The Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge

On Sean McGrath’s Confessions and the Case for a New Integral Humanism

Feb 13, 2026

Abstract:

Sean McGrath is one of the most rigorous Schelling scholars working today — a philosopher whose Dark Ground of Spirit helped catalyze the German idealism revival and whose Secular Christ podcast, produced with Jakob Lusensky through the Psychology & The Cross, has already diagnosed with philosophical precision what Peterson gets wrong about Christianity and what Žižek refuses to follow to its contemplative conclusion. But The Lost Road — modeled on Augustine’s Confessions and grounded in McGrath’s five years of monastic formation in the Carmelite contemplative tradition — is something different. It is McGrath coming out from behind the scholarly cover that the German idealism revival provided, speaking directly about what had been driving his work all along.

This essay argues that McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition is genuine and irreplaceable — and that it cannot cross the post-metaphysical threshold on its own. McGrath retrieves pre-modern contemplative resources with real philosophical sophistication and experiential authority, but without the epistemological architecture to make that retrieval communicable across the pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere. Drawing on Habermas, Wilber, Haidt, Hayes, and B. Alan Wallace’s pioneering work on contemplative science, I make the case for a new integral humanism that could hold what McGrath has recovered while making it translatable — situating this project within the distinctly Canadian philosophical lineage, from Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism” through the Davis-Baum theological rupture to McGrath’s own Fackenheim-Nicholson lineage at the University of Toronto. Canada has consistently produced thinkers who attempt to hold together what other traditions keep splitting apart — and the new integral humanism I am proposing grows from this soil. It takes Maritain’s original project seriously, engages Catholic Social Teaching and the integral human development tradition from Francis through Leo XIV, and argues that the contemplative depth McGrath has recovered — the Desert Fathers, Merton, the Carmelite mystics — deserves an architecture adequate to the pluralist world in which it must now speak. The Catholic intellectual tradition has always carried the resources for this. What it needs is the post-metaphysical framework that could make those resources communicable beyond the faithful — and that is what this essay attempts to provide.

Tags: Integral Humanism, Sean McGrath, Western Contemplative Tradition, Post-Metaphysical Thinking, Habermas, Ratzinger, Peterson, Žižek, Haidt, Hayes, Wilber, Maritain, Dallmayr, Catholic Social Teaching, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV, Philosophy Portal, German Idealism, Communio, Concilium, Merton, Desert Fathers, Canadian Philosophy, Armour, Trott, Coward, Vervaeke, B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science, Gregory Baum, Charles Davis, Jens Zimmermann, Notre Dame

I. A Phenomenon, a Philosopher, and a Canadian Conversation

Something strange has been happening in the humanities over the past decade. German idealism — the philosophical tradition running from Kant through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — has come back to life. Not as a subject of historical scholarship, though there is plenty of that. It has come back as a living tradition, treated by a growing network of young philosophers with the kind of devotion and intensity that, from the outside, looks less like academic fashion and more like a quasi-religious movement. Online communities, podcasts, reading groups, Discord servers — an entire infrastructure of engagement has sprung up around the conviction that Schelling and Hegel are not dead thinkers to be catalogued but living voices to be heard. As a scholar of comparative religion, I found this phenomenon fascinating. I wanted to understand where it was coming from, what need it was addressing, and what it might tell us about the condition of philosophy and religion in the twenty-first century.

My investigation began with the political philosopher Matthew McManus. McManus’s work on “postmodern conservatism” — his analysis of the post-truth, resentment-driven politics emerging on the right, where appeals to tradition and identity replace rational standards for adjudicating facts and values — drew me into the orbit of the Pill Pod, a podcast run by a group of PhD friends from York University working at the intersection of continental philosophy, systems theory, and critical theory. Through the Pill Pod I discovered Christopher Satoor, a PhD candidate at York working on Schelling’s middle period and one of the most generous connectors in this growing community of German idealism scholars. I had originally wanted to interview Chris for my podcast precisely to understand the phenomenon: what was generating all this excitement? I had assumed it was Žižek’s influence — his massive Less than Nothing had made Hegel sexy again for a generation of continental philosophers. But Chris showed me something deeper. There was an entire network of scholars pushing this material — not as Žižek’s idiosyncratic project but as a genuine philosophical renaissance. And at the center of the Canadian strand of this network was Sean McGrath.

Chris told me about McGrath’s The Dark Ground of Spirit and the work he and Jason Wirth had been doing through the North American Schelling Society. McGrath had opened something for Chris: a hidden layer deep inside German idealism, running from Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa through Jacob Böhme and the theosophical tradition into Schelling’s freedom philosophy. “Sean’s book brilliantly goes through all of this entire history,” Chris told me. “It’s a book on depth psychology — his argument is that it’s Schelling, not Freud, who created the unconscious.” As the introduction to McGrath and Joseph Carew’s edited volume Rethinking German Idealism puts it, the specter haunting Europe is not Marx but German idealism itself.

From there, my engagement with McGrath deepened. I began listening to his Secular Christ podcast — a remarkable series, produced with the Jungian analyst Jakob Lusensky through the Centre of the Cross, in which McGrath seeks the meaning of Christ in the secular world. What struck me was how directly the podcast engaged the very figures I had been thinking about: Episode 3 is a sustained critique of Jordan Peterson’s archetypal reading of Christianity (”Christ is not an archetype”), and Episode 4 takes on Žižek’s “gnostic” Christian atheism. McGrath was already diagnosing the same vacuum I was — from the contemplative side, with a philosopher’s precision. I participated in the Season 2 Q&A in November 2022, and that led to a breakfast meeting with McGrath during one of his visits to Montreal.

Over breakfast, I told him about my years at the Montreal Zen Centre and my work on the Canadian philosophical lineage I had been tracing through my Substack: Charles Davis, the Catholic theologian who left the priesthood and came to Concordia; George Grant, whose Lament for a Nation and engagement with Heidegger has shaped so much of Canadian intellectual life; John Watson, the Queen’s University idealist whose 1882 Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism represents one of the earliest Canadian engagements with German idealism. I shared with him a book that had become foundational for my own project: Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott’s The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850–1950 — the first systematic history of philosophy in English Canada, endorsed by both Northrop Frye and George Grant. Armour and Trott argue that what is distinctive in Canadian philosophy is a concept of reason that interacts with experience in a new world and a cold climate to create not one grand overarching system but what they call a “philosophic federalism” — “many faces of reason,” a plurality of views that can be justified or synthesized without forcing them into a single framework. This concept — philosophic federalism — resonated deeply with what I was already developing under the name Integral Epistemological Pluralism. I was not the first Canadian to think this way. I was, I began to realize, working within a tradition.

Alongside Armour and Trott, Harold Coward’s Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective gave me the other half of my disciplinary genealogy. Coward traces the transformation of religious studies in Canada from theology in seminaries to non-sectarian departments in faculties of arts and humanities — a shift that created the very institutional conditions under which my own training at Concordia became possible. His account of the “golden decade” of 1966–1976, McMaster’s pioneering role, and the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria documents the infrastructure within which the study of religion became a genuinely interdisciplinary enterprise in Canada — the kind of enterprise my own work at the Metapattern Institute is attempting to continue.

McGrath knew this territory intimately — not as academic history but as a living inheritance. He had earned his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2002 under Graeme Nicholson, the Heidegger scholar who had himself studied under Emil Fackenheim. This lineage matters: Fackenheim, Nicholson, McGrath — three generations of Canadian philosophers wrestling with the question of God, Being, and the meaning of modernity after the catastrophes of the twentieth century. I was not part of this lineage. I was studying it — observing the resurgence of German idealism from the disciplinary standpoint of comparative religion, trying to understand what drove serious people to treat two-hundred-year-old metaphysical systems as answers to contemporary crises. But I was studying it as a scholar of Canadian intellectual life specifically, and I increasingly saw McGrath, Peterson, John Vervaeke, the Pill Pod network, and the Philosophy Portal community as the latest chapter of the story Armour, Trott, and Coward had documented — the continuing Canadian conversation about reason, religion, and the public good.

It is McGrath’s Heidegger work that most interests me. His Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (2006) reads the young Heidegger as a “modern Luther” — a philosopher whose entire project is shaped by his rupture with Catholic Scholasticism and his deep, suppressed engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition. McGrath uncovers what Heidegger spent a career concealing: that the question of Being, as Heidegger poses it, is inseparable from the question of God as the Christian mystical tradition poses it. Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of facticity” — his insistence that philosophy begins from the concrete, thrown situation of human existence — is, McGrath shows, a secularization of Luther’s theology of the cross. I should note that the word facticity in my own project’s title, Integral Facticity, owes something to this Heideggerian lineage, even as I develop it in a very different direction.

