Yesterday, we looked at how efforts to avoid the
consequences of assuming that the only source of financing for new capital
formation is past savings, combined with the lack of understanding of the act
of social justice, virtually ensured that the “orthodox,” reason-based,
Aristotelian-Thomist concept of the natural law would — temporarily, we believe
— go down before the forces of irrational faith, personal opinion, and the
triumph of the will.
This is an example of Msgr. Ronald Knox called
“enthusiasm” or “ultrasupernaturalism.”
As a result, “Faith and
Reason” became in most cases “Faith or
Reason,”
with people seemingly divided into those who
went with the immaterial as the basis of the natural law, and those that went
with the material. Reason was left without a
guide, and faith was left without a foundation.
In that environment, obviously, anything goes, as long as an individual
or a group has a sufficiently large club with which to beat others into
submission, er, accept the correct opinion(s).
The struggle in the Catholic Church after Vatican II (which
mirrored what was happening in civil society and, eventually, the family) ended
up being between two groups, both of which took a faith-based position
unsupported by reason. In broad terms,
these were the individualists/capitalists, and the collectivists/socialists.
In Just Third Way terms, of course, both are wrong, and wrong
for the same reason about the same things.
The only way to correct the situation is to show members of both
extremes what is right, i.e., how
future savings can be used to finance new capital formation and institutions
reformed through acts of social justice.
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| Msgr. Ronald Knox |
The problem with that is that, as a rule, people at the
extremes (and most people in the middle) have never learned to think, and so
cannot truly discern right from wrong.
Instead, they follow the “inner light” G.K. Chesterton and Msgr. Ronald Knox
deprecated. The question then becomes,
Where did it all go wrong?
It began, as always seems to be the case, in the
universities — academia. As was
demonstrated during the English Reformation, Cambridge and Oxford were already to
all intents and purposes Protestant before Henry VIII decided to “sever the tie
with Rome,” as the euphemism generally goes.
As these were the pools from which the bishops of the Church in England were
usually drawn, it is not surprising that only one, Bishop John Fisher of
Rochester, had the courage and the intellectual honesty, as well as
philosophical and theological acumen, to stand up to and resist the king’s
innovations.
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| Bishop John Fisher of Rochester |
Ironically, Fisher had attempted a reform of academia
through his almost single-handed administration of Cambridge. Reform of institutions is, however (consistent
with the laws and characteristics of social justice), necessarily a social, not
an individual effort. Consequently,
everything Fisher accomplished as an individual to restore orthodoxy was quickly
overturned with the Reformation and his execution.
Had Fisher organized with others in social justice at this
time, however, the story of “the King’s Great Matter” might have been very
different. It could have been the
history of a crisis averted, for (as Erasmus commented) “[Fisher] is the one man at
this time who is incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning and for
greatness of soul.” (Leonard Foley, Saint
of the Day: Lives, Lessons & Feasts.
Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2009.) Unfortunately, without the techniques of
social justice — as Chesterton, Knox, and Sheen discovered — even the greatest
individual virtue, learning, and strenuous efforts are insufficient and
ineffective in making the necessary changes in institutions.
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| Bishop Fulton Sheen of Rochester |
As an interesting note, purely by coincidence, Fulton Sheen
(who, as we shall see, seems to have been assigned to the Catholic University
of America to correct and counter John A. Ryan and reform the institution by
returning it to orthodoxy in the area of social thought) was also a bishop of
Rochester, albeit Rochester, New York.
Sheen, too, was (in a sense) martyred.
He later referred to that period at the Catholic University as "a great trial," tantamount to a crucifixion.
What happened following Vatican II was thus nothing
new. It had been preceded in microcosm
in Catholic academia, which set the stage for widespread dissent prior to the
Council and then validated the changes with self-serving and self-justifying
circular arguments.
We
see something similar in the recent hysteria at Yale and the University of
Missouri, which defies any definition of common sense or rational behavior.
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| Dr. Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame |
The furor over contraception that Ralph McInerny identified
as the heart of the problem was itself the result of Catholic academics
attempting to put their heterodox theories into practice. Even then, it was not so much the theories
that had become entrenched in Catholic colleges and universities as a
fundamental approach to Catholic teaching itself. It was the fact that by the time of the
Second Vatican Council, the abandonment of reason that led to the theories (that
was, in part, why the First Vatican Council was called) had become established
as the new orthodoxy in social thought.
