by
Damien F. Mackey
“My research
and writing aims to alert as many Australians as possible to the political
challenges facing Western civilisation: to see the overall, to understand the
seriousness of the situation. A clear and present danger has emerged. We can no
longer afford to take the advantages of our civilisation for granted.”
Mark Latham
Various politicians, journalists and
teachers in Australia today are desperately trying to defend so-called ‘Western
Civilisation’. Right at the forefront of these is senior research fellow at the
Australian Catholic University, Dr. Kevin Donnelly: “Students are taught about
the dark side of Western civilisation … [but] indigenous culture and history
are always positive”.
Some of these have been calling for - in
the face of Islamic terrorism and left wing subversion - a return to rationalism,
to what they consider to be ‘the values of the Enlightenment’.
The former Prime Minister of Australia,
Tony Abbott, is one of these:
“All of those things that Islam has never had —
a Reformation, an Enlightenment, a well-developed concept of the separation of
church and state — that needs to happen,” he told Sky News. …. “All cultures
are not equal and, frankly, a culture that believes in decency and tolerance is
much to be preferred to one which thinks that you can kill in the name of God,
and we’ve got to be prepared to say that”.
No one is permitted to “kill in the
name of God”, that is for sure.
However, militant
Islam is not the only culture that can perpetrate mass killings.
What about the terrorism of
the millions of abortions being performed in the West?
“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
is under fire from faith leaders
after he signed a bill into law that legalizes abortion up until birth in many
cases. The Democratic governor directed the One World Trade Center and other
landmarks to be lit in pink … to celebrate the passage of "Reproductive
Health Act".” “Our governor and legislative leaders hail this new
abortion law as progress. This is not progress”, the bishops wrote. “Progress
will be achieved when our laws and our culture once again value and respect
each unrepeatable gift of human life, from the first moment of creation to
natural death”.
Ours is not always “a culture that
believes in decency and tolerance”?
Pope Francis has also denounced gossip as ‘form of terrorism’: ‘The tongue kills like a knife,’ the
pontiff told Catholic faithful at an audience in the Vatican. Gossip, too, can
waste people, though it is obviously a more subtle form of killing than when
one shouting “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic: الله أكبر), and wielding a serrated knife and the
Koran, beheads an ‘infidel’ in our very streets.
But even that
is too subtle for the left-wing media that cannot detect any sort of motive in this.
Another
Enlightenment favouring, Western civilisation defender is Mark Latham, a former
leader of the Australian Labor Party. Latham regards the Enlightenment as a
deliverance from the “primitive superstitions” of previous centuries and the
arrival at such knowledge as “could give
mankind a comprehensive mastery over nature”:
THE
RADICAL LEFT-WING ATTACK ON WESTERN CIVILISATION
…. I worry that Australia is
sleep walking its way to disaster. Political correctness, identity politics and
cultural Marxism have run through our institutions at an astonishing rate. There’s
not enough public awareness of where these changes have come from and what they
mean for the future. Media headlines focus on each controversy in isolation.
But we need to understand the overall pattern.
The Left has launched a
cultural invasion of Australia based on the concept of ‘fluidity’. Everything
we thought was fixed in our understanding of the world – such as recorded
history, science, national allegiance, gender, sexuality and even the words of
everyday language – is now said to be open for reinterpretation and revision.
Under the influence of
post-modernism, the Left claims these basic forms of knowledge are actually
‘capitalist constructs’, the equivalent of brainwashing to make us support the
existing social and political order. In pushing this line through our
institutions, traditional Australian values are being lost. We are no longer a
nation of free speech and meritocracy, the land of the fair go.
Yes, our politics has changed,
our culture is under siege and many Australians are thoroughly confused by
what’s happening around them. But it’s even worse than that. The Leftist drive
for ‘fluidity’ is actually an attack on our civilisation. It’s an attempt to
wind back many of the gains of the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment.
If you take one thing away
from reading this article, hopefully this is it. My research and writing aims
to alert as many Australians as possible to the political challenges facing
Western civilisation: to see the overall, to understand the seriousness of the
situation. A clear and present danger has emerged. We can no longer afford to
take the advantages of our civilisation for granted.
Coming out of the Middle Ages,
a new era of reason and scientific progress propelled Western nations to
unprecedented levels of economic development, consumer comfort and advanced
health care and education. The primitive superstitions of earlier centuries
were left behind, replaced by a conviction that knowledge drawn from experience
and evidence could give mankind a comprehensive mastery over nature.
