Yesterday, in the
previous posting on this subject, we looked at one of the most important
things the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen addressed in his work: the fact that
God created human beings, not humanity.
We also noted that most people would be completely baffled by this
distinction, not able to see the difference between the actuality of a child,
woman, and man created by God, and the ideas of children, women, and men
created by human beings.
The fact is,
however, that a number of modern philosophers, such as the Great Books
philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, have made this same point, as did Monsignor
Ronald A. Knox with whom Sheen worked, and G.K. Chesterton. Knox, in fact, titled the final chapter in
his life’s work, Enthusiasm (1950), “The Philosophy of Enthusiasm.”
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| Msgr. Ronald A. Knox |
It was not a
compliment. To Knox, enthusiasm is “an
excess of charity [that] threatens unity.”
(Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1.) After a few introductory paragraphs in which
he (mistakenly) opined that enthusiasm appeared to him to be in abeyance — for
the time being — Knox asked, “At what sources do they feed, these
torrents which threaten, once and again, to carry off our peaceful country-side
in ruin?” Answering his own question, he replied,
Basically, it is the revolt of
Platonism against the Aristotelian mise
en scène of traditional Christianity. The issue hangs on the question
whether the Divine Fact is something given, or something to be inferred. Your
Platonist, satisfied that he has formed
his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will divorce
reason from religion. (Ibid., 578-579.)
For his part
Adler noted the Platonic revolt against Aristotle, while Sheen put it in terms of undermining the philosophy
of Aquinas. The rebellion is rooted in
the fact that both Aristotle and Aquinas stressed the primacy of the Intellect over the Will, and thus the necessity of
both faith and reason. For the Platonist, however, the Will — personal faith and opinion — is everything,
the Intellect nothing; “nothing really matters [for the
Platonist] except the Divine will.” (Ibid.,
579)
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| Aquinas: primacy of the Intellect |
Relying on one’s
personal opinion of God’s Will (or whatever one puts in the place of God, such
as the State or your own ego) without reference to
empirical evidence or logical argument, however, causes disagreements and
contradictions to appear with an alarming, albeit unsurprising regularity.
Using reason is anathema to the truly spiritual person who “will
have God served for himself alone.” (Ibid.)
Knox traced
this capacity for contradiction in Christian religious society to perversions
forced on the philosophy of Saint Augustine of Hippo. As Knox wrote, “Exaggerated
now from this angle, now from that, St. Augustine’s theology has provided, ever
since, the dogmatic background of revivalism,” (Ibid., 580.) “revivalism”
being a manifestation of enthusiasm.
This is because
Plato taught the
obvious truth that ideas exist just as do the things of the physical world. He
then made the mistake, however, of claiming not only that generalizations —
abstractions — exist (which they do), but that they exist independently of the particular, i.e., that ideas exist apart from the human mind (which they do
not). As Adler explained,
More than a full measure of
reality, the world of ideas had for [Plato] a superior grade of reality.
The physical things that we perceive through our senses come into being and
pass away and they are continually in flux, changing in one way or another.
They have no permanence. But though we may change our minds about the ideas we
think about, they themselves are not subject to change. . . . The world of
changing physical things is thus for Plato a mere shadow of the much more real
world of ideas. When we pass from the realm of sense experience to the realm of
thought, we ascend to a higher reality, for we have turned from things that
have no enduring existence to enduring and unchanging (Plato would say
“eternal”) objects of thought — ideas. (Mortimer J. Adler, Six Great Ideas. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, 8.)
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| Aristotle: truth is true |
Some people will
thereby be tempted to deny particular, concrete things because within the
Platonic framework they are transient, compared to
seemingly eternal, general abstractions. An actual human being (so the
reasoning goes), is therefore lower than the abstraction of humanity. A human creation thereby becomes
greater than human beings and He Who created them.
In extreme cases,
the ultrasupernaturalist will claim to ascend to such a higher, mystical level
of existence, or raise his or her consciousness to such an elevated plane, that
this world becomes completely unimportant, sometimes even illusory. Truth
itself ceases to be true and becomes subject to change as new truths displace
old truths, just as the supernatural displaces the natural. (See, for example,
E.F. Schumacher’s New Age classic, A
Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Harper Collins, 1979.)
For his part,
Chesterton believed that mysticism enlightens, it does
not obscure; it is specific and concrete, conveying true knowledge, not vague
opinion. It does not give special knowledge only to a gnostic élite. As he said of one New Age guru,
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| G.K. Chesterton: mysticism is not abstract |
He is enslaved by the one great
fallacy of the mystics, that mysticism, religion and poetry have to do with the
abstract. Thinkers of Mr. Waite’s school have a tendency to believe that the
concrete is the symbol of the abstract. The truth, the truth at the root of all
true mysticism, is quite the other way. (G.K. Chesterton: The Speaker,
May 31, 1902.)
The Platonist, then, utterly rejects what
the Aristotelian-Thomist accepts as a matter of course: that the principles
of reason illuminated and guided by faith put actual God, not the abstraction of Collective
Man, at the center. As Adler concluded, distinguishing — as he put it —
reality from existence (or, as Sheen put it, existence from conception),*
For those of us who cannot shuck
off our commitment to common sense, Plato goes too far in attributing reality to ideas,
and much too far in exalting their reality over the reality of sensible
phenomena — the reality of the ever-changing world we experience through our
senses. We do not hesitate to reject Plato’s theory of ideas, and declare him
wrong in attributing reality to ideas as well as to physical things, and a
superior reality at that. For us commonsense fellows, it is the world of ideas
that is comparatively shadowy as compared with the tangible, visible, audible
world of things that press on us from all sides. (Adler, Six Great Ideas, op. cit., 8-9.)
* Illustrating the problem of
accurately translating difficult concepts from other languages such as Greek
and Latin, Sheen made the same argument in Religion
Without God. Sheen, however, said that ideas are conceived, but do not
exist, where Adler said that ideas exist, but are not real — yet both Adler and
Sheen were making the same point.
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