Traditional Cures for Modern Ills
I've chosen a provocative title for this piece quite deliberately. I'm not a reactionary and do not believe the resolution of the problems of the modern world lie in the resuscitation of past forms. In my doctoral thesis I criticised Alasdair MacIntyre for seeking to resolve modern problems by reviving past communities. That criticism was incorrect and totally misunderstands MacIntyre's position. I do, however, hold that these past communities and traditions embody perennial truths that can be valued independently of particular determinations in time and place.
The photograph is of the North Rose window in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, portraying Mary, Jesus and the disciples.
I have been thinking of traditional morality in light of both the fire at the Cathedral and the reaction to it. Many have expressed sorrow and concern; many have reacted against that concern to express contempt. I have been struck by incomprehension, the ignorance, and also the bigotry of the latter. In keeping with the sophism of the age, they have their own facts, their own values, their own stories, and recognize no standard by which we may check those things by. It is futile engaging such people. More interesting for me have been those who have engaged in the primary fallacy of the age: "what-aboutism," seeking to advance their own particular causes, as though they have any right to or claim upon the commitment and energy of those concerned with the rebuilding of the Cathedral. They begin by expressing regret at the fire and then very quickly proceed to their own particular concern (indicating a complete lack of concern with Notre Dame in the process). "Re/build this" has come the demand issued to those concerned with Notre Dame, with an image of whatever is of concern or interest to those issuing their demands. My response to such people is a curt "You build it!" And if you don't or can't, if you need the help of others who do not share your concern, then ask yourselves some searching questions as to why, given that you presume your causes to be so right, and have so much science and technology on your side. There's a moral and motivational failing here that interests me. People with a right issue or cause - and I support much that they say - cannot command the power, resources, and support to get anything they want done. That's a huge failing on the part of those so keen to change the world. To put it bluntly, they cannot do what the Christian Middle Ages succeeded in doing so spectacularly well - they cannot build and sustain a civilisation. It is this that interests me.
Many of the images from those demanding "re/build this" portray the destruction of nature beyond possibilities of revival. It is an indulgent and impotent lament, then. I think it is meant to shock us into protecting nature and preventing ecological degradation. That begs the question as to why the moderns, with all their science and technology at their fingertips, have lost the wit and the nous to join together in common cause. The people they lecture here have lessons to teach them, should they prove wise enough to be taught.
I shall take the opportunity of this controversy to highlight some important truths which the disenchanted modern world has long since departed from. These are truths embodied in the culture and history of the Cathedral, truths that so many proved incapable of recognizing let alone comprehending.
I don't do too much of this argumentation in public, because it is all too easy to be misunderstood by people who have no understanding of metaphysics and theology and even less respect for religion. It's an age of deliberate ignorance and it is easy to get dragged into debates that resolve nothing. I am learning to ignore. I take arguments and materials from all sources and try to fashion them to my own work of synthesis.
But here goes, a brief commentary on articles I have been reading this week in light of the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
This first article takes positions that I have been arguing with respect to morality and modernity in recent years. I have yet to publish most of this work, but it is substantial and will buttress my previously issued work. Put simply, the argument is this: shorn of its theological assumptions and underpinnings, the morality of the modern world is rootless and fruitless. People are using moral terms and categories that are fundamentally empty and have no critical or practical purchase. The self-legislating reason of modernity is ultimately self-cancelling. To argue that human beings should take morality into their own hands, and liberate ethics from God and religion, sounds emancipatory, but it is proving anything but. The existence of human beings within asymmetrical relations of power and resources means that this humanist ethics soon reduce to a sophist power struggle in which victory goes to the strongest voice. I would, on Kantian grounds, argue for the universality of reason here, but I cannot and will not argue for truth and goodness as wilful human projections upon an objectively valueless and meaningless world. There are limits to Kant's praxis-based philosophy, and that means that, sooner or later, Kant's intersubjectivity fragments into a subjectivism of irreducible choice, preference, and opinion. All that remains is a value-free pragmatism, an instrumentalism, or a fracturing of morality into mere value judgements, an expressivism or emotivism. The truth is that, in the absence of ends upon which we can agree and share in common, we will be unable to agree on means either. I have written at length on this in work I shall shortly publish. All I can do here is point out that this article below and this book it reviews establish truths that I have consistently argued for in my work and developed at great length.