These advances made important
social goals possible. It was hoped that democratic government would sweep away
feudal hierarchies and entrench the universal freedoms of political expression,
association and participation. So too, the welfare state was designed to give
people freedom from want, illness and ignorance. A new age of technology and
creativity had the potential to uplift the quality of work, community and
intellectual life – a genuine enlightenment.
Everywhere we look in
Australia today, these values and gains are under attack. Reason and
rationality are being lost, replaced by the march of ‘fluidity’. ….
[End of quote]
Both Western Civilisation and the Enlightenment
might prove somewhat hard to define, or to pinpoint. For example, when,
precisely, did the Era of the Enlightenment begin?
There is little consensus on the precise beginning of
the Age of Enlightenment.
And, again, is Australia a Western civilisation?
Certainly not geographically speaking, at least, as
we live in an Asian part of the world.
|
Almost every time that we read the newspaper or listen to the news on
TV or radio we see or hear the West mentioned. Until a few years ago its
mention was apt to be in connection with some military initiative in
opposition to the Soviet Union and her allies. Currently it is more likely to
be about some economic problem or program.
And although the news media seldom take the trouble to define the word
West, it is not difficult to figure out what they mean by it. Unfortunately,
for them the term signifies no more than a political or economic bloc, the
United States, the European Community, some other European countries, such as
Scandinavia or Austria, and a few countries in Asia or the Pacific such as
Australia and New Zealand. And because the media's notion of the West is
repeated so often, many of us begin to see the West chiefly in their terms:
the West is nothing but a political or economic bloc committed to certain
things, chiefly democracy and freedom, conceived principally as freedom for
moneymaking and pleasure seeking, and, till recently, organized to defend
itself against another bloc of nations that wished to destroy or inhibit that
freedom. Of course there is occasionally some mention of "historical
values" or such, that are seen to be at the bottom of the unity of the
West, but in our media's conception these are so ethereal as to mean little
besides an adherence to representative democracy and a minimum of restraints
on conduct. With abortion legal in nearly every one of these countries, they
surely do not include a respect for human dignity!
Because the public and civic life of Western nations shows no deeper
unity than a superficial political and economic likeness, most publicists and
commentators assume that that is all there is to the West, at least today.
It is merely a group of nations with some sort of common historical
background, but sharing nothing important now but a commitment to preserving
its freedom for materialistic and hedonistic pursuits.
But is this all there is to the West?
Is it only a grouping of nations seeking to preserve the material
goods and worldly pleasures they possess? Although I think that many
Catholics in the West know that our civilization is much more than this, yet
we too are affected by the media's conceptions and for that reason are apt to
forget just what Western culture really is and what gives it its unity. For
example, many of us follow the common practice of classifying Latin America
and such eastern European nations as Poland and Hungary as non-Western,
clearly an historical absurdity. In this essay, then, I intend to set forth some
of the basis for the West's historic unity, a unity that is still important
for us today.
How do we discover the ultimate basis of the unity of the West?
Jacques Maritain captured the essence of the West in one sentence, when he
wrote that the Greek people "may be truly termed the organ of the reason
and word of man as the Jewish people was the organ of the revelation and word
of God." [An Introduction
to Philosophy, London:
Sheed and Ward, 1947, p. 33].
The West then is nothing but a rich fusion of the word of God and the
word of man, all that our culture has received from God by way of revelation
and all that we have received by way of the exercise of reason. The former,
the theological content of Western culture, comes from the revelation God made
to the Chosen People—to Abraham, Moses and others under the Old Law,
culminating in the coming of God himself as man. And though the final form of
this theological content is in Catholic doctrine, its origins lie in the Old
Testament covenant of God with the Hebrew people. ….
[End of quote]
|
Thomas Storck’s concise definition of “the theological content of
Western culture”, originating in the Old Testament and reaching its fulfilment
in the New Testament, makes a clear statement. Not so Dr. Kevin Donnelly’s
uncharacteristic lapse when he, on one occasion, completely by-passes the Old
Testament. His summation of the origins of Western democracy - after having
noted that all cultures have their own religion - is this: “In Western liberal
democracy, such as Australia, it is Christianity and the New Testament”.
