Catholic Thought discussion
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
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Chesterton wrote this book in 1925 in part in response to H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History (published 1919). Wells wrote a history of mankind from an evolutionary perspective and being dismissive of Jesus Christ as "merely a charismatic figure."Hilaire Belloc also had his problems with Wells' book and wrote his own rebuttal A Companion to Mr Wells's 'Outline of History', which Wells rebutted in turn, and Belloc then wrote Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of History". This gives us an impression the splash Wells’ book made. *
Fr. Hardon in The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan summarizes G.K. Chesterton’s writings in the following way:
” The best word to describe Chesterton’s writings is brilliant. His paradoxes almost overwhelm the reader with their extraordinary depth and what may be called “obviousness.” He has been described as a plumed knight defending his lady, the Catholic Church, with fidelity and sincerity of heart that cannot be matched by any other apologist.
Because Chesterton related everyday events and things to the eternal, his writings are sure to endure. Etienne Gilson called him “one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed.” Pope Pius XI bestowed on him the rare title Defender of the Catholic Faith.”
*Source: Wikipedia
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http://www.theimaginativeconservative...
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http://www.theimaginativeconservativ..."
Great find Kerstin. That does put Chesterton’s work in perspective. By the way The Imaginative Conservative is one of my favorite websites and Joseph Pearce is probably the leading scholar who writes on the Catholic intellectual tradition. His book The Quest for Shakespeare is the finest scholarly evidence for Shakespeare being a Roman Catholic. It convinced me.
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I did listen to a talk Joseph Pearce gave on the subject of Shakespeare's possibly being a Catholic. I didn't know he wrote a book about it. I thought all the evidence he brought together astounding.
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I did listen to a talk Joseph Pearce gave on the sub..."
The Quest for Shakespeare is excellent, a great read, especially if you enjoy Shakespeare. Did I put it in our bookshelf? I can't remember. Oh and I believe Pearce had a EWTN series on showing the evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism. I wonder if it can be found on youtube.
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There is a Chesterton website that a previous member of this group Mike pointed out:https://www.chesterton.org/
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Hey, why am I no longer receiving email alerts when people post on Catholic Thought? It was working until a few days ago. Anyone else have this trouble?
Hi, Manny. Your email came through to me today, Monday, February 26. I hope this reaches you.
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No I did not receive an email. I did get the notification up at the top of the Goodreads page but not the email. How do I fix that? Those emails are very helpful.
Manny, I wish I could help. Do you mean you only see that you have something in your inbox, but can't access it? I am sorry that I don't know what to advise. One of the other members -- someone with tech skills -- could probably help. Otherwise, do you have a Geek Squad service in your community?Best wishes, Frances
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Thanks Francis. This sounds like a Goodreads issue. I checked my email settings and they are all correct. I don't know if there is some sort of help here at Goodreads to ask. Does anyone know?
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Glad you found your email notices. I have had a similar problem in the past, either email notifications stopped or my daily digest from GR. Usually, resetting the notification perimeters on my GR profile does the trick. Not sure why, but, if it works. Also, if it does not work, there is a "help" button on GR where you can find answers to common problems and/or send an email inquiry. I had to do it once when I just could not get my digest to reinstate. The GR tech people were very nice.
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I stumbled over it one time when I could not figure out how to reinstate my daily digests. Whenever my notifications or daily digest has spontaneously ceased, my settings were all still correct. Really don't know why it happens from time to time. Anyway, glad your issue resolved so easily.
After his daily meditation today Bishop Robert Barron talks about Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
Most of you probably know this already: Chesterton is one of the pivotal players in Bishop Barron's book by the same name.
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Here's Bishop Barron speaking on Chesterton and Orthodoxy:
https://wofclassics.com/chesterton
I said above I think that Orthodoxy blew me away. I can't wait to read The Everlasting Man.
Alas, we had sparse contributions to the discussion in this group on “Orthodoxy”. Carlos who made some incisive and to the point commentary left the group and it seems left goodreads altogether, and even removed his comments on “Orthodoxy”. It sure seemed that the Catholic Thought group was in a hiatus at the time—March to May, 2015.
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That was probably before Susan Margret took it over. She revived it.
