Progressives and forward-looking elites pride themselves on being or becoming “woke.” In common with other advocates of supposedly new and improved products and ideas, however, contempt for anything other than their own opinions often leads the Awokened to reject and utterly ignore events prior to their own incarnation or outside their respective frames of reference.
It comes as no surprise, then, that in common with modernism (an amalgam of two millennia of failed ideas repackaged for current consumption), today’s “wokeness” consists of warmed-over notions from the past. Most of these have not aged well and were never very palatable to begin with.
The Second Great Awakening
Take, for example, the “Second Great Awakening” in the United States that lasted from about 1795 to around 1840. Usually characterized as an enthusiastic religious revival in the Msgr. Ronald Knox sense, the Second Great Awakening signaled a far more profound change than many people today realize. Religiously, it consisted of slightly modified, often sanitized versions of “the Democratic Religion,” le démocratie religieuse. Creeds consisted of adaptations of the “New Things” (rerum novarum) of socialism, modernism, and the New Age wreaking havoc in Church, State and Family in Europe at the time.
As in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s, religious belief became fideist, more emotional and less intellectual, often discarding “man’s miserable intellect”i altogether as irrelevant or dangerous.ii In consequence, many people rejected organized religion for its presumed inherent irrationality. Given the perceived need to justify human chattel slavery,iii enthusiastic sects and movements such as the New Christianity, Neo-Catholicism, and Theosophy in many cases rationalized racism instead of condemning it.iv
Politically, the Second Great Awakening resulted in a gradual transference in American political theory from sovereignty of the human person under God,v to the French or European concept of sovereignty of the collective under itself.vi Complicating matters further was the existing confusion between American personalist liberal democracy and English individualist liberal democracy.vii
The meaning and purpose of life changed from becoming more fully human, that is, acquiring virtue by exercising natural rights (live, liberty, and private property) and practicing the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justiceviii), to attaining or providing a good material life as efficiently as possible. This was the “Kingdom of God on Earth,” the “consistently recurring objective of American messianic movements,”ix inherited in substantially altered form from the First Great Awakening.x Ends justified means, and the greatest good for the greatest number superseded fundamental natural rights and traditional moral values. State became supreme over Church, and even over Family.
Chauvinistic patriotism and concern for material wellbeing in the civil order transformed or replaced faith and observance in religious society. As man is spiritual as well as material, however, wildly innovative new religions and private revelations spread rapidly, regardless of logical consistency or empirical validity. This not uncommonly caused confusion and sometimes tragedy.
Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick depicts this. One of the least successful of Melville’s books during his lifetime, it is often dismissed as boring or incomprehensible today. Considered as a commentary on the Second Great Awakening, religious belief, and the nature of truth, however, it takes on new significance. This is speculation, but Ahab’s weird domination of Starbuck might reflect Melville’s own opinion of “religion” instilled in the outré and emotional atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening.
To the pious and prosaic Starbuck, the whale has no meaning except its God-made reality as a source of lamp oil. Ahab, however, destroys himself and the Pequod by projecting his own apocalyptic delusions and invented truth on to nature. As Starbuck cries to Ahab, “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”xi
Many outside the Church continued to view Catholicism with suspicion and distrust. In general, however, rationalization shifted from Catholics as adherents of a false religion luring people away from God to agents of a foreign power bent on enslaving or politically subjugating Americans. This was an aspect of what became known as Americanism or Nativism.xii Papal condemnations of socialism and slaveryxiii were taken as confirming Catholicism’s animus against God, man, and the United States.xiv
Still, anti-Catholicism in the United States was neither universal nor consistent. In his bestselling novel, The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), George Lippard, a socialist, portrayed the Catholic Church as un-American for its aristocratic and presumably anti-democratic institutions. At the same time and in the same work, he defended the Church against calumnies spread by some Protestant preachers and portrayed in works such as Six Months in a Convent (Rebecca Reed, 1832) and The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery (“Maria Monk,” 1836).
Paradoxically, every effort was made to convince people that there was no substantive difference between traditional Christianity, especially Catholicism, as believed for eighteen centuries, and the Democratic Religion. This hypocrisy, even deception, did not pass unnoticed. As former socialist Orestes Augustus Brownson commented shortly after his conversion to Catholicism,
The spirit that works in the children of disobedience must . . . affect to be Christian, more Christian than Christianity itself, and not only Christian, but Catholic. It can manifest itself now, and gain friends, only by acknowledging the Church and all Catholic symbols, and substituting for the divine and heavenly sense in which they have hitherto been understood a human and earthly sense. Hence the religious character which Socialism attempts to wear.xv
De Tocqueville versus the New Things
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville examined the personalist liberal democracy of the United States and contrasted it with English elitist liberal democracy and the French or European collectivist version. He concluded that the founding principles of American democracy are essentially Catholic and universal.xvi
Given what he saw as the trend of American society, and assuming the evils of slavery and treatment of native peoples were corrected, de Tocqueville predicted the United States would one day be a “Catholic country.” By this he did not mean Catholicism would be established as the official religion of the United States. Rather, de Tocqueville believed those Americans who remained Christian would be Catholic, and the civil institutions of the country would conform to the natural law as understood in Catholicism.xvii
A century later, Pope Pius XI (who may have been familiar with Democracy in America) agreed with de Tocqueville’s concepts of liberal democracy. He consciously rejected the caesaro-papistical and collectivist notion of the Kingdom of God on Earth. In its stead, His Holiness proposed the personalist “Reign of Christ the King,”xviii which is explicitly not of this world.xix
De Tocqueville, however, failed to give due consideration to the influence of the New Things and the Second Great Awakening. He viewed them, their prophets, and adherents almost with contempt. As a young man, he had fallen briefly under the influence of the Democratic Religion and suffered a profound crisis of faith.xx This may have been exacerbated by the wave of anti-intellectualism that swept through popular Catholicism at the time, provoked in part by overly intellectual and stilted catechesis and preaching,xxi as well as corruption of Church doctrine.
Although he soon rejected the New Things, and accepted and promoted Catholic principles, teachings, and authority,xxii de Tocqueville never resolved his difficulties. He only returned to the Sacraments on his deathbed by making a leap of faith.xxiii
Today’s orthodox Christians often have little sympathy for de Tocqueville. Ironically, they do not realize or appreciate the extent to which modernist and socialist principles and practices — and the virtual identity between modernism and socialismxxiv — subverted early nineteenth century Christianity and have been adopted today by some mainstream churches.xxv
The Transformation of “Distributive Justice”
As a case in point, take the understanding of distributive justice. Traditionally, distributive justice presupposes commutative justice;xxvi “Without commutative justice, no other form of justice is possible.”xxvii Commutative justice governs equality of exchange (contracts), that is, “equality of quantity.”xxviii
This understanding of commutative justice leads naturally to the concept of distributive justice, “wherein equality depends not on quantity but on proportion.”xxix For example, someone who contributes 25% to a common endeavor receives 25% of the gain or suffers 25% of the loss.
Socialism, however, abolished commutative justice and changed the basis of distributive justice from proportionality to need. When combined with a general intention for the common good (classical legal justice) and controlled by the State, socialists claimed that distributive justice became “social justice.” This contradicts traditional Catholic teaching.xxx
To many people today, then, “distributive justice” means some version of the Marxist dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”xxxi This has even made its way into the Catechism of the Catholic Church in a much-misunderstood passage.xxxii
This happened almost by chance. In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII noted that in “extreme cases” distribution based on need should be made in justice by duly constituted authority. By complex reasoning this falls under “distributive justice.”xxxiii
What many people overlook, however, is that need-based distribution is ordinarily charity, not justice. It is only classed as distributive justice in exceptional circumstances by default since the State as duly constituted authority carries out its functions under distributive justice. Need-based distribution under justice is an exception to the general rule that need falls under charity, and almsgiving is “a duty not enforced by human law.”xxxiv
Distribution based on need as justice is the fundamental principle of socialism. It entered Christianity through the “back door” of the New Things.xxxv As Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon put it in his posthumous 1825 book, Le Nouveau Christianisme (“The New Christianity”), “The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end.”xxxvi
America, with its open frontier, democratic institutions, and tradition of “the City Upon the Hill” proved to be fertile ground for the spread of the New Christianity. The country (as Knox notedxxxvii) seemed an ideal place to implement socialist experiments. Foremost among the messiahs of the new faiths in the United States was François Marie Charles Fourier. This was largely through the efforts of his American disciple, Albert Brisbane.
