Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski taught philosophy and humanities for ten years at Wyoming Catholic College where he also served as academic dean. He is the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lexington Books, 2010) and the newly released Words, Concepts, Reality: Aristotelian Logic for Teenagers (EnRoute Books, 2022). The following interview centers on his book Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos (Angelico Press, 2019).
Christopher Loughman: If it’s all right, Dr. Kozinski, I’d like to quote from the introduction of your book for the sake of anyone unfamiliar with it:
“To its devotees, modernity is just the way things really are…. But to those more resistant and skeptical of its soteriology, modernity is Christendom’s rotting corpse, having been murdered sometime in the Enlightenment by the sword of de-hellenization, the poison of nominalization and the stranglehold of secularization. And modernity has divided up the body, giving us Christ without the cross, in its liberal-democratic half, and the cross without Christ, in its totalitarian half. Modernity is nothing more than a counterfeit of and parasite on the Mystical Body of Christ.”
Can we try teasing some of that out?
Thaddeus Kozinski: I think I would still agree with most of that. What we are dealing with now I don’t think I could have imagined back then—the emergent global totalitarianism.
What I mean by modernity is more the ideology that accompanies public discourse and the way institutions function—the kind of implicit presuppositions and absolutes and the cult, the religious background that is inherent in modern life. What I am trying to do is reject the idea that [modernity] is just a kind of neutral space where one can freely live any type of life one wants without influence or conditioning or restrictions. I see it more as a kind of mood or background—the “imaginary,” to use Charles Taylor’s language—that has hidden metaphysical, theological, anthropological dogmas and customs and beliefs. So we need to be very wary and vigilant in order to detect them.
CL: Can we talk about how this applies to America? In section V of your book, entitled “Apocalypse,” you speculate:
“Perhaps Lucifer employed his unimaginably powerful intellect to create and then immerse himself in an abstract and unreal universe of words—`liberty’ and `equality’ come to mind—thereby severing himself from the concrete and real being of God.”
Now I’m reminded that when Alexis de Tocqueville made his monumental survey of our young country in 1835, these were the two ideas he saw playing out in conflict here: the two you mentioned. “equality” and “liberty.” And that conflict looked to him something like a closed dialectic, it looked to him something like the whole ballgame. We see these two ideas roughly manifest today in the camps of conservatism and small-l liberalism and that battle looks to many as if it’s the whole ballgame. It’s just the way things are.
One of the things you seem to be saying is that this conflict is not only not the whole ballgame, but that it’s a counterfeit conflict delineating a counterfeit reality—and quite possibly something worse. Is that fair?
TK: My main foe is ideology—in the [Eric] Voegelinian sense of it as a kind of gnosticism, a kind of second reality. And what I am referring to about Lucifer is the ability of human beings to reject reality by repairing to abstractions and living life according to unreal universals. And when that gets institutionalized and enculturated, you wind up with an ideological culture. Add to this the technology and the complex institutions we have, the bureaucratization that takes us away from the ordinary activities of life, [you wind up with] the imposition of a counterfeit.
[This] counterfeit begins in the minds of philosophes and ends up for the masses being indistinguishable from the real. [As for] “liberty” and “equality,” you have opposite sides of the spectrum using those terms, believing and behaving in the most dramatically antithetical manner. Ideology serves the oligarchs, not the public.
CL: In the same section of the book, you quote David Schindler: “The state cannot avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either `freedom from’ or `freedom for’—and both of these imply a theology.” You then go on to say: “By prescinding from the particularity of religious truth in the organization of the American body politic, the American founders enshrined a theology, a religion. [And that] this religion’s first commandment is the first amendment—and it does nothing less than separate the order of nature from the order of grace, person from faith and, indeed, freedom from truth itself.”
Why do you think it was necessary to the founders that these profound separations occurred? What was the point?
TK: I don’t want to condemn the American Founding simply because of what’s come after it: the consequences of certain decisions they made out of circumstantial prudence based on the complexities of geopolitics, etc. It’s extremely complicated, obviously. But if you look at something like the First Amendment:
To set up a constitutional regime and prescind from the order of religion, the supernatural, the reality of the Catholic Church….
It’s the first time in history that a political order was set up where the cult, the sacred, the transcendent, the relationship to the divine is put wholly within the political order and, in effect, privatized: you have a first attempt at an a-religious political order.
CL: Is it as simple as Madison pitting our privatized belief systems against each other so that, for instance, the Catholic Church cannot establish hegemony?
