REVIVING THE CHURCH'S SOCIAL DOCTRINE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
IHS Press Reprints Old Texts for New Audiences
NORFOLK, Virginia, 11 SEPT. 2003 (ZENIT).
There's nothing new under the sun, says the Book of Ecclesiastes. John Sharpe thinks that adage is particularly applicable to social ills.
That's why Sharpe started IHS Press, a publishing company aimed at making old books on Catholic social teaching available to a contemporary audience.
Sharpe, a free-lance writer and lecturer who founded IHS two years ago, shared with ZENIT why books written decades ago can be so important to understanding and healing society today.
Q: What inspired the creation of HIS Press?
Sharpe: The Press was created to fill a gap. There are books on all kinds of Catholic subjects readily available, except for serious works on politics and economics from a Catholic standpoint. Much of the Catholic social justice writings from the 1960s and 1970s have a Marxist or materialist bent.
The clear, substantial works on what a Catholic society should look like come from the 1930s, the last decade to witness a serious movement for Catholic social principles. IHS was formed to help people rediscover those works, and to form a movement of people concerned about where society is headed. People can base their sense of what's wrong with the world on the clear thinking of Catholic social teaching.
Q: What is Catholic social teaching, and how is it an alternative to the political ideologies of today?
Sharpe: Catholic social teaching is that part of Catholic moral teaching that deals with man's social life — it suggests what society should look like in its social, political and economic aspects, based upon the ultimate purpose of temporal life in society.
The social doctrine teaches principles specific enough to identify what's right and wrong, but general enough to allow the laity to work out the details of temporal life in conformity with those principles.
Catholic social teaching bases its approach on truths that philosophy teaches and that revelation confirms; thus it differs from other political positions in that it is founded upon the truth and is not merely pragmatic. This is fundamentally different than all other ideologies — the social doctrine differs not only in its approach to sociopolitical questions but also in its underlying assumptions.
Other political positions differ equally from the social doctrine in that they tend to be: skeptical, not recognizing an absolute Truth upon which to base political action; materialist, seeing the purpose of man's life in society as mere enjoyment of this life, rather than as preparation for the next; and naturalist, not recognizing the existence of realities and truths that cannot be seen, touched and measured.
The social doctrine approaches politics in a radically different way. For Catholics, political life is a question of practicing virtue within the context of social living, and any structure of society that encourages virtue is to be praised because it helps people get to heaven. The opposite is true for societies that encourage vice — like ours — or make the practice of virtue difficult.
There are points of overlap between modern political positions and the social doctrine. Opposition to abortion, unlimited immigration, support for workers' rights and concern for the poor are all positions that the social doctrine supports.
Non-Catholics can accept the various principles of the social doctrine without accepting the Church because the principles reflect the natural law, which based upon reason. So Catholics and others can collaborate in certain specific areas for specific policies that conform to Catholic social principles.
As a complete sociopolitical creed the social doctrine really is a third way that isn't just between the Left and Right — it rather transcends both Left and Right and rises above them with its own vision of social order.
Q: Why is it important to rediscover the writings of the Catholic social thinkers of the early 20th century? What wisdom can they offer?
Sharpe: The thinkers of the 1930s were confronting the problems that we face today: unemployment, an industrialized economy, a financial system with ridiculous national debts and rampant usury. Their approach to these problems was based upon an articulation and application — without compromise or apology — of the true Catholic position.
Today, sadly, there is a tendency of some to water down the teachings of the Church, to adapt them to the world. Many works on the Catholic social vision are neutralized by a desire to not shock modern readers too much and to affirm aspects of modern society as acceptable that are not acceptable at all.
The thinkers from before World War II spoke the truth in all its purity — which is why our program takes their work as a starting point and hopes to pick up from there.
Q: The editors of IHS Press have stated that they are convinced the wisdom of Catholic social thought is, today, largely a buried treasure, relatively untapped and almost wholly neglected. Why do you think it was forgotten and has not been rediscovered until now?
Sharpe: World War II and Vatican II. These were two major events of the 20th century that somewhat eclipsed the work being done in implementing the Church's social principles.