Yet how many Catholics would not bat an eyelid when reading or hearing such
a statement? Might some of these be perfectly content with just a New
Testament, not appreciating that the ‘Jesus Christ’ they purport to follow was
utterly steeped in Old Testament culture?
I intend to give examples of this Old Testament cultural influence in
the course of this article.
The Rich Young Man
Pope John Paul II dedicated a whole chapter to this famous Gospel
encounter (CHAPTER I - "TEACHER, WHAT GOOD MUST I DO...?" (Mt 19:16) -
Christ and the answer to the question about morality) in his rousing encyclical (6th August,
1993), Veritatis Splendor (“The
Splendour of Truth”), a chapter essentially metaphysical, about “the absolute Good”,
and also “moral theology”:
7. "Then someone
came to him...". In the young man, whom Matthew's Gospel does not
name, we can recognize every person who, consciously or not, approaches
Christ the Redeemer of man and questions him about morality. For the young
man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about
the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of
every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting
which sets freedom in motion. This question is ultimately an appeal to the
absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is the echo of a call from
God who is the origin and goal of man's life. Precisely in this perspective the
Second Vatican Council called for a renewal of moral theology, so that its
teaching would display the lofty vocation which the faithful have received in
Christ,14 the only response fully capable of satisfying the
desire of the human heart.
The suggestion will be proposed here that the response by Jesus to the
young man is only properly intelligible when considered in the context of the
Old Testament and Mosaïc Law – Moses invariably being Jesus’s very starting-point
for explaining “himself” (Luke 24:27): “And beginning with
Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the
Scriptures concerning himself”.
This is not necessarily the typically Catholic approach.
Quite recently a very good Dominican priest - one who often manages to
explain in simple fashion the meaning of somewhat obscure Gospel passages -
preached a sermon on this text in which he greatly lamented the young man’s
turning away from Jesus as a sadly missed opportunity in the young man’s life journey
with the virtual implication that this was when he stepped right away from the path
of salvation.
What that explanation misses, just to begin with, is that the young man
was habitually a fervent keeper of God’s commandments (Matthew 19:20).
148. Was the
Rich Young Ruler Barnabas?
When Jesus spoke of the difficulty for
the rich to find a place in the kingdom of God, his disciples, utterly
astonished, asked: "Who then can be saved?"
As they saw it, if a man with all the
advantages of ease and comfort could not prove himself worthy of everlasting
life, what dope was there for those beset with all the cares of a life of toil
and anxiety? And was not material prosperity the outward sign of God's
blessing? So surely the scales were loaded in favour of the rich.
Jesus answered: "With men it is impossible (that the rich should be
saved), but not with God: for with God all things are possible"- which
surely means that God has the power to save even the rich whose wealth is
actually such a big spiritual handicap.
Honesty
But this rich man had chosen to go away
from Jesus, and so this saying that God has the power to save even the rich was
left hanging in mid-air, so to speak-unless He proceeded to do just that with
this earnest young man who said: 'No, you are asking too much, Jesus. I cannot
do what you require of me.' In this fact, then, there is surely good presumptive
evidence that ultimately God did save this rich man, in vindication of Christ's
assertion that God can save even a rich man in love with his riches.
The ominous saying with which this
incident concluded is also worth pondering here: "many that are first
shall be last; and the last first." The first phrase was a palpable
warning to the privileged twelve, the one of whom (Mk.14:10 RVm.) was to become
last of all. But who was the last one who was to be given a place among the
first?
It is to be noted that, whatever else,
this would-be disciple did not lack honesty. Unlike so many of Christ's more
recent disciples, he did not somehow manage to persuade himself that "Sell
all that thou hast and distribute to the poor" really meant something else
less exacting and a great deal easier of achievement. When a man is frank and
honest regarding the demands of Christ there is hope for him, even though his
response be inadequate. But when he succeeds in throwing dust in his own eyes
so as to persuade himself that he is fulfilling the Lord's commands, when
really he is doing nothing of the sort, he is in dire spiritual danger.
A Levite
It makes an intriguing study in
circumstantial evidence to bring together the various lines of argument which
support, without completely proving the conclusion that this young man was
Barnabas, who later became Paul's companion in travel.
First, it is possible to go a long way
towards establishing that this rich ruler was a Levite (as, of course, Barnabas
was; Acts 4:36).
