"The Corporate War on Free Speech"

G. K. Chesterton once said "The problem with capitalism is too few capitalists," thereby pointing out that not only socialism but capitalism could be oppressive if unconstrained by the moral respect for the individual, the family, and what Pius IX called the Principle of Subsidiarity. In his book, The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara also points out that it is not only big government, but a triumvirate of big government, big business, and big finance that serves to create a "market-driven" political economy where the the Church has no business intruding with its moral imperatives. The other side of that equation is that the "free marketplace" of business and finance isn't a value-free "naked public square," to borrow the phrase of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, but a place now straightjacketed with the "politically correct" values of the left. Ryszard Legutko argues this in his masterful book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016). And now Jim Goad argues, in "The Corporate War on Free Speech" (Taki's Magazine, March 5, 2018), that it is not only government-sponsored PC censorship that threatens the free marketplace of ideas, but, even more, the private sector's corporations that have taken up the left's ideological war on the traditional ideals of freedom of thought and free speech in the public forum. And when "Political Correctness Goes to the Vatican" (The Philosophical Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books, December 25, 2017), one wonders what traditional institutions remain to oppose the totalitarian grip of leftist ideology and its dream of jackboot repression of all opposition.

The pagan maiden and the apostate adultress

I thought of titling this post: "Why apostates are so much more worse off than unevangelized pagans." But then I thought of the words above, whose meaning should soon become apparent.

This is a familiar theme among Chesterton readers who know, for example, his quote wherein he declares: "Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger and everything since has been comparatively small." It was a big theme in his book, The Everlasting Man.

It's not surprising that C.S. Lewis also addresses the issue, as one of my students recently pointed out in a term paper. Quoting from C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calibria, The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustin's Press, 2009), p. 90, he writes (first in the Latin, then the English translation):

Hinc status pejor quam illum statum quem habuimus ante fidem receptam. Nemo enim ex Christianismo redit in statum quem habuit ante Christianismum, sed in pejorem: tantum distat inter paganum et apostatam quantum innuptam ed adulteram. Nam fides perficit naturam sed fides amissa corrumpit naturam.

This [present] state is worse than that state which we had before the faith [was] received. For no one from Christianity returns into the state which he had before Christianity, but into a worse one: pagans and apostates differ as much as an unmarried [woman] and an adultress. For faith perfects nature, but faith lost corrupts nature.

Related: Peter Kreeft, "Comparing Christianity & The New Paganism" (www.peterkreeft.com)

“Look, Dad, the sun is rising just like on TV”

Fr. Rutler, in his most recent column (June 7, 2015), offers another gem:

A young city boy on his first camping trip awoke his father at dawn and said, as he gazed out of his tent, “Look, Dad, the sun is rising just like on TV.” Our present generation, of which we are privileged to be a laggard part, does not find it easy to distinguish actuality from artifice. In the background is a reluctance to acknowledge that an impression of reality is not the same as reality itself. This is symptomatic of what Pope Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

By that he meant the notion absorbed by people bereft of logic, that what one wants something to be, comes to be simply by the wanting. This has immediate and desultory influence on moral conduct. So, like the little boy who thought that the real sun looked like the cartoon sun on television (or, like the nice woman who told me that the altar flowers were so lovely that she though they were artificial), people may reject the concrete facts of nature and posture that their desires are legitimate just because they are desired. A lurid example of this is the redefinition of marriage to make that organic and divine institution nothing more than a fantasy of one’s arrested emotional development, the product of a plebiscite, and the opinion of judges in solemn robes. Polls and parliaments are willing tyrants when the mob consents to be tyrannized by their opinions and decrees.

G.K. Chesterton gently slapped his readers back to reality from egoistic comas when he wrote in his A Short History of England: “To have the right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” So when someone says, “I am free to do what I want with my body,” you may be impelled by charity and justice to reply that he is indeed so free, but if he defies the law of gravity, the pavement quickly will be of a different opinion, and if he says there is no difference between a man and a woman, two shades named Adam and Eve will rise up with mocking smiles.

