Re-enchanting Re-enchantment

Lawrence Solum has posted on his  Legal Theory blog an essay by Yishai Blank (SSRN) in which Blank argues that legal rationality today includes attempts to re-enchant legal theory. He looks to four themes or strategies for this: 

the reenchantment of legal formalism, the reenchantment of virtue, the reenchantment of law as art, and the reenchantment of legal authorities.

Ever the Aristotelian, Solum himself doubts that a metaphysically teleological conception of the good is necessary for virtue ethics to inform legal theory. 

Of course, Christians would have much to say about Blank's thesis. In the end, I would want to affirm that virtue and "art" are the most hopeful approaches today. I take this from the fact that Christian's have affirmed the apprehension of God in the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The problem today is that truth is viewed reductively, in terms of scientific/technical rationality. Other modes of reason are marginalized or even driven from the field. This is so evident in contemporary legal thought which mimics the marketplace where the rationality of the sciences and engineers is idolized because if its utility.

Art and virtue appeal because they hold the potential to check the utilitarian mode of reason by pointing to truths that are ineffable, as Christian affirm God to be. For pursuing this project both Blank and Solum are to be commended. But, neither gets it quite right. Blank needs to find the unity of the four approaches--each seeking after a mystery. And, Solum's desire for a non-metaphysically teleological account of virtue reflects the desire to escape the mystery of the person, which is displayed by the beauty of Christ on the Cross

Cross-posted.