble with all heresies\u2014it has no idea that it is a heresy. It believes that it developed sui generis<\/em>, without parents, as a sudden insight of an enlightened mind which finally decided to be rational, see all men as equal, abhor slavery, recognize democracy as the ideal form of government, posit the nature of man as a self-interested actor, relegate religion to the sphere of private belief, and otherwise constitute the world of open elections and iPad sales that we know and love today.<\/p>\n In fact, liberalism is an interpretation of Scripture, the sum of many heretical commentaries on the Bible which were extremely popular between the 16th and the 19th centuries, and which have now become normative. To live as a \u201cmodern\u201d is simply to live out this set of commentaries without citing them. Unlike the Medieval or the Patristic commentary traditions, where orthodox and heterodox thinkers alike clearly set out to provide a gloss on a particular passage of Scripture or an attack on a particularly onerous theology, liberalism blossoms within a literary tradition of long-windedness. As Jacques Ellul put it, a \u201ccharacteristic of this scientific literature is that it attempts to set down in one book the whole realm of knowledge.\u201d[1]<\/p>\n Within this tradition, no one bats an eye when Locke interprets the Tower of Babel as the establishment of a Commonwealth in his Treatises on Government<\/em>; when Hobbes calls Moses an absolute sovereign in the parts of Leviathan<\/em> that no one reads; when John Adams includes in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson an argument disdaining the \u201ctotal lack of political realism on the part of the [Hebrew] prophets.\u201d It falls to the critic to pull out the scriptural exegesis from the humanistic attempt to say everything about everything; but without addressing the liberal fathers\u2019 appeal to Scripture, we fail to understand them, and thus their progeny\u2014ourselves.<\/p>\n Most fundamentally, liberalism is a retelling of the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden. This retelling is masked as a rational deduction of the original state of man prior to entering into society\u2014but no one continues to pretend that Rousseau or Locke produced a more scientific account of mankind\u2019s beginning with their \u201cstate of nature\u201d myths. They told another story. Elsewhere in this publication, D. C. Schindler articulates the soul of the new, liberal Eden. By beginning with Adam as an individual, \u201cliberalism proceeds by positing<\/em> an abstract nature, emptied of the actual substantial content that would immediately…root<\/em> nature in a concrete web of relations, and so anchor it in various natural hierarchies that co-determine the actuality<\/em> of what it is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Genesis begins with an original society of male and female in dynamic relation with their Creator. Liberalism subtracts the originality of society and calls man\u2019s individuality \u201coriginal\u201d instead.[2] As a result, human relations become extrinsic meetings between sovereign individuals rather than the original truth of the human person, who walks about in families. Genesis begins with Adam\u2019s dynamic ordination to till and to keep the world; creatively transform the entire earth into a temple fit for God\u2019s praise. Liberalism subtracts this original mission from Adam (which only makes sense when man is described as originally belonging to a social order) and replaces it with the individualistic mission of survival. Adam tills and keeps to keep himself alive.[3]\u00a0<\/p>\n To feel the \u201ctruth\u201d of liberalism, that we are all self-interested, individual survivors, is simply what it feels like to live out a material heresy\u2014to see with the liberal lenses that have been given to us. Exiting liberalism requires shaking off liberalism\u2019s exegesis by, first of all, recognizing it as<\/em> scriptural exegesis rather than according to its own self-description as a post-Biblical, scientific deduction of the truth about man and, secondly, by relearning and believing orthodox exegesis of the Scriptures that comes to us from the Church, her fathers and her saints.<\/p>\n Thomas Malthus is especially instructive in this task. He famously articulated the basic principle which props up liberal economic theory: scarcity<\/em>. We live his Essay on the Principle of Population<\/em> when we presume that human beings, by virtue of living within a world of scarce (finite, limited) goods, can be described as racing against misery, in a state of competition for individual survival. Rather less famously, Malthus, an Anglican priest, defended this vision of man in a re-reading of Genesis.