Insights - Hilaire Belloc - "The Modern Attack" # 2 of 2

INSIGHTS – Hilaire Belloc – “The Modern Attack” # 2 of 2
Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007
“It is impossible to act rightly without truth. That is why the will to know the truth, to seek it humbly and with a readiness to learn it, is the basic prerequisite of all morality. Where profit or success leads to the neglect of truth, the world is fragmented into interests groups because profit always depends on the viewpoint of the one acting. (1988), July 27th, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditations for every day of the Year, Ignatius, 1990.
Let us continue with Hilaire Belloc’s book, The Great Heresies, We will complete the chapter on The Modern Phase. This book was first published in 1938.
“Anyhow, there you have the Modern Attack in its main character, materialist, and atheist: and, being atheist, it necessarily indifferent to truth. For God is Truth.
“But there is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered),a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others. Therefore with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all that civilization which the Faith produces, there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; & immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue…
“Though this Modern Attack,… It is essentially atheist, even when atheism is not overly predicated. It regards man as sufficient to himself, prayer as mere self-suggestion and – the fundamental point – God as no more as a figment of the imagination, an image of man’s self thrown by man on the universe; a phantasm and no reality….
“… the denial of God had been confined in the past to comparatively small number of intellectuals, that denial had now gained the multitude and was acting everywhere as a social force.
“This is the modern enemy; this is that rising flood, the greatest and what may prove to be the final struggle between the Church and the world….
“But the Faith and use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up. The use of Reason is a main part – or rather the foundation – of all inquiry into the highest things. It was precisely because reason was given this divine authority that the Church proclaimed mystery- that is, admitted reason to have its limits….
“When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together) but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God. So the words “God is Truth” which the mind of Christian Europe used as a postulant in all it did, cease to have meaning…. And reason is thus made a victim because Humanity itself is what the Modern Attack is destroying in its false religion of humanity. Reason being the crown of man and at the same time his distinguishing mark, the Anarchs march against reason as their principle enemy….
“… Either the Catholic Church (now rapidly becoming the only place wherein the traditions of civilization are understood and defended) will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence, or the Catholic Church will in this case as throughout the pat, react more strongly against her, she will recover and extend her authority, and will rise once more to the leadership of civilization which she made, and thus recover and restore the world.
“In a word, either we of the Faith shall become a small persecuted neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, “Christus Imperat.” ....The Church will not disappear, for the Church is not of mortal stuff; it is the only institution among men not subject to the universal law of mortality.”
George H. Kubeck, http://cinopsbegone.blogspot.com Duplicate, translate into Spanish.