By DONALD DeMARCO
G.K. Chesterton may very well have been the most confident writer who ever set pen to paper. He took great pleasure in making bold statements that seemed obviously wrong, but on further examination, proved incontestably right. In his book, The Catholic Church and Conversion, he asserts that he can “justify the whole of Catholic theology if he could be granted the supreme sacredness and value of just two things: Reason and Liberty.”
His claim has all the daring of openly challenging the secular world to a duel, but having the certainty afore-hand of winning. The world would say, “We love both reason and liberty and are nothing like the Catholic Church”! “Just look at how we draw upon reason to develop our technology,” it will say, and “how we employ liberty in making moral choices.”
On the other hand, it will claim that the Church suppresses reason to allow for faith, and how it suppresses liberty by imposing dogmas.
Despite such volleys from the secular world, Chesterton is right. The world does love reason and freedom, but it does not believe that they are bound together. The world believes in reason that supports technology, without having the liberty to acknowledge what it has to say about the adverse effects of contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts. It believes in reason only up to the point where it does not interfere with political correctness. It also believes that liberty must bow to political correctness.
The secular world believes that liberty is enlarged to the degree that it is separated from reason. Catholics believe, along with Chesterton, that liberty is achieved through reason, not from reason. Reason reins in liberty so that it does not become license. Without reason, liberty is replaced by mayhem, confusion, or even war. As such, it ceases to be desirable. Liberty is desirable only when reason directs it to a good end. In this regard, liberty and reason must be yoked together.
Or, as GKC similarly put it in GK’s Weekly, April 28, 1928:
“Without authority there is no liberty. Freedom is doomed to destruction at every turn, unless there is a recognized right to freedom. And if there are rights, there is an authority to which we appeal for them.”
St. Thomas Aquinas knew well how reason and liberty are intrinsically mated together. Therefore, he referred to the will, our faculty to allows us to choose liberty as the “rational appetite,” thereby conjoining reason with liberty.
“The whole of liberty,” he writes, “is rooted in reason” (Totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta – De Veritate, 24, 2).
Jacques Maritain concurs that “in uprooting liberty from reason they themselves have made an invalid of it.”
Let us explain the matter in more down to earth terms. A hungry diner enters a Chinese restaurant. All the menusre in Chinese and none of the waiters know any English. Not knowing any Chinese, our diner is at a loss concerning how is can order.
He is at liberty to order anything that is on the menu but does not want to choose something too expensive, something he does not like, or something that conflicts with his dietary needs. He cannot apply reason to the situation because reason remains entirely uninformed.
Out of desperation, but trusting in luck, he makes a wild stab. He points to an ideogram that says, “Printed in Newark, New Jersey.”
In order for our diner to enjoy the liberty of choosing what he wants, his liberty must be grounded in reason. But since he cannot exercise his reason, he cannot enjoy the liberty of making a good choice. Hence, reason is the root of liberty (and certainly not its enemy).
The Catholic Church has always had a positive attitude toward reason. It was this positive regard that prompted her to found the university. The Church has been even passionate in encouraging her members (as well as people outside the Church) to use reason in order to distinguish truth from falsity, right from wrong, and good from evil. By using reason in this sense, one an achieves a liberty in which he knows who he is, what he is to do in life, and his proper relationship with God.
The Church has always understood that reason and liberty have an unbreakable symbiotic relationship with each other.
Chesterton might have put the matter in more concrete terms. There are three doors: one is marked Reason, another is marked Liberty. Both these two doors open to nowhere. The third door, marked Reason and Liberty opens to all the good things that life possesses.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress