Posted: December 22nd, 2007, 1:24 pmHi Rose. Sorry my response took longer than I thought.
::So where does that leave us? What idea existed that was superior to our own?
I think Chesterton’s point has to do with the development of ideas—what ideas existed then that grew up or have the potential to grow because the Church highlights them in it’s very existence and secures them as something more than a fad?
In a fictional dialogue by Chesterton (from The Ball And The Cross), a Catholic responds to an atheist:
[T]here are only two things that really progress; and they both accept the accumulations of authority… they have steadily increased in certain definable manners; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church… I say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I say that there is only one example of it… [a]nd that is Us… Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal… It keeps the key of permanent virtue… if you really want to know what we mean when we say that Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make it something more than a fashion.
Whether or not you agree with this view, this is where Chesterton’s coming from; it’s key to understanding his approach.
::I understand you to be interpreting Chesterton as saying this: a society that holds general theories in high regard--that is, views of the universe in high regard--has a better chance for true progress than a society that does not hold general theories in high regard; even if the former abuses its view of the universe or uses the wrong means to pursue it.
I’d say in general that Chesterton sees that what is good about our society now was budding in the Middle Ages, and that, though certain good things have blossomed, certain other things that were budding, or were yet to sprout, have not.
You see, from Chesterton’s point of view it’s not just the fact that they of the Middle Ages believed in a version of absolute truth; it’s that they believed in *the* absolute truth—the only version, the real deal. Yet it’s also more than that; it’s not just that they believed in *the* absolute truth, but that they carried the motive to develop it…
A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls "little social or political advance." There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time. --From Getting to Know the Middle Ages, by Chesterton: http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/historian/middleages.html
::So where does that leave us? What idea existed that was superior to our own?
I think Chesterton’s point has to do with the development of ideas—what ideas existed then that grew up or have the potential to grow because the Church highlights them in it’s very existence and secures them as something more than a fad?
In a fictional dialogue by Chesterton (from The Ball And The Cross), a Catholic responds to an atheist:
[T]here are only two things that really progress; and they both accept the accumulations of authority… they have steadily increased in certain definable manners; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church… I say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I say that there is only one example of it… [a]nd that is Us… Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal… It keeps the key of permanent virtue… if you really want to know what we mean when we say that Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make it something more than a fashion.
Whether or not you agree with this view, this is where Chesterton’s coming from; it’s key to understanding his approach.
::I understand you to be interpreting Chesterton as saying this: a society that holds general theories in high regard--that is, views of the universe in high regard--has a better chance for true progress than a society that does not hold general theories in high regard; even if the former abuses its view of the universe or uses the wrong means to pursue it.
I’d say in general that Chesterton sees that what is good about our society now was budding in the Middle Ages, and that, though certain good things have blossomed, certain other things that were budding, or were yet to sprout, have not.
You see, from Chesterton’s point of view it’s not just the fact that they of the Middle Ages believed in a version of absolute truth; it’s that they believed in *the* absolute truth—the only version, the real deal. Yet it’s also more than that; it’s not just that they believed in *the* absolute truth, but that they carried the motive to develop it…
A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls "little social or political advance." There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time. --From Getting to Know the Middle Ages, by Chesterton: http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/historian/middleages.html