Review of "Curing Mad Truths" by Rémi Brague
University of Notre Dame press, 133pp, £25/$29
Modernity, on Brague’s account, is defined by several ideas it borrowed from Christianity, while at the same time it rejects the larger conceptual context that made those ideas intelligible. Progress is thus the idea of divine providence without its grounds in God - a delusion, and a dangerous one. I argue that 'men as gods' through technological power have succeeded in horizontalising the vertical, pursuing infinity through their economic and technical powers on an Earth of finite resources.
There are other errors in modernist thinking. Moderns seek mercy and forgiveness and yet deny the divine judge who alone can give them absolution. In the absence of God, we are reliant upon each other - and human beings prove all too unforgiving and merciless in their dealings with each other. Dante's Inferno is a place of all too human justice, vengeful and retributive, far removed from divine justice. There is no God in such a world. 'Modern science presupposes that the universe exhibits a rational order that can be uncovered by the human mind. But it also represents the mind as entirely the product of forces that favour, not rationality per se, but only whatever is conducive to survival.'
This article and the book it reviews identifies precisely the basic fallacy of modern ethics:
'In his first chapter, Brague contrasts the modern notion of a project with that of a task. A task is something laid upon us, by God or natural law. Of its nature it is answerable to and justified by some standard outside itself. The modern project has been precisely to reject such an external standard and make the recreation of man a kind of free-ranging experiment that has no justification or criterion of success outside of man himself. The trouble is that this gives the project no objective foundation or content at all. Unsurprisingly, human existence comes to seem pointless.'
So much in Edward Feser's article correlates with positions I develop in my own work that I have to quote at length:
'Next, Brague identifies what he takes to be the Achilles heel of today’s atheism. Modern science and politics have aimed at conducting themselves without reference to any theological or metaphysical foundation. What matters is simply what works, technologically and socially, and we needn’t bother with questions about why things work or what purpose they serve. But this purely pragmatic focus leaves unanswered, and unanswerable, the question of why we should value even this atheistic sort of science and politics.Next, Brague meditates on the implications of the fact that while modern man seeks to maximise his control over his circumstances so as to improve them, his own existence and nature is something that lies outside his control. He does not and cannot create himself. This is unendurable unless we see ourselves as created by a cause which is perfectly good and made us to be good.Another source of modern man’s unease is that he has made of nature a resource rather than a home, so that he is not at home within it. Science quantifies, predicts, controls and exploits the physical world, but does not concern itself with final causes or teleology. Naturally, then, things come to seem meaningless, including ourselves. Brague calls for a return to a philosophy of nature that addresses precisely these questions which fall through science’s methodological net.'
The article proceeds to discuss freedom, distinguishing this from the individualist subjectivism and licence of the modern age. Again, the view correlates with my conception of 'rational freedom,' understanding reason as something built into the design and plan of the universe by God.
'True freedom is the freedom to realise most fully the ends that our nature points us towards.'
We are back to natural law. I was once subjected to a pretty vicious dressing down on this by an atheist biologist who claimed that "arrogant Catholic scholars" like me have no understanding of nature. I could have responded that arrogant scientists like him have no understanding of natural law, in that natural law is not a naturalism but something very different - nature seen through the eyes of moral reason. But I didn't. Because I know that such scientists believe such a thing, indeed believe ethics as such, to be merely 'made-up' and irrelevant. The truth, of course, as revealed by natural facts, is that there is no design, no meaning, no purpose, no end point in the universe, no inherent value and goodness. It leaves us bereft of any point other than survival.
That thinking is a dead-end.
Evolutionary biology makes existentialists of us all, I read. This is not new thinking at all, but pretty much repeats Max Weber's position from over a century ago. Weber's view of the future was bleak and pessimistic: "where there is nothing, both the Keiser and the proletarian have lost their rights." Without God, human beings are disinherited and homeless in a disenchanted world. All that there is is subjective choice and the wilful projection of truth and value and meaning upon a pointless, valueless, and meaningless world. All social ties and common forms in community and culture are dissolving in a modern world which sees values as merely subjective preferences expressed by discrete individuals, with no objective standard available to evaluate competing claims. Feser states the solution: "What morality requires is the notion of virtue, which concerns the realisation of an end that our nature sets for us as a matter of objective fact."
This next article also deals with issues I have recently been addressing with respect to the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Fr Raymond de Souza
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame is not a museum, it is a living space, one that is enlivened by Catholics. It is the individual men and women comprising the Catholic community, and the Faith that enthuses them, who have made the Cathedral live. Not tourism and certainly not tourists who flit from one site to another in search of transitory pleasures. The cathedral is not "just a building," and those many that have been saying that it is have revealed everything about the emptiness of the modern secular world. As I have written in the post on Notre Dame, human civilization, if we are to be reductive in the manner of a modern scientism that strips the world of purpose, is just flesh and stone: both are subject to decay, corruption, and death. If you want more - and humans as meaning-seeking creatures seem to want more, hence the extent to which they continue to cry against the objective facts they claim to be the only standard of truth - then you will need to embrace the eternal life ordered by God. That's what a true "cathedral project" is all about. (Re)build this, (re)build that, the people of faith and belief have been ordered these past few weeks. To build is to be, and being is more than flesh and stone. Only God does the ordering here. I have written at length on this in the Notre Dame post, so please refer to that.
And the word ‘Catholic’ is not a swear word, either. It comes from the Greek for ‘universal,’ katholikos, a word which conveys a meaning that is very different from, and much richer than, the Latin universalis. We are on Earth to proclaim a universal fraternity based on love.
Here is something I have written in The Ecology of Good, to be edited and published in the next year or so.
"If ‘universal’ is the adequate meaning of ‘catholic,’ then why did the Latin church, which in its vernacular language had the word universalis, not use this word but rather borrowed from Greek the term katholikos instead, speaking of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ (to put it into English) instead of the ‘one, holy, universal and apostolic church’?
In answering this question, Walter Ong shows how ‘universal’ is to be understood in an expansive and inclusive sense. The word ‘universal’ in Latin likely derives from two root-words, unum (meaning ‘one’) and vertere (meaning ‘turn’). This image is akin to an architect’s compass drawing a circle around ‘one’ central point. The understanding of universal here does imply a certain degree of inclusivity, gathering all that falls within the boundary established by the circle. However, as the frequently heard phrase ‘expanding the moral circle’ indicates, there are persons, things, bodies and beings that can fall outside of the boundary. If the universal here was genuinely inclusive, then there would be no need to keep arguing for its expansion to include those left outside. A circle establishing a boundary necessarily entails the exclusion of all things that fall outside of the lines drawn around the ‘universal’. Such a moral circle is only partially inclusive and universal, and therefore not at all.
In contrast to universalis, katholikos derives from two Greek words: kata or kath (meaning ‘through’ or ‘throughout’) and holos (meaning ‘whole’). A concern or consideration that runs ‘throughout-the-whole’ carries no implication of a circle or boundary containing core and periphery and separating those who are ‘inside’ and those who are ‘outside.’
Ong’s point has a direct bearing on what it is to be a Christian, with katholikos being consistent with the ministry of Jesus Christ in a way that the more exclusive notion of the church as ‘universal’ is not. He points to Jesus’ parable of ‘the yeast’ (Matthew 13:33, also Luke 13:21) in which the Kingdom of God is likened to the woman who makes bread. The Kingdom of God is like the yeast that is added to flour and is found ‘throughout-the-whole’ of the dough, not separating out the flour, but building it all together until it becomes part-of and at one-with the bread, contributing to and mutually benefiting from the life of bread.
Like yeast, true universality is a catholicity which does not seek uniformity and conformity, but works with and celebrates the diversity of the parts that make the whole so that parts and whole are at-one.
It takes little thought from here to appreciate how this understanding of catholicity can inform and shape the meaning of universality in the world, ensuring that the ‘global’ ethic and institutional framework we seek is genuinely ‘whole’ and inclusive. The ‘universal’ approach indicated by universalis is one that draws lines and establishes boundaries around ‘one point’ lying at the centre, with endless debates about who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ conducted with respect to determining proximity to that point. Such an approach is likely to establish boundaries between ‘the global institution’ and ‘the world’ as a whole.
The ‘catholic’ approach indicated by catholicity is one that embraces the whole and everything and everyone that falls within that whole. This approach extends a moral concern and consideration ‘throughout-the-whole’ of the world. This sees ‘the global’ ethic and institution as inclusive in existing as part of, not apart from, the world. In establishing boundaries, we encircle and enclose ourselves around a central and singular ‘one point’, compelling everyone and everything to fall ‘in line’, and excluding those that do not.
