Yesterday we looked at what you can’t do: mix politics and
religion. When we start basing things in
the realm of natural law, or human positive law based on the natural law, on
faith, we’re just asking for trouble.
By insisting that the natural law is based on anything other
than reason, that is, knowledge arrived at through the intellect and the senses,
absolutes are eliminated, and everything becomes opinion. Before he became a Catholic, G.K. Chesterton
called the shift from reason to faith (usually in one’s own opinion or “the
inner light”) the “suicide of thought” (Orthodoxy,
1908, Chapter III).
Fulton Sheen, who was inspired (at least in part) to write God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
(1925) by Chesterton’s Orthodoxy,
called this shift “mental suicide,” combining Aquinas’s “intellectual
self-annihilation” and Chesterton’s chapter heading. (As an Anglican, the “Apostle of Common
Sense” seems to have been unaware that in Orthodoxy
he was reiterating Aquinas’s argument.)
Chesterton, in Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” (1933), his “semi-sequel” to Sheen’s book, God and Intelligence (to which he wrote
the introduction), referred to the shift from reason to faith, or from
knowledge to opinion, as “the assassination of Thomism.”
Denying that faith must be grounded in reason, that knowledge
of God’s existence and of the natural law can be through reason alone, or that faith
cannot contradict reason, is the basis of what is called modernism in religious
society (“the synthesis of all heresies”), and positivism in civil
society. It is, as the popes and others
have argued, the basis for totalitarianism.
This is because, where reason requires sound argument or
empirical evidence — facts — faith severed from reason, or used as the
foundation of reason (instead of the proper order of reason being the
foundation of faith) requires only that those who wish to force their opinions
on others have the power to do so. Might
makes right. Something is not true
because it can be proved, but because others can be coerced into accepting it.
This has caused massive frustration as the “new things” Leo
XIII noted have undermined society.
People accept on faith that certain things are right, but other people
and the system seem determined to do what is not right; reason and faith seem
to be in opposition. That being the case
— and this was the mistake made by the Inquisition — people must be forced to
do what is right. Essential rights, virtues,
the natural law, even human nature must be redefined to fit the pattern
dictated by faith. Which faith? Whichever one people can be coerced into
accepting.
That, however, is precisely the wrong thing to do. The correct response to the growing social,
political, and economic chaos today is not to force results, but to organize
and study the situation to determine the cause(s) of the problems (social
charity), and then restructure the institutions of the social order to enable
the system to work properly (social justice).
This was the breakthrough of Pius XI, building on the work of Leo XIII.
In the interim, it will be necessary as an act of individual
charity or political prudence (expedience) to provide for those individual
goods that people are unable to provide for themselves through their own
efforts, at least until the social order is restructured. The latter, State redistribution, a
non-objective evil, is allowed under the principle of double effect.
State redistribution is not, however, and can never be
social justice, which is the particular virtue directed to the common good, that vast network of institutions
within which people realize their individual
goods. Nor is it distributive justice,
except in the very broad sense that any justifiable acts carried out by the
State constitute “distributive justice,” an interpretation that does extreme
violence to the true meaning of distributive justice.
Thus, such measures as the Inquisition or the Welfare State may
be necessary in the short term (although there can, no doubt, be endless
discussion as to whether the Inquisition was truly necessary, or violated
fundamental human rights — that is not the issue here), but they are not, and
can never be, a solution. They are expedients
to address an emergency.
The only real solution to counter the “new things” is the
act of social justice, by means of which the social order is restructured so
that people can take care of themselves through their own efforts. They will thereby become more fully human by
exercising their natural rights, and the environment is provided wherein people
can exercise freedom of conscience with respect to their religious beliefs
without coercion from other individuals, groups, or, especially, the State.
Anything less — or more — is tyranny.
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