Tuesday, December 27, 2005
THE DEATH OF THOUGHT SIGNALS THE DECLINE OF CONTROVERSY
A reader sent in a link to this essay by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, titled "The Decline of Controversy," which appeared in "This Rock", November 2000. In it Sheen talks about the love of controversy being very much a Catholic trait, but one that has been lost, and "without which no civilization can long survive."
Not even philosophers argue today; they only explain away. A book full of bad logic, advocating all manner of moral laxity, is not refuted by critics; it is merely called "bold, honest, and fearless." Even those periodicals that pride themselves upon their open-mindedness on all questions are far from practicing the lost art of controversy. Their pages contain no controversies, but only presentations of points of view. These never rise to the level of abstract thought in which argument clashes with argument like steel with steel, but rather they content themselves with the personal reflections of one who has lost his faith, writing against the sanctity of marriage, and of another who has kept his faith, writing in favor of it. Both sides are shooting off firecrackers, making all the noise of an intellectual warfare and creating the illusion of conflict, but it is only a sham battle in which there are plenty of explosions but never an exploded argument.
No wonder. The words "bigot" and "prejudice" and "fundamentalist" are tossed around like grenades in guerrilla warfare. According to Sheen, today there is "one great and fundamental dogma that is at the basis of all the other dogmas: that religion must be freed from dogmas. Creeds and confessions of faith are no longer the fashion."
With the passing of creeds and dogmas, the passing of controversy is a given. Prejudice, he tells us, is anti-social.
He mentions the philosophy of Hegel, and not in a positive tone. "Hegel of Germany rationalized error" Bishop Sheen tells us, and now we have indifference to truth. The ignorant are newly defined as tolerant.
Sheen writes:
The Church loves controversy, and loves it for two reasons: because intellectual conflict is informing and because she is madly in love with rationalism. The great structure of the Catholic Church has been built up through controversy. It was the attacks of the docetists and the monophysites in the early centuries of the Church that made her clear on the doctrine concerning the nature of Christ; it was the controversy with the Reformers that clarified her teaching on justification.
If today there are not nearly so many dogmas defined as in the early ages of the Church it is because there is less controversy— and less thinking. One must think to be a heretic, even though it be wrong thinking.
Today when a Catholic explores the doctrines of the occult, that Catholic becomes the pariah of the Catholic world. Had the present mindset existed in the Early Church, Catholicism could never have been defined. In the Early Church devout followers of Jesus Christ mined the doctrines of the followers of others for truth and discussed the falsehoods. The Early Fathers were not afraid to disagree.
Sheen tells us that Rationalism was approved by the First Vatican Council:
Not only does the Church love controversy because it helps her sharpen her wits—she loves it also for its own sake. The Church is accused of being the enemy of reason. As a matter of fact, she is the only one who believes in it. Using her reason in the [First] Council of the Vatican she officially went on record in favor of rationalism (meaning here the proper use of reason) and declared, against the mock humility of the agnostics and the sentimental faith of the fideists, that human reason by its own power can know something besides the contents of test tubes and retorts and that, working on mere sensible phenomena, it can soar even to the "hid battlements of eternity," there to discover the Timeless beyond time and the Spaceless beyond space that is God, the Alpha and Omega of all things.
He goes on to point out that the thoughts formed by individual man and taken to the marketplace of ideas where they become concrete in action together form an identifiable society structured in conjunction with the truth arrived at through rational thought. While good thoughts produce a good society, bad thoughts produce the opposite. It was for this reason, Sheen tells us, that thoughts were burned, presumably in the manner of burning books. As he says: "When society finds it is too late to electrocute a thought, it electrocutes the man."
Today, though, thinking rationally, when it opposes the intentions of Rome and especially Rome's political intentions, is labeled anathema and ridiculed. That attitude is contemporary and not based in the traditional thinking of the Church as Bishop Sheen sets it out in this essay.
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UPDATE
Lucio Mascarenhas, who sent me a link to the essay, has forwarded to me an email he wrote to Jim Blackburn to correct the note at the end of the essay on the above-linked website:
I have searched out and hold in my hands at this moment Vol. 3 of the Radio Replies authored by Frs. Leslie Rumble and Charles Carty, copyrighted 1942, with a Dec. 27, 1941 imprimatur by John Murray, Archbishop of St. Paul, and containing this very essay by Fulton Sheen as the preface.
The essay is merely titled "Preface", but it is the same essay, beginning with the words,
"Once there were lost islands..."
and ending with
"... brains that were thinking out the death of Paganism...
"It is to this task of thinking out the death of New Paganism that these chapters of the third volume of Radio Replies by Frs. Rumble and Carty are published."
The essay is signed "Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D., D.D., LL.D."
It is therefore obvious that the essay in question was written at least by Dec. 27, 1941 in order for Archbishop Murray to provide his imprimatur for it.
