Alasdair MacIntyre, in his important book After Virtue, suggests what the world needs today is “another — doubtless very different — Saint Benedict.” Some might argue that Pope Benedict XVI was that new “Benedict” speaking to the modern world.

I’d like to suggest what the world needs today is a new St. Dominic.

St. Dominic and his new order were instrumental in bringing an end to the Albigensian heresy that then ruled southern France. Albigensianism had a particular take on the human body, a perspective not wholly alien to today’s France.

Albigensianism was dualist. It dualistically split reality and, therefore, the human person by teaching that the spiritual side of man is created by God, while the material side is the work of evil. The material world and especially the material body were to be escaped. The Old Testament is the work of that evil principle. Punishment, at best, happens in this world; because souls are divine in nature, there is no everlasting punishment. There is no resurrection of the body.

The moral implications of this anthropology include these: liberation from the body is man’s goal, suicide is allowed; marriage is to be avoided in favor of perpetual chastity, though “concubinage, being of a less permanent nature, is preferable to marriage”; spousal abandonment was approved.

As the French say, Plus ça change… The modern world may not wrap dualism in a religious package like Albigensianism, but dualism is alive and well today. Germain Grisez argued the same almost fifty years ago.

The Albigensians turned their philosophy into a religion, or it could be left as a philosophy. Modern philosophy is usually considered as beginning with Frenchman René Descartes. For Descartes, man is essentially a mind with a body attached. The body is subpersonal, a mere instrument or tool of “person,” who is mind. “I think; therefore, I am” is Descartes’s motto, but it’s the polar opposite of Catholic metaphysics, which affirms that, in the case of man the rational animal, “I am; therefore, I think.”

One must depreciate the body to reach many of the conclusions of the modern world. Only in a Cartesian worldview does the idea that a “person” can be in the “wrong body” make sense. Only that view — of escaping the “wrongness” of the instrumental body — justifies genital mutilation, including of minors. If the Old Testament is the work of an evil deity who promotes “judgment,” so the New Testament’s message of “love” abstracted from any concrete definition based in the other Commandments becomes the basis of sloganeering like “love is love” while refusing to examine what the content and contours of true love (versus lust) is. If permanent marriage permanently binds human beings to matter — in the person of a spouse and the person of a child — then it follows that marriage is depreciated. Which is now declared “weird”: singles with “fur babies” or parents with real ones? If removing the “permanence” of marriage weakens the nexus to matter, well, our society has done a fine job at dissolving what God has joined together. Concubinage, one-night stands, sodomy — all masquerade as ersatz substitutes for marriage. Resurrection of the body? Why? What for? If the body is at best an optional attachment, sometimes the “wrong” attachment, why does the “person” — a disincarnated thought — need “resurrection”? And, in the end, if the soul is divine and is the only thing that matters, why not have everything end “happily ever after”? The hope that all men be saved crossed the line into presumption about it long before the 20^th century.

The depreciation of the body is not something new or unique to France. It is very much a phenomenon of the modern world, certainly of the Western world.

And, instead of recovering the dignity of the body — which is the dignity of the Incarnation — the Francis Church has instead seemed far more ready to accommodate these tendencies than fight them. Whereas once upon a time the Church depended on a religious order like the Society of Jesus to carry that message to a confused world, it is arguable that — while it may still be the Church’s largest community of male religious — the Jesuits may be as much of the contemporary problem as its solution.

Once upon a time, in the days of the first generation of Dominicans, St. Dominic managed to turn France around and defeat the Albigensians. Given the problems our modern world faces, we desperately need a new Dominic — a preacher to that world, or maybe the next pope.