The Final Heresy, or, Indifferent to Self-Contradiction
This text is from THE GREAT HERESIES by Belloc, where he described the character of the modern heresy that, having no one heresiarch, has no one name. He prefers the term ‘The Modern Attack’ but says that technically, the correct term is ‘The Anti-Christ’ since the attack is directed to the end of abolishing the Church, and the whole of Western Civilization which she built.
The reader is invited to see if he recognizes anything from our own generation, to which we are all too often blind, that a man writing in 1938 was able to discern so aptly.
The words that follow are his.
Let us examine the Modern Attack — the anti-Christian advance — and distinguish its special nature.
We find, to begin with, that it is at once materialist and superstitious.
There is here a contradiction in reason, but the modern phase, the anti-Christian advance, has abandoned reason. It is concerned with the destruction of the Catholic Church and the civilization preceding therefrom. It is not troubled by apparent contradictions within its own body so long as the general alliance is one for the ending of all that by which we have hitherto lived.
The modern attack is materialistic because in its philosophy it considers only material causes. It is superstitious only as a by-product of this state of mind. It nourishes on its surface the silly vagaries of spiritualism, the vulgar nonsense of “Christian Science,” and heaven knows how many other fantasies. But these follies are bred, not from a hunger for religion, but from the same root as that which has made the world materialist — from an inability to understand the prime truth that faith is at the root of knowledge; from thinking that no truth is appreciable save through direct experience.
Thus the spiritualist boasts of his demonstrable manifestations, and his various rivals of their direct clear proofs; but all are agreed that Revelation is to be denied. It has been well remarked that nothing is more striking than the way in which all the modern quasi-religious practices are agreed upon this — that Revelation is to be denied.
We may take it then that the new advance against the Church-what will perhaps prove the final advance against the Church, what is at any rate the only modern enemy of consequence-is fundamentally materialist. It is materialist in its reading of history, and above all in its proposals for social reform.
Being Atheist, it is characteristic of the advancing wave that it repudiates the human reason. Such an attitude would seem again to be a contradiction in terms; for if you deny the value of human reason, if you say that we cannot through our reason arrive at any truth, then not even the affirmation so made can be true. Nothing can be true, and nothing is worth saying. But that great Modern Attack (which is more than a heresy) is indifferent to self-contradiction. It merely affirms. It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone. Indeed, it may be remarked in passing that this may well be the cause of its final defeat; for hitherto reason has always overcome its opponents; and man is the master of the beast through reason.
Anyhow, there you have the Modern Attack in its main character, materialist, and atheist; and, being atheist, it is necessarily indifferent to truth. For God is Truth.
But there is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.
Therefore with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all that civilization which the Faith produces, there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue.
The better dupes, the less vicious converts to the enemy, talk vaguely of a “readjustment, a new world, a new order”; but they do not begin by telling us, as in common reason they should, upon what principles this new order is to be raised. They do not define the end they have in view.
Communism (which is only one manifestation, and probably a passing one, of this Modern Attack) professes to be directed towards a certain good, to wit, the abolition of poverty. But it does not tell you why this should be a good; it does not admit that its scheme is also to destroy other things which are also by the common consent of mankind good; the family, property (which is the guarantee of individual freedom and individual dignity), humour, mercy, and every form of what we consider right living.
Well, give it what name you like, call it as I do here “The Modern Attack,” or as I think men will soon have to call it, “Anti- Christ,” … we know the thing well enough. It is not the revolt of the oppressed; it is not the rising of the proletariat against capitalist injustice and cruelty; it is something from without, some evil spirit taking advantage of men’s distress and of their anger against unjust conditions.
Now that thing is at our gates. Ultimately, of course, it is the fruit of the original break-up of Christendom at the Reformation. It began in the denial of a central authority, it has ended by telling man that he is sufficient to himself, and it has set up everywhere great idols to be worshipped as gods.
Belloc details how the chief effect of the modern attack in the social field will be the slavery under communism, and the slave-like conditions of workingmen in state-run industrial economies, were the factory hands lack either real property or civic rights. He continues:
Cruelty will be the chief fruit in the moral field of the Modern Attack, just as the revival of slavery will be the chief fruit in the social field…
Belloc then speaks of the effect of the modern attack on morality, on justice, on reason itself.
…the Modern Attack on the Faith will have in the moral field a thousand evil fruits, and of these many are apparent today, but the characteristic one, the one presumably the most permanent, is the institution everywhere of cruelty accompanied by a contempt for justice.
The last category of fruits by which we may judge the character of the Modern Attack consists in the fruit it bears in the field of the intelligence — what it does to human reason. When the Modern Attack was gathering, a couple of lifetimes ago, while it was still confined to a small number of academic men, the first assault upon reason began. It seemed to make but little progress outside a restricted circle. The plain man and his common-sense (which are the strongholds of reason) were not affected. Today they are.
But reason today is everywhere decried. The ancient process of conviction by argument and proof is replaced by reiterated affirmation; and almost all the terms which were the glory of reason carry with them now an atmosphere of contempt.
The analysis continues
But the Faith and the use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up. The use of reason is a main part — or rather the foundation — of all inquiry into the highest things.
It was precisely because reason was given this divine authority that the Church proclaimed mystery — that is, admitted reason to have its limits.
It had to be so, lest the absolute powers ascribed to reason should lead to the exclusion of truths which the reason might accept but could not demonstrate.
Reason was limited by mystery only more to enhance the sovereignty of reason in its own sphere. When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together) but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time.
There is no God. So the words “God is Truth” which the mind of Christian Europe used as a postulate in all it did, cease to have meaning.
None can analyse the rightful authority of government nor set bounds to it. In the absence of reason, political authority reposing on mere force is boundless.
And reason is thus made a victim because Humanity itself is what the Modern Attack is destroying in its false religion of humanity. Reason being the crown of man and at the same time his distinguishing mark, the Anarchs march against reason as their principle enemy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
