In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. In France today, I was there on one of these occasions, July 14 is Bastille Day. It is the official holiday celebrating the independence of France, corresponding to a great extent to our July 4. The Bastille was a building, a hunk of stone that went back to the thirteenth and the fourteenth century.
And it had a gruesome history. It became a symbol of royal tyranny, absolute right of the monarch and all of that. It stood for royal supremacy. And when France went through the throes of its revolution following ours, and stymied, fueled, made dynamic by pretty much the same philosophical causes and reasons, it became the great symbol which was totally destroyed. Now, one of the worst things we can do is try to simplify history.
There's nothing simple about it. There is no way you can can encapsule a huge movement where thousands and thousands of people laid down their lives on both sides. Sometimes you didn't know which side was which. And in France especially, so much of this activity is centered around Paris. When I went to France for the first time in 1929 to spend six weeks at Salem Now, Salem isn't a million miles away from Paris.
Close to Le Mans. A few hours by train, that's all. And yet, in many ways, you wouldn't have known there was a had been a revolution. This was in 1929. So, I'm not trying to simplify simplify or make any judgment at all.
I'm only saying that this building became a symbol of tyranny. Now, whether it was the right way or wrong way to get rid of it, that's another question. But you had in this latter part of the eighteenth century, you had this tremendous upheaval of which we are still the consequences are still being actually felt, which disturbed the Western world considerably, and is considerably disturbing it still. Now, when you go back to that eighteenth century, whether these men were deists or theists, and maybe a few of them atheists. Nevertheless, and despite David Hume and company, they had a conviction about truth.
They had a conviction about principle. They had convictions about certain absolutes. Most of them. I don't say all, but most of them. You don't lay down your life, you know, for a probability.
And on both sides, or three sides, or how many sides there were, you had people who were convinced of truth. And that's, you see, one of the most profound ways in which the eighteenth century, which had not yet felt the full thrust of Hume and Locke and so forth, and the twentieth century. Where today we have drawn the conclusion of their positivism, and now, generally speaking generally speaking, not individually, and allowing for many exceptions. But if you take a general view of The United States Of America, if you take a general view of of England, if you go to their media, if you go to their chief writers, the ones who are exercising most national influence, you find either doubt or downright rejection of anything absolute. You find a either a a great doubt or a downright rejection for anything such as an absolute truth, that there are truths in religion.
There are truths in morals. There are truths in politics. There are truths in the beauty. There are truths in the good. In other words, that there is something absolute.
This is one of the things Chesterton, in his orthodoxy emphasized. How do you talk about better or best? How do you talk about the ideal unless you have some kind some kind of perception of the ideal? Where is it? It certainly isn't in this world.
You take what happened. You take what happened in in our country. Take what happened in France in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We celebrate July 4. They celebrate July 14.
Man has become the center. We have become a homocentric universe. You you take this overwhelming emphasis upon human welfare, taking care of the weak, the disformed, the malformed, and all the rest. Now, there's nothing wrong about this. Don't misunderstand me at all.
This is good. But the first commandment isn't love of neighbor. The first commandment is not love of self. There's no first commandment which says I have to be altruistic. There is no first commandment which says I have to be egotistic.
There's a first commandment which says, I am the Lord your God. I am the lord your God. And you will have no other gods but me. And I, you shall love with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all that you are. And the first and the second commandment, second commandment is like that.
But remember, the second commandment is not altruistic. The second commandment is to love yourself. And the third commandment is to love your neighbor. If you analyze that you must love your neighbor as you love yourself. So that here we have the picture of man from the eighteenth century and even earlier, but certainly from the eighteenth century in Western world, we have man seeking man.
We have become secular humanists. It didn't happen all at once, but it has happened. Now, this is not to reject or downgrade the important values that were sought in these revolutions. Man's, as our holy father never tires of saying, man's irrepeatable worth, man's existential value. You scarcely can read anything that the holy father writes or says that he doesn't bring in this idea.
And certainly, what happened in the eighteenth century here, and what happened in the eighteenth century in France, and what has happened elsewhere under the influence of those events, has emphasized in many ways the intrinsic value of man. They were a person. You just take the supreme court's decision about abortion and ask yourself, how do they estimate the intrinsic value of a human person? That's the world we're living in. We have gone in one sense, we are torn apart.
We're schizophrenic. In one sense, say the important thing is the individual, his value, his worth. But, of course, you see what the rationalists, the humanists can't tell you is why? Why? Then on the other hand, we have today the downgrading, especially when you get in socialism and communism and Marxist.
The downgrading of the individual and making society Oh, this great mammoth thing called society. As that That's the important thing. We Catholics, Christians, let's come back to some basics. Man is the greatest creation of God, the human individual. Society came because Christ created individuals.
He didn't create society. Society is simply something that exists in my mind. It isn't a reality. Society only exists in so far as individual human beings exist. A wall exists only in so far as you have bricks making up the blooming wall.
That's clear enough, even to me, at this early in the morning. So, we come back to our blessed Lord. That God If we come back to that second question of the Baltimore catechism, why did God make you? God made me, that little answer goes, to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. That does not reject the idea that man should make this world as good a world as he can.
We cannot do that to the exclusion of God. Oh, you can try it, and it's being tried and has been tried, but we come back to the first sentence of Saint Augustine's confessions. Oh God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts will not be at rest till they rest in you. The name of the father, and of the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.