Newman 101

Newman 101: An Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of John Cardinal Newman, by Roderick Strange, Christian Classics, 2008.

 

John Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) is one of the most prominent figures in nineteenth-century English Catholicism, but like many great religious notables, his life and work remain sadly underappreciated by the broader public today.  Roderick Strange’s book is meant to give the broader public a new appreciation of a brilliant and fascinating man, as well as the relevance of his thoughts and philosophy on contemporary society.

 

Strange did an excellent job in selecting his title.  This is first and foremost an introduction to Newman’s life and work.  Using the college-course-like title Newman 101 illustrates that this ought to be only the first of many books consulted by the individual who wants to learn more about Newman.  By emphasizing the introductory nature of this book, Strange wisely forestalls the sharpest criticism that could justifiably be leveled against this book, namely that it provides only a basic overview of Newman’s biography and major writings, and needs to a lot more to put Newman’s ideas and controversies in their full social and historical context, as well as analyze and explain Newman’s writings thoroughly.  These are valid points, but addressing them properly might fill volumes of tomes, and Newman 101 is meant to be a quick but informative read.

 

Those who are already familiar with Newman’s life will therefore find a fair amount of things they already know in Newman 101, but Strange’s personal reflections on Newman’s relevance ought to make this book worth reading for even the most confirmed Newman experts.  As for Newman novices, Newman 101 provides a concise, readable, and easy to understand look at a complex and compelling figure.

 

Strange wisely opens his book with a brief overview of Newman’s life.  Newman believed that he was destined to devote his life to religion from an early age, and at first he began his religious vocation in the Anglican Church in which he was raised.  As time passed and he wrestled increasingly with theological doctrines, historical interpretations, and moral questions; Newman decided to convert to the Roman Catholic Church.  Not surprisingly, this decision came at a major price.  Many of Newman’s Anglican former colleagues were scandalized, and Newman’s conversion was often treated as a temporary passing whimsy, an opinion that never ceased to annoy Newman himself.  Newman dealt with numerous career annoyances and even a lawsuit that he lost only because of another person’s carelessness, but eventually Newman gained a level of prestige and respect he had thought he would never attain when he was appointed a cardinal.

 

Furthermore, Strange notes that Newman needs to be viewed as both a major Catholic intellectual and one of England’s greatest intellectual minds.  All too often, Newman has been classified as one or the other over the decades, and Strange suggests that Newman’s influence in the Oxford Movement is often under-recognized because of his Catholic identity.  It is unfair, Strange argues, to rank Newman as a second-tier figure in English intellectual life because of the perceived “outsider” nature of his religion.  Oppositely, some critics have habitually downplayed Newman’s spiritual side when they applaud his intellect.  The need to secularize Newman in order to praise him is confounding and abhorrent to Strange.

 

The book’s brief chapters each contain compelling capsule summaries of major aspects of Newman’s life and career.  The first two chapters are biographical.  One revolves around Strange’s own religious education and the formative influence that Newman had upon him.  The next summarizes Newman’s life and major works.  Most of the remaining chapters take a look at Newman’s views on contentious or confusing topics.  Papal infallibility, Marian devotion, the role of the laity, and ecumenicalism all receive thoughtful attention in Strange’s chapters.  

 

One way that the book could have been enriched would be if there was a chapter addressing Newman’s critics over the years.  There are frequent instances where Strange lists charges leveled against Newman by Protestant contemporaries who felt betrayed, as well as Newman’s own responses to this hostility, but it would have been interesting to see Strange address the early twentieth-century attacks on Newman, such as Lytton Strachey’s snide caricatures, as well as more recent attempts by various pundits and activists to twist Newman into an instrument for their own non-traditional views on culture and religion, regardless of the lack of evidence to support such usurpations of the man and his work.

 

Although a many of Newman’s books and major articles are mentioned in this study, further details on the contents of each one, coupled with the circumstances and intellectual and social atmosphere of the time, might have also helped further readers’ understanding of Newman’s work and influence.  Furthermore, Strange understandably strives to keep his book from becoming argumentative or polemical, but Newman has been misrepresented and misinterpreted so many times over the years that more detailed explanations of why these views are wrong, flawed, or at least dubious might have added a fuller understanding of the man and his influence.  Strange does address such issues on numerous occasions (and does so with dispassionate clarity), but this is a case where more would probably have been better.

 

Strange inserts a fair amount of his own life and biography into his book, explaining how he was first introduced to Newman’s work, how he came to study Newman in depth, and how Newman has shaped his own spiritual outlook and career choices.  Monsignor Strange serves as Beda College’s rector in Rome, directing vocations, and he has also worked throughout England as a priest and chaplain.  Strange’s personal journey with Newman is definitely enlightening, but some additional stories about the various other people who have been shaped intellectually by Newman might also have been fascinating.

 

Indeed, it is the personal touch that Strange inserts into his writing that truly makes Newman 101 indispensable.  Many literary and biographical studies are utterly flat and uninvolving due to their inability to connect to the material.  When Strange writes, however, we can see how Newman has shaped the trajectory of one man’s mind and career.  We see more than just a disconnected criticism to the source material, we see conclusive evidence that Newman remain relevant and capable of influencing people over a century after his death. 

