One of the things that strikes the reader of Fulton Sheen’s God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
— assuming that Chesterton’s The “Dumb Ox”
and Knox’s Enthusiasm were read first
and the reader has a little knowledge of what was really going on in the world
of the 1920s — is the pervasiveness of certain ideas that Sheen found in both
civil and religious life. Understanding
these ideas and becoming somewhat familiar with the environment and culture
within which Sheen wrote go a long way toward helping us understand what Sheen
was doing. By that we mean the world in
which he lived and that provided the environment within which he formed his
thought when he began writing, and against which, in large measure, he was
reacting.
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| Thought crimes, Newspeak, and Improvised History |
The “Christian World” of the 1920s was in a state of spiritual
and moral chaos that is little appreciated (if it is even acknowledged) by
people today, but that paralleled the political and civil disorder following World
War I. Our modern ignorance is in part, however,
understandable and to some extent excusable.
People tend to look back on the time before they were born as a sort of
Golden Age, the “Good Old Days.” What is
inexcusable is the failure of Academia to instruct students of actual events
instead of histories “improvised” à la
1984 to meet various agendas.
After the Great War, “Mitteleuropa” — what was left of the
German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (“the Heart of Europe”) — to say
nothing of the Russian Empire, were in ruins.
What the war hadn’t destroyed, the hyperinflation took care of until
brought under control by Hjalmar Schacht, “the Old Wizard,” at least in Weimar
Germany.
The victors weren’t in much better shape, except for the
United States, which had only been involved directly in the war for a year and
escaped having any battles fought on U.S. soil, the Zimmerman Telegram
notwithstanding. Even the term “victor”
is something of a misnomer, as the Armistice was sold to the Central Powers
(primarily Germany) as a peace without victory based on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen Points. This later allowed Germany,
Austria, and Hungary with some justification to claim the Allies had betrayed them.
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| Major Douglas's "social credit" is a form of socialism. |
Socialism, which had gained momentum as private ownership of
capital became increasingly concentrated prior to the Great War, seemed to have
come into its own. The variations, from
Keynesian economics, through Major Douglas’s “social credit,” to Marxism
triumphant in Russia, were endless, and seemed the wave of the future; Msgr.
John A. Ryan (without calling it socialism) expressed great enthusiasm for
“public ownership.” As Lincoln Steffens
declared early and often about the new Soviet Union (first stated in a report
filed before he arrived in Russia), “I have seen the future and it works.”
Spiritually, that is, in religion and philosophy, the New
Age had made great inroads. It became an
accepted part of popular culture as well as pervasive throughout Academia among
both faculty and students. A cartoon
published in a college humor magazine in the early twenties, for example, shows
two women with car trouble wondering aloud whether they should consult their
Ouija Board for help.
Not that this was restricted to the period between the two
world wars. It is pervasive today. As Mortimer Adler noted, using “pagan” in the
sense of non-Abrahamic believer or non-believer who, as a general rule, knows
nothing of philosophy prior to what passes for it in the twentieth century,
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| Adler: The proliferation of pagans in modern times. |
“The number of pagans in the
West today may be larger than in any previous century. It is not the number of these that matters,
but their state of mind. The pagans of our
day have had their minds formed by some acquaintance with 20th-century
science, especially 20th-century cosmology and 20th-century
subatomic physics. The cosmology and
physics of classical antiquity, which provided the conceptual framework, the
imagery, and the vocabulary employed by ancient pagans in their thinking about
God, must be completely cast aside in any discourse about God addressed to 20th-century
pagans. That conceptual framework, imagery,
and vocabulary persisted throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times;
in fact, to the end of the 19th century. The cosmology of Newton as well as that of
Aristotle is now completely antiquated, no longer a medium of intelligible and
persuasive communication.” (Mortimer J. Adler, How To Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1980,
4-5.)
And for the non-thinking?
It was the era of the weird cult and bizarre belief system, depicted in
films, magazines, newspapers, and novels, almost always based on some distorted
and half-understood “Eastern Mysticism.”
“Buddhism” — that no Buddhist would recognize — was mixed willy nilly
with Christianity with surprising results, something to which G.K. Chesterton
drew his readers’ attention in his own inimitable fashion:
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| Mixing the Enlightened One with the Anointed One. |
“A distinguished military
gentleman recently wrote to the newspaper to announce that a Chinese Buddhist
is shortly to visit England, with the firm intention of finally abolishing war.
He — I mean the military gentleman — explained that Buddhism is a word that
means Enlightenment, and that only Enlightenment can abolish War. This seems in
itself a simple process of reason and reform. But I should not be moved to
criticise anything so excellent in intention, if the writer had not dragged in
the dreary old trick of comparing the enlightened condition of Buddhists with
the benighted condition of Christians. It is true that, like most men in this
modern confusion of mind, he needlessly muddles himself by using the same word
in two senses and on both sides, and setting Christianity against itself.
Buddhism is Christianity, and Buddhism is better than Christianity, and
Christianity will never be itself until it is enlightened enough to become something
different. But this mere logomachy [a dispute over words — ed.] does not alter the essentials of the opinion, which most of us have
seen in one form or another for a great many years past. The key of the
situation is that the military critic says that ‘Christians have failed’ to
abolish War; and that this is due to the lamentable fact that Christians are
not enlightened; or, in other words, to the curious fact that Christians are
not Buddhists.” (G.K. Chesterton,
“Buddhism and Christianity,” Illustrated
London News, March 2, 1929.)
If it were not obvious that Chesterton was responding to “a
military gentleman,” he might almost have been alluding to Fulton Sheen’s
comments made the previous year in Religion
Without God. These referred to the
pseudo Buddhism (Chesterton labeled theosophy "Esoteric Buddhism") mixed in with equally faux Christian philosophy and theology
(modernism) that seemed to pervade popular culture and Academia. Chesterton was almost certainly familiar with
Religion Without God, as he was cited
in it and had written the introduction to God
and Intelligence. As Sheen said in
one of his references in the later book to the fake “Eastern Mysticism” that
flooded Academia in the twenties,
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| Otto: No distinction between Buddhist and Christian mysticism. |
“Professor [Rudolf] Otto [1869-1937]
denies primitive Monotheism, and seems to take a substantial religious
evolution for granted, never making a distinction between Buddhistic and
Christian mysticism or even attempting a distinction of the true and the
spurious.” [Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the
Holy. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1923, 133, 135, note in text.] (Sheen, Religion Without God, op. cit., 35.)
So much for Academia in the Roaring Twenties, at least in
outline. It becomes easy to understand
why the Very Reverend Canon Léon Noël of the University of Louvain suggested
the specific topic of the decline and transformation of religion due to the
abandonment of reason to his star pupil, Fulton Sheen. It also explains why G.K. Chesterton
and Msgr. Ronald Knox got involved in the project.
Noël, by the way, was one of the world’s leading Thomists in
the first half of the twentieth century.
Pope Pius XI named him head of the Higher Institute of Thomistic Philosophy
at the Louvain in 1928, the same year Religion
Without God was published.
Yet, if it were simply Academia that was affected, it would
hardly have been important enough for Noël to suggest the topic or for Sheen to
waste his time on it. Nor was that the
case — as we will see in the next posting in this series.
#30#