It may sound strange to the ears, but in this sense, we need not so much to be universal than catholic, in the sense of coming to see and understand ourselves as parts of and as ‘at one’ with the whole, moving ‘throughout-the-whole’. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 refers to a mutuality between individuals building each other up (‘Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.’ 1 Thessalonians 5:11), pointing to a catholicity as a welcoming of each and all. This mutuality I see at work within the whole, extending to all beings and bodies in the More-than-Human World that enfolds and nourishes us. The whole is the more-than-human whole." (Peter Critchley, The Ecology of Good, forthcoming)
Back to the article on Notre Dame.
In 2005, George Weigel published The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God. Weigel wanted to explore whether a religiously informed public culture, or a secularist one, better provided for the defence of human rights and the common good. He used the architecture of Paris as his departure point.
In the title of this book,"The Cube and the Cathedral," the cube is La Grande Arche and the cathedral is Notre-Dame. Weigel was struck that all the promotional material about the Arche notes that the entirety of Notre-Dame – towers, spire and all – could fit into the Arche.
Weigel asks the crucial questions:
“Which culture ... would better protect human rights?”
“Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations of democracy?
"The culture that built this stunning, rational, angular, geometrically precise but essentially featureless cube?
Or the culture that produced the vaulting and bosses, the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the nooks and crannies, the asymmetries and holy ‘unsameness’ of Notre-Dame and the other great cathedrals of Europe?”
This post answers those questions very clearly.
This next article is also well worth a read.
It is the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo.
I've always admired Michelangelo much more than Leonardo, but I know many who rave about Leonardo. It's the science they love, the inquiring, investigative mind seeking out facts. That's fantastic, but it's not the whole story of Leonardo's life. Leonardo's religious inspiration and commitment has disappeared from view. That may fit the modern secular age, but it makes a nonsense of the man and his work. Leonardo produced some of the most important religious art of all time. The religious dimension runs through his entire work, propelling his keen interest in all things within the Creation. That dimension is excised to leave Leonardo as a purely scientific mind. The dominant conception of Leonardo is a travesty of the man, which says everything about the sterility of a modern age that has separate fact and value, exalted facts as the realm of truth, and denigrated values as mere subjective judgment and opinion.
"Leonardo’s greatest artworks are zealously guarded behind museum walls, lest any hint of their religious origins escape. His altarpieces alternate with mythological scenes; his devotional panels are only used for visitors taking selfies. The convent where he painted the great mural of the Last Supper is unrecognisable as the once-busy hive of Dominicans, who prayed, studied and ate before that magnificent backdrop.
It is daunting for Catholics to embrace this man, flaunted as he is by our artistically sterile era as an icon of godless beauty. This two-dimensional picture, however, does little credit to the artist best known today for his nuanced portrait of Mona Lisa. Leonardo’s greatest works were the fruit of his engagement with religious subjects, entrusted to him by some of the Renaissance’s most exacting patrons of sacred art."
Elizabeth Lev is an art historian who tells it plain:
"It would probably surprise Leonardo to see the portrait painted of him in this age. Extolled as a scientist, atheist, gay rights activist and even a green prophet, he is remembered vaguely as a painter, and forgotten as a man who produced some of the most important religious art of all time. His brush, courted by popes, kings and religious orders for its extraordinary insight into the sacred, has been whittled down by modern critics to a matte pencil to highlight the profane."
"It is daunting for Catholics to embrace this man, flaunted as he is by our artistically sterile era as an icon of godless beauty. This two-dimensional picture, however, does little credit to the artist best known today for his nuanced portrait of Mona Lisa. Leonardo’s greatest works were the fruit of his engagement with religious subjects, entrusted to him by some of the Renaissance’s most exacting patrons of sacred art."
"Catholics should not be shy about reclaiming their brilliant brother and celebrating 2019 as the year of the man who tirelessly studied creation until he found the Creator."
by Elizabeth Lev
Leonardo struggled with sin and temptation like everyone else, but used his art to glorify creation at its best, not its basest. His art is not a naturalism or a scientism, it is religious to the core, a Christian humanism.
Another interesting article:
"Ruth Burrows, the renowned British Carmelite, defines mysticism this way: “Mystical experience is being touched by God at a level deeper than words, thought, imagination and feeling.” We have a mystical experience when we know ourselves and our world with clarity, even if just for a second. That can involve something extraordinary, like a vision or apparition, but normally it doesn’t."
"We have a mystical experience when we are in touch with that part of our soul that was once touched by God, before we were born; that part of our soul that still bears, however unconsciously, the memory of that touch.Henri Nouwen calls this a dark memory of “first love”, of once having been caressed by far gentler hands than we have ever met in this life.We all have experiences of this to some degree. We all have mystical experiences, though we aren’t all mystics."
And
There are contentious claims made in this article. Take what you can from this and the other articles. Read critically as always. That's what I do. I dialogue with myself in the reading.
I would read this article in light of Terry Eagleton's book “Culture and the Death of God.”
'Once upon a time—before modernity, to be precise—God was alive and robust, and religion united “theory and practice, elite and populace, spirit and senses.” With its capacious embrace of the soul and the body, religion—clearly epitomized, for Eagleton, by Roman Catholicism—has repeatedly exhibited the capacity to “link the most exalted truths to the daily existence of countless men and women.” More attuned to our most fundamental needs and longings than the modern cultural apparatus, it has been “the most tenacious and universal form of popular culture.” With its theology, philosophy, liturgy, and morality, Roman Catholicism embodied a grand synthesis of the human condition that embraced both scholasticism and the Corpus Christi festivals, the Book of Kells and the peasant’s prayers, Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Bonhomme. Eagleton fondly evokes the sensuous felicity of Catholic religious life, how faith finds material expression in “the odour of incense, the colour of a chasuble, the crook of a knee.” (The redolence of Eagleton’s own Catholic past—recounted in his 2003 memoir, The Gatekeeper—is evident throughout this book.)
Shaken by the Reformation, the Catholic synthesis of religion and culture was finally demolished by the Enlightenment.'
And we've been living in the ruins ever since. Modernity is not ruins at all, for those who point to the fact that humans are healthier, wealthier, better educated, and longer lived, in greater numbers, in the age of capitalist modernity. The modern world has been very liberatory for very many people. It's an important point to make, lest the criticism here sound like a nostalgic rejection of modernity. (Marx would agree, seeing alienation as a progressive dialectical movement). The resolution of the problem of the collapse of an authoritative moral framework requires a whole lot more than nostalgia. Have a read, anyway, if it is of interest.
This is a fascinating article:
Next.
I love Tolkien, but the new film on him appears to be another travesty to fit the tastes of a modern audience. Remove the religious dimension, and you make a nonsense of Tolkien. If Tolkien is so popular with so many millions of people - and he evidently is - then this is because he offers something to modern men and women searching for soul in a spiritual wasteland. Say so! Don't bury it just to sell tickets!
Fr Michael Ward
I have seen much more positive reviews than this. But I have also seen Mark Kermode, a man with no axe to grind either way, make it clear that the film is just so ... simplistic, reducing complexity and depth to blandness.
I would say that you would be better off reading my own book on Tolkien from last year.
One day, I shall integrate all this work to produce a concise and definitive statement of my view. You can call me left, you can call me right - I just say that I am attempting to reconcile disclosure and imposure, the two great wings of objective truth and subjective will, to establish the unity of the three transcendentals - the true, the good, and the beautiful. I proceed from the view that beauty is the supreme political category for the way that it lights the path to truth and goodness and invites the heart to follow. Whatever politics that involves, that is my politics. I need to write this properly, rather than keep putting out snippets on social media, inciting controversies that only serve to confuse the issue and divide people against each other rather than achieve the unity I seek.
And I vehemently reject "what about-ism" as the primary fallacy of the current age, an age bereft of true ethics and culture. This fallacy refers to the way in which whenever anyone expresses a view on a matter of particular interest and concern to them, it is immediately countered with a "what about" this, that, or the other by others seeking to bully or force action in favour of their own pet project. It's an age of moral fragmentation. You think it's this, I think it's that, and in the mutual indifference that such self-cancellation nurtures, civilization dies a long, slow death. Such thinking is a nonsense. Since all things are connected, a concern for one thing is perfectly compatible with concern for another. These things are not mutually exclusive. Split these things up, and they become so, splitting people up in the process. You will never win a mass constituency for your politics that way. But there it is: separation is the key figure of the modern world, and it is this fragmentation that ensures a deficiency in the motivational economy - you will always be struggling to mobilize sufficient numbers to your cause as to make a difference. Hence the calls that are consistently made upon the concern of others.
