![]() ![]() ![]() As Berry tells us, if we cannot say what freedom is for, we can only curtail it when it infringes the rights of others-the famous harm principle. Now, as Professor Mathew Berry tells us, “political nominalism provides a stronger foundation for brutal imperialism and fascism than it does for good government.” The reason is that only Aristotelian Christianity can tell us what freedom in the political order is for, because the teleological nature of social reality constrains the impulse to freely determine it from the outside. If will overcomes reason, freedom in political life should reign, they surmised. Just as God was free to impose an order into chaos, individuals are free to impose an order into society and into their own lives. Such nominalism was introduced into politics by way of an extreme adherence to human freedom. God willed a given order but that order is extrinsic, only found in Him. ![]() God imposes a given order but could have imposed another. All order in the universe, they held, is extrinsic from the rambling chaos of matter. Prime examples are William of Ockham and later some in the Protestant tradition who sought to vindicate divine sovereignty and freedom. There were some in theology who adhered to a nominalist understanding of the universe and who questioned the Thomistic tradition. This teleological universe, and we as part of it, is intelligible and intrinsically ordered. With Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian Christianity asserted that human beings are real beings with a substance or nature and that nature has a purpose or end built into it. The differences between Christian theology and the philosophical foundations of the modern world cannot be starker. ![]()
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