Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: post 5

                                                                    Sigrid Undset


Week 2: 

We continue week 2 of the course on Anthony Esolen's Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching by looking at chapter 4 on 'The Family'.

My synopsis:

• The family is the fundamental society: it is both a society itself and the foundation for other societies such as the State.
• The family is the space within which individuals are formed who have an understanding of their natural end and, fundamentally, of their supernatural end as oriented towards God.

My critical discussion:

Esolen starts this chapter again with a discussion of a work of art: the novels of Sigrid Undset and, in particular, her triology, Kristin Lavransdatter. (I've made this point before, but it's worth stressing again Esolen's methodology here. He constantly refers to art and particularly canonical works of the Western tradition: for him, the idea of Catholic social teaching appeals to a prudentia -the virtue of practical wisdom formed in part by the Western classical tradition.) Undset's novel focuses on a household, indeed, a patriarchal household of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. By seeing the concrete nature of such a society and its goodness, Esolen (and Undset) hope to restore the vision of a natural pattern of human existence as good, in opposition to the theoretical modern opposition to patriarchy and the family. (Esolen doesn't make this point, but Undset herself lived through a divorce, war and the death of her oldest child. If she has a vision of the 'good family' it is not through a naive ignorance of its problems.) 

This chapter continues on from the previous one on marriage. In essence, it repeats and extends the message of the centrality of the family to human social life, its naturalness as a society (rather than its existence as a voluntary contract), and the existence of attacks on it by secularised modernity.

Questions:

 

• Esolen constantly argues that the family helps the individual to see herself 'oriented beyond time, to God' by seeing an loving its origins (parents, grandparents) and its future (children, grandchildren). Does that mean that those of us who don't have the experience of knowing our parents (or having children) are harmed in some way?
• Esolen (and Leo) emphasises the importance of the father's role in leading the family. Since this is obviously a 'patriarchal' thought. do we need to bother reading on?
• If Catholicism is based on the traditional family, isn't that precisely why it's going to fail in future years?

Works of Leo referred to in chapter:

From now on, I won't be listing the references to Leo's works on the individual blogposts. The full set of documents referred to by Esolen are listed here. Perhaps the two most important writings for this chapter are Arcanum divinae (Vat. Eng. version here), and Rerum Novarum [Vat. Eng. version here.] The latter in particular is often seen as the foundation stone of Catholic social teaching. It would be an interesting exercise to read the document focusing instead on some of the more countercultural sections on the nature of the family. (Eg: sections 13 and 14.)

[Next post -the final one of  week 2- will be tomorrow 1 September 2015.]