Despite all of this — the podcast, the breakfast, the Canadian intellectual references we had in common — I have never written on McGrath. I have written on Davis, on Grant, on the Canadian idealist tradition — the lineage that Armour and Trott documented in The Faces of Reason and that Coward traces through the institutional transformation of religious studies as a discipline. My fascination with McGrath, like my fascination with Peterson, Vervaeke, and the German idealism network, stems from this same interest: I see them as continuing the distinctly Canadian philosophical conversation that Armour, Trott, and Coward mapped — the “many faces of reason” encountering new cultural conditions. This essay is my first attempt to think publicly with McGrath’s work, and I want to be candid about why it has taken me this long: I was not sure I had the right to intervene in a conversation I had been studying from the outside. My training is in comparative religion, not continental philosophy. I had no background in German idealism before encountering this network. I came to it as an observer — a scholar of religion watching what looked increasingly like a philosophical revival with genuinely spiritual stakes — and I was wary of speaking before I understood what I was observing. The Lost Road changed that, because it made the religious dimension of McGrath’s project explicit in a way his scholarly work had not.

And this is the crucial point. McGrath is one of the most rigorous Schelling scholars working today, a philosopher whose engagement with German Idealism, Heidegger, and Integral/Negative Ecology has earned him a place among the most serious thinkers in contemporary continental philosophy. He was a professed monk in a contemplative Catholic religious order from 1990 to 1995 before pursuing philosophy — a fact that gives The Lost Road an experiential authority most academic philosophers cannot claim. But The Lost Road is not simply the next book in his scholarly career. It is something that his scholarly career made possible — or rather, something that the German idealism revival, and the cultural shift Peterson triggered, finally made safe to publish.

This distinction matters enormously. McGrath’s Schelling scholarship — brilliant, rigorous, indispensable — functioned in part as academic cover for a deeper commitment that the contemporary university does not welcome: serious Christian contemplative practice as a mode of philosophical knowing. This is not a criticism of McGrath; it is a description of the institutional conditions under which serious religious thinkers have had to operate. The academy will allow you to study Schelling’s freedom philosophy as a historical object. It will not welcome you saying that the contemplative tradition Schelling drew upon is true — that it describes real states of consciousness accessible through reproducible practices. German idealism, interestingly, gets a pass that contemplative theology does not. Peterson’s massive cultural intervention — whatever its philosophical limitations — smashed the taboo against public religious seriousness. In the wake of that intervention, scholars like McGrath could come out from behind the scholarly apparatus and speak directly about what had been driving their work all along. The Lost Road is McGrath’s coming-out.

This is also why I see McGrath as occupying what McManus identifies as a “postmodern conservative” position — not in the crude post-truth sense that McManus primarily diagnoses, but in a deeper structural sense. McGrath retrieves pre-modern contemplative resources with genuine philosophical sophistication and experiential authority. But his retrieval operates within what we might call substantive ontological commitment — the conviction that the Christ event, the Western contemplative tradition, and the road itself are genuinely real. This commitment takes different forms across Catholic intellectual life: from the neo-Scholastic natural law tradition, through the Augustinian personalism and sacramental ontology of the Communio school (de Lubac, Balthasar, Ratzinger), to McGrath’s own post-Heideggerian retrieval through Schelling’s freedom philosophy. Charles Taylor occupies a similar space — accessing the sacred through hermeneutical participation rather than metaphysical demonstration. These are not equivalent positions, and the internal debates among them are real. But what they share — and what constitutes the post-metaphysical challenge this essay addresses — is that each depends on participatory formation to be fully intelligible. You must already be inside something — a practice, a tradition, a liturgical life — for the ontological commitments to resonate. That is precisely their strength as lived traditions. It is also what limits their communicability across the genuine pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere, without the architecture this essay proposes. McGrath, in this specific sense, is a sophisticated and contemplatively grounded version of the pattern McManus identifies: tradition retrieved without the post-metaphysical means to test it, translate it, and share it across genuine difference. That he is incomparably more serious than Peterson does not exempt him from the structural diagnosis. It makes the diagnosis more urgent, because what McGrath has recovered is worth translating — and the essay you are reading is an attempt to provide the architecture for that translation.

The Lost Road is something different from his scholarly work — something more personal and, I think, more important. Modeled explicitly on Augustine’s Confessions, the book opens with death. McGrath’s first cousin John — a cheerful twenty-year-old whom he loved like a brother — bought a one-way bus ticket from Montreal to a small town in Ontario, walked into a patch of woods, climbed a tree in his bare feet, and hanged himself from a rope he had purchased that day. The shoes were placed neatly at the trunk.

McGrath was eighteen. “My life is divided into two distinct and incommensurate periods: before and after John’s death,” he writes. “For better or worse, John made me a philosopher. My intellectual and spiritual journey began with his death.”

There is a kind of philosophical writing that begins in personal crisis and remains accountable to it. Augustine’s Confessions is the prototype. Kierkegaard’s authorship is another. McGrath’s Lost Road belongs to this tradition. The philosophical arguments it advances — about consumerism, about the Western contemplative tradition, about the Christ event — cannot be separated from the life that generated them. This is not a weakness. It is the book’s deepest strength and, as I will argue, also the place where it encounters a problem it cannot solve on its own.

My own research at the Metapattern Institute — which I have been documenting through my Substack, Integral Facticity — comes from a very different place than McGrath’s. I work across integral theory, critical social theory, contextual behavioral science, and the study of religion, trying to build what I have been calling a “new integral humanism.” My training is in comparative religion and applied human sciences at Concordia University, where I studied under Marc Lalonde — a philosopher of religion who completed his PhD under the supervision of Charles Davis and devoted his career to developing what he called a “critical theory of religious insight,” bridging Davis’s critical theology with Habermas’s communicative rationality. Lalonde’s sudden passing in January 2025 remains a deep loss. It was through him that I first encountered Davis, Maritain, and the intellectual tradition that eventually led me to this project. When I read The Lost Road, I did not recognize a fellow traveler on the same road. I recognized something else: that what I had been observing as a scholar of religion — an entire generation of serious philosophers reinventing German idealism in the present tense — was not primarily a scholarly phenomenon. It was an attempt to fill a deep spiritual void. The hunger driving the German idealism revival is the same hunger driving McGrath’s return to the Western contemplative tradition, and the same hunger Peterson exploits and Žižek diagnoses but refuses to address. They are all circling the same emptiness. What none of them have — not McGrath, not the network of brilliant scholars I have been studying — is the epistemological architecture that could hold what they are reaching for without collapsing it back into the metaphysical systems that modernity has already falsified. That is the argument of this essay.

Before turning to the book itself, I need to explain why I believe McGrath’s project is urgent by placing it within a broader intellectual context. That context begins with a debate that, on the surface, seems to have little to do with The Lost Road — but in fact exposes the very vacuum McGrath is trying to fill.

II. The Debate That Failed

The observation running through this entire network — that the left had ceded religion to the right — was not incidental. It runs through the work of everyone I have been engaging with over the past several years: McManus’s critique of “postmodern conservatism,” Michael Brooks’s insistence (before his untimely death in 2020) that the left needed to take seriously the human needs Jordan Peterson was addressing, Cadell Last’s diagnosis of the deadlock between Hegelian-Lacanian philosophy and cultural conservatism. And as I noted above, McGrath himself has already engaged this problem directly — his Secular Christ podcast devotes entire episodes to Peterson and Žižek, diagnosing with philosophical precision exactly what each gets wrong about Christianity. All of them were circling the same problem. And it was nowhere more visible than in the event that, perhaps more than any other, defined the intellectual landscape of the late 2010s.

In April 2019, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the psychologist Jordan Peterson met in Toronto for what was billed as “The Debate of the Century.” The topic was “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” Thousands watched. The conventional verdict was that Žižek won on philosophical substance while Peterson won on cultural resonance. I want to suggest that this verdict misses what actually happened and why it matters for McGrath’s project.

I have been thinking about this debate for years — first through my Integral Facticity podcast, where conversations with figures like Matt Flisfeder (who helped facilitate the event) and Cadell Last (whose Real Speculations I reviewed in an essay called “A Rosy Cross of a Book”) helped me see the debate as a symptom of something deeper than a mismatch of intellectual styles.

Peterson spoke to something real in the culture. His Jungian-hermeneutical retrieval of Western mythology, his emphasis on personal responsibility, his reverence for tradition and hierarchy — these resonated with millions of people whom the academic left had stopped speaking to. Alongside the Orthodox iconographer Jonathan Pageau , Peterson articulated a vision of the sacred that addressed a genuine hunger. McManus’s analysis of postmodern conservatism — whose work first drew me into this entire network — shows how figures like Peterson deploy post-truth appeals to tradition and identity in place of rational standards for adjudicating facts and values. But I want to press the analysis further than McManus does. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research, I would argue that Peterson’s appeal stems from something more specific: he inhabits a postmodern conservative position while speaking directly to the moral foundations — loyalty, authority, sanctity — that the left has systematically neglected. Peterson captured a cultural space the left abandoned not merely through resentment politics, but by addressing the deep human need for religious meaning and moral seriousness that progressive secularism left unmet. Brooks made the same argument from a different angle, insisting that the left needed to engage the real human needs Peterson was speaking to, even while rejecting his framework.

But Peterson’s framework is deeply flawed. His retrieval of religion operates at what I would call a mythic-literal level — he sacralizes existing hierarchies and traditional narratives without the capacity to distinguish which forms of authority serve human flourishing and which enforce domination. He and Pageau treat Christianity as a repository of archetypal wisdom rather than as a living contemplative tradition. McGrath’s Secular Christ makes this point with devastating clarity: “Christ is not an archetype,” he insists — Christ is not reducible to a Jungian symbol of individual self-actualization. The contemplative Christian tradition, as McGrath develops it across the podcast, offers something Peterson cannot: not “rules for life” but the radical grace of a self that cannot help itself, a transformation that begins precisely where self-help ideology breaks down. The result of Peterson’s approach is a cultural conservatism that can diagnose the emptiness of secular modernity but cannot offer a genuinely transformative alternative.

Žižek, meanwhile, is a formidable philosopher whose Hegelian-Lacanian system offers one of the most sophisticated diagnoses of ideology available. His concept of the “parallax gap” — the irreducible gap between irreconcilable perspectives that cannot be resolved through synthesis — has been central to my own theoretical development, as I explored in my essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem.” But Žižek’s “Christian Atheism” — his appropriation of kenosis (God’s self-emptying) and the death of the divine Father as resources for dialectical materialism — borrows the structure of Christian contemplative insight while refusing its substance. McGrath, in his Secular Christ episode on “the gnostic Slavoj Žižek,” identifies exactly this move: Žižek has a “better purchase on the essence of Pauline Christianity” than Peterson precisely because he takes the tragic ground of human existence seriously — but his Lacanian atheism and cynicism ultimately prevent him from following that insight to its contemplative conclusion. He theorizes the emptiness at the heart of subjectivity but can only think that emptiness as lack, never as the luminous ground that the contemplative traditions describe. He touches the mystical tradition and immediately retreats.

The left, more broadly, was not even in the room — and here is where Habermas becomes indispensable, not as a critic of the right alone, but as a thinker who diagnosed both sides of this crisis with equal severity. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas showed that the postmodern and poststructuralist thought that had increasingly dominated the humanities since the 1980s commits what he calls a performative contradiction: it uses rational arguments to undermine the very possibility of rational standards, deploying truth-claims in the service of the thesis that truth-claims are merely exercises of power. Foucault, Derrida, and their inheritors cannot offer a coherent critique of reason because they presuppose the rational norms they claim to deconstruct. The result — played out across three decades of academic culture — is an intellectual left that has undermined its own capacity to make truth-claims in public, retreating into institutional control of discourse rather than persuasive engagement with publics.

But Habermas was equally devastating on the other side. In The New Conservatism (1989), he anatomized the neoconservative reaction that was already gathering force — the attempt to “normalize” historical injustice, to weaponize tradition against the emancipatory gains of modernity, to exploit the left’s self-inflicted incoherence for reactionary ends. Both pathologies feed each other: the more the postmodern left abandons rational standards, the more space opens for the new conservatism to fill the vacuum with appeals to identity and tradition. Ken Wilber, working from a developmental psychology framework, arrived at a parallel diagnosis with what he calls the “mean green meme” — the pathological expression of postmodern pluralism that takes relativism to an extreme where no perspective can be judged better than any other, actively blocking the emergence of more integrative thinking while remaining blind to its own performative contradictions. The Peterson-Žižek debate was a symptom of this double pathology: on one side, a conservative mythologist filling the meaning vacuum; on the other, a dialectical materialist performing the very contradiction Habermas had diagnosed.

Peterson won the culture by default — not because his framework is adequate, but because nobody else was speaking to the whole human being. The debate exposed a vacuum: the absence of a framework that can hold genuine contemplative depth, intellectual rigor adequate to a pluralist world, and the capacity to address the full range of human moral experience.

McGrath already knew this. His Secular Christ podcast, across three seasons, is a sustained attempt to recover the contemplative Christianity that Peterson reduces and Žižek refuses. The Lost Road is the culmination of that effort — and the place where it encounters a problem it cannot solve on its own.

III. What McGrath Gets Right — and Where the Ground Shifts

McGrath’s journey begins in the Himalayas and ends in the Western contemplative tradition — but the journey is not what makes the book important. What makes it important is what he brings back. And what complicates it is where he brought it back to.

After his cousin’s death, McGrath traveled to India, to Buddhism, to the sacred sites of the Buddha’s life. He practiced meditation in remote monasteries in Ladakh, visited ashrams, read everything he could find on Eastern spirituality. Like so many Western seekers, he was convinced that authentic contemplative depth could not be found in the religion of his upbringing — Irish Catholicism, which seemed to him mechanical, devoid of spiritual life, manifestly inadequate to the question John’s death had forced upon him.

He did not find what he was looking for. Or rather, he found something more important: that he could not become a Buddhist without disowning his own tradition, and that he could not disown what he had never properly examined. T.S. Eliot, who had made the same discovery decades earlier, put it precisely: the attempt to penetrate Eastern thought fully would require “forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European,” and this, Eliot concluded, he could not do. McGrath goes further: it is not merely that we do not wish to abandon our tradition; it is that we cannot. “Tradition is the vehicle for understanding,” he writes. “Because cultural presuppositions are always relative and finite, they can never be the only way — but without them, there is no way.”

This argument has real force, but I want to note that it runs structurally parallel to Žižek’s own critique of Western Buddhist appropriation — a point I explored at length in my previous essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem.” Žižek argues that Western Buddhism functions as a fetish supplement to late capitalism, a way of maintaining inner peace while leaving the structural conditions of suffering untouched. McGrath’s critique arrives from the opposite direction — the contemplative rather than the dialectical — but the diagnostic overlap is striking. Both see Western Buddhism as a symptom rather than a solution. And both, I would argue, underestimate the genuine contemplative depth that Buddhist traditions carry in their own right, independent of their Western appropriation.

My own years at the Montreal Zen Centre — which McGrath and I discussed over breakfast — gave me a different angle on this. Zen practice opened something essential, something I would not have accessed through any purely Western framework. The contemplative depth was real. The question was not whether Buddhism was adequate — it was what architecture could hold the genuine insights of multiple contemplative traditions without requiring practitioners to abandon their own. That is the question McGrath cannot quite ask, because his framework assumes the Western tradition is the primary road.

What followed McGrath’s return from the East was a period of monastic formation. From 1990 to 1995, he was a professed monk in the Spiritual Life Institute — an offshoot of the Discalced Carmelites founded by Fr. William McNamara in the 1960s, with hermitages in Colorado and Nova Scotia. I want to be candid about this context, because it matters for evaluating what McGrath brings back. The Spiritual Life Institute was a product of its era: a mixed-gender contemplative community with deep roots in Carmelite mysticism but also in the countercultural Catholic moment of the 1960s — McNamara’s “earthy mysticism,” his language of “the human adventure,” the institute’s self-conscious positioning at the intersection of contemplative renewal and the human potential ethos. It was not the Catholic charismatic renewal, but it breathed the same air. The community eventually disintegrated after McNamara’s health crisis in 2001, and co-founder Tessa Bielecki left to start a separate Desert Foundation. This is not a scandal — communities fracture. But it is a reminder that the “Western contemplative tradition” McGrath invokes is not a seamless inheritance; it is mediated through very particular institutional experiments, some more stable than others.

What redeems McGrath’s contemplative formation — what gives The Lost Road its genuine authority — is that his intellectual work does not stay at the level of the Spiritual Life Institute’s somewhat idiosyncratic ethos. It goes deeper, grounding itself in the patristic and medieval sources that have genuine staying power: the Desert Fathers, Augustine’s Confessions, the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, and above all Thomas Merton. Merton is the crucial figure here — a monk who lived the contemplative life with complete seriousness while engaging with Buddhism, social justice, and the full complexity of the modern world. McGrath’s best writing channels Merton’s spirit: the insistence that contemplation is not withdrawal from the world but the deepest engagement with it. This is praxis in the fullest sense.

