by
Damien F. Mackey
“When a reporter asked [Gandhi] what he thought of Western civilisation,
he famously replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea’.”
Western civilisation. What is it? Where is it? And do we really need it?
Various politicians, journalists and teachers in Australia today are desperately trying to defend so-called ‘Western Civilisation’. Right at the forefront of these is senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Dr. Kevin Donnelly: “Students are taught about the dark side of Western civilisation … [but] indigenous culture and history are always positive”.
Some of these have been calling for - in the face of Islamic terrorism and left-wing subversion - a return to rationalism, to what they consider to be ‘the values of the Enlightenment’.
The former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, has been one of these:
“All of those things that Islam has never had — a Reformation, an Enlightenment, a well-developed concept of the separation of church and state — that needs to happen,” he told Sky News. ….
“All cultures are not equal and, frankly, a culture that believes in decency and tolerance is much to be preferred to one which thinks that you can kill in the name of God, and we’ve got to be prepared to say that”.
No one is permitted to “kill in the name of God”, that is for sure.
However, militant Islam is not the only culture that can perpetrate mass killings.
What about the terrorism of the millions of abortions being performed in the West?
“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is under fire from faith leaders after he signed a bill into law that legalizes abortion up until birth in many cases. The Democratic governor directed the One World Trade Center and other landmarks to be lit in pink … to celebrate the passage of "Reproductive Health Act".” “Our governor and legislative leaders hail this new abortion law as progress. This is not progress”, the bishops wrote. “Progress will be achieved when our laws and our culture once again value and respect each unrepeatable gift of human life, from the first moment of creation to natural death”.
Ours is not always “a culture that believes in decency and tolerance”?
Pope Francis has also denounced gossip as ‘form of terrorism’: ‘The tongue kills like a knife,’ the pontiff told Catholic faithful at an audience in the Vatican. Gossip, too, can waste people, though it is obviously a more subtle form of killing than when one shouting “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic: الله أكبر), and wielding a serrated knife and the Koran, beheads an ‘infidel’ in our very streets.
But even that is too subtle for the left-wing media that cannot detect any sort of motive in this.
Another Enlightenment favouring, Western civilisation defender is Mark Latham, a former leader of the Australian Labor Party.
Latham regards the Enlightenment as a deliverance from the “primitive superstitions” of previous centuries and the arrival at such knowledge as “could give mankind a comprehensive mastery over nature”:
https://www.facebook.com/MarkLathamsOutsiders/posts/the-radical-left-wing-attack-on-
THE RADICAL LEFT-WING ATTACK ON WESTERN CIVILISATION
…. I worry that Australia is sleep walking its way to disaster. Political correctness, identity politics and cultural Marxism have run through our institutions at an astonishing rate. There’s not enough public awareness of where these changes have come from and what they mean for the future. Media headlines focus on each controversy in isolation. But we need to understand the overall pattern.
The Left has launched a cultural invasion of Australia based on the concept of ‘fluidity’. Everything we thought was fixed in our understanding of the world – such as recorded history, science, national allegiance, gender, sexuality and even the words of everyday language – is now said to be open for reinterpretation and revision.
Under the influence of post-modernism, the Left claims these basic forms of knowledge are actually ‘capitalist constructs’, the equivalent of brainwashing to make us support the existing social and political order. In pushing this line through our institutions, traditional Australian values are being lost. We are no longer a nation of free speech and meritocracy, the land of the fair go.
Yes, our politics has changed, our culture is under siege and many Australians are thoroughly confused by what’s happening around them.
But it’s even worse than that. The Leftist drive for ‘fluidity’ is actually an attack on our civilisation. It’s an attempt to wind back many of the gains of the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment.
If you take one thing away from reading this article, hopefully this is it. My research and writing aims to alert as many Australians as possible to the political challenges facing Western civilisation: to see the overall, to understand the seriousness of the situation. A clear and present danger has emerged. We can no longer afford to take the advantages of our civilisation for granted.
Coming out of the Middle Ages, a new era of reason and scientific progress propelled Western nations to unprecedented levels of economic development, consumer comfort and advanced health care and education. The primitive superstitions of earlier centuries were left behind, replaced by a conviction that knowledge drawn from experience and evidence could give mankind a comprehensive mastery over nature.
