Nazareth or Social Chaos by Father Vincent McNabb OP
It is startling, given his deserved reputation as a champion of Rerum Novarum, how few books by Father McNabb touch directly and in the plain fullness of their substance upon the Social Teaching of the Church. Certainly his life was one long sermon upon that Teaching, but amongst his books of retreat conferences, scriptural meditation, theology and hagiography, that Teaching is only touched upon occasionally, and then indirectly. Even in his more general books of essays such as Thoughts Twice-Dyed or Wayside, a Priest's Gleanings, references to the great social questions of the day and to the Church’s response are fewer than one might expect.
In truth, the core of Father McNabb’s writings on the Church’s Social Teaching can be found in three books: The Church and the Land (recently reprinted by IHS Press), Nazareth or Social Chaos, and Old Principles and the New Order. The first of these (even before its reprint) is by far the best known of the triumvirate, if only for the opening essay, A Call to Contemplatives, its advocacy of ‘the Nazareth Measure’ – that all legislation and policy be measured by its effect upon the welfare of the Family. Old Principles and the New Order is a more compendious and diverse book, but contains sublime nuggets of McNabbian wisdom and insight.
Nazareth or Social Chaos is perhaps the most overlooked of the three, despite the thundering challenge of its title. It was first published in 1933, soon after The Church and the Land (1927) and, like that preceding volume, stands as a compilation of essays and short pieces penned for a wide array of periodicals and newsletters, from GKs Weekly to The Columban. Like The Church and the Land, in some of its particularity and detail it suffers from the passage of time. But beneath that, in every essay the principles invoked remain timeless, apposite and challenging. Indeed, the topicality of many of the essays, despite their 70 year old particularity and detail, is at times remarkable.
Father McNabb was – in his writings – a man of few words. Very occasionally overcome by righteous indignation or native Ulster sentimentalism, his prose is almost always hard and gem-like. It can seem cold and unyielding, but it has facets aplenty, and often one phrase carries the weight of what would be in another writer’s book a paragraph or even a page’s worth of substance. Much has to be carefully unpacked from a McNabb essay. Sometimes the telescoping of his intellectual process is too great for me: I cannot follow him every step he takes, because I simply cannot keep up with the speed at which he moves from one idea to the next. I can assent to his conclusions without following his train of thought for its entire passage through the essay. Usually, I can follow – and do follow – slowly but steadily, each of his thoughts condensing centuries of volumes of learning, of philosophy, of the glorified Catholic common sense that is Thomism – and condensing too his own profound wisdom, ascetic and pastoral experience and spiritual insight.
One essay in particular stands out: Things and Tokens. In all of McNabb’s work, there is great emphasis laid on the difference between value and price, between primary things and secondary things, between real wealth and token wealth, money. Again his work is dominated by the principle that we can expect from the average person no more than the average goodness, which is why we must all flee occasions of sin, which are occasions when, not to succumb to temptation, an average person needs more than average goodness.
As with many of his essays, Father McNabb’s mind was set a-whirring by a text, in this case a line from Holy Scripture, from St John’s account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. St John records how those who were hungry took “as much as they would”. Father McNabb comments: “If the Eternal Wisdom, instead of miraculously providing bread and fishes, had provided money, St John would have been unable to say that as much as each one wanted Jesus gave.” As ever there is much to unpack from this text and from Father McNabb’s comment. Together they reflect upon the nature of charity, upon the practice of economy; they touch upon social welfare, and they of course give some insight into how Christ allowed His Will to be conditioned, as it were, by the will of Man. Father McNabb goes on:
“In a system mainly of things, the average person may be trusted to limit his wants by his needs. But in a system mainly of tokens, the average person cannot be trusted to limit his wants by his needs… no man desires an infinite meal… no man desires an infinite house… no man desires an infinite field to till… but the undue desire of these tokens tends to a certain infinity,.. for tokens...excite an unsatisfied indefinite desire.”
Thus, desire for money is infinite. Thus also desire for other tokens, other shadows of real things, is likewise infinite. This desire is made even stronger by the realisation that money has no value but only represents price and prices shift even while value is constant. A certain amount of wheat will always be capable of feeding a certain number of people for a certain period of time. Its current money equivalent may in a week’s or month’s time be able to purchase not even half of that amount of wheat. But there are other tokens than money. The world of fashion is full of shadows and tokens – fashion in clothes, fashion in music, art: the fickle World creates an endless flow of ever-changing and never necessary things which stand for wealth, or standing, or for ‘good taste’, or for position in society, or for ‘up-to-dateness’. The ephemera of modernity stoke the infinite desire for those things which are neither necessary nor truly real.
“Everywhere there will be the very definite desire to have more and more token-wealth. The very uncertainty of the future value of this token will heighten and foster the desire.”
Even setting aside monetary value, i.e price, the “fashion value” of all these shadow-things changes almost by the hour. Those things of fashion that are bought today are tomorrow worthless as things of fashion. The modern world equates these shadows and tokens with wealth. It considers poverty to be the absence of these tokens and shadows: it considers poverty to be not having enough, as if one can ever have enough, of these tokens and shadows. It believes poverty – having enough of real wealth – to be the same as destitution – not having enough of real wealth. In its confusion, part deliberate and part the result of ignorance – it has made the word ‘poverty’ stand for a vice rather than for a virtue.
“Bethlehem and Nazareth poverty is not a defect to be remedied, but fundamental condition of all ultimate remedy and redemption.”