The Fantastic Fourier
Brisbane became a socialist when he went to Europe to complete his education. Rejecting the doctrines of Saint-Simon and others, he discovered Charles Fourier. Fourier had declared himself the successor of Jesus Christ and Sir Isaac Newton and founded a new scientific religion.
In Fourier’s creed, association (cooperation) replaces individualism and competition. “Unrestrained indulgence of human passion” is the true path to happiness and virtue. Misery and vice result when society prevents or inhibits the gratification of desires.xxxviii
All creation is God. The social evolution of collective man is the evolution of God. As society becomes perfected, there is less need for God. Progress consists of man gaining absolute freedom through transformation into the immanent God, and the gradual death of the transcendent God.xxxix
Marriage and family must be abolished and replaced with libidinal associations. Women are to be completely emancipated from men and make pursuit of pleasure an end in itself. Children should have complete freedom to raise themselves according to their natural instincts.xl
Civilization must be abolished; sex and food must be available to all. All work must be “libidinalized,” and performed only so long as the task gives sexual pleasure. The power of sex will turn the oceans to lemonade, the Sahara will be fertile, and the North Pole will become a tropical paradise.xli
Brisbane became Fourier’s leading disciple, assisting the Master in launching the initial phase of his movement. After further travels in Europe and Asia Minor, Brisbane returned to America. There he promoted a modified version of Fourierism.
Foremost among Brisbane’s revisions was Fourier’s position on private property. Fourier’s concept was a communist social order in which the community or “Phalanx” owns everything. Everyone works and is compensated accordingly.
In Brisbane’s system, people were permitted private ownership of capital if it was exercised in accordance with the good of the entire community. He expurgated Fourier’s concept of the “libidinalization” of work, although eliminating Fourier’s related abolition of marriage split the movement.xlii This did not, however, stop accusations that “Associationism” was anti-marriage.xliii
Socialism as a replacement for traditional Christianity was downplayed.xliv Associationism was presented as just another Christian sect. Disdaining reason, Brisbane claimed Fourier’s ideas must be accepted on faith and would establish practical Christianity throughout the world. People would naturally love God and their neighbors, temptation would disappear, and evil would be purged from society.xlv
Brisbane founded the Fourierist Society in New York in 1839 and began publishing books explaining his system in 1840. With the aid of Horace Greeley, whom Brisbane converted to socialism, the movement experienced rapid growth. Phalanxes were established as far away as Texas. The most well-known of these was Brook Farm, the former transcendentalist commune. In its heyday, Brook Farm attracted such notables as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Orestes Brownson.xlvi
A Clash of Visions
Fourierism was the most popular and — within limits — successful form of socialism in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Still, it was only one among many, such as Robert Owen’s utopian New Harmony, Indiana, where grandiose schemes came to nothing. Owen’s infamous “Declaration of Mental Independence” on July 4, 1826, probably ensured failure. In this speech, sufficiently embarrassing to be glossed over by most biographers, Owen called for abolition of private property, organized religion, and marriage and familyxlvii . . . but not slavery.
Volumes can (and have been) written about other social experiments in nineteenth century America, such as the Shakers, Étienne Cabet’s Icarian communism,xlviii the Oneida Community, and the Koreshan Unity. To this can be added the movement that would one day be called the New Age, encompassing Theosophy, spirit rapping, and spiritualism, as well as prophets and mystics such as Thomas Lake Harris, Andrew Jackson Davis (“The Poughkeepsie Seer”), the Fox Sisters, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (“The Sage of Nininger”), and so on.
Subtleties of modernism infiltrating mainstream Christian bodies seemed sane in comparison, although (as Chesterton observed) they were ultimately far more destructive.xlix From the traditional Christian perspective, the future of western values, even civilization itself, seemed bleak.
