The English Dominican Social Tradition

1
The English Dominican Social Tradition

• Aidan Nichols OP

2
Vincent McNabb

• 1868-1943
• Irish Ulster, Newcastle
• Entered aged 17, ordained at 23
• Woodchester Louvain
• 1920 to Haverstock Hill
• Renowned as a preacher on the social question
• Speakers Corner
• Distributism

3
Back to the Land

• The Church the Land (1926)
• Nazareth or Social Chaos? (1933)
• Old principles of the New Order (1942)
• Hawkesyard garden in WWI

• Something began to say, indeed sing within
  me, When we come back to the earth as God made
  it, and God made it for us, we need never waste
  an ounce of material or a moment of time.

4
Exodus

• Holy Family at Nazareth as prototype of Christian
  Society
• Autarchy self-support
• Back to a life with God
• Pre-enclosure golden age
• 1930s solution to unemployment
• Catholics wanting rural presence, but lack of
  episcopal support

5
Bede Jarrett

• 1881-1934
• Born Blackheath, south London
• Entered aged 17, ordained at 27
• Influence of McNabb in Woodchester
• Political history at Oxford interested in
  Aquinas on justice right order in society
• Social Theories of the Middle Ages
• Medieval Socialism

6
Socialism Land Ownership

• Tutor Ernest Barker Associations neither
  state nor individuals alone can attain the common
  good
• Tried to make the term socialism take a form
  acceptable to Catholic thought radical for
  contemporaries
• Medieval no concept of absolute property
  ownership doctrine of almsgiving common law

• mans life differs, yet are the categories
  which mould his ideas eternally the same.

7
Education

• Thomistic theory of education, adapting to the
  individuality of each child
• Applied in his teaching at Laxton,
  Northamptonshire
• power latent in womanhood to influence and
  re-construct society

8
Distributism Lay Dominicans

• Eric Gill David Jones
• Both innovative visual artists as well as prose
  writers
• Part of Ditchling back to the land community of
  Catholic artists craftspeople
• Distributism widespread small ownership of
  property, with the small family-farm as the
  essential foundation of the well-ordered society

9
Eric Gill

• 1882-1940
• Born Brighton, son of a nonconformist minister,
  to RC 1913
• Trained in masonry calligraphy letter-cutter
• At Ditchling, interest in Aquinas person in
  society, how to live whole holy in the city
• Arts Crafts tradition
• Guild of St Joseph Dominic good making, labour
  contemplation
• Doctrine collected in essays, Autobiography
  letters

10
David Jones

• 1895-1974
• Born Brockley, South London, son of Welsh
  printers manager
• Major modernist poet
• Camberwell Art School
• WWI soldier
• Westminster School of Art under Gill, joined him
  at Capel-y-Ffin community
• Thomist theology of gratuitousness of creation
  gratuity of artists work
• Human nature as creative beast

11
Gerard Vann

• 1906-1963
• Entered aged 17, ordained at 25
• Born in Kent
• One of original community at Blackfriars Oxford

12
Bonum Commune

• Like Maritain, integral humanism, open to the
  divine
• Christian organic society only possible with
  Thomism
• Reformation destroyed view of society as an
  organism, then political divorced from ethical
• Thomism over communism, liberalism fascism
• Work as vocation, but contemplation and leisure
  essential to creativity
• The Divine Pity (1956) his spiritual classic
• Beatitudes have social implications
• Welfare of souls as well as bodies
• Morality War (1939) a major source for the PAX
  movement into beyond WWII

13
Thomas Gilby

• 1902-1975
• Born Birmingham, family to RC on eve of WWI
• Entered aged 16, ordained priest at 24
• Taught moral theology at Blackfriars Oxford, then
  at Blackfriars Cambridge
• Edited new English bilingual edition of Aquinas
  Summa Theologiae

14
Tradition builds the City

• Between Community Society (1953)
• Humane city spiritual friendship through
  Christs Church
• Eschatological civilised society over primitive
  ethnological community
• Principality Polity (1958)
• Good state is civilised justice through freedom
  co-operation
• best law is custom enforced, so tradition vital
• altogether there are good grounds for calling
  St Thomas the first Whig, if a Whig is a man who
  believes that the social and political life
  should be run according to a reasonable
  constitution, and who reserves to himself the
  right of deciding to break it in cases where the
  ordinary rules do not apply.

15
Herbert McCabe

• 1926-2001
• Irish father took citizenship at heart of the
  Troubles 1974
• Entered aged 23
• Editor of New Blackfriars from Cambridge 1964

16
Christian Socialism

• Slant (1964-1970)
• Christian Marxism or Catholic Social Teaching?
• PAX movement for nuclear disarmament, Spode House
• These issues to New Blackfriars under McCabe
• Christian humanity community require socialism
  
• Church corrupted by capitalism, needs to help
  transform society
• the teaching of the Bible is that the goal of
  humankind, real unity in love can only be reached
  by dying to our injured human nature the unity
  we have as members of Adams race and rising
  again to a new physical human community in the
  risen Christ.

17
Edward Booth

• 1928
• Promoter of the social teaching of the Church
• Became Catholic while reading history at
  Cambridge, then joined OP
• Schoolteacher
• Returned to Cambridge, doctorate in metaphysics

18
Catholic Social Thought

• Person as centre of social economic life
• Labour is more than a unit of power, it includes
  mind skill
• Personal links in the chain of production echoes
  of Distributism
• Work as expression of human dignity
• Magisterial CST e.g. Gaudium et Spes -
  economics of
• Erhard (Economics minister in Adenauers Germany)
• As a model of prosperity in contrast with British
  social policy
• Baudhuin (Economics professor at Louvain)
• Automation creates new forms of employment
• Saw food supply would increase beyond population
  growth
• Thomistic natural law dictates ownership of
  goods, duty to give to those in need, need for
  the state to serve

19
An English Tradition

• Thomas Aquinas influence a common thread
• In a great variety of forms, but not popular
• The general failure of Catholic social teaching
  to inculturate itself into an indigenous English
  form was matched by the inability of the British
  party system to generate a visionary yet
  practicable social politics for civil society at
  large.
• An impressive corpus of social reflection that
  one day may be useful to a culture at present
  divided between futurism and a love of historical
  roots.