Those who have long sipped the intoxicating nectar of false perception may hesitate to draw a line between desire and dogma, fabrication and fact. If reality is nothing more than the visible costume of an impression, impressive tyrants will orchestrate that fantasy from their balconies, with rhetoric to mold malleable minds. The long legacy of demagoguery attests that weak points persuade people if the points are shouted loudly enough to overwhelm reason. Opinion polls shout, and network “talking heads” shout, and Internet pundits shout, but then there is a “still small voice” that does not fade away: the long and logical echo of “Fiat Lux” uttered by the real Creator of the real universe.

The past is a foreign country

The Rolls Royce Cloud pulled up (of all the ironic incongruities!) in front of my modest condominium. Out stepped a gentleman in a tux WITH TAILS! I watched him out the window as he placed on a silver tray, with white-gloved hands, a cognac glass, popped open a bottle of Camus, and deftly poured some into the glass, then added a rose in a vase, and placed beside it a folded parchment with a red wax seal upon it. Then he rang my doorbell.

First time I ever had Camus Cognac ... along with something else I missed while looking out the window: a neatly-wrapped pack of four Louixs cigs. Amazing.

You guessed it. This guy's got taste. No, not the gentleman courier. I mean the gentleman who sent the courier: the clandestine underground correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep it's secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, who more than makes up for the modest stipend I send him in all these elegant accessories he sends along with his telegrams and sundry other missives. It's like being a seminary professor and hiring a guy with James Bond's tastes (or James Bond himself!) to do a little sleuthing for you. You pay him pennies on the dollar in terms of the good time he shows you. It makes Lent a nearly impossible challenge some days.

Here's what he wrote me: Noir, not Bond (though they could be the same person for all we know):

Interesting meditation here. This part hit me because it is a boilerplate line of recent papacies: "And there is no going back."

Peter Kreeft has a counterpoint line to the effect that, "People say you can't turn back the clock, but why not? Isn't that exactly what you do if it is telling the wrong time?"

Like in discussion of many other items, a lot of informed people would say the old product was simply plain better. They don't make them like they used to. Etc. An odd attitude to have to take to a Church's most prized communal possession.

Oh, and enjoy the cigs. I picked them up in Havana, of all places, last week. [emphasis mine - PP]

The "meditation" Noir was referring to was this piece, by James Casper, "The Past is a Foreign Country" (Ignatius Press, March 19, 2015). Wistful and profoundly true, I was glad to have the Camus Cognac in hand as I read the piece, which awakened some deep sentiments in my own soul:

Much we know about the world would be lost were it not for artistic renderings of the past. Memories otherwise would seldom outlive those who remember.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars forced professional historians and casual readers alike to revise assessments of the Catholic religion in England in the years immediately preceding the Reformation:

If medieval religion was decadent, unpopular, or exhausted, the success of the Reformation hardly requires explanation. If, on the contrary, it was vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular, then we have much yet to discover about the processes and the pace of reform.

In the almost six hundred pages following this observation, Duffy develops support for this thesis: that the Reformation in England was more of a revolution against a popular, widely-revered institution than an effort to reform something rife with problems and corruption. He can only build his case by reference to contemporary written accounts and a study of Church artistic works that somehow managed to survive state-sponsored efforts to obliterate the past.

Saint Gilbert? Maybe not a good idea

Of course, with the cartoons about the Vatican turning into a "canonization factory," there's no telling who may canonized next, maybe even G.K. Chesterton. Our underground correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, just wired us this remarkably thoughtful and detailed account of his own demurrals on precisely that prospect:

Over at Unum Santcum Catholicam there is this excellent and long-overdue rejoinder to all the breathless nonsense about a St. Gilbert now being proposed by professional Chestertonians. I have repeatedly generated ire for pointing out in com boxes that his biographer Maisie Ward -- who knew him personally -- was dismayed over Chesterton's over-imbibing in his last years. But as this piece points out, the predictable response is always that GKC had to be a saint because, well, we like him and thus we want to to be one! Such a spirit seems to be the guiding one nowadays with canonizations. It's messed up. The widening of the process has given us more saints, but it has also cheapened the brand. Sainthood is a ceremonial process that is supposed to not only affirm someone's life with God but also his or her worthiness as a public model of emulation and heroic sanctity. Saints are supposed to be heroes. Chesterton as a hero?! Good writers are simply not heroes by virtue of their literary prowess, or their sense of humor. Kenneth Woodward, liberal on some points, is objectively helpful in his treatment of the whole process in Making Saints. Highly recommended. Especially now, when names are floated about including those of Catherine de Hueck and Dorothy Day... despite what a firsthand associate like Frank Sheed might have written about them. People just don't care if these souls were holy by objective standards (or uniquely heroic in an age where we now ascribe hero status to everyone who enlists in the Armed Forces). Any more than they might give pause to describing Pope Francis as holy due to personal unfamiliarity with him. Today we think people are saints or holy because we approve of what we think they represent. It's "Identity Catholicism" off the rails. And it's all backwards. Saints aren't proven by their causes; their causes take on added luster based on saintly associations. Vatican II does not make Paul VI a saint. Chesterton's writings hardly make him a saint. But if he becomes a saint, his writings would gain that added sparkle. I say if. But he appears to have been no more a saint than Tolkien, or than Belloc. And Belloc, for one, was by all accounts most definitely not a saint.