What made the situation seem much worse than otherwise was the prevailing American mythos of the City Upon the Hill, the terrestrial paradise, “the Kingdom of God on Earth.” This was a product of the Reformation, which — to grossly oversimplify — in part reoriented religion away from predominantly spiritual ends to more material goals. The idea was that “the human race is advancing ineluctably toward a perfection of our own making.”l The perfect life is attainable here on Earth instead of in an ephemeral Heaven.
Unfortunately, great (even astounding) advances in politics, finance, and technology were implemented in ways that denied most people the benefits. This was largely due to misunderstanding, misuse, and abuse of basic institutions such as money and private property. Increasingly alienated from God and their fellow man, more people looked to America as the place where the ideal society could be created, and Heaven on Earth attained. In turn, America, which Knox labeled “the last refuge of the enthusiast,”li became increasingly fixated on the New Things of socialism, modernism, and the New Age.
Truth, however, does not mean trying to force yourself or — especially — others to fit an unattainable ideal, particularly one in direct conflict with reality. Even in America, it was impossible to escape from reality, that is, from truth, for truth means conformity with reality.lii As a result, Antebellum America, already divided by slavery and the treatment of native peoples, began questioning its fundamental reason-based personalism, and shifted increasingly to a faith-based orientation.
Endnotes
i Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, 3, 578-580, 585-587.
ii Ibid., 113-116, 119, 129, 152, 220-223, 394, 395, 404, 399, 552, 554.
iii Cf. David Christy, Cotton is King, or, The Culture of Cotton, and its Relation to Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce; to the Free Colored People; and to Those Who Hold that Slavery is In Itself Sinful; by an American. Cincinnati, Ohio: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1855.
iv “Central to Theosophical doctrines is the concept of ‘root races’ that reflect a grand cosmological scheme manifesting in different evolutionary stages of humanity.” Julian Strube, “Theosophy, Race, and the Study of Esotericism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, December 2021, Vol. 89, No. 4, 1180.
v St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum; St. Robert Bellarmine De Laicis.
vi Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (1762), derived from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).
vii John Locke Two Treatises on Government (1689); Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698).
viii The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity make one “like God,” not more fully human. Ephesians 5.
ix Adam Morris, American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019, 6-7, 256; Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. New York: Random House, 2016, xii, 38, 295; J.D. Dickey, American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019; William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakening and Reform. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 8, 18, 19, 20, 158-159, 171-178, 182.
x Morris, American Messiahs, 17, 50, 72-73, 82, 134-135.
xi Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale. New York: Random House, 1950, 560. Melville also explored the conflict between truth and human illusions, frailties, and institutions in his unfinished novella, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), in which Captain Vere — Truth — is forced to execute a morally innocent man.
xii See Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938.
xiii In Supremo Apostolatus (1839). The encyclical may have been prompted by the 1838 slave auction by the Jesuits in Maryland to provide funding for Georgetown University. See Rev. Joel S. Panzer, The Popes and Slavery. New York: Alba House, 1996, for an overview of papal condemnations of slavery over the centuries.
xiv E.g., Hugues-Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, Les Paroles d’un Croyant (1834).
xv O.A. Brownson, Essays and Reviews, Chiefly on Theology, Politics and Socialism. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1852, 499-500.
xvi Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1994, I. 300-302.
xvii Ibid., II.29-30.
xviii Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (1922), Quas Primas (1925).
xix John 18:36.
xx Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006, 48-62. Brogan dismisses the possibility that reading “bad books” and the academic environment had any influence on de Tocqueville’s lapse (p. 52), attributing it to maturity and sex.
xxi Lancelot Sheppard, Lacordaire: A Biographical Essay. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964, 45-47.
xxii As Foreign Minister of the short-lived Second French Republic, de Tocqueville defended the spiritual and temporal authority of Pope Pius IX against the radicals during the revolutions of 1848. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1959, 314-315.
xxiii Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, op. cit., 637-638.
xxiv G.K. Chesterton, “There Was a Socialist,” G.K.’s Weekly, May 10, 1930.
xxv Pontifical Council for Culture and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the “New Age.” 2003.
xxvi Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1807.
xxvii Ibid., § 2411.
xxviii IIa IIae, q. 61, a. 2.
xxix Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2411.
xxx Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, § 201.
xxxi Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1972, 17.
xxxii Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2411.
xxxiii Rerum Novarum, § 22.
xxxiv Ibid.
xxxv Morris, American Messiahs, op. cit., 82-83.
xxxvi “Saint-Simon,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19: 14th Edition, 1956, Print.
xxxvii Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 3, 558.
xxxviii “Fourier, François Marie Charles,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9: 14th Edition, 1956, Print.
xxxix Gregory S. Butler, In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, 130-131.
xl “Societary Theories,” The American Review: A Whig Journal, Vol. 1, No., 6, June 1848, 633-636.
xli Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 50; Jennings, Paradise Now, op. cit., 168.
xlii “Societary Theories,” op. cit., 633-636.
xliii “The Fate of Reformers,” The National Era, Washington, D.C., September 2, 1855; “The Free Love System,” Littell’s Living Age, Vol. 46, No. 592, September 29, 1855, 815-821.
xliv “The Free Love System,” op. cit.
xlv Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association: Or, Plan for a Re-organization of Society. New York: J.S. Redfield, 1844, 2.
xlvi Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker. New York: The Columbus Press, 1891, 47-48.
xlvii Margaret Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark, 1771-1758. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1969, 156-157. Ven. Fulton J. Sheen’s Declaration of Dependence (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1941) may have been intended, at least in part, as a response to Owen’s speech.
xlviii Cabet’s system is invariably referred to as “Icarian socialism” today, but Cabet insisted he was a communist, not a socialist. Julian Strube, “Contested Christianities: Communism and Religion in July Monarchy France,” Socialist Imaginations: Utopias, Myths, and the Masses. New York: Routledge, 2018 (preprint), 1-2.
xlix G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”. New York: Image Books, 1956, 108.
l Jennings, Paradise Now, op. cit., 4.
li Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 3.
lii “[A] proposition is true . . . when the corresponding state of affairs is the case.” J(ózef) M(aria) Bocheński, The Methods of Contemporary Thought. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1968, 6.
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As I read these references to 19th c. socio-political thought, I can’t help but think how many of these influences have seeped into the mindset of our Church at the highest hierarchical levels.
I’m not sure that a long, complicated philosophical article like this (with punctuation errors and umpteen footnotes) is appropriate for the general audience that I think CWR aims to serve.
Appropriate? That’s a puzzling choice of words. CWR has a long history of posting essays about involved theological, philosophical, and historical matters. I understand that they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, which is fine. But I believe that most CWR readers are able to read and profit from such pieces, in part because I think CWR’s readership is, on the whole, better read and educated than the general public (not a high bar, alas).
You make a point, but also consider this…the article is less a display of intellectualism than it is a demonstration against the anti-intellectualism of our time.
Yes, the long article might well have been divided into a series of two parts, or maybe three. The first dealing with the emotional Great Awakenings on the American frontier, and the second with the collapse into the vacuum of secularized Socialism. And the third? How about an article comparing/contrasting the intuitional awakenings and socialism, with what has become of “synodality”?
The package-deal “sensus fidei”? Really? It’s not only that the contaminating German synodal path—not limited to Germany!—is theologically incorrect, nor morally corrupt. The German thing is simply PREPOSTEROUS. You just can’t put lipstick on that pig.
But, now, this about the earlier awakenings…I once joined the home of a true believer of the awakenings, in rural Idaho. A gymnastics coach, he had been reduced to a total quadriplegic (possibly by mercury poisoning, he said). For most of twenty years his wife rose every two hours (!) to turn him in bed to prevent skin bruising. His large family sang beautifully each night around him, propped up on a chair in the middle of the family room. Day and night, his eyes were consistently filled with light; and his life in complete joy (!) was contagious. A reminder that while the grace of God works through the gift of the Church’s sacraments, surely, His grace also is not limited to the sacraments.