These advances made important social goals possible. It was hoped that democratic government would sweep away feudal hierarchies and entrench the universal freedoms of political expression, association and participation. So too, the welfare state was designed to give people freedom from want, illness and ignorance. A new age of technology and creativity had the potential to uplift the quality of work, community and intellectual life – a genuine enlightenment.
Everywhere we look in Australia today, these values and gains are under attack. Reason and rationality are being lost, replaced by the march of ‘fluidity’. ….
[End of quote]
Both Western Civilisation and the Enlightenment might prove somewhat hard to define, or to pinpoint.
For example, when, precisely, did the Era of the Enlightenment begin?
There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.
And, again, is Australia a Western civilisation?
Certainly not geographically speaking, at least, as we live in an Asian part of the world.
Whatever be the case, Thomas Storck has attempted to determine “What is Western culture?”: http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/FR94102.htm
Almost every time that we read the newspaper or listen to the news on TV or radio we see or hear the West mentioned. Until a few years ago its mention was apt to be in connection with some military initiative in opposition to the Soviet Union and her allies. Currently it is more likely to be about some economic problem or program.
And although the news media seldom take the trouble to define the word West, it is not difficult to figure out what they mean by it. Unfortunately, for them the term signifies no more than a political or economic bloc, the United States, the European Community, some other European countries, such as Scandinavia or Austria, and a few countries in Asia or the Pacific such as Australia and New Zealand. And because the media's notion of the West is repeated so often, many of us begin to see the West chiefly in their terms: the West is nothing but a political or economic bloc committed to certain things, chiefly democracy and freedom, conceived principally as freedom for moneymaking and pleasure seeking, and, till recently, organized to defend itself against another bloc of nations that wished to destroy or inhibit that freedom. Of course there is occasionally some mention of "historical values" or such, that are seen to be at the bottom of the unity of the West, but in our media's conception these are so ethereal as to mean little besides an adherence to representative democracy and a minimum of restraints on conduct. With abortion legal in nearly every one of these countries, they surely do not include a respect for human dignity!
Because the public and civic life of Western nations shows no deeper unity than a superficial political and economic likeness, most publicists and commentators assume that that is all there is to the West, at least today.
It is merely a group of nations with some sort of common historical background, but sharing nothing important now but a commitment to preserving its freedom for materialistic and hedonistic pursuits.
But is this all there is to the West?
Is it only a grouping of nations seeking to preserve the material goods and worldly pleasures they possess? Although I think that many Catholics in the West know that our civilization is much more than this, yet we too are affected by the media's conceptions and for that reason are apt to forget just what Western culture really is and what gives it its unity. For example, many of us follow the common practice of classifying Latin America and such eastern European nations as Poland and Hungary as non-Western, clearly an historical absurdity. In this essay, then, I intend to set forth some of the basis for the West's historic unity, a unity that is still important for us today.
How do we discover the ultimate basis of the unity of the West?
Jacques Maritain captured the essence of the West in one sentence, when he wrote that the Greek people "may be truly termed the organ of the reason and word of man as the Jewish people was the organ of the revelation and word of God." [An Introduction to Philosophy, London: Sheed and Ward, 1947, p. 33].
The West then is nothing but a rich fusion of the word of God and the word of man, all that our culture has received from God by way of revelation and all that we have received by way of the exercise of reason. The former, the theological content of Western culture, comes from the revelation God made to the Chosen People—to Abraham, Moses and others under the Old Law, culminating in the coming of God himself as man. And though the final form of this theological content is in Catholic doctrine, its origins lie in the Old Testament covenant of God with the Hebrew people. ….
[End of quote]
Thomas Storck’s concise definition of “the theological content of Western culture”, originating in the Old Testament and reaching its fulfilment in the New Testament, makes a clear statement. Not so Dr. Kevin Donnelly’s uncharacteristic lapse when he, on one occasion, completely by-passes the Old Testament.
His summation of the origins of Western democracy - after having noted that all cultures have their own religion - is this: “In Western liberal democracy, such as Australia, it is Christianity and the New Testament”.