TK: A lot of the Founders were hostile to the Catholic Church. John Locke, in the Second Treatise of Government, forbade two types of people from being good citizens in the new kind of commercial republic: the atheists and the Catholics. And that’s because he knew that, for a Roman Catholic, political allegiance and citizenship were bound up with one’s religious identity and the authority of the Church. Locke wanted the state to define what religion is and its place in the city. The state was going to limit itself and everything outside it. Whereas in Catholic political theology, it’s not the state’s prerogative to define the boundaries of church and state, of the secular and the sacred…. It can’t do it. [The state] can only do it if it already has an ecclesiology—in this case a Protestantized and deistic one. Locke says: “Every church is orthodox to itself.” Meaning that no church has a from-the-inside monopoly on what’s true in religion. That statement itself denies the reality and authority of the Catholic Church.
And so, if you have a kind of political order that’s based on this universal statement that there is no access to God’s will that is an any way objective and authoritative for the public…. [No,] it’s all a private matter. You can see the logic. What that implies. And what’s going to happen.
CL: I hate to tell you how old I was when I learned that there was something very specific called “Americanism” and it was condemned as a heresy by no less than Pope Leo XIII….
TK: Testem Benevolentiae, yes.
CL: And I don’t think I’m unique in my ignorance. Now I had a terrific elementary Catholic school education, taught by bright, pious, committed nuns…. But the pledge-of-allegiance, you know, was said with our morning prayers. And up on the wall behind the good sister, on each side of the crucifix, were pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and probably one of our first Catholic president Kennedy….
So that was the “social imagining,” to use Charles Taylor’s phrase, that we were immersed in. It all came at one as of-a-piece.
So, you know, being an American Catholic is…interesting.
TK: I had a similar awakening shortly after I was married. I was at a conference with Professor John Rao and the Dietrich von Hildebrand’s group [The Roman Forum] at Lake Garda and I heard some talks given on Leo XIII and John Locke.
Before then, I was on my way to becoming a good neoconservative, going to Lord Acton conferences and the Heritage Foundation and the Philadelphia Society and all these things….
I had never read Leo XIII. Or if I had, I’d only heard about his economic encyclicals. I didn’t know he had written about the Christian constitution of states or on Americanism or on freedom: Immortale Dei, Testem Benevolentiae, Longinqua…. The letter to the U.S. bishops where he says the Church has borne good fruit in America simply because it had a certain amount of physical freedom to do its work. But, he says, the Church would be better off of it wasn’t dissevered and divorced, as it is in America, from the state.
A statement like that, from the pope, of course got me thinking: What are the alternatives here? I thought theocracy was the kind of outdated, restrictive, repressive sort of state that we’d grown out of. But he’s not talking about theocracy. And he’s not talking about integralism, either.
D.C. Schindler does a great job with integralism: the solution is not to use the centralized, bureaucratic, Lockean state and import into it Catholic principles. The solution has to be much more radical and imaginative and therefore much different.
We see the problem as a kind of religion of Liberalism. D.C. Schindler has an essay called “What is Liberalism” in New Polity, and a book called The Politics of the Real, which I think is the best thing written on this topic. [He makes the compelling case] that if you want to know what modernity is, what liberalism is, [you have to ask]: What is it rejecting, most of all?
[The answer is] the Catholic Church. Not “Christianity.” Not Christian “values,” Christian principles. [It’s rejecting] the reality of the Catholic Church. What-it-actually-is.
CL: And does this correspond to [D.C. Schindler’s] explication of the [Lockean] inversion of the [Aristo-Thomist categories] of potentiality over actuality?
TK: Yes. That’s in his first book of the trilogy he’s writing, the first book [being] Freedom from Reality—that tremendous work on John Locke.
Because what that actuality is—the Catholic actuality—is the tradition that synthesized, once and for all, the Greek, the Roman, the Hebrew, the Germanic—all the tributaries of the axial age that came together with Christ. [The Incarnation] synthesized them all into a living reality, a lived tradition.
And what the Enlightenment represents in liberalism is [an attempt] to access these ingredients—the Greek sense of the truth and science, the Roman sense of the law and authority, the Jewish understanding of God’s omnipotence and [man’s] sin…. In Christ all of this is gathered up together. {And liberalism’s approach winds up with] Humpty Dumpty. You can’t separate them out. Once you try to access [these components] outside the Church’s tradition they wind up becoming heresies. They end up becoming mad.
[And so] liberalism says: the Church and the tradition it embodies—not just intellectually, but morally, politically, in its economics and sociology, its [complete] living reality…. Liberalism says that it is not going to recognize this reality in our political order, in our laws and what we consider to be the human good…. [In its] rejection of reality it has to try to build upon something else.
Schindler says that liberalism has substituted the God of the Catholic Church, the true God, with “nature and nature’s god.” Well, what nature is this? What’s this nature’s god? It’s a “potential religion”—it’s pure potency overcoming actuality—which is impossible. There’s no actual reality to it.
CL: Is that potency, that prioritization of potentiality…. Are we just talking about pure power at that point?
