The disintegration of the shared consensus of the West has caught many by surprise. It seems that only yesterday we had an agreed-on set of cultural norms, values, and morals. Certainly, there were disagreements, but they took place within a larger framework that formed a tacit unity for over half a century. The experience of the most recent decade, in contrast, has been to lurch from one disintegrated set of norms to another. 

The old consensus—which Philip Rieff famously called the therapeutic—has failed, and in certain ways failed spectacularly. Indeed, it is the sheer inarticulateness of that consensus in the face of new cultural challenges that has been so striking. But to understand why it failed, and why it failed in such a particular way, one must first understand why the therapeutic triumphed in the first place. Modernity gave rise to a set of political ideologies—most significantly Nazism and Communism—that sought to achieve the perfect moral-political system, both complete and consistent. The bloody rise and seismic collapse of those ideological projects left the therapeutic—the triumph of individual experience over corporate belief—as the only remaining contender for a shared consensus. 

The therapeutic, however, contains the same fatal flaw as its predecessors. All ethical systems are, to one degree or another, rooted in self-reference. Self-reference inevitably leads to irresolvable paradoxes, sowing the seeds of inevitable collapse. This is not mere conjecture; it is mathematical fact. As epochs produce prophets that predict their downfall, so the early twentieth century produced a young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s theorems not only predicted the inevitable failure of modernity’s attempts at complete and consistent systems but also provide a framework for understanding the initial triumph and eventual downfall of our therapeutic world—as well as underscore a unique vocation for Christians in this unsettled time. 

The Modern Quest for Consistency and Completeness

In the early twentieth century, about a decade before the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs, the British mathematician-philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead set out to address the problem of logical paradox. Take, for example, the following statement:

Is the statement true or false? If the statement is true, then it must be false. However, if the statement is false, then perhaps it is not false. The key to its logical unintelligibility is its self-referential nature—by rendering a judgment on itself, the sentence becomes susceptible to logical paradox. Now, if you’re not a machine reading this, you likely can get your mind “inside” the paradox to understand its irresolvability intuitively, but then you can step back “outside” the statement and recognize it for the nonsense that it is. 

Russell and Whitehead attempted to replicate this “inside/outside” psychological move using formal mathematical language. In the Principia Mathematica, they created a system of logic that exists on “levels” of analysis, so that higher levels “outside” the paradoxes of lower levels could be used to resolve them. The paradoxical sentence above could simply be declared “ill-formed”—“out of bounds,” as it were—by a higher level of mathematical grammar. 

By generating such a system of ever-increasing levels, the problems of logic could seemingly disappear. All Russell and Whitehead needed to do was prove that their system was (1) consistent (i.e., it contained no logical contradictions) and (2) complete (i.e., it contained all true statements of formal logic within it). Once both consistency and completeness had been proved, all logical disputes could be perfectly resolved. 

And then something unexpected happened. In a slim eighty pages, a twenty-seven-year-old Gödel proved not only that the Principia Mathematica did not have these properties of consistency and completeness but also that no sufficiently complex system could. This was accomplished through a comparatively brief proof, summarized by Douglas Hofstadter using a single phrase:

If the statement is true, then the Principia Mathematica is incomplete. If the statement is false, then the Principia Mathematica is inconsistent. 

This statement shares the same essential principle of logical paradox—it refers to itself. There is no escape: Any grammar complex enough to refer to itself is always going to run up against either the problem of inconsistency or the problem of incompleteness. Either it must accept false things within itself or it must exclude true things—there is no way around it. 

Less than two years after the publication of Gödel’s theory, Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany and Stalin unleashed famine on Ukraine. Modern man was putting its hubris into practice even as its fundamental flaw was being laid bare. 

But what does mathematical paradox have to do with the ideologies of the early twentieth century? The Gödelian problems of inconsistency and incompleteness lurk in our moral systems. Since any account of what a human being ought to do assumes certain things about what human nature is, ethics is, at its root, a self-referential project. Like a protagonist’s character flaw in an ancient Greek tragedy, the Gödelian problem quietly brings all ethical narratives to an ignominious end. 

Consider one of humanity’s most basic moral rules: Thou shalt not kill. This seemingly clear-cut statement becomes less so under closer examination. There are obvious exceptions, such as when killing is done in the defence of another or in service to one’s country; but these make the system inconsistent. If we leave out the exceptions, eventually we would exclude actions that are morally justified—such as killing a wild animal attacking a child—making the system incomplete. 

Modern philosophers tried to untie this Gödelian knot in at least two major ways. One, proposed by Kant, was to simply narrow the meaning of words. We can replace “kill” with a legally sophisticated term like “murder” and define it so that it can be universally affirmed as an imperative by all rational people (note how this refers the ethics back to humanity itself). Another popular way, proposed by utilitarians like J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham, was to set aside what the rule says and instead make assumptions about what it’s aiming at. In this view, “Thou shalt not kill” is really aiming at life maximization—not all killing is wrong, because some killing results in a greater preservation of life. Rules can then be developed with greater sophistication to determine which kinds of lives are more valuable than others (again, note how this ethics eventually refers back to humanity itself), mandating lethal action against one entity when it would save a more valuable one. We can kill cancer, unless cancer is killing Hitler. 

But this plurality of solutions to the Gödelian problem points to the inherent fly in the ointment: We need to pick one. If the new grammar is going to work, then everyone needs to be on board. We—all of us, without exception—need to decide whether we’re going to fastidiously hold to categorical imperatives or become utilitarians or settle on some other solution. This necessity reveals the modern problem: Instead of solving the Gödelian flaw in our ethics, all that extensive moral reasoning managed to do was transform us into walking, talking Principia Mathematicas, requiring an even higher level of grammar to sort truth from falsehood. No longer concerned with which actions were morally “in” or “out,” but which people were morally “in” or “out,” nations began to take the sorting responsibility upon themselves—equipped with “grammatical” boots with which to stamp on “ill-formed” human faces—forever. 

Thus Communism, Nazism, the gulag, the gas chamber. In 1939, the same year World War II began, Gödel and his wife, in a moment of unintentional symbolism, fled Nazi-annexed Austria to the United States—travelling through Communist Russia—to deliver a warning to Albert Einstein about Germany’s progress toward the atomic bomb. 

The Triumph and Downfall of the Therapeutic

Although his message about the bomb was never delivered, the implications of Gödel’s theories for ethics were increasingly taken to heart in his adopted country. As one nation after another succumbed to the modern totalitarian temptation, the post-Allied West, led by the United States, tried resolving the Gödelian tension with a mind toward avoiding authoritarianism. To this end, we all engaged in a grand bargain: I will withhold passing judgment on your ethical grammar so long as you withhold passing judgment on mine. We could achieve social completeness and individual consistency. No good life was in danger of exclusion (or annihilation), and individuals could work out their own ethics—striving for perfect internal moral consistency with the help of an affirming, therapeutic support network (built loosely, if elaborately, on the techniques developed by Sigmund Freud). The highest grammar was made low, instrumentalized toward the end of individual fulfillment. “Our cultural revolution does not aim at victory for some rival commitment,” wrote Rieff in 1966, “but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none.” 

Under this anti-ethic, even subjecting oneself to a rigorous, socially demanding order, such as a religious or monastic life, was itself viewed through the lens of personal choice and individual journey—these demands are real for those who undertake to live by them, but not for others. Instead, they exist within one’s psychology, and their claims and internal contradictions get worked out through a variety of analytic techniques to achieve a sense of consistency within oneself. All moral claims became claims of self-reference—one could “self-identify” as a vegetarian, as a Christian, as a Wiccan—without the danger of those claims having universal content. 

It seems reasonable to think that this wouldn’t work—that the various expressions of internally consistent ethics would collide with the conditions of social reality, and that someone or some group would transgress in a way that could not simply be overlooked by others. Two factors, however, provided conditions that enabled the bargain to succeed where previous projects had failed: the near-constant fear of defeat by its totalitarian alternatives during the Cold War and its arrival at a time of unprecedented wealth. While capitalism was dissolving communal relationships into instances of economic exchange, material abundance made it possible to isolate ourselves within our own nuclear families and move to ideologically consistent geographical enclaves—and all of this was taking place under the shadow of the Communist threat, therapeutic individualism’s bête noire. Meanwhile, the proliferation of therapeutic ideas through mass media gave us access to a language through which conflicts between personal ethics and social reality could be ironed out. Ethical battles moved from international warfare to self-referential psychological struggle. 

But ironically, this attempt to include a variety of individually consistent moral traditions under a maximally complete social umbrella rooted all moral concerns in self-reference, which is precisely the aspect of moral reasoning that is responsible for the incommensurability of ethical systems in the first place. The lesson of the eruption of furious moralistic “hate-casting” of the last ten years is that our therapeutic form of ethical self-reference is not the solution to the Gödelian problem; it is the Gödelian problem. 

The fissures between our individual subjectivities inevitably grew, to the point where they are now cracking open our social existence. It turns out that for the therapeutic bargain to work, there needs to be at least some degree of correspondence between one’s internally consistent reality and the way society actually organizes itself. Therapeutic language can help address this problem if one’s network is sufficiently self-affirming, but social reality includes more than one’s carefully curated network, and it has a way of stubbornly refusing to consistently affirm us. 

