It is a gross error, typical of the materialists of our age, to believe that the degradation of the family and the ruin of education began in the chimneys of factories or in economic bureaus. Matter always obeys the spirit. Before man could be reduced to a mere cog of production, it was necessary for his soul to be stripped of its Ultimate End and for society to be emptied of its Divine Order. The educational and familial disgrace we witness today is the terminal stage of a philosophical and theological corruption whose seeds were planted centuries ago.

To trace the genesis of this fall, one must return to the 14th century, when the backbone of Western thought suffered its first great blow through the ideas of the English friar William of Ockham. By formulating the so-called Nominalism, allied with his lethal Voluntarism, Ockham denied the existence of “universals”—the idea that there is an objective order, a true essence in things, imprinted by the Creator and which can be known by the human intellect. By elevating divine Will above His own Intellect, Ockham caused Creation to cease being a rational and ordered cosmos, turning it into a heap of arbitrary acts.

If there is no universal and objective Truth to unite us, and if reason can no longer read the “signature” of God in nature, only isolated individuals remain, guided by their own wills. Nominalism lethally severed Faith from Reason. The path to modernity was paved: if reason cannot reach eternal truths, the world ceases to be a divine work to be contemplated and becomes merely a heap of matter to be manipulated by power and utility. Modern thought—which would later culminate in the abstractions of Descartes and utilitarian pragmatism—was erected upon this profound denial of reality.

However, for this philosophical corruption to dismantle the practical life of the common man, political and theological action was necessary. This occurred devastatingly in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation. By rejecting the authority of the Church’s Magisterium and instituting the principle of “private judgment”—whereby each individual becomes the supreme judge of the interpretation of the Scriptures—the spiritual unity of Western Christendom was shattered. Man was theologically and ontologically isolated.

The deviation of the intellect inevitably translates into tragedy in the material realm. Spiritual corruption soon translated into the spoliation of the Catholic social order that protected the people. In England, by order of King Henry VIII, the secular power confiscated and destroyed thousands of monasteries and abbeys. Those institutions were not merely centers of prayer, but the true foundation of charity, education, hospitals, and support for the poor and widows. By stealing these lands and handing them over to a new oligarchy of court sycophants, the English Crown generated, for the first time, a legion of destitute peasants.

Simultaneously, the advance of the Protestant ethic—especially Calvinism—inverted economic morality. The Catholic Church had always condemned usury (the charging of exorbitant interest and profit for profit’s sake), teaching that the economy should serve man, not the other way around. The Craft Guilds (the famous medieval guilds) were Catholic brotherhoods founded on charity and justice. They guaranteed the “just price,” protected the dignity of the labor of the shoemaker, the blacksmith, and the carpenter, and prevented the artisan from being crushed by predatory competition.

The new bourgeois morality—of an essentially Calvinist matrix—destroyed these guilds and sanctified greed. The accumulation of wealth ceased to be seen as a danger to the soul and became justified as a “sign of divine election.” The poor man, once seen as the image of the suffering Christ, came to be viewed as accursed (a reprobate), someone who had failed before God and the demands of the new economic order.

Thus, long before the rise of steam engines, Western man had already been stripped of his heritage. The peasant and the artisan lost the material support of the monasteries, the labor protection of the Craft Guilds, the unity of the Faith, and the vision of a universe ordered toward the Beautiful and the Supreme Good.

When the doors of the 18th century opened, man was already a spiritual and social orphan. Isolated, deprived of land and protection, he did not walk into the Industrial Revolution out of choice or ambition. He was cornered by hunger and destitution, driven into the coal mines and the factories. The home, then, was ready to be emptied.