 

If this book provokes the desired responses in its readers, after finishing Newman 101, people will want to find out more about the great man and his legacy.  Any of Newman’s own books will be superb resources for curious readers (his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine are excellent places to start), and there are many other fine critical and biographical works on Newman (Fr. Stanley L. Jaki’s Newman’s Challenge is an excellent analysis of how best to contextualize Newman’s philosophy and role in the broader debate over the state of contemporary culture, and a biography by Avery Robert Cardinal Dulles was recently published).  With Newman’s upcoming beatification and subsequent media coverage, it is certainly possible that a new wave of interest in Newman will emerge in the coming years.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005.

 

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. wrote How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization as a rebuttal to the prevalent version of history that denigrates the role of the Church in advancing Western culture.  In this worldview, Catholicism was at best a bastion of backwardness and at worst a malignant force of oppression and stagnation.  This thesis credits advances in science and society to the rise of secularism and skepticism.  It is a popular theory, and variants of it can be found in countless textbooks, documentaries, and forums for public discourse.  The main problem with it, Woods argues, is that it is completely false.

 

Woods laments the fact that the Catholic Church’s reputation is unjustly low in popular culture, noting that the average person’s connotations of the Catholic Church involve vague impressions of “corruption” and “oppression.”  In this version of history, the Catholic Church helped to drive the glorious and noble pagan Roman Empire into a centuries-long morass known as the Dark Ages, where intellectual pursuits were smothered, save for determining new and innovative ways to burn suspected witches.  This cesspool of an epoch finally started to crack with the Protestant Reformation, and the people of Europe finally knew freedom, high culture, intelligence, and technological innovation with the advent of the Enlightenment.  As the Church’s influence waned, civilization got better and better, leading up to the present day, which is unquestionably the apex of human history.

 

How could a conception of history this popular be so radically wrong?  As Woods argues, the vast majority of legitimate historians, even those who are not Catholic, realizes that the term “Dark Ages” is a complete misnomer.  Unfortunately, many writers who are not trained historians (Woods singles some of them out in his introduction) have produced widely read books that savage everything Catholicism-related.  The facts have rarely been allowed to get in the way of a good story, but Woods uses the facts to create an unfamiliar but compelling narrative.

 

It is through his readable prose and clear presentation of information that Woods attempts to appeal to a broad audience, since that is the only way that the popular culture might be transfigured.  Many of the cultural and social institutions that we enjoy today are due almost entirely to the efforts of the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church’s legacy, Woods insists, is one of intelligence, beauty, justice, and morality.  Woods admits that the Church has had many missteps and embarrassing incidents over the past two millennia, but that when all is put into context, the Church’s reputation ought to be overwhelmingly positive.

 

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is divided into topical chapters, each providing an overview of some way that the Church helped make the world a better place.  Each of these chapters is informative, and each of these chapters is much too short.  By rights, each chapter covers a sufficiently complex and interesting topic to fill a lengthy book (indeed, in many cases such books have thankfully been written).  Woods’ comparably short essays provide enough information to completely refute misconceptions and prove the Church’s beneficial influence, but hopefully many readers will feel compelled to study these subjects further.  Simultaneously, several portions of Woods’ book, such as the rise and fall of political dynasties, or the development of certain theological views, are written with the presumption that the reader already has a basic grasp of the era’s historical facts.  Sufficient background information is provided so that even the most historically illiterate reader should not have too much trouble following the narrative.

 

Woods addresses each subject with perception and verve.  One canard that he considers especially irksome is the perception that the Catholic Church did little to advance the cause of intellectual achievement.  Woods has no shortage of evidence to the contrary.   One early chapter, on the role of monks and their role in preserving and creating higher culture, illustrates how thousands of men devoted their lives to preserving information and developing technology.  Monasteries saved countless lives by developing more efficient farming and sanitation methods.  Furthermore, the university is an institution nurtured first and foremost by the Catholic Church, which oversaw essentially all of Europe’s education for centuries.

 

One of the most pernicious and utterly unfounded charges that is often leveled against the Catholic Church is that it is anti-science.  In one of the book’s best chapters, Woods brings up example after example to show just how many of the great scientists of history were Catholic priests, and how the Catholic Church funded scientific endeavors over the centuries.  Of particular interest is Woods’ comparison of the differences between Catholic and Muslim scientific research, and how both were heavily influenced by their starkly contrasting theologies about how the laws of nature connect to the power of an omnipotent God.  

 

A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to the most commonly cited incident used as proof of the Church’s hostility to science: the trial of Galileo.  In the commonly cited version, a brilliant scientist was crushed by a superstitious clergy that insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible.  The reality is quite different.  The Church was open to the idea of a heliocentric universe, but papal authorities insisted that heliocentrism be treated strictly as a theory until much more research had been done.  Galileo insisted that his ideas were accurate and was insulting to those who questioned him.  Galileo’s theories were actually flawed, since he believed that planetary orbits were perfectly circular, when in fact they are elliptical.  The Church may not have acted in the most judicious manner regarding the Galileo affair, but it was far from the reactionary villain that it is often caricatured as being.

 

Perhaps one of Woods’ sharpest arguments lies in his observations about how lost Western culture can become without the salutary influence of the Church.  One of the most self-evident arguments in favor of the positive influence of Catholicism on the culture is the role of religion in art.  When artists created painting and statues on religious themes, they created lasting works of beauty and inspiration.  Michelangelo’s Pieta alone contains more beauty and pathos than the collected holdings of many modern art museums combined.  When artists jettisoned the quest for glorifying God and honoring the lives of the saints in favor of an increasingly nihilist outlook, Woods argues, the art world began a precipitous descent from the sublime to the ridiculous.  

