Kyle Nazareth
George J. Marlin, Modern Monsters: Political Ideologues and Their War Against the Catholic Church (St. Augustine’s Press)
The Council of Trent, which refuted and condemned the errors of the Reformation, defined original sin as “the death of the soul.” George J. Marlin’s Modern Monsters: Political Ideologues and Their War Against the Catholic Church is the story of that death’s modern resurrection. His thesis is that ideology is a fake religion: a rigid, abstract formula that promises worldly perfection by placing humanity in control of its destiny and nature. While faith looks beyond the finite world to a higher reality, ideology turns inward, making man the measure of all things, and politics the tool of salvation.
Across thirteen chapters, Marlin traces how this project was carried out by a succession of thinkers — from Martin Luther and Niccolo Machiavelli through the utilitarians to G.W.F Hegel and the totalitarians — each adding a new layer to the ideological tower of terror. Each chapter systematically surveys an ideology’s core beliefs, its consequences for society, its incompatibility with Church teachings, and its targeting of the Church as the principal obstacle to its vision. The result is a comprehensive philosophical history of the West over the past five centuries, told from the Catholic perspective.
Marlin documents how each thinker explicitly rejected Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Read together, a deeper pattern emerges. The modern monsters’ war on the Church is, at its root, a war on her intellectual heritage: Aristo-Thomism. This great synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology harmonized faith and reason into a unified vision of truth.
To introduce a few of Marlin’s modern monsters:
Martin Luther: “Patient zero” in the rebellion against the Catholic Church. Luther’s Reformation challenged Church authority and the supernatural law by championing salvation through faith alone, personal interpretation of Scripture, and individual spiritual sovereignty. This privatized religion, justified the divine right of kings, catalyzed the decline of Christendom, and gave rise to the secular liberal state and religious pluralism.
Luther was a nominalist, meaning he denied the existence of objective, universal truths. Consequently, he rejected the three pillars of natural law: man’s free will and moral agency, nature’s rational and observable order, and nature’s inherent purpose. To Luther, reason was pagan, logic had no place in theology, and the mind was a “whore.” He despised Aristotle, whom he called “the destroyer of godly doctrine,” and wanted his philosophy destroyed; he called St. Thomas’ theology “dung” and branded him a heretic. Luther fired the opening shot in the war against the union of faith and reason.
Marlin shows that Luther was not merely a religious reformer but the architect of a new movement, creating the template for every subsequent ideologue. He quotes political theorist Dante Germino: “Luther prefigures the age of ideologies.”
Niccolò Machiavelli: Marlin casts Machiavelli as the first fully modern political ideologue. A Renaissance thinker, Machiavelli believed not in God, but in power and chance. He completely liberated politics from Christian morality, denied the objectivity of truth, and replaced virtue with pragmatism: no “should,” no “good,” or “bad,” only what works.
Where Luther attacked the Aristo-Thomist tradition from within theology, Machiavelli attacked it from without. Marlin writes that Machiavelli’s explicit goal was “the liberation of man from the moral order taught by St. Thomas Aquinas.” Luther severed the Church’s spiritual authority from public life; Machiavelli went further, completely subordinating spiritual power to worldly power, creating the secular state, and making political glory the new highest good.
René Descartes: Descartes is the first of many Enlightenment thinkers that Marlin profiles. The father of modern philosophy, Descartes was a rationalist, meaning he held that knowledge comes from reason alone, making the individual mind, not God, the new foundation for knowledge. His “Cartesian revolution” shifted Western philosophy away from asking what something is (Aristo-Thomist metaphysics) to asking how we know (epistemology).
As a pivotal figure in the Scientific Revolution and the inventor of analytic geometry, Descartes sought to explain all of reality through mathematical formulas and the scientific method. Mathematical reason replaced theology as the supreme science. Marlin observes that Cartesianism is the moment the human mind formally declared its independence from God, and philosophy appointed itself the replacement.
John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill: Locke was the father of liberalism and British empiricism, meaning he rooted knowledge in sense experience rather than Aristo-Thomist metaphysics. He also grounded individual rights in his own conception of God and natural law. Locke limited the state to protecting life, liberty, and property rather than guiding citizens toward the common good. Hume radicalized Locke’s empiricism and demoted morality into mere feelings. Bentham and Mill reduced morality to a pleasure-pain calculus. Mill’s non-harm principle, justifying coercion only to prevent harm to others, sidelined the common good in favor of individual preference. Their liberalism inflated mankind into its own supreme being, delegitimizing the Church’s moral authority. Prioritizing individual preference over the common good paved the way for statism.
