In a typically charitable mode, George Scialabba reviewed Charles Taylor’s big book on romantic poetry for Commonweal’s 100-anniversary issue. In an equally typical move, however, he writes the following toward the end:

“Clearly,” he writes, “to understand this ethical growth we have to suppose an Aristotle-type theory of the human Form, a set of innate goals which demand fulfillment.” It’s regrettable that Taylor should invoke that most archaic of philosophical notions: the human telos. According to Aristotle, there is one human telos, corresponding to invariant human nature. There is not a contingent, or individual, telos for each human being. Individuals do not choose their telos, or purpose; they learn it from their elders. Now, while it is certainly true that, like every other animal, humans have “innate goals” (though not always the same goals, since our genetic endowments vary), these come from millions of years of biological and social evolution, not from an ahistorical metaphysical Form. And they are only predispositions, strong or weak, which socialization may override. Our purposes do not—cannot—preexist us; we choose them, after deliberation and painful experience. The same is true of societies.

Notice the strange upturned nose of “that most archaic…” More to the point, notice the false contrast: “millions of years of biological and social evolution” versus “an ahistorical metaphysical Form.” I love Scialabba and read everything he writes, but this implicit opposition is present in all that he writes and is his intellectual Achilles' heel.

Even if religious, philosophical, and theological varieties of metaphysics were not true, anyone familiar with them as systems of thought understands that they are not “either/or” frameworks, in a kind of vulgar reflection of evolutionary just-so stories. On the contrary, the entire point is that they are not competitive with natural accounts of (e.g., as in this case) biological and social goals, desires, and forms of life. Precisely because God creates ex nihilo, he is not a cause or factor on a par with, or located somewhere within, the spatio-temporal network of secondary causes and effects. In fact, his transcendence of the network as such enables his immediate presence to every item of it, in intimate and immanent care and purpose. In which case, my desires and goals—my nature and end—may simultaneously come from God and from evolution (or society, or whatever), without logical or metaphysical contradiction.

As I say: Argue with this account; declare why it’s wrong. But don’t set up a binary that no actual theologian or philosopher would endorse or accept, phrased as a takedown. The effect is an exposure, but not the sort intended.