Last Thursday we
looked at what led up to Saint Thomas
Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” (1933), G.K. Chesterton’s final word in the literary
debate he carried on with R.H. Tawney, the socialist/New Christian author of The Acquisitive Society (1920) and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(1926).
It was not the
final word on the subject, of course, or the problem would not still be with us
today, pervading every aspect of religious, civil, and family life. It was, however, the last that Chesterton had
to say on this subject, at least in book form.
It is therefore both appropriate as well as useful to take a look at
what he said.
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| Tawney: Why argue when a sneer will do? |
In Saint Francis of Assisi (1923),
Chesterton had warned of the danger of the “new things” that were undermining and
replacing Christianity with “Christian” socialism. As if on cue, in his effort to refute
Chesterton and prove that New Christian (i.e.,
socialist) principles were right and those of outdated mainline, orthodox
Christianity were wrong, in his book, Religion
and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), R.H. Tawney simply reasserted all the
old socialist-New Christian quasi arguments without bothering to do anything
except ridicule traditional religion and get a dig or two in at Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc.
Rather than give
in to the sort of tit-for-tat exchange of insults at which the Fabians and
other socialists excelled, however, Chesterton decided to give reason and
common sense another try. And who better
to lead the way than St. Thomas Aquinas, whose insistence on the first
principle of reason — that nothing can both be
and not be at the same time under the
same conditions — had been the subject of Fulton Sheen’s first book, to which
Chesterton wrote the Introduction, God
and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925)?
This is nothing
against Chesterton’s earlier work on St. Francis, but the little volume on
Aquinas is a much more profound piece.
This is easy to understand.
In Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton had
looked at an issue that seemed straightforward.
This was how exaggerating a single principle — care for the poor (or
anything else) — no matter how important, and subordinating everything, even
truth itself, to that single principle leads straight to betrayal of the Church, heresy, even
the total destruction of Christianity . . . to say nothing of paving the way
straight to totalitarianism.
 |
| Aquinas: To argue is human, to sneer is swine. |
In Saint Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton was
faced with a much more difficult task.
Where in Saint Francis of Assisi
he had explained what needed to be
refuted, he now took it upon himself to explain how to refute it — after a fashion.
Clearly, however,
it would not be sufficient or even effective to present the same philosophical arguments
all over again as to why you can’t set aside or redefine the natural law to get
what you want. Fulton Sheen had done
that brilliantly in God and Intelligence
and Religion Without God (1928), and
had been either completely ignored or egregiously misunderstood. Even Pope Pius XI’s inspired 1931 encyclical refuting
religious socialism, Quadragesimo Anno,
had been “reinterpreted” as an endorsement of the very things it condemned.
No, just
reiterating the arguments would do little good, as Chesterton knew full well
(and as this writer has discovered). First of all, he was no philosopher,
especially on the level at which Fulton Sheen, Ronald Knox, or Pius XI operated. It would take years to reach the degree of
understanding of the Thomist arguments that Sheen, Knox, Pius XI, and others brought
to the table to refute the New Christian-socialist claims.
What Chesterton could do, however, was try and teach
people the basic principles of how to
argue, fairly and effectively . . . which was something entirely lacking in
both of Tawney’s books. Sneers abounded,
of course, but there was little or no actual argument.
 |
| "I am the monarch of the sea / Only no one knows but me!" |
Being a good
journalist, however, Chesterton couldn’t just leap into his presentation. He had to avoid the temptation of letting
readers know (for example) “that Admiral Banks has been shot, which is the first intimation
we have that he has ever been born.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi. New
York: Image Books, 1957, 19.) That is,
he had to give a little background on Aquinas, if only so that his readers
would know who this "Dumb Ox" of a person was.
It was, in fact, not
until Chesterton was two-fifths into the book that he got around to introducing
his main subject. This was how to think and argue effectively,
which he began discussing in Chapter III: “The Aristotelian Revolution.”
Chesterton’s goal
was to give people the intellectual tools they needed to develop their own
arguments and refute the New Christian-socialist errors on their own, not give
them half-understood or garbled arguments. He therefore only had to begin by showing the
error people needed to refute. This was
the “error behind the error” of New Christianity-socialism: the wrong idea of man,
and thus of God, that resulted in such treason.
Not that
Chesterton came flat out and said it that way.
Instead, he gave two examples, one which twisted the supernatural, and
the other, the natural: “Astrology sprawls over the Sunday papers, and the
other doctrine has its hundredth form in what is called Communism; or the Soul
of the Hive.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1956, 79.)
 |
| Eliphas Lévi, Neo-Catholic Materialist Magician |
Astrology assumes
that human beings are at the mercy of spiritual or astral forces they cannot
control; that what you are and what happens to you is somehow determined by
what star or planet you’re born under (or something like that). It denies free will, and thus the sovereignty
of the human person under God. (“Magic”
as defined by the Neo-Catholic Eliphas Lévi is a way to manipulate these
forces, the astral or inner light, to reach higher states of consciousness; see
Chesterton’s comments about the “inner light” in Orthodoxy, 1908; cf. E.F. Schumacher’s “New Age” concept of different
truths at different levels of consciousness in A Guide for the Perplexed, 1977.)
The “Soul of the
Hive” is a much more subtle and far more dangerous treachery. How many people actually believe in astrology
is difficult to determine, but most people in the United States today seem to
reject it out of hand. A somewhat
equivocal survey as recently as 2012 said that half of Americans reject it
outright, while many of the rest don’t take it seriously.
This is ironic,
for the “Soul of the Hive” — the idea that the abstraction of the collective
created by man is sovereign while human beings created by God are not — is, in
a very real sense, the “natural” version of astrology (explaining the natural
affinity of socialism and the Occult noted by Dr. Julian Strube), and has
seized almost total control of the way most people think these days. After all, the belief that individuals are at
the mercy of impersonal forces radiating from the stars is no more ridiculous
(or any more believable) than that individual human beings only have such
rights as the collective gives them.
Astrology and collectivism are, in that sense, the supernatural and the
natural sides of the same counterfeit coin.
As a result,
Chesterton was fully aware that both the social and religious teachings of the
Church were and remain under constant assault, both from treachery from within,
and hatred from without the Church . . . and that the most deadly attacks came
from that treason inside the Church itself.
As Chesterton described it,
This error then had many forms; but especially, like nearly every
error, it had two forms, a fiercer one which was outside the Church and
attacking the Church, and a subtler one which was inside the Church and
corrupting the Church. There has never
been a time when the Church was not torn between that invasion and that
treason. (Ibid., 108.)
#30#