<\/p>\n The reason for the re-reading is obvious: If increased population dooms men to war for finite resources, then the Genesis blessing \u201cbe fruitful and multiply\u201d is no blessing, but a curse. So Malthus sought to reconcile a scarce universe and a misery-damned humanity with a God of blessing and abundance.<\/p>\n Malthus posited, first of all, that God was not omnipotent. The reason he created a universe of scarce resources was because he created under the necessity of developing the mind of man: \u201c[T]o the Great Creator, Almighty as he is, a certain process may be necessary, a certain time (or at least what appears to us as time) may be requisite, in order to form beings with those exalted qualities of mind which will fit them for his high purposes\u201d.[4]<\/p>\n It is not the case that misery and toil are evils which man must bear insofar as he disobeys God. Rather, God creates the world with the intention<\/em> that man will be threatened with misery, as it is precisely the threat of misery and death, and the subsequent necessity of toil, which serves as \u201ca process necessary, to awaken inert, chaotic matter, into spirit; to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul; to elicit an \u00e6thereal spark from the clod of clay.\u201d This leads Malthus to assert his real heretical whopper, that \u201cthe original sin of man, is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter, in which he may be said to be born.\u201d<\/p>\n Let us be clear of the reasoning that now forms the substratum of our own. Matter is evil. Mind is good. To get mind out of matter, it was necessary that God make a scarce universe, rather than a universe of abundant provision, because \u201c[t]he first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body.\u201d Toil, instead of a punishment, becomes the means of man\u2019s salvation from his original (and sinful) state of being mixed up with torpid matter. This description is \u201cfundamental,\u201d because Malthus applies it, not to man as a sinner, but for man as he is created by God.<\/p>\n Malthus\u2019 heresies are expansive: He indulges in Manichaeism, with its assertion that matter is evil; Dualism, in which evil is described as a necessary principle of creation; Pelagianism, with its optimistic belief that man, through toil, can attain his salvation; Gnosticism, by which the development of Mind is posited as the true end of Christianity; and a few more, I don\u2019t doubt. Malthus\u2019 wiser friends encouraged him that his position was untenable, and he stripped his theological groundwork from all subsequent editions of the Essay on Population. This serves as a kind of metaphor for liberalism as a whole, in which a theological \u201cfirst edition\u201d is stricken from subsequent texts which entire generations believe and carry in their backpacks, blithely unaware that the whole show once involved an immensely dubious reading of Scripture.[5]<\/p>\n When I say that Malthusian economics has been digested into the gut of every contemporary man, I do not mean that we have read Malthus, nor that, if we were to read him, we would agree with his dire predictions of overpopulation. I mean that we have absorbed his fundamental description of Adam, the original man, as a being who works because he is compelled by fear for his own survival. Malthus makes the threat of misery essential to the very existence of the human being, and thus describes all of man\u2019s possible actions as strife against the threat of a lack<\/em>. This is a fundamental theme of classical liberalism, obvious in thinkers like Hobbes and Darwin, but equally present in \u201cthe good guys\u201d \u2014 as in the theology of John Locke. As noted, Locke argued that Adam toiled in the Garden of Eden: \u201cWhen God gave the world in common to all mankind, he commanded man to work, and man needed to work in order to survive.<\/em>\u201d Working for his survival, man creates property, which Locke describes as belonging to the order of competition between men: \u201cA man who in obedience to this command of God subdued, tilled and sowed any part of the earth\u2019s surface thereby joined to that land something that was his property, something that no-one else had any title to or could rightfully take from him.<\/em>\u201d[6]<\/p>\n In our own lives, the liberal account of Adam\u2019s work in the Garden plays out in our inability to rest; to enjoy things for their own sake; to do anything that doesn\u2019t give us money or property; to appreciate art; to imagine a society that does not operate on the principle of competition or a world that is not scarce, but abundant. But it is most apparent in our worship of technology.<\/p>\n As Josef Ratzinger puts it, \u201ctechnology originally arose as the means for assuring man\u2019s security.