Don’t confuse this with the 12th century book by the same name by the famous Jewish rabbi Maimonides. I would liken this book favorably to the 21st century book by Kelmet Preus The Fire and the Staff. As the latter saved be from going insane theologically, the former as none likewise philosophically.
This 1977 work by E.F. Schumacher was loaned to me by one of my sons. It’s uncanny one of my sons has been prophetic in the realm of technology about what I would and wouldn’t get, like, use, find helpful. One has been accurate as to what authors I would find palatable and not. And one has proved adept at smoking cigars and drinking beer. Go figure. It’s as if we’re all related.
Anyway, while AI will tell you that nowhere does the Internet say specifically that he converted to Roman Catholicism; nevertheless this site (https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-unsung-convert-who-converted-millions-to-catholic-teaching) says he did: “In 1971, Schumacher was finally received into the Catholic Church, a decision that was the culmination and final consummation of his long spiritual quest.” This is case of forewarned being forearmed. Don’t read this uncritically. Don’t take my “salvation” from philosophy as an endorsement of everything Schumacher opines or particularly his solutions to spiritual matters.
Still get this book. Schumacher started from the same philosophical wasteland I had been a wastrel in for decades. I read and read philosophy not just perplexed, but convinced that since I couldn’t understand the great minds of this august realm, I was stupid, crazy, or both. Turns out I’m not nuts – at least philosophically speaking.
For the last 10 years or so I had been plugging away based on this Baconism (I don’t think this is a real term.): “It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion” (Francis Bacon, “The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral”). This was my upgrade from the quote I had made my way by for the previous 25 or so from Pasternak’s remark in Dr. Zhivago that philosophy is a fine condiment but a lousy entrée.
Bacon and Pasternak may have some validity when it comes to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on into some of the Church Fathers and Aquinas, but when you get to the Renaissance the game changes. Denying the reality of anything beyond the physical, they do all their thinking of man based on inanimate principles. Only the natural. The physical not the metaphysical. Only the natural not the supernatural. And like Lucy (Not Arnaz but Van Pelt) to Schroeder, “I shouted, ‘That’s it!’” I’m not nuts these godless philosophers are. They are even worse than those doing psychological studies on animals and making conclusions about humans. They are going from rocks to people, from inanimate to animate. They are in the path of Darwin believing that nonlife can generate life.
“There are harmless and mild-mannered philosophers who raise their question of whether a tree at which they are gazing will still be there when nobody is looking at it” (95). “It is one thing to banish ‘inner’ knowledge from the study of inanimate nature. …It is quite another thing to banish it from the study of human nature and behavior, at the highest of the four Levels of Being, where outer appearance is a very unimportant matter compared with inner experience” (101). “The lower takes the place of the higher, as when the study of a great work of art confines itself to the study of the material of which it is made” (102). “[M]ost scientist. …methodically exclude all evidence of forces deriving from the higher Levels of Being and confine themselves to the dead aspect of the Universe” (117). Think of all the buzz that Dark Energy generated and the conclusion that most of the Universe is this. “’Good scientists,’ says P.B. Medawar, ‘study the most important problem they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems not merely to grapple with them.’ This is fair enough; it clearly demonstrates, at the same time, that ‘good scientists’ is this sense can deal only with the dead aspect of the Universe” (134).
As more testimony that you’re not crazy if modern philosophy makes no sense to you read this on page 139: “More and more people are beginning to realize that ‘the modern experiment’ has failed. It received it’s early impetus from what I call Cartesian [PRH -Descartes] revolution, which, with implacable logic, separated man from those Higher Levels that alone can maintain his humanity. Man closed the gates of Heaven against himself, and tried, with immense energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth.” You do realize that the Internet and AI, which Schumacher knew nothing of, have barred those gates completely, don’t you? The following paragraph tells you where that ends, but here’s where Schumacher muffs the ball.
This early quote that might cause you to put down the book, but don’t. “Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana” (71). To paraphrase Luther, if you see a man climbing another ladder toward God or Truth other than Jesus Christ, pull him down for he is about to stick his head not into heaven but hell. See Nietzsche.
