In Twin Powers, Thomas Molnar, one of our age’s most imaginative and creative thinkers, confronts us, like Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin before him, with an analysis of our social, political, and cultural situation that is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating, because it seems to explain so much; frustrating, because it appears very difficult to do anything with the knowledge that he gives us. One is left with the feeling that one has understood the problem but is powerless to do anything about it.

Molnar’s thesis, which he develops carefully with many illustrations, is that power—the political order—needs to be based on a vision of a sacred order if it is to endure and to be healthy. He contends that in “postmodern” Western civilization, we have totally lost the concept of a transcendent sacred order and have substituted for it a kind of immanent sacredness based on the individual, an unstable situation that Molnar characterizes as “fragile” and productive of a constant state of anxiety and tension.

Published in September 1988, Twin Powers must have been written before the 1988 presidential campaign was well under way. In the aftermath of what was a personal triumph for Bush, somewhat soured by the Republicans’ losses in Congress, as we ponder the direction that the new administration will be able to give our “stumbling giant” of a country, Molnar provides us with a diagnosis that sounds rather like irreversible arteriosclerosis. We no longer have a sacred vision, for we have been dismantling it since the days of the later Scholastics at least, and we cannot have a viable society without one. This leads inexorably to a melancholy vision of America’s future, since it seems hardly likely that in our pluralistic society we will ever be able to lay such a foundation afresh.

Molnar contends that until the Western “break”—which he asserts had begun long before the Protestant Reformation—all societies have lived out of a vision of a sacred order. Nineteenth-century sociologists and anthropologists assumed that such a religious outlook was a projection of the self-awareness of the particular community, but now it is more generally admitted that communities do not “deify” themselves, but somehow perceive, by intuition or revelation, a transcendent Other from beyond their own human boundaries. Both in Twin Powers and its immediate predecessor, The Pagan Temptation (Eerdmans, 1987), Molnar emphasizes that there is a fundamental difference between the common human vision of the sacred, which he calls “pagan,” which locates the divine in this world, and the monotheistic Jewish and Christian vision, which sees only God as holy and honors, but does not worship, the world as his handiwork. Both paganism and biblical religion possess a vision of the sacred, but the biblical vision is so lean and austere, and involves so much pruning of man’s fertile religious imagination, that the process of going biblical, so to speak, may fail to stop in time and may go on to demolish biblical ideas and symbols as well. Molnar clearly wants to preserve that which is truly sacred while ridding us of the spurious claims to sacredness of created things. Unfortunately, the campaign to desacralize the world seems to have gone too far, and Molnar does not think that it can be reversed.

Molnar believes that power, deprived of any sacred sanction, is atrophying in the West and, having lost all moderation, is in a state of hypertrophy in the Communist East. The loss of all sacred vision and our consequent myopic preoccupation with man and his presumed abilities led first to Utopianism, which is still honored, at least formally, in the Communist world, but which in the West has given way to an increasing moral fatigue, based on an awareness of man’s limitations, a sense of man’s inability to meet his needs on his own.

Molnar speaks of a battle between two schools of historical and cultural analysis: the optimists, who look on the break with the past as a good thing, and think that man can build a hopeful future without sacred sanctions by means of his own science and rationality, and the pessimists, who see the rupture with the past as fatal and irremediable, and think that man faces a “robotized future” such as that envisaged by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Two classes of people stand on the sidelines: the “happy hedonists,” who are content to satisfy their material and sensual needs, and the strong believers, who look to the final triumph of faith. Although Molnar is definitely a believer, he is not prepared to join the spectators, but wants to do something. or at least to say something. He may have presented us with such a bleak diagnosis that no therapy will be attempted.

Molnar asserts that humanity cannot create its own sacred order. A myth is unpersuasive if we know that we have made it up ourselves. Yet it is impossible for a community to exist without such an order. He is not categorical in asserting that a rational community is totally impossible without a sacred component, but says that we are now attempting it for the first time in history. Therefore we do not yet know whether success will be possible. There seems to be a certain ambivalence in his position, as he first says that it simply is not possible, and then suggests that it really hasn’t been property tried, no doubt because man really is incapable of attempting to live rationally without the sacred in a consistent way or over a long period. The ultimate result of the attempt to have a rational society without the sacred will be the Hobbesian helium omnium contra omnes. Man cannot live without the sacred, and having lost it, he cannot create it for himself What then may one hope? The soul, a “rectifier of matter,” “may at any time request divine assistance.” This, Molnar says, is not a program for civilization but something better than a program, namely, “hope.” His concluding sentiment reminds one of the last lines of the Apocalypse: “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

Twin Powers is difficult to read and probably should be read after The Pagan Temptation. And it left me with a sense of frustration, because Molnar is fundamentally right—and his erudition and arguments are impressive—then it does not help us much to know what he wants to teach us. We will understand some important things, but we will not be able to say, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” We will rather be in a situation where, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout souffrir“: “To understand it all is to endure it all.”

[Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred, by Thomas S. Molnar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) 142 pp. $9.95 (paper)]