Peter Kreeft's Foreword to F.J. Sheed's "Society and Sanity"

The Foreword to F. J. Sheed's Society and Sanity: How to Live Well Together (Ignatius Press, 2013) | Peter Kreeft

It
is a great honor to be asked to write a foreword to a
masterpiece.

The book you hold in your hands is, I firmly
believe, the single most useful and important book (outside of the
Church’s own official teachings in the Catechism
of the Catholic Church
and the papal encyclicals) that we can possibly read about the single
most important field of conflict between the Catholic Church
and the
increasingly de-Christianized Western world today.

Frank Sheed
was one of the three best Catholic apologists of the twentieth
century, the others being G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis (a
Catholic who thought he was an Anglican). Just as Sheed’s Theology
and Sanity
remains the very best introduction to Catholic theology, Society
and Sanity
remains the very best introduction to Catholic social and political
philosophy, even now, sixty years later. Like Huxley’s
preternaturally prophetic Brave
NewWorld,
it is astonishingly current, though it was published in 1953.

The
Church and the world both face exactly the same most basic problems
and issues today as then. These issues are not only the perennial,
unchanging ones that are many millennia old (good and evil, God and
man, sin and salvation, life and death), but are even the new,
distinctively modern ones that are only a century or two old, the new
crises.

What are these current civilizational crises? For many
centuries the issues that divided the Church and the world were
theological issues. But today they are all “social issues”. All
the “hot-button” controversies today are about man and marriage
and sex and society. This is why the greatest philosopher of modern
times, John Paul the Great, focused on anthropology; what C. S. Lewis
called “the abolition of man” follows necessarily upon the
abolition of God from any area of life—not only theology but also
society, both private (sex, marriage, and family) and the “public
square”. The greatest war today is not in the Middle East but in
the Middle Earth of Europe and North America. It is a war between two
world and life views, especially views of man and society. The new
view was summarized most candidly by Justice Anthony Kennedy of the
U.S. Supreme Court in his support of abortion in the Planned
Parenthood v. Casey
decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s
own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the
mystery of human life.” In other words, “Move over, God; you’re
sitting in my seat.”

These conflicts center around three
areas: the Christian and Catholic view of man, of marriage, and of
society. (There is, by the way, almost nothing in this book that
biblical Protestants should not find equally compelling.) It is
really three little books, making it the best available introduction
to Christian anthropology, Christian sexology and marriageology, and
Christian sociology. The foundational principles it lays out in these
three areas are the most basic and essential, both logically and
practically, the most currently ignored and neglected, and the most
urgently necessary-to-restore principles of man, of marriage, and of
social morality—the foundations it is literally insanity to
neglect.

To explain “the three parts of morality”, C. S.
Lewis in Mere
Christianity used
the unforgettable metaphor of humanity as a fleet of ships. Their
sailing orders tell them the three practical things they most need to
know: (1)
how to cooperate, how to work together as a fleet; (2)
how each individual ship is to stay shipshape and afloat; and (3)
what the mission of the whole fleet is. The first is social morality,
the second individual morality, and the third is philosophy,
especially “philosophy of man” or philosophical anthropology, and
of “the meaning of human life”. It is the third that is
studiously ignored today; yet the other two absolutely depend on it.
How can we become good individual human beings and how can we build a
good human society if we do not know, or even ask, what humanity is
and what humanity is for? That is the very first foundational
question. Nowhere will you find a book about that question that is
more clear and commonsensical, more sane and sagacious, more
fundamental and foundational, than this one.

Today it is not
the new, advanced stories of the social building but the very
simplest and most fundamental foundations that are crumbling; and it
is to those foundations that we must first turn if we are to repair
the upper stories. Imagine a China that can no longer understand the
common sense wisdom of Confucius, the philosopher who sounds most
like Mister Rogers from Mister
Rogers’ Neighborhood.
That is today’s China. Imagine a Western educational world that has
forgotten the lessons it learned in kindergarten. (See Robert
Fulghrum’s wonderfully wise Everything
I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.)
Imagine bright college students of philosophy who comprehend Hegel
and Heidegger, Marx and Nietzsche, even Derrida and
Deconstructionism, but find Aristotle, the most commonsensical
philosopher who ever lived, to be the very hardest one in history to
comprehend and pass exams on. You have just imagined my students.
Worse, you have just imagined the world you are living in. The
building we live in is big and beautiful but it is collapsing because
its foundations are crumbling.

This is a book about those
foundations. It is so simple that it is stunning, because it is
“radical”, i.e., about the roots. For instance, its very first
and most important point, implied in the title, is that (in Sheed’s
own words)

our
treatment of anything
must depend, in the last resort,on what we think it is: for instance,
we treat people one way and cats another, because of our idea of what
a man is and what a cat is. All our institutions . . . grew out of
what those who made them thought a man was. . . . In every field, the
test of sanity is what
is;
in the field of human relations, the special test is what
man is.
. . . The total ignoring of this question runs all through modern
life. . . . Yet it does not strike people as odd. And the depth of
their unawareness of its oddness is the measure of the decay of
thinking about fundamentals.

The
book will be hated and feared, and therefore ignored, by the
barbarians who have commandeered the formal and informal educational
institutions of our civilization. Why? For the same reason “Great
Books” are hated and feared above all things in “progressive”
educational circles. It is the same reason cavities hate dentists. It
will be feared because it dares to assume that there is such a thing
as truth, and that we can and must know the most important truths
about ourselves and our true happiness. It dares to ask the great old
questions, the currently forbidden questions, like Socrates, or like
the little boy in The
Emperor’s New Clothes.
It will therefore be labeled “dogmatic” by those who dogmatically
forbid those questions and who call themselves “open-minded” and
“progressive”.

If
you care about the “Brave New World” our society is moving
toward, and if you want to know the minimum that you must know in
order to reverse that direction, this is the book you must start
with.