This failure of the therapeutic bargain has led to enormous, society-wide, zero-sum battles over the definition of fundamental aspects of social life, particularly as the internet has given previously ignored ways of living a more prominent place on the social stage. The maintenance of the completeness of our system means the social consensus has a moral obligation to affirm any given individual’s genuine subjective experience in order for that individual to achieve personal consistency. This obligation to affirm others’ subjective experience means that everything from the contours of major institutions to the meanings of words—any element of life requiring social consensus—is disputed territory. Social consensus, then, must be continually revised to account for subjectivities hitherto unknown (but which are declared to have always existed). Or if revision is not plausible, it must be shored up by officially designating incompatible subjectivities to be either voluntarily chosen (and thus private) or scientifically pathological (and thus ethically irrelevant). 

Now social discourse has degenerated into an endless race to see who can more effectively assert why their subjective experience ought to be honoured and (more importantly) why others’ that conflict with it ought to be ignored or condemned—my self-reference versus your self-reference. The rooting of ethical reality in self-reference, while protecting us from the totalitarian temptations peculiar to the twentieth century, created a psychological war of all against all. Our therapeutic order promised the experience of universal affirmation of our individual lives; post-therapeutic ideologies promise to cast out those responsible for our failure to achieve that experience. 

Meanwhile, equipped only to affirm and not to exhort, partisans of the therapeutic—notwithstanding their attempts to conjure spectres of the therapeutic’s horrific predecessors—have been ironically unable to muster a strong affirmative defence of the therapeutic consensus. They simply stand silent, befuddled and frustrated that these upstarts refuse to lay down in their Procrustean featherbed. 

Christians in a Post-therapeutic World

In the face of the failing therapeutic consensus and its incommensurable post-therapeutic alternatives, where are Christians to turn? Should we work to shore up the therapeutic imperium, or cast our lot with one of the ideologies bent on succeeding it? It is first important to underscore that the Gödelian problem is not new to the modern world. In Genesis, prior to possessing the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., ethics), Adam and Eve’s gazes were projected outward without any reference to self—they were unashamed of their nakedness (Genesis 2:25). In the instant of humanity’s moral awakening, humanity became self-referential: “The eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). In the recognition of their own nakedness, the human capacity for naming, expressed in Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis 2:20, turned inward. As St. Athanasius puts it, “They turned their minds away from intelligible reality and began to consider themselves.” In this turn toward self-reference, we seized ethical judgment for ourselves, opening our ethics to the necessity of either inviting in what is evil (inconsistency) or excluding what is good (incompleteness). 

Just as Genesis recognizes the problem of self-reference at the heart of human ethics, the gospel provides us a way out of it. Recall that in Principia Mathematica, paradox at one level could be resolved by reference to a “higher” level of grammar. What if there existed a level “above” all grammars? The level that makes the very possibility of grammar possible? Christianity teaches that the Author of the law became a human being and lived fully subject to the law. Jesus Christ is both above the law and subject to the law, affirming, respectively, the law’s completeness and its consistency. 

But this is not all: Jesus also eschewed self-reference. The church recognizes an entire liturgical season, Epiphany, devoted to the manifestation of Jesus’s divine identity to his people. All the events commemorated during Epiphany are events in which the identity of Jesus as God the Son is revealed through the confessions of others, the power manifested in Jesus’s actions, or the public acclamations of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus does not engage in self-reference—he relies on the reference of others. This is most fully expressed in the Gospel of John: In John 5, when the Pharisees challenge Jesus’s authority, he points resolutely to John the Baptist, to the Father, and to the Scriptures as the authorization for his testimony about himself. And at the crucifixion Pilate has an inscription placed above Jesus’s thorned head identifying him as the king of the Jews. The enemies of Christ want the inscription to say that Jesus said he was the king of the Jews, but Pilate rejects this alternative history, as does the Gospel witness. The last attempt to assert that Jesus is just like us—that he self-identifies, self-asserts, self-refers—is defeated along with sin and death on the cross. Rather than puzzle through and untie it, Jesus simply cut the Gödelian knot. 

