As we saw in the previous posting in this series, the two
problems Fulton Sheen addressed in God
and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy were, one, a new concept of God and
religion, and, two, the rejection of the intellect. Not that either of these two issues is
peculiar to the modern age. As far as
the capacity for error goes (especially in religion), the human race has seen
very little that is new under the sun.
As Sheen noted,
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| Fulton J. Sheen |
“The new idea of God has not
burst upon the world with the suddenness of a new star. It has had its antecedents dating back over
half a century. New scientific notions,
increased faith in the philosophy of progress, birth of new values and
interpretations of life, love of novelty, dissolution of dogmas, each has
contributed its share to bring it into being.” (Sheen, God and Intelligence, op. cit., 17.)
Sheen’s “over half a century,” of course, referred only to
the immediate antecedents of the situation he addressed in 1925 with respect to
Christianity. In “The Dumb Ox” G.K. Chesterton noted what happened in the Middle
Ages. While Enthusiasm focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Msgr.
Ronald Knox also recorded new concepts of God and religion that sprang up
within a few years of the Crucifixion.
Going back further and outside Christendom, Aristotle had
problems with the Sophists. Even the
moment of creation was marked by Lucifer’s rebellion against ultimate Truth —
which, according to adherents of the Abrahamic religions, is what caused the
whole problem in the first place.
Sheen’s chronology is significant, however. Half a century puts the immediate beginning
of the problems Sheen addressed around 1875.
Three key events in the United States underscore the importance of this
time period.
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| Slaughterhouse led directly to Roe v. Wade |
The year 1873 marked the United States Supreme Court’s
decision in “the Slaughterhouse Cases.”
According to constitutional scholar William Winslow Crosskey in Politics and the Constitution in the History
of the United States (1953), the Court’s intentionally vague opinion in Slaughterhouse nullified the recently adopted
Fourteenth Amendment, enshrined in law the belief that sovereignty resides in
the State instead of in human beings, and gave the Court virtually unlimited
“raw judicial power.”
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| Founder of theosophy |
In 1875 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical
Society in New York City, and in 1877 published Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern
Science and Theology.
Madame Blavatsky’s doctrines helped
spread Hindu and Buddhist concepts in the West, leading to widespread
syncretism. Theosophy was a primary
source for other esoteric movements such as Ariosophy (collectivist [Völkische
Bewegung] Aryan-esoteric theories that influenced Nazi ideology), Anthroposophy
(an offshoot of theosophy that attempted to integrate Christian and natural law
elements), and the New Age that merged with an expanded georgist socialism to
form Fabian socialism.
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| Henry George |
In 1879 Henry George published Progress and Poverty, advocating the effective abolition of private
property in land through the “single tax.” The georgist single tax would consist of all
rents and other profit of land ownership taken by the State and be applied to
public purposes in lieu of all other taxes (cf. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto.
London: Penguin Books, 1967, 104).
In this way all economic incentive to own land would be destroyed, and “the
State would become the universal landlord without calling herself so.” (Henry George, Progress and Poverty. New
York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1935, 406.)
We don’t need to get into a discussion as to whether these
were symptoms or causes of the situation Sheen faced. Personally we think they were symptoms of a
much deeper problem: the fact that many people were losing control over their
own lives as economic (and thus political) power became increasingly
concentrated. What concerns us here is
their significance, the underlying meaning of and commonality among these three
events.
The Slaughterhouse
Cases reversed the roles of man and the State in general. It shifted the source of State power from
human beings, to the State itself. Thus,
instead of the original political theory embodied in the Constitution that “We,
the People” organize and grant rights and recognition of personality to the
State, the new theory was that the State grants rights to people and determines
which human beings are persons. Instead
of persons creating the State as in traditional philosophy of law, the State
creates persons.
Theosophy reversed the roles of God and human beings. By claiming that a human being could become a
god, an idealized humanity, an abstraction, became divine. Thomas Hobbes had anticipated this in Leviathan (1651) with his notion that
the State is a “Mortall God,” to be obeyed in temporal matters as the Immortal
God is obeyed in spiritual matters. Theosophy,
however, dismissed the idea of a Supreme and Perfect Being altogether. Putting humanity in the place of God
inevitably leads to putting the representative of humanity — the State or the
collective — in the place of God, vesting it with absolute power.
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| Msgr. John A. Ryan |
Georgism reversed the roles of man and the State in
particular. Where Slaughterhouse effectively made all natural, inalienable rights
such as life, liberty, and property alienable, socialism made private property
alienable. True, George claimed that
this only applied to “the gratuitous offerings of nature” (i.e., whatever had not been produced by human labor, such as land
and natural resources), but as transformed by the Fabian Society and, later, by
Msgr. John A. Ryan, all private
property could be alienated and effectively owned by the State, usually through
the tax system. Since private property
is the chief support of, and protection for life and liberty, abolishing
private property — even if restricted initially to land — necessarily makes all
rights alienable at the discretion of those who own capital, and who consequently have
power over others who do not own capital.
The decade of the 1870s was also notable for the actions
that the Catholic Church took to address and counter the situation. In October 1870 the First Vatican Council
adjourned, prematurely. Despite that,
two very important definitions came out of the Council. They were intended to restore common sense to
both religious and civil society, “Church and State.”
The first (and better known) was the definition of papal
infallibility, or (more accurately) the infallibility of the teaching authority
of the pope. The doctrine of infallibility
made clear that religious doctrines — matters of faith and morals — are not
subject to anything except objective truth as revealed to humanity by God and
interpreted authoritatively by the Catholic Church.
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| Pius XII: God may be known by reason. |
Not so well known is the Council’s declaration of the
primacy of the intellect over the will — of human reason as the basis of sound
faith and knowledge of God’s existence and of the natural law. As Pope Pius XII reiterated this nearly a century
after its promulgation,
“[A]bsolutely speaking, human
reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain
knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and
governs the world, and also of the natural law, which the Creator has written
in our hearts.” (Humani Generis, § 2.)
On his election in 1878, Leo XIII took swift action. He began applying the common sense that Pius
IX had lamented was in decline with his (Pius IX's) first encyclical, Qui Pluribus, in 1846 — no, despite its unique character, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum in 1891 was not “the first social encyclical” . . . and
a good case could probably be made that neither was Qui Pluribus.
On April 21, 1878, then, Leo XIII issued Inscrutabili Dei Consilio: “On the Evils of Modern Society,”
notably socialism. On December 28, 1878
he issued Quod Apostolici Muneris
specifically “On Socialism.” On August
4, 1879 he issued Æterni Patris, “On
the Restoration of Christian Philosophy,” which made it clear that “Christian
Philosophy” is to be understood as “Aristotelian-Thomism,” which is based on
the primacy of the intellect.
This, then, was Sheen’s framework for how to address the
twin evils of the new concept of God and religion, and the denial or rejection
of common sense. In the next posting in
this series, we’ll give a brief outline of Sheen’s argument.
#30#
