The Deification of Man
This section consists in:
1. An Analysis of
Texts;
2. A Schematic
Representation of the Modes in which the Council Deifies Man;
3. The Council’s
Ultimate Justification for the Deification of Man.
1. Analysis of Texts
In the last section on the
dignity of man, we have seen how the Council ascribes to man properties which
in fact belong to God alone: in subsection (a), the faculty perfectly to know
all things together with the property of Absolute Freedom; in subsection (b),
the status of being an end in himself. In subsections (c) and (d), moreover, we
have seen the Council suggest that man is called to, or indeed already enjoys,
a union with God which is that of identity. In such ways the Council
effectively deifies man, as it does also in the following texts [1]:
i) ‘… by their power to know themselves in the depths of their being, they
[women and men] rise up above the
whole universe of objects’ [2]
(GS 14);
ii) ‘… there is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of human persons
who stand above all things…’ (GS 26);
iii) ‘the ferment of the Gospel has aroused and continues to arouse an
unquenchable thirst for human dignity’ (GS 26);
iv) ‘Women and men… crave a life that is full, autonomous, and worthy of
their nature as human beings; they long to harness for their own welfare the
immense resources of the modern world.’ (GS 9).
Fichte visits Kant [engraving - 1792 ] ‘experts in perverse divagations of German Philosophy’
First, we observe that here
too the Council is only describing man’s natural dignity: not man’s supreme
dignity which is the supernatural dignity which he attains by his union to God
by sacramental, sanctifying Grace; second, we observe that the Council is here
using a particularly elevated manner of speech: a language, indeed, more suited
to God than to man. We note in particular man’s pretention to autonomy in text
(iv), recalling the perverse divagations of German Modern Philosophy [3].
‘Where
is God’s sublime dignity in all this?’
Where is God in all this? we
might ask, who Himself is ‘before all’ [4],
and Himself stands above the whole universe of objects, whose ‘magnificence is
elevated above the Heavens’ [5],
who ‘holds the primacy’ [6]
in all things? Who ‘beholdeth the power of the height of heaven: and all men
are earth and ashes’ [7].
Where is God’s sublime dignity? Where
is the unquenchable thirst for Him
aroused by the Gospel? Where is the craving of the heart for Him? Where the longing to harness the
immense resources of the modern world for His
glory? The Council here has veritably substituted God for man.
2. A Schematic Presentation of the Modes in which the
Council Deifies Man
Having brushed aside the
god-like, supernatural dignity of man, as we have explained at the end of
section C, the Council is pleased to attribute a god-like quality to his merely
natural dignity. We proceed to present schematically ten of the relevant elements,
taken particularly from the present chapter:
1. Man’s reason is
capable on its own of attaining and completely comprehending all truth;
2. Man’s freedom
stands higher even than objective reality [8];
it is to be used as man desires, like the freedom of God Himself. Man is hereby
free to choose the religion he wishes [9],
and free also to interpret the Sacred Scriptures himself;
3. Man’s love within
marriage is an end in itself like God’s own love [10];
4. Man’s dignity and
freedom are associated to his ‘fraternity’ with all other men, thus lending him
the spirit of self-deification which informed the French Revolution;
5. Man is the supreme
principle of society, in the place of Christ the King;
6. Together with the
rest of humanity man constitutes the egalitarian State-God;
7. Man ‘stands above
all things’;
8. The whole creation
has been made for man alone;
9. Man is not prey to
Original Sin because it has been repaired by Christ [11],
10.
Man is not prey to personal sin because it is
incompatible with his god-like freedom.
..jpg)
The Procession of the Goddess of Reason, France 1793
('Man’s reason is capable on its own of attaining and completely comprehending the truth.')
3.
The Council’s Ultimate Justification for the Deification of Man
How does the Council
ultimately justify man’s god-like dignity? The answer is given above [12]:
‘Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed… in him, has been raised in
us… to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his Incarnation, He, the Son of God,
has in a certain way united himself with each individual’ [13];
‘In the human nature united to himself, the Son of God, by overcoming death
through His own death and resurrection, redeemed humanity and changed it into a
new creation’ [14]. In
other words, our sublime dignity derives from Christ’s purported union with us
in the Incarnation, and from His consequent Death and Resurrection which
redeemed us.
In this vision of man’s
dignity, as we observed above, in this vision of man’s union with God and of
man’s redemption, neither the supernatural order, nor, more precisely, Grace,
nor the sacraments, nor a good life, have any rôle to play. Now the Church has
always taught that we are united to God by Grace, which lends us a likeness to
Him and a real, but finite, participation in Him. But if we are not united to
Christ by Grace, how are we united to Him? We are told that He has united
Himself to us ‘in a certain way’, but in what way? The god-like language used
leaves us in no doubt but that Christ has divinized man directly, so that man
has become Him, has become identical to Him. We are no longer united to God,
deified by Him, through Grace and participation, as the Church teaches, but
through nature and identification.
Is this, then, what we know
‘in the depths of our being’? [15]
Is this what the Council means when it tells us that Christ ‘fully reveals man
to himself’? [16],
when it elects man as the supreme principle of society in place of Christ the
King? Is this what Pope John Paul II means when he says that the Ecce Homo reveals man’s Kingship to man?
