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Political Morals From The Left

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2024

Thomas Gilby O.P.
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Extract

The people who are restrained in their communism by a tug from their tradition of culture form a considerable body of opinion in this country. Their state of mind is hinted at in the title of the periodical they patronize, for the New Statesman incorporates the Athenaeum, and the Week-End Review into the bargain. Catholic publishing has entered popular journalism and has also admirably engaged the Tory temper; it has not yet succeeded in addressing itself to this Liberal-Marxist sentiment, though at one time the Catholic Herald promised fair to do so. Accordingly the book Mrs. Mitchison has written to clear her own mind, should be of more than biographical interest. Her object is to bring some kind of order into the modem economic and political scene. She advances in Indian file, from question to question, or rather from questioning to questioning, sensitive to the rustle in the undergrowth, and not by deployment from massed and established premisses. To reduce this Socratic method to scholasticism reminds one of the general from home who tried to make the Virginians fight according to the drill-books. Still, they both wanted the Ohio Fork, and it may be profitable to indicate here some strategic positions held in common by St. Thomas and the symbolic Mrs. Mitchison.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 19 , Issue 217 , April 1938, pp. 291 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © 1938 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The Moral Basis of Politics. By Naomi Mitchison. (Constable. Pp. xxi, 376. 8/6.)

2 Summa Theologica. 1a–2ae: I: 7.

3 cf. 1a–2ae: LVI: 4, ad 3.

4 1a–2ae: VI: 5.

5 2a–2ae: L: 2.

6 cf. Ia–2ae: LXI: 5, ad 4.

7 Ends and Means. Chap. III.

8 cf. 1a–2ae: XCVI: 2.

9 cf. 1a–2ae: XXI: 1.

10 cf. 1a: V: 6. VI: 4. XCIII, on man as the image of God. 2a–2ae: II: 3. Mrs. Mitchison writes (p. 60), “It seems possible that ultimately and beyond politics we may be all means to (or at least parts of) some end which we scarcely perceive, an end which Olaf Stapledon calls ‘worship’… But if this is so, the end is beyond all of us and is not in the hands of any class of priests or prophets, nor can it be brought down to political or social terms.”

11 1a: V: 6. 1a–2ae: XI; 3. XXXIV: 4.

12 2ae–2ae: CLXVIII.

13 1a–2ae: I: 6, ad 1.

14 “The Roman Catholic doctrine of the sanctity of human life claims that a married woman must virtuously wear herself out and reduce the quality of her own life so as to produce the maximum number of children, even of poor quality.” (p. 294.)

15 “The other way of change is by archaising, by cutting out as far as possible the new materials of civilization with their results on society. This is the Nazi way. They cut out the products of the rubber and quinine trees, and with them the resultant freedom of women.” (p. 309.)