 

Woods cites the examples of the “artist” who signed his name to a urinal and passed it off as an exemplar of early twentieth-century avant-garde art, a well as the more recent example of the unmade bed filled with evidence of sexual activity becoming a cause célèbre. To this, Woods could have added some more famous examples, such as two recent winners of England’s most prestigious art prize. One is The Lights Go On and Off, consisting of a bare room where the lights are set to perform the action in the piece’s title– nothing else.  The other consists of a bunch of black garbage bags filled with air.  Reading about the critical acclaim slathered over exhibits like this is enough to make one pray that the contemporary art world finds religion soon.

 

Woods covers many other topics, all with balance and measured tones.  While many Western Civilization textbooks attribute contemporary Western and international law to non-Catholic intellectuals such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, Woods attributes many legal policies and processes to the theological influence of Catholicism and its thoughts on human dignity.  Furthermore, there is one achievement of the Catholic Church that has earned it respect from even its harshest detractors: charity.  The Catholic Church’s determination to help people regardless of whether or not they are members of their faith, and the sheer size and scope of their efforts, has been one of the Church’s most convincing recruiting tools.

 

The most problematic portion of the book may well be the conclusion, titled “A World Without God.”  This is unquestionably the most depressing chapter, since it focuses on the effects of rampant secularism in Europe, coupled with the historical amnesia that has led to the Church’s great achievements being forgotten by all but a handful of experts.  Woods seems to accept the common trope of “the post-Christian West,” which contends that Western culture has completely abandoned its religious roots, perhaps beyond the point of no return.  While Christianity’s role in public life has been considerably relegated, the perception that Western culture has had its soul surgically removed may be an exaggeration– and possibly a harmful misconception.  This assumes that the widespread indifference to Christianity, particularly Catholicism, is irreversible, and that is not the case.  

 

Perhaps the contemporary culture should not be called “the post-Christian West,” but rather “the age of ignorance.”  This refers to ignorance about a shared history and the facts behind one’s culture, problems frequently bemoaned by Woods.  People who worry about the godlessness of contemporary culture, instead of wringing their hands and proclaiming that Western culture has permanently apostatized, should instead focus on educating people about the truth of the Catholic Church’s history and correcting misconceptions.  God is not dead; people just need to be reminded about his existence.  How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is a useful tool in helping to heal a woefully misinformed culture.

 

 

–Chris Chan

A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World

A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World, by Carl Anderson, HarperOne, 2009.

 

Carl Anderson serves as the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, and his book reflects his deep concern for Catholicism and its role in the public sphere. A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World is an overview of various aspects of contemporary culture; as well as a call to action for the faithful to find some way to make their world a better place.

 

The book takes its title from the works of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who claim that if the societal, intellectual, and spiritual malaises affecting the world are to be confronted and rectified, the best tool to solve these problems is love.  There is no thorough, all-encompassing plan to reform all of society and government in this book, but Anderson’s advice is simple.  Fixing the world must start with individuals making a conscious effort to love. Unlike many “self-help” books that seek to make readers improve themselves for their own fulfillment, A Civilization of Love asks its readers to improve themselves for the sake of everyone around them.

 

A Civilization of Love is in the same vein as many other Catholic call-to-action books, such as Fr. James Keller’s You Can Change the World.  Much of what is said in this book has been put forward in numerous other works that call for faithful Christians to engage and challenge the culture, but that does not mean that this book is redundant.  This book is separated from similar works due to its unshakeable sense of optimism.  Many other writers, when approaching subjects such as government corruption, the unsettling effects of secularization gone mad in Europe, and widespread apathy towards social decay; lapse into a “the end is near” mentality that depresses rather than inspires.  Anderson certainly isn’t fueled by Pollyanna-like levels of optimism.  He realizes that the world is plagued by daunting, even despair-inducing problems.  Nevertheless, giving up hope should never be an option, and the best way to repel despair is to take personal action in the right direction.  In the words of Socrates, “Let him that would move the world first move himself.”

 

One of the more intriguing features of this book consists of the questions that Anderson includes at the end of each chapter.  These allow the book to serve as a spiritual exercise as well as an informational and instructional resource.  After reading each chapter, readers need to ask themselves hard questions.  For example, at one point Anderson asks his readers to think of a time when they have not treated someone else with as much love and respect as that person deserves, and ask why that happened and what one might do in order to prevent that from happening again.  In another case, the reader is asked to think of a person he dislikes, and attempt to explain the reasons for that loathing and how these feelings affect his behavior.

 

It’s very easy to simply skim through these questions, or just give perfunctory or even dishonest answers to them.  This is a fairly short book, but if one is going to reap the full benefits from it, one should spend as much time mulling over the five or six questions at the end of each chapter as one does reading the chapter itself.  There isn’t too much in this book that a reader who is fairly well-read in recent history and Church current events doesn’t already know, but added attention to the spiritual exercises in this book will allow this commonplace information to take on new and intriguing relevance.

 

Some chapters give short thrift to subjects that really need more space in order to better address the intriguing ideas and implications they provoke.  In one titled “A Dignity That Brings Demands,” Anderson discusses the enduring legacy of two of the Nobel Prizewinners for 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre (Literature) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Peace).  These two very different men and their worldviews are both presented as challenges to the Catholic worldview, Sartre for his atheistic existentialist philosophy, and King for his use of American Protestantism as a means of social change.

