Rorate Caeli marks the 60th anniversary
of the opening of The Second Vatican Council on October 11th 1962, with an analysis of its causes, Metaphysical, Theological and Religious – causes as
dramatic as the effects that the whole world has been living for the past two
generations. Don Pietro Leone delves
deep into the very heart of modern error and traces it back to its roots in the
Rebellion of the Angels and the First Man at the dawning of creation. Parts 2 and 3 of this analysis will be published on the 11th and 13th of October respectively.
F. R.
THE CAUSES OF COUNCIL TEACHING
In this chapter we shall
consider:
I
The Sources of Antirealist Subjectivism;
II
The Principal Agents involved in the Council:
III
The Features of the Texts influential for Promoting the Council’s
Program.
I The Sources of Antirealist Subjectivism
Since we have situated the
evil of Council teaching in the false principle of ‘antirealist subjectivism’,
our search for the causes of Council teaching will begin with a search for the
source of this principle, namely in the following fields:
A.
Metaphysics;
B.
Theology;
C.
Religion;
D.
Psychology.
A. Metaphysics
We here present:
Introduction: Philosophy and Faith;
1. 1. Modern Philosophy;
2. 2. Marks of Modern Philosophy on the Council.
Introduction:
Philosophy and Faith
Now the principle of
theological knowledge, as we have said above, is reason illuminated by the
Faith. Obviously different philosophical schools will adopt different
principles of reason to attain such an end, amongst which we will sometimes
find the marks of intellectual and moral weakness. Pope Leo XIII explicitly
condemns initiatives to dilute Catholic doctrine on the pretext that [1]:
‘... the Church ought to adapt herself somewhat to our advanced civilization,
and, relaxing her ancient rigour, show some indulgence to modern popular
theories and methods... to pass over certain heads of doctrines, as if of
lesser moment, or so to soften them that they may not have the same meaning
which the Church has invariably held. On that point the Vatican Council says:
‘The doctrine of Faith which God has revealed is not proposed like a theory of
philosophy, which is to be elaborated by the human understanding, but as a
divine deposit delivered to the Spouse of Christ... that sense of the sacred
dogmas... is not to be departed from under the specious pretext of a more
profound reasoning’.’
In opposition to such schools
of thought stands that vigorous and immortal school which perfectly conforms to
the Faith and to the perennial philosophy of the Church. That school is
Aristotelian-Scholasticism, particularly as represented by the Angelic Doctor,
the Doctor of the Schools, who is St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Pius X declares in Pascendi [2]:
‘We will and ordain that scholastic philosophy be made the basis of sacred
science... And let it be clearly understood also above all things that the
scholastic philosophy We prescribe is that which the Angelic Doctor has
bequeathed to us... Let professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas
aside especially in metaphysical questions without grave detriment. On this
philosophical foundation the theological edifice is to be solidly raised.’
Pope St. Pius X is here
setting up a defence against Modernism, that sum total of all heresies, which
he has already described in the same encyclical in the following terms [3]:
‘If we pass from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first
which presents itself, and the chief one, is ignorance. Yes, these very
Modernists who pose as Doctors of the Church, who puff out their cheeks when
they speak of modern philosophy, and show such contempt for scholasticism, have
embraced the one with all its false glamour because their ignorance of the
other has left them without the means of being able to recognise confusion of
thought, and to refute sophistry. Their whole system, with all its errors, has
been born of the alliance between Faith and false philosophy.’
These words were to prove true
both of the Council periti (experts)
and of the Bishops. Monsignor Lefebvre writes: ‘... a large number of the
bishops, especially those who were chosen as members of the commissions, were
men... who knew nothing of Thomist philosophy, men who, as a result, did not
even know what a definition was. For them there is no such thing as an essence:
nothing must be defined. One may discuss, one may describe, but under no
circumstances must one define. Definitions are no longer needed’ [4].
We have seen in the course of this book how Modernist errors condemned in Pascendi, Humani Generis, the Syllabus and by the various modern Popes, were to enter into Council teaching, to form what St. Pius X prophetically describes as an ‘alliance between Faith and false philosophy’, the false anti-scholastic philosophy. We shall now examine the root of this false philosophy, and where its marks may be found in the Council.