What about the endless ethical battles whiplashing our increasingly post-therapeutic society, which swing between an overemphasis on consistency or completeness? While we cannot avoid living in the overlapping moral worlds tied to these factions, we do not have to simply choose one or the other. Indeed, Christ explicitly warns us not to use the leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians to enliven the gospel (Mark 8:15). Contemporary Pharisees may, in their imperious, hypocritical pretensions to moral authority, push relentlessly for moral consistency, stoking mobs to destroy the enemies of their ideological imperatives, as their first-century forebears did to Jesus. And contemporary Herodians may, in their amoral, power-seeking cults of personality, push relentlessly for moral completeness, arbitrarily applying political power to erase anyone bold enough to try to hold them to an objective moral standard, as their first-century forebears did to John the Baptist. Both are ultimately enemies of Christ—just as their first-century forebears were (Mark 3:6). They are also both more nakedly self-referential even than the purveyors of the therapeutic establishment they have supplanted, their ethics boiling down to a cosmic “Because-I-Said-So.” Instead of yoking ourselves to them—or to the passing empire of the therapeutic—we must pour our energies into the alternative society Christ founded: the church, which holds within itself the possibility of freedom from self-reference. 

To follow Jesus in his path free of self-reference, we need the body of Christ, which is physically present in history but also “really present” to us in two other forms. As Henri de Lubac argues in his own reflections on this point, the body of Christ in history is ontologically joined to the body of Christ in the Eucharist and to the body of Christ in the church. 

It is in the partaking of the full life of the church that we become members of Christ’s body and can therefore participate in the external recognition that he received. Because the identity of Christ is bound up in outward reference toward others (rather than self-reference), so too our identity as Christians is bound up in the recognition of our membership in the church by other Christ(ian)s, rather than our own self-reference or self-identification. (This means, of course, that the idea of a “self-identified Christian” is a contradiction in terms.) 

The priest, standing in persona Christi, recognizes us as living members of the body of Christ (the church) and offers us the spiritual food of the body of Christ (the Eucharist). In the gift of Communion, we take the body of Christ into our selves and, because the body is brought to us under the form of bread, our two bodies quite literally become one flesh—“that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us,” as the Book of Common Prayer says. Since the grace of this sacrament comes to us through our baptism (a partaking of the epiphanic event in which Christ’s identity was made manifest), the Father and Holy Spirit jointly affirm our membership in the body of Christ—we become “heirs through hope of [Christ’s] heavenly kingdom”—providing us our ethical identity, again, apart from self-reference. It is in being welcomed into the place of Christ, being freed from our need for self-reference, that we are invited to follow where he has led—ascending into the internal life of the Trinity. 

Therefore, it is through our membership in the church, most fully enacted in the remembering of Christ in the Eucharist, that we can partake of an identity—and an attendant ethics—that does not rely on self-reference and is therefore not subject to ethical inconsistency or incompleteness. It also means that the Christian ethical duty is less one of prescription and more one of supplication. Our primary ethical question as Christians is not “How ought we to behave?” or even “How should we then live?” but “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” We need to ontologically become one with the body of Christ—not merely adhere to and confess Christian doctrines, or live in accordance with Christ’s teachings, or even engage in acts of profligate mercy. These things are good, of course, but only insofar as they are evidence that we are ontologically one with Christ and that we can be recognized as Christ(ian)s. It is through oneness with Christ, in the church, that we have hope in the future beyond our fatal ethical finitude. 

The ethics of Christianity—rooted as they are in Christ’s identity achieved without self-reference—are the only ethics that can be saved from Gödelian incompleteness and inconsistency. Yet they are never fully settled. A Christian ethics will always look backward for affirmation from the Father in creation and forward for affirmation from the Holy Spirit in the eschaton. The church’s priorities may at times intersect with the moral battles of a particular time and place, but always because it is following Christ—straight into the grave if necessary. Christ needs neither a Caiaphas nor a Herod to bless his Bride, and she will bury them both in the end. 

The living out of the moral life in a state of humble uncertainty, buffeted by factional hatreds, is the only truly Christian way to navigate the Gödelian problem of ethics, and it is the only way to navigate our post-therapeutic age. No alternative system will ever be able to replace Christ, because no system is authored by its perfect Subject. The church’s life is animated by the Spirit of God, who is always larger and more comprehensive than the spirit of the age. Therefore, not only should we refrain from looking on the Pharisees and Herodians in awe or fear or hatred. We should look on them with pity and pray for them as we await their (and our) inevitable coming judgment. 

More than anything, participation in the body of Christ should alter our stance toward ourselves. The world of self-reference we have created is a world in which, like our forebears Adam and Eve, we know that we are naked. The therapeutic—which would have us embrace and delight in our nakedness—has failed, and now we are returning to the historical norm of being ashamed of it. This shame empowers both the Caiaphases and the Herods of the world. God has gifted us with one reaction to our nakedness that undermines both Pharisaical severity and Herodian pomposity and rewrites Adam and Eve’s self-referential reaction to the fall. In the light of our membership in the body of Christ, we ought to look on ourselves, and all our absurd modern pretensions to escape the inherent limits of what we are, and laugh.