World War II seemed to confirm the triumph of capitalism and political liberalism, so that it became difficult, if not ungrateful, to oppose them. Laissez-faire economics and secular democracy — never mind that it was allied with militant, atheist Communism — triumphed over the Axis.
To many people, that physical triumph suggested that capitalism and political liberalism were in fact morally right, though the conclusion doesn't follow at all. The position of papal teaching is that neither capitalism nor liberalism is an ideal social system.
Following World War II, criticisms of them could be dismissed as either totalitarian, politically; or socialist or communist, economically. Today, however, in the era of stock market bubbles, Enron, Wal-Mart, the Patriot Act and a tendentious war on terror, it is easy to see that the triumph of liberalism and capitalism in the 1940s was not an unmitigated blessing for humanity.
Nevertheless, the movements that flourished in the 1930s were decimated, at least ideologically, by the war.
The Distributist League, founded in 1926, fizzled away. The Scottish and English Catholic Land Movements, founded in 1929, ended in the middle 1940s.
And the Catholic schools of thought in France — theirs was corporatism — and Germany — the solidarism of Heinrich Pesch — were respectively discredited with the fall of the Vichy government in France, which had implemented a good bit of Catholic social doctrine, or drowned out by the din of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Meanwhile, the confusion accompanying the implementation of Vatican II throughout the world was later to do as much damage to the theoretical prospects of the social doctrine as World War II did to the practical prospects.
It has to be admitted — as many prominent churchmen including Cardinal Ratzinger have said — that the interpretation of the truths of the faith were, in some circles, watered down during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The social doctrine suffered a similar fate.
Even though the council documents suggest that the Catholic layman has the duty of implementing Catholic principles in social life, some reinterpreted those principles in a worldly context.
On the Left were the liberation theologians and Marxist priests who lost all sense of the otherworldly destiny of man and thought that Christian social action consisted in initiating a material paradise on earth. On the Right there was — and still is, in a bad way — a tendency to shy away from criticizing capitalism for fear of seeming reactionary.
So, the Church's clear stance against economic liberalism was and is watered down into a kind of Catholic capitalism that doesn't square with the faith.
If in some circles Vatican II was used to try to appease the modern world by meeting it on its own terms — that, too, undercut any attempt to conform the world to the faith according to Catholic principles.
Everyone now admits that the effects of Vatican II weren't all marvelous. That, along with the realization that the post-World War II triumph of liberalism and capitalism weren't unmitigated blessings, provides the opportunity for a restatement, re-appreciation and implementation of the integral social doctrine.
Q: Why does your press highlight the writings of thinkers who call themselves "Distributists"?
Sharpe: The Distributist School was the main group of English thinkers from the 1930s who enunciated the vision of Catholic social doctrine with the most clarity and vigor. They wrote in English and are accessible to us. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both famous in their own right, were among their numbers.
Most important, though, is their clear articulation of the Catholic position in the face of the twin evils confronting it — capitalism and socialism. They understood that position fully, enunciated it in excellent prose and acted upon it by founding leagues, movements and journals that attempted to conduct an effective propaganda for the social doctrine and to make it a reality in the world.
One example is a book by Harold Robbins, a leader of both the Catholic Land Movement and the Distributist League, called "The Sun of Justice — An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Church." That book is one of the best on the Distributist case for the social doctrine.
The Distributists are a very good place to start in beginning to reconstruct and re-popularize the social doctrine, and in attempting to implement the solutions it offers to the manifold problems facing the modern world. ZE03091126
By Carrie Gress
WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 31, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Even though the modern world talks of the hope in terms of progress and social justice, these concepts are "inhuman" aberrations of the true meaning of the theological virtue, says Father James Schall.
The Jesuit professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University is the author of "The Order of Things," and "Another Sort of Learning," both published by Ignatius Press.
In Part 1 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall comments on how Benedict XVI, in his encyclical "Spe Salvi," defends the theological virtue of hope by showing that without God human fulfillment and happiness is impossible.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Friday.
Q: Why do you think that this consideration of the theological virtue of hope is particularly timely?
Father Schall: We might state the issue briefly, but with some irony, by saying that in fact the secular world is itself full of "hope." However, the intellectual origins or implications of the ideas it uses for hope are no longer recognized. The modern words used instead of hope are "progress," or "making the world safe for democracy," "social justice," or the "scientific" eradication of suffering and evil. The theological background for this "secularization" of hope comes from Joachim of Flora and Francis Bacon, among others.