Yet how many Catholics would not bat an eyelid when reading or hearing such a statement? Might some of these be perfectly content with just a New Testament, not appreciating that the ‘Jesus Christ’ they purport to follow was utterly steeped in Old Testament culture?
I intend to give examples of this Old Testament cultural influence in the course of this article.
The Rich Young Man
Pope John Paul II dedicated a whole chapter to this famous Gospel encounter (CHAPTER I - "TEACHER, WHAT GOOD MUST I DO...?" (Mt 19:16) - Christ and the answer to the question about morality) in his rousing encyclical (6th August, 1993), Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendour of Truth”), a chapter essentially metaphysical, about “the absolute Good”, and also “moral theology”:
7. "Then someone came to him...". In the young man, whom Matthew's Gospel does not name, we can recognize every person who, consciously or not, approaches Christ the Redeemer of man and questions him about morality. For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion. This question is ultimately an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is the echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of man's life. Precisely in this perspective the Second Vatican Council called for a renewal of moral theology, so that its teaching would display the lofty vocation which the faithful have received in Christ,14 the only response fully capable of satisfying the desire of the human heart.
The suggestion will be proposed here that the response by Jesus to the young man is only properly intelligible when considered in the context of the Old Testament and Mosaïc Law – Moses invariably being Jesus’s very starting-point for explaining “himself” (Luke 24:27): “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself”.
This is not necessarily the typically Catholic approach.
Quite recently a very good Dominican priest - one who often manages to explain in simple fashion the meaning of somewhat obscure Gospel passages - preached a sermon on this text in which he greatly lamented the young man’s turning away from Jesus as a sadly missed opportunity in the young man’s life journey with the virtual implication that this was when he stepped right away from the path of salvation.
What that explanation misses, just to begin with, is that the young man was habitually a fervent keeper of God’s commandments (Matthew 19:20).
The following more biblically-based article, from Cristadelphianbooks, which even goes so far as to suggest an identification for the rich young man, seems to be a far more preferable interpretation of the encounter:
http://www.christadelphianbooks.org/haw/sitg/sitgb52.html
148. Was the Rich Young Ruler Barnabas?
When Jesus spoke of the difficulty for the rich to find a place in the kingdom of God, his disciples, utterly astonished, asked: "Who then can be saved?"
As they saw it, if a man with all the advantages of ease and comfort could not prove himself worthy of everlasting life, what hope was there for those beset with all the cares of a life of toil and anxiety? And was not material prosperity the outward sign of God's blessing? So surely the scales were loaded in favour of the rich.
Jesus answered: "With men it is impossible (that the rich should be saved), but not with God: for with God all things are possible"- which surely means that God has the power to save even the rich whose wealth is actually such a big spiritual handicap.
Honesty
But this rich man had chosen to go away from Jesus, and so this saying that God has the power to save even the rich was left hanging in mid-air, so to speak-unless He proceeded to do just that with this earnest young man who said: 'No, you are asking too much, Jesus. I cannot do what you require of me.' In this fact, then, there is surely good presumptive evidence that ultimately God did save this rich man, in vindication of Christ's assertion that God can save even a rich man in love with his riches.
The ominous saying with which this incident concluded is also worth pondering here: "many that are first shall be last; and the last first." The first phrase was a palpable warning to the privileged twelve, the one of whom (Mk.14:10 RVm.) was to become last of all. But who was the last one who was to be given a place among the first?
It is to be noted that, whatever else, this would-be disciple did not lack honesty. Unlike so many of Christ's more recent disciples, he did not somehow manage to persuade himself that "Sell all that thou hast and distribute to the poor" really meant something else less exacting and a great deal easier of achievement. When a man is frank and honest regarding the demands of Christ there is hope for him, even though his response be inadequate. But when he succeeds in throwing dust in his own eyes so as to persuade himself that he is fulfilling the Lord's commands, when really he is doing nothing of the sort, he is in dire spiritual danger.
A Levite
It makes an intriguing study in circumstantial evidence to bring together the various lines of argument which support, without completely proving the conclusion that this young man was Barnabas, who later became Paul's companion in travel.
First, it is possible to go a long way towards establishing that this rich ruler was a Levite (as, of course, Barnabas was; Acts 4:36).
