<Sounds of coffee being prepared> Cafe La Morenita. “The little dark-haired girl.” <Sips> Ehn. Should’ve made Yerba Mate or something. All right, let’s get back to it.
Once people around the world had finally caught on to the fact that they’d been the marks in a shell game they’d foolishly been betting on since the industrial revolution—that their personal labor had been structured within a set of legal and economic institutions and had been measured in standardized units (hours of work) that could be traded and sold on a market for a set value—they had reacted with . . . predictable indignation.
You might think that I am alluding to another feature of the reality Perón found himself lodged in before the junta: “dialectical materialism”—what some call Marxism. And you certainly cannot explain Perón’s rise devoid of that half-baked theory of everything. But there is another way you can strike out on once you face up to the abuses suffered by the subservient.
By the early 1940s, Communism, the purest distillation of Marxist thought, had long-since made its expansiveness apparent: Its most basic dictate—that the lowest level of human experience (the struggle for power and “material” possession) subsumes every other facet of human behavior—was voracious. Everything else—family bonds, career ambitions, fealty to nation, altruism, charity, . . . and (famoulsy) religion—was consumed in the monomaniacal maw of this basic principle, according to which human coexistence is necessarily impelled to one inevitable conclusion: a classless, stateless society where all property is collectively owned and wealth is distributed based on need.
The adherents of this principle believed that some further evolutionary state hidden beyond the veil of those ends might be possible; but that we are culturally blind to that possible state because we cannot look past the aforementioned institutions: the state, the family, religion. In order to achieve those ends, the seductive phantasms of institutions holding them back had to be exposed and brought into synthesis with them.
As you can imagine, the Catholic Church was not amused. It didn’t like being called an institution. It didn’t consider itself the work of humans at all. But much worse: to be rendered a mere diversion—to be labeled as priestly magicians, pressing made-up concerns to distract the people, all the while fleecing the people of their needs, and of the means to attain those needs, either for the gain of the Church itself or, worse yet, in the service of secular powers—that was more than flesh and blood could stand.
Now, you can explain away this reaction as angry deflection or denial. “Of course the Church would resist such a conclusion,” you might say. And, well, maybe. Alternatively, I can call you a self-important cynic. What you might call deflation or reduction, I might call nihilism. Your psychologizing of the Church, or of the Clergy, presupposes the very things you are claiming are “merely” instruments of class domination: values, principles. Marx himself had wavered before leaning into “revolutionary materialism.” He was enthralled not merely by Hegel’s dialectic, but by his idealism.
I’m just gonna help this guy out. So, you should note that when he says “idealism,” he doesn’t mean it in the common way people use it to mean having high ideals or aspirations. He’s using the philosophical term of art: The notion that our minds, our consciousness, our ideas—our values and principles—are real; and alternatively that reality is, at least somewhat, shaped by our minds and ideas.
In Phänomenologie des Geistes, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel argued that we do indeed encounter the “things” of the world. They are outside of us. But we also “make” them, in every facet. Outside of our ideation they are never fully real. Their reality is tied to the process of our conceiving and understanding them. When we begin to understand the things we have conceived in thought as separate from us—and especially when we perceive ourselves as objects, separate from us—this is estrangement.1
However, Hegel contends that this process is, nevertheless, an essential part of our becoming complete selves—for the things of the world are separate from us; yet we are objects in the world. When we reconcile ourselves to this paradox, we are alienated, but we are free.
Marx turned this idea on its head. In Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, what in English we abbreviate as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx borrowed the notion of “estrangement.” But where Hegel saw “alienation” as the positive version of estrangement—a stage in the development of self-consciousness—Marx saw only the worker's estrangement2 from labor, production, and ultimately, their human essence. And as he “matured,” Marx jettisoned ideas and self-consciousness altogether.He criticized Hegel for viewing ideas as the primary drivers of history, arguing instead that material conditions and economic structures determine consciousness. In the set of manuscripts by Marx and Engels (and probably a few others) that we call The German Ideology, they famously declare: “Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sander umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt.” (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”)
Unto the breach rode Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci. Alternatively known as Pope Leo XIII. From one perspective, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Pope Leo wanted to provide the Church with a philosophical and theological bulwark against the encroaching influence of modern ideologies. You could of course think of him as a CEO whose one job is to secure the bottom line—butts in pews, knees on prie-dieux, pesos in collection baskets—for the red-cassocked board of directors. But that begs the question that was at hand: What was wrong with those ideologies?
Hegel’s philosophy of reality as a dynamic unfolding of contradictions through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—and especially his views on God and his nigh-on deification of historical progress—those didn’t sit well with Leo. But he understood where they were coming from. The diversity of beliefs, and the difficulty of living together in peace given that diversity, make Hegel’s model of reality appealing. If God is an end toward which things evolve, a self-directing principle that governs or animates reality; and if the truth itself evolves over time; then you can fudge your way through moral quandaries in God’s good graces. It was an enticing notion, but by Leo’s lights discernibly wrong.
Meanwhile, Marx. Marxism denied the spiritual dimension of human existence altogether and placed the onus of virtuous “progress” on the struggle between the classes. If the good is simply all the means necessary to effect the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist structures, then there are no moral obligations for the lower classes—as long as they break the chains of oppression, whatever the lower classes do is, by definition, good.
Leo believed this purely economic and materialist view of history dismantled any moral and metaphysical order. So in one of his first acts as Pope, he released the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which reintroduced the world to a figure once dismissed by the likes of Voltaire and Diderot, d’Holbach and Hume: St. Thomas Aquinas.
It’s not enough to say Leo’s revival of Thomism was simply an academic preference; nor that it was a strategic intellectual or theological response to the challenges posed by Hegelianism, or Marxism, or logical positivism, or whatever other philosophical movement was ascendent in his day. Yes––unlike Hegel, who subordinated theology to philosophy; or Marx, who eliminated theology altogether––St. Thomas provided a balance, where reason supported faith rather than undermining it. And he reinforced the immutability of truth, particularly in metaphysics and ethics, which countered Hegel’s relativistic historicism and Marx’s radical materialism. But he did more than that. Leo believed Thomism offered a better response to that question of how to live together as diverse individuals in a system seemingly bent on stripping us of our individual spirits.
The Enlightenment thinkers had disparaged Aquinas, Leo argued, because he represented medieval Scholasticism, natural law theology, and Aristotelian metaphysics, all of which they sought to replace with rationalism, empiricism, and secular political thought. But Leo argued that their own latter-day evolution into historicism, phenomenology, and dialectical materialism had proved that the Enlightenment’s priorities were a shallow soil that, no matter how long you left it to fallow, could bear no fruit. Leo believed St. Thomas had already foreseen Hegel’s insights, but had given a more elegant, more beautiful account. God is indeed an end.But the truth itself does not evolve.
Aquinas built his metaphysical framework on participation (participatio), which means that all created beings derive their existence from God, who is Being Itself (Ipsum Esse Subsistens). Everything in creation possesses being by participation, meaning not that the world is God but shares in His existence. Thomas writes in the Summa Theologiae that Christ, as the Word (the Logos), is the principle of creation. Everything exists through Him, as confirmed in John 1:3: "Through Him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made."
Christ is not only the Creator but also the ultimate end (telos) of creation. His incarnation fulfills the divine purpose of history. The human soul is created with an intellectual and volitional capacity to receive God. Through grace, Christ becomes present within us. When a person receives grace, they receive a real but participatory share in Christ’s divine life. This means Christ emerges in us through sanctification. To turn away from Christ and rely on ourselves is not freedom. It is emptiness and death.We become our free and sovereign selves only by giving ourselves over to participating in Christ’s life—even if we have never heard Christ’s name or heard His words; even if we have heard them and question them.
I mean . . . . first of all, this guy has lost the frickin’ plot. Second: He’s kinda making the Enlightenment philosophers’ case for them. This stuff just sounds like fantasy and fiat.
Thomism rejects the idea that nature and grace are opposed; rather, grace builds upon nature (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit). This means Christ’s emergence is not destructive but elevating, fulfilling creation’s original purpose. Thus, creation itself is oriented towards Christ, and His emergence in us and the cosmos follows from our participation in divine being.
Now, as I said before, the Enlightenment thinkers shifted to empiricism as a reaction to Aquinas and other medieval Scholastics’ model of cosmic order. Their reasoning was not just intellectual, but political and cultural. They saw Scholasticism as propping up an outdated hierarchy. It was “authoritarian.”
Huh. It’s like . . . it’s like he’s listening to me. Is this– . . .? <distortion from tapping on microphone>
I’m playing with words. Words are so very fun to play with. By “authoritarian,” I mean that as of the eighteenth century, the received wisdom about medieval Scholasticism had hardened into hardness. In philosophical and scientific discourse, power had supposedly improperly lain with authority over inquiry; and in politics, a sovereign king had unjustly had more authority than a sovereign people.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as Ruiz de Montoya was smuggling the pot of imperfect embers that would ignite our reality, a mischievous pombero3 among the island monkeys4 named Francis Bacon stole the honey that had been used to hold that reality together, and left a new reality in its place. Bacon wrote, and I quote, “As the present sciences are useless for the discovery of effects, so the present system of logic is useless for the discovery of the sciences. The present system of logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate the errors founded on vulgar notions than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than useful. The syllogism is not applied to the principles of the sciences, and is of no avail in intermediate axioms, as being very unequal to the subtilty of nature. It forces assent, therefore, and not things.”5
Woah, woah, woah, whoah, woah. Slow the crap down, Tex! The Forger6 here has the luxury of pasting together a book, which means that you can disembark from his fantasy cruise at the next port of entry, and avoid all the locals, and get all the information you need, like, What does “syllogism” mean? And discover that, oh! by the way, the word “vulgar” actually doesn’t mean what you think it means—at least not yet in 1620. Bacon meant of the vulgare—of the common people. It’s a folk category and therefore susceptible to being kind of made up. You know, like I said before: “ fiat.” As for a “syllogism,” it’s classic three-part logical argument that deduces a conclusion from two stated premises. So, you know, “All bacon is salty. This author is Francis Bacon. Therefore this author is salty.” I have no idea what a “pombero” is. And “island monkeys”? Come on!