 

Anderson speaks highly of both Sartre and King, which is surprising in the former case.  Anderson may conceivably be impressed by Sartre’s literary skills while being far less receptive to his intellectual worldview– it’s certainly possible to admire a gift for writing while disliking the message behind the words.  Nevertheless, the deeper implications of Sartre’s work and their pernicious (from a Catholic perspective) effect on academia and broader society and culture are largely ignored here.  Sartre is presented merely as highly intelligent man whose worldview diverges sharply from traditional Catholicism.  If Anderson wanted to provide a more thorough presentation of what the faithful need to do in order to build a more loving civilization, a fuller critique of Sartre’s philosophy and fiction needs to be presented.  (For a more in-depth criticism of Sartre’s legacy and its attacks on Christian culture, check out the essay on Sartre in Architects of the Culture of Death, by Donald DeMarco and Benjamin D. Wiker.)

 

Despite the religious differences between Anderson and King, the former’s deep respect and admiration for the latter is easy to understand.  One particularly thorny question lies in Anderson’s contention that the blend of King’s Protestantism and social justice campaigning really poses a challenge for Catholic culture.  There are plenty of Catholic activists who have similarly campaigned against social ills, and further exposition is necessary in order to see if there really is any validity to the argument that Protestant social justice movements really challenge Catholic ones, or if they simply give a slightly different theological basis to moral motivation.

 

Most of the other chapters take various issues, subjects, and situations; posit on the problems facing humanity at length, and then suggest paths for improvement.  Injustices in the law, causes of suffering, and projections for the future fill the book; and they are coupled with various Catholic responses and attitudes for how to deal with such unpleasant subjects.

 

Probably the most inspirational portion of this book comes from its presentation of ordinary individuals who noticed problems and decided to take a shot at fixing them.  In today’s culture, good deeds only seem to get recognized when multimillionaire celebrities donate a hefty check or a good photo opportunity’s worth of volunteerism.  Anderson cites a handful of examples, such as a couple who take in young unwed mothers, and another family who mortgaged their home in order to fund an organization that digs much-needed wells in order to provide water to drought-plagued farmers in Central America.  These do-gooders have helped dozens of people, but they receive no widespread recognition or acclaim, nor do they seem to want it.  The examples in this book hint that doing God’s work often comes at a personal cost.  Mother Teresa of Calcutta abandoned her comfortable job at a school in order to care for the sick and destitute.  An unstated moral is that doing really good work is generally not pretty or glamorous, and rarely brings about any widespread recognition.  It does, however provoke much less tangible rewards.  After all, people need to realize that things aren’t always about them.

 

This book, read thoughtfully, intelligently, and honesty, may be used as guide for gauging one’s moral behavior.   Those who are disinclined to concur with Catholic social teachings and doctrines are less likely to be swayed by Anderson’s rhetoric, but if one is willing to consider Anderson’s blueprints for a better tomorrow, A Civilization of Love might prove to be a useful tool for helping readers understand their own natures better, the problems they face, and what needs to be done in order to improve oneself and the wider world.

 

–Chris Chan

The Everlasting Man

The Everlasting Man, by G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, originally published 1925, reprinted in 1993 by Ignatius Press.

 

One of G.K. Chesterton’s best-known books, The Everlasting Man is famous not only for its content, but also for its connection to two other British authors with double-initialed names: H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis.  The Everlasting Manwas written in part as a counterargument to Wells’s bestseller The Outline of History, which promoted a materialistic and secular worldview.  In contrast, Chesterton’s book stresses the primacy of Jesus in all aspects of human history, society, and culture.  C.S. Lewis’s connection to the book lies in the fact that he was an atheist when he first started reading it.  When he finished, his worldview had changed dramatically.

 

Chesterton opens The Everlasting Man with a reference to a subplot of his novel Manalive, where it is stated that there are two ways to appreciate one’s home.  The first is to stay there, and the second is to go all the way around the world and return home after having circled the globe.  By circumnavigating the world, traveling in a strange land and seeing one’s home as a destination rather than a place of rest, one thereby gains an appreciation for one’s home that one otherwise might never have obtained.  Grumbling about the state of one’s home means nothing if one has never been homesick.  Chesterton uses this metaphor to explain how critics of Christianity fail to understand how deeply everything around them in Western Civilization has been affected and shaped by Christianity.  In his introduction, Chesterton writes:

 

“The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.  And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it.  They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk.  They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives.”

 

Throughout the book, Chesterton addresses many of the popular arguments against the Church and concludes that all them miss the point.  Christianity, he argues, is a good that cannot be corrupted.  The fallen race of Man, in contrast, is far too anxious to extrapolate its own faults and sins upon the only thing that can truly redeem humanity.  He continues his introduction by contending that:

            

“As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.”

 

It is popular to refer to the “post-Christian West,” especially when referring to contemporary Europe, where church attendance rates are low and hostility towards Christianity, especially Catholicism, is rampant. For Chesterton, there is no truly “secular” society, and “post-Christian” is a misnomer, since all of society has been baptized by the light of Christ.  There are only apostate sections of society, and no matter how hard certain aspects of society may try, they can never entirely cease being Christian.  This raises intriguing questions.  How are all of society’s institutions, ideologies, and aspects influenced by Christian doctrine and tradition?  As The Everlasting Man illustrates, the answers are sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, but always inspiring.

