Nazareth or Social Chaos

by OP Fr. Vincent McNabb, Dr. Cicero Bruce (Preface by), Joseph Kelly (Foreword by)

Overview

Distilling the work of Father Vincent McNabb's years of preaching in London's Hyde Park, this challenging and entertaining book examines urbanized and industrialized life. The arguments claim that urban life has a deleterious effect on nature, community, family, and the spirit and offer a challenge to "flee to the fields," seeking a life not dominated by technology and artificial schedules but by the forces of God and nature. Newly edited and annotated, this edition stands as an important work of English social criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605700281
Publisher:	IHS Press
Publication date:	03/15/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, was a Dominican theologian and social critic of 19th- and 20th-century England and the author of numerous classic works of spirituality and history, including The Catholic Church and Philosophy, Church and Reunion, Craft of Prayer, Faith and Prayer, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Joseph Kelly is editorial director of the Universe Media Group and the editor of Church Building, School Building, The Universe Catholic Weekly, and Who’s Who in Catholic Life. Dr. Cicero Bruce is a professor of English at Southern Catholic College and the author of Crowd Culture. He lives in Dawsonville, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

Nazareth or Social Chaos

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By Vincent McNabb

IHS Press

Copyright © 2009 IHS Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60570-028-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Call of Nazareth

Some Thoughts on the Age-Old Exodus From the City to the Land

It is the best part of twenty years since the matter of this letter was first broached between us. Student and teacher were so akin in aim and ways of thinking that at the end of our thought-gathering, neither of us could measure, in the yield of thought, what was his share.

Early in our thinking — and Jesus, the Messiah of Jewry, was always the beginning and goal of our thought — we realized that the great Jewish movements of reformation and redemption were movements out of complex, organized city life to the simple life with God on the land, or even in the desert.

Gradually the dogged spadework of the archaeologist had proved to us that when Abraham left Haran for the desert it was not Chaldean slum-dwellers alone who formed his train. There was also something we can venture to call an intelligentsia, of whom Abraham was leader, in their going out from a decadent neo-paganism to the primaries of human life and liberty.

In our discussions on this earliest record of a group exodus we often asked ourselves the unanswered question: Whether it was not to this intelligentsia-led exodus that the earliest record should be assigned of an explicit and formulated Credo in an intelligent Creator. We could not see in the matchless Hexemeron of the first two chapters of Genesis the product of unlettered nomads. But we were agreed that the religious atmosphere around Thare and his son Abraham at Ur and Haran was such that the bugle-music of this first Quicumque vult would be fit war-song for an intelligentsia shaking the town-dust of neo-paganism from its feet.

To us in our desperate venture of thinking there seemed a dramatic inevitability in this exodus from Chaldea being followed after some centuries by the exodus from Egypt. It was like the phenomenon of second conversion, which makes the soul's return to God authentic and final.

Again the two "goings-out" from Chaldea and Egypt were alike not merely in substance but in those lesser modes that seemed to betoken a law fulfilled. As the Chaldean exodus was led by an alarmed intelligentsia (as it seemed to us), so, too, the simple brick factory hands of Egypt were guided out into the desert with God by Moses, "skilled in the learning of the Egyptians." We could not refrain from seeing Moses surrounded by a group of intelligences who have given us a Social Code which the Greece of Solon, Lycurgus, Plato, and Aristotle failed to rival.

Again, it seemed to us that if the Israelitish reaction against the neo-paganism of Chaldea gave us the Hexemeron, the reaction against the neo-paganism of Egypt gave us the Decalogue. In each case reformation and inspiration came when the God-appointed leaders shepherded their people out of decadent city organization back to the land.

You will remember how it weighed upon our minds that the precedent of Abraham and Moses seemed to be set aside by Jesus Christ. Search as we would, we could not find a trace of his having left an Ur or a Memphis for the desert. Our inner conviction that all true reformation must be a return to the things primary of land-work and hand-work almost began to sicken if not die, when — Deo Gratias! — a text of St. Matthew restored our conviction from its sick bed.

"Out of Egypt have I called my Son. ... Arise, take the Child and his Mother and go into the land of Israel" (Matt. ii, 15 – 20).

The day we found the meaning of these prophetic and inspired words we almost shouted for joy, as if a doom of doubt had been lifted from our shoulders. We almost chanted aloud the further phrase of the tax-collector Matthew: "And coming he dwelt in a hamlet called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was said by the prophet, that he shall be called a Nazarene."

It was with joy on joy that, with still further study and prayer, we still further realized how punctiliously and completely this Son of Abraham had followed the lead of his earthly Sire by turning from the complexities and complication of city life to the simplicities and primaries of a life with God and with the earth as God has made it.

Some lesser riddles of the adventure of redemption, though still left unsolved, were so much a part of what had been solved as no longer to seem incapable of solution. Thus we had asked ourselves: If land- work is of such necessity — indeed, of primary necessity for redeeming the world — why did not the Redeemer choose all, or some, of the primary apostles from workers on the land?

