In G.K Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, which I have just re-read, the claim is made that no philosophical system since the sixteenth century comports itself with what the ordinary person would call ‘common sense’. This is entirely true. Grossly inferior ‘Philosophers’ such as Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Hume and the ‘moderns’ all premise their ‘scepticism’ on the belief that nothing real exists. They entirely suspend and ignore the reality of the world of the 5 senses. In this vein an egg is not an egg but a chicken, a cat is simply an abstract naming convention for an animal which may or may not exist, and there is no essence to an object and its very being is subject to denial. The cant of Kant et al is infinite in its sophistry and anti-reality. The greatest philosopher in history, greater even than Aristotle, was of course St. Thomas Aquinas, and as Chesterton relates, his vast genius is built upon the solid foundation of reality, logic and common sense. Not so the modern world.
Without the Catholic faith and religion there is no modern world. It is quite as simple as that. The heights of cultural and societal achievement was only conquered by Catholicism. Everything else is either an imitation, forgery, fraud or if positive, built entirely on the edifice of medieval energy and insight. The Catholic faith leads one initially to the truth of God and creation, a God who should be and who is beyond our crude and rough comprehension, limited as we are in both reason and understanding. Alongside God, the Catholic faith requires a belief and affirmation about human reason and the essence of Being. The Catholics preserved the knowledge of classical systems during the Germanic migrations and takeover of the Roman-Greek empire in the West during the 5th and 6th centuries. It was the faith which inspired Charlemagne to create a recrudescence across all of society and dream of a new and much improved Athens. This is the faith that generated modern science, astronomy, mathematics, schooling, universities and sundry inventions from eye-glasses to agriculture and armaments and everything else that built the basis for modernity.
The most remarkable feature ascertained by Chesterton and embedded in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, is the obvious miracle where Christian revelation manifests an inherent superiority in the natural plane of existence, without neutering, or obstructing reason, and in fact, demands the union of faith and reason. In sum we can say that without faith there is precious little reason, but plenty of obscurantism, paganism, violence and oppression. Without reason, there is no faith, but blind obedience, dogma and ritual. When the two are married as in Catholicism, we have the capability to create, build, discover, invent and know. Our faith is the worthy counsellor, the guard-rail, the brake, the common-sense of our reason.
In the ‘modern’ world, poorly described as such, with its pagan attributes, atavistic impulses, its sacrifices of unborn children, its medical Nazism and disregard for natural immunity, natural law rights and natural freedoms, its drunken screeching about the benefices of totalitarian governance and the usurpation of national cultures; we see the 2000 year old, carefully constructed and beautifully made edifice of Western Civilisation under siege from within and without. Mechanical ‘science’, Benthamite libertinism, the crass and shallow individualism carried to extremes expressed in the ‘rights of men’, the post-modern relativism in which nothing matters or is even really known, are false, repressive, inane idols of pagan practices, hardly more developed in their barren theology than the worship of Baal the storm, fertility or moon God. The modern world denies reality, chromosomes, genders, natural climate processes and objective truth and reality.
What makes the onslaught worse, is that the modern Catholic Church, with a globalist-Pope and corrupt-craven Vatican, is part of the problem. The Church is unwilling to defend itself against the pagan-secularist invasion of our civilisation, it chooses instead to aid its own destruction. Orthodox Catholicism is being expunged at an alarming rate and the infantilisation and Anglicanisation of the Church is being implemented with due haste. The radical negativity of the Church towards its own history and doctrines is barely matched by the secular hatred of the same. The irrational dogmas of the ‘modern age’ divorce faith and reason and indeed, obliterate reason altogether. Freedom of speech, thought, activity and natural law rights to bodily and national autonomy are now the enemies of the globalist-Church hierarchy and its Pope. Pope Leo XIII taught that all laws are divinely premised, as manifested in canon law which connects reason with divine commands and obligations. The current Catholic Church does not believe this, ascribing all power to the secular state, and rejecting the independence and importance of the Catholic faith in people’s lives. If the government says ingest poisons, imprison yourself, stop going to church, and live in fear, the Catholic Church poses no opposition or even mild criticism.
Most recent ‘scholarship’ is restating the obvious that the Catholic Church was the one indispensable organisation in the creation of the modern world. Ironically, this very institution which bequeathed so much, does not believe it contributed anything and demands its faithful to obey the Church of State.