The modern idea of hope always means dissatisfaction with the present in the light of some presumed future that is not only better, but is the man-made answer to what we mean by complete happiness.
Even the word "education" has overtones of hope. Stress on education as a solution also has a Socratic background. Socrates evidently thought that at the origin of all the human disorder we find "ignorance." Thus, education, both general and universal, comes to be considered a universal "cure" for the moral disorders manifest in human nature wherever and whenever it appears in our experience. If we can just eliminate "ignorance," it is "hoped," we will eliminate evil.
This view clearly presupposes that we know and define properly the nature of the evil that we seek to eliminate. Perhaps no ideology is more stubborn than this educational one. The fact is that it is not primarily ignorance that causes evil. Education as an ideology always refuses to face the core problem of evil, its relation to free will, virtue and grace.
Aristotle was clear that, while intelligence was indeed a major factor, there was a recurring element of "wickedness" in human nature. The most intelligent and well-educated were often the ones closest to the greatest evil. The classical tractates on tyranny always presupposed this relationship of the greatest evil to the greatest finite intelligence, angelic or human. Lucifer is one of the most intelligent of the angels, which is why he is so dangerous.
Following Augustine and Aquinas, we understand the place of will, free will, in our lives. Evil is not located outside of us. Aristotle had recognized that virtue and vice are acquired habits based on repeated choices. We do not become virtuous or vicious simply by knowing what virtue or vice is. We have to "do" them repeatedly.
Behind this emphasis on will, we find the doctrine of original sin with its relation to pride.
My point here is simply this: The billions of dollars of wealth that sundry modern states and private charities pour into education in order to improve the world are almost always justified by a version of hope that essentially maintains that what causes human ills is lack of knowledge. Since the whole story of human disorder includes more than knowledge, we must recognize that this modern enthusiasm for "knowledge alone" betrays utopian overtones of a this-worldly solution of ultimate human problems.
The point is not to abandon the valid aspect of education in our lives. No religion -- or philosophy -- is more dedicated to intelligence than Catholicism. The point is to put it in proper order. We should seek and know the truth. But it does not automatically follow that those who seek education necessarily choose to live by the truth.
What this Pope is able to do, in an almost revolutionary manner, is to sort out the unrecognized theological strands of hope that exist within the secular order.
Modernity's very search for its own self-sufficiency is charged with Christian overtones that exist in the culture, but are not recognized. One of the results of the loss of faith, itself a choice, is the sense of no longer knowing how Christian themes were implicit in the culture.
Students and faculties today, including often those in Catholic institutions, have little notion of the Christian origins and limits of their favorite enthusiasms. Ever since we stopped studying heresies as heresies, we have often adopted them in enthusiastic terms whose origins we no longer recognize. There is not only ignorance, but a willed ignorance.
We do not want to know that our most basic desires are best explained by a reasoned faith, which we have uncritically, without examination and virtue, rejected as untenable.
Q: You have made a connection between Eric Voegelin's phrase "immanentize the eschaton" and the encyclical. What does this phrase mean? How do what connection do you see?
Father Schall: Eric Voegelin was a German political philosopher who came to the United States during the Nazi period. He had begun a distinguished academic career in Germany that he continued at Louisiana State and Stanford Universities. His voluminous and profound writings are published by the Louisiana State University Press and the University of Missouri Press.
After long studies in philosophy, language, scripture, history and theology, Voegelin concluded that the main motivating force behind modern philosophic movements was their effort literally to achieve the transcendent goals found in classical philosophy and Christianity, such as heaven, happiness, but within this world. He called these efforts at systems "ideologies." He explained that their effort was to "immanentize the eschaton."
Realist philosophy and Christian theology are not, in this sense, "ideologies," though this is what they will often be called in universities. This is why, from a Catholic view, the defense of philosophy and revelation as such is so important. Their realism is what distinguishes them from ideologies. Neither philosophy nor revelation is merely a projection onto reality of humanly concocted ideas that have no further justification other than the construct in the mind of some thinker now transformed into political action.
