CESJ is not Catholic, but we rely heavily on Catholic social
teachings, which (as Pius XII emphasized in the opening paragraphs of his 1950
encyclical, Humani Generis) can be
discerned by “human
reason by its own natural force and light.”
Catholicism
is not simply a philosophy, however, but a religion. Since the social teachings of the Catholic
Church are based on the natural law discernible by reason, everyone can (and, in
a sense, must) accept them. On the other hand, the purely religious teachings
are based on faith, which only those who accept that particular faith are required to believe.
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| Pius X: The Hammer of Modernism |
Unfortunately,
because Catholicism is a religion, people tend to accept its social teachings
on faith instead of reason — an error Pius X called “fideism” (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, § 7). This leads to serious conflicts between Catholics
and non-Catholics, and even more serious conflicts between Catholics who base
their understanding of their Church’s social teachings on faith, and those who
base their understanding on reason:
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| Pius XI: A Completed Doctrine of Social Justice |
“[C]ertain doubts have arisen concerning either the correct
meaning of some parts of Leo’s Encyclical [Rerum
Novarum] or conclusions to be deduced therefrom, which doubts in turn have
even among Catholics given rise to controversies that are not always peaceful.”
(Quadragesimo Anno, § 40.)
“Disagreement
and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of
profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of
the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture
being attacked on all sides.” (Humani
Generis, § 1.)
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| Pius XII: Faith and Reason |
It is not a question of “Faith versus Reason,” then, but of “Faith and Reason.” If there is an
apparent conflict between what you think your faith is telling you, and what
your reason tells you, you can’t just sit back and claim to be a faithful
anything if you don’t even try to resolve the conflict.
Worse, you aren’t doing your job as a human being,
regardless of your faith (or lack thereof) if you avoid or condemn without
debate other people who take a position that seems to contradict your own. You can’t just sneer that they are heretical,
vicious, or stupid without presenting some kind of reason to support your
argument, or reject someone else’s. As
Chesterton said,
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| "The Dumb Ox" |
“[T]here
are many who do not understand the nature of any sort of argument. Indeed, I think there are fewer people now
alive who understand argument than there were twenty or thirty years ago; . . .
[Most men] have not time to argue. No
time, that is, to argue fairly. There is
always time to argue unfairly; not least in a time like ours. . . . [I]t is
generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has
been so little argument and so much sneering.” (G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox.” New York: Image Books, 1956, 125-126.)
It’s the coward’s way out to declare someone else wrong simply
because he or she disagrees with you.
Hilaire Belloc called people who reject others’ positions out of hand
without debate, argument, or evidence, “stupid skeptics,” whom he contrasted
with “intelligent skeptics” who present a reason-based case as to why they think
you are wrong. Chesterton was even more
pointed in his criticism of the type of Catholic (and, by extension, anyone
else) who declares you wrong on a matter of philosophy or science because you
disagree about something that he bases on faith-held principles:
“If
there is one phrase that stands before history as typical of Thomas Aquinas, it
is that phrase about his own argument: “It is not based on documents of faith,
but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.” Would that all Orthodox doctors in
deliberation were as reasonable as Aquinas in anger! Would that all Christian apologists would
remember that maxim; and write it up in large letters on the wall, before they
nail any theses there. At the top of his
fury, Thomas Aquinas understands, what so many defenders of orthodoxy will not
understand. It is no good to tell an
atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the
infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he
is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on
his own. After the great example of St.
Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that
we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and
not ours. We may do other things instead of arguing, according to our
views of what actions are morally permissible; but if we argue we must argue ‘on
the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.’” (Ibid., 95-96.)
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| Guaranteed Fresh "New Things" |
Nowhere is the artificial conflict between faith and reason
more apparent in our day than in matters relating to private property, that is,
the natural absolute right to be an owner, and the necessarily limited exercise
of that right. This was the main issue
on which Henry George locked horns with the Catholic Church, and the one that
has done the most damage down to the present day.
The fact is that George lost the battle — but has come very
close to winning the war. Many sincere
Catholics and people of other faiths take George’s assumptions for granted,
most of them without realizing they are doing so. This, in our opinion, is due in large measure
to the faith-based belief that the only way to finance new capital formation is
through past savings instead of both past savings and future savings, but that
is an issue for another posting.
Tomorrow we will start posting the relevant portions of
Archbishop Corrigan’s pastoral letter in which he refuted the position of Henry
George on property.
