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| The Christian Order |
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 Address delivered on January 31, 1943, by Msgr. Fulton Sheen
We now come to the third of the worldviews involved in this war, namely, the Christian which alone is capable of defeating the hard barbarism from without and the soft barbarism from within.
All the Totalitarian views - the Marxian, Fascist, Nazi - spring from liberalistic 19th-century attitudes; their character was determined by the errors they combated. For that reason, Marxian Socialism is nothing but rotted capitalism on a state basis; Fascism is nothing but rotted Parliamentarianism on a one-party basis; Nazism is nothing but rotted nationalism on a racial basis. In each case, they took their position from the enemy. They were inspired more by a hatred of something they wished to overthrow, than by a love of new ideals they desired to establish.
Because they were rebellious against the last revolution, they tended to bestow an absolutely sacred character on previously neglected elements of the regime they sought to overthrow. That is why, we have capital in the saddle in one revolution, labor in the saddle in the next revolution, and poor John Q. Public hitchhiking but never getting a ride. That is why we need an entirely different kind of revolution, one that will not keep its eye on the last revolution, or take its character from it, but concentrate on man in his highest reaches and noblest destiny. This is the Christian revolution.
The Christian worldview differs from the Totalitarian view and from the Materialist culture of the Western World in one basic fact: It believes that it is man who makes society, and not society which makes man. That is why our first broadcast on the Christian order must begin with man.
After all, what is the use of a revolution, or a new system of economics, or a new international society, unless we know the type of creature who will live in it.
For the last century the world has had a very distorted notion of man. In fact there were fashions in man as there were in clothes, inasmuch as each fashion concentrated on one aspect of man to the neglect of all the others, like the five blind men who felt an elephant, each describing it differently - according as he touched the trunk, the tail, the ear, or the leg.
For the last one-hundred years blind men have been feeling man. In the days of Darwin blind men felt man and found him to be an animal, and therefore concluded he must have evolved to be one and should be treated as one. So we had jurists like Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court defining man as a "cosmic ganglion." For the life of me, I cannot see why if man is only a ganglion we should go to war - to prevent Hitler from making mincemeat of ganglia.
Then came the new fashion. Blind men felt man and found that he was made up of nerves, reflexes, and responses, so they defined man as a "physiological bag filled with psychological libidos," and they consulted dream books after each fitful sleep to learn what Freud had to say about their sex life.
Then came another blind philosopher, that German who denied democracy because its foundation was Christian: Karl Marx. He discovered that man spent much of his time earning a living. Universalizing this particular aspect, he gave us the economic man, for whom religion, culture, law, literature, and the arts were byproducts of his method of production. And thus did a German spawn Marxian Socialism.
Now we are at the beginning of a new fashion in man. Blind men discovered that man lived in a State and that he was dependent OR it for his ideas and his values; and thus was born the Political Man who has rights because, the new lawyers told him, the State gave them to him.
These partial views of man - of Marx, Spencer, Darwin, and Freud - never treat man as he really is. They are incidental activities erected into absolutes by shallow thinkers whose thinking is of much the same mental caliber as a dentist who thinks man is all teeth, or a manicurist who thinks he is all hands, or a pedicurist who thinks he is all feet, or a phrenologist who thinks he is all bumps.
The Christian view of man admits that man has ganglia, does dream, experiences libidos, works, and talks politics; but it insists that man is none of these things exclusively. It begins by asking what it is that makes man different from anything else in the world; and answers: an intellect and a will: an intellect by which he can know truth, and a will by which he may choose goodness. Next, it says, since he is different from an animal he must have a different purpose from an animal, just as a monkey wrench must have a different purpose from a monkey. This purpose will obviously be in keeping with what is highest in his life, namely his intellect and his will. He therefore wants Life - not for two more days, or two more months, but undying Life. He therefore wants Truth-not the truths of geography to the exclusion of science, nor of art to the exclusion of history, but all Truth without a mixture of error. He therefore wants Love - not love for a limited period of time, but an eternal ecstasy of Love without the shadow of hate or satiety. This Eternal Life, Truth, and Love for which he seeks is God. God therefore is his final and ultimate end. Hence politics, economics, education, rationing, parliaments, parties, bureaucrats, governments and social security are not the ends of life but means to a final end and derive their morality from it. This is the Christian view of man.