McGrath’s argument about consumerism — that it is not materialism but a perversion of spiritual longing — has a certain rhetorical appeal: “Consumerism works because it appeals to all aspects of human desire, both to what is lowest in us — the craving for pleasure, recognition, and power — and to what is highest in us: the drive toward the good.” But I find this less convincing than it first appears. The structural analysis of consumerism as a feature of late capitalism — the analysis that Žižek, whatever his limitations, provides with far greater precision — cannot be replaced by a spiritual diagnosis alone. The crisis is also political and economic, not spiritual “before” it is political. McGrath’s contemplative lens gives him genuine insight into the experiential dimension of consumer culture, but it lacks the tools to address the systemic conditions that produce and sustain it. This is precisely where Habermas’s analysis of the colonization of the lifeworld — the systematic replacement of communicative rationality by market and administrative logics — provides what McGrath’s contemplative framework cannot.

Where McGrath is strongest — and genuinely irreplaceable — is in his recovery of the Western concept of the person. This is not the individual of liberal theory — the autonomous, self-creating subject of the Enlightenment. The person, as the early Christian theologians developed the concept in order to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, is constitutively relational. “The essence of the person is relationality,” McGrath writes. “To be a person is to be related to other persons such that those relations constitute one’s identity.” The divine personality itself, in Trinitarian theology, subsists in a community of love. This concept — born from the attempt to explain how Jesus could be God and yet distinct from the Father — provides, in McGrath’s account, the philosophical foundation for human dignity that no other tradition has generated with the same force.

This is powerful. And it matters because it identifies the contemplative depth that any adequate response to the Peterson-Žižek vacuum must include. Without access to what the Western mystical tradition has cultivated — the kind of lived interior transformation that Merton described, that the Desert Fathers practiced, that the Carmelite tradition refined — any framework for public life will remain motivationally thin. Habermas himself acknowledged this in a dialogue that preceded the Peterson-Žižek debate by fifteen years.

IV. The Habermas-Ratzinger Precedent

In January 2004, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — met at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria for a dialogue on the moral foundations of the liberal state. For readers unfamiliar with this exchange, it remains the most intellectually serious attempt at exactly the conversation the Peterson-Žižek debate failed to have.

Habermas made a remarkable concession. The architect of “communicative rationality” — the thinker who had spent decades arguing that rational discourse could produce normative consensus in a pluralist society — acknowledged that secular reason cannot generate its own motivational resources. The values that sustain democratic life — solidarity, justice, human dignity — are presupposed by rational discourse but cannot be grounded by it. They have historical roots in religious traditions, particularly in the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person. Secular reason needs what Habermas called the “semantic content” of these traditions, but can only access this content through careful “translation” into terms that do not require religious commitment.

Ratzinger, in turn, conceded that faith must submit to the corrective of reason. Revelation cannot simply override rational discourse in a pluralist society. What they arrived at was a “complementary learning process” — faith and reason mutually correcting.

What they achieved was genuine. What they did not achieve — and what remains unresolved — is an architecture that can actually hold what both sides bring.

Habermas’s framework has no access to the contemplative dimension. His procedural rationality describes the conditions for rational discourse but says nothing about the interior transformation that makes genuine discourse possible. You cannot simply argue your way into the kind of moral openness that allows someone deeply committed to one moral vision to genuinely understand someone committed to a different one. Something more is needed — something the contemplative traditions have cultivated for millennia but that Habermas’s philosophy cannot account for.

Ratzinger, for his part, never fully committed to what Habermas calls “post-metaphysical thinking.” His theology operates within what I described above as substantive ontological commitment — in Ratzinger’s case, an Augustinian personalism and Logos theology in which the human person is grounded ontologically in the imago Dei. This is not the rigid neo-Scholasticism of the manuals; Ratzinger’s thought is richer than that, shaped by de Lubac and the ressourcement movement. But it depends on participatory formation — on liturgical life, on prayer, on the sacramental imagination — to be fully intelligible. These provide exactly the depth and motivational resources Habermas acknowledged secular reason needs. But they depend on commitments that cannot simply be translated into post-metaphysical terms without losing what makes them powerful.

I want to dwell on this, because it is the crux of the problem McGrath inherits — and because the problem has a dimension that neither Habermas nor Ratzinger addressed.

What the contemplative traditions carry is not merely “semantic content” — not merely concepts and values that can be translated like vocabulary from one language to another. They carry reproducible experiential practices. B. Alan Wallace — a former Buddhist monk ordained by the Dalai Lama who went on to earn a PhD in religious studies at Stanford after studying physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst — has done more than perhaps any living scholar to articulate this point. In Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (2009), Wallace demonstrates that Buddhist and Christian meditative practices, despite their different belief systems, function as parallel methods of cognitive inquiry that produce similar insight into the nature and origins of consciousness. He traces the Christian contemplative tradition back to the Desert Fathers meditating in Egypt and shows that what they developed — and what the Buddhist traditions refined through entirely independent methods — constitutes a genuine contemplative science: a body of reproducible practices that yield verifiable, intersubjectively testable results about states of consciousness, interior transformation, and the conditions under which genuine perspective-taking becomes possible.

Wallace’s achievement is to bring this contemplative science into dialogue with contemporary cognitive science, quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of mind — linking Buddhist and Christian views to the philosophical work of Hilary Putnam, Charles Taylor, and Bas van Fraassen. The result is not syncretism but what I would call contemplative epistemology: the recognition that the great meditative traditions have been conducting first-person empirical research for millennia, and that this research has epistemic standing comparable to — though methodologically distinct from — the third-person investigations of modern science.

The Desert Fathers did not simply believe in the transformation of the person through prayer; they developed systematic methods for achieving it — methods that produced consistent, verifiable results across practitioners, across centuries, across cultural contexts. The Carmelite mystics mapped stages of interior development with the precision of empirical researchers. Zen Buddhism has its own rigorous developmental phenomenology, tested across a thousand years of practice. These are not metaphysical assertions. They are, as Wallace has shown, something closer to a contemplative science — a body of practical knowledge about states of consciousness whose results are epistemologically significant.

This is what Ratzinger brought to the table without quite naming it, and what Habermas could not receive because his framework has no category for it. The contemplative traditions are not merely repositories of “semantic content” to be translated; they are technologies of interior transformation whose results are epistemologically significant — they produce new capacities for knowing, for empathy, for moral discernment that are not available to the untrained practitioner. The post-metaphysical challenge is not to discard this experiential data but to describe it functionally and test it experientially without requiring the metaphysical scaffolding in which it has traditionally been packaged. The contemplative practices are reproducible. The metaphysical ontology in which they have been housed is not the practices themselves — it is a theory about the practices, and theories can be revised while the practices and their effects remain.

This distinction — between the reproducible contemplative science and the metaphysical packaging — is what the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue needed and did not have. It is also what McGrath’s Lost Road needs and does not provide.

V. The Post-Metaphysical Problem

To call a framework “post-metaphysical” is not to call it anti-metaphysical. This distinction is crucial and widely misunderstood.

Anti-metaphysical thinking — Žižek’s dialectical materialism, logical positivism, reductive naturalism — claims that metaphysical questions are either meaningless or answerable in purely material terms. This position is self-defeating in ways that are by now well documented. Žižek’s own “materialism without matter,” in which absolute negativity functions as the ground of reality, is transparently a metaphysical position in anti-metaphysical clothing.

Post-metaphysical thinking, as Habermas articulates it, is something different. It means conducting inquiry without presupposing a cosmic ground, a purposive Idea, or an ontological telos — while remaining open to the validity of claims that emerge from traditions that do presuppose these things. It is procedural, fallibilist, and inclusive. It doesn’t say “God doesn’t exist”; it says “we can conduct this conversation without requiring agreement on whether God exists, while taking seriously the insights of those who believe God does.”

McGrath’s Lost Road encounters this threshold and cannot cross it. His entire project depends on metaphysical claims: the Christ event as ontological reality, creation as the theater of divine revelation, the road as genuinely real. He closes with “theological hope” — hope that “does not rely on the merely human.” This is not a flaw in his argument. It is what gives his testimony its existential power. But it means McGrath can speak to those who already share, or are open to, his Christian contemplative commitments. He cannot, on his own terms, speak across the deeper divides — the divides the Peterson-Žižek debate exposed, the divides that the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue identified but could not bridge.