Many readers of the gospels have mused over the fact that Jesus quoted to his enquirer the second half of the Decalogue-those commandments which have to do with duty to one's neighbour. Why did he not quote the others (more important, surely) which concern a man's duty to God? But if indeed this enquirer were a Levite, then by virtue of his calling, the first half of the Decalogue would find fulfilment almost as a matter of course.
It is also worth noting perhaps - though not too much stress should be put on this - that apparently it was when Jesus was near to Jericho that the rich young ruler came to him; and at that time, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows, Jericho was a Levitical city.
Much more emphatic is the fact that apparently Jesus did not require of other disciples that they "sell all, and give to the poor, and come and follow him." Once again, if the man were a Levite, all is clear, for "Levi hath no portion nor inheritance with his brethren; the Lord is his inheritance " (Dt.10:9).
Thus a Levite with a large estate was a contradiction in terms, and when Jesus bade him be rid of this wealth, he was merely calling him back to loyalty to other precepts in the Law of Moses. Barnabas, it is interesting to observe, was a Levite of Cyprus. So apparently the letter of the Law was observed by his owning no property in Israel. The "inheritance" Moses wrote about was, of course, in the land of Promise. So that estate in Cyprus was a neat circumvention of the spirit of the Mosaic covenant, and now Jesus bade him recognize it as such.
Jesus went on to quote also from Moses' great prophecy concerning the tribe of Levi: "There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time ..." In spirit, and also in detail, this is very much like Deuteronomy 33:8,9: "And of Levi he said, Let thy Thummim (' If thou wouldst be perfect. . .') and thy Urim be with thy holy one . . . who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children .. ."
Even more impressive is the Lord's demand that this earnest seeker sell all and come and follow him, for this is exactly what the Law prescribed when a Levite wished to give himself to full-time service of the sanctuary (Dt. 18 :6-8). There must be first "the sale of his patrimony," and the devotion of the proceeds to the sanctuary. Instead of the temple Jesus substituted his own poor disciples, the new temple of God. But this was to be done only if the Levite came "with all the desire of his mind."
Perhaps also there is special significance in the fact that when Jesus quoted the Commandments he put one of them in the form: "Defraud not" (Mk.10:19), as though with reference to the commandment forbidding the withholding of the wages due to a poor employee (Dt.24:14,15). But it could refer to the dutiful devotion of one's resources to the honour of God, a responsibility specially incumbent on a Levite who rejoiced in excessive wealth. ….
[End of quote]
This explanation really serves to make full biblical sense of the famous encounter.
None of it, though, is likely to impress the sort of Catholics, as mentioned above, who are disdainful of the Old Testament. Or those who eschew Vatican II with its timely call for us to study all of the Scriptures (Dei Verbum), and to seek a closer relationship with the Jewish people (Nostra Aetate), who are much closer than we to the teachings of Moses.
“Dei Verbum quotes one of the greatest Bible Scholars of the Early Church, St. Jerome to emphasize the need of all Christians to become intimately familiar with Scripture: “Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ”.”
“There is of course a tremendous amount of history, doctrine, and moral instruction in Scripture. But the deepest truth about Scripture is this – it is a privileged place where we encounter God and where He speaks a living, personal, life-changing word to us. “For in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them.” (DV 21)”.
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/vaticaniiandthewordofgodpart4goalofcat
Fr. Nadim Nassar describes it as “shocking”, when “the culture of God” comes into contact with the “culture of the people”.
He, the Church of England’s only Syrian priest, urges a theme in his recent book, The Culture of God – the Syrian Jesus (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018), that has been a central theme in various article of mine. Nassar is “an outspoken advocate for Western Christians to recognise the Middle-Eastern roots of their faith”.
Actually, this is nothing new. Eighty years before Fr. Nassar wrote his book, pope Pius XI, addressing a group of Belgian pilgrims (1938), asserted that: “Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are all Semites”.
Again, this is right in line with Thomas Storck’s conclusion (refer back again to p. 5), based on the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, that “the theological content of Western culture” originates in the Old Testament and reaches its fulfilment in the New Testament.
Judaeo-Christian thus sums up much of the early basis of our Western Civilisation.