The question thus broached had not long to wait for an answer. It was as if under the very poison-fang of the difficulty we found the poison's antidote. He who brought in the supernatural order did not rest it on the wreckage of the natural order:

Non eripit mortalia]
[Qui regna dat caelestia.
(He stealeth not the natural
Who giveth realms celestial.)

Indeed, he himself said, as if beforehand with an answer to our doubt: "No man putting his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God" (Luke ix, 62).

The Word made flesh was not minded to disturb the Divine order which made land-work the primary duty and need of beings demanding daily bread to keep them in being. It was only from work of secondary need such as fishing or of still less need such as tax-collecting that Jesus chose his disciples. Land-work was an institution so indispensable and divine that from it he took no workers, but only the wisdom of parables.

You will remember the day when another of our lesser questions was answered to our joy. We were lopping the branches of a felled birch, to provide fuel for the bread oven. For the hundredth time we had asked ourselves, "Why did not the Son of God choose to be born on a farm?" Perhaps our previous talk on Russia's naive efforts after the Co-operative State gave us the clue. At last one of us said gravely: "But the Incarnate Word, as he could not disturb the land-unit, so he could not be born in the land-unit." To the inevitable question, "Why?" came the inevitable and satisfactory answer: "Because the divinely instituted land-unit is the normal family of father, mother, and several children. And the Word made flesh could not be One of several children." At once we saw that, as the only Child of the Heavenly Father must be the only Child of an earthly mother, he could be born nowhere save in a home whose craft did not demand the normal family of several children.

All this was gradually opening our eyes to the full meaning of the title officially given to the Redeemer of the World in the hour of the world's redemption. For ever this Son of God and of Mary, this Redeemer of the World, will be JESUS OF NAZARETH — indeed JESUS THE NAZARENE, as one says, Donald the Crofter!

I used to envy you who had made three years of Bible study in the university that is the Holy Land. How often have I made you bring back memories of the hamlets and by-ways hallowed by the feet of Jesus! But though the very stones of Nazareth were known to you, it was only after years of speech and thought in common that you, old pupil — and I, your teacher — saw what Nazareth was and meant, and what was meant by the title: Jesus the Nazarene.

For us both Nazareth was always a highland hamlet, whose every stone was hallowed by thirty years of God's redemptive love. Gradually our eyes began to see this highland hamlet as one of the necessities — one of those conditional necessities, to use the phrase of the Dumb Ox of Aquin — of the enterprise of Redemption. For Nazareth was the Unit of human society. It was a family of families gathered together in aid and defence of life. Within its circuit dwelt the little self-sufficing group of land-workers and hand-workers.

The primary craft of land-work and the secondary yet necessary crafts of hand-work were there working together in the primary Co-operative Group. All the sanctities and social necessities of property, chastity, and authority were there in their natural soil and setting. If, then, the Son of God made Nazareth his earthly home and took it as his earthly title, it was because He, the Redeemer and the Beginning, who came to make all things new, realized that in a Nazareth alone could be the beginning of redemption.

For this reason you — my beloved pupil — and I, your unworthy teacher, have come to feel Nazareth calling us; indeed, crying out with a loud Calvary shout to us. The theme of that unceasing Nazareth cry is: "Come back, not to Ur or Memphis or Jerusalem, but to Nazareth, lest you prepare another Golgotha."

So shrill and unceasing is this call of the Nazarene that, in spite of ourselves, it is dulling our ears to all other cries of efficiency, prudence, experience, progress, statesmanship, as if they were but the cracking or rumbling of a world tottering to ruin. Much as our will shirks this challenge of the truth, we yet see that, of a truth, only Jesus of Nazareth is the Saviour and Hope of the world.

Much as our feet falter on the threshold of the way we yet know that Nazareth alone, where alone Jesus had a home, is the divine pattern to souls who covet to do the Redeemer's work in the Redeemer's way, amidst a strayed, lost people who do not yet know that their sorest need is Repentance and Redemption.

CHAPTER 2

On Rights and Property

LET ME SET DOWN SOME PRINCIPLES AND DEFINITIONS, chiefly from St. Thomas Aquinas. They may help towards clearer thinking.

A Duty is an act necessitated, not by a physical, but by a moral obligation, i.e. not by nature but by Will. It is a moral, as distinct from a physical, necessity to act, e.g. the duty of living, of seeking the truth, of working, etc.

A Right is a moral, as distinct from a merely physical power to have the means necessary to fulfil a Duty. Hence Duty is primary and absolute; Right is secondary and relative to Duty.

As moral obligation and moral power presuppose a free will, Duties and Rights are predicable only of a Free Will.

The fundamental right of the free will is to be free, and not enslaved.

SERVITUS EST IMPEDIMENTUM BONI USUS POTESTATIS.

Slavery is a hindrance of the good USE of power.

"To use is to apply a principle of action to its action." Hence "To Use is properly an act of the will." Slavery is the evil of a being that has the internal quality of free will, but has not the external condition of freedom. Hence the fundamental property or the foundation of property and ownership is our free will. A being that cannot call its will its own can call nothing its own.

By liberty our acts are our own; by property our goods are our own. Free will is the psychological condition of property; and property is the material condition of freedom. "A man by his will possesses [owns] things." To have (or own) is nothing else than to use or to be able to use; and this is only by an operation. As a right is a moral power to use, Right is the fundamental form of property.