In such a case, what would
this union amount to theologically? The author of the text does not tell us,
but leaves the question suspended in the air with that elusive phrase ‘in a
certain way’. The union between man and God with which the Catholic Faith is
primarily concerned is of course that which subsists in Our Lord Jesus Christ
Himself, namely the hypostatic union. So does the author conceive the union
between God and every man as hypostatic? Has the Divine Person Who is the Word,
united Himself to our human nature, so that each of us has become another
Christ in the true sense of the term? If so, then we are face to face with the
error of the pantheists, of the pantheistic Gnostics [17]
who say: Look into yourself and you will find God there; we are God; I am God [18]:
man presumes to ‘be like God’ simply in virtue of his nature, as Lucifer did
and as he tempted Adam to do [19].
'You
will be like God.'
Pope Paul VI was well aware that the Council presented modern man as a sort of god. As Romano Amerio points out [20], he shared this diagnosis of modern man with St. Pius X, but differed from him in approving, rather than deploring, such a vision. Pope Paul stated in his concluding sermon, which Professor de Mattei considers ‘the conclusive message of the Council and the key which the Pope offered for its interpretation’, that: ‘The Religion of God made Man has encountered the religion (because that is what it is) of man who has made himself God. What has happened? … a conflict, a struggle, an anathema? It might have been the case, but it was not… the Council was completely pervaded by an immense sympathy’ [21].
Conclusion
to Part II
If in the first part of the book we were surveying from a high vantage - point the Church in Herself, and in Her multiple relations with other societies and with the World; in the second we were focusing more closely on man himself: on his choice of life - marriage, priesthood, and religious life - and in the Holy Mass. And yet in both fields we have witnessed the same work of destruction on the Faith, a work wrought with the same equipment: antirealist philosophy with its six false principles of thought, naturalizing, secularizing, protestantizing the Faith, and reducing it to rubble.
But in the midst of this
rubble we have observed an edifice being built, like some meaningless and godless monster of modern architecture: and
this is man, self-glorifying, bursting forth from what he is pleased to consider
the shackles of Faith, and crying out against God and His Christ with the words
of the opening psalm of the Tenebrae
of Good Friday: Dirumpamus vincula eorum:
et proiciamus a nobis iugum ipsorum, ‘Let us break their bonds
asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us…’ [22]
- the tyrant cry of the outraged infant,
taken up by the Modern Philosopher in his study, laboring wearily to prove the
most illusory of all dreams: that man is God.
We can think of no more
fitting commentary to this dream, and of no more fitting conclusion to this
part of the book, than the following passage from the Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii [23],
referring to the arrival of the Emperor Claudius at Heaven’s gate: ‘He wants to
become a god… Once it was a great thing to be made a god, but now you have made
the distinction a farce… I move that from this day forward, no-one should be
made a god…. Whoever, contrary to the decree of the senate, shall be made,
called, or depicted as a god, is to be given to the hobgoblins, and get a
thrashing among the newly-hired gladiators of the next show… I propose that
stout punishment be meted out to him, that he be granted no rest… and that he
be got out of the way as soon as possible, departing from Heaven within 30 days
and from Olympus within 3.’ This verdict was carried… he was carried off from
Heaven towards the nether regions, whence, they say, no-one returns.’
[1] sections 9 and 26 are singled out amongst others by Pope John Paul II
as particularly expressive of man’s royalty, in his retreat Le Signe de Contradiction, op. cit.
[2] Interioritate
enim sua universitatem rerum excedit: ad haec profunda redit, quando
convertitur ad cor
[3] the Freemason philosopher Fichte, following the lead
of Kant, states: ‘Man is free by nature and nobody has the right to lay down a
law for him except himself’, cf. Father Denis Fahey op. cit., p.33
[4] ante omnes Col. 1.17
[5] elevata est
magnificentia tua super caelos Ps. 8.2
[6] primatum tenens Col. 1.18
[7] Ecclesiasticus 17.31
[8] not indeed as a property of God, since God is Himself
identical to objective reality; but rather as a fantasy of the self-deifying
creature.
[9] ch.4, A 3
[10] see the section on marriage in the next chapter
[11] C (d)
[12] C (d)
[13] GS 22
[14] LG 7
[15] see text D (i) above
[16] GS 22, see b (ii) above
[17] such as the Freemasons and the ‘New-Age’ adherents
[18] we note that such people like to think of themselves
as divine, not because they claim, for instance, to be Holiness itself, but
rather because they think they know everything, that everything they do is
right, that the whole world revolves around them: the sort of infantile egoism
that a child will normally learn to abandon as he is growing to adulthood.
[19] although Satan tried to be like God in His
Divinity, and man tries to be like Him in His Divinity and Humanity combined.
[20] Iota Unum p. 97 referring to the encyclical of St. Pius X E Supremi Apostolatus cf. RdM p. 521
[21] ‘La religione del Dio che si è fatto Uomo s’è incontrata con la religione (perché tale è) dell’uomo che si fà Dio...’
[22] Ps 2.3
[23] the satire on the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius, normally
attributed to Seneca, is, most reasonably in our view, by Petronius.