Nietzsche's "death of God" pertains directly to this notion of value monism. Without an authoritative moral framework, whose dissolution Nietzsche highlighted with the "death of God," there are no moral imperatives, only moral appeals without a referent, without any critical or practical purchase, without an appropriate social identity that inspires, motivates, and enables human beings to act in response. That is precisely what has gone missing in the modern world, and that is why I make such an issue of this, rather than proceeding to the science, the design, the technology, the interconnections that impress others so much. Such things are easy, and alone will not resolve the problems we face. This is an age of a mutual indifference to one another's gods - the subjective preferences and choices we each of us make as moral agents. Without an objective standard, ethics is just irreducible value judgments. Each chooses their own god; but it could be a devil for another person. We live under the shadow of Nietzsche and Weber on this.
So what is the value of overriding concern. You think it is climate change, others think it is economic growth. Nature? Which is?
I repeat this quote from Max Weber one hundred years ago a lot, for a good reason:
"Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights."
Weber was referring to Nietzsche's "death of God" as the loss of an authoritative moral framework. Without that framework, value monism is a mere self-cancellation within human power relations. The ontological status of any entity you care to propose as the one important thing is uncertain and open to decisive challenge. I am interested in reinstating "something" as against Weber's "nothing." Nietzsche rejected this. He explicitly refused to put human beings in the place of God, denouncing this as a mere idolatrous humanism. I agree. But I'm not sure Nietzsche's gay science, the joyous affirmation of life, alone suffices. I'll leave it open until I finish editing and publish. I try to develop it as a Gaian/Gayan Science (excuse the awful pun, I'm a bit light headed after a day of heady excitement and celebration).
The one "something" we can be sure of is planet Earth and our presence on it. Is that enough for value monism to work?
I'm not convinced, for reasons Marx gave.
But here I am more interested in the fact that human beings exist within asymmetrical relations of power. The notion of humanity taking morality into its own hands changes little. The paradoxical formulation concerning the "death of God" derives from the fact that such a God was never alive in the first place, in which case humans have always had morality in their own hands, and all the problems we face are self-authored - the solution is no solution at all, but the problem, with a call to do the same thing, only do it better. Why? That's a question that invites the transcendent, something independent of the laws, practices, institutions, and struggles of time and place. Without that, it is power that decides. And there's no point to the game other than staying in the game and staying ahead of your rivals. Or wiping them out. Unless you want to keep them around and establish parasitic exploitative relation to them. It's the 'constant battles' thesis.
Which brings me back to Weber. It doesn't matter which side wins in this sophist power struggle between classes over the terms on which the Earth is possessed. Human civilization has to get beyond these relations of possession. And that means getting beyond Thrasymachus' sophist assertion that justice is the interests of the strongest. I go with Plato on this, and proceed from there.
I just think that this "something" on which share common ground and build our hopes, dreams, and lives, is something ... more, an anarchic excess or surplus that evades enclosure by reason. Man may be the measurer of all things, but he is not the measure of all things.
Time and again I return to Dante, my unfailing guide through life. He doesn't make it easy. He is an awkward read, frankly. But he has guts and is unafraid.
Dante writes that humankind has through ‘foul usury’ humiliated the Creation, ('Paradiso', XXII, 151), that flower-bed that has been gifted to us. This "despising Nature and her goodness" is a violence against God and Creation and against ourselves. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48. We have the right to use what we need but have no right to do any more than that. It’s clear that Dante condemns usury and great accumulations of property: “the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere." (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, destroying our place within Creation, seeing ourselves as gods through our actions and powers in creating the self-made social world, we are destroying our own Being. The modern economic system, we know, is a heating machine, as a result of which we are not creating a Heaven on Earth as turning Earth into an Inferno. And there are some who bear much more responsibility than others. The virtues are now considered sins against the GNP.
I'll state my view plainly. Value monism is untenable apart from a belief in a God that encompasses all things and orders and moves all things to their true ends.
All you need is love, people have told me, objecting to such convoluted arguing. So The Beatles thought, I reply, and they split in acrimony within two years. Love has to be ordered to its true end - the Love of a God that enfolds, nourishes, moves and carries all.
Of course I can't prove it. But Love has no need of proof. You live it as best you can.
Tennyson called it right in The Ancient Sage.
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!