One of the things that strikes readers of Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” is
Chesterton’s mildness toward, even respect for, those whom he regarded as
Traditionalists and social conservatives. Chesterton himself had a great respect for
both human tradition and Sacred Tradition.
He couldn’t be too hard on reactionaries who exaggerated things and
confused the two.
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| Is Manichean Dualism inherently dishonest? |
The Traditionalists and social conservatives of Aquinas’s
day were pointed more or less (although usually less) in the right
direction. Chesterton even admitted
that, unlike others involved in the question (the Manichees), the
Traditionalists and social conservatives were at least honest. As he commented,
“Stephen Tempier, the Bishop of
Paris, was apparently a rather fine specimen of the old fanatical Churchman,
who thought that admiring Aristotle was a weakness likely to be followed by
adoring Apollo. He was also, by a piece
of bad luck, one of the old social conservatives, who had intensely resented
the popular revolution of the Preaching Friars.
But he was an honest man; and Thomas Aquinas never asked for anything
but permission to address honest men.”
(Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit.,
86.)
Chesterton carried this mildness over into his criticisms of
capitalism. Capitalism, while it
distorts truth, does not abolish it. In The Dumb Ox he noted the “nonsense” of
attempting to combat the great evil of socialism with the flawed weapon of
capitalism. It was thus not the honesty
of such people Chesterton called into question, but the effectiveness of their
methods and the soundness of their paradigm.
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| Lenin, the New Truth of Socialism. |
Socialism, however, doesn’t merely distort truth, but
attempts to overthrow it. Chesterton did
not regard it with anything other than loathing. In common with St. Francis who loved men but
had no use for mankind, and Pope Francis in our day, Chesterton often had a
great liking for friends who were socialists, theosophists (although in general
turned off by their “shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles”), and even some who
were not only bad Christians, but very bad human beings. That did not mean, however, he had any liking
at all for socialism, theosophy, or sin.
Where capitalism distorts the natural law by limiting its
application to an élite and exaggerating its exercise by a few, socialism’s
chief error lies in the presumption that the abstraction of the collective — a
human creation — has God-given natural rights that individuals do not
have. This is most obvious in what Pope
Leo XIII, Karl Marx, and others agreed is the chief tenet of socialism: the
abolition of private property in capital.
Similarly, Chesterton despised those whom he called
“Manichees” and “Moderns” as inherently dishonest. Immediately following his statement about the
honesty of the social conservative and reactionary Tempier in the passage
quoted above, Chesterton went on to say, as if in extenuation of Tempier’s
suspicion of Aristotle and the Friars,
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| Siger of Brabant (as vague as his thought) |
“All around him [Aquinas] there
were other Aristotelian revolutionaries of a much more dubious sort. There was Siger, the sophist from Brabant,
who learned all his Aristotelianism from the Arabs; and had an ingenious theory
about how an Arabian agnostic could also be a Christian.” (Ibid.,
86.)
And, yet, why this automatic assumption of dishonesty? Because Manichaeism, like socialism, is based
“on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and
irreconcilable with true Christianity.”
(Quadragesimo Anno, § 120.) That is, like socialism, Manichaeism assumes
moral relativism (the triumph of the will over the intellect, of faith over
reason, or of opinion over knowledge) as a given.
Chesterton therefore saw socialism and fake Eastern
Religions derived from theosophy — the essence of Fabian socialism and New Age
thought — as the real enemy: “[H]e who will not climb the mountain of Christ
does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 115) — something of which today’s rather
flabby New Age syncretists who speak of Buddhists and Christians sharing the
same philosophy seem blithely unaware. Short
cuts to Paradise or Enlightenment usually end up in Hell or ignorance. As Chesterton explained,
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| Medieval Magicians |
“What is called the Manichean
philosophy has had many forms; indeed it has attacked what is immortal and
immutable with a very curious kind of immortal mutability. It is like the legend of the magician who
turns himself into a snake or a cloud; and the whole has that nameless note of
irresponsibility, which belongs to much of the metaphysics and morals of Asia,
from which the Manichean mystery came.”
(Ibid., 106.)
To make it perfectly clear that he was drawing a direct
parallel between the Manichean madness of the Middle Ages, and the Fabian
socialism that has captured much of modern thought since the late nineteenth
century, Chesterton became quite explicit.
As he said,
“Two points were always put by
those suspicious of the Aristotelianism of Aquinas; and they sound to us now
very quaint and comic, taken together.
