In 2001 on the death of Mortimer Adler, the noted “Great
Books Philosopher” at the age of 98, columnist Paul Greenberg presented his
analysis of why (in his opinion) Adler had lapsed into semi-obscurity. As he said,
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| Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001) |
“Adler’s obscurity in his later
years was not just a sign of increasing age and its burdens, but of changes in
society — mainly a dangerous lessening of interest in the power of ideas. The result is that we have become susceptible
to the worst ideas, or even the absence of ideas, for we are deprived of the
habit of struggling with them regularly. . . . we waste ourselves debating
facts, which should be ascertained rather than argued, and having to rediscover
what the ancients knew. Often enough by
bitter experience. . . . That many today never heard of Mortimer Adler or the
Great Books, and many others may have to be reminded of who he was, is not a
good sign for a cohesive, democratic, tolerant, learned and above all thinking society.” (Paul Greenberg, “Mortimer Adler: A Funny and
Great Little Man,” The Item, July 6,
2001, 10A.)
As we have seen, Adler’s concerns echoed those of G.K.
Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Fulton Sheen, particularly in the area of Academia
and the general understanding of the basic principles of common sense in the
modern world. The whole concept of what
it meant for something to be true had changed, as Sheen noted in both God and Intelligence and Religion Without God.
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| Jesus before Pilate: "What is truth?" |
In particular, as Greenberg noted, the “lessening of
interest in the power of ideas” affected how facts are treated. Facts were no longer something to be
verified, dismissed if false, and accepted if true, then used as input to the
development of ideas.
No, facts were now to be evaluated on the basis of their
utility to whoever had the power to force others to his or her will, and could be validated as "authentic" instead of true. Opening up the door to a veritable flood of
utter nonsense, what mattered was how many people could be persuaded or forced
to accept a useful fact, regardless whether it was even a fact in the first
place. Might, as in politics and
economics, now made right in philosophy.
Part of the reason for this was the incidence of what we can
call an inadequate Aristotelian-Thomist logic on which a semi-Platonist concept
of ideas had been superimposed. By going
from the general to the particular (instead of from the particular to the
general), anything that appeared to conform to a subjective and preconceived
notion was deemed true, while anything that did not conform — despite its
objective verifiability — was deemed false if it did not fit into the
subjective preconception.
What that means in English is, having changed what it means
for something to be true, people simply took what they wanted to be true, and
forced it onto reality, rather than make their understanding of truth conform
to empirical evidence (what your senses tell you) and logical argument (what
your reason tells you). Thus, you don’t
believe something to be true because you have tested it and verified
(ascertained) it, but because you find it useful.
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| Sheen: contradiction is nonsense. |
The possibility that something is neither true nor false, but
nonsense — what Sheen discovered when writing God and Intelligence — was no longer considered. “Nonsense” — something contradictory or
irrational — became another word for “falsehood.” This is especially the case when dismissing
what others who disagree with you have to say.
Take, for example, the statement, “If God can do anything,
then He can make a weight so heavy He can’t lift it.” The statement is based on a contradiction
that violates the first principle of reason.
That is, the statement declares that God can both “do” and “not do” (i.e., “be” and “not be”) at the same
time under the same conditions. The
statement is therefore neither true nor false, but nonsense.
The statement is, nevertheless, taken as “true” by atheists
because it presumably proves the whole concept of God is nonsense, instead of
merely the statement itself. At the same
time, it is taken as “false” by theists because there are things about God
human beings cannot understand. In both
cases, the faith of the atheists and that of the theists contradicts reason,
leaving nonsense.
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| Lewis: God is not a convenience. |
The insertion of contradiction and the nullification of the
concept of nonsense is particularly devastating, even destructive — shades of
Knox’s “destructive grace” as we termed it earlier — when it comes to matters
of faith. As C.S. Lewis had the demon Screwtape
explain to Wormwood when advising the Assistant Tormentor on the Satanic
benefits of getting people to abandon truth as the reason for doing anything,
“[T]he Enemy [God] will not be used as a convenience.
Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a
good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a
short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.
Fortunately, it is quite easy to coax humans round this little
corner. Only today I have found a
passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of
Christianity on the ground that ‘only such a faith can outlast the death of old
cultures and the birth of new civilizations.’
You see the little rift? ‘Believe
this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That’s the game.” (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, op. cit.,
108-109.)
In light of this, it is ironic that there are a significant
number of people today who have been drawn to the Catholic Church because of its
social teachings.
Now, there is nothing wrong with that. It is, in fact, laudable — as long as it doesn't stop there . . . and as long as they have the correct (not necessarily "authentic") understanding of those teachings.
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| Aquinas's thought cannot support contradiction. |
The problem is that some converts (including nominal
Catholics who undergo a “reversion” or inner conversion) assume that the
preconceptions they bring to the table are correct understandings of what the
Catholic Church teaches. They begin forcing
what they have previously accepted as true without proof or argument on to a
foundation that might not be able to support it, especially within the
Aristotelian-Thomist framework, which simply cannot support contradiction of any kind.
When the inevitable contradictions appear, such converts and
reverts become perverts tailoring what the Church teaches in matters of faith and morals
to conform to their untested assumptions, often distorting them completely out
of shape. When others disagree with them
— especially when those others present empirical evidence and logical argument
— the enthusiastic (in Knox’s sense) response is to reject reason, and go with
a personal faith, calling into question the personal faith of those who
disagree with them.
This is not to say that what people believe should not be a
part of their personal, family, and civil life.
One’s faith not only should, but must be a part of everything one does,
just as each person must have a consistent and sound philosophy to be able to
develop more fully as a human person.
That is not the issue. The issue
is whether one is integrating his or her faith into every aspect of life . . .
or whether one is changing the absolutes of one’s faith to conform to what one
finds “useful.” As Lewis had the demonic
adviser Screwtape say,
“Certainly we do not want men to
allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the
establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major
disaster. On the other hand we do want, and
want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of
course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to
anything — even to social justice. The
thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which
the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values
Christianity because it may produce social justice.” (Ibid.,
108.)
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| Tawney: Anglican Christian, Fabian Socialist. |
As a case in point, we know of at least one noted Catholic
commentator who was drawn into the Catholic Church because he found the
writings of the Anglican Christian socialist and Fabian Society member Richard
Henry Tawney (1880-1962) persuasive.
This was evidently because Tawney, who headed the Fabian Society from 1920 to 1933, and advocated that organized religions become less religious(!), said what the commentator wanted to
hear.
Influenced
by what comes across as a violent hatred of capitalism, this individual assumed
as a matter of course that Catholic social teaching (the understanding of which
he derived from a Protestant socialist involved in “Esoteric Buddhism” — i.e., theosophy) is simply
an ethical form of socialism. This had
to be under another name, of course, since the Catholic Church has condemned
socialism in no uncertain terms, and tends to look askance at syncretism, that
is, combining different forms of religious belief, such as Esoteric Buddhism and Christianity.
The fact that an Anglican Fabian socialist could hardly be
considered an authoritative source for understanding Catholic social teaching that opposes socialism was brushed aside, along with the clear and unequivocal
condemnations of socialism and New Age thought by the popes. A twist to the mind here, a turn around the
corner there, and the thing was done.
Something becomes “true” because it is perceived as useful for gaining
one’s ends and because someone with power validated it, not because it is objectively factual.
Of course, mere contradiction by itself soon wears thin and
becomes obvious for what it is: an exaggerated sense of one’s self, a supreme
lack of humility that can overcome even truth and reason itself in furtherance
of one’s own ends. Just as socialism and
New Age thought needed each other, something else was needed to complete the
overthrow of reason and common sense.
That is precisely what Fulton Sheen found in the
philosophical and theological movements of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as we will see in the next posting in this series, and
what he set out to counter and correct in God
and Intelligence.