 

Another popular maxim that Chesterton contends is erroneous is the belief that there is an inherent and irrevocable gulf between reason and religion.  Nothing could be further from the truth, he argues, since it was the great intellectual traditions of Christianity that shaped the minds of Western Civilization and upheld the use of reason. In his closing paragraphs, Chesterton writes:

 

“If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense.”

 

The book is divided into two main sections, the first titled “On the Creature Called Man,” the second named “On the Man Called Christ.”  In the first half, Chesterton summarizes the whole of human civilization, and contends that contrary to what many pundits have contended, there is indeed something special about the human race.  In the second half, Chesterton presents an abridged history of the Christian millennia, and assails the commentators who insist that Christianity is nothing more than one of dozens of mythological and moral systems that weak-minded people cling to out of a fear of the bleak random meaningless of a godless universe.  Out of all the religions on Earth, Chesterton claims, Christianity is special, and furthermore, of all the characters that have played a part in the human story, Jesus Christ is far and away the most important.

 

Much of this review has been devoted to explaining how The Everlasting Man could affect the heart and mind of a man like C.S. Lewis, but what of the other double-initialed author who provoked a literary response from Chesterton?  Chesterton produced a generalized history of humanity that contended that every facet of mankind’s existence was influenced the life, love, and teachings of Jesus Christ.  H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, in contrast, argued for materialism and atheistic scientific forces being the main directing agents of humanity.  Wells blithely mocked religion and filled his book with slurs against believers and those who disagreed with his take on history, science, morality, and all other disciplines.

 

Intellectuals who disagreed with Wells did so in dramatically different ways.  Chesterton, as has been stated, wrote his own book in response.  In The Everlasting Man, as well as in all of his other works, Chesterton displayed class and grace towards his ideological foe.  Chesterton disapproved of Wells’ ideas, but he never let his differing opinions spill over into personal animosity.  Chesterton fills The Everlasting Man with counterarguments, not attacks upon the author.  Wells seems to have appreciated Chesterton’s respectful disagreement– the two men remained good friends despite their wildly opposite opinions.

 

One of Chesterton’s dearest friends, Hilaire Belloc, did not maintain such cordial relations with Wells.  Belloc was a staunch Catholic and an unhesitant controversialist, and understandably took umbrage to Wells’s frequent assertions of the irrelevance of religion.  A series of critical essays were rapidly fired off by Belloc, and anthologized under the title A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.”  Belloc did not hesitate to savage Wells’s intellectual integrity.  Wells rebutted with a short collection of essays titled Mr. Belloc Objects, which contained venomous quips about Belloc.  The angry ideological game of ping-pong continued with Belloc’s Mr. Belloc Still Objects.  Chesterton tried to mediate between the two men, but to no avail: Wells and Belloc were never able to bury their personal acrimony.

 

It is therefore a testament to Chesterton’s character that he was able to keep anger and direct attacks out of his work.  The Everlasting Man tries to convince its readers of the value and relevance of Christian doctrine through intellectual arguments, humor, respect, and love.  One may certainly derive a great deal of personal satisfaction from metaphorically grinding one’s intellectual opponent’s face into the dirt, but does that really win many converts?  Not only that, does that earn anyone any friends?

 

Today, the gargantuan Outline of History is largely out of print save for a heavily abridged version.  The Everlasting Man, in contrast, is now available in numerous editions.  Perhaps not very much should be read into this, after all, The Outline of History was such an immense and unwieldy text that it had to published in two volumes.  In addition, many of the scientific assertions that Wells championed have been proven false or fraudulent today, such as Piltdown Man. 

 

One final comment on The Outline of History.  For all his defense of the book, Wells’s authorship has been challenged recently.  A.B. McKillop’s book The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text asserts that Wells basically ripped off his book from the work of an obscure feminist scholar.  Florence Deeks wrote a lengthy history of the world stressing the importance of femininity and sent it to a publisher for consideration.  Much later, the publishers declined to print the book and a surprisingly battered manuscript was sent back to Deeks.  When Deeks read The Outline of History some time afterwards, she realized that the many similarities regarding structure, content, and style (not to mention the errors) were too close to be coincidental.  Her manuscript had essentially been cannibalized to feed Wells’s own work.  A plagiarism lawsuit soon followed, but Wells triumphed and Deeks never received any vindication during her lifetime.  Contemporary scholarship, however, has not been kind to Wells.

 

At the risk of sounding puckish, Chesterton has never been accused of plagiarizing his work.  Indeed, The Everlasting Man provides such an original defense of Christianity and its legacy that one wonders how many more Christian writers (à la C.S. Lewis) that it will inspire.

 

–Chris Chan

 

Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Revised Edition,

Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Revised Edition, by Paul Johnson, Harper Perennial, 2007.

In G.K. Chesterton’s mystery “The Scandal of Father Brown,” Father Brown comments on the wasted life and potential of a prominent writer, declaring that, “You don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual.”  This quote could be the tagline for Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals.  This book is a collection of essays on various literary figures and self-described intellectuals, many of whom have been elevated to the status of demigods in the popular critical pantheon.  About two-dozen such personages are addressed in this book, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman.  One of Johnson’s chief aims is to demythologize these figures, illuminating not just the flaws in their thinking, but also the disastrous personal lives of the intellectuals, their hypocrisies, and the ways that their work and personal lives hurt both those closest to them and the rest of the world.

