One can only
imagine the rage that suffused the leaders of the Fabian Society with the
publication of G.K. Chesterton’s book on St. Francis of Assisi. Here was a former member of the Society, one
whom they had ridiculed for years and characterized as a buffoon, almost an
imbecile, for refusing to admit that they were right and he was wrong.
Instead of meekly
coming to them for confession, forgiveness, and instruction, however, Chesterton
turned their insults back on them. He
then demonstrated that — at least when it comes to the truths of Christianity —
an idiot who holds by the truth is far superior to the genius who persists in
error.
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| R.H. Tawney: the Fabians' finest socialist writer. |
Since his book, The Acquisitive Society, had evidently
been the spark that ignited Chesterton’s effort, R.H. Tawney was the obvious choice
to carry out the counterattack. This was
combined with a series of debates between G.B. Shaw and Chesterton, which — as
the two men argued from different sets of principles — never managed to resolve
anything (as Hilaire Belloc predicted).
Tawney carried
out the literary phase of the assault with the exemplary skill that had made
him the Fabian Society’s best socialist writer and moved him into the upper
echelon of the Society’s leadership. The
result was Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism, published in 1926 when Tawney was at the height of his powers.
Tawney based his
analysis on the New Christian principle that “The whole of society ought to
strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the
poorest class.” He drew on his esoteric
studies as well as the pseudo histories created by leading New Christians and
Neo-Catholics such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Félicité Robert de
Lamennais, and “Eliphas Lévi” (Alphonse-Louis Constant), who appears to have been the model of what C.S. Lewis called "the Materialist Magician." As Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University
characterized this school of historiography,
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| The "Baphomet," a Neo-Catholic symbol. |
A key concept of Lamennais and other Neo-Catholic authors was the révélation primitive, a theory that
sought to prove the eternal and exclusive truth of Catholicism on the basis of
“historical evidence” gathered from all religious tradition. Lévi’s approach to history decisively relied
on this theory, as becomes most obvious in the light of his constant emphasis
on the true tradition being nothing else but “Catholicism.” Similar to Neo-Catholic writers, he certainly
did not seek to abolish the Church but to reform it and establish its true
character, which would eventually lead to a universal — that is literally
“Catholic” — religion of humanity. However,
his attitude towards the status quo of
the Church was much more radical in that it was marked by an aggressive
anti-clericalism, directed not against the office of the priest, but against
the corrupted holders of this office.
(Julian Strube, “The ‘Baphomet’ of Eliphas Lévi: Its Meaning and Historical
Context,” Correspondences 4 (2016),
8-9.)
Paradoxically,
the image that Lévi created to symbolize his new socialist “religion of
humanity” or “true Catholicism” — the “Baphomet” — was eventually taken over by
Satanist groups, as was his goat’s head-pentagram design. Today, the images Lévi intended as the icons
of his version of “true Catholicism” are widely regarded as diabolical in
origin.
Thus it comes as
no surprise that Tawney took as his starting point the New Christian doctrine that
the organized churches had long ago departed from the real message of
Jesus. Religion was going to have to
change, becoming less “religious” and more “naturalistic.” As he declared in the opening salvo of his
response to what he considered Chesterton’s treachery,
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| New Christianity: Jesus was a socialist. |
Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is
between those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained, and
those which appeal to a supernatural criterion.
Modern social theory, like modern political theory, develops only when
society is given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation, and a
capital fact which presides at the birth of both is a change in the conception
held of the nature and functions of a Church.
(R.H. Tawney, Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952, 8.)
As Tawney warmed
to his subject, he developed his main theme.
That is, having betrayed the real, historical Jesus (as envisioned by
the New Christians and Neo-Catholics), the official churches could no longer be
considered truly Christian. As Tawney declared,
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| John Wyclif[fe], 1320-1384. |
It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and
temptations of the secular world, which is par
excellence the life of religion. As
one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the
primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St.
Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of
movements for reform. As for
indifferentism — what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s
teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all” and that “in this world
God must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial
happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a
cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must
expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond [to say nothing of Marx — ed.] have revealed as an opiate dulling both
the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons
are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only
Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them — the
phrase has a long history — of stirring up class hatred. (Ibid.,
18.)
Consistent with
New Christian assumptions, and in contrast to Chesterton and Knox’s disparagement
of the Fraticelli (“the Spirituals”), Tawney recast them as being the only true
Christians, oppressed by the official Church:
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| New Christian myth: Pope John XXII oppressing the Friars. |
Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated
to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and
land tenure. Itself the greatest of
landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the
Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a
crusade against royalties. The
persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of
John XXII, to maintain St. Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests
that doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the
teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian
Church. (Ibid., 56-57.)
This, of course,
was not only a response to Chesterton, but to his confrere Hilaire Belloc,
whose constant theme was that the wealth of the Church was held in trust as “the
Patrimony of the Poor” until confiscated by the State . . . after promising to
take care of the poor. What actually
happened, as William Cobbett — “the Apostle of Distributism” — related in his History of the Protestant Reformation in
England and Ireland (1827) is that, having created a new class of pauper,
it was made a crime to be poor.
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| Tawney: Belloc (left) and Chesterton (right) were really Protestants. |
Nor did Tawney
neglect to get in a few gratuitous jibes at Chesterton and Belloc. Of the system of widely distributed capital
ownership those two “aggressively Catholic” individuals developed they (reluctantly)
called “distributism,” Tawney claimed that it was really Protestant. He then implied
that Chesterton and Belloc — to say nothing of the late Charles Stewart Parnell
in Ireland who had so effectively countered for a time the influence of the
agrarian socialist Henry George in the Irish nationalist movement — were
romantic fools for hearkening back to an allegedly false image of a long-lost past:
Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the twentieth
century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of
peasant prosperity. The social theory of
Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in
the Distributive State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. (Ibid., 92.)
The obvious logical
weaknesses in Tawney’s argument, combined with his reliance on bad history and
the unpleasant habit he had of sneering at anyone with whom he disagreed should
have alerted people — but it didn’t.
Chesterton waited for a while before responding to Tawney’s riposte,
possibly expecting ordinary people’s inherent fairness and basic common sense
to come to his assistance, as it had for Cardinal Newman some sixty years
previously.
When that did not
happen, Chesterton again took up the gage of battle, and produced what most
authorities rank among his five best books, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. Not
unexpectedly, while it absolutely demolished the whole basis of New
Christianity and Neo-Catholicism — not by its argument, but by showing how to argue — the main point of the
book was completely ignored. Today's Fabians, New
Christians, and Neo-Catholics use it not to lead them back to common
sense, but to support them in their errors.
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