1. Modern Philosophy
Magni passus sed extra viam [5]
We understand Modern
Philosophy to consist of two essential components:
a)
Idealism;
b) Nominalism.
a) Idealism
In the Introduction we traced
back the Council’s skepticism to Idealism: that philosophy which holds that the
object of knowledge is not objective reality, but rather the ideas (i.e. the
mental content) of the knowing subject. We referred to Descartes’ philosophical
starting-point: the principle of ‘Universal Doubt’, according to which, in his
view, we cannot be certain about the existence of the external world, of
objective reality, but only about ourselves and about the fact of our thinking
(that is to say when we are thinking).
His skepticism in fact encompasses not only ontological truth (the existence of
objective reality), but also logical truth (the correspondence of an idea to
reality), because, having once rejected everything about which we cannot be
certain, we are left with no objective criterion for Truth. Later Modern
Philosophers, in virtue of their Idealism, will continue to doubt the existence
of the external world: Berkeley will declare that it does not exist, Kant that
we cannot know it, Spinoza that it is identical to God. For them too, and for
the same reasons, logical truth also becomes a problem.
Once objective reality is cast
into doubt, its principles (or ‘determinations’) will also be cast into doubt:
there will be no possible justification for the principles or determinations of
objective reality, for the way in which it is ordered. Descartes leaves the
question of the ordering of reality unresolved; Kant places its principle in
the mind of the subject himself; other philosophers place it directly in the
mind of God. Hume, by contrast will deny the order of the external world,
attacking the principle of substance, the principle of the human subject, and
the principle of causality. We see how skepticism about the existence of objective
reality leads to skepticism about all the common-sense principles which
determine it.
b) Nominalism
Delving deeper in our search
for the root of Modern Philosophy, we discover that that Idealism which is the
proximate cause of the skepticism of Modern Philosophy and of the Council’s
philosophy, derives in its turn from another theory, ‘Nominalism’. This latter
theory holds that the object of man’s knowledge is particulars, that is to say
individual things without the natures or essences that one generally supposes
them to possess. The Nominalist would say, for example, that if I see a man in
front of me, I have no reason for assuming that he has such a thing as a
‘nature’, that is a human nature: he is just an individual man like any other.
The effect of Nominalism is to
deny the possibility of the knowledge of things altogether, because to know a
thing is nothing else than to grasp its essence: the knowledge of things, in
other words, is the knowledge of their natures, of their essences by means of
the relation of correspondence between the thing and the mind. But if I cannot
possess any real knowledge of the world outside me, then all that I am left
with is my ideas of things: I can
know only my ideas, which is Idealism.
The root, then, of Idealist
Modern Philosophy with its skepticism concerning the external world and our
knowledge of it, is Nominalism with its skepticism concerning natures /
essences. In contrast to Modern Philosophy stand the Philosophy of Being and the
Faith, which respectively teach and entail that:
- - - reality exists
objectively outside us;
-
- reality is the
object of our knowledge; that is to say
- - by the relation
of correspondence [6]; and
-
- by means of our
apprehension of the natures / essences of things.
2. Marks of Modern Philosophy on the Council
The two essential component
parts of Modern Philosophy, namely Idealism and Nominalism, constitute the
Council’s own philosophy, so that we can conclude that Modern Philosophy and
the Council Philosophy are one and the same. We proceed to present the marks on
the Council of:
a) Idealism
b) Nominalism
a)
Idealism
The Council, as we have
witnessed in every page of this book, has adopted the skepticism of Modern
Philosophy: a skepticism about Truth, about the correspondence of things with
the mind [7],
and about dogma. We shall look at the two gravest effects of this skepticism in
the form of:
i) Atheism; and
ii) The self-deification of man.
i) Atheism
We have seen that subjectivist
Idealism denies that we can know the things outside us. Amongst the things (or
beings) outside us there is, of course, most notably, God. Idealism therefore
denies that we can know God: that we can know that God exists. In other words,
Idealism entails negative atheism, agnosticism. As we said in the Introduction,
this attitude is, however, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to positive
atheism, to the denial of God: on the practical level it is one and the same
thing. For if we cannot know that God exists, we have no incentive for acting
as though He did exist.
We observe in passing that the
Nominalist - Idealist current of Modern Philosophy is its most influential
current, but there is another one, which has as its protagonists thinkers such
as Karl Marx, and which is Materialism. This theory directly denies the
existence of God, and is known as ‘positive atheism’. Modern philosophy is
then, in its main currents, entirely atheist [8]:
in the negative sense in the Nominalist - Idealist current, and in the positive
sense in the Materialist current.
ii) The Self-Deification of Man
The consequence of atheism,
negative or positive, consists in its deification of man. Because if God does
not exist, or if, at least, we cannot know that He exists, then man becomes the
highest principle of all things in His place.