Many readers of the
gospels have mused over the fact that Jesus quoted to his enquirer the second
half of the Decalogue-those commandments which have to do with duty to one's
neighbour. Why did he not quote the others (more important, surely) which
concern a man's duty to God? But if indeed this enquirer were a Levite, then by
virtue of his calling, the first half of the Decalogue would find fulfilment
almost as a matter of course.
It is also worth noting
perhaps —though not too much stress should be put on this-that apparently it
was when Jesus was near to Jericho that the rich young ruler came to him; and
at that time, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows, Jericho was a
Levitical city.
Much more emphatic is the fact that apparently Jesus did not require of other
disciples that they "sell all, and give to the poor, and come and
follow him." Once again, if the man were a Levite, all is clear, for
"Lev! hath no portion nor inheritance with his brethren; the Lord is his
inheritance " (Dt.10:9).
Thus a Levite with a
large estate was a contradiction in terms, and when Jesus bade him be rid of
this wealth, he was merely calling him back to loyalty to other precepts in the
Law of Moses. Barnabas, it is interesting to observe, was a Levite of Cyprus.
So apparently the letter of the Law was observed by his owning no property in
Israel. The "inheritance" Moses wrote about was, of course, in the
land of Promise. So that estate in Cyprus was a neat circumvention of the
spirit of the Mosaic covenant, and now Jesus bade him recognize it as such.
Jesus went on to quote also from Moses'
great prophecy concerning the tribe of Levi: "There is no man that hath
left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or
children, or lands, for my sake and the gospel's, but he shall receive an
hundredfold now in this time ..." In spirit, and also in detail, this is
very much like Deuteronomy 33:8,9: "And of Levi he said, Let thy Thummim
(' If thou wouldst be perfect. . .') and thy Urim be with thy holy
one . . . who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not
seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children
.. ."
Even more impressive is the Lord's
demand that this earnest seeker sell all and come and follow him, for this is
exactly what the Law prescribed when a Levite wished to give himself to
full-time service of the sanctuary (Dt. 18 :6-8). There must be first "the
sale of his patrimony," and the devotion of the proceeds to the sanctuary.
Instead of the temple Jesus substituted his own poor disciples, the new temple
of God. But this was to be done only if the Levite came "with all the
desire of his mind."
Perhaps also there is special
significance in the fact that when Jesus quoted the Commandments he put one of
them in the form: "Defraud not" (Mk.10:19), as though with reference
to the commandment forbidding the withholding of the wages due to a poor
employee (Dt.24:14,15). But it could refer to the dutiful devotion of one's
resources to the honour of God, a responsibility specially incumbent on a
Levite who rejoiced in excessive wealth. ….
[End of quote]
This explanation
really serves to make full biblical sense of the famous encounter.
None of it, though,
is likely to impress the sort of Catholics, as mentioned above, who are disdainful
of the Old Testament. Or those who eschew Vatican II with its timely call for
us to study all of the Scriptures (Dei
Verbum), and to seek a closer relationship with the Jewish people (Nostra Aetate), who are much closer than
we to the teachings of Moses.
“Dei Verbum quotes one of the greatest Bible Scholars of the Early Church, St.
Jerome to emphasize the need of all Christians to become intimately familiar
with Scripture: “Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ”.”
“There is of course a tremendous amount of history,
doctrine, and moral instruction in Scripture. But the deepest truth about
Scripture is this – it is a privileged place where we encounter God and where
He speaks a living, personal, life-changing word to us. “For in the sacred
books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and
speaks with them.” (DV 21)”.
Fr. Nadim Nassar
describes it as “shocking”, when “the culture of God” comes into contact with
the “culture of the people”. He, the Church of England’s only Syrian priest,
urges a theme in his recent book, The
Culture of God – the Syrian Jesus (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018), that has been
a central theme in various article of mine. Nassar is “an outspoken advocate
for Western Christians to recognise the Middle-Eastern roots of their faith”.
Actually, this is
nothing new. Eighty years before Fr. Nassar wrote his book, pope Pius XI, addressing
a group of Belgian pilgrims (1938),
asserted that: “Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are
all Semites”.
Again, this is
right in line with Thomas Storck’s conclusion (refer back again to p. 5), based
on the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, that “the theological
content of Western culture” originates in the Old Testament and reaches its
fulfilment in the New Testament.
Judaeo-Christian thus
sums up much of the early basis of our Western Civilisation.