It is important to be precise when understanding Johnson’s definitions.  Johnson is definitely not attacking people who are smart or traditionally educated.  Indeed, Johnson’s own intelligence and extensive literary knowledge is evident with every page he writes.  Johnson’s target is not the brainy, or academia, or even those who belong to a specific political group (although most of his subjects are hard left-wingers).  Johnson takes aim against individuals who put ideas over people.  Johnson defines “intellectuals” as a relatively recent phenomenon.  Since the rise of intellectual secularism in the eighteenth century, many men of aptitude and literary skill have argued that the use of “reason” and new philosophies of life and behavior can solve the ills of the world.  Unfortunately for the world, as Johnson never tires of noting, intellectuals have tended to leave a trail of devastation in their wake, even as they toil to promote their own glory.

This is not an angry book.  It is an indignant book, at times even righteously indignant.  Johnson could conceivably have filled this book with rants and furious denunciations, but his tone is always calm, measured, and he frequently tries to be fair.  In some instances, he even professes to be an admirer of some of these intellectuals, such as when he declares himself to be a fan of Ibsen’s plays.  A fierce, furious book could conceivably have been great fun to read, but it would have been all the easier for critics to dismiss.  As it is, by asserting that the acclaim that many intellectuals have received has been largely undeserved, Johnson has opened himself up to a flood of criticism.  The most recent edition of Intellectuals includes a selection of negative criticism regarding this book, mainly by people who believe that the figures in this book ought to be above reproach, or who believe that personal behavior should not be a factor in ranking the legacy of an intellectual figure.

The essays in this book attempt to demythologize the targeted intellectuals, exposing some as frauds and fools, others as brazen liars, still more as utterly toxic to those closest to them, and most as unworthy of veneration or even serious respect.  Johnson is holding a barbeque, and the main course is sacred cows.  Of course, these intellectuals have never been revered by everybody, and Johnson takes pains to illustrate exactly which types of people contributed to the making of the intellectuals’ reputations. 

These essays are not hatchet pieces.  Johnson’s theses are not centered around arguing that the intellectuals described here were horrible, self-absorbed jerks with no regard whatsoever for the happiness or wellbeing of other human beings, although several of the figures in this book certainly appear to fit that description.  Johnson seems to have some respect for some of subjects, even some affection for one or two, and thinly veiled disgust for many more.  The intellectuals in this book are not portrayed as evil incarnate, but as deeply flawed individuals whose theories about the world and society hurt a lot of people.  This is revisionist history, seeking to reveal disturbing facts about major figures that are too often ignored, or worse, defended.

Is Johnson being unfairly harsh towards his subjects?  It is certainly possible.  The purpose of biography is to describe what figures from the past were actually like and how they affected the world around them.  Perhaps what Johnson does here is not demonize these figures so much as humanize them.  Then again, there is much to be said about being charitable towards those one disagrees with, and never speaking ill of the dead is a sound policy.   And yet…  The characters in this book, and their ideas, have hurt a lot of people, and historians have a responsibility to speak the truth, even when expressing such opinions is unpopular.   The author’s bias aside, there is one definite aspect of the book that could have used improvement: Intellectuals does have a thorough collection of citations, but Johnson uses a lot of obscure anecdotes and references in order to make his points, and a few of them are not cited.  In order to keep the level of discourse above reproach, thorough presentation of evidence is essential.

Can you separate a major figure’s life from his work?  Johnson argues that one cannot.  If a prominent intellectual engaged in morally dubious behavior or treated towards those closest to him like dirt, how can one respect their prose?  In his essay “The Heartless Lovers of Humankind,” a summary of the main points expressed in Intellectuals, Johnson writes, 

“I believe the reflective portion of mankind is divided into two groups:  those who are interested in people and care about them; and those who are interested in ideas.  The first group forms the pragmatists and tends to make the best statesmen.  The second is the intellectuals; and if their attachment to ideas is passionate, and not only passionate but programmatic, they are almost certain to abuse whatever power they acquire.  For, instead of allowing their ideas of government to emerge from people, shaped by observation of how people actually behave and what they really desire, intellectuals reverse the process, deducing their ideas first from principle and then seeking to impose them on living men and women.”

Johnson has declared that, “people must always come before ideas and not the other way around.”  That, in his eyes, is the great crime of the intellectuals who are featured here.  He does not deny their intelligence, only the ways that they applied their intelligence.  By subjecting their lives to critical scrutiny, it appears that Johnson intends to place their ideas and writings under a more analytical light as well.  By stripping away the moral foundations of the men, he questions their ideas. 

One has to be careful when reviewing a book like this.  I personally am no fan of most of the intellectuals featured in his book, with the major exceptions of Tolstoy and Hemingway.  Having an active dislike for the writings– and philosophy– of most of the intellectuals featured here, I have to say that a certain part of me enjoyed seeing Shelley, Marx, Russell, and Sartre depicted as womanizers who refused to take responsibility in their lives, or learning that the author of The Second Sex spent her life as the manager of her paramour’s ever-expanding harem, or discovering the extent to which Sartre served to inspire and inflame genocidal regimes in Southeast Asia.  Nearly every intellectual presented here comes across as being morally bankrupt.