G.W.F. Hegel: Hegel is notoriously convoluted and nonsensical, so Marlin accurately characterizes him as a modernist heretic. Like his predecessors, Hegel rejected Aristo-Thomist metaphysics, but took the rebellion even further. He collapsed God into creation and put reality in a constant state of flux, a worldview closer to pantheism and Eastern mysticism than to Christianity.
Hegel’s philosophy didn’t merely reject the Church and natural law; it replaced them entirely. Hegel deified the state, calling it God on earth marching through history. The state became the source of rights, morality, and the final arbiter of truth. Hegel attributed these ideas to Protestantism. Marlin shows that the logical conclusions of this absolutization of the state are the communist and fascist experiments of the twentieth century.
Overall, Marlin’s project is ambitious, tracing over five centuries of ideological rebellion. He sticks the landing remarkably well, making dense philosophy accessible and turning what could be a dry chronology into a vivid indictment of modernity’s monsters. Marlin’s strength lies in his willingness to let major Catholic thinkers and ideologues speak in their own words. This gives the work a cumulative authority that a single voice could not achieve. His own prose shines brightly, artfully weaving insightful observations and historical anecdotes into a unified narrative greater than the sum of its parts.
Marlin’s narrative makes clear that these modern ideologies are not discrete historical episodes, but successive waves of a single continuous movement. The collective evidence points toward a larger conclusion that the book never quite states outright: since the late Middle Ages, European history’s revolt against the Catholic Church has been prosecuted specifically through the systematic dismantling of her intellectual heritage; the integration of faith and reason achieved by St. Thomas upon Aristotle’s foundation.
The Reformation and Enlightenment are two sides of the same coin, different in their premises, yet united in their rebellion. Both struck at the same target: natural law, the ground where faith and reason meet. The Reformation toppled natural law’s pillars from within Christianity — Luther’s idea of original sin denied man’s free will and moral agency, scripture alone and faith alone denied that human reason could understand nature, and his nominalism denied that creation had an inherent purpose. The Enlightenment did the same from outside Christianity by rejecting objective morality, advancing skepticism about knowledge beyond reason or the senses, and adopting the idea that reality is only material. Both framed faith and reason as mutually exclusive. These two halves of modernism converged in subjectivism and relativism, making man a law unto himself. From this emerged the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century and today’s radical leftist politics.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his Regensburg Address, gave this crisis a name: “dehellenization,” the gradual severance of Christianity from Greek thought. But to understand what was severed, we must understand what was built.
From Christianity’s very beginning, God formed a union between Greek reason and biblical faith, Athens and Jerusalem, that mutually enriched each other. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, European Christians recovered the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s key works from the Muslim world. Catholics recognize Aristotle was a “righteous pagan,” whose natural reason reached out to God and readied the world to receive the Gospels. In his honor, a stained glass window in New York City’s St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church depicts Aristotle with a laurel wreath that doubles as a green halo.
St. Thomas recognized Aristotle’s genius, referring to him simply as “the Philosopher.” He drew on much of Aristotle’s philosophy to support his theology, “baptizing” Aristotle in the Catholic understanding. In doing so, St. Thomas achieved the perfect synthesis between faith and reason. He showed that natural reason can lead to faith’s preambles: that God exists, there are laws of nature, and there is goodness, justice, and the common good. But only divine revelation can unveil faith’s mysteries: the Trinity, Resurrection, and real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Though distinct in kind, these truths are one in origin, for God is the author of all truth.
The Church has affirmed St. Thomas’ synthesis at the highest levels. At the Council of Trent, his Summa Theologica was placed on the high altar, second only to Sacred Scripture. In Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII declared that reason, borne to its height by St. Thomas, can scarcely rise higher. In Fides et Ratio, St. John Paul II wrote that in St. Thomas’ thinking, “the demands of reason and the power of faith found the most elevated synthesis ever attained by human thought.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church echoes St. Thomas: “There can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind. God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”
This is the Church’s intellectual heritage that every modern monster set out to destroy, which Marlin so painstakingly documents. So far, they are winning. Faith and reason are divorced, both fragmented and impoverished. Faith is seen as sentimental, irrational, and impotent. Reason, though capable of extraordinary technological feats, falters on the deepest questions: the meaning of life, death, man, and God. Humanity may have left the Garden of Eden, but we carried the apple with us, taking repeated bites ever since.
Modern Monsters is a comprehensive guide that Catholics must read to understand how we arrived at this cultural and spiritual moment. To reconcile what the monsters have divorced and restore the union of faith and reason, Catholics must once again study and teach the timeless and sound doctrine of St. Thomas in their personal lives, families, parishes, and universities so that they may defend the Deposit of Faith from another five centuries of chimerical attacks.
Kyle Nazareth is Director of Research at the Catholic League.