Butt, now, and from within the Church founded by/anchored in the incarnate Jesus Christ, we mimic Pentecostal big-tent awakenings, with big-tent and circus-tent Catholicism, and then to worldly capitulation and abuse of the sacraments—by Marx, Batzing, Grech, Hollerich & Co.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
“Ahab, however, destroys himself and the Pequod by projecting his own apocalyptic delusions and invented truth on to nature” (Greaney). A difference of interpretation of hatred of the White Whale is Melville’s hatred of God, a God indifferent to injustice himself indifferent to natural calamity the destruction of whaling crews on bright sunny days fit for a nuptial [in a letter to friend the religious Hawthorne]. Melville was obsessed with injustice [likely his own self perception] Billy Budd another example, an innocent man who strikes his false accuser, accidentally kills him, unjustly hanged.
“Paradoxically, every effort was made to convince people that there was no substantive difference between traditional Christianity, especially Catholicism”, here author Greaney adroitly perceives the thread of organized religion and political religiosity. His perception of the antagonistic relation between religion and politics is summarized at the end, “Increasingly alienated from God and their fellow man, more people looked to America as the place where the ideal society could be created, and Heaven on Earth attained. In turn, America, which Knox labeled the last refuge of the enthusiast”. America, the apparent seedbed for a new world order placing the common good above the person.
Religion is rightly identified by Greaney as politics in the Woke world. The reason why progressive adherents of the new politico religion, vilify, condemn, seek to incarcerate [and have succeeded] critics, those who offer different and evidently better solutions, a political religiosity blind to its own injustice.
I failed to make the connection in my 1st paragraph to Michael Greaney’s article, why I submit this revision. “Ahab, however, destroys himself and the Pequod by projecting his own apocalyptic delusions and invented truth on to nature” (Greaney). A difference of interpretation of hatred of the White Whale is Melville’s hatred of God, a God indifferent to injustice indifferent to natural calamity the destruction of whaling crews on bright sunny days fit for a nuptial [in a letter to friend the religious Hawthorne]. Melville was obsessed with injustice [perhaps a perception of his own maltreatment] Billy Budd another example, an innocent man who strikes his false accuser, accidentally kills him, unjustly hanged. Melville’s anti religion seems consistent with Greaney’s identification of a political culture in which man can do better than God.
A very interesting and helpful essay. Thank you.
Carl above – I prefer my philosophy lucid and succinct. Something is fishy when a short (in comparison to a book) essay has fifty footnotes.
So…if it’s well-sourced, it must be “fishy”? How’s does that work? Shouldn’t a moment or two with the footnotes indicate if it’s “fishy” or not? (I’ll help you out, since I edited it: it’s not fishy.)
I’m afraid I surrendered to the modern, word processor-inspired habit of footnoting anything that might be questioned as the result of complaints about my writing (not in CWR) that I did NOT footnote many of the more surreal or fantastic statements. As for trying to be lucid and succinct . . . we’re dealing with modernism, “the synthesis of all heresies,” and even Pope Pius X couldn’t be lucid and succinct when condemning it, limiting himself to identifying the main errors and warning that the rest were presented in an incoherent manner, although I disagree with Pius X that it was always deliberate. If you really want to see how bizarre this gets, look into the work of Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University. You might think you’re reading a fantasy or alternative history when all he does is give the facts. (And he footnotes even more than I do, in three languages.)
Still, they are valid comments from one point of view, but in my defense I can only say that the problem — in common with the situation — is almost unbelievably complex, and is very difficult to sort out in a (relatively) brief article. Oversimplification of the problem has, in my opinion, done more to advance the New Things than some of its strongest advocates.
As a general rule, it’s always better to cite sources than not, no matter how long the list gets. It communicates that your points are developed from scholarship, not from personal opinions.
Yes, exactly. Besides, there is no law requiring that footnotes much be read. I simply don’t get the concern or fixation.
Over the course of reading many books on American history, I encountered most of these silly movements, but it’s interesting to be reminded of them in one essay.
All I can say is please don’t let the German bishops or any proponents of this synodal madness read your essay. Don’t give them ideas. Who knows what ridiculous tyrannical claims they will invent as “what the laity really wants today.”