The philosopher Dylan Shaul’s recent work on the Nature-Spirit transition in Hegel faces the same limitation from the other side. Shaul completed his PhD at the University of Toronto — the same department that Fackenheim built and where McGrath studied under Nicholson — working under Rebecca Comay on Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. The U of T lineage is not incidental: Fackenheim, Nicholson, McGrath, Shaul represent successive generations of Canadian philosophers wrestling with the question of God, Being, and modernity, each brilliant, each unable to step outside the metaphysical architecture they inherit. As I argued in my essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem,” Shaul offers one of the most lucid interventions in contemporary Hegel scholarship — but his reading re-introduces the Absolute Idea as the hidden agent of Spirit’s emergence, creating a system that is philosophically magnificent but unfalsifiable. The problem is not that no lived experience could challenge it — lived experience, including contemplative experience, is rich with epistemological content. The problem is that Shaul’s system, like the broader Hegelian tradition, does not attend to the epistemological and reproducible character of the experiences it claims to describe. It absorbs all possible experiences as moments in its own self-development without ever submitting its claims to the kind of empirical testing that a contemplative science would demand. The contemplative traditions do have reproducible methods and verifiable developmental stages. What they lack — and what Shaul’s Hegelianism equally lacks — is a framework that treats these reproducible experiences as genuine epistemic data while separating them from the metaphysical systems that claim to explain them.

This is the move that Enactive Fallibilism makes: when a framework — philosophical, institutional, political, or theological — includes all possible counter-evidence as moments in its own self-development, it has become unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable systems are epistemologically disqualified regardless of their internal elegance. The body’s testimony, the practitioner’s verified experience, the reproducible results of contemplative practice — these constitute genuine epistemic data that can test and potentially falsify theoretical frameworks. A system that cannot be falsified by such data is not a map of reality; it is a closed hermeneutic circle.

What The Lost Road opened for me was the recognition that Shaul and McGrath are working the same problem from opposite ends of the same corridor — and that neither can solve it alone. I want to be clear about something: these are the thinkers I admire most in this entire landscape. McGrath’s contemplative depth is real in a way that Peterson’s mythological retrieval is not, and Shaul’s philosophical rigor is genuine in a way that Žižek’s dialectical fireworks often are not. Both have the intellectual seriousness and the existential stakes that make their work worth wrestling with. But admiration does not exempt anyone from the post-metaphysical test. McGrath’s framework requires metaphysical commitments that cannot speak across the pluralist divides Habermas identifies. Shaul’s Hegelian system absorbs all possible counter-evidence into its own self-development, making it unfalsifiable in precisely the way that Enactive Fallibilism treats as a disqualification. Both almost get there. Both lack the epistemological architecture that Wilber and Habermas provide — the capacity to hold multiple irreducible ways of knowing without collapsing them into a single metaphysical system.

The broader landscape reveals a pattern. Each of these positions, in its own way, inhabits something structurally analogous to what McManus identifies as postmodern conservatism: not in the crude post-truth sense, but in the deeper sense that each retrieves pre-modern resources — contemplative tradition, Absolute Spirit, Jungian archetypes, Christian atheism — without the epistemological means to make those retrievals genuinely post-metaphysical. Listed in ascending order of seriousness:

Peterson retrieves religion at the mythic-Jungian level without encountering the post-metaphysical problem at all — the purest form of the pattern, and the most politically dangerous.

Žižek claims to be post-metaphysical while smuggling metaphysical commitments through the back door. His Christian Atheism is the most instructive failure: it demonstrates that you cannot simply subtract the metaphysical content from the contemplative tradition and retain anything livable.

Shaul reconstructs Hegel’s system with extraordinary rigor — the most lucid intervention in contemporary Hegel scholarship I have encountered — but the Absolute Idea functions as a hidden metaphysical agent that pre-decides the very freedom it claims to ground, and the system’s claims are never submitted to the reproducible empirical testing that a genuine contemplative science would require.

McGrath recovers the Western contemplative tradition with philosophical sophistication and genuine experiential authority — the deepest work in this landscape. But his framework remains tethered to substantive ontological commitments that, however sophisticated their post-Heideggerian mediation, depend on participatory formation to be intelligible. He can describe the contemplative experience with unmatched precision, but he cannot separate the reproducible contemplative science from the ontological framework, and therefore cannot speak across the divides his own diagnosis identifies.

Everyone in this conversation is circling the same question: how to reintegrate the contemplative and religious dimension into public life without regressing to pre-modern metaphysics or collapsing into secular flatland. The Habermas-Ratzinger “complementary learning process” described a relationship between faith and reason. It did not produce the architecture that could hold both. This is the post-metaphysical challenge. What follows — through the Catholic institutional expression and the Canadian intellectual context that has been my home — is the case for meeting it.

VI. The Catholic Institutional Expression and the Canadian Context

Before proposing the architecture I believe can bridge these divides, I need to address the Catholic institutional dimension of this conversation — because McGrath’s work does not exist in an intellectual vacuum. It exists within a living tradition that has already produced the most practically effective expressions of integral humanism available, and it exists within a distinctly Canadian intellectual context that has consistently fostered the kind of synthetic, federalist thinking this moment requires.

Pope Francis represented perhaps the most practically effective expression of the Catholic integral vision in recent memory. His encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti articulate integral human development with pastoral genius. His creation of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development institutionalized the anthropological turn that Sarah Shortall traces from the Jersey exiles through the nouvelle théologie to Vatican II — a genealogy I explored at length in my essay “Pope Francis’s Integral Vision & Legacy.” Francis’s insistence that “we do not face two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” captures the integral impulse at its best — the refusal to separate what modernity has fragmented.

But Francis’s genius was pastoral, not theoretical. The integral human development tradition he inherited does not need to be post-metaphysical to feed the hungry or welcome the migrant. But the intellectual framework underlying it does, if it is to speak in a pluralist public sphere — if it is to address the Peterson-Žižek vacuum rather than simply minister to those already within the fold.

Pope Leo XIV has sharpened the question further. His insistence that “the challenge is not technological, but anthropological” echoes the deepest commitments of the Catholic tradition. The Vatican’s doctrinal note Antiqua et Nova (2025) insists that AI must serve “the higher criterion of human dignity.” But “human dignity” in this tradition is grounded in the imago Dei — the theological claim that human beings bear the image of God. Can this claim be articulated in post-metaphysical terms without losing its force? As I argued in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory,” the Catholic intellectual tradition offers sophisticated resources for thinking about technology, dignity, and human flourishing — but those resources remain tethered to a metaphysical anthropology that limits their communicability in a pluralist context.

What is striking, and what connects this Catholic institutional dimension to McGrath’s Lost Road, is the Canadian context in which these questions take a distinctive shape. Canada’s relationship to Catholic intellectual life is unique: it is a country in which French Catholic and Anglo-Protestant traditions have been forced into conversation from the beginning, producing what Armour and Trott identify as “philosophic federalism” — a disposition toward synthesis rather than exclusion, plurality rather than system. This disposition runs through the entire lineage I have been tracing: from John Watson’s early engagement with Schelling, through George Grant’s Heideggerian-Christian critique of modernity, through Charles Davis’s migration from Catholic theology to critical theory at Concordia, through Lalonde’s “critical theory of religious insight,” through the defining theological rupture between Davis and Gregory Baum — the Jewish-born refugee and Vatican II peritus who drafted Nostra Aetate and devoted his career at Toronto and McGill to reconciling Catholic tradition with critical sociology and social justice. As I argued in my essay “Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate,” the Davis-Baum conflict represents the Canadian culmination of the Communio-Concilium crisis, and its unresolved tensions continue to shape every question this essay addresses. The German-Canadian theologian Jens Zimmermann’s “incarnational humanism” — his attempt to ground human dignity, freedom, and reason in the doctrine of the incarnation — represents yet another iteration of this characteristically Canadian project, one I engaged at length in “Engaging Jens Zimmermann’s Incarnational Humanism from an Integral Perspective.” Zimmermann’s work offers genuine theological depth, but as I argued there, his Christocentric framework risks the same hermeneutical closure that McGrath’s substantive ontological commitments produce: richness of content without the epistemological architecture that could make it communicable across genuine pluralist divides. And now through McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition from within a Canadian university system that both shaped and constrained his work.

McGrath’s situation is, in this light, characteristically Canadian. He works at Memorial University of Newfoundland — a secular institution where serious Christian contemplative commitment must be channeled through acceptable academic forms (Schelling scholarship, Heidegger studies, Negative/Integral ecology) in order to survive professionally. The Lost Road is the moment when the contemplative commitment steps out from behind the scholarly apparatus — enabled, as I argued in Section I, by the cultural shift Peterson triggered, but also shaped by the distinctly Canadian pattern of holding multiple traditions in tension without forcing premature resolution.

