In the previous posting in this series we saw that in the
1920s, when Fulton Sheen’s thought was formed, the new concept of religion found
in the mutability of modernist and New Age thought made it particularly
attractive to, the perfect foil for, and a seemingly independent verification
of the various forms of socialism — and that socialism returned the favor. This made the pseudo science of socialism and
the quasi religion of the New Age a dangerous combination in a world that had
lost its philosophical bearings.
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| Heinrich Pesch's solidarism was sabotaged. |
This “Manichaean mutability” accounts for the alacrity with
which the modernist movement adopted the fascist-socialist solidarism of Émile
Durkheim — as well as the later regression of Heinrich Pesch’s
Aristotelian-Thomist solidarism back to that of Durkheim by Pesch’s latter day
followers. Durkheim’s theory that
religion is a social rather than a spiritual phenomenon fitted perfectly into
the modernist demand that the Church update its teachings to conform to the
needs of the modern world, making the Church both in the world and of it.
God became a useful concept, but not strictly speaking
necessary (cf. Grotius, loc. cit.). The collected mass of the people — humanity
as a whole or the community (Der Volk)
— becomes God, or the people construct the God they need or desire. As Sheen described this development,
“In addition to the purely
metaphysical or psychological explanations of religion there is yet another
which may be called the sociological or the humanitarian. Among European thinkers this explanation
takes a double form: either that of Durkheim for whom God is ‘a divinized
society’ or that of [Wilhelm Maximilian] Wundt for whom God is the term which
represents the values of life as estimated either by the folk or the
community.” (Sheen, Religion Without God,
op. cit., 54.)
In this framework, humanity — the abstraction of the
collective, not actual human persons — takes the center. Religion becomes a way of meeting material
needs, the greatest good for the greatest number without being limited or
qualified by such things as the inalienability of natural rights of minorities
or the ungodly.
Within the new framework, spiritual needs are merged into
material needs, and the whole concept of religion must change or be changed to
conform to the demands of modern life.
As Sheen analyzed this,
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| Fulton Sheen's thought was marginalized. |
“‘The crisis in the religious
world,’ he [Professor
Charles Abram Ellwood (1873-1946), author of The Reconstruction of Religion.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922 — ed.] writes, ‘has been brought about by the failure of existing religion
to adapt itself to two outstanding facts in our civilization — science and
democracy.’ [The Reconstruction of
Religion, 1922, p. 2, note in text.]
He believes that a religious revolution is in the air, and that it is
concerned with a transition from ethical monotheism to a scientific and social
conception of religion. And ‘the real
religious problem of our society is to secure the general acceptance of a
religion adapted to the requirements of continuous progress toward an ideal,
consisting of all humanity.’ [Ibid.,
p. 64, note in text.] ‘Service of God
must consist in service of man.’ [Ibid.,
p. 100, note in text.] The traditional
notion of God will then be done away with.
Professor Ellwood calls it a Santa Claus notion. ‘The autocratic conception of God, as a force
outside the universe, who rules by arbitrary will both physical nature and
human history, will be replaced by the conception of a spirit immanent in
nature and in humanity, which is gradually working out the supreme good in the
form of an ideal society consisting of all humanity. And since service of God is in reality
service of man, there will be sin in this new religion of democracy; it will be
a failure to serve mankind. In other
words it will be ‘disloyalty to society.’ [Ibid.,
pp. 139, 143, note in text.]
“‘Religion means the
consecration of individual life, at first for love and spiritual ends, but
finally for humanitarian ends.’” [Ibid.,
p. 45, note in text.] (Sheen, Religion Without God, op. cit., 56.)
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| "Forgotten" Benedict XV battled modernism. |
In the world in which Fulton Sheen developed his thought (in
common with G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox), the First World War had given
socialism and modernism a tremendous impetus due to the general failure to
resolve the problems caused by the “new things” — although not for the want of
effort on the part of Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (and, not to
seem exclusive, Fascist Italy) were the natural outcome of the reaction against
capitalism and the new things combined with the devastation of the Great War.
As a result, socialism and the New Age became entrenched in
the psyche if not the economy and daily life.
No country seemed able to resist.
Both the United States and Imperial Japan, as well as many other
countries, fell victim to the new way of thinking and the abandonment of sound
philosophy.
It becomes evident why, in addition to its socialism, then, the
Nazi movement incorporated so much New Age thought in its formative period in
the 1920s. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
explained in his book, The Occult Roots
of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New
York: New York University Press, 1992), this did not mean actual demonic
influence, as a number of lurid fictional and semi-fictional works
suppose. Rather, Goodrick-Clark
demonstrated that Nazi ideology (particularly its racial theories) had its
roots in esoteric theories, especially ariosophy, a school of thought heavily
influenced by theosophy.
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| The (fictional) German judiciary on trial at Nuremberg. |
Eventually the Nazis established what amounted to a
pseudo-pagan theocracy, with socialism supporting its New Age “philosophy,” and
esoteric thought supporting National Socialism.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the changes introduced into the
German legal system — something with which every viewer of the Stanley Kramer
film, Judgment at Nuremburg, should
be familiar. As George Holland Sabine described
this development,
“The judiciary . . . completely
lost its independence and security, while at the same time judicial discretion
was extended practically without limit. The law itself was made studiously
vague, so that all decision became essentially subjective. The penal code was amended in 1935 to permit
punishment for any act contrary to ‘sound popular feeling,’ even though it
violated no existing law. . . . Obviously no rational administration of such
statutes was possible. Equality before the law and due process were supplanted
by complete administrative discretion. What totalitarianism meant in practice
was that any person whose acts were regarded as having political significance
was quite without legal protection if the government or the party or one of
their many agencies chose to exert its power.”
(George H. Sabine, A History of
Political Theory, Third Edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1961, 918.)
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| Pius XI's social doctrine was ignored. |
Within the Catholic Church, “social justice” came to mean
meeting individual needs on a large scale, rather than that at which Pope Leo
XIII hinted, “the restoration of [the social order]
according to the principles of sound philosophy and to its perfection according
to the sublime precepts of the law of the Gospel.” (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 76.) By 1931, when Pope Pius
XI presented his completed social doctrine based on the act of social justice
directed to the reform of the institutions of the common good, not any
individual good, the teaching fell largely on deaf ears.
By the late 1950s when the New Age seemed to have passed and
the dangers of socialism exposed, John XXIII thought it “safe” to convene a
council. This would allow him to restart
the work of Pius IX and Leo XIII and address the new things interrupted by the
decades-long struggle against fideism — what Dr. Ralph McInerny later identified
as the greatest danger to the Catholic Church (and by extension to all religion) today.
That John XXIII’s confidence was misplaced is
self-evident. Socialism and modernism,
much less the New Age, had not been defeated, but had simply gone into hiding
after a fashion, and needed only the right opportunity to resurface. The aberrations that followed Vatican II,
however, would not have gained so much ground had not the whole nature of what
it means for something to be true changed.