Maritain’s other side of the equation for the essence of the West, the supposed Greek influence: “the Greek people "may be truly termed the organ of the reason and word of man as the Jewish people was the organ of the revelation and word of God", may need to be seriously reconsidered, we think, in light of various Patristic statements that the Greeks owed their wisdom to the Hebrews.
“What is Plato but Moses in Attic Greek?” St. Clement (Stromateis, I, 22)
St. Clement believed that Sirach (c. 200 BC, conventional dating) had influenced the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 500 BC, conventional dating).
Justin Martyr insisted that not only Moses but all the prophets are older than any poets, wise men, or philosophers the Greeks can put forward.
“Moses is more ancient than all Greek writers; and anything that philosophers and poets said … they took as suggestions from the prophets and so were able to understand and expound them …” (Apol. I.44).
St. Ambrose claimed that Plato (c. 400 BC, conventional dating) had learned from Jeremiah (c. 600 BC, conventional dating) in Egypt; a belief that was initially taken up by Augustine.
We submit that the statement by Plato in The Republic (II.362a): “… our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered … and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified”, could only have been written during the Christian era.
“When the culture of God reaches us, the inevitable result is that it shakes our world; sometimes it is like a hurricane or an earthquake”. (Nassar, p. 180)
Jesus Christ, who had come to set all things right, was wont to say (e.g. Matthew 5:21, 22): ‘You have heard that it was said to the people long ago …. But I tell you …’.
The first part of this statement refers to the received cultural view of long-standing.
Fr. Nassar describes this as follows (p. 180): “For all of us, we organise our world around ourselves according to what we have been taught, with ‘in’ and ‘out’, friends and enemies, right and wrong, values and vices and so on”. He then goes on to describe the second part of Jesus’s statement: “What a shock when God breaks into our lives and sweeps our ordering of the world aside like a house of cards, and says to us, ‘This is not what I want from you’.”
Whilst there is a meek and mild side to Jesus, he can also be, according to Fr. Nassar’s description, “a volcanic Jesus” (p. 10):
In Matthew 23 Jesus launches a series of fierce attacks on [the Pharisees and scribes]: ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.’ (23:13)
Along with “volcanic” fury, Fr. Nassar also discerns a humour (“funny”) and irony (“ironic”) in this statement of Jesus that he thinks Levantine people at least would pick up. He continues (pp. 10-11):
This saying of Jesus belongs to the essence of the culture of God; here, Jesus is being both ironic and funny, and his audience would have laughed when they heard this. Jesus wanted to speak the truth that touches the people’s hearts on the one hand, and on the other, to really strike the leaders. This is how Jesus handled his earthly culture and the culture of God. Nobody now listens to this sentence and smiles – but in the Levant, you would immediately laugh at Jesus’ irony.
Jesus then attacks the religious leaders for their flawed understanding of what is sacred: ‘Woe, to you, blind guides, who say, “Whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath.”
You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred?’ (23:16-17). Here, Jesus is not only using harsh words – this is also an exceptional way of speaking that Jesus used exclusively when he spoke to or about the religious leaders. He did it on purpose, to show without any doubt that the leadership they modelled does not belong in any way to the culture of God.
Jesus is furious with the religious leaders because they place great weight on minor matters while ignoring what really counts; he calls them hypocrites, ‘For you tithe mint, dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith’ (23:23). Hypocrisy is especially loathed in the Levant, and an accusation of hypocrisy would stain someone’s character. ….
[End of quote]
On pp. 179-180, Fr. Nassar tells of the profound impact of the culture of God on his own life.
“I feel that my experiences resonate strongly with Peter’s experience in Joppa”:
From birth I was indoctrinated by the state to follow a certain ideology, with a view on who were friends and who were enemies ingrained in my heart. I could not see beyond what had been planted in me. When I went through the Civil War in Lebanon, I was forced to challenge my preconceptions and prejudices …. It took a fresh life in a new world to melt the barriers like snow inside me under the light of God. Seeking the culture of God helped me to liberate my soul from the bondage of the past and to shake off the chains.
I feel that my experiences resonate strongly with Peter’s experience in Joppa. Peter was proud of his upbringing and his religion, and how he practised it, to the extent that he did not hesitate to boast about it even to God.
Here Fr. Nassar is referring to Acts 10:9-16. He continues:
We must remember that all the disciples had been raised as Jews, hating the Samaritans and looking down on all ‘outsiders’, and they found it hard to grasp the consequences of the work of the Spirit when this conflicted with a lifelong obedience to rules of ritual cleanliness.
Despite all his experiences of the universality of the gospel, here is the old Peter, slow to respond to the full implications of Pentecost. In place of the culture of God, he is still proudly stuck in the old Law – dividing the world into those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’. The response of the Lord in the visions reveals the full implications of his culture: ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’. This encounter is a window into the culture of God, which challenges Peter when he was boasting about his observation of the Law and confronts him with the true nature of the culture of God, which is all-inclusive, celebrating diversity and excluding no one. We know the will of God only through a relationship with him, not through a set of written rules.
[End of quotes]
As in the Joppa incident with St. Peter, the culture of God has again impacted the Church “like a hurricane or an earthquake” in the era of Vatican II. To recall Fr. Nassar again: “What a shock when God breaks into our lives and sweeps our ordering of the world aside like a house of cards, and says to us, ‘This is not what I want from you’.”
Pope Francis said in his trip to the Baltic states:
“What needs to be done today is to accompany the church in a deep spiritual renewal. I believe the Lord wants a change in the church. I have said many times that a perversion of the church today is clericalism. But fifty years ago, the Second Vatican Council said this clearly: the church is the People of God. Read number 12 of Lumen gentium. I know that the Lord wants the council to make headway in the church. Historians tell us that it takes a hundred years for a council to be applied. We are halfway there. So, if you want to help me, do whatever it takes to move the council forward in the church. And help me with your prayer. I need so many prayers.”
There are many Catholics who, like St. Peter at Joppa, resistant of change - “Peter was proud of his upbringing and his religion, and how he practised it, to the extent that he did not hesitate to boast about it even to God” - have not wholeheartedly (or not all) embraced Vatican II, finding “it hard to grasp the consequences of the work of the Spirit …”.
The culture of man, when motivated by any poisonous agenda, can also be “shocking”.
Fr. Nassar, fully grasping the significance of Simon the Pharisee’s treatment of Our Lord (that might be underestimated by someone from a Western culture without sufficient sensitivity towards Middle Eastern behaviour) writes on p. 123:
The shocking thing about this story is that Simon invited Jesus to his home in order to show him that he thought he was Jesus’ superior; he meant to degrade and offend him. If we know anything about Levantine culture, we know that it could never be an accident for an invited guest to be treated so offensively with such a clear and ostentatious display of a lack of hospitality.
On p. 183, Fr. Nassar even makes a statement about the West and the Enlightenment:
The dilemma of the early Church is still in the Levant today. In the West, the secular world has also permeated Christian beliefs, especially the Enlightenment and its focus on reason, which pushed Christianity into becoming an intellectual exercise, losing the warmth of the heart. Spirituality is now left to those on the verges of faith. ….
(Whittaker Chambers, in ‘COLD FRIDAY’, 1964, pp. 225, 226).
"I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against communism. But the West is divided, not only politically, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which to one degree or other has rejected the religious roots of the civilization the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates. In short, this is the order of which communism is one logical expression. Not originating in Russia, but in the cultural capitals of the West, reaching Russia by clandestine delivery via the old underground centres in Cracow, Vienna, Berne, Zurich and Geneva. It is a Western body of beliefs that now threatens the West from-Russia. As a body of Western beliefs: secular, materialistic, and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret, emotional complicity with communism, of which they dislike, not the communism, but only what, by chance of history, Russia has specially added to it: slave-labour camps, purges, MVD et alia. And that, not because the Western intellectuals find them unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them. If they could have communism without the brutalities of overlording that the Russian experience bred, they have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is Socialism but Communism with the claws retracted? (Note retracted, not removed)."
A Plato (Cave) – Aristotle (Light) Divide?
American popular historian, Arthur Herman, a writer of boundless knowledge, has written an intriguing book, The Cave and the Light. Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (Random House, 2014), according to which the last 2000 or more years are to be divided between the supremacy of the thought of Plato, or that of Aristotle. It is truly amazing how Herman is able to show how the thinking of Plato was uppermost in one era, whilst that of Aristotle prevailed in another.
The trouble is, who was Plato? Who was Aristotle?
If, as according to St. Ambrose, Plato really was in Egypt with the prophet Jeremiah - which, chronologically, the classical Plato could not possibly have been - then the likeliest candidate for ‘Plato’ so-called would have to be Jeremiah’s disciple in Egypt, the Jewish scribe, Baruch, a true proficient of wisdom (Baruch 3:9-4:4).
What may strengthen this somewhat is that, according to tradition, Baruch was the religious (philosophical) founder, Zoroaster.
Anyway, ‘not to let truth get in the way of a good story’, let us read a bit of what Arthur Herman has written, through a reviewer, Bill Frezza:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2014/01/14/book-review-the-struggle-for-the-soul-of-
Like many an engineer who got nary a whiff of a liberal education, I’ve spent the last 35 years trying to make up for it through my own reading. Charting a course through history, economics, and literature has been relatively easy. But making sense of the conflicting schools of philosophy without a roadmap has been vexing—until the right book came along to finally help put all the pieces in place.
That book, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman, should be standard reading in every Philosophy 101 course, and on the short list of “must read” books for any educated adult. Herman lays out the competing dynamic between Plato’s mysticism and Aristotle’s empiricism, which has driven over 2,300 years of history.
For the first of these 900 years, the Schools of Athens laid the foundation of Western thinking, with Plato’s Academy becoming the model for every monastery, university, and totalitarian regime.
Meanwhile, Aristotle’s legacy bequeathed to us capitalism, the scientific method, and the American Revolution.
As history has ebbed and flowed, we’ve seen the influence of each school wax and wane. Plato’s theory of decline and yearning for a vanished utopia informed the inward turning of European societies following the collapse of the Roman Empire —“the Cave”—while Aristotle’s faith in human potential and vision for continual progress fueled the Renaissance and Enlightenment—“the Light”. Along the way, Herman lays out the contributions of subsequent philosophers, who echoed one or the other of these themes, both through their teachings and through the deeds of the societies that embraced them.
One of the book’s most important threads is the impact these two schools had on the evolution of Christianity, including the Catholic Church’s efforts to harmonize faith and reason and the relative importance of good works in this life vs. entry into the next. The balance tips back and forth from Augustine to Aquinas, culminating in the rupture of the Protestant Reformation, before we are carried through to Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic.
But this is no dry pedantic tome! Herman makes the journey fun, as he weaves a captivating narrative of thought and action and puts the ethos of the key players in historical context.
His treatment of Aristotle’ greatest student, the scientist-warrior Archimedes, comes to life in his account of the epic defense of Syracuse, complete with monstrous war machines plucking Roman ships into the air and tossing them about like toys. Might there be a Hollywood blockbuster waiting to be made here?
But the heart and soul of the book, providing enough food for thought to last a lifetime, is the contrast of Platonic excess and Aristotelian hubris. The former gave us not just sublime art, but also tyrants from Robespierre to Adolf Hitler. The latter gave us not only Adam Smith and the industrial revolution, but also the atom bomb.
Herman’s delineation of the difference between a subjective reality crafted by elites, vs. an objective reality informed by direct observation is punctuated by a brilliant quote from Benito Mussolini: “It is not necessary that men move mountains, only that other men believe they moved them.” Thus, Plato’s “noble lie” through which rulers control producers leads to Josef Goebbels’s “big lie.”
While it’s clear that the author is a champion of Aristotle’s reason, liberty, and Athenian democracy against Plato’s call to faith, Spartan obedience, and rule by philosopher-kings, he sounds an important warning about the “fatal conceit,” to which Aristotle’s heirs often succumb, citing the work of F. A. Hayek, an important thinker though not normally included in the pantheon of philosophers. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
And then at the end of the book, rather than indulge in a bout of Aristotelian triumphalism, Herman leaves the door open for Plato’s leavening influence. Perhaps Herman believes there really is something ineffable out there—or he has taken to heart the advice of Voltaire, who did not believe in God but hoped his valet did “so he won’t steal my spoons.”
Read it yourself and be the judge.