Maritain’s other
side of the equation for the essence of
the West, the supposed Greek influence: “the Greek people "may be truly
termed the organ of the reason and word of man as the Jewish people was the
organ of the revelation and word of God", may need to be seriously reconsidered,
we think, in light of various Patristic statements that the Greeks owed their
wisdom to the Hebrews.
“What is Plato but
Moses in Attic Greek?” St. Clement (Stromateis,
I, 22)
St.
Clement believed that Sirach
(c. 200 BC, conventional dating) had influenced the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus (c.
500 BC, conventional dating).
Justin Martyr
insisted that not only Moses but all the prophets are older than any poets,
wise men, or philosophers the Greeks can put forward.
“Moses is more
ancient than all Greek writers; and anything that philosophers and poets said …
they took as suggestions from the prophets and so were able to understand and
expound them …” (Apol. I.44).
St. Ambrose claimed that Plato (c. 400 BC, conventional dating)
had learned from Jeremiah (c.
600 BC, conventional dating) in Egypt;
a belief that was initially taken up by Augustine.
We submit that the statement by Plato in The Republic (II.362a): “… our
just man will be scourged, racked, fettered … and at last, after all manner of
suffering, will be crucified”, could only have been written during the Christian era.
“When the culture
of God reaches us, the inevitable result is that it shakes our world; sometimes
it is like a hurricane or an earthquake”. (Nassar, p. 180)
Jesus Christ, who
had come to set all things right, was wont to say (e.g. Matthew 5:21, 22): ‘You
have heard that it was said to the people long ago …. But I tell
you …’.
The
first part of this statement refers to the received cultural view of
long-standing.
Fr. Nassar
describes this as follows (p. 180): “For all of us, we organise our world
around ourselves according to what we have been taught, with ‘in’ and ‘out’,
friends and enemies, right and wrong, values and vices and so on”. He then goes
on to describe the second part of Jesus’s statement: “What a shock when God
breaks into our lives and sweeps our
ordering of the world aside like a house of
cards, and says to us, ‘This is not what I want from you’.”
Whilst there is a
meek and mild side to Jesus, he can also be, according to Fr. Nassar’s
description, “a volcanic Jesus” (p.
10):
In
Matthew 23 Jesus launches a series of fierce attacks on [the Pharisees and
scribes]: ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves,
and when others are going in, you stop them.’ (23:13)
Along with “volcanic”
fury, Fr.
Nassar also discerns a humour (“funny”) and irony (“ironic”) in this statement of Jesus that he
thinks Levantine people at least would pick up.
He continues (pp.
10-11):
This saying of Jesus belongs to the essence of the culture of God; here,
Jesus is being both ironic and funny, and his audience would have laughed when
they heard this. Jesus wanted to speak the truth that touches the people’s
hearts on the one hand, and on the other, to really strike the leaders. This is
how Jesus handled his earthly culture and the culture of God. Nobody now
listens to this sentence and smiles – but in the Levant, you would immediately
laugh at Jesus’ irony.
Jesus then attacks the religious leaders for their flawed understanding
of what is sacred: ‘Woe, to you, blind guides, who say, “Whoever swears by the
sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary
is bound by the oath.” You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the
sanctuary that has made the gold sacred?’ (23:16-17). Here, Jesus is not only
using harsh words – this is also an exceptional way of speaking that Jesus used
exclusively when he spoke to or about the religious leaders. He did it on
purpose, to show without any doubt that the leadership they modelled does not
belong in any way to the culture of God.
Jesus is furious with the religious leaders because they place great
weight on minor matters while ignoring what really counts; he calls them
hypocrites, ‘For you tithe mint, dill and cummin, and have neglected the
weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith’ (23:23). Hypocrisy
is especially loathed in the Levant, and an accusation of hypocrisy would stain
someone’s character. ….
[End of quote]
On pp. 179-180, Fr.
Nassar tells of the profound impact of the culture of God on his own life.
“I feel that my
experiences resonate strongly with Peter’s experience in Joppa”:
From birth I was indoctrinated by the state to follow a certain
ideology, with a view on who were friends and who were enemies ingrained in my
heart. I could not see beyond what had been planted in me. When I went through
the Civil War in Lebanon, I was forced to challenge my preconceptions and
prejudices …. It took a fresh life in a new world to melt the barriers like
snow inside me under the light of God. Seeking the culture of God helped me to
liberate my soul from the bondage of the past and to shake off the chains.
