at the external level there is no profound doubt about whatdoesn’t workat the
level of institutions.
Instead, the persistent doubt is directed to the nature and dignity of the
human persons who inhabit these institutions. Paradoxically, the only human
right that standsfirm in the court of public opinion is the right to revise one’s
own identity. This, I propose, is what John Paul II discerned about our
‘modern times’: man inflight from his own works and dominion.
Negative anthropology greatly weakens the three great institutions of
human happiness—marriage/family, polity, and church—by turning them
into platforms for self-revision rather than for the perfection of a nature.
Indeed, the three great institutions are anthropologically empty precisely
because one could (and many do) regard each one as an option: government
can be replaced by private contract, marriage by various relationships of
intimacy, and church by ever-shifting relations and identities without the
system of global communications.
Make no mistake about this: negative anthropology is not amenable to
ordinary institutional solutions. It affects all of our institutions, but it is not
the kind of crisis to befixed by afive-year plan. What in the domain of law or
public policy can even touch it? Only religion and philosophy (in its deepest
sense) are equipped to understand and meet the challenge of negative anthro-
pology. Negative anthropology is elusive. Only with great effort is it brought to
the surface and put back into dialogue with Christian anthropology. That
dialogue is only just beginning. It took the Leonine Thomists more than a
century tofigure out how to give the Catholic answer to the institutional crisis.
The anthropological crisis of our times is likely to be even more protracted.
It is on the inside rather than the outside. The remedy, therefore, is counter-
intuitive to those of us who are educated. For we are the creatures and
perpetrators of institutional solutions. The crisis of modern times identified
by John Paul II requires heroic patience. It cannot be met effectively by the
usualfive-year plans or election cycles. We are dealing now, to invoke the
metaphor of Pope Francis, withfield hospitals in which the ministers are not
so different from the patients. How the current magisterium of Francis and his
successors will adapt Ratzinger’s claim that the social question today has
become‘a radically anthropological question’, and how the inside and outside
of institutions can be rendered integral, is a story still in the making.
252 F. Russell Hittinger