The choice before the world is this: Will we build a New Order on the Totalitarian assumption that man is a tool of the State, or will we retain the Old Order of the secularist culture of the last two hundred years which holds that man is only an economic animal, or will we build a New Order on the Christian assumption that man is a creature made to the image and likeness of God and therefore one for whom economics, politics, and society exist as a means to an eternal destiny beyond the historical perspective of planets, space, and time?
Judging by the speeches and the writings of some of the present-day post-war planners, they are still assuming with Marx that man is essentially economic, or with Darwin that he is essentially animal, or with Freud that he is essentially sexual, or with Hitler that he is essentially political. Hence they seem to think that all we have to do is to change an economic system, or form new parties, or give more sex instruction, or provide greater license to the breakup of the family - and we will have peace!
These planners think they are practical, because they talk in terms of money, trade, international police, geographical areas of influence, and federated States. The truth is they are just as impractical as men who might legislate for squirrels by passing laws about nuts. Squirrels cat nuts, and man lives economically; but as nuts do not ex plain squirrels, so neither does production explain man. Because the planners do not understand the nature of the one for whom they are planning, their plans are going to lead us into a phase of history "where - eldest Night and Chaos - Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchy, amidst the voice of Endless Wars" (Milton, Paradise Lost).
Unless they abandon the Darwinian, Marxian, or Freudian man, whether they will it or not, they will end in only one solution: Socialism.
Given the errant impulses, the frustrated selfish existences, the distorted human goals which these partial views of man engender, there is only one way to arrest that chaos, and that is by organizing it, and the organization of chaos is Socialism. The individualism and egotism which is begotten of a distorted concept of man leave him alone and isolated; and to overcome this isolation there is only one non-Christian solution possible: the subordination of these rebellious atoms to a compulsory principle in the hands of the State. Socialism is the secularized, atheized version of a community and a fraternity of men which Christian love was meant to engender. It is the new order into which man will bring his tortured and isolated personality, in vain quest for peace, unless he returns to the moral law of God.
The Old Order of Liberal Individualism is dead. Now man will either become the subject of a non-divine evil will embodied in socialistic bureaucracy, or he will submit himself to the higher Divine Principle for which he was made and in which he alone can find his peace.
Unless we restore the Christian concept of man, and thus build a human rather than an economic order, we will be forced into totalitarianism in the very hour we are doing our most to combat it. Whether we perfume it or not with the sweet scent of democracy, will not alter its nature anymore than bathing a skunk in Chanel No. 6 will make it anything but a skunk.
What is the objection to the basic Christian principle, that we build for the whole man as a creature of God? The answer is on the tongues of all the reactionaries: "Christianity does not suit the modern man." Certainly it does not. And for the reason that the modern man is not man; he is part-man, a dissected man.
But Christianity does however suit man in his entirety, or human nature as it is, composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness of God, with horizontal relations to the right and left in space and time, and yet never wholly explained by these, because identified with something prior and more fundamental, namely, vertical relations with God, his Creator and Redeemer in Whom is his Peace and his Joy.
Up until now it has been said Christianity does not suit the modern man, therefore scrap Christianity. Now let us say, Christianity does not suit modern man, therefore let us scrap modern man.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with Christianity after all; maybe - may we dare suggest it - there is something wrong with us. Maybe there is something wrong with John Dewey and nothing wrong with St. John; maybe there is something askew with H. G. Wells and nothing wrong with Vincent de Paul; maybe there is something wrong with Gertrude Stein and something right about St. Gertrude; maybe there is something wrong with Progressive Education and nothing wrong with the Light of the World. Maybe science cannot be a substitute for morality; maybe morality is not identical with self-will; maybe the goal of life is not to get seven per cent on mortgages; maybe the goal of economics is not for management to be responsible to bondholders but to be responsible to the common good; maybe self-expression raised to a national form could end in Nazism; maybe we have been wrong. Maybe we had better get back to God! We have given the Marxists their chance, and the Darwinians theirs, and the Freudians theirs, and the Liberals theirs. Now let’s give man a chance!
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