This Canadian pattern matters because it is, I believe, the cultural soil from which a genuinely post-metaphysical integral humanism can grow. Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism” is not just a description of past Canadian philosophy — it is a method: the conviction that a plurality of views can be justified or synthesized, that the “many faces of reason” need not collapse into a single face. Coward’s documentation of the transformation of religious studies in Canada — from confessional theology to genuinely interdisciplinary, non-sectarian scholarship — describes the institutional conditions under which multiple contemplative traditions can be studied, compared, and respected on their own terms. My own training at Concordia, under Lalonde, within a department shaped by Davis’s migration from theology to critical theory, is a direct product of this Canadian institutional experiment.

What I am proposing in this essay — a new integral humanism that holds contemplative depth, post-metaphysical rigor, moral-psychological breadth, and developmental sorting together — is not, then, a purely theoretical construction imported from outside. It grows from the Canadian philosophical conversation itself, the conversation that Armour, Trott, and Coward documented and that McGrath, Peterson, Vervaeke, Shaul, and I are continuing in our different ways. The difference is that I am trying to make explicit the epistemological architecture that the Canadian “philosophic federalism” has always implied but never fully articulated — the architecture that could turn this distinctive Canadian disposition into a framework adequate to the global crisis McGrath’s Lost Road diagnoses.

VII. Toward a New Integral Humanism

I want to make the case for a new integral humanism — and to show that the resources for building it already exist, scattered across disciplines that have not yet been brought into conversation. It requires bringing together resources that, to my knowledge, have not previously been synthesized — some of which will be unfamiliar to readers coming from continental philosophy or confessional theology, and which I have been developing across several essays and through my work at the Metapattern Institute. My training in comparative religion — where one learns to hold multiple traditions as genuine without absolutizing any — turns out to be the disciplinary position this synthesis requires. And the Canadian “philosophic federalism” that Armour and Trott describe turns out to be not merely a national intellectual habit but the disposition this moment demands.

When Jacques Maritain first articulated his vision of “integral humanism” in 1936, he laid a vital foundation. His personalist philosophy centered human dignity in the theological claim that the person is not reducible to the individual of liberal theory — the person is constitutively relational, ordered toward transcendence, bearing an inherent dignity that no political order may violate. Louis-Joseph Lebret extended this into practical development theory. The Jersey theologians radicalized it through ressourcement. Pope Francis brought it to institutional expression. But as I argued in my tribute to the political philosopher Fred Dallmayr, “The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism,” Maritain’s integral humanism operates within the same substantive ontological commitments I have been tracing throughout this essay — and requires a structural upgrade to address the deep pluralism and systemic challenges of the twenty-first century.

A genuinely new integral humanism must hold four things together that no existing framework manages to combine. Let me introduce each, recognizing that several of these thinkers may be new to readers in McGrath’s intellectual world.

I should anticipate two objections here — one from McGrath himself, and one from the broader Catholic intellectual world in which his work circulates.

McGrath’s objection would not be that integral humanism is too systematic — his own Schelling scholarship is nothing if not systematic. It would be that I am housing the transcendent inside a humanist architecture. The entire thrust of The Lost Road is that the contemplative tradition leads beyond the human — beyond any framework, however sophisticated, that keeps the human person as its horizon. The encounter with God, as the Desert Fathers knew and as Merton practiced, shatters the categories through which we try to contain it. By placing contemplative depth as one component within a larger architecture — alongside Habermas’s procedure, Haidt’s moral psychology, Hayes’s behavioral science — am I not domesticating the very wildness McGrath spent five years in the mountains learning to receive?

I take this seriously, but Maritain already answered it. Integral humanism, as Maritain conceived it in 1936 and as I am developing it here, is not humanism without God. It is humanism ordered toward God — a humanism in which the transcendent is not one component among others but the horizon toward which the entire architecture opens. The “integral” means precisely that nothing is left out, including what exceeds the human. The architecture does not contain the divine; it creates the conditions under which the divine can be encountered across the divides that currently prevent genuine communication. Contemplation remains the engine. The architecture serves it; it does not replace it.

The second objection will come from the Communio theologians — figures like Larry Chapp, Tracey Rowland, and those in the tradition of de Lubac, Balthasar, and Ratzinger — who will see in this project exactly what they have spent decades warning against: the Concilium error. By synthesizing Maritain with Habermas — a Frankfurt School philosopher — and treating Catholic metaphysical commitments as revisable through Enactive Fallibilism, I am, in their reading, accommodating faith to modernity’s terms rather than letting faith challenge modernity on its own. Rowland’s taxonomy is clear: Communio theologians look at contemporary culture from the perspective of magisterial teaching; Concilium theologians look at magisterial teaching from the perspective of contemporary culture. By their lights, I am firmly in the second camp.

I want to respond to this directly. The Communio narrative holds that the Concilium accommodation — the “spirit of Vatican II” as distinct from its actual documents — is what emptied the churches. I believe this narrative is empirically wrong. What emptied the churches was corruption and scandal — decades of institutional betrayal that no amount of theological refinement can explain away. The decades-long contest between Communio and Concilium, however intellectually serious, has consumed an enormous amount of Catholic intellectual energy on ecclesial positioning — a dynamic I examined at length in my essay “Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate” — while the contemplative tradition both camps claim to value has continued to atrophy in practice. McGrath’s work — his recovery of the Desert Fathers, his grounding in Merton, his insistence on contemplative Christianity as praxis rather than system — is exactly what serious Catholic intellectuals should be attending to, and it is striking how little attention the ecclesial combatants have paid to work like his.

This essay is, among other things, an attempt to redirect that attention. The architecture I am proposing does not reduce faith to procedure, and Enactive Fallibilism is not accommodation. It is the intellectual honesty to say: any framework — including this one, including Communio theology, including Concilium theology — is revisable when it produces suffering. That is not relativism. It is what Peirce called fallibilism — the recognition that all knowledge, including theological knowledge, is provisional and subject to revision through lived experience. Enactive Fallibilism takes Peirce’s insight further: when a framework produces suffering, the body’s testimony has epistemic authority over the framework’s internal logic. This is not relativism. It is the only epistemic stance adequate to a living tradition — one that has survived two thousand years precisely because it has always contained within itself the capacity for metanoia, for turning, for reform. The contemplative traditions themselves teach this: genuine interior transformation requires the willingness to let go of what no longer serves, including one’s most cherished formulations. What Enactive Fallibilism adds is the insistence that this willingness must extend to the institutional and theoretical frameworks that house the contemplative practices, not merely to the practitioner’s personal attachments.

Contemplative Depth

This is what McGrath recovers, what the Western mystical tradition carries, what Peterson gestures toward but cannot reach, and what Žižek theorizes but cannot inhabit. Without access to what the contemplative traditions have cultivated — states of consciousness, the witnessing perspective, the interior transformation of the person through sustained practice — any framework for public life will remain motivationally thin. This was Habermas’s own diagnosis of secular reason’s insufficiency. The contemplative dimension is not an optional supplement; it is the engine of the moral transformation that genuine dialogue requires.

But — and this is the point I developed in Section IV — the contemplative traditions carry something more than “semantic content.” They carry reproducible experiential practices that function as a contemplative science. As B. Alan Wallace has demonstrated in Mind in the Balance, Buddhist and Christian meditative traditions, despite their different belief systems, converge on parallel methods of cognitive inquiry that produce similar insight into the nature of consciousness. The post-metaphysical move is to honor this science — to describe its methods, map its developmental stages, and test its claims experientially — while separating it from the metaphysical packaging in which it has historically been housed. McGrath’s contribution here is irreplaceable. The Lost Road demonstrates that this depth is available within the Western tradition — not as a museum piece but as a living way. Wallace demonstrates that the same depth is available across traditions, through reproducible practices whose results converge. Anyone working toward a new integral humanism needs both.

Post-Metaphysical Rigor

This is Habermas’s essential contribution — the procedural, fallibilist framework that makes inquiry communicable across traditions without requiring metaphysical commitments from interlocutors. Without this, we get McGrath’s testimony: existentially powerful but not translatable across the divides that define our public life. Post-metaphysical thinking is not the enemy of contemplative depth; it is the condition under which contemplative depth can speak in a pluralist public sphere.

But Habermas’s framework, as I have noted, is incomplete. It needs to be updated — supplemented with resources he did not have access to — if it is to become adequate to the full scope of the problem.

Moral-Psychological Breadth

This is where I introduce a thinker whose work has been transformative for my own project but who remains largely unknown in the circles where McGrath’s work circulates.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated through extensive empirical research that moral reasoning is fundamentally embodied and pre-verbal. Moral intuitions move first; the conscious, verbal mind constructs post-hoc rationalizations that feel like reasons but function as justifications. Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant (embodied moral intuition) and the rider (conscious verbal reasoning): the elephant moves, and the rider narrates.

Moreover — and this is the crucial finding — human beings operate across six irreducible Moral Foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Authority/Subversion, Loyalty/Betrayal, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Progressives tend to rely primarily on Care and Fairness. Conservatives draw on all six. This explains, with empirical precision, why Peterson resonates with audiences the academic left cannot reach — he speaks, however crudely, to the full moral spectrum: authority, loyalty, sanctity, and liberty as well as care and fairness. The left speaks to two foundations and wonders why it keeps losing the culture.

This presents a devastating challenge to Habermas’s project. If moral reasoning is post-hoc rationalization — if the elephant moves first and the rider merely narrates — then the “ideal speech situation” Habermas envisions, in which rational agents exchange reasons and reach consensus, is built on a psychological illusion. Participants in discourse are not exchanging reasons; they are exchanging rationalizations generated by incommensurable embodied moral intuitions.

This looks like a fatal blow to the Habermasian project. I argued in my essay “Beyond the Master Signifier” that it is not — if you know where to look for the bridge. That bridge is provided by Steven C. Hayes.

Hayes developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) within contextual behavioral science — a tradition rooted in pragmatic philosophy. ACT’s core contribution is what Hayes calls the “hexaflex”: six interconnected psychological processes that together constitute psychological flexibility — the capacity to contact the present moment fully, as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior in the service of chosen values. These processes include cognitive defusion (observing your thoughts as mental events rather than literal truths), acceptance (making room for difficult experiences rather than struggling against them), self-as-context (accessing a witnessing perspective that observes experience rather than being consumed by it), present moment contact, values clarification, and committed action.

Here is why this matters for the Habermas-Ratzinger problem: defusion is precisely the psychological capacity to notice your moral intuition — your elephant’s movement — as an embodied response rather than mistaking the rider’s post-hoc narrative for truth. It does not silence the elephant. It creates space between intuition and response — space in which genuine perspective-taking becomes possible. This is the psychological precondition for Habermas’s ideal speech situation that Habermas himself could not produce. As I argued in “Beyond the Master Signifier”: Haidt tells us why communicative action fails across moral divides. Hayes tells us how to create the psychological conditions under which it can succeed. Habermas tells us what we are building toward.

No one, to my knowledge, has previously brought Haidt and Habermas into dialogue through Hayes. This synthesis updates Habermas — providing the psychological infrastructure his procedural framework was always missing.

And here is the connection to the contemplative science I described in Section IV: Hayes’s self-as-context — the witnessing perspective within the hexaflex — is functionally identical to what the contemplative traditions have cultivated for millennia. The Desert Fathers’ practice of nepsis (watchfulness), the Zen practice of shikantaza (just sitting), the Carmelite tradition of interior observation — these are all, functionally described, methods for cultivating the capacity to observe one’s own mental events without being consumed by them. Hayes arrived at this insight through behavioral science; the contemplative traditions arrived at it through millennia of practice; Wallace arrived at it through his unique position as a physicist-turned-Buddhist-monk-turned-scholar of comparative religion. They are describing the same capacity from different disciplinary angles. This convergence — between empirical behavioral science, comparative contemplative science, and the living traditions themselves — is the strongest evidence that what I am proposing is not a metaphysical fantasy but a genuine domain of reproducible human experience with epistemic standing.

Developmental Sorting

The final resource comes from the integral theorist Ken Wilber, whose work will be familiar to some readers and entirely unfamiliar to others. Wilber’s most important diagnostic tool for the conversation McGrath is engaged in is what he calls the “Pre/Trans Fallacy” — the confusion of pre-rational with trans-rational.

Here is the problem in concrete terms: Peterson’s mythic-Jungian retrieval of Christianity and McGrath’s contemplative recovery of the Western mystical tradition can look identical from the outside. Both invoke tradition, authority, the sacred, the transformative power of religion. But they are operating at fundamentally different levels. Peterson retrieves religion at a mythic-literal level — archetypes, hero narratives, the sacralization of existing hierarchies. McGrath retrieves it at a contemplative level — Augustine’s freedom and grace, the dark ground of Spirit in Schelling, the mystical witness, the personal encounter with Christ as transformative. Without a framework that can sort these — that can distinguish pre-rational engagement with the sacred from trans-rational engagement — the left’s blanket dismissal of all religion as regression appears justified, and the right’s mythic retrieval appears equivalent to genuine contemplative depth. It is neither.

Wilber’s developmental architecture provides this sorting. He also provides a crucial distinction between what he calls “growth hierarchies” and “dominator hierarchies” — a distinction I developed in my essay on Dallmayr and integral pluralism, “The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism.” Growth hierarchies transcend and include: each stage preserves and integrates what came before. Dominator hierarchies suppress and exclude: each level maintains power by preventing the development of those below. Peterson is right that hierarchies are not inherently oppressive; the left’s blanket rejection of hierarchy cedes moral territory to the right unnecessarily. But Peterson cannot distinguish which hierarchies serve flourishing and which enforce conformity. This sorting capacity is exactly what The Lost Road needs and does not have.

The Synthesis: Integral Facticity and the New Integral Humanism

These four requirements — contemplative depth, post-metaphysical rigor, moral-psychological breadth, and developmental sorting — converge in what I have been calling a new integral humanism. It is grounded in a concept I call Integral Facticity, which I have been developing across several essays and which I articulated most fully in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory.”

Integral Facticity synthesizes Wilber’s developmental architecture with Habermas’s insistence on irreducible givenness. The philosopher’s term “facticity” refers to the brute, unchosen conditions within which all human action occurs — the body you have (not the body you want), the history you carry (not the history you’d prefer), the material conditions you inhabit. Habermas, in Between Facts and Norms, articulates the tension between facticity (what is) and validity (what ought to be) as the fundamental structure of social life.

The core insight of Integral Facticity is this: development — including the contemplative development McGrath describes — occurs within facticity, not in escape from it. We do not transcend our biological limits, our historical situatedness, or our material conditions through spiritual awakening. We develop a transformed relationship to them. The contemplative traditions are clear on this when read carefully: Zen does not promise escape from sickness, old age, and death — it offers a transformed relationship to them. Christian mysticism does not dissolve embodiment — it sanctifies it. Augustine’s discovery of grace is not escape from the human condition but the recognition that the human condition, in all its limitation, is already held within something greater.

This is the move that holds McGrath’s contemplative depth while keeping it post-metaphysical. The interior transformation McGrath describes — the witnessing perspective, the encounter with grace, what the tradition calls the soul’s ascent — is real. It can be described functionally and tested experientially against the practitioner’s lived experience. It is part of the reproducible contemplative science I described in Section IV. It does not require ontological claims about the Logos or the Christ event to be valid as human experience, though it may also carry those meanings for those who receive it theologically. This is the bridge between Ratzinger’s contemplative realism and Habermas’s procedural fallibilism — a bridge built not by abstracting away the experiential content but by describing it with epistemological precision.

A second concept — Enactive Fallibilism — provides the epistemological engine. Synthesizing Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism (all knowledge is provisional and subject to revision through experience) with Francisco Varela’s enactivism (cognition is not passive representation but active engagement of organism and environment), Enactive Fallibilism ensures that the new integral humanism does not calcify into another closed system. When frameworks — philosophical, institutional, political, or theological — produce suffering, they are tested and found wanting. The body serves as empirical probe. This is not grievance; it is the self-correcting mechanism that prevents any comprehensive framework from becoming what Hegel’s Encyclopedia became: a magnificent system that includes all possible objections as moments in its own self-development and is therefore unfalsifiable.

What I call Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) is the practical operationalization of this new integral humanism — Hayes’s hexaflex (empirically validated processes of psychological flexibility) nested within Wilber’s integral architecture (developmental sorting across states, stages, and types), grounded in Integral Facticity (development within irreducible givenness) and kept honest by Enactive Fallibilism (the body’s epistemic authority over theoretical frameworks). I have described IACT’s theoretical foundations and its practical applications in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory” and in earlier essays including “Bridging Minds & Souls” and “Towards an Integral Approach to Recovery & Beyond.” For readers interested in the clinical and practical dimensions, those essays develop what I can only sketch here.

The Catholic Resonance

I want to be explicit about something that matters deeply to me: this new integral humanism does not replace the Catholic integral human development tradition. It enriches it — providing the post-metaphysical architecture that tradition needs to speak in a pluralist public sphere without sacrificing its depth.