\u201d[7] In this respect, technology is a great good\u2014a tremendous capacity of the human beings to see the world as parts and resources that can be ordered into systems and devices that solve problems, cure diseases, and otherwise fill needs<\/em>. In another respect, technology is the offspring of famine, war, and death; a shield flung up against the fiery sword that casts mankind out of paradise; a desperate ordering of nature\u2019s goods into the effort of staving off death and dearth. Our oscillating opinions about technology\u2014praising it as our future and fearing it as our apocalypse\u2014are grounded in this fact: behind every technological device is an imperfection that it purports to heal. If Malthus, Locke, and all the rest are correct that man is created in and through his confrontation with lack, then man\u2019s natural gaze must be technological.<\/p>\n The book of Genesis takes an opposite view. It actively rejects the description of the world as scarce, and it castigates the technological gaze. Genesis describes Adam as the one who perfects other created beings. The plants are not made except insofar as Adam exists to till them: \u201c[N]o plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up\u2014for the lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.<\/em>\u201d (Genesis 2:5) Likewise, as Ephrem the Syrian says, \u201cthe animals came to Adam as a loving shepherd.\u201d[8] The \u201ckeeping\u201d of Adam, which the Fathers took in the allegorical sense of keeping the commandment, probably referred in the literal sense to shepherding (as in Genesis 30:31 and 1 Samuel 17:20), and just as his presence perfects the plants of the field, his shepherding perfects and finishes the animals: \u201cwhatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.\u201d (2:19)<\/p>\n Thomas Aquinas argues, concerning Adam, that \u201cGod created things not only for their own existence, but also that they might be the principles of other things\u201d[9] Thus, when the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till and keep it, we can understand this tilling and keeping as the fulfilment of the nature of the plants that \u201cwaited\u201d for their gardener and the animals that waited to be named by their shepherd\u2014their principle of perfection. At this original juncture, labor is not toilsome, but restful, as Augustine says: \u201cAlthough man was placed in paradise so as to work and guard it, that praiseworthy work was not toilsome.\u201d[10] To till and keep what one is created to till and keep can no more be described as a toil for survival than breathing or laughing at a joke.<\/p>\n Already we begin to catch a glimmer of the orthodoxy from which Malthus departs: There is a kind of work that is not performed for the sake of survival, for fear of a lack, and out of competitive self-interest; it is that work by which man acts according to his nature as a principle of perfection of other beings\u2014as a gardener and shepherd of this Earth.<\/p>\n This work is restful. Rest does not indicate a lack of activity, as Malthus seemed to assume. As Aquinas puts it, \u201cGod did<\/em> act on the seventh day, not by creating new creatures, but by directing and moving his creatures to the work proper to them.\u201d[11] If God, in his Sabbath rest, sustains creation in being and moves it towards its perfection, Adam, made in the image of God, participates in this work-which-is-not-toil, directing and moving God\u2019s creatures to their perfection. This non-technological making, motivated by our nature as gardeners of the world, is difficult to feel and to find outside of the Garden of Eden\u2014but this is no reason to declare it non-existent and never having been. We experience glimmers of Eden in our daily lives.<\/p>\n To be the master of a tool or of a skill is to have it as a second nature. The child learning to use a hammer toils<\/em>. He feels it as a thing, a wooden shaft with a heavy, metal end that he must manipulate through space in order to accomplish his aspirations to carpentry. The hammer resists him\u2014he bashes his thumb, misses the nail, loses his grip. But as he works and learns, he enters into communion with the tool. He no longer \u201caims\u201d the hammer at the nail\u2014he hammers the nail, knowing that it will land with the same certainty that he knows his fingernail will land on his nose when he moves to scratch it. Through repeated actions, the hammer becomes an extension of his body. He masters the tool.\u00a0<\/p>\n Likewise, the amateur gardener toils to perfect the skill of gardening. Insofar as he is an amateur, his skill is only an ideal that his hoeing and pruning tends towards; a body of knowledge that he must continuously look up, get wrong, and look up again. But the man who has gardening as a habit and a \u201cperfection of a power of the soul\u201d does not fight with the soil. His toil is no toil; his work has become his rest; his labor is enjoyable; his technique is no longer technical, but a second nature.