One was the view that the stars are personal beings, governing our
lives; the other the great general theory that men have one mind between them;
a view obviously opposed to immortality; that is, to individuality. Both linger among the Moderns; so strong is
still the tyranny of the Ancients.
Astrology sprawls over the Sunday papers, and the other doctrine has its
hundredth form in what is called Communism; or the Soul of the Hive.” (Ibid.,
79.)
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| The Soul of the Hive |
We’ve seen this before, in the beginning of this series. In larger terms, it can be called the great
issue of the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century. In even larger terms, of course, it is simply
another episode in the eternal struggle between an artificially separated reason-knowledge-intellect,
and faith-opinion-will. Astrology is just
the most common manifestation of the New Age, as it came to be called, and
Communism the most obvious example of the idea that the collective — “the Soul
of the Hive” — somehow as a human creation, an abstraction, has primacy over
human beings created by God in His own image and likeness.
This conflict is so visceral and so fundamental to human
existence that it even intruded into what is for Christians the pivotal moment
in God/man relations: the Agony in the Garden.
That is, is personal will, or that of God, to be the focus and the
center?
In His agony, Jesus Himself as true man, had to commit the
ultimate act of both reason and faith by surrendering His human will to the
Divine Will of the Father as true God.
This is an act that simply doesn’t make sense, and was not even possible
unless Jesus’s rational Divine Intellect/knowledge, not His personal human will/opinion,
conformed perfectly to that of the Father.
Whether or not you accept it as historical fact, there may
be no more graphic illustration of the primacy of the Intellect over the Will
than Jesus saying, “Not my will, but Thine.”
Why else freely surrender your personal will to that of another?
Thus, after his successful defense of the Friars and
Aristotle against the Traditionalists and social conservatives, Aquinas faced a
far more dangerous adversary in those whom Chesterton called Manichees, and we
call Modernists, socialists, and theosophists and New Age devotees. Of these, the chief was the individual whose
honesty Chesterton had already called into question, Siger of Brabant, today
revered as a martyr to freedom of inquiry and the relationship between faith
and reason . . . in opposition to the thought of Aquinas.
Chesterton put a somewhat different perspective on matters. As Chesterton put it, in Aquinas’s conflict
with the Traditionalists and social conservatives, the Dominican rationalist
had clarified the roles of faith and reason, of opinion and knowledge, of will
and intellect. The natural provides a
solid foundation for the supernatural, e.g.,
justice provides the basis of charity. This is so that the supernatural may complete,
perfect, and fulfill the natural — but not abolish it.
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| Faith without reason is a house built on sand. |
Faith cannot contradict reason, for natural reason is the foundation
of supernatural faith. There is a unity
of the Intellect. No personal
interpretation of the Will of God can possibly contradict what we know by
empirical evidence and logical argument.
If there is an apparent contradiction, then there is an error, whether
in the evidence, the argument, or the understanding of the Will.
Faith and reason each have their proper roles. One cannot contradict the other, even though
each is properly confined to its own area: reason guides faith, while faith
completes and perfects reason.
Yet this reconciliation of faith and reason, so sensible and
so clear, was the very thing Siger of Brabant attacked. As Chesterton related, “And when [Aquinas]
had said this, Siger of Brabant got up and said something so horribly like it,
and so horribly unlike, that (like Antichrist) he might have deceived the very
elect.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 92.)
“Siger of Brabant said this: the
Church must be right theologically, but she can be wrong scientifically. There 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. In other words, Siger
of Brabant split the human head in two, like the blow in an old legend of
battle; and declared that a man has two minds, with one of which he must
entirely believe and with the other may utterly disbelieve.” (Ibid.,
92-93.)
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| Siger of Brabant (Maybe) |
Obviously, no one can really accept Siger’s position as
Chesterton summarized it, stripped of its rationalizations and rhetoric. What necessarily happens, as John Paul II
pointed out, and which has become increasingly prevalent today, is that
fideists reject reason, and rationalists reject faith. The union of faith and reason, so carefully
worked out by Aquinas, is consigned to the trash heap.
That was bad enough, but was at least merely something of an
intellectual exercise for Chesterton.
The problem, at least as he seems to have seen it, however, was that
this presumably stale, old Medieval debate between the Intellect and the Will had
taken on new life in the modern world, especially with the advent of theosophy
and socialism, particularly in those peculiar phenomena called Fabian socialism
and the New Age.
Adding insult to injury, so to speak, was the fact that
Chesterton’s own followers, not to mention the whole drift of Catholic social
teaching, had fallen prey to this “Double Mind of Man.” The problem then became what to do about it.
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