Fulton J. Sheen opened his first book, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, with the declaration,
“Modern philosophy has seen the birth of a new notion of God.” The new notion is easily expressed. As Sheen put it, “It brings man into greater
prominence. It exalts him even to the
extent of giving him a ‘vote in the cosmic councils of the world.’ It is, in a word, the ‘transfer of the seat of
authority from God to man.’” (Sheen, God and Intelligence, op. cit.,
17-18.) As Sheen went on to explain,
 |
| Fulton J. Sheen |
“But what is this new notion of
God? It is God in evolution. God is
not. He becomes. In the beginning
was not the Word, but in the beginning was Movement. From this movement God is born by successive
creations. . . . Man is a necessary step in the evolution of God. The divine shows in him as well as in
God. One day it will manifest itself
completely. Just as man came from the
beast, God will come from man. The
perfectibility of man implies the manifestation of the divine. “Men will be like Gods.” (Ibid.,
18.)
This is the sort of thing familiar to readers of E.F.
Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed
and other New Age tracts. In New Age
thought, there are different levels of consciousness. By raising his or her consciousness, the
enlightened individual can move up the ladder of existence. Presumably the process is reversed for the un-
or dis-enlightened.
Not surprisingly, New Age thought also embodies what
Chesterton identified as Siger of Brabant’s principal sophistry, the idea that
there are different kinds of truth. By
splitting their heads in two — Siger’s “double mind of man” — people can grasp
higher truths that contradict lower truths, or accept some aspect of truth that
is somehow more important as truth or
more true than other aspects of truth.
 |
| New Age Logic. |
What is true in New Age thought, therefore, for someone who
has attained enlightenment, is not necessarily true for the Muggles and
Mudbloods who remain unenlightened or outside the group of elect disciples of
some prophet or other. As Schumacher put
it in what one noted Catholic commentator described as his “wonderful book,” many things that are true at
a lower level are nonsense at a higher level, and vice versa — a complete contradiction of the Aristotelian-Thomist
unity of the intellect.
That is because contradiction of the sort on which
Schumacher based his philosophy (of any sort, actually) violates the first
principle of reason, the basis of common sense.
The first principle of reason is stated “positively” as the principle of
identity, “That which is true is as true, and is true in the same way, as
everything else that is true.” It is
stated “negatively” as the principle of (non) contradiction, “Nothing can both be and not be at the same time under the same conditions.”
That is why Sheen said that the problem is not merely a new
conception of God and religion. It is
also a problem of the decline of intelligence, of reason, of common sense —
however you want to put it — that is, of the understanding of the concept of truth
itself. As Sheen explained,
“It is the purpose of this work
to examine this new notion of God. But
this problem cannot be adequately treated apart from another problem which is
intimately bound up with it. This other
problem is the value of the intelligence.
As men lost faith in the intelligence, they acquired faith in the God of
becoming. The modern God was born the
day the ‘beast intellectualism’ was killed.
The day the intelligence is reborn, the modern God will die. They cannot exist together; for one is the
annihilation of the other.” (Ibid.)
Sheen’s argument in God
and Intelligence, then, is very simply stated. A new idea of God and religion has entered
the world; God has been degraded, and man has been raised up in His place. This was made possible only by the shift from
the Intellect to the Will as the basis of faith and reason; common sense
declined, and nonsense took over. Only
restoring common sense — reason — can bring sanity back into the world.
 |
| Feynman: just say no to Cargo Cult science. |
The problem that most people today have with understanding
what Sheen, G.K. Chesterton, and Msgr. Ronald Knox were trying to do, however,
is that they lack fundamentals of a sound philosophy, that is, a concept of
truth as necessarily true. As Maisie
Ward described Chesterton’s momentary impulse to yield to the temptation to
distort truth or reject something that didn’t fit a preconceived position à la “Cargo Cult Science,” as Richard
Feynman termed it (and which reverses the roles of God and man),
“In an interview, given shortly
after its [Orthodoxy] publication,
Gilbert told of a temptation that had once been his and which he had overcome
almost before he realized he had been tempted.
That temptation was to become a prophet like all the men in Heretics, by emphasizing one aspect of
truth and ignoring the others. To do
this would, he knew, bring him a great crowd of disciples. He had a vision — which constantly grew wider
and deeper — of the many-sided unity of Truth, but he saw that all the prophets
of the age, . . . had become so by taking one side of truth and making it all
of truth. . . . He must not, for the sake of being a prophet and of having a
following, sacrifice — I will not say a truth already found, but a truth that
might still be lurking somewhere. He
could not be the architect of his own intellectual universe any more than he
had been the creator of sun, moon and earth.”
(Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
op. cit., 208-209.)
 |
| Aquinas a given for Sheen |
For Sheen, Chesterton, Knox, Mortimer Adler, Heinrich
Rommen, etc., etc., etc., of course, understanding
the concept of truth meant a solid grounding in Aristotelian-Thomism . . .
which Sheen took for granted his readers would have. As he said,
“There is no purely positive
treatment of traditional [Aristotelian-Thomist]
doctrines [in God and Intelligence].
All this is presupposed. This
work is merely an emphasis of certain points of view which have an interest for
contemporary thought. It presumes that
the Scholastic notions of God, His Nature and His Intelligence, as well as the
criteriological and ontological problems of knowledge, have been already
treated. Hence there is no attempt made
in the course of this book to treat traditional theodicy in its entirety.” (Sheen, God and Intelligence, op. cit.,
13.)
Sheen then went on to suggest two works for interested
readers on the philosophical issues he examined in God and Intelligence to make up for not covering the (to him) basic
material . . . both in French originally and both very rare in translation. The first, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Dieu, son Existence et sa Nature (“God,
His Existence and His Nature”) in two volumes is very expensive if you can even
find both volumes in English. The French
is listed as “unavailable.” The second,
Pierre Rousselot’s L’Intellectualisme de
St. Thomas, has been out of print in English since 1935, although seems to
be fairly reasonably priced in French.
The assumption that the reader already has a basic grounding
in the Thomism that provides the framework for Sheen’s examination is the main
reason why Sheen’s book should be read after those of Chesterton and Knox. That is so even though we think it’s evident
that Sheen’s work to some extent influenced, and in our opinion probably
inspired Chesterton’s “The Dumb Ox”
and Knox’s Enthusiasm.
 |
| Mortimer Adler's books are "helpful" (to say the least). |
To Chesterton’s and Knox’s books, then, readers might want
to add others of a more general nature before cracking Sheen’s. As is probably obvious, we found Mortimer
Adler’s books very helpful, especially Aristotle
for Everybody (1979) and Ten
Philosophical Mistakes (1985).
Adler, however, also assumed a certain degree of
philosophical literacy, and we found that a good introductory text for
philosophy came in handy. The one we
used most frequently for quick reference was Daniel J. Sullivan’s An Introduction to Philosophy (1957),
which is still in print. Of course,
Father William Ferree’s pamphlet Introduction
to Social Justice (1948) with CESJ’s introduction gives a Just Third Way
perspective.
Those are the basic issues that Sheen covered in God and Intelligence. In the next posting in this series we’ll
take a more in-depth look at the basic problems
Sheen faced, and then how he addressed them. After
that, with the orientation and intellectual tools we’ve given in this series,
it should be possible for a careful reader to get the most out of what is
admittedly one of Sheen’s most difficult (but potentially most rewarding)
books.