<\/p>\n What mastery we enjoy is a hard-earned and fragile product of toil. The mastery Adam enjoyed he enjoyed because he was created as the natural principle of perfection for the garden in which he was planted. We labor to incorporate the tool and its technique into our bodies. Aquinas argues that in the state of innocence, Adam\u2019s work is already incorporated into his body: \u201cof…the body itself man is master not by commanding, but by using\u2026 [Likewise] in the state of innocence man\u2019s mastership over plants and inanimate things consisted not in commanding or in changing them, but in making use of them without hindrance.<\/em>\u201d[12]<\/p>\n But mastery alone is insufficient to assure that work is restful. A man could perfect a skill and still find the use of it loathsome and wearying. Aquinas argues that God created man to \u201cdress and keep paradise, which dressing would not have involved labor, as it did after sin, but would have been pleasant on account of man\u2019s practical knowledge of the powers of nature.\u201d[13] Perfect knowledge of the beings upon which one works is also required to rid work of its toilsome aspect. We see this dimly in the phenomenon by which a \u201clabor of love\u201d does not seem to be a labor at all. A mother who feeds her child enjoys her work, insofar as she wants to perfect the child\u2014insofar as she knows and loves the child and understands that her labor shepherds that child into its full stature. Aquinas seems to extend the pleasure of love\u2019s labors to all the labors of Paradise. Adam, like Eve, is \u201cthe mother of all the living,\u201d the one who nurtures the world to its proper perfection, and thus does not loath to labor, but delights in it.<\/p>\n The vision of the restful man for whom the world waits as for its principle of perfection is not spoken by the authors of Genesis in a vacuum, but as a polemic against the dominant myths of the nations with which they warred. The Atrahasis Epic, which contains the stories of the Flood and the Ark which the authors of Genesis obviously confronted, likewise contains a description of the reason for Man\u2019s existence: \u201cWhen the gods were man they did forced labor, they bore drudgery. Great indeed was the drudgery of the gods, the forced labor was heavy, the misery too much.\u201d<\/p>\n As in Malthus, there is nothing prior to drudgery. It is concomitant with existence. The solution sought by the gods is not to redeem toil, but to vacate themselves from it. They look for one who they will force to toil for them; they create a state in which a few escape drudgery and misery by a relative increase in the drudgery and misery of others: \u201cthe seven great Anunna-gods were burdening the Igigi-gods [lesser gods] with forced labor.\u201d<\/p>\n The myth describes Creation itself as the product of slaves serving their masters: \u201cThe Igigi-gods dug the Tigris river and the Euphrates thereafter.\u201d Genesis subverts the dominant mythologies when it describes a Creation that is freely given, in which both the Tigris and the Euphrates \u201cflow out of Eden to water the garden\u201d (2:10) and there is peace. In Atrahasis there is class war: \u201cLet us face up to our foreman the prefect, he must take off our heavy burden upon us….Now them, call for battle, battle let us join, warfare!\u201d The gods heard his words: they set fire to their tools, they put fire to their spaces, and flame to their work baskets.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, the insurrection of the slave-gods is quelled by the suggestion that human beings be created: \u201cBelet-ili, the midwife, is present…Let her create, then, a human, a man. Let him bear the yoke! Let him bear the yoke! Let man assume the drudgery of the god.\u201d[14]<\/p>\n Genesis attacks the myths by asserting that man was not made for toil, rather, toil was an invention of sinful man. It undermines any attempts to build a society on the basis of slave labor, by undercutting the idea that toil is man\u2019s \u201clot,\u201d if by it one means that toil is man\u2019s by nature, in the order of Creation, rather than by punishment, in the order of the Fall. The technological gaze, which the mythmakers describe as the very reason for man\u2019s existence, is castigated as belonging to a world of sin. In the liberal re-telling of Genesis, the technological gaze is made fundamental, and Adam is described as the deficient one who must toil against a surrounding lack in order to be properly made man. Liberalism, as a reading of Scripture, ends in the same position as the paganism that Scripture sought to destroy.<\/p>\n