One modern philosopher who
elaborated his version of Idealism to its ultimate consequences, was Emanuel
Kant. On the metaphysical level he wrests the ‘Categories’, or the ultimate principles
of Being, from the mind of God and places them in the mind of man, by means of
which he implies that man himself creates reality; on the moral level he
ascribes to man an ‘autonomous reason’ and an ‘autonomous will’ [9].
Another modern philosopher whose self-deifying theories, both in the area of
personal, but also and particularly in that of political, ethics, exercised an
important influence on the Council [10]
was Rousseau.
The Council, through its
experts, imbued, as many of them were, with the Idealism of Modern Philosophy,
followed suit. We have seen the Council’s atheism in its denial of the
possibility of the knowledge of Truth; we have seen its consequent deification
of man. In fact if we look carefully at the Council documents as a whole, we
may observe an internal dynamic which moves towards the deification of man:
first God’s existence is doubted and then the points of contact between Him and
the world are gradually effaced:
-
- Faith by which
man can know God and be saved;
- - The Church
which teaches the Faith and through whom God is present in the world; and
-
- The Sacraments
through which God acts in the world;
-
- The Consecrated
Life by which man can love God perfectly [11].
The supernatural dimension is
thus gradually expunged, and man’s life and operations are consequently reduced
to an exclusively natural level. With Original Sin denied, and human
nature proclaimed unqualifiedly as good,
man becomes transformed into some sort of Rousseauist
noble savage [12], and
then, in the ‘twinkling of an eye’, into God Himself.
b) Nominalism
This skepticism of Idealism,
as we have just stated, derives ultimately from the poisonous root of
Nominalism, the theory which denies natures, or essences, of which we have
given examples in the previous chapter. Altogether we may identify four
nominalist doctrines in the Council.
The first feature is, then, the denial of natures / essences;
The second feature is the absence of definitions, as Monsignor
Lefebvre complained in the passage that we quoted in section 1. The Council may
claim that it renounces definitions because it does not intend to be dogmatic,
or particularly because it does not want to use them in order to condemn, but
its metaphysical motivation can be nothing else than Nominalism: if there are
no natures or essences to things, then there can be no definitions either. How
can we define something if it has no nature?
The third Nominalist doctrine in the Council is what we have called the ‘false principle of degree’. As we noted above, Nominalism holds that one can only know particulars and that there is no such thing as a universal, a nature or an essence. This entails that the Faith is simply an amalgamation of disparate doctrines, which in its turn allows the Council to state:
-
- that the Church
does not possess the fullness of the Truth in this world;
-
- that other
confessions and religions can share to a greater or lesser degree in this Truth as well as in the Church’s means of sanctification;
- - that the other
confessions and religions can, to the extent of their share in Truth and in the
means of sanctification, be in communion with the Church.
The fourth nominalist doctrine in the Council is the denial that one
may know God in this life (at least by means of the reason [13]),
which, as we noted above, is tantamount to agnosticism or negative atheism.
[1] Testem
Benevolentiae, 1899. Amongst contemporary
philosophical schools that, in our opinion, bear the marks of the softness to
which the Sovereign Pontiff Pope Leo refers we indicate ‘Personalism’ and the personalist‘Theology
of the Body’ in particular. We refer to our recent interview with Brother
André-Marie on Rorate Caeli
[2] s. 45-6
[3] s. 41
[4] Un Evêque parle, p. 161, MD pjc, p.36
[5] ‘Great strides but off the track’. This phrase of St.
Augustine is quoted by Father Garrigou-Lagrange OP in his book ‘Everlasting
Life and the Depths of the Soul’ in regard to the modern philosophers, whom he
does not hesitate to term ‘intellectual monsters’
[6] adaequatio res
et intellectus, as we have stated above
[7] we recall the Introduction (B. I b) where the Council
makes a radical distinction between things and their expression, referring back
to the distinction made by Pope John XXIII in his opening speech between the
doctrines of Faith and their ‘clothing’, rivestimento
- an image evoking skepticism about the expression of Truth.
[8] apart of course from lone figures such as Blaise
Pascal
[9] we have seen similar views adopted by the Council in
chapter 8
[10] cf. chapter 4. IV on the discussion of the Right to
Error
[11] we make our theological analysis of the Council on
these lines in Section B below
[12] in the vision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, as it
were, in the tropical jungle of the Douanier
Rousseau
[13] a doctrine of Occam
END OF PART 1