The semantic content that Habermas acknowledged secular reason needs? It is here — translated, not lost. The integral ecology that Pope Francis articulated in Laudato Si’ — the insistence that “we do not face two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” — finds its post-metaphysical articulation in Wilber’s four-quadrant model, where the individual interior, the individual exterior, the collective interior, and the collective exterior are irreducible and interdependent. The human dignity that Pope Leo XIV insists must govern our relationship to artificial intelligence is honored within Integral Facticity not merely as a metaphysical assertion about the imago Dei (though it may also be that, for those who receive it theologically) but as a procedural commitment: systems must be worthy of persons, not persons worthy of systems.

Dallmayr’s integral pluralism — the hermeneutical encounter with the “other” that demands rigorous dialogue across traditions without syncretism or relativism — is built into this architecture through Haidt’s moral psychology (multiple irreducible moral foundations, each carrying genuine wisdom about social life) and through the post-metaphysical procedure that welcomes contributions from all contemplative traditions without requiring any tradition to abandon its deepest commitments or to impose its metaphysical claims on others as preconditions for dialogue.

And Armour and Trott’s Canadian “philosophic federalism” — the conviction that the many faces of reason can coexist and enrich one another without collapsing into a single system — finds its theoretical articulation in what I have been calling Integral Epistemological Pluralism: the meta-theoretical architecture that holds multiple irreducible ways of knowing in productive tension without forcing premature resolution. This is not eclecticism. It is the Canadian philosophical disposition raised to the level of explicit method.

This is an architecture within which McGrath’s Western contemplative tradition, the Buddhist contemplative traditions, the Jewish philosophical heritage, the Islamic mystical tradition, and secular humanism can each contribute their irreducible insights to a shared project of human flourishing.

VIII. The Road Within Facticity

McGrath found the road. That is not in dispute.

His testimony to the Western contemplative tradition as a living resource — not a museum piece, not an object of academic study, but a way of life capable of addressing the nihilism and false spirituality of consumerism — is among the most important contributions to this conversation in recent years. The Lost Road should be read by everyone working in the space between philosophy and theology, between the academy and the search for meaning, between the culture wars and the deeper questions they obscure.

But McGrath closes with theological hope — hope that has no limits, hope that “does not rely on the merely human.” This is where the new integral humanism both honors his achievement and goes further.

The road is real. The contemplative depth McGrath recovered is genuine. The Western mystical tradition carries resources for human transformation that no secular framework has replicated. Habermas was right to acknowledge this. And the Canadian philosophical tradition — from Watson’s early engagement with Schelling through Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology through McGrath’s recovery of the contemplative tradition — has been wrestling with these questions with a distinctive seriousness and a distinctive openness to synthesis that the new integral humanism both inherits and makes explicit.

But the road must be walkable together — across traditions, across moral divides, across the fractures the Peterson-Žižek debate exposed and the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue began to bridge. This requires architecture that McGrath’s testimony alone cannot provide. It requires post-metaphysical procedure that makes contemplative depth communicable without requiring metaphysical buy-in. It requires the moral-psychological breadth that Haidt’s research reveals is necessary and that Hayes’s work makes operationally possible. It requires the developmental sorting that can distinguish McGrath’s contemplative recovery from Peterson’s mythic regression — and can explain, with precision, why the difference matters. And it requires the recognition that the contemplative traditions carry a genuine science — reproducible practices producing verifiable results — that can be articulated in post-metaphysical terms without losing its transformative power.

Maritain laid the foundation. Dallmayr provided the pluralism. Habermas provided the procedure. Wilber provided the developmental architecture. Haidt provided the moral psychology. Hayes provided the functional praxis. McGrath recovered the contemplative depth. Francis and Leo XIV demonstrated the institutional expression. Armour, Trott, and Coward documented the Canadian conversation within which all of this work unfolds.

A new integral humanism holds all of this together — not as a closed system (Enactive Fallibilism prevents that), but as a living architecture within which the road can be walked. Together. One day at a time.

A Postscript on Urgency

As I write this, the urgency of these questions is being demonstrated in real time. On February 12, 2026, the University of Notre Dame — long regarded as the flagship of American Catholic higher education — appointed a political scientist who publicly advocates for abortion rights as director of a key institute dedicated to “integral human development.” Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne–South Bend issued an unusually direct rebuke, invoking Ex Corde Ecclesiae and framing the controversy as touching the core of the Church’s mission in higher education. Two scholars have already resigned in protest. Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pontiff — has recently reiterated that authentic development must encompass every dimension of the human person and must never exclude the most vulnerable.

The controversy crystallizes exactly the problem this essay has been diagnosing. On one side, defenders of the appointment invoke academic freedom and pluralism. On the other, the bishop and the resigners insist that Catholic institutional identity requires coherence between teaching and governance. Both sides are right about something, and neither has the architecture to hold what the other is right about.

This is the Communio-Concilium impasse playing out at the level of a hiring decision — and it is characteristically American in a way that illuminates, by contrast, what the Canadian intellectual tradition offers. The American Catholic university system, shaped by the culture wars and the legal frameworks of the First Amendment, tends to frame these disputes as binary choices: academic freedom or doctrinal fidelity, pluralism or Catholic identity. The Canadian tradition I have been tracing — Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism,” the Davis-Baum dialectic, Zimmermann’s incarnational humanism, McGrath’s contemplative recovery — has consistently resisted this binary. Not by splitting the difference, but by seeking architectures capable of holding genuine plurality without abandoning the depth commitments that give institutions their reason for existing.

The new integral humanism I am proposing is precisely such an architecture. It does not resolve the Notre Dame controversy by siding with the bishop or the university. It provides the framework within which both the Church’s non-negotiable commitment to human dignity and the university’s commitment to genuine intellectual inquiry can be honored — because it holds contemplative depth and post-metaphysical procedure together, rather than forcing a choice between them. That this architecture does not yet exist in institutional form is precisely the point. McGrath recovered the contemplative depth. Habermas provided the procedure. Wallace demonstrated the contemplative science. The Canadian philosophical tradition provided the disposition. What remains is to build.

Every serious intellectual project is, in some sense, a confession — an account of what one has found to be true, tested against the resistance of lived experience. Augustine confessed. McGrath, in The Lost Road, confesses. This essay is my own confession: that the emptiness these thinkers are circling is real, that what the contemplative traditions carry is irreplaceable, and that the post-metaphysical challenge is not the enemy of that depth but the condition under which it can finally speak to everyone it was always meant to reach.

Further Reading from Integral Facticity

The arguments sketched in this essay are developed more fully in several previous essays available on my Substack:

“A Rosy Cross of a Book” — My review of Cadell Last’s Real Speculations, tracing the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks through the Peterson-Žižek debate to the Philosophy Portal.

“Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics” — The full Haidt-Habermas-Hayes synthesis, the Pre/Trans Fallacy, and the case for the ACT hexaflex as the psychological infrastructure for communicative action.

“Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem” — My intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate, proposing IEP as the meta-theoretical architecture the Hegel-Lacan corridor lacks.

“The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism” — My tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism and its structural upgrade of Maritain’s original project.

“Pope Francis’s Integral Vision & Legacy” — The Catholic anthropological turn from the Jersey exiles through Vatican II to Francis, and its resonance with integral humanism.

“When the Body Becomes the Laboratory” — IACT’s theoretical foundations, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, and the operationalization of a new integral humanism.

“Bridging Minds & Souls” — The integration of Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism into IACT’s practical framework.

“Towards an Integral Approach to Recovery & Beyond” — The 2-T’s, 3-A’s, and 4-I’s of the IACT program.

“Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” — Michael Brooks, the integral left, and the reconstruction of the public sphere.

“Engaging Jens Zimmermann’s Incarnational Humanism” — A dialogue between incarnational humanism and integral pluralism.

“Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate” — The Canadian culmination of the Communio-Concilium crisis and its unresolved legacy.

Suggested Reading

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Christian Alternative, 2025)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Sean McGrath, Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006)

Sean McGrath, The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1965)

George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Anansi, 1969)

Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)

Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)

Harold Coward, Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012)

B. Alan Wallace, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Gregory Baum, The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis (Herder and Herder, 1968)

Jens Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World (IVP Academic, 2012)

Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (Ignatius Press, 2006)

Steven C. Hayes , A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery, 2019)

Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions (Shambhala, 2017)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Sarah Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican, 2015)

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (Vatican, 2009)

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

David Sloan Wilson, Paul Atkins, and Steven Hayes, Prosocial (Context Press, 2019)

Dylan Shaul, “From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia,” Crisis & Critique 12:1 (2026)

Matthew Shadle , Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Integral [+] Facticity

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?