Cloth
masks, narrow plastic shields, and six feet of separation to stop an airborne
virus. Limiting exposure to the largely nonlethal virus when immunity is
necessary to function and no vaccine exists. An apparent belief that avoiding
the virus will remove it from the environment. All this is obviously insane.
Delaying
medical screenings for deadly conditions like cancer and heart disease.
Depleting the resources of medical centers needed to treat such conditions.
Substantially increasing pressure on individuals prone to mental illness. All this is obviously insane.
Disrupting
commerce with business closures and stay-at-home orders, thereby suppressing
demand and creating negative multiplier effects which will extend into the
foreseeable future. Greatly increasing the risk of private investment and then
crowding it out with yet more government borrowing, leading to decreased
supply. Diminishing the savings needed for investment through an immediate loss
of income and a potential loss of value upon further monetization of
debt. All this is
obviously insane.
How
did Modern Man, that hard-headed creature who occupied the earth 60 years ago,
fall into insanity? Was he not a clear thinker, a doer, a pragmatist? Look! We
now have clean water! Roads and sewers! Skyscrapers and bridges! None of your
medieval inventions like "essences" were ever needed.
There
is an etiology to these things, and it probably did not start with a
coronavirus. Modern Man was hard-headed about physical things, but soft-headed
about metaphysical things. His soft-headedness has simply progressed to
physical things, albeit to an unseen virus.
So,
where did the insanity start? With Adam and Eve, but if one were to pick a
point of new decline, it would be during the Middle Ages. Just after the turn
of the first millennium, when the physical conditions of Western society were
stabilizing with increased security and prosperity, intellectual life began a
thousand-year process of metaphysical deconstruction.
Rationalism
was first heard in the forerunners of medieval universities, and then with
increasing virulence in the universities themselves. Perhaps due to a certain
pride in no longer being slaughtered by Vikings, or in having usually adequate
harvests, some thinkers emphasized their own mental processes in a way which
diminished the rest of reality. The change began in the arts faculties, where
scholars doubted whether the mind could grasp the essences of things, and
progressed to Occam and his followers, who claimed essences did not exist at
all.
Rationalism
thus gave birth, following a very subtle gestation, to empiricism. Both mother
and daughter focused on part of reality, the mother preferring mental processes
and the daughter preferring sense data. Both thereby missed that intersection
of mental processes and sense data, the understanding mind, which actually
grasps reality. One would naturally wonder about the father of such a strange
family.
In
any event, these philosophical distortions had horrible implications for
theology. St. Thomas therefore mounted a defense. He relied on the greatest
philosopher of essence, Aristotle, to establish a philosophical/theological
synthesis that built upon St. Augustine.
St.
Augustine, it is true, knew much more Plato than Aristotle, but Augustine was
fundamentally a Paulist, not a Platonist. The world had thus already heard St.
Paul of Tarsus, St. Augustine of Hippo, and St. Thomas Aquinas—arguably the
three greatest minds of Christianity, and interestingly, three of the most
virile.
Even
with these witnesses, the insanity continued. Dr. Luther maintained the
Scriptures could speak for themselves and that he was the man to do it. King
Henry claimed control over the Church on the same basis the pagan Emperors had
claimed it, because his realm was an Empire.
These
positions naturally led to war. James Madison and others eventually proposed to
avoid war by establishing a government which would decide disputes between
religiously motivated parties without addressing the religious question. The
fact any such decision would inevitably touch on the underlying issue was
somehow missed.
Unfortunately,
many American Catholics saw the temporary ceasefire as a permanent solution.
Some even attributed the growth of the Church in the United States to it. Pope
Leo XIII corrected these misperceptions in his encyclical Longinqua, but the insanity
was already advanced.
The
courts of the supposedly neutral state began operating as a
counter-magisterium, contributing to what Pope Benedict recently called
society's "antichristliches Credo," or Antichrist-like creed.
Seewald, Benedikt
XVI: Ein Leben 1075 (Droemer, 2020). With a derangement
possible only upon full surrender of the reason to the will, the courts held
marriage bears no relation to the sex of the partners, and that nature
establishes a right to kill one's child. These perverse creedal statements
perfected metaphysical insanity by denying any meaning to physical reality. Once
again, who could be the father of all this?
Having
achieved complete metaphysical insanity, the next step was physical insanity
regarding an invisible virus. The move was actually incremental, if considered
in context. A society which could accept same-sex marriage and abortion on
demand was fully capable of destroying itself on the pretext of individual
well-being. With respect to the father of the most recent insanity, Msgr.
Charles Pope has asserted a
demonic origin.
Humans
have a natural affinity for each other which makes personal and societal
destruction hard to watch. Christians know the remedy, but they also know the
cost. One must die in Christ. The choice seems insane to worldlings, but it has
this effect, which is not the point but only a marker—it leaves the believer in
possession of his or her reason. G.K. Chesterton captured the dynamic in his
brilliant conclusion to Heretics:
"The great march of mental
destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a
creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be
a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a
dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be
kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove
that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the
incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible
still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall
fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the
impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who
have seen and yet have believed. THE END"