I did look over the footnotes/endnotes. I question the necessity of so many footnotes. Just now, I looked at #8. Why does reference to the cardinal virtues require a footnote? I even find the footnote confusing in relation to the sentence.
Mr. Greaney above – I appreciate your comments. We seem to agree that the number of footnotes can get out of control. As for modernism being so complex, I think that only underlines the absolute necessity of lucidity and succinctness.
I agree with the need for lucidity and succinctness up to a point. Principles must be clear and straightforward, as well as self-evident, at least when referring to first principles. Matters get more complex, however, when dealing with 1) application of the basic principles, 2) exceptions, and 3) errors. A quick glance at St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (or any other of Aquinas’s treatises) illustrates this. Chesterton related in his sketch of Aquinas an anecdote about a woman who read Aquinas’s treatise on the simplicity of God and remarked that if that was God’s simplicity she certainly didn’t want to know about His complexity.
Take, for example, justice. The fundamental principle of justice is to render to each what each is due. That sounds simple enough but applying it in the real world can get a little complicated at times.
In commutative justice, the justice of contracts, a debt of five dollars must be paid with five dollars or the value thereof. A five-dollar bill is obviously worth five dollars and settles the debt . . . or does it? In the United States from 1862 to 1878, a five-dollar bill was not considered as having the same as gold or silver coin in the amount of five dollars. Earlier, when private banks of issue were not connected by a central bank (as was the case from 1837 to 1863), a five-dollar bill from Bank A was highly unlikely to have the same value as a five-dollar bill from Bank B.
Or take the problem of adjudicating the law in the Roman Empire before Justinian’s codification. It was a principle of Roman law that a case be judged according to the law of someone’s tribe or nation. Recall what seems to us the bizarre complexity of Jesus’s trial before Pilate. Jesus was a Jew accused of breaking a Roman law, a political offense trumped up because the Priests, Scribes and Pharisees wanted to condemn Jesus for breaking a religious law (claiming to be the Son of God) . . . which was not a capital offense under Roman law, and the Jews could not condemn someone for a political or legal offense as the Romans had reserved judgment in those cases to themselves. Note how quickly Pilate tried to palm the case off on to Herod the moment he found out that Jesus was from Galilee, which put Him under Herod’s jurisdiction . . . which would not have satisfied the Priests, Scribes and Pharisees as Herod could not sentence Jesus to death, at least legally. Not that the Romans would have made a fuss about it unless it became “official,” as it had in Jesus’s case. John the Baptist was off the Roman radar and Herod could have him killed without any political repercussions. Later Roman law is filled with complex opinions in which judges had to decide first which law code applied before they could even try the case, e.g., a Gothic Roman committed what would have been a minor offense under Gothic law in a Burgundian Roman town against a Frankish Roman who considered it a major offense under Salic law. Which law code applies?
And that is just applying a principle. Allowed exceptions become even more complex, e.g., the matter of usury. Usury means taking a profit where no profit is due, so a loan of money as money should not bear interest, where a loan of money for investment must bear interest as the lender’s just share of profits from a productive enterprise as a fundamental right of private property.
What about a loan of money to the government to permit the government to keep functioning? No one will voluntarily lend to government unless the loan bears interest, but government is not a productive enterprise (or isn’t supposed to be). An exception is therefore allowed for necessary loans to the government under the principle of double effect. Since taking a profit is not objectively evil, and the common good would suffer extreme, possibly irreparable harm if the government cannot function due to lack of money, lending to government at interest is permitted as the lesser of two evils.
What about unallowed exceptions or errors? This is the case with the New Things of modernism, socialism, and the New Age. The fundamental principles themselves are changed or reinterpreted to mean something new and often revolutionary. Forms of justice are abolished or redefined, while virtues are merged and confused. In order to explain or even deal with the situation effectively, it is often necessary first to discover the error, understand it, then “back out of it” before getting to the correct principle and applying it. This as you noted, is far from succinct and lucid, but absolutely essential if one is attempting to understand the real world which is far from neat and tidy, rarely permitting a clear and simple application of a basic principle.