I feel that my experiences resonate strongly with Peter’s experience in
Joppa. Peter was proud of his upbringing and his religion, and how he practised
it, to the extent that he did not hesitate to boast about it even to God.
Here Fr. Nassar is
referring to Acts 10:9-16. He continues:
We must remember that all the disciples had been raised as Jews, hating
the Samaritans and looking down on all ‘outsiders’, and they found it hard to
grasp the consequences of the work of the Spirit when this conflicted with a
lifelong obedience to rules of ritual cleanliness.
Despite all his experiences of the universality of the gospel, here is
the old Peter, slow to respond to the full implications of Pentecost. In place
of the culture of God, he is still proudly stuck in the old Law – dividing the
world into those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’. The response of the Lord
in the visions reveals the full implications of his culture: ‘What God has made
clean, you must not call profane’. This encounter is a window into the culture
of God, which challenges Peter when he was boasting about his observation of
the Law and confronts him with the true nature of the culture of God, which is
all-inclusive, celebrating diversity and excluding no one. We know the will of
God only through a relationship with him, not through a set of written rules.
[End of quotes]
As
in the Joppa incident with St. Peter, the culture of God has again impacted the
Church “like
a hurricane or an earthquake” in the era of
Vatican II. To recall Fr. Nassar again: “What a shock when God breaks into
our lives and sweeps our ordering of the
world aside like a house of cards, and
says to us, ‘This is not what I want from you’.”
Pope Francis said
last October in his trip to the Baltic states:
“What needs to be done today
is to accompany the church in a deep spiritual renewal. I believe the Lord
wants a change in the church. I have said many times that a perversion of the
church today is clericalism. But fifty years ago, the Second Vatican
Council said this clearly: the church is the People of God. Read number 12
of Lumen gentium. I know that the Lord wants the council to make headway
in the church. Historians tell us that it takes a hundred years for a
council to be applied. We are halfway there. So, if you want to help me, do whatever
it takes to move the council forward in the church. And help me with your
prayer. I need so many prayers.”
There
are many Catholics who, like St. Peter at Joppa, resistant of change - “Peter
was proud of his upbringing and his religion, and how he practised it, to
the extent that he did not hesitate to boast about it even to God” - have not
wholeheartedly (or not all) embraced Vatican II, finding “it hard to grasp the
consequences of the work of the Spirit …”.
The culture of man, when motivated by any poisonous
agenda, can also be “shocking”.
Fr. Nassar, fully grasping the significance of
Simon the Pharisee’s treatment of Our Lord (that might be underestimated by
someone from a Western culture without sufficient sensitivity towards Middle
Eastern behaviour) writes on p. 123:
The shocking thing about this story is that Simon invited Jesus to his
home in order to show him that he thought he was Jesus’ superior; he meant to
degrade and offend him. If we know anything about Levantine culture, we know that
it could never be an accident for an invited guest to be treated so offensively
with such a clear and ostentatious display of a lack of hospitality.
On p. 183, Fr. Nassar even makes
a statement about the West and the Enlightenment:
The
dilemma of the early Church is still in the Levant today. In the West, the
secular world has also permeated Christian beliefs, especially the
Enlightenment and its focus on reason, which pushed Christianity into becoming
an intellectual exercise, losing the warmth of the heart. Spirituality is now
left to those on the verges of faith. ….
(Whittaker
Chambers, in ‘COLD FRIDAY’, 1964, pp.
225, 226).
"I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as
if it were at least a cultural unity against communism. But the West is
divided, not only politically, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are
the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other
side is the enlightened, articulate elite which to one degree or other has
rejected the religious roots of the civilization ‑ the roots without which it
is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and
mandates. In short, this is the order of which communism is one logical expression. Not originating in Russia, but in the cultural capitals of the
West, reaching Russia by clandestine delivery via the old underground centres
in Cracow, Vienna, Berne, Zurich and
Geneva. It is a Western
body of beliefs that now threatens the West from-Russia. As a body of
Western beliefs: secular, materialistic, and rationalistic, the intelligentsia
of the West share it, and are
therefore always committed to a secret, emotional complicity with communism, of which they dislike, not the communism, but only what, by
chance of history, Russia has specially added to it: slave-labour camps,
purges, MVD et alia. And that, not because the Western intellectuals find them
unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them. If they
could have communism without the brutalities of overlording that the Russian
experience bred, they have only marginal objections. Why should they object?
What else is Socialism but Communism with the claws retracted? (Note retracted,
not removed)."