But is this wholly fair or wise?  I never cease to be disgusted by pundits who airily dismiss the work G.K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc because they claim that they were anti-Semitic or that they engaged in extramarital affairs, charges that are patently false.  I can thoroughly understand how some fans of these figures might deem Intellectuals to be mere character assassination, but as Johnson illustrates in his coverage of Lillian Hellman and other figures, the popular media, academic, and political establishment often deliberately covered up the details about several intellectual figures. As Johnson observes, from the late eighteenth century onwards, self-styled intellectuals attempted to give themselves moral authority by smearing the cultural and scholarly life of Western civilization, which for centuries had been led by the Church.  Many of the figures in Intellectuals have attacked the character of several popes and the behavior of the Church, using utterly spurious allegations.  Perhaps turnabout is fair play, especially if Johnson’s analysis of the intellectuals is more accurate than that of the intellectual’s critique of the Church. 

Johnson writes with such confidence and verve that he propels his historical narrative forward with surprising power.  Intellectuals illustrates a side of history that has often been glossed over in the textbooks.  We need to understand how ideas originate and how they affect society.  Intellectuals illustrates just how little we know about the recent past, and emphasizes the importance of being highly critical towards those who think they know better about everything than the average person.

–Chris Chan

God Has Not Changed.  By Alice Thomas Ellis, Continuum, 2004.

Alice Thomas Ellis, who also published under her birth name of Anna Haycraft, was raised by atheistic parents who were members of the Church of Humanity, a godless organization originated by Auguste Comte.  In her late teens, she rebelled and converted to Catholicism.  She initially intended to enter a convent, but her poor health prevented her from pursuing this vocation. She eventually married and had seven children, though the deaths of two of them would deeply affect her and her work.  Starting in 1977 and continuing for over two decades, she would produce a series of wonderful novels of manners that frequently addressed themes of faith, love, and family.  Due to her acerbic wit, Ellis might very justifiably be thought of as, “Jane Austen after a few fast shots of whiskey.”

Besides her novels, Ellis also wrote a popular column on the joys and trials of domestic life, as well as numerous essays on religious themes. It is this latter group of writings that has been anthologized into “God Has Not Changed.” All of these essays were originally published in a newspaper, and therefore most of them are quite short, being only about two pages long.  Despite their brevity, each essay contains Ellis’s piercing insights into the state of the Faith in England.

Ellis was a staunch Catholic for her entire adult life, but she was an outspoken critic of the secularization of society, particularly what she viewed as the watering down of theology and traditional religious practices in the wake of Vatican II, which she frequently alleged led to the breakdown of a sense of wonder and beauty in favor of modern fads and political correctness.  Her outspoken disgust at contemporary trends in worship was very controversial, sparking a wide variety of reactions from all people of all backgrounds.  In one of her essays, Ellis wrote that:

“I get lots of letters.  In one of them a Reverend writes: ‘You may be a fine novelist but I really do wonder why your theological opinions should be of the slightest interest to anybody, let alone worthy of inclusion in The Guardian.  Since you are not a professional theologian they are your private opinions…’  I had written a few words on the liberal approach to God, or as the Reverend would put it ‘God,’ for on the reverse side of the letter is an ad for a work by the Reverend himself entitled On Doing Without ‘God.’… Part of the ad reads: ‘In a global village, the God of religion should not be modeled in the metaphysical terms of a more parochial age. New ways of doing this must be developed.’ New ways of doing what? However, the gratifying part of it is that I had written, in the article to which the Reverend takes such exception, about the intolerance of the liberal stance, the baffled outrage of the liberal whose views are questioned, the refusal to consider any other point of view. It is sweetly ironic that the modernists, the reformers, the liberals, say things like ‘we are church,’ meaning presumably, the people the laity.  They wish to democratize the faith and give everyone a say except, of course, for the orthodox.  The only voices the bien pensant can tolerate are those that sing in agreement with the current vogue, and the most noted ‘professional theologians’ of our time seem to be either feminists or atheists or both. The simple believer cannot get a word in.” (11).

Ellis was not in the habit of mincing words, and her acerbic style turned off a lot of people.  Ellis was singularly disinclined to be charitable towards people who disagreed with her, though it would be unfair to regard her as mean-spirited.  A more just evaluation of her character would be to describe her as saying that she was always “snapping to keep from crying.”  At the heart of all of Ellis’s work is a deep sadness, often revolving around something that no longer exists, but that was once very deeply loved.  In God Has Not Changed, the loss in question often revolves around what Ellis saw as a much wiser and purer past.  Anger is commonly regarded as a stage of grief, and behind the disgusted complaining lies some very real mourning.  In another essay, Ellis mourns the generational gap in religious knowledge, writing:

“I have given up trying to explain to the younger generation that we are not mere passive spectators at the Tridentine Mass but deeply involved in the mystery, the holiness, the sense of awe, the awareness of a Presence which you sure as hell don’t feel in the kindergarten atmosphere that too often prevails now.  With all the endless talk of ‘empowering the laity,’ of giving us a ‘role in church affairs,’ we have ended up being treated like witless kiddies, too stupid, too immature to grasp anything smacking of theological complexity: everything must be sweetened, diluted, simplified and made as bland as infants’ pap.  No guilt and certainly no humility and nothing that might appear to tax our intelligence.  The attitude of the ‘reformers’ is profoundly insulting, patronizing in the worst possible way, and if we complain they take offence, protesting crossly that it’s all for our own good and how can we be so ungrateful?  The changes in the Church increasingly look less like alteration than total destruction, an act of iconoclasm, vandalism previously unsurpassed.” (20).

Many people might disagree with Ellis’s assessment of the post-Vatican II Church, but any serious study of religious changes have to understand the diversity of opinions that changes provoke.  Ellis’s writings raise the point that somehow complaining has the power to lead to sanctity, if only because venting over everything that bothers you can assist in purging you of anger.  One particularly salient point that she makes is that the attempts to turn religion into a commodity for mass consumption wind up producing something that few people wish to consume at all.  Ellis comments:

“Much of the appeal of the religious life used to lie in the challenge it presented.  It took courage and determination, as well as faith, to abandon what the world perceived as desirable, and the distinctive habit was an outward sign of commitment.  Besides, if one may be permitted to strike a fashion note, the habit suited all women regardless of size, shape or form of countenance, and was a pleasure to gaze upon.  A group of nuns clad in the old style, compared with the new ones in short skirts, anoraks, lisle stockings, sandals and the unbecoming approximation of a veil, are reminiscent of swans adjacent to a bunch of tatty pigeons.  Some new nuns, of course, dress as they please, with make-up, hair-dos and earrings, and God alone knows what message they hope to put across.  I think they might claim that the inner light of the spirit shines through their outer appearance, but it doesn’t.  Many of them are concerned only with feminism, goddesses, and ‘women’s rites’– which is even more tiresome than the eldritch squawking about ‘rights,’ and flesh-creepingly silly.  Not just spirituality, but all common sense disappears in a welter of secular trendiness, hung about with the tawdry baubles of paganism which are intended, I suppose, to add a flavour of other-worldliness, but are in direct contradiction to Christianity.  One of the troubles with the devil is that he has lousy taste he is not the suave gentleman that some would like to think of him as, but a poseur avid to keep up to date with the latest fad.  I sometimes think that perhaps he lives in Islington and reads The Tablet, but I may be doing him an injustice…  (As I wrote those rude words about Satan, the adversary, my pen dried up.  Typical petty spite.)” (27-28).

–Chris Chan

Europe and the Faith

Europe and the Faith.  By Hilaire Belloc, 1920.

Hilaire Belloc loved controversy.  He took pride in his intractable opinions and almost never backed down.  Belloc’s irascible temper led to the loss of friendships and career setbacks, but Belloc never adopted the ability to separate personal disagreements from personal relationships that his friend G.K. Chesterton perfected.  Belloc’s interests included history, religion, culture, and economics, and all of these subjects are present in Europe and the Faith.  

In Europe and the Faith, Belloc presents his history of European society over the centuries, and argues that Catholicism was at the heart of the continent’s cultural and regional identity.  This perspective has an added level of controversy in the present day, when the bureaucrats of the European Union have recently attempted to draw up a history of the continent in their constitution without the slightest mention of Christianity.  In contrast, Belloc posits that Catholicism formed the core of national identity and shaped the mentality of each individual European.  When explaining the centrality of faith to European life and intellectual culture, Belloc writes:

“The Catholic brings to history (when I say "history" in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together. 

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”

This famous syllogism
has provoked much ire from Belloc’s critics, especially those who stress that contemporary Europe’s secularism and multiculturalism have utterly and permanently divorced it from its religious past.  These opinions were present a century ago, more towards secularism than multiculturalism, the latter of which has grown more prominent in the post-colonial period.  Belloc was convinced that the Catholic Church traditionally filled the soul and intellect of Europe, and when society was divorced from the faith, innumerable societal and personal problems would follow.  He writes:

“I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this disaster: its spiritual result--an isolation of the soul; its political result--a consequence of the spiritual--the prodigious release of energy, the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.”

Belloc’s history of Europe starts with the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, moving through the Dark and Middle Ages, through the rise of Protestantism up to contemporary times.  Special attention is paid to the English religious experience.  Belloc does not argue that the past was better than the present because Catholicism was more ubiquitous and better protected by the establishment, but he does suggest that a culture that is thoroughly infused with the morals and societal justice preached by the Church made for a better treated and more united civilization.  A society permeated with the ideologies that Belloc termed the “modernist heresies,” in his view, isolate the soul from the protective truths and codes of conduct that are necessary to keep people balanced, safe, and sane.  Belloc further explains what he means by “the isolation of the soul” when he writes:

“The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane balance produced by general experience, the weight of security, and the general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than merely complete and confirm human misery.”

Belloc wrote this book long before the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, before Communism fell over Eastern Europe, before the looming demographic collapse of Europe, before the rise of terrorism, and before economic turmoil caused widespread societal unrest.  Yet though the modern age saw many technological and medicinal advances, Belloc insisted that with the soul of the continent rotting, no amount of comfort and affluence could protect Europe from slouching toward certain doom.  Indeed, over ninety years have passed since this tome was written, and many of the predictions Belloc made have come true.

“So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing. 

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. 

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. 

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

No overview of European history is complete without a detailed and thorough understanding of how the Catholic Church shaped every faced of it, but unfortunately all too many history of the region do exactly that.  Will Europe return to its Christian roots, or will it follow one of multiple pathways to destruction?  It is impossible to divine the future, but it must be remembered that with God all things are possible.

Europe and the Faith is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free for the Amazon Kindle, or from Project Gutenberg as a free e-book in various formats.  It is also published in book form.

–Chris Chan