Christ the King Statue in Świebodzin (POLAND)
‘The Council's anti-realist subjectivism
is directed uniquely towards the dethronement of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the
enthronement of man in His place.’
vi) Antirealist Subjectivism
The created, rational being
possesses the faculties of intelligence and will. The freedom of the will
enables the creature to direct its will either to its proper object which is God,
the infinite Good, or towards itself, the finite good, in God’s place. Such was
Lucifer’s act at the beginning of creation, an act of aversion from God and
conversion to the self, an act of pride which is nothing other than
the principle of Antirealist Subjectivism in the moral domain. This principle
thereby became the very formal principle, or cause, of the devil’s Fallen Nature, that
which makes him what he is: the very principle of his nature and action [1].
It was this same principle
which he was to propose to the first human pair as the temptation for them to
commit the act of Original Sin. Their commission of this act was to establish
that same principle as the principle of the triple concupiscence of their own
Fallen Nature. It did so when their will, in the violence of its aversion from
God and of its conversion to themselves, drew the inferior faculties of their
soul away from God to themselves, directing it away from the infinite, to the
subjective, finite, good. And so it was to remain for all their descendants [2]
on whose behalf they had acted.
The principle is antirealist in its aversion from Objective
Reality (in the ultimate sense of the term) and subjectivist in its conversion to the self. The principle, which in
itself is the essence of all error and sin, was, as we have seen above,
subsequently to be developed by the devil into the self-deifying, anti-religion
of Gnosis, which was to inform all the esoteric sects and, to a lesser degree,
all the false religions [3];
into the anti-philosophy that is Modern Philosophy; and into the anti-theology
that is Modern Theology. The principle
entered the Council through all these channels: through the triple
concupiscence, through Gnosis, through Modern Philosophy and Theology.
This principle, as
antirealist, stands in opposition to Being and to Objective Reality, and as
such has a destructive effect on all it encounters. So, once it has entered the Church as we have
seen above, it destroys the doctrines of Faith in their very inner logic and
coherence, and reduces the Faith to an amorphous heap of intellectual rubble.
So much for the work of
destruction wrought by Antirealism. It corresponds inversely to a work of construction
on the rubble left behind, by the principle of Subjectivism. The construction
is that of self-deification, than which no more vain or perverse labor has ever
been undertaken by philosophers, nor more shameful or hybristic enterprise
undertaken by idolaters. In combination with the Faith, these evils constitute
what we have termed ‘Neo-Gnosticism’: a new amalgam of Faith and Gnosis, the
like of which the Church had not seen for nigh on 2,000 years.
Antirealist Subjectivism is,
then, in synthesis:
1) The formal principle of the devil’s
rebellion against God;
2) The formal principle of Fallen Angelic
Nature;
3) The formal principle of the temptation
which the devil proposed to humanity in the form of their representatives, Adam
and Eve, in order to destroy that same humanity;
4) The formal principle of their act of
rebellion against God [4];
5) The formal principle of the triple
concupiscence of Fallen Human Nature;
6) The formal principle of Gnosis;
7)
The formal principle of the corrupted Cabala;
8)
The formal principle of all the false religions;
9)
The formal principle of all the non-Catholic Christian confessions [5];
10) The formal principle of that anti-philosophy which is Modern Philosophy, inaugurating it with the Cartesian ‘evil demon’, and elaborating and consolidating it over the three ensuing centuries;
11) The formal principle of that anti-theology which is Modernism;
12) The formal principle of the Council’s heterodoxy.
vii)
Universal and Systematic Scope
Now the devil’s agency is
manifest in the systematic and universal nature of a given evil: two qualities
which clearly characterize the evil of the Council. Its evil is systematic and
universal both in regard to the heterodoxy of the Council texts, as we have
shown above, and also in regard to the expansion of this heterodoxy and the
consequent damage that it did to souls throughout the world.
*
An ambitious project of the
devil indeed, one might say, to have the highest authority of the Church
dethrone Christ and enthrone man in his place. In the rest of this chapter we
shall sketch out the way in which he was to achieve this end.
*********
FOR YOUR INTEREST: A VIDEO OF THE CHRIST THE KING STATUE IMAGE SHOWN ABOVE
[1] if God is
Being, Absolute and Infinite, then the devil is the Negator of Being, in the
sense of the Negator of the Infinite Being, the True and the Good that is God,
in preference to the finite being which is himself
[2] apart, as we have already said, from Our Blessed Lord
Jesus Christ and Our Blessed Lady
[3] Igor Shafarevich (op.cit.) gives evidence that the
Gnostic sects of Mitteleuropa
prepared it for the acceptance of Protestantism. He also makes a connection
between the sect of the Free Spirits and the person of Martin Luther himself.
[4] The will’s act of rebellion against God was so
violent, that to a certain degree it detached all the faculties of the soul
from the True and the Good, weakening the higher faculties of intellect and
will and inciting the lower faculties to join in its revolt
[5] see our reflections on Protestantism in the Conclusion
to chapter 2
