The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume 2

Preface

Preface This is no ordinary book. It is pure wisdom.We have lost the habit of regarding the practical world in the light of the most profound principles, with the exception perhaps of those inverted thinkers who shake up the order of thought the better to reverse the real order, the political and moral order, and organize with an innocent air the most radical revolutions which end by being both the bloodiest and most cynical. At the same time, good souls throw up their hands in terror and scandal but soon, little by little, begin to think like the revolutionaries, not taking into account the equivocations hidden in apparently acceptable formulas nor the fact that such a concession is a way of cooperating even in the shedding of blood. The author of this book surely sees better than most the frightening perils and social disorder that arise from Nazism and communism. He sees them better because he has penetrated the false wisdom, the principles which lie latent in movements of attack and retreat by the organizers of disorder. He sees the principles in all their perfidy and in their twisted truth, a truth poisoned by the microbe of pride which uses the terms of truth in order to lead to error and the language of virtue to conceal sin and evil. What frightens and grips the soul is that good people, sometimes the best, become used to this, however much they dread the revolutions which unroll before their eyes, until they too misconceive the essential and become drunk on the most harmful formulas. The world, in a word, grows accustomed to thinking in a communist,a Marxist manner,radically negative,first unconsciously, thoughtlessly, then with tipsy enthusiasm, denying all that is true because it is being, all that is just because it is ordered, all that perfects man because he is subordinate to God and rectified only by his ordination to the true sovereign end. The author has already shown in earlier studies the historical origins and evolution of this essentially deviant and corrosive philosophy. One must go back to Averroism which sought emancipation from the natural order,  DeKoninck-02 5/13/09 3:52 PM Page 65  | Charles De Koninck to voluntarism which sought the emancipation of appetite, to nominalism which led to the emancipation of human language, to the moralism of good will which sought the emancipation of feeling, to a posturing and methodical skepticism which sought the emancipation of purely human thought, to Kantian subjectivism which sought the emancipation of reason against intelligence and of right against the common good, and continued its avatars in the emancipated dialectic of Hegel which turned against all nature, in Marxism, which acquired the power of destruction in Bolshevism, and Nazism . It is by seeing how, little by little, even among traditional minds, revolutionary thought gains more or less conscious adherents, that the author is both moved and fired by zeal for the truth. Nowadays it is personalism that is in vogue. The most sincere minds recommend it. The dignity of the human person is exalted, one demands respect for the person, one writes on behalf of a personalist order and works to create a civilization which will be for man. . . . All that is very well, but too brief, for the person, man, is not an end unto himself nor the end of all else. He has God for his end, and to want to borrow the language of others, even when one seems to correct it by the employment of the best of adjectives— haven’t we heard of the ‘dialectical materialism of Aristotle and St. Thomas’ to designate their natural doctrine?—even if one does not exclude the presuppositions that orthodoxy presupposes, one admits the presuppositions of others, of a naturalist thought, atheist if only out of indifference, and radically humanist, which favors turning civilization upside down because this has already been done to language, and along with language, philosophy and theology. This is what the author opposes. He is not wrong. More than ever, it is time to cry Thief! Time for societies to reorganize themselves, not in function of the individual person, but in function of the common good in its various degrees, that is, the sovereign end—that is, in function of God. The author openly attacks the personalists, but only in order truly to defend the dignity of the human person. His study insists on the grandeur of the person without flattering persons. It is...