See also:

• Boniface, "This is not about Chesterton" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam, November 30, 2014).
• Boniface, "History of the Devil's Advocate" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam, July 11, 2013).

Affirming Aquinas & Catholic Tradition only to dismiss them?

Jason Steidl, in a paper on Chesterton's interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas, writes:

Ironically, just as Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas was published in 1933, many theologians within the Roman Catholic Church were beginning to criticize the role of the Thomistic tradition in Christianity. The way of understanding Christian faith and the world, so strongly advocated by Chesterton, had become stale with centuries of use and abuse, its thinking, as Chesterton characterized the Neo-Platonism that preceded it, an outmoded model that no longer addressed modern concerns. Hence, scholars such as Marie Dominique Chenu challenged the church authorities in much the same way that Aquinas had challenged the hierarchy centuries before. These scholars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s proposed new paradigms for Thomistic thought and the role of theology in the church, while Chesterton remained silent in thecontroversy, content to dwell in, and even defend, the forms of faith as he received them.

Our Atlantic correspondent, who sent us this linked article, suggested that it's worth checking out how someone like Aquinas or Chesterton is handled by modern Catholics, such as this writer, and remarks:

[These writers, like Aquinas or Chesterton] are affirmed even as they are essentially dismissed! Sometimes I feel like this is just how the Nouvelles handled Tradition: "We are all for it! There, now lets dismantle it!"

[Hat tip to G.N.]

Chesterton's poem on St. Francis Xavier

Yesterday, of course, was the feast day of St. Francis Xavier, who was the greatest missionary produced by the Church since St. Paul. In fact, he has been called the second St. Paul.

Like my correspondent I keep on retainer, I did not know about G. K. Chesterton's poem, "St. Francis Xavier," or the details surrounding it; but thought you might enjoy this:

I did not know that GK Chesterton's early school days poem on the Saint won a prize and sort of shoved him over the line into a lifetime of wordsmithing.

Sort of Pascalian, and not bad as far a school boys and poetry go.

... This then we say: let all things further rest
And this brave life, with many thousands more,
Be gathered up in the Eternal's breast
In that dim past his Love is bending o'er:
Healing all shattered hopes and failure sore:
Since he had bravely looked on death and pain
For what he chose to worship and adore,
Cast boldly down his life for loss or gain
In the eternal lottery: not to be in vain.

[Hat tip to JM]

Chesterton: "There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than celebrating Christmas before it comes.”

Fr. George W. Rutler (The Judge Report, December 1, 2013) writes:

... Without Advent, the only thing to do is to “rush” Christmas, with celebrations without much purpose. That turns Christmas inside out and can even make it depressing. Superficial Christmas is “joy without a cause” as G.K. Chesterton said in 1911 in his epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. He also said a couple of years earlier: “There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes.

”Our Lord spoke of people who “loved the dark rather than the light” (John 3:19), and we see that today in those who would ban any mention of Christmas. The tendency to set up Christmas decorations before Christmas is at least a clumsy way of expressing a desire for light rather than dark, but it is futile without a moral awareness of what light and dark are.