Change for the sake of change was already the law in academia, as the
demand for “original” research in order to obtain a Ph.D. to get a job made
novelty instead of truth the measure and goal of scholarship.
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| Leo XIII: warned of "new things." |
From the Church’s social teachings, the “new things” rapidly
spread to all of Catholic thought. Even
in institutions that gave lip service to faith and reason, reason as the
foundation of faith either took second place, or was rejected altogether. In this framework, faith alone is necessary,
and it justifies itself.
Ironically, McInerny himself was aware of this. As he explained in a book he wrote more than
a decade before he published What Went
Wrong With Vatican II in 1998,
One of the greatest dangers to
the faith today is what the [Catholic] Church calls fideism. Fideism is the
view that nothing that we know with unaided reason counts either for or against
what we believe. Faith obeys radically different laws than reason, and the
believer should not, indeed cannot, relate what he believes to what men
(including non-believers) can know about the world. (Ralph McInerny, Miracles: A Catholic View. Huntington,
Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1986, 15.)
The wreckage that followed Vatican II, then, was simply
another example of what Chesterton termed Siger of Brabant’s error of "the Double Mind
of Man,” by which . . .
. . . [t]here are two truths;
the truth of the supernatural world, and the truth of the natural world, which
contradicts the supernatural world.
While we are being naturalists, we can suppose the Christianity is all
nonsense; but then, when we remember that we are Christians, we must admit that
Christianity is true even if it is nonsense. (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 92.)
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| Hilaire Belloc: warned of the Servile State. |
Thus, taking contradiction, novelty, and change as principles,
both individualists and collectivists try to circumvent the slavery of savings
and the necessity of the act of social justice for attaining and maintaining a
just society in ways that seem different to them, but are curiously the same:
the extremes of capitalism and socialism.
This left those in the vast muddled middle with the Welfare or Servile
State to try and correct the flaws of the extremist positions.
The problem however (as Chesterton noted) was that, having
abolished the idea of universal absolutes, both collectivist/socialists and
individualist/capitalists “attacked what is immortal and immutable with a very
curious kind of immortal mutability.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 106.)
Thus, the presumed paradox of ownership by all for the good of all was
“resolved” by changing the definition of property, and eventually the whole of
the natural law, thereby replacing one great error with another, even greater
error.
Obviously, Knox did not foresee the results of how enthusiasts
would twist Vatican II into what amounts to a new concept of religion. Neither could he predict how the aberrations
of the social thought of Msgr. John A. Ryan and Fabian socialism would so
forcefully seem to corroborate each other — although (as we have seen) coming
from the same sources, such corroboration is simply an example of someone
bearing witness to one’s self, and therefore invalid: “If I bear witness of
myself, my witness is not true.” (John 5:31.)
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| Evelyn Waugh: Enthusiasm dedicated. |
What Knox did, though — and what is invaluable to us today —
is delineate the characteristics of enthusiasm, and describe their errors in
terms so clear as to leave no doubt as to what we see around us in what seems
to be the wreck of civilization, even of religion and family. And, knowing that, we can begin to organize
in social justice to correct the problems.
First, however, we need to familiarize ourselves with “the
enemy,” which (as usual) is more often bad ideas than bad people. As Knox remarked in his dedication of Enthusiasm to Evelyn Waugh, he developed
great sympathy with the people making the errors . . . although, like
Chesterton, not accepting the errors themselves, some of which verge on the horrifying
when they don’t appear utterly Satanic.
As Knox quoted a newspaper article from 1933 (that year again!),
“Eight members of a family of
Kentucky mountaineers were lodged in jail to-day, charged with taking part in
the ritual murder of Mrs. Lucinda Mills, aged 72. . . . Some of the arrested
persons are reported to have told the police that they had received a divine
command to make a human sacrifice and that the lot fell upon Mrs. Mills. A son-in-law is alleged to have said that he
wanted to prevent the sacrifice, but he had a feeling that he must not.” (New York message in The Times, February 9, 1933, quoted in Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 582.)
As Knox commented, “How are we to argue against such a ‘feeling’,
if it is accompanied by the conviction that the inner light is something which
no Bible, no Church, can legitimately gainsay?”
(Ibid.)
How, indeed?
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