We've now completed the systematic three week run through of Esolen's Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching chapter by chapter. For the remainder of this fourth and final week of the course, I intend to add some general posts which critically engage with the book as a whole.
In the first of these general posts, I'd like to focus on the issue of methodology. It's a frequent problem in book reviews that the reviewer complains that the book under discussion is not the book that the reviewer himself would have written. Esolen's book isn't and cannot be the final word on Catholic social teaching. But what are the specifics of his book and what might be said critically about the approach he has taken?
The most obvious thing to note is that it is a book solely about Leo XIII's teaching. Whatever else might be said about this, it does mean that, as a text on Catholic social teaching simpliciter, it is incomplete: much has been written by Popes and others since then. So one book this is not is the book that shows how contemporary magisterial teaching fits in with Leo's. Although there is, in principle, nothing wrong with a book that focuses solely on one Pope's understanding of Catholic social teaching, if it is intended to be a book that is aimed at a general audience rather than an academic one specialising in nineteenth century thought, the choice of this focus does require some explanation and even justification.
The first thing to say is that Esolen's book presents a vision more than an argument. He stresses the coherence (and one might add beauty) of Leo's view, but he does not engage in a detailed, philosophical defence of either its content or of its methodology. What you should make of that is a tricky question. I have no doubt that at least part of Esolen's aim is persuasive: he wants to persuade his readers that Leo's vision is right and that those who either reject Catholic social teaching in toto or reject Leo's/Esolen's version of it are wrong. Whether that persuasion is best accomplished by presenting your case as coherently as possible so that the sheer strikingness of the vision convinces or whether it is better to enter into detailed argument is another matter. Certainly, Esolen's approach is one way to convince people whether or not it is the most effective.
But even noting that Esolen's aim is to produce a persuasive vision of the whole does not directly explain why it has to be Leo's. Why couldn't it (eg) be John Paul II's or even contemporary Catholic social teaching as it now stands? I have no doubt that it could be: these are books that Esolen simply hasn't written rather than books that could not be written. The advantages of taking Leo's vision as a focus, however, bring me on to my second point: Leo stands at a crucial point between modernity and tradition in Catholicism and it is this point that Esolen is implicitly at least addressing in the book.
As I've mentioned before, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum is often taken as the beginning of a new phase in Catholic teaching: the creation of a separate body of thought called Catholic Social Teaching. Esolen's aim is undoubtedly to undermine this sense of a chasm between the old and the new here by showing that Leo is firmly rooted in the past: if Leo founded Catholic social teaching, he did so in full continuity with past Catholic teaching. As well as the 'creation' of social teaching, Leo XIII is also famous for the revival of Thomism in his Encyclical Aeterni Patris (description here) and the social teaching he puts forward is what one would expect from someone soaked in the Aristotelianism of Thomist political and moral philosophy. Moreover, by being rooted in that Thomism, the social teaching falls into the general framework of Thomist discussions of beatitudo (human flourishing) and, in particular, of the relationship between our supernatural destiny with God and the goods of our natural life here on earth. If Leo is the founder of Catholic social teaching, then it is a teaching that is not separated from the philosophical and theological past, nor a teaching which separates human social life from our lives after death with God, nor one that ignores the importance of the liturgical life of the Church.
I'll go on to say something more tomorrow (16 September 2015) about some of the detailed content of Leo XIII's vision of human social life.
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