The Catholic and the Modern Loss of Purpose

All peoples have an implicit understanding of themselves, an understanding based largely on their perceived place in human history. Americans generally see themselves as heirs to a process of political liberation that reached a high point in the founding documents of our regime, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Some Americans celebrate in addition economic liberation, the triumph of market economics, while others look to sexual liberation as the new frontier. But whatever kind of liberation we prefer, it is through this story of the march of freedom that we understand ourselves as a people.

But the Catholic Church also has a story, a story that is played out not merely in salvation history as recorded in Sacred Scripture, but in the subsequent life of the Church and of Catholic civilization. And this story is very different from the narrative of liberation from the dead hand of the past, whether political, economic, or sexual. For the chief villain in the historical narrative of freedom is without question the Catholic Church.

It Always Begins in the Middle Ages

Of course, this fact is not always fully perceived, but it exists nevertheless. The narrative of mankind’s march to freedom always begins in the Middle Ages, and it is by rejecting medieval institutions—religious, political, and economic—that modernity came into existence and by which it understands itself.

Although there is a peculiarly American version of this narrative, it is deeply ingrained in the modern mind throughout the Western world, and informs how we think about ourselves and our society and all of human history. And even though this account is profoundly anti-Catholic, this does not mean that it is not held by most Catholics. If this is the case, whatever level of piety we may reach, our thinking and our actions will still be affected by this erroneous understanding of ourselves and of history.

Although the rehabilitation of the myth that the Middle Ages was a time of darkness began as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, around the turn of the twentieth century the English Catholic historian and social critic, Hilaire Belloc, undertook to recenter the understanding of history that had so largely captured the modern mind, especially the English-speaking mind, and too often the English-speaking Catholic mind as well. As he wrote in his book, Survivals and New Arrivals, “The whole story of Europe looks quite different when you see it from the point of view of the average cultivated Frenchman or Italian from what it does in the eyes of average educated English or American Catholic.”

Belloc set out to show that the Catholic ages had not been times of darkness, and more importantly, that the arrival of modernity, whether Protestant or secular, was not about a universal increase in human well-being. Its much-touted liberation, for example, was mostly about liberating those with money and power to oppress others. It was forgotten that the springs of economic conduct are just as much tainted by original sin as any other area of human motivation, and that Christian civilization had always insisted that certain kinds of economic actions must be prohibited to protect the common good of society.

Along with numerous other writers and thinkers, such as Christopher Dawson, Belloc created an entire school of Catholic thought that dissected and exposed the prevailing Western narrative of history. Instead of telling the usual story of increasing freedom and enlightenment, they revealed a history in which the new freedoms, whether in economics, politics, or sexuality, were largely directed toward disordered goals, in which philosophy turned away from reality and got lost in the interstices of the human mind or human language, and in which artistic creation no longer knew why it existed and became divorced from the social roles it had once had, such as in the liturgy of the Church.

What a Thing is For

In the premodern period the notion of what a thing was for, its purpose, was deeply embedded in human thought. Whether it was knowledge, political authority, economic activity, art, or sexuality, among the first questions that was asked was: What is it for? This presupposed that it had a certain determinate whatness of its own. In the modern period, as Frank Sheed wrote in Society and Sanity, “there seems something quaint and old-world in asking what a thing is for; the modern question is always what can I do with it.”

With regard to economic activity, for example, human beings need external goods not merely to survive but to live lives that are fully human. External goods exist for the sake of our family life, our community life, our intellectual life, our spiritual life. We eat to live, we do not live to eat.

So economic activity, the activity by which we obtain external goods, of its own nature is strictly subordinate to the good life of each man and of the entire community. If an economic system subverts the common good, if it makes the more important aspects of human life more difficult to attain, it violates its purpose and goes beyond its merely subordinate role and thus should be changed.

But this is not how economic activity is seen today. Neither the so-called practical man, the entrepreneur, nor the economist in the tradition of Adam Smith, ever asks, “What is the purpose of economic activity as a whole?” He asks only what each individual’s own purpose is, and he assumes the answer that it is to enrich himself. This is held to be true regardless of what it means to the moral or cultural health of the community or to the moral character of the entrepreneur himself.

All that economists has to see is this man selling and that man buying, this man producing and that man consuming. They are simply facts, facts from which we can discover how to buy most cheaply or sell most dearly or produce and consume the most. Wealth, however obtained, for whatever end and in whatever amount, is the purpose of economic activity. If I can make money producing a good or service, so long as it is legal, I need never ask if the community really needs the things that I make, or if they are not in fact harmful to it, or if I am otherwise destroying any of the higher goods that pertain to the community.

This understanding of economic life is possible only because men were first convinced that the purpose of economic activity is whatever an individual wants to make it, that it has no inherent purpose to which one must in humility submit. And that view is only possible because Western civilization had already decided that things have no inherent nature. There is no standard by which to judge any economic action because there is no purpose inherent in them, and they have no purpose because they have no nature.

Our Influence as Catholics

If Catholics of our era hope to have any influence as Catholics in the social, cultural, or even political spheres, it is incumbent that we come to understand the historical process, and in particular the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, not in terms of an achievement of freedom, but in terms of the breakup of Catholic civilization and the triumph of anti-Catholic thinking and living in most aspects of life. My recent book, From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond: The Long, Jagged Trail to a Postmodern Void (Angelico Press), is an attempt to look at the history of the last few centuries from a Catholic standpoint.

Adherence to the Church’s teachings in every area is obviously the sine qua non for any Catholic. But such adherence is not enough. If we understand ourselves and our world in a way that is opposed to the Church’s teaching, we will not act rightly as Catholics.

Only if we reorient our thinking to see ourselves, and indeed the entire trajectory of history with the Catholic understand of nature and purpose can we expect the Church’s apostolate to have much effect. If we do, we will be able to see ourselves as actors in a drama much more important than that of a series of triumphs of freedom, a drama that sees the Church as the chief focus of history and understands that humanity’s fluctuations will end with nothing less than our final judgment and the return of our King.