Last week we saw that, as a result of the application of bad
ideas about natural law, virtue, and the role of the State, the whole concept
of civil society has changed. People —
human beings — are no longer considered sovereign, with inalienable rights that
automatically define them as persons.
Instead, the State is considered sovereign, in and of
itself. All rights, and thus recognition
of the status of a human being as a “person,” are presumed to come from the
State. The State, in effect, becomes a
god.
That’s bad enough.
What has happened to organized religion, even to the whole concept of
religion, is even worse. Nor is this a
recent development.
At least as early as Pope John XXII (Jacques Duèse, cir. 1244-1334) in the Bull Quia Vir Reprobus (“That Evil Man”) in
1329, the popes have dealt with the same issue, that is, a shift in the
immediate source of natural rights from the human person, to something outside
or apart from humanity. Renegade
Franciscans, the Fraticelli, led by
Michael of Cesena and William of Occam, insisted that everything humanity has
comes directly from God; that all rights are contingent on God’s Will . . .
meaning their personal interpretation of something they accepted on the basis
of faith without reference to reason was God’s Will. The main attack, as it has been throughout
history, was against private property.
As Chesterton carefully explained in his book, Saint Francis of Assisi (1923), however,
“Il Poverello” — “The Little Poor Man” — abolished property for himself, not for others. It was a personal
decision, what the Catholic Church calls “a counsel of perfection,” giving up
something good to get something better.
As we might expect, however, “some Franciscans, invoking the
authority of Francis on their side, went further than this and further I think
than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only private
property but property.” (G. K. Chesterton, Saint
Francis of Assisi. London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1943, 173.) They
claimed that property (private or otherwise) was not, in fact, good at all, but
something evil, although permitted as an expedient on account of man’s
sinfulness.
As Chesterton explained the error of the Fraticelli,
“The
truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough in
Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic history of
industrial civilization. It shows that the Saints were sometimes great men when
the Popes were small men. But it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong
when small men are right. And it will be found, after all, very difficult for
any candid and clear-headed outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he
insisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans.” (Ibid., 174.)
That, as Chesterton saw it, was the question. Was sound
reason, or unsound faith, to triumph? Did God make the world for an elite,
whether the poor (socialism) or the rich (capitalism) . . . or for everyone —
some kind of just, third way? Just as
in the 19th and 20th centuries when the rising tide of
modernism and positivism threatened the foundation of the social order (and
continues to do so today), the 13th and 14th centuries
were a time of deadly peril for civilization:
“St.
Francis was so great and original a man that he had something in him of what
makes the founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready,
in their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were willing
to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the Christian spirit
had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it eclipse Christendom as the
Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel. Francis, the fire that ran through the
roads of Italy, was to be the beginning of a conflagration in which the old
Christian civilization was to be consumed.” (Ibid., 175.)