A Plato (Cave) – Aristotle (Light) Divide?
American popular
historian, Arthur Herman, a writer of boundless knowledge, has written an
intriguing book, The Cave and the Light. Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul
of Western Civilization (Random House, 2014), according to which
the last 2000 or more years are to be divided between the supremacy of the
thought of Plato, or that of Aristotle. It is truly amazing how Herman is able
to show how the thinking of Plato was uppermost in one era, whilst that of
Aristotle prevailed in another.
The trouble is,
who was Plato? Who was Aristotle?
If, as according
to St. Ambrose, Plato really was in Egypt with the prophet Jeremiah - which,
chronologically, the classical Plato could not possibly have been - then the
likeliest candidate for ‘Plato’ so-called would have to be Jeremiah’s disciple
in Egypt, the Jewish scribe, Baruch, a true proficient of wisdom (Baruch
3:9-4:4).
What may strengthen
this somewhat is that, according to tradition, Baruch was the religious (philosophical)
founder, Zoroaster.
Anyway, ‘not to
let truth get in the way of a good story’, let us read a bit of what Arthur
Herman has written, through a reviewer, Bill Frezza:
Like many an engineer who got nary a whiff of a liberal education, I’ve
spent the last 35 years trying to make up for it through my own reading.
Charting a course through history, economics, and literature has been
relatively easy. But making sense of the conflicting schools of philosophy
without a roadmap has been vexing—until the right book came along to finally
help put all the pieces in place.
For the first of these 900 years, the Schools of Athens laid the foundation
of Western thinking, with Plato’s Academy becoming the model for every
monastery, university, and totalitarian regime.
Meanwhile, Aristotle’s legacy bequeathed to us capitalism, the scientific
method, and the American Revolution.
As history has ebbed and flowed, we’ve seen the influence of each school
wax and wane. Plato’s theory of decline and yearning for a vanished utopia
informed the inward turning of European societies following the collapse of the
Roman Empire
—“the Cave”—while Aristotle’s faith in human potential and vision for continual
progress fueled the Renaissance and Enlightenment—“the Light”. Along the way,
Herman lays out the contributions of subsequent philosophers, who echoed one or
the other of these themes, both through their teachings and through the deeds
of the societies that embraced them.
One of the book’s most important threads is the impact these two schools
had on the evolution of Christianity, including the Catholic Church’s efforts
to harmonize faith and reason and the relative importance of good works in this
life vs. entry into the next. The balance tips back and forth from Augustine to
Aquinas, culminating in the rupture of the Protestant Reformation, before we
are carried through to Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic.
But this is no dry pedantic tome! Herman makes the journey fun, as he
weaves a captivating narrative of thought and action and puts the ethos of the
key players in historical context. His treatment of Aristotle’ greatest
student, the scientist-warrior Archimedes, comes to life in his account of the
epic defense of Syracuse, complete with monstrous war machines plucking Roman
ships into the air and tossing them about like toys. Might there be a Hollywood
blockbuster waiting to be made here?
But the heart and soul of the book, providing enough food for thought to
last a lifetime, is the contrast of Platonic excess and Aristotelian hubris.
The former gave us not just sublime art, but also tyrants from Robespierre to
Adolf Hitler. The latter gave us not only Adam Smith and the industrial
revolution, but also the atom bomb.
Herman’s delineation of the difference between a subjective reality crafted
by elites, vs. an objective reality informed by direct observation is
punctuated by a brilliant quote from Benito Mussolini: “It is not necessary
that men move mountains, only that other men believe they moved them.”
Thus, Plato’s “noble lie” through which rulers control producers leads to Josef
Goebbels’s “big lie.”
While it’s clear that the author is a champion of Aristotle’s reason,
liberty, and Athenian democracy against Plato’s call to faith, Spartan
obedience, and rule by philosopher-kings, he sounds an important warning about
the “fatal conceit,” to which Aristotle’s heirs often succumb, citing the work
of F. A. Hayek, an important thinker though not normally included in the
pantheon of philosophers. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to
men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
And then at the end of the book, rather than indulge in a bout of
Aristotelian triumphalism, Herman leaves the door open for Plato’s leavening
influence. Perhaps Herman believes there really is something ineffable out
there—or he has taken to heart the advice of Voltaire, who did not believe in
God but hoped his valet did “so he won’t steal my spoons.”
Read it yourself and be the judge.