We must increasingly strive to separate ourselves from shadows and tokens, however difficult. When we still must use them we must increasingly see them as shadows and not as realities, and we must desire instead the primary things, the real things. The World over which Satan rules is a shadow world: by holding on to the solid things of God we will keep ourselves from falling into the Enemy’s Shadow.
Old Principles and the New Order by Father Vincent McNabb OP
In many respects this book, first printed in 1942, is Father McNabb’s opus magnus on social issues. Like The Church and the Land and Nazareth or Social Chaos it is a compendium of articles, in this instance dating principally from the late 1930s, although one or two were penned after the commencement of the Second World War. It was compiled and prefaced by Maisie Ward. It was almost the last work to come out under Father McNabb’s name, before his death in 1943, and was the product of a man in his seventies but still very active, preaching at Speaker’s Corner and Parliament Hill, at sundry public meetings and Catholic conferences.
This book is probably the most thorough and ordered of his non-theological works. In good part, this is down to Maisie Ward’s organization of its structure: Economics and the Gospel (what Holy Scripture records about morally sound economics); The Land of Shadows (a critique of token and false wealth, of shifting price and the insubstantiality of money); Land and the Legislators (how to return sanity to society by returning families to the land, and how to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of this exodus); Land and the Cultivator (how living on the land benefits families and society, how it is the basis for sanity and charity and wisdom – and the source of real wealth, of a sufficiency of food, clothing and shelter). The book then shifts on to more historical/theological issues – Centralism and the Clergy – before ending with a series of letters, more general essays and aperçus.
But while this arrangement lends the book order, what truly lends it the magnificent focus that gives that order such true weight and impact is the author’s own introduction. I have quoted from this introduction before, but it is more than worth setting down again.
“The Church is not primarily interested in politics or economics, because neither economics nor politics are primary.
Yet the Church is necessarily and greatly interested in politics and economics because both politics and economics are moral.
This book, therefore, has been written by a priest-teacher of the Church, not as a politician nor as an economist seeking the civil well-being of the State. But it has been written by a theologian whose concern must be for those moral principles which are the necessary root of the civil well-being of the State.
The book rests therefore on
1.Certain dogmatic and moral principles;
2.Certain undeniable facts; and it makes
3.Certain practical proposals.
The first principle is that there is a God, our Creator Whom we must love and serve; and Whom we cannot love and serve without loving and serving out fellow-creature.
The second principle is that the family is the unit of all social life; and that therefore the value of all social proposals must be tested by their effect on the Family.
The third (Psychological) principle is that from the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the average man more than average (i.e., heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of Sin.
The fourth (moral) principle is that occasions of sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed; i.e., they must be overcome by flight not fight.
The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue [because of the temptation to contracept, amongst other things].
This is, as we shall see, authoritatively asserted by Pope Pius XII when he couples Flight from the Land with the degradation of marriage.
From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled, this Flight from the Land must now be countered by Flight to the Land.”
And this fixes the mind in all that is to be read not so much upon the differences between real things and tokens, a prominent theme in Nazareth or Social Chaos, but upon the allied theme of the City and the Land. It re-echoes the call of that great first essay in The Church and the Land, A Call to Contemplatives: a call to leave ‘Babylondon’ for the fields of England; to flee the occasion of sin for the opportunity for virtue. For the Land promotes charity and poverty and self-restraint and is the enemy of luxury and sloth. The Land welcomes the Family: the City is its enemy.
Yes, the City is an occasion of sin (can anyone of us deny this?). Father McNabb in thus describing the City had in mind principally its temptation to race-suicide, to contraceptive greed, sloth and selfishness. But he was also thinking of its preoccupation with token and unreal wealth, with the sham of fashion, with luxury and excess, with its focus on things that are to do primarily with enjoyment rather than with. (How often has the Church told the World that if you seek happiness for itself you will never find it, but if you seek God or the Things of God happiness will be given unto you?) “A State organized for leisure is a State organized for pleasure. And a State organized for pleasure is a State organized for – Hell!” (Can anyone of us deny that society now is consumed by a lust for leisure, and that much of its leisure is also an occasion of sin?) The City will tend always to decadence: the moderns revel in their decadence, too dulled or stupid to realize that decadence is decay and decay precedes collapse.
To escape the City (the World, occupied in force by the Flesh and the Devil) we who live in the City (or at its edge) must turn inwards. This is the very least we can do to survive. Our Children do not (largely) go to the local school; often they are home-schooled. They are seldom allowed out to play in the local parks or on the streets. If there is a television set it is used exclusively for videos, under adult supervision. We try to shun the City. But it is there all around us. The local newsagent is festooned with pornography. The young Mum on the bus is reading a publication which has pictures and stories that even a non-Catholic young male twenty years ago would have shunned. Immodest dress, vulgarity and excess of luxury and token wealth are promenaded as today’s fashion accessories. In the City we must seal our Children hermetically in our Houses or our People Carriers to keep out the toxicity of the World. Is this the best we can do? Is this the life we want to give them, which we ourselves want to lead?
In this book Father McNabb will force us to move towards finding the answer to this question, however awkward it might be. For a workman, is it not preposterous to live in constant fear of disease, of accidental injury, by choosing to live or work where disease is rife or injury likely? Is not City living for Catholics today, particularly Catholic families, likewise preposterous?
Shun the City and embrace the Land. The World will think us mad, but that is no loss as the World’s understanding of sanity is crazed and unhealthy. Shun the World and embrace the worship of God amidst His Creation: not the structures and streets and filth of Man, but the green fields and shady groves of the Lord.