Advent is awkward because its mysteries are not the sort of things entertainers dressed as elves sing about. While the Church calls attention to reality, avuncular clergymen often succumb to fantasy themselves, with Christmas parties in Advent and wreaths without reason. Of course, this is illogical, because it contradicts the way the Logos arranged the world. The Logos, or the Word, is Jesus himself, who uttered all things into being by saying, “Fiat” — “Let there be.” And the first thing he let there be was light: “Light from Light” as the Creed chants it. But the only way to recognize the illogic of Christmas without Advent is to “walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8).

The choice of darkness rather than light is a preference for the Prince of Darkness rather than Christ the Light. The best way to walk in the Light is to get rid of the darkness in the soul, and so Advent is a prime time for confessing sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Then the penitent is re-united with the Light of the World. Christ sheds light on Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, giving moral cogency to the mystery of life itself. “He is before all things, and by him all things are held together" (Colossians 1:17). As the highest truths are very simple, the simplest logic is this: Without the Christ of Christmas, all things fall apart.

[Hat tip to JM]

Thomas Howard interviewed by Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills

The Catholic Angler
An Interview with Thomas Howard

A longtime friend of Touchstone and himself a model of the “ecumenical orthodoxy” and “mere Christianity” we strive to represent, Professor Thomas Howard has brought many—Catholics as well as Evangelicals—to a deeper understanding of the treasures of the historic church through his writings and personal influence.

A graduate of Wheaton College and New York University, Professor Howard taught for many years at an Evangelical college until he became a Roman Catholic in 1985. From then on until his retirement he taught English at St. John’s Seminary College, the seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. 

He has written several books, on both religious and literary subjects, beginning with Christ the Tiger, a sort of spiritual autobiography, in 1967. Since then he has written seven more books, including Evangelical Is Not Enough; Lead, Kindly Light, the story of his conversion to Catholicism; and most recently On Being Catholic. He has also written studies of the novels of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, notably The Achievement of C. S. Lewis and C. S. Lewis, Man of Letters. Ignatius Press, the publisher of On Being Catholic, also distributes a videotape series of 13 lectures by Professor Howard on “The Treasures of Catholicism.”

Professor Howard was interviewed by senior editors Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills while at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry to teach a weeklong course on the novels of C. S. Lewis. The interview has been edited for clarity and completeness, but the oral style has been retained.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Touchstone: One of the things C. S. Lewis is now notable for is his intellectual dissent from, in a way his assault on, feminism. I mean not the ordination of women as in his essay “Priestesses in the Church?” but the feminist ideology in general.

Thomas Howard: That’s one of those questions that has to be chased all the way through the corpus of Lewis’s works, because, obviously, feminism as such was not then a major or articulate force. He wrote the essay “Priestesses in the Church?” because the question had surfaced in a mild Anglican sort of way, but there was nothing very imminent about it.

Lewis presents a view of reality at a polar extreme from the frame of mind that ends up demanding ordination of women as presbyters. Obviously, he believes in hierarchy, but it’s not a hierarchy of power, which seems to be the feminist understanding. The whole discussion of priestesses in the last thirty years has run along sociological and political lines, with theology dragged in, when necessary, from the sidelines and various attempts made to rewrite the Bible to show that St. Paul said you should ordain women as presbyters.

In Lewis, you get a vision of things—of everything—in which the whole question of masculine and feminine is a subdivision of tremendous, prior considerations that he understands to characterize the universe. Lewis felt that those categories are of the very stuff of the universe, prior to male and female. Male is the way masculinity exhibits itself under biological species or terms, and female is the way femininity manifests itself under biological species.

For him, hierarchy is obviously the way the dance is choreographed, or the way the map of the universe is drawn. He points out in one place that in a hierarchy one has the duty of obedience to those above one in the hierarchy and the duty of magnanimity and stewardship and noblesse oblige to those below one. I seriously doubt that Lewis would use the words “above” and “below” with respect to masculine and feminine, because they don’t apply. They’re the terms of people who can only think of a dance in terms of power—which makes for a pretty poor dance.
The locus classicus for his view of gender is, I think, the scene toward the end of Perelandra when Ransom sees the two eldila: Perelandra, who is feminine, and Malacandra, who is masculine. The feminine eldil, Perelandra, participates in equal majesty, dignity, authority, and so on, with the masculine figure, Malacandra, but she has a receptiveness, a nurturing side. All these words have become buzzwords now, but they weren’t when Lewis wrote them in the 1940s.

I think he would feel that it’s turning things upside down to try to come at the mystery of femininity and masculinity with a power glint in one’s eye, or with an egalitarian, calculating set of categories to try to even up the slices of the pie.

You see this mind in That Hideous Strength.

TH: There’s a sense in which the entire book That Hideous Strength is a document in the case. Jane Studdock is clearly deeply confused at the beginning of the book in her effort to avoid being thought of as “little wifey”—and who wants to be thought of as little wifey? Fairy Hardcastle calls her that.

But she doesn’t want to be identified with what she would think of as stereotypes, but which are actually archetypes, having to do with womanhood and being wife or mother, etc. She is an intellectual, she is writing her dissertation on John Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and yet poor Jane is a Gnostic without knowing it. She hasn’t got a clue about the vindication of the body. She doesn’t know that her body will turn out to be virtually Mark’s salvation, not just because he remembers her with lust or concupiscence in the toils of Belbury, but because it is her womanhood that stands with clarity and truth and good sense and resilience and toughness over against the bottomless deception and disintegration that is Belbury.

It is Jane embodied, not just the idea of Jane, not just Jane’s intellect—far from it—but Jane as his spouse that saves Mark. And, of course, the very last paragraph of the book is, in one sense, the beginning. We have now come up to the real beginning of the marriage. Mark is about to be saved. He has escaped hell, and Jane is to be his salvation.

Mark Shea in trailer of movie based on Chesterton's "MANALIVE"

[Hat tip to K.K.]

Evangelization through tobacco and liquor

I'm sorry, but this is just too funny and too good -- from Theater of the word Incorporated.

The theme of this year's Chesterton Conference in Rochester, New York, which 150 eager Chestertonians attended several weeks ago, was "Transforming the Culture." Just a couple of thoughts from Kevin O'Brien:

"One way to transform the culture is to get men [that includes women, you toads] drinking and smoking again."

What?? No, you got that right:

"The True, the Beautiful and the Good echo the glory of the Holy Trinity, and we dare not as artist or audience settle for the Trite, the Banal and the Mediocre.

"These sorts of insights only come by way of cigar smoke, bourbon, a chilly night, the pouring rain, and true Christian fellowship.


"This is because there's something dangerous in men of like mind smoking and drinking together, united in a love of Christ.

"There's nothing dangerous about Kumbaya, about "the sign of peace", about sitting in a circle and sharing [Yes, you MUST click on that!]. The one is living and has gonads; the other is the emasculated product of the same society that's trying its best to re-bury G. K. Chesterton."

And if you have any doubt about that, perhaps you should have been following Fr. Z's "blognic" (you know, "picnic" for "bloggers") in one of London's watering holes, The Coal Hole, recently.

[Hat tip to K.J.]

'Impartiality' -- a pompous name for indifference, ignorance

Michael Barber, Professor of Theology, Scripture and Catholic Thought at John Paul the Great Catholic University, in San Diego, CA, writes (in "Chesterton on Impartiality," Singing In The Reign, April 17, 2007) that he was thinking about the hesitance of scholars to take a stand on the question of the genre of the Gospels, which has crucial implications for historical Jesus work. He writes:

I was thinking about this today when I came across this quote from G. K. Chesterton: "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker

[Hat tip to Tom]

New paperback edition, by G.K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World (Classic Books Library, 2007) is out in a new paperback edition designed and typeset by Waking Lion Press, sure to please fans as well as newcomers to this wonderful author.

Here Chesterton takes a hard look at what's wrong with England in 1910, and his insights are just as true for America in 2007. As Amazon reviewer Brian White says, he "skewers feminism, free-love, collectivism, capitalism, and the nanny state," and the fact that the essays are a century old does not reduce their relevance in the least.

Furthermore, Chesterton addresses the underlying problem, which, in his view is that our leaders no longer put the individual (who is human and therefore sacred) above the social organization (which is artificial and expendable).

The book falls into five sections: "The Homelessness of Man," "Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man," "Feminism, or the Mistake About Woman," "Education: Or the Mistake About the Child," and "The Home of Man," each of which has several chapters on a variety of topics.

As White notes, Chesterton enjoyed the genuine friendship even of those he politically and culturally opposed, which may be related to the fact that his expansive good-humour was legendary. "His writings make it clear why he was a hit at any party!"