Within 120 years the inchoate reality that Bacon left behind had cracked through its chrysalis and emerged fully formed in the likes of David Hume
. . ., and his ridiculous red-velvet shower cap, . . .
who wrote, and I quote, “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”7
At least some of the germ of Bacon’s new reality took to the wind and would eventually transplant itself in our own forebears, lodged in the cassock threads and the minds of Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina. Yet, while some of its traits took hold, we were resistant to utter transformation; inoculated by Aquinas, who had long-since countered such arguments in the very first question of his Summa, on the nature and extent of sacred doctrine. Some truths, he insists, exceed human reason—we need revelation to reach them. Revelation helps reason—it does not replace it—especially for truths that are otherwise hard to reach or regarding which we are prone to error. In that vein, even truths that reason can reach are better known through divine teaching, because it provides clarity and accessibility to minds that otherwise struggle.
Okay. Look buddy, clearly, you and I are both Catholic. And I get it. I see the appeal of all this reverting back to Thomas Aquinas. I stand up, and kneel, and sit, and stand up again and say the creed at mass, too. But I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I know there are people out there for whom none of that makes any sense. I can’t shake off Hume’s words. They’re very sticky: Facts are the things on which people agree. People don’t roll their eyes when you appeal to facts. Yeah, okay, some people do. But still, not people acting in good . . . faith.
Perhaps you are so used to your surroundings that you do not notice their utility. Do you believe that Aquinas did not know that people grow skeptical of things they do not observe for themselves. he entire architecture of his Summa is built around the pillars of skeptical questions to address. Francis Bacon didn’t create skepticism. He stole it to make his reality. Realities are not eternal. They are the spandrel spaces that emerge when we draw lines through the eternal with our rulers and compasses.
But Aquinas was a thief himself. The honey he stole was Aristotelean logic. And as Francis Bacon’s own editor and commentator at the turn of the last century points out, Bacon erringly forsook that logic to form his reality: “The demonstrative forms [that logic] exhibits,” the commentator writes, “ . . . are necessary to the support, verification, and extension of [observation], and when the propositions they embrace are founded on an accurate and close observation of facts, the conclusions to which they lead, even in moral science, may be regarded as certain as the facts wrested out of nature by direct experiment.”8
Aristotle said that there are two modes by which we invesitgate: we either we build up from particular facts to general laws and axioms, or dig down from universal propositions to the individual cases that exemplify them.
Mmm-hmm. And it seems to me like Aquinas sort of mixed up the two modes and treated particular facts—like scripture—as if they were universal propositions.
Perhaps Aquinas—and Duns Scotus, and their heirs—favored too highly the former mode of invesitgation. But Bacon—and especially Hume—disparaged the latter mode altogether, and made even the former seem suspicious. And one wonders, given the lines they drew, whose reality was better built.
That reality could not have sloughed off its chrysalis at any given point in the intervening 120 years between Bacon and Hume. That century and change were a transformative juncture. The imaginal discs9 Bacon had hidden in the stolen honey remained dormant—quiescent—for some time, before the full materialist form emerged and spread its dusty wings.
<Exhales beleagueredly> Okay buddy. I’ve got the mental twisties. I thought your were going to tell me about Juan Peron, and somehow we landed on English Civil War radicals.10 I’m supposed to be going somewhere with this myself. I’m going to need another cup of the little brown haired girl. I’ll be back.
Estrangement (Entzweiung). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 12.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Progress Publishers, 1959), throughout, but see 28 e.g., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf.
See here for more detail. Pombero is a mythological creature of Guarani mythology. This reference has been taken to suggest the Forger may have come from the the coastal region of Argentina near Paraguay, perhaps Misiones. But all investigations have been fruitless.
Compare with German: inselaffen. As Gowen was fluent is German, it is curious that he did not remark on this.
Bacon, Sir. Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, pp. 12-13.
This is significantly the first attested use of the term “the Forger” not as a description but as a sobriquet.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1748), 175, https://ia801300.us.archive.org/25/items/enquiryconcernin01hume/enquiryconcernin01hume.pdf.
Bacon, Sir. Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, pp. 290-291.
Possibly a pun?
Gowen seems to have erred. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) died more than a decade before the Civil War began. David Hume (1711–1776) was born sixty years after the Civil War ended.