"OWNERSHIP ... denotes the relation between a person and any right that is vested in him. That which a man owns is a right."

Whoever, then, admits the existence of human rights has denied the arguments against human property.

The right to property does not mean that a man shall have a right to as much as he wishes, but that he shall have a right to as much as he needs.

If ownership or property is a right, and especially if ownership is moral power, as distinct from physical power, to use, it is as misleading to speak of the ownership of a thing as to speak of the right to a thing. There are as many limitations of ownership as there are limitations of right and of power.

Where there is no physical power there is no moral power; a blind man has not the right to have electric light shades.

Yet there may be no moral power where there is physical power. Physical power to use is not moral power to use; and moral power to use in one way may not be moral power to use in another way.

In one and the same material being there may be centred many physical and many moral powers to use and thus to own.

Of God alone, who alone has full physical and moral power over everything, can we say "God has the ownership of A or B."

All other beings have only an ownership in whatever they are said to own; thus, in land the nation has not the ownership but only an ownership of the land. All England belongs to all England. The nation has the "altum dominium," the highest ownership of the land of the nation. But this kind of ownership by the nation is quite compatible with another kind of ownership by the individual.

Some examples may stimulate thought. (a) Lord B. — has a valuable picture-gallery; but is blind. His valet is an artist who has found no money in painting. The valet has the physical and psychological power to use the pictures. Lord B. —, who is said to own them, has not the power to use them, but has only the power to prevent other people from using them!

(b) Mr. E. —, the millionaire ship-owner, owns half a Scotch county; but his asthma confines him to the South of France. His tenants have the physical and psychological power to use his land both for tillage and for enjoyment. He can neither till nor enjoy. Almost his only ownership of the land is a power of selling; or is a selling-ownership.

(c) A certain Government holds the Communistic doctrine that no one can individually own land. But the individual land-workers have alone the physical power to till the land and largely the physical power to control the fruits of the land. Whether or not their very real control of the "earth and the fruits thereof" is called ownership by the central authority, it is a more effective ownership than the shadowy overlordship of a doctrinaire bureaucracy. The land-workers, who have no official ownership, can bring the land under cultivation; whereas the central Government's official ownership is a power of putting the land out of cultivation.

All this may lead us to generalize about the words Right and Property. Right is an old word with something like a simple definite meaning. Property (like Capital, Industrial, Employee, Income, etc.) is a new word with a complex or indefinite meaning.

Again, the things which are the objects of Rights and Property are of many kinds. At the one extreme there are things like food and clothing, whose use is their consumption. At the other extreme there is the earth or land which can be used in a thousand ways and even abused, but cannot be consumed. Between these two extremes there are different classes of things with different ways of being used. To state man's relation to these things, with their complex and multifold ways of use, in terms of one word "Property," is to court ambiguity. The older word Right is at once more illuminative and scientific. Thus we can say, Right of Production, Right of Use, Right of Usufruct, Right of Occupation, Right of Selling, etc., etc.

"... the more the politicians, jurists and economists study the wisdom of [St. Thomas Aquinas] the more will their minds open to the lure of scientific truth."

— Rev. Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P.

Blackfriars, March 1931

CHAPTER 3

The Money Muddle

DURING A MEETING AT THE OLYMPIA, GLASGOW, MY lecture on "Unemployment and the Land" led a man in the hall to ask me if I could give a definition of what I think he called National Credit. I ingenuously confessed that I could not give a definition of National Credit. Indeed, as there seemed some hesitation in taking my word, I again confessed that I did not know what National Credit was; and indeed I did not care.

To tell the truth, I had a suspicion that National Credit had to do with currency or token-wealth. Now, I have long felt that as the way into our social quagmire was by putting second things first, and therefore first things second, our only way out of the quagmire was by putting first things first. But as currency is not a first thing or even a second thing, but only the token of a thing, to be deeply concerned with money and the money view of the world is to sink still deeper into the quagmire. Hence my indifference to all schemes based on a money-unit.

A walk through the slums, and a study of the official reports, of Glasgow had made me perhaps unduly sensitive to the futility of the money-standard of civilization. I do not mean that I was depressed because Glasgow was Glasgow and not, say, Birmingham or Liverpool; but because, like Birmingham and Liverpool, Glasgow has a large number of human beings living in inhuman conditions through the money-muddled thinking of a small group of not ill-minded human beings,

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Dedication,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Foreword,
Introduction,
Eulogy to Rev. Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P.,
The Call of Nazareth,
On Rights and Property,
The Money Muddle,
Things and Tokens,
Social Soundings,
Are We Living on Capital?,
Over-Production or Under-Consumption?,
The Farmers' Food Raid,
Cogs in the Machine,
Facts for Whitehall,
Is Patriotism Dead?,
The Sins of Avarice,
Memento Mei,
Dear Mother Earth,
Towards Hope,
Nature's Call to Work and Thrift,
Absenteeism,
Mass-Production in Agriculture,
Group Home-Colonisation,
Fifteen Things a Distributist May Do,
Notes,
About IHS Press,