TK: Yeah, I think so. What makes you say that?
CL: Well, because ontologically [having bracketed the actual]—that’s what you’re left with. I think that’s why we’re steeped in power politics. Because that’s all that’s left.
TK: Yeah. And it’s masked very well.
CL: It certainly is.
TK: Well, it’s becoming unmasked now. My recent articles on Substack deal with what was implicit in early classical liberalism, [that it’s manifesting now] as this monstrous, arbitrary power, a most inhumane diabolical dynamic. People are waking up to it because of the obviousness of it. And what they are doing is basically fighting it with old-school assertions of the Tao and simple goodness, the goodness of mothers and the working man in the street.
People without much higher education are seeing the basic realities. Because of the great evil we are undergoing they are recognizing the value of a human person and their ability to make their own decisions and to be cared for. When you’re deprived of normal face-to-face conversations and you’re in constant terror—propagandized—people are starting to realize: this is unreality. They may not put it that way. But they are actually demanding that the political order recognize the authority of reality.
When Schindler, for instance, says that liberalism is against reality, that it’s potentiality over actuality, that liberalism is an all-out assault against the reality of the Catholic Church—what does that look like? Well, it looks like what we have today. It looks like the face of Fauci as savior.
CL: “Catholic” Fauci.
TK: [Laughs] You have someone telling us what to do in our public and private lives who has engaged in experiments putting monkey’s heads in a tank to be eaten by sandflies or whatever it is….And he has experimented on human beings in the past, killing many and getting away with it. It’s all in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s recent book The Real Anthony Fauci. He is a psychopathic sadist, but he’s our avuncular wise and loving man to whom we have given dictatorial authority over reality.
CL: You brought up the historian Dr. John Rao. And he said in a recent interview that in a time that loudly proclaims the separation of church and state as a given, that in fact there has never been greater unity of church and state but that it’s an ironic if not inverted unity. And you recently quoted the theologian Chad Pecknold: “The progressive civic-religious regime is a very dangerous sort of pseudo-integralism, which is to say, an inverted parody of Christianity.”
Now if this is true, then we are really through the looking glass.
Do you think it’s just a matter of having a seat at the World Economic Forum and that the truth really doesn’t matter?
TK: Yeah, that a pretty low level of consciousness. I can’t imagine a lower level of consciousness, actually, because what it comes down to, as we were saying, is pure power.
Being a person of faith means that you are not governed by pure power. You are governed by truth and love.
CL: You make the distinction between authority and power. I would think, given his transcendent concerns, he would be more committed to authority than he would be to pure power.
TK: Authority being reality.
CL: Right.
TK: Schindler says that authority is essentially generosity. That’s what authority does—it gives itself, it gives reality, so to speak, so that power can do good work.
To call a literal poison good and to mandate it for children…. And for those people who [refuse to wear] the satanic sacramental of submission to arbitrary power—the mask—which everyone knows is medically useless and harmful—I think all this is the elites mocking us, like a diabolical liturgy.
I could use words like “diabolical disorientation” like Lucia at Fatima, we could talk about the antichrist and the spirit of antichrist, the great delusion, the prophecies of La Sallette and of other mystics…. But when you are actually living through it, it’s literally incomprehensible.
CL: Something you maybe thought you would never see in your lifetime—the diabolical disorientation….
TK: But the thing that has shocked me most of all—and it’s why we know we’re in a kind of great tribulation—is the absolute complicity and cowardice of the clergy in shutting down the churches, in refusing to give the sacraments, and having their churches become “vaccine” sites—This is unimaginable stuff.
CL: You just mentioned scapegoating and one of my questions has to do with your interest in Rene Girard….
One of the more pernicious counterfeits going involves the therapeutic state and the grievance industry and it centers on the cult of victimization.
In the canon of the mass I attend, the priest references: “…a victim which is pure, a victim which is holy, a victim which is stainless….”
Now I have an impossible time—and mere cognitive dissonance doesn’t begin to capture it—reconciling our Lord Jesus Christ with the mass media victim of various sexual and racial stripe that we are saturated with.
I think you go so far as to identify this manufactured victim as the new dominant oppressor. Of the new scapegoat.
TK: Girard makes a good case that the dynamic of scapegoating is the ultimate counterfeit salvation. The feeling you get from scapegoating another is instant self-righteousness in identifying all that is evil in the accused. You feel this sense of salvation and purification and you achieve [a type of] solidarity with your fellow scapegoaters. So, you have an enemy that you can project upon.
Girard shows that either you are allowing yourself to be the scapegoat—because you are guilty—but knowing that your Redeemer lives and has been scapegoated before you and therefore you will not be doomed and that the scapegoaters will not have the last word. The scapegoaters didn’t write the Gospels.
Or you are going to be doing the scapegoating. There is no neutrality here.
And so what do we have with our culture right now? It’s obvious that it’s based on self-righteousness of the most cowardly, idolatrous and hypocritical people—the Covid-cult, the Covidians…. They are scapegoating those who will not accept this self-justifying community of the irrational—[clearly] totalitarian.
Now, the Church is supposed to be the one institution that doesn’t do this. Every other institution will fall to it. [And so] it is not only doing it in its most elevated power structures—it’s taking a lead in it.
I don’t think Girard ever witnessed such a thing. He talks about certain things in the Middle Ages, when the Church got caught up in a kind of regression: pogroms, torture, etc. But if Girard were alive today, I don’t know how he would understand what is happening.
CL: Your writing is not without some profound approaches to something like solutions. In a recent Substack article entitled: “The Only Way to Survive and Defeat the Satanic Plandemic,” you quote Romano Guardini from The End of the Modern World:”
“The new age will declare that the secularized facets of Christianity are sentimentalities.” And: “That the free union of the human person with the Absolute through unconditional freedom will enable the faithful to stand firm—God-centered—even though placeless and unprotected.”
And while I hope everyone understands the controversies surrounding Karl Rahner, you forward this arresting quote from him: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.”
Now, we utilitarian Americans are built for something like the opposite of mysticism. So where does a typical American, specifically an American Catholic, begin?
TK: Well, the Catholics don’t have a home anymore in most churches—the ones who are not Covidians are already being uprooted. But I have found a place with people I would never have dreamed I would be relating to in the last two years: new agers, atheists, animal rights people. [Laughs.] People who would normally be on the left, progressivists who have woken up, who feel alone and isolated. And we’ve come together in little activist groups against the mass insanity. People who are trying to love in the middle of this lovelessness. It sounds pretty hippie-ish, but it isn’t. People have been brought to this position of needing each other. I see Guardini’s prophecy coming true in ways I never would have thought when I quoted him.
In terms of mysticism…. To me [it means] being connected to what’s real…. Whatever is the opposite of being a Covidian. [Laughter.]
But it’s the life of prayer, mortification, the cross. I think it is also recognizing with Guardini that God is taking away the normal supports. We’re talking about the possibility of being rounded up into concentration camps, of starving, of new diseases coming down the pipe. So if we are not crying out to God and asking to be in His will, mystically, so that we can know what to do and how to survive…. God wants us to call out to Him when we have nothing left. And I can’t understand what is happening, the gravity of the evil—genocide, totalitarianism—I can’t understand it unless I think of it as God saying: “Look, I’m letting this happen because I want you to depend on me completely. And I want to show you what happens when you don’t.” And that means that there is no more time, no more excuses—that when you pray, it has to be mystical. And mystical, to me, means complete surrender: be quiet, listen to God [in] the direct experience of God. As much as possible. Because we need it.
CL: It’s not the Rod Dreher approach, “The Benedict Option?” I think you said somewhere that that’s not even possible right now.
TK: No, that’s not going to happen. Of course we have to flee from this cult and, as much as possible, the institutions that have enshrined it. We have to be present to each other, those who understand what is happening.
CL: Didn’t Guardini say that at the end of the modern world the faithful are going to be lonely but that they’ll find each other….
TK: Yes.
CL: …but that it was going to be a lonely trek. It’s not a sentimental view of what a Catholic is going to be looking at the end of the modern world.
TK: No. Another prophecy I want to bring up is by St. Louis de Montfort. In The True Devotion to Mary he says that saints in the end times will be the greatest saints in the history of the Church. And their greatness will be in their heroism and love and surrender. And Guardini says that the loneliness will be harsh, but the love will be greater. And so we’ll be able to handle it.
And I wanted to bring up Luisa Piccarreta from Italy. I’ve been reading through her 36 volumes over the last few years. And from what I understand, she lived a life of virtue and holiness that was unprecedented, achieving for the world and the Church a new outpouring of grace greater than all the others. It’s called “The Gift of Living in the Divine Will.” And when I read her writings and I try to understand what is going on right now…. It only makes sense that we need to be fused with Jesus Christ, to be one with Him in a way that is even higher than spiritual marriage.
It’s not that anybody deserves this grace or that you can do it with your efforts. It’s pure gift. It is being given to the world now and it’s available to everyone.
So it’s a new normal! And the new normal for Christians now has to be at this next level. Because what’s coming down the pike…. I think we’re just at the beginning. I don’t like to say this. I say this with fear and trembling.
But I think there are also good signs. I don’t keep my earthly hopes up—I keep them medium, as my son says. But there are some good signs that this two-year cycle is waning down and I don’t know what’s coming next. We need to keep on our toes and make God the priority.