The description of the philosopher by Belloc is marvelous: A modernist! He is on the road to untruth, to be sure, and perhaps even well-along the road to a Nietzschean insanity. In sum, here is one who denies the perennial philosophy. Here is a man who denies the moderate realism of Aristotle and Aquinas, denies the principle nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu, "nothing is in the intellect without first being in the senses," denies common sense. Like Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, this nameless character denies any notion of the Aristotelian efficient cause. This modern, nameless philosopher -like the philosopher David Hume-denies the principle of cause and effect.
During the pilgrimage, we find one of the protagonists in Belloc's story, a certain Grizzlebeard, arguing "hammer and tongs" with a modern philosopher, a "stranger," who-egads!-drinks not strong ale, but only tea, a drink only good for the effete. There are four main protagonists, all really part of Belloc's personality, called Myself, Grizzlebeard, the Poet, and the Sailor. But it is also serious, and contains some very deep reflections about life, about beauty, about friendship, about love, about lasting things, about the fleetingness of human life, and our hankering after the divine.
#The four men a farrago full#
It is full of curiosities, inane things, doggerel, songs and hymns, silliness, whimsy, and irreverent fun, as so much of Belloc's writings have. In a book called The Four Men: A Farrago, Belloc tells a delightful tale of a pilgrimage in Sussex, a half-real and half-fictional allegory of the pilgrimage of life. Why to that infallible source of Catholic common sense, Hilaire Belloc. Where shall we go to learn more about the baptism by beer? Only baptism by water, by blood, and by desire is therein mentioned. As Catholics, let us pity them, for they were not baptized by beer.īaptized by beer? What does being baptized by beer mean? To be sure, this sort of baptism is not to be found in the Catechism.
Let us read Descartes and his bastard philosophical progeny and sorrow. From Kant's idealism, we slowly lapsed into skepticism, which, of course, is currently a serious problem we face. Kant insisted that we could never know the thing in itself-the ding an sich was unknowable-we only could not the idea in our mind.
In the main, we moderns are all Kantians, and we doubt the adequacy of our senses to inform our minds as to objective truth. In the classical Aristotelian and Thomistic view (which imbibes in what is called the philosophia perennis or perennial philosophy) nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu, "nothing is in the intellect without first being in the senses." What is in the mind is somehow related to what is, the two are inextricably linked, and therefore what is in our mind corresponds with the truth of what is.īut since Descartes' "epistemological turn," we moderns have strayed into all sorts of philosophical absurdities based on this "capital error." A little mistake in the beginning of a journey can lead us seriously astray. This, of course, is quite a change from the traditional and classical view. We could never know that the idea which is in our mind is true, that is, that it corresponds with what is, i.e., reality. Without a link between mind and reality, there was no guarantee that the idea in the mind corresponded to that which was outside the mind. As Jacques Maritain describes the error, Descartes' "capital error" was to divide the idea in the mind from the thing outside the mind.
Descartes, generally given the prize for initiating the "epistemological turn" and ushering modern philosophy, is the fellow who famously suggested the senses may not give the mind reliable input, and so he felt he had to rely on something outside of the senses upon which to base thought.ĭoubting everything all about him, Descartes, the methodological doubter, came to conclude that the only reality he could trust was in his mind: I think therefore I am, Cogito ergo sum. Keywords: Descartes, Philosophy, ontology, Hilaire Belloc, Beer, reality, epistemology, cogito, Andrew M Greenwell, Esq.ĬORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In the history of Western philosophy, there is a cataclysmic thought event called the "epistemological turn." Epistemology (from the Greek episteme=to know) is the study of how we know what we know, and how we know what we know is equivalent to what is.
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