The word "eschaton" refers to the last things. We traditionally call them: death, purgatory, hell, and heaven. We will quickly notice that these are the four things to which Benedict XVI addresses himself in "Spe Salvi." We are so used to writing off any serious consideration of these topics that we can't easily appreciate the depth of what the Pope is about. As I often like to point out, Catholicism is an intellectual religion. We had better be prepared to understand why.
I know the expression "immanentize the eschaton" sounds formidable. It is something only a German academic mind could drum up, I suppose. But it is apt. It has the advantage of accurately identifying what is going on in the modern mind as it seeks to find a human meaning outside of a realist philosophy to which revelation is addressed in a coherent fashion. In other words, it means that modern thought does not escape Christianity even when it tries to do so. What it does is to strive to relocate it within the world as a rejection of Christianity.
The brilliance of the Pope's encyclical is that he is also a German philosopher and reads German philosophy. He knows that the great German thinkers, upon whom, in fact, most of modern thought depends, simply bring back in Christian ideas, only now in some distorted form. They try to locate "eternal life" down the ages. They try to escape death by projecting ages of man to 200 years. They try to imitate paradise by ecological fantasies of eternal earth.
Q: Can you briefly philosophic sketch how our contemporary world has distorted the vision of man? How does this idea of "progress" fit into the Pope's analysis?
Father Schall: In the beginning, modern ideology often proposed a humanism that was supposedly independent of revelation. Now, classical philosophy is independent of revelation, even though, as the Pope said in the Regensburg Lecture, that already in the Old and the New Testaments we find ideas of philosophy and revelation that are directly related to each other, the principle ones being the notions of truth, love, being and happiness.
What revelation argues in the face of modern thought and politics is that "humanism" has gradually become more and more "inhuman." Chesterton often predicted this would happen. The concepts of the length of human life in terms of years, of love in terms of sex, of happiness in terms of individual creation of its own ends are aberrations, much like those found in book five of Plato's "Republic," which in the name of justice sought to eliminate the family and to produce perfect children by a combination of genetics and state education.
"Progress" is an idea coming from post-Enlightenment thought. J.B. Bury's famous book "The Idea of Progress" reads like a book on salvation history. I like your expression, "How our contemporary world distorted the vision of man."
The theological virtue of hope, the subject of this encyclical, is precisely the virtue that most directly involves modern philosophy whose main claim to fame is that it can in fact produce a better "humanism." Taking it at its own word, the Pope systematically shows that without God it is impossible, really, to give actual human men and women any hope for themselves and their kind.
The Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, something that has intimations in Aristotle's notion of friendship, is the only real doctrine that addresses itself to the salvation of each individual in his own particular being, but within the notion of a community of love and friends, which is what we all want. What we hope for in the Christian sense is precisely that we see God "face to face." We already seek to know one another '"face to face." There is no guarantee that this condition can ever be realized outside of the hope that God exists and has saved us. We must include our sins and destiny.
The Pope reestablishes the importance of purgatory as a sensible position precisely because he knows, as we do, that few of us die with absolutely pure souls. There is nothing irrational about this much-maligned doctrine that alone addresses the fact of sins of the past and their proper atonement.
One almost has to laugh at this encyclical that boldly takes the eschatological doctrines -- heaven, hell, death, purgatory -- and shows us that they have direct meaning on our lives and culture. The encyclical is called "hope" but it is also "bold." It is bold precisely because it is intelligent and aware of the meaning of modern ideologies. Modern thought is, as was much of ancient thought after the Resurrection, an effort to avoid the truth of revelation. We cannot ever prevent anyone from rejecting this truth. Nor do we want to do so. This is what free will is about. The truth of God and of his purpose for man in the world must be chosen as well as understood.
What "Spe Salvi" does is spell out in lines too clear to miss the implications of rejecting the "eschaton" as it is presented in Christian faith. It is no doubt true that these doctrines must be understood accurately. Much of the heresy in history arises from a misunderstanding of what is actually taught.
This encyclical is a representation of what is actually taught. This is why it is so astonishing and revolutionary in itself.
Our eyes have not seen what our ears have heard because we do not want to receive what we are as a gift. We want to make what we are. And when we do, we find that we create mostly monsters. The Pope also sketches the monsters in this encyclical.
