One thing became evident when researching what we might call
the Decline and Fall of Common Sense in the modern world. That is, at some point a shift occurred not
only in what people think, but in how or even if they think. As we noted in the first posting in this
series, this was a change from a reason-based worldview, to what Richard
Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science,” i.e.,
faith-based, meaning one’s own opinion about what one wants to believe
projected on to the world.
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| Religious innovation led to philosophical innovation. |
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, by most accounts,
the turning point. The social,
political, and religious developments of the sixteenth century laid the
groundwork for the philosophical changes and innovations of the seventeenth
century. This, in and of itself,
accounts for most, if not all, the thinking errors — that is, philosophical
mistakes — that beset the world today, those small errors in the beginning that
lead to great errors in the end.
That, at least, seemed to be the opinion of G.K. Chesterton,
as we saw in the previous posting in this series. As this is an examination of the philosophy
of common sense, as Chesterton called Aristotelian-Thomism, it should come as
no surprise that a number of other Aristotelian-Thomists shared this opinion,
especially Ronald Knox and Fulton Sheen (to say nothing of Mortimer Adler and
Heinrich Rommen).
Knox, in particular, in his book Enthusiasm (1950), highlighted the critical period between the
sixteenth century, when many of the “small errors” had their modern rebirth,
and the nineteenth century, when they began reaching maturity. As the subtitle of Enthusiasm has it, “A Chapter in the History of Religion with
Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”
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| The papacy a supranational moral authority. |
The nineteenth century in particular was crucial. This was when the popes as head of the
Catholic Church began reasserting a supranational moral authority, above and
beyond that of the modern Nation-State.
This was based not on revelation or “documents of faith,” as Chesterton
quoted Aquinas, “but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers
themselves.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox,
op. cit., 94.)
That is, since the revival of Aristotelian-Thomism in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church has employed a
philosophy that, while based on reason alone, is allied with and illuminated
and guided by faith. The Church rejects
any philosophical system built on false premises, especially one that has as
its main purpose to avoid the consequences of having made an error in the first
place. As Mortimer Adler explained the
dangers of doing anything else,
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| "Erroneous premise ... a wolf in sheep's clothing. |
“At the very beginning, before
the consequences are discerned, the mistake appears innocent and goes
unnoticed. Only when we are confronted
with the repugnant conclusions to which cogent reasoning carries us are we
impelled to retrace our steps to find out where we went wrong. Only then is the erroneous premise that at
first appeared innocent revealed as the culprit — a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Unfortunately much of modern
thought has not sought in this way to avoid conclusions that have been regarded
as unacceptable for one reason or another.
Instead of retracing the steps that lead back to their sources in little
errors at the beginning, modern thinkers have tried in other ways to circumvent
the result of the initial errors, often compounding the difficulties instead of
overcoming them.” (Mortimer Adler, Ten
Philosophical Mistakes, op. cit., xv.)
This, as Pope Pius X noted, was the root intellectual cause
of “modernism,” that is, moral relativism applied in religious society. He termed modernism “the synthesis of all
heresies,” i.e., a conglomeration of
errors about God based on personal opinion or will, necessarily reflected in
our understanding of humanity. As he
explained,
“If we pass from the moral to
the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first which presents itself, and the
chief one, is ignorance. Yes, these very Modernists who pose as Doctors of the
Church, who puff out their cheeks when they speak of modern philosophy, and
show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false
glamour because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of
being able to recognise confusion of thought, and to refute sophistry. Their
whole system, with all its errors, has been born of the alliance between faith
and false philosophy.” (Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, § 41.)
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