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I consider G. K. Chesterton the best voice for the countering of the modernist worldview. In his day Chesterton was the voice of orthodoxy, but today the intellectual worldview has flipped, and so one can now think of Chesterton as countercultural by today’s values. That Chesterton is not taught in secular universities is a crime, if you ask me. I specialized in the modernist era in my literature studies, and not once was Chesterton brought up. How could you not present the vocal opposition to the intellectual zeitgeist? His voice, though in opposition, was just as modern because it rebutted the modernist positions. His personal life was almost a trend against modernism itself. His parents were Unitarians, but he found his way into the Anglican Church, ultimately siding with High Anglican, and then in 1922 at the age of 48 converted to Roman Catholicism, each step, as I see it, a step backward toward Medievalism. He even proposed an economic system, “distributism,” that tries to combine modern economic trends with medievalist sensibilities. Now I don’t personally think much of distributism as an economic alternative, but I am amazed at how many Catholic intellectuals out there today are committed to it.
I’ve come to consider Chesterton a giant. His Wikipedia entry says he wrote “around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, The Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929).” He wrote a lot! His writing voice to me sounds very Victorian in style. I’ve read his novel, The Man Who was Thursday, his what I like to call a developmental memoir, Orthodoxy—developmental because it traces how he came to his Christian beliefs—and a smattering of his Father Brown mystery short stories. Only Chesterton can create a sleuth who was almost the opposite of Sherlock Holmes, humble, shy, and religious. I’ve also read his essay, “Why I Am Catholic,” which is only a couple of pages and can be found here: https://www.chesterton.org/why-i-am-a... But the opening paragraph is a classic and I’ll post copy over here:
The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, “It is the only thing that…” As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.
But I think this paragraph gets to the heart of his thought, so it’s also worth copying:
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.
Finally I want to point out that Catholics in England are pushing to have Chesterton canonized. From the National Catholic Register, almost five years ago:
Devotees of the English writer and Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton rejoiced at the news that a Catholic bishop in England is seeking to open an investigation into whether he should be declared a saint.
Opening the annual conference of the American Chesterton Society at Assumption College, Worcester, Mass., society president Dale Ahlquist said that Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, England, “is seeking a suitable cleric to begin an investigation into the potential for opening a cause for Chesterton.”
Speaking to the Register, Father Ian Ker, author of G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, published by Oxford University Press, reacted to the announcement by saying, “The Church is looking for heroism, and Chesterton was heroic in his journalism — he always turned the other cheek. Thus, he was heroic in his apostleship.”
Stuart McCullough, founder of the Catholic G.K. Chesterton Society, told the Register that he believes Chesterton to be a saint: “Hundreds of converts to the Catholic faith cite Chesterton as the main reason for their conversion. In my case, he did not convert me, but he ‘introduced’ me to Hillaire Belloc, and that did the job.”
You can red the entire article here: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/...
I can’t believe that was almost five years old; I remember reading it when it came out. St. Gilbert! That has a nice ring.
Manny wrote: "He even proposed an economic system, “distributism,” that tries to combine modern economic trends with medievalist sensibilities. Now I don’t personally think much of distributism as an economic alternative, but I am amazed at how many Catholic intellectuals out there today are committed to it. "I have always been dismissive of distributism as an economic system, but must admit to not having studied it much. But I have become more and more disillusioned with modern economics as neither Keynesians nor monetarists seem to have figured out how to address Olson's distributional coalitions which strike me as a major factor in increasing inequality. I have decided that it is time for me to give distributism the serious study it deserves. It would be interesting to do it within the group, if there is interest.
Two options might be The Third Way: Foundations of Distributism As Contained in the Writings of Pope Blessed Leo XIII and Gilbert K. Chesterton: 1, which would have to be a long read :-) or something more manageable, such as The Hound of Distributism: A Solution for Our Social and Economic Crisis or Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More.
I am interested in understanding an economics that is consistent with the Gospel.
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I have challenged those that advocate distibutism to show me an economic textbook that even mentions distributism. I haven't seen one. I have never heard a real economist talk of distributism. Just like communism but in a different way, distributism is a man thought up scheme by a social scientist in order to construct a utopia. That's not how real economies get formulated.
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I am interested in understanding an economics that is consistent with the Gospel"
I don't think the Gospels talk about economics. What they talk about are human interactions, interactions that I think would apply in either complete laissez faire or complete communism.
John, I read Toward A Truly Free Market a year or two ago and was appalled at the way it treated women. I saw some significant problems with implementing what was laid out in that book, but the sexism was so galling that I could not really engage with the rest of it.
Irene wrote: "John, I read Toward A Truly Free Market a year or two ago and was appalled at the way it treated women. I saw some significant problems with implementing what was laid out in that book, but the sex..."That's curious. It wasn't written that long ago that you would expect misogynism to be openly expressed.
Manny wrote: "Just quickly and off the top of my head, a few short comments on why distributism won't work and why in practice people would never go for it. To summarize its goals in a sentence, distributism tri..."I guess that's a no. I am familiar with all of those arguments, indeed have made most of them as reasons not to spend much effort looking into distributism. To address just one, Taiwan has a rule for corporations that limits the amount of retained earnings a company may have. Everything above that is required to be distributed to the shareholders. If the company requires additional equity it has to go back to the market for an additional capital raise. I'm not recommending that, but it is a way to limit corporate size without anything like a totalitarian state. Another approach could permit organic growth, but prohibit any acquisition that would increase a company's market share above a specified portion of any relevant market, 10%, 20%, or whatever. This would require only a minor change in our existing anti-trust regime and again could be done without anything like a totalitarian state.
Since 2008, I have thought that big has a quality of bad all its own. I am certainly not a fan of big government, but I am not convinced that big business, big labor, big NGO or even big church are any better. Would there be efficiency tradeoffs? Maybe. But those should be discussed and evaluated, I am not convinced that the current system is the ideal economy for a Christian society (not that I am under the illusion that we live in a Christian society).
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Manny wrote: "John wrote: "Manny wrote: "He even proposed an economic system, “distributism,” that tries to combine modern economic trends with medievalist sensibilities. Now I don’t personally think much of dis..."I am really referring to the social justice teachings of the Church, which I have always found problematic. My understanding of distributism is that it is an economic system that attempts to put the teachings of Rerum Novarum into a practical system. Whether it works or not, that, it seems to me, is something worth thinking about.
Sorry for the tangent.
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Yes it is. One of my comments had to do with chapter two. Please do.
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That’s quite alright. Even most of us who have been here a while slip. As I think I may have above.
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Stark talks about how capitalism, i.e. the systematic reinvestment of profits, is really a product out of the Middle Ages and monasticism. In the monasteries you had populations that created wealth, but not for their own profit, and they had no heirs to pass the wealth onto. So this extra capital was systematically reinvested into monastery and their charitable works, such as soup kitchens, hospitals, etc. It was also during that time that accounting was developed. They had to keep track of stuff. Now this was a very new concept of dealing with wealth, this systematic reinvesting of profits, he states that you really can't find it before then.
During the Renaissance you had the first true companies emerge in Italy. Here we find the first paid employees and in their accounting books was always a column titled "God's Share." Steeped in Catholicism as they were, there was the understanding that they had a Christian obligation to give back to the less fortunate. So here we see that this early capitalism had a social justice component that can only flourish if people have a Christian moral compass.
Now fast forward to the industrial revolution and the emergence of collectivism, and most devastating, secularism. Now we begin to find a capitalism that is stripped of its social justice component for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for the owners and shareholders. The flip side, of course, is the exploitation of workers with its accompanying human suffering. Ever since then we've been struggling to come to a better equilibrium so that every human being earns a living/family wage, has humane working conditions, and is able to live a dignified life from his own labor.
When we talk of capitalism today, we normally have this reductionist form in mind. Seems to me that without re-Christianizing our culture we won't be able to develop economic models that honor and respect the innate dignity of man.
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Looks like everyone is finding their way to this read, but for any stragglers, I found this free online. http://www.worldinvisible.com/library...
Catholic Thought
Books mentioned in this topic
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (other topics)The Third Way: Foundations of Distributism As Contained in the Writings of Pope Blessed Leo XIII and Gilbert K. Chesterton (other topics)
The Hound of Distributism: A Solution for Our Social and Economic Crisis (other topics)
Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More (other topics)
Orthodoxy (other topics)
More...
Week 1: 5 Mar – 11 Mar - Introduction – Chapter II
Week 2: 12 Mar – 18 Mar – Chapters III + IV
Week 3: 19 Mar – 25 Mar – Chapters V + VI
Week 4: 26 Mar – 1 Apr – Chapters VII + VIII
Part II: On the Man Called Christ
Week 5: 2 Apr – 8 Apr – Chapters I + II
Week 6: 9 Apr – 15 Apr – Chapters III + IV
Week 7: 16 Apr – 22 Apr – Chapters V – Conclusion