Holiday Reading: Part One
TS Eliot, Matthew Arnold and the idols of Modern Man
I have gone on my holidays to Ireland and I thought to do some posts on things I have read, and am reading, which help explain the state we are in today.
This repost about the secular religion of liberalism and the remedy to this ruinous idolatry is accompanied with a new video I made today about why I think you should read TS Eliot.
Here is me going on about a brief passage in Eliot’s “Second Thoughts About Humanism”.
I made this 13 minute video to show you how much you can get out of a short passage of the kind of timeless wisdom which is deliberately absent from our mass education.
Here is the extract I discuss:
I talk about this extract to show you why it is important to understand what “humanism” is, and what it means to live under a cult of liberal idolatry.
The rest of this post explores the ideas which rule us today with reference to some other books, too. I hope you find it helpful.
MODERN LIFE - A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS?
The crisis of our times is not causeless, the chaos we inhabit is no mystery, and there is a remedy to the state of emergency we inhabit in its every aspect.
This is the lesson of the luminous wisdom of the Catholic Church, whose power to restore our civilisation will further be explored in this and the following posts.
This post is an introduction to the errors which make up the Liberal State Religion.
In it, I will show you some of the books and encyclicals you can examine to better understand the state we are in today - and how we can best get out of it.
We explore some major ideas as my aim is to equip the reader with the solution to the problem of the replacement of our Christian civilisation with a counterfeit culture.
CONTENTS
The Syllabus of modern errors
The Liberal Project
The Liberal Current in the Late 19th Century
TS Eliot and Matthew Arnold
Pascendi - Feeding the Flock
“Authority is nothing else but numbers and the sum total of material forces” -
Maxima Quodem - Pope Pius IX
This is one of the errors of the modern world as stated by Blessed Pope Pius IX in his 1862 allocution, Maxima Quodem.
Two years later, Blessed Pope Pius IX would publish his 1864 “Syllabus of Errors” - as an appendix to his encyclical Quanta Cura.
The Syllabus Errorum as it is titled in Latin also contained the above line about power.
Stated with deceptive simplicity, this error when examined unfolds the conflict between the natural law defended by the Church - and the reduction of all meaning to the limits and desires of Man under the banner of “progress”.
This post also presents a brief history of the subtraction of Christ from Christendom, and His replacement with the political beliefs of liberalism.
Today, the Vatican is seeking to transform the Church into a democratic liberal entity by way of the synodal path.
This is to refashion the Church in the image of Man’s institutions - patterned on the European Union and the United Nations - so that the Church itself will resemble a liberal democracy.
THE LIBERAL PROJECT
As I have explained in my Brief History of Liberal Democracy, this system is merely presented as one offering universal empowerment.
In reality it is the realisation of Isaiah Berlin’s second type of liberal government: the rule by an elite which decides what the ruled shall believe and desire through the manufacture of consent.
Of course, liberal democracy presents its authority as legitimised by majority opinion. In reality, public opinion is made by the ruling elite, in a soft despotism whose power is secured by the making and marketing of belief.
This is how the sacred majority of democratic rule is contrived, and its legitimacy - claimed by the “sum of numbers” - is a falsehood.
The power of liberal democracy is secured in fact by the “sum total of material forces” as explained by Pope Pius IX. These forces are the control of positions of power, of patronage, partnership with NGOs and sinecures - and of course in the domination of media messaging.
I attempt here to explain a wider context showing how we came to have a modern Vatican which preaches the political religion of climate, migration, feminism and the rainbow flag.
The broader liberal current has resolved into a project, political and religious, to replace everything with itself in Church as in State, in imagination as in reality.
It is the replacement of reality with a tragedy of errors. This series will show these errors, and how they are to be corrected.
THE LIBERAL CURRENT IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY
The Syllabus of 1864 is a list of statements taken to be true by the enemies of the Church, and warns of the modernising current of liberalism infecting Church and State.
Shortly afterwards, a sort of manifesto for the promotion of these errors would be published by a man called Matthew Arnold.
Arnold foresaw the increasing liberalisation of Christendom - and like the great Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, recognised that the predictable replacement of largely Catholic monarchies with liberal democracy in Europe would lead to chaos.
In his essays of 1867-8, Arnold laid out the thesis that would be published in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy.
In it, he argued that the new liberal democratic world must be unified by culture - instead of Christ.
TS ELIOT ON CULTURE VERSUS CHRIST
I will also make occasional mention of the work of TS Eliot, whose conversion to Anglo-Catholicism saw him produce some remarkable contributions to the history of the liberal idea and its impact on our civilisation.
In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot pointed out that one thing simply cannot replace another - as it is of course a different thing we are to accept as the same.
This sort of observation is typical of wisdom. It appears at face value to be superficial, but once examined and applied reveals a profound insight into the concepts by which our modern culture is contrived.
What binds our modern culture - and within which limitations?
Eliot was referring to Matthew Arnold’s notion that “culture” can be supplied in place of Christ, to provide cohesion against the possibility of a democratised chaos.
His remark is perhaps even more profound when we consider the presentation of the New Religion as a fitting replacement for the True Religion.
What is lost is Christ, what remains is simply the designs of men who think it in our best interests to dispose of Him, and preach an ecumenical and Godless humanism in His stead.
FEEDING THE FLOCK - PASCENDI OF POPE PIUS X
In this introduction I aimed to explain how the crisis of our times developed, tracing its advancement from the late 19th century to the predicament we inhabit.
No sickness can be cured without an accurate diagnosis.
With the 1864 Syllabus of Errors we see a list of falsehoods asserted as truth. These are the green shoots of the modern evils we call the new normal today, springing from the soil of the revolutionary Enlightenment.
Over forty years later, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, we find in the 1907 encyclical of Pope St Pius X a comprehensive treatment of modernism - its errors, their causes - and the remedies provided by the wisdom of the Church.
With the background of the liberal current in mind I will move in the next posts to a treatment of Pascendi, showing how its warnings came alongside the formation of the liberal democratic project.
This great encyclical is intimidating in its volume and in its detail. Those who hear of it are often put off by its complexity. For this reason I will use the Catechism of Modernism of Fr. Lemius.
This book presents Pascendi as a series of questions, posed on behalf of the reader, with the answers supplied by the words of Pope St Pius X. It makes of this somehwat daunting encyclical a conversation between the reader and the treasure house of wisdom found in the Catholic description of reality.
It is absorbing in every sentence. At times, something greater moves into sight than the particular subject of each passage. For me, one example of this is the profound lesson of the difference between civilisation and culture, which is marked by the absence or presence of God in the boundaries and limitations which mark our lives.
The liberal democratic model produced the political religion of liberalism, a series of tragic errors which have resolved into the catastrophe we are compelled to call our culture today.
The liberation it promised was the binding of man and the meaning of his life to the limitations of the liberal idea.
There is another way to live. There is a better way. The Catechism of Modernism reveals the design of the modern trap, and the way out.
As I examine the diagnosis and remedy presented in Pascendi, we will walk together down a path our culture did not take, and see why in so doing we have lost almost everything.
Almost. And not forever.
I have finally made it to Ireland to go on the holidays. My car blew up on the way on the first attempt. Lol.
I will return on Friday with some more holiday reading - perhaps a spot of poetry, or some sorely neglected short stories.
Thanks for the list Frank. Enjoy the holiday.
Thank you, Frank ... now will read :-)