In St. Thomas Aquinas:
The “Dumb Ox”, G.K. Chesterton made a point of calling himself stupid — a fool
or a moron, in fact. If it were anyone
other than Chesterton, a reader might tend to think Chesterton was trying to
get people to contradict him and say, no, how intelligent he really is, he’s
just being modest, etc., etc.
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| Chesterton a dunce? |
Chesterton’s goal might have been a little different. In context, he seems to have meant that, in
matters with which Aquinas and serious students of philosophy dealt, he was a
complete novice. He was so unlearned as
to be to all intents and purposes a fool or a moron. As he put it: “It will be understood that in
these matters I speak as a fool; or, as our democratic cousins would say, a
moron; anyhow as a man in the street.”
(G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas
Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New York,
Image Books, 1956, 146.)
There also seems to be a little dig at trained philosophers
who lose sight of the common sense to which such “esoteric” subjects as
philosophy and theology must be connected if they are to have any meaning. Chesterton seemed almost to take something of
an un-Christian delight in pointing out that Aquinas, one of the greatest
intellects who ever lived, was called “dumb” and considered stupid. This should serve as a graphic warning to us
not to judge by appearances . . . especially if we have an interested motive in
maintaining a previously established position or opinion — such as someone
(else’s) presumed stupidity in opposing us, or anything else.
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| Early Sheen |
The bottom line here is that Chesterton considered the
philosophy of Aquinas to be something anyone who dared to use his brain
honestly could figure out, as well as the “golden mean” (so to speak) of common
sense. That is, when Thomism wasn’t
being twisted all out of recognition by creative reinterpretations, re-editing of
the dictionary, or replaced with will-based fantasies bolstered by personal
opinion and self-interest. Possibly
influenced by Fulton Sheen’s book, God
and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925) — of which more anon — Chesterton
shifted his focus in his book on Aquinas from what was wrong with the way people were pretending to think, to why it was wrong.
That was the whole point of Sheen’s God and Intelligence. It
wasn’t that people weren’t using their reason.
That was not the question. The
fact that they were not being rational was obvious, at least to Sheen,
Chesterton, and Knox.
Rather, the problem behind the problem was the reason they weren’t using their
reason. It was not enough, as Chesterton
had done in his previous books, to point out the flaws in specific
reasoning. He seems to have realized
that he had to get to the root of the problem: that reason itself had been
suborned. In its place was total
reliance on faith disjoined from reason, making it in all cases mere opinion —
the triumph of the will.
Specifically, what Chesterton identified at some point as
the “small error that leads to great errors in the end” was the shift from the
Intellect to the Will as the basis of the natural law. That is, instead of basing fundamental values
and moral principles on knowledge-reason-intellect, the modern world bases what
it terms “values” and “morality” (when it’s not rejecting the whole concept of
values and morality) on opinion-faith-will.
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| The Abolition of Man |
This, as we’ve already noted above (Posting VIII in this
series, “The Paradox of Il Poverello”) by quoting Heinrich Rommen on the
tendency inherent in William of Occam’s distortions of Duns Scotus’s reliance
on the Primacy of the Will instead of the Intellect, leads straight to pure
moral relativism and totalitarianism. By
violating the first principle of reason, the modern world has opened the floodgates
to what C.S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.” As Lewis explained,
“This
thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call natural law or Traditional Morality
or the first Principles of Practical Reason or the first Platitudes, is not one
among a series of possible systems of value.
It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all
value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to
refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There
has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the
history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them)
‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole
and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as
they possess.” (C.S. Lewis, “The Way” (Ch. 2), The Abolition of Man, 1943.)
This tendency applies in any field where opinion has supplanted
knowledge. Possibly the greatest
constitutional scholar of the twentieth century, William Winslow Crosskey, made
it his life’s work to explain how the shift from knowledge to opinion — from
reason to faith, or from the intellect to the will — resulted in the “living
constitution” theory, by means of which courts can make law and effectively
overthrow the very constitution that gives them their authority. (See William Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 1953.)
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| Mortimer Adler, Great Minds in Great Books. |
Decades after Chesterton, Mortimer J. Adler joined him in
identifying the tendency to replace reason with faith, knowledge with opinion,
or the intellect with the will, as one of the “Ten Philosophical Mistakes” that
plague the modern world. As he said,
The fifth mistake also draws a
line between what is genuine knowledge and mere opinion. This time it places all judgments about moral
values — about what is good and evil, right and wrong, and all judgments about
what ought and ought not to be sought or done — on the side of mere
opinion. There are no objectively valid
and universally tenable moral standards or norms. This denial undermines the whole doctrine of
natural, human rights, and, even worse, lends support to the dogmatic
declaration that might makes right.
(Mortimer J. Adler, Ten
Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought — How They Came About,
Their Consequences, and How to Avoid Them.
New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985, xvii-xviii.)
Adler and Chesterton were not alone in this assessment. As the solidarist political scientist and
jurist Dr. Heinrich Rommen noted, alluding specifically to the rise of Nazi
Germany in 1933, the year Chesterton published “The Dumb Ox”,
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| ". . . the depths of evil and perversion . . ." |
“[T]otalitarianism has opened
the eyes of more and more thinking people to the ultimate consequences to which
the denial of the natural law must lead.
Such consequences were not obvious or clearly predictable so long as modern
society, though infected with positivism, continued to live on, beguiled by an
optimistic faith in an inevitable and automatic evolutionary progress and under
the protection of a constitutional form of government which was still feeding
on an inherited Christian substance.
People and their leaders were therefore not yet sufficiently aware of
the depths of evil and perversion to which the evolutionary product, man,
supposedly determined by blood or mere economic conditions, could sink, if once
the age-old moral and intellectual molds and floodgates were shattered.”
(Rommen, The Natural Law, op. cit.,
136.)
Pope John Paul II was of the same opinion. In Fides
et Ratio, his 1998 encyclical on the relationship between faith and reason,
the pope made these rather pointed comments about systems of thought that
separated faith and reason:
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| "A fateful separation [of faith and reason]" |
From
the late Medieval period onwards . . . the legitimate distinction between the
two forms of learning became more and more a fateful separation. . . . [One] of
the many consequences of this separation was an ever-deeper mistrust with
regard to reason itself. In a spirit
both skeptical and agnostic, some began to voice a general mistrust, which led
some to focus more on faith and others to deny its rationality altogether. . .
.
It
is not too much to claim that the development of a good part of modern
philosophy has seen it move further and further away from Christian Revelation,
to the point of setting itself quite explicitly in opposition. . . . [V]arious
forms of atheistic humanism, expressed in philosophical terms . . . regarded
faith as alienating and damaging to the development of a full rationality. They did not hesitate to present themselves as
new religions serving as a basis for projects which, on the political and
social plane, gave rise to totalitarian systems which have been disastrous for
humanity. (Fides et Ratio, §§ 45-46.)
To someone like Chesterton, the writing was on the wall. There could be no hope for anything as long
as people — his own followers, especially — insisted on substituting their
subjective opinion, faith, or will, for objective knowledge, reason, or
intellect. Ronald Knox and Fulton Sheen
joined Chesterton in this conclusion.
That is, as long as people insisted on substituting nonsense
for common sense. To try and correct the
problem, Chesterton wrote Saint Thomas
Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”, a graphic warning to everyone, but (again) with
special focus on people who claimed to agree with him, but who, through “one
twist to